Anna Karenina 9

ANNA KARENINA

 

PART 9

 

Chapter 25

 

“So you see,” pursued Nikolay Levin, painfully wrinkling his forehead and twitching.

It was obviously difficult for him to think of what to say and do.

“Here, do you see?”... He pointed to some sort of iron bars, fastened together with strings, lying in a corner of the room. “Do you see that? That’s the beginning of a new thing we’re going into. It’s a productive association....”

Konstantin scarcely heard him. He looked into his sickly, consumptive face, and he was more and more sorry for him, and he could not force himself to listen to what his brother was telling him about the association. He saw that this association was a mere anchor to save him from self-contempt. Nikolay Levin went on talking:

“You know that capital oppresses the labourer. The labourers with us, the peasants, bear all the burden of labour, and are so placed that however much they work they can’t escape from their position of beasts of burden. All the profits of labour, on which they might improve their position, and gain leisure for themselves, and after that education, all the surplus values are taken from them by the capitalists. And society’s so constituted that the harder they work, the greater the profit of the merchants and landowners, while they stay beasts of burden to the end. And that state of things must be changed,” he finished up, and he looked questioningly at his brother.

“Yes, of course,” said Konstantin, looking at the patch of red that had come out on his brother’s projecting cheekbones.

“And so we’re founding a locksmiths’ association, where all the production and profit and the chief instruments of production will be in common.”

“Where is the association to be?” asked Konstantin Levin.

“In the village of Vozdrem, Kazan government.”

“But why in a village? In the villages, I think, there is plenty of work as it is. Why a locksmiths’ association in a village?”

“Why? Because the peasants are just as much slaves as they ever were, and that’s why you and Sergey Ivanovitch don’t like people to try and get them out of their slavery,” said Nikolay Levin, exasperated by the objection.

Konstantin Levin sighed, looking meanwhile about the cheerless and dirty room. This sigh seemed to exasperate Nikolay still more.

“I know your and Sergey Ivanovitch’s aristocratic views. I know that he applies all the power of his intellect to justify existing evils.”

“No; and what do you talk of Sergey Ivanovitch for?” said Levin, smiling.

“Sergey Ivanovitch? I’ll tell you what for!” Nikolay Levin shrieked suddenly at the name of Sergey Ivanovitch. “I’ll tell you what for.... But what’s the use of talking? There’s only one thing.... What did you come to me for? You look down on this, and you’re welcome to,—and go away, in God’s name go away!” he shrieked, getting up from his chair. “And go away, and go away!”

“I don’t look down on it at all,” said Konstantin Levin timidly. “I don’t even dispute it.”

At that instant Marya Nikolaevna came back. Nikolay Levin looked round angrily at her. She went quickly to him, and whispered something.

“I’m not well; I’ve grown irritable,” said Nikolay Levin, getting calmer and breathing painfully; “and then you talk to me of Sergey Ivanovitch and his article. It’s such rubbish, such lying, such self-deception. What can a man write of justice who knows nothing of it? Have you read his article?” he asked Kritsky, sitting down again at the table, and moving back off half of it the scattered cigarettes, so as to clear a space.

“I’ve not read it,” Kritsky responded gloomily, obviously not desiring to enter into the conversation.

“Why not?” said Nikolay Levin, now turning with exasperation upon Kritsky.

“Because I didn’t see the use of wasting my time over it.”

“Oh, but excuse me, how did you know it would be wasting your time? That article’s too deep for many people—that’s to say it’s over their heads. But with me, it’s another thing; I see through his ideas, and I know where its weakness lies.”

Everyone was mute. Kritsky got up deliberately and reached his cap.

“Won’t you have supper? All right, good-bye! Come round tomorrow with the locksmith.”

Kritsky had hardly gone out when Nikolay Levin smiled and winked.

“He’s no good either,” he said. “I see, of course....”

But at that instant Kritsky, at the door, called him....

“What do you want now?” he said, and went out to him in the passage. Left alone with Marya Nikolaevna, Levin turned to her.

“Have you been long with my brother?” he said to her.

“Yes, more than a year. Nikolay Dmitrievitch’s health has become very poor. Nikolay Dmitrievitch drinks a great deal,” she said.

“That is ... how does he drink?”

“Drinks vodka, and it’s bad for him.”

“And a great deal?” whispered Levin.

“Yes,” she said, looking timidly towards the doorway, where Nikolay Levin had reappeared.

“What were you talking about?” he said, knitting his brows, and turning his scared eyes from one to the other. “What was it?”

“Oh, nothing,” Konstantin answered in confusion.

