CHAPTER 6

EVERYONE TOOK PART in the conversation except Kitty and Levin. At first there rose to Levin’s mind what he had to say on the Robot Question. He thought of his recent foray deep into the bowels of his mine, swinging an axe alongside his clever and industrious Pitbots; how he had come to admire them, like one admires a fellow man, though they were technically but Class IIs. But these ideas, once of such importance in his eyes, seemed to come into his brain as in a dream, and had now not the slightest interest for him. It even struck him as strange that they should be so eager to talk of what was of no use to anyone. Kitty, too, should, one would have supposed, have been interested when the subject turned to the supreme value of Class Ills to women, as a means of relieving them from the drudgery of household labor. How often she had mused on just this subject, how Class Ills were more than mere chore-doers, how they offered bosom companionships-how useful Tatiana had been to her as emotional support in her long and painful days aboard theVenutian orbiter.

But it did not interest her at all. She and Levin had a conversation of their own, yet not a conversation, but some sort of mysterious communication, which brought them every moment nearer, and stirred in both a sense of glad terror before the unknown into which they were entering.

At first Levin, in answer to Kitty’s question of how he could have seen her last year in the carriage, told her how he had been coming home from the smeltworks along the highroad and had met her.

Over time the evening’s conversation turned from cold robotics to warm human passions. Turovtsin, another of the party, as a means of drawing attention away from the Robot Question, about which he knew nothing, mentioned an acquaintance involved in an intrigue.

“You heard, perhaps, about Pryatchnikov?” said this Turovtsin, warmed up by the champagne he had drunk. “Vasya Pryatchnikov,” he said, with a good-natured smile on his damp, red lips, addressing himself principally to the most important guest, Alexei Alexandrovich, “they told me today he fought a duel with Kvitsky at Tver, and has killed him.”

Just as it always seems that one bruises oneself on a sore place, so Stepan Arkadyich felt now that the conversation would by ill luck fall every moment on Alexei Alexandrovich’s sore spot. Small Stiva, as attuned as his master to conversational nuance, brought himself up short in his round of bustling, flashing with alarm at Oblonsky. Together they would have contrived to pull the brother-in-law away, but Alexei Alexandrovich himself inquired, smiling neutrally from behind his mask:

“What did Pryatchnikov fight about?”

“His wife. Acted like a man, he did! Called him out and blasted him!”

“Ah!” said Alexei Alexandrovich indifferently, and lifting his eyebrows, he went into the drawing room, and the rest of the party resumed their conversation.

“How glad I am you have come,” Dolly Oblonsky, Stiva’s wife, said to Karenin with a frightened smile, meeting him in the outer drawing room. “I must talk to you. Let’s sit here.”

“Sit sit,” echoed her Class III, Dolichka. “Oh do, sit.”

Alexei Alexandrovich, with the same expression of indifference given him by his lifted eyebrows, sat down beside Darya Alexandrovna, and smiled affectedly.

“It’s fortunate,” he said, “especially as I was meaning to ask you to excuse me, and to be taking leave. I have to start tomorrow.”

Darya Alexandrovna was firmly convinced of Anna’s innocence, and she felt herself growing pale and her lips quivering with anger at this frigid, unfeeling man, wreathed by the eldritch gleam of his silvery half-face, who was so calmly intending to ruin her innocent friend.

“Alexei Alexandrovich,” she said, with desperate resolution looking him in the face, “I asked you earlier about Anna, but you made me no answer. How is she?”

“She is, I believe, quite well, Darya Alexandrovna,” replied Alexei Alexandrovich, not looking at her.

“Alexei Alexandrovich, forgive me, I have no right… but I love Anna as a sister, and esteem her; I beg, I beseech you to tell me what is wrong between you? What fault do you find with her?”

Alexei Alexandrovich frowned, and almost closing his eyes, dropped his head, and was at once confronted by the caustic hissing of the Face.

HOW DARE SHE

“Quiet! Please!” he cried aloud, and balled a fist against his forehead; Dolly stared back at him tremulously.

“I presume that your husband has told you the grounds on which I consider it necessary to change my attitude toward Anna Arkadyevna?” he said, not looking her in the face.

“I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it, I can’t believe it!” Dolly said, clasping her bony hands before her with a vigorous gesture. She rose quickly, and laid her hand on Alexei Alexandrovich’s sleeve. “We shall be disturbed here. Come this way, please.”

HOW DARE SHE began the Face again, but Dolly’s agitation had an effect on Alexei Alexandrovich. He got up and followed her to the schoolroom. They sat down to a table covered with an old sheet of acetate, cut in slits by I/Penknife/4s; at such “writing tables” did children play at the old game, a mere amusement since the time of the Tsars, of “learning one’s letters.”

“I don’t, I don’t believe it!” Dolly began, trying to catch his glance, which avoided her.

“One cannot disbelieve facts, Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, with an emphasis on the word “facts.”

“But what has she done?” said Darya Alexandrovna. “What precisely has she done?”

“She has forsaken her duty, and deceived her husband. That’s what she has done,” said he.

“No, no, it can’t be! No, for God’s sake, you are mistaken,” said Dolly, putting her hands to her temples and closing her eyes.

Alexei Alexandrovich smiled coldly, with his lips alone, meaning to signify to her and to himself the firmness of his conviction; but this hot defense, though it could not shake him, reopened his wound. He began to speak with greater heat.

“It is extremely difficult to be mistaken when a wife herself informs her husband of the fact-informs him that eight years of her life, and a son, all that’s a mistake, and that she wants to begin life again,” he said angrily, with a snort.

“Anna and sin-I cannot connect them, I cannot believe it!”

“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, now looking straight into Dolly’s kindly, troubled face, and feeling that his tongue was being loosened in spite of himself, “I would give a great deal for doubt to be still possible. When I doubted, I was miserable, but it was better than now. When I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope, and still I doubt of everything. I am in such doubt of everything that I even hate my son, and sometimes do not believe he is my son. I am very unhappy.”

He had no need to say that. Darya Alexandrovna had seen that as soon as he glanced into her face; and she felt sorry for him, and her faith in the innocence of her friend began to totter.

Karenin’s inner voice for once was silent, and he was glad for that-he could bear, he thought, this woman’s childish pity, but not the ruthless disdain of the Face.

“Oh, this is awful, awful! But can it be true that you are resolved on a divorce?”

“I am resolved on extreme measures. There is nothing else for me to do.”

“Nothing else to do, nothing else to do…,” Dolly echoed, with tears in her eyes.

“Nothing else? Nothing?” came the third echo, this from Dolichka, parroting her mistress in sad, mechanical tones.

OH BUT THERE IS SOMETHING, came the brutal dead whisper of the Face.

OH BUT THERE IS.

DIVORCE HER? YOU MUST Kl-