“If I told her to leave her husband, that must mean uniting her life with mine; am I prepared for that? How can I take her away now, when I have no money? Supposing I could arrange… But how can I take her away while I’m in the service? If I say that, I ought to be prepared to do it, that is, I ought to have the money and to retire from the army. But… to retire from the army? Can I?” he said to Lupo, bending to scratch the wolf-like Class III in the sensitive spot above his Third Bay.
He flung his crackle dagger again, with an extra curl of the wrist, and watched it sail toward the wall before swinging itself around like a Carpathian throwing stick toward the opposite corner of the room, where it embedded itself solidly in the heart of a second racoon.
Vronsky let out a long whistle, low and admiring, while Lupo retrieved the catch. He had worked all the days of his life to earn his place: the right to wield such powerful devices. Ambition was the old dream of his youth and childhood, a dream which he did not confess even to himself, though it was so strong that now this passion was even doing battle with his love.
“Women are the chief stumbling block in a man’s career,” his old friend Serpuhovskoy had pronounced the previous night, as they raised glasses together in memoriam of poor Frou-Frou. “It’s hard to love a woman and do anything. There’s only one way of having love conveniently without its being a hindrance-that’s marriage.”
“But Serpuhovskoy has never loved,” Vronsky murmured softly now, looking straight before him and thinking of Anna. Sensing the drift of his master’s thoughts, Lupo yelped sharply in protest, regarding Vronsky with eyes like slits; a Regimental Class III, he was naturally anxious that Vronsky should remain in the service.
“Yes, yes, you’re right,” Vronsky said. “If I retire, I burn my ships. If I remain in the army, I lose nothing. She said herself she did not wish to change her position.” And slowly twirling his mustache, he got up from the table and walked about the room. His eyes shone particularly brightly, and he felt in that confident, calm, and happy frame of mind which always came after he had thoroughly faced his position. Everything was straight and clear, every piece of his armory having been checked and rechecked and fired-except the Tsar’s Vengeance, which even the most elite soldiers were not permitted to discharge outside of combat situations-and stowed in its proper place.
Except his oldest and dearest friends: his simple, beloved smokers. Before reholstering them, Vronsky took one more trick shot, admiring the way the weapons’ hot blast lit up the four corners of the room.
Lupo ducked and rolled, his Vox-Em howling in vigorous approval of his master’s steady eye.
CHAPTER 9
IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK ALREADY, and so, in order to reach Anna quickly, and at the same time not to drive with his own carriage, known to everyone, Vronsky got into Yashvin’s hired fly, and ordered the II/Coachman/644 to drive as quickly as possible. It was a roomy, old-fashioned fly, with seats for four. He sat in one corner, stretched his legs out on the front seat, and sank into meditation.
I’m happy, very happy I he said to himself. He had often before had a sense of physical joy in his own body, but he had never felt so fond of himself, of his every sinew, as at that moment. He enjoyed the slight ache in his strong leg, an aftereffect of the catastrophe at the Cull, and he enjoyed the muscular sensation of movement in his chest as he breathed. The bright, cold August day, which had made Anna feel so hopeless, seemed to him keenly stimulating, and refreshed his face and neck, which still tingled from the cold water. The scent of brilliantine on his whiskers struck him as particularly pleasant in the fresh air. Everything he saw from the carriage window, everything in that cold, pure air, in the pale light of the sunset, was as fresh and cheery and strong as he was himself: the roofs of the houses shining in the rays of the setting sun, the strong Russian four-treads driven by gleaming groznium androids, the sharp outlines of fences and angles of buildings, the figures of passers-by, the motionless green of the trees and grass, the airships in their slow, majestic glide, the hydroponic greenhouses where grew the massive super-potatoes, each of which would feed a peasant family for a week-everything was bright like a pretty landscape just finished and freshly varnished.
“Get on, get on!” he said to the driver, putting his head out of the window, giving the Class II a light jolt with his hot-whip, and the carriage rolled rapidly along the smooth highroad.
“I want nothing, nothing but this happiness,” Vronsky declared to Lupo, who gave a happy woof of agreement before sticking his head out the carriage window to taste the wind.
“And as I go on,” Vronsky declared further, “I love her more and more. Ah, here’s the garden of the Vrede Villa”-where they had planned to meet. Whereabouts will she be? he wondered. How will she look?
He ordered the driver to stop before reaching the avenue, and, opening the door, jumped out of the carriage as it was moving, and went into the avenue that led up to the house. There was no one in the avenue; but looking round to the right he caught sight of her. Her face was hidden by a veil, but he drank in with glad eyes the special movement in walking, peculiar to her alone, the slope of the shoulders and the setting of the head, and at once a sort of electric shock ran all over him, as if someone had jolted him with a hot-whip. With fresh force, he felt conscious of himself, from the springy motions of his legs to the movements of his lungs as he breathed, and something set his lips twitching.
Joining him, she pressed his hand tightly.
“You’re not angry that I sent for you? I absolutely had to see you,” she said; and the serious and set line of her lips, which he saw under the veil, transformed his mood at once.
“I, angry?” he stammered, taken aback by her somber demeanor. “Of course not! But-how have you come, where from?”
“Never mind,” she said, laying her hand on his. “I must talk to you.”
She and Android Karenina were standing beneath a flowering tree, of a kind that Vronsky had never seen before, with large, overhanging emerald petals. The tree had an unfamiliar and vaguely foreboding appearance, which seemed in keeping with Anna’s expression. Vronsky saw clearly that something had happened, and that the rendezvous would not be a joyous one. For all the elation he had felt just a minute before, in her presence he had no will of his own: without knowing the grounds of her distress, he already felt the same distress unconsciously passing over him. He felt like a robot who’d had a burst of rainwater splashed violently behind its faceplate, shorting out his ability to reason and rendering him a useless, immobile hunk of man-shaped debris.
“What is it? What?” he asked her, squeezing her hand with his elbow, and trying to read her thoughts in her face.
She waited a few steps in silence, leaning against the trunk of the peculiar tree, gathering her courage; then suddenly she stopped.
“Yesterday,” she began, breathing quickly and painfully, “coming home with Alexei Alexandrovich I told him everything… told him I could not be his wife, that… and told him everything.”
He heard her, unconsciously bending his whole figure down to her as though hoping in this way to soften the hardness of her position for her. But as soon as she had said this he suddenly drew himself up, and a proud and hard expression came over his face.
“Yes, yes, that’s better, a thousand times better! I know how painful it was,” he said.
But she was not listening to his words; she was reading his thoughts from the expression of his face. She could not guess that that expression arose from the first idea that presented itself to Vronsky-that a duel was now inevitable. The idea of a duel had never crossed her mind, and so she put a different interpretation on this passing expression of hardness.