CHAPTER 12

HAVING RECEIVED SEVERAL anxious communiqués relating to his sister’s difficult confinement and long recovery, Stepan Arkadyich and his beloved-companion Small Stiva traveled from Moscow to pay her a visit.

They found her in tears. Small Stiva immediately joined Android Karenina in tending to Anna’s physical condition, turning up her Galena Box, smoothing the bedcovers with his flattened end-effectors, and refilling the ice water of his master’s ailing sister. As for Stepan Arkadyich himself, he immediately and quite naturally fell into the sympathetic, poetically emotional tone which harmonized with her mood. He asked her how she was, and how she had spent the morning.

“Very, very miserably. Today and this morning and all past days and days to come,” she said.

“I think you’re giving way to pessimism. You must rouse yourself, you must look life in the face.”

“Rouse! Rouse!” beeped Small Stiva, up-actuating the Galena Box.

“I have heard it said that women love men even for their vices,” Anna began suddenly, “but I hate him for his virtues. I can’t live with him. Do you understand? The sight of him has a physical effect on me, it makes me beside myself. But what am I to do? I have been unhappy, and used to think one couldn’t be more unhappy, but the awful state of things I am going through now, I could never have conceived. Would you believe it, that knowing he’s a good man, a splendid man, that I’m not worth his little finger, still I hate him. I hate him for his generosity. And there’s nothing left for me but…”

She would have said “death,” but Stepan Arkadyich would not let her finish.

“You are ill and overwrought,” he said. “Believe me, you’re exaggerating dreadfully. There’s nothing so terrible in it.”

And Stepan Arkadyich smiled. No one else in Stepan Arkadyich’s place, having to do with such despair, would have ventured to smile (the smile would have seemed brutal); but in his smile there was so much sweetness and almost feminine tenderness that his smile did not wound, but softened and soothed. His gentle, soothing words and smiles were as soothing and softening as almond oil. And Anna soon felt this.

“No, Stiva,” she said, “I’m lost, lost! Worse than lost! I can’t say yet that all is over; on the contrary, I feel that it’s not over. I’m an overstrained string that must snap. But it’s not ended yet… and it will have a fearful end.”

“No matter, we must let the string be loosened, little by little. There’s no position from which there is no way of escape.”

“I have thought, and thought. Only one…”

Small Stiva burbled cheerily, trying to lift everyone’s spirits, but Stiva felt that his pleasantness was, for once, unwarranted, and sent the little bot into Surcease.

“Listen to me,” he said to Anna. “You can’t see your own position as I can. Let me tell you candidly my opinion.” Again he smiled discreetly his almond-oil smile. “I’ll begin from the beginning. You married a man twenty years older than yourself. You married him without love and not knowing what love was. It was a mistake, let’s admit.”

“A fearful mistake!” said Anna.

“But I repeat, it’s an accomplished fact. Then you had, let us say, the misfortune to love a man not your husband. That was a misfortune; but that, too, is an accomplished fact. And your husband knew it and forgave it.” He stopped at each sentence, waiting for her to object, but she made no answer. “That’s so. Now the question is: Can you go on living with your husband? Do you wish it? Does he wish it?”

“I know nothing, nothing.”

“But you said yourself that you can’t endure him.”

“No, I didn’t say so. I deny it. I can’t tell, I don’t know anything about it.” She gripped the bedcovers, and then whispered: “There’s something else, Stepan. Something in his character I cannot fathom, something…”

She could not finish, and Stepan Arkadyich did not pursue the point. But in his mind he returned to the Moscow sub-basement, and saw again what Karenin had shown him there, and felt again the fear and confusion he had experienced on that day.

“Yes, but let…”

“There’s nothing, nothing I wish… except for it to be all over.”

“But he sees this and knows it. And do you suppose it weighs on him any less than on you? You’re wretched, he’s wretched, and what good can come of it?” With some effort Stepan Arkadyich brought out his central idea, and looked significantly at her. “But divorce would solve the difficulty completely.”

She said nothing, and shook her cropped head in dissent. But from the look in her face, which suddenly brightened into its old beauty, he saw that if she did not desire this, it was simply because it seemed to her an unattainable happiness.

“I’m awfully sorry for you! And how happy I should be if I could arrange things!” said Stepan Arkadyich, smiling more boldly. “Don’t speak, don’t say a word! God grant only that I may speak as I feel. I’m going to him.”

Anna looked at him with dreamy, shining eyes, and said nothing.

Outside the room, Alexei Alexandrovich heard all, and the Face heard all, and took its chance to strike.

YOU SEE? it shouted, the cruel and taunting voice bouncing like rocket fire off the corners of his mind.

YOU SEE WHAT YOUR FORGIVENESS HAS EARNED YOU?

Alexei flushed with shame and anger and returned to his room, where he paced like a caged animal. Louder and louder grew the vituperative roar of the Face.

NO MORE GENTLENESS.

NO MORE FORGIVENESS.

ONLY CONTROL.

Stepan Arkadyich, with the same, somewhat solemn expression with which he used to take his presidential chair at his board, walked into Alexei Alexandrovich’s room. Alexei Alexandrovich was walking about his room with his hands behind his back, lost deep in the violent eddies of his mind.

“I’m not interrupting you?” said Stepan Arkadyich, on the sight of his brother-in-law. To conceal this embarrassment he took out a Class I cigarette case he had just bought that opened in a new way, and, flicking the blue-green toggle, took a cigarette out of it.

“No. Do you want anything?” Alexei Alexandrovich asked, while into his mind’s eye came a picture of the Class I exploding, of Stepan Arkadyich’s fat, smirking face melting off of his skull.

LET HIM PAY.

LET THEM ALL PAY.

“Yes, I wished… I wanted… yes, I wanted to talk to you,” said Stepan Arkadyich, with surprise, aware of an unaccustomed timidity.

This feeling was so unexpected and so strange that he did not believe it was the voice of conscience telling him that what he was meaning to do was wrong.

Alexei Alexandrovich meanwhile looked with angry eyes at Small Stiva, that squat, twittering fool of a Class III.

SOON. SOON ITS TIME TOO WILL COME.

Stepan Arkadyich made an effort and struggled with the timidity that had come over him.

Alexei knew what Stepan Arkadyich would say, and knew as well what his reply would be. Let her have her divorce; let her go; who cared? What did it matter? There were weightier matters at hand. He had wrested control of his Project back from his opponents; Stremov lay in a Petersburg basement, buried to his neck in rock and gravel, never to mount another challenge.

His focus must remain on his work: even now new ideas were flooding into his head; even now the Project was evolving… becoming exactly what the Face had always wanted it to be.

SO LET HER GO. LET HER GO WITH HER HANDSOME BORDER OFFICER.

“I hope you believe in my love for my sister and my sincere affection and respect for you,” he said, reddening.