“Oh, if you don’t want to say, don’t. Only it’s no good your talking to her. She’s a wench, and you’re a gentleman,” he said with a jerk of the neck. “You understand everything, I see, and have taken stock of everything, and look with commiseration on my shortcomings,” he began again, raising his voice.

“Nikolay Dmitrievitch, Nikolay Dmitrievitch,” whispered Marya Nikolaevna, again going up to him.

“Oh, very well, very well!... But where’s the supper? Ah, here it is,” he said, seeing a waiter with a tray. “Here, set it here,” he added angrily, and promptly seizing the vodka, he poured out a glassful and drank it greedily. “Like a drink?” he turned to his brother, and at once became better humoured.

“Well, enough of Sergey Ivanovitch. I’m glad to see you, anyway. After all’s said and done, we’re not strangers. Come, have a drink. Tell me what you’re doing,” he went on, greedily munching a piece of bread, and pouring out another glassful. “How are you living?”

“I live alone in the country, as I used to. I’m busy looking after the land,” answered Konstantin, watching with horror the greediness with which his brother ate and drank, and trying to conceal that he noticed it.

“Why don’t you get married?”

“It hasn’t happened so,” Konstantin answered, reddening a little.

“Why not? For me now ... everything’s at an end! I’ve made a mess of my life. But this I’ve said, and I say still, that if my share had been given me when I needed it, my whole life would have been different.”

Konstantin made haste to change the conversation.

“Do you know your little Vanya’s with me, a clerk in the counting house at Pokrovskoe.”

Nikolay jerked his neck, and sank into thought.

“Yes, tell me what’s going on at Pokrovskoe. Is the house standing still, and the birch trees, and our schoolroom? And Philip the gardener, is he living? How I remember the arbour and the seat! Now mind and don’t alter anything in the house, but make haste and get married, and make everything as it used to be again. Then I’ll come and see you, if your wife is nice.”

“But come to me now,” said Levin. “How nicely we would arrange it!”

“I’d come and see you if I were sure I should not find Sergey Ivanovitch.”

“You wouldn’t find him there. I live quite independently of him.”

“Yes, but say what you like, you will have to choose between me and him,” he said, looking timidly into his brother’s face.

This timidity touched Konstantin.

“If you want to hear my confession of faith on the subject, I tell you that in your quarrel with Sergey Ivanovitch I take neither side. You’re both wrong. You’re more wrong externally, and he inwardly.”

“Ah, ah! You see that, you see that!” Nikolay shouted joyfully.

“But I personally value friendly relations with you more because....”

“Why, why?”

Konstantin could not say that he valued it more because Nikolay was unhappy, and needed affection. But Nikolay knew that this was just what he meant to say, and scowling he took up the vodka again.

“Enough, Nikolay Dmitrievitch!” said Marya Nikolaevna, stretching out her plump, bare arm towards the decanter.

“Let it be! Don’t insist! I’ll beat you!” he shouted.

Marya Nikolaevna smiled a sweet and good-humoured smile, which was at once reflected on Nikolay’s face, and she took the bottle.

“And do you suppose she understands nothing?” said Nikolay. “She understands it all better than any of us. Isn’t it true there’s something good and sweet in her?”

“Were you never before in Moscow?” Konstantin said to her, for the sake of saying something.

“Only you mustn’t be polite and stiff with her. It frightens her. No one ever spoke to her so but the justices of the peace who tried her for trying to get out of a house of ill-fame. Mercy on us, the senselessness in the world!” he cried suddenly. “These new institutions, these justices of the peace, rural councils, what hideousness it all is!”

And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new institutions.

Konstantin Levin heard him, and the disbelief in the sense of all public institutions, which he shared with him, and often expressed, was distasteful to him now from his brother’s lips.

“In another world we shall understand it all,” he said lightly.

“In another world! Ah, I don’t like that other world! I don’t like it,” he said, letting his scared eyes rest on his brother’s eyes. “Here one would think that to get out of all the baseness and the mess, one’s own and other people’s, would be a good thing, and yet I’m afraid of death, awfully afraid of death.” He shuddered. “But do drink something. Would you like some champagne? Or shall we go somewhere? Let’s go to the Gypsies! Do you know I have got so fond of the Gypsies and Russian songs.”

His speech had begun to falter, and he passed abruptly from one subject to another. Konstantin with the help of Masha persuaded him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk.

Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and to persuade Nikolay Levin to go and stay with his brother.

