Android Karenina - By Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy & Ben H. Winters & Leo Tolstoy Page 0,96

gripped her, felt her heart wrung by love. He is a man of action, she thought, a man who does not hesitate to grab hold of whatever life presents to him. That is how I am meant to live: with truth, with purpose, with vitality. I cannot give this up—cannot give him up, cannot stop loving him. But . . . am I really prepared to leave my husband? To lose my son? To abandon all I have begun, all I have known? To uproot my life entirely?

At that thought, all her problems coalesced. Of course! Anna gestured frantically to Vronsky, waving and pointing. Her wild but deliberate motions captured his attention, stopping him just before his cocked arm would have sent the deadly crackle-dagger arcing towards her. At last, they were communicating.

Vronsky, following her pantomimed suggestion, swung his crackle-dagger around to attack not the flowering bubble that held her fast, but at the base of the tree whence it had come. Lupo joined in the assault, extending excavation-quality end-effectors from his paws to dig furiously at the root of the mechanical plant. Within moments, they severed the trunk from the earth, and as it creaked and fell to the ground, the bubble that had been its progeny dissipated—sending Anna tumbling down to where Android Karenina waited to catch her beloved mistress in her arms.

“MY GOD!” VRONSKY SHOUTED, AT LAST NOTICING: “ANNA! YOU ARE FLOATING!”

* * *

After Anna had assured Vronsky for the third time that she had suffered nothing but minor bruising in the fall, they sat beside each other upon the stone wall beside the tree.

She turned his face to hers, looking him squarely in the eye. With the intensity brought on by peril, they focused and listened to one another.

“I cannot lose my son,” Anna began simply.

“But, for God’s sake, which is better?—leave your child, or keep up this degrading position?”

“To whom is it degrading?”

“To all, and most of all to you.”

As they spoke, Lupo padded carefully around the tree, sniffing at the earth, gathering up fragments of the translucent sheath for later analysis.

“You say degrading . . . don’t say that. That has no meaning for me.” Her voice shook. She did not want him now to say what was untrue. She had nothing left but his love, and she wanted to love him. “Don’t you understand that from the day I loved you everything has changed for me? For me there is one thing, and one thing only—your love. If that’s mine, I feel so exalted, so strong, that nothing can be humiliating to me. I am proud of my position, because . . . proud of being . . . proud . . .” She could not say what she was proud of. Tears of shame and despair choked her utterance. She stood still and sobbed.

He, too, felt, something swelling in his throat and twitching in his nose, and for the first time in his life Vronsky found himself on the point of weeping. The flower-trap; his love; their impossible situation; he could not have said exactly what it was that touched him so. He felt sorry for her, and he felt he could not help her, and with that he knew that he was to blame for her wretchedness, and that he had done something wrong.

“Is not a divorce possible?” he said feebly. She shook her head, not answering. “Couldn’t you take your son, and still leave him?”

“Yes; but it all depends on him. Now I must go to him,” she said shortly. Her presentiment that all would again go on in the old way had not deceived her.

“On Tuesday I shall be in Petersburg, and everything can be settled.”

“Yes,” she said. “But don’t let us talk any more of it.”

Anna’s carriage, which she had sent away and ordered to come back to the little gate of the Vrede Garden, drove up. Anna said good-bye to Vronsky. Android Karenina gingerly lifted her up into their carriage, and they drove home.

CHAPTER 10

ON MONDAY THERE WAS the usual sitting of the Higher Branches of the Ministry. Alexei Alexandrovich walked into the hall where the sitting was held, greeted the members and the president as usual, and sat down in his place, the papers laid ready before him. Among these papers lay the necessary evidence and a rough outline of the speech he intended to make. But he did not really need these documents. He remembered every point, and did not think it necessary to go