And with fury, as it were with passion, the murderer falls on the body, and drags it and hacks at it; so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses. She held his hand, and did not stir.
“Yes, these kisses-that is what has been bought by this shame. Yes, and one hand, which will always be mine-the hand of my accomplice.” She lifted up that hand and kissed it. He sank on his knees and tried to see her face; but she hid it, and said nothing. At last, as though making an effort over herself, she got up and pushed him away. Her face was still as beautiful, but it was only the more pitiful for that.
“All is over,” she said. “I have nothing but you. Remember that.”
“I can never forget what is my whole life. For one instant of this happiness…”
“Happiness!” she said with horror. She felt that at that moment she could not put into words the sense of shame, of rapture, and of horror at stepping into a new life, and she did not want to speak of it, to vulgarize this feeling with inappropriate words. “For pity’s sake, not a word, not a-”
As if to underscore her determination for him to be silent, Anna stopped speaking midway through her sentence. Indeed, Vronsky realized, it was not only her lovely mouth but her entire body: Anna had stopped moving, her body locked in place, eyes half-open, limbs stilled, frozen like a statue upon the bed.
“Anna?” he cried out. “Anna! What is the matter?”
It is he, Vronsky thought immediately, meaning the husband-her bizarre and cruel husband has discovered us, and somehow poisoned her… but this was something stranger and more powerful than any poison: for as Vronsky watched, Anna’s body, still frozen like it was carved from marble, rose slowly several inches off the bed and oscillated wildly in the air.
“Anna!”
He reached toward her with a shaking hand, unsure of how to proceed, ashamed to admit to himself that he was afraid even to touch her-when, as suddenly as this extraordinary episode had begun, it ended. Anna’s body stopped quivering, fell back softly onto the mattress, and reanimated; indeed, Anna returned to their conversation exactly where she had stopped.
“-a word more,” she concluded, while Vronsky stared back at her, trying to comprehend what he had witnessed.
“Anna,” he finally began. “Anna, I…”
But it was too late. With a look of chill despair, incomprehensible to him, she parted from him.
In dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness. One dream haunted her almost every night. She dreamed that both were her husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on her. Alexei Alexandrovich was weeping, kissing her hands, and saying, “How happy we are now!” And Alexei Vronsky was there too, and he too was her husband. And Lupo was also there, prowling in circles, sniffing the tangled bedsheets; and Alexei’s metal Face was there, glinting in the light of the lumiéres; and then Anna, glancing down, saw that while she embraced Vronsky, her own human head had been fused somehow onto Android Karenina’s gleaming robot body.
This dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.
CHAPTER 7
IN THE EARLY DAYS after his return from Moscow, whenever Levin shuddered and grew red, remembering the disgrace of his rejection, he said to himself: This was just how I used to shudder and blush, thinking myself utterly lost, when I was plucked in physics and did not get my remove; and how I thought myself utterly ruined after I built that first surface mine and it collapsed. And yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much. It will be the same thing too with this trouble. Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.
But three months had passed and he had not left off minding about it; and it was as painful for him to think of it as it had been those first days. He could not be at peace because after dreaming so long of family life, and feeling himself so ripe for it, he was still not married, and was further than ever from marriage.
Meanwhile spring came on, beautiful and kindly, without the delays and treacheries of spring-one of those rare springs in which plants, beasts, and man rejoice alike. This lovely spring roused Levin still more, and strengthened him in his resolution of renouncing all his past and building up his lonely life firmly and independently.
One day, as he rode up to the house in this happy frame of mind, Levin heard the bell ring at the side of the principal entrance of the house.
’Yes, that’s someone from the station,” he said to Socrates. “Just the time to be here from the Moscow Grav… Who could it be? What if it’s brother Nikolai? He did say: ‘Maybe I’ll go to the waters, or maybe I’ll come down to you.’”
He felt dismayed and vexed for the first minute, that his brother Nikolai’s presence should come to disturb his happy mood of spring. But he felt ashamed of the feeling, and at once he opened, as it were, the arms of his soul, and with a softened feeling of joy and expectation, now he hoped with all his heart that it was his brother. He pricked up his horse, and riding out from behind the acacias he saw a hired three-horse sledge from the Grav station, and a gentleman in a fur coat.
“Ah,” cried Levin joyfully, flinging up both his hands. “Here’s a delightful visitor! Ah, how glad I am to see you!” he shouted, recognizing Stepan Arkadyich, with Small Stiva balanced like a fat, happy child between his legs.
“Now you shall find out for certain whether she’s married, or when she’s going to be married,” Socrates muttered to him with a cautious tone, anxious to protect his master’s feelings. But on that delicious spring day Levin felt that the thought of Kitty did not hurt him at all.
“Well, you didn’t expect me, eh?” said Stepan Arkadyich, getting out of the sledge, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his cheek, and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits. “I’ve come to see you in the first place,” he said, embracing and kissing him, while Socrates plucked an air-blasting end-effector to clean the mud from Small Stiva’s frontal display. “To participate in the Hunt-and-be-Hunted second, and to sell that little patch of soil at Ergushovo third.”
Stepan Arkadyich told him many interesting pieces of news, but not one word in reference to Kitty and the Shcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin was grateful to him for his delicacy and was very glad of his visitor. As always happened with him during his solitude, a mass of ideas and feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could not communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon Stepan Arkadyich his poetic joy in the spring, and his failures and plans for the seasonal extraction. Stepan Arkadyich, always charming, understanding everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming on this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as it were, and a new tone of respect that flattered him.
They determined that they would Hunt-and-be-Hunted the very next day, and Levin ordered the Huntbears to be warmed and baited overnight.
CHAPTER 8
THE PLACE FIXED ON for the Hunt-and-be-Hunted was not far above a stream in a little aspen copse. On reaching the copse, Levin led Oblonsky to a corner of a mossy, swampy glade, already quite free from snow. He went back himself to a double birch tree on the other side, and leaning his gun on the fork of a dead lower branch, he took off his full overcoat, fastened his belt again, and worked his arms to see if they were free.