Chapter 26

 

In the morning Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and towards evening he reached home. On the journey in the train he talked to his neighbours about politics and the new railways, and, just as in Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, dissatisfaction with himself, shame of something or other. But when he got out at his own station, when he saw his one-eyed coachman, Ignat, with the collar of his coat turned up; when, in the dim light reflected by the station fires, he saw his own sledge, his own horses with their tails tied up, in their harness trimmed with rings and tassels; when the coachman Ignat, as he put in his luggage, told him the village news, that the contractor had arrived, and that Pava had calved,—he felt that little by little the confusion was clearing up, and the shame and self-dissatisfaction were passing away. He felt this at the mere sight of Ignat and the horses; but when he had put on the sheepskin brought for him, had sat down wrapped up in the sledge, and had driven off pondering on the work that lay before him in the village, and staring at the side-horse, that had been his saddle-horse, past his prime now, but a spirited beast from the Don, he began to see what had happened to him in quite a different light. He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before. In the first place he resolved that from that day he would give up hoping for any extraordinary happiness, such as marriage must have given him, and consequently he would not so disdain what he really had. Secondly, he would never again let himself give way to low passion, the memory of which had so tortured him when he had been making up his mind to make an offer. Then remembering his brother Nikolay, he resolved to himself that he would never allow himself to forget him, that he would follow him up, and not lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help when things should go ill with him. And that would be soon, he felt. Then, too, his brother’s talk of communism, which he had treated so lightly at the time, now made him think. He considered a revolution in economic conditions nonsense. But he always felt the injustice of his own abundance in comparison with the poverty of the peasants, and now he determined that so as to feel quite in the right, though he had worked hard and lived by no means luxuriously before, he would now work still harder, and would allow himself even less luxury. And all this seemed to him so easy a conquest over himself that he spent the whole drive in the pleasantest daydreams. With a resolute feeling of hope in a new, better life, he reached home before nine o’clock at night.

The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by a light in the bedroom windows of his old nurse, Agafea Mihalovna, who performed the duties of housekeeper in his house. She was not yet asleep. Kouzma, waked up by her, came sidling sleepily out onto the steps. A setter bitch, Laska, ran out too, almost upsetting Kouzma, and whining, turned round about Levin’s knees, jumping up and longing, but not daring, to put her forepaws on his chest.

“You’re soon back again, sir,” said Agafea Mihalovna.

“I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better,” he answered, and went into his study.

The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag’s horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father’s sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ashtray, a manuscript book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging the new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: “No, you’re not going to get away from us, and you’re not going to be different, but you’re going to be the same as you’ve always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won’t get, and which isn’t possible for you.”

This the things said to him, but another voice in his heart was telling him that he must not fall under the sway of the past, and that one can do anything with oneself. And hearing that voice, he went into the corner where stood his two heavy dumbbells, and began brandishing them like a gymnast, trying to restore his confident temper. There was a creak of steps at the door. He hastily put down the dumbbells.

The bailiff came in, and said everything, thank God, was doing well; but informed him that the buckwheat in the new drying machine had been a little scorched. This piece of news irritated Levin. The new drying machine had been constructed and partly invented by Levin. The bailiff had always been against the drying machine, and now it was with suppressed triumph that he announced that the buckwheat had been scorched. Levin was firmly convinced that if the buckwheat had been scorched, it was only because the precautions had not been taken, for which he had hundreds of times given orders. He was annoyed, and reprimanded the bailiff. But there had been an important and joyful event: Pava, his best cow, an expensive beast, bought at a show, had calved.

“Kouzma, give me my sheepskin. And you tell them to take a lantern. I’ll come and look at her,” he said to the bailiff.

The cowhouse for the more valuable cows was just behind the house. Walking across the yard, passing a snowdrift by the lilac tree, he went into the cowhouse. There was the warm, steamy smell of dung when the frozen door was opened, and the cows, astonished at the unfamiliar light of the lantern, stirred on the fresh straw. He caught a glimpse of the broad, smooth, black and piebald back of Hollandka. Berkoot, the bull, was lying down with his ring in his lip, and seemed about to get up, but thought better of it, and only gave two snorts as they passed by him. Pava, a perfect beauty, huge as a hippopotamus, with her back turned to them, prevented their seeing the calf, as she sniffed her all over.

Levin went into the pen, looked Pava over, and lifted the red and spotted calf onto her long, tottering legs. Pava, uneasy, began lowing, but when Levin put the calf close to her she was soothed, and, sighing heavily, began licking her with her rough tongue. The calf, fumbling, poked her nose under her mother’s udder, and stiffened her tail out straight.

“Here, bring the light, Fyodor, this way,” said Levin, examining the calf. “Like the mother! though the colour takes after the father; but that’s nothing. Very good. Long and broad in the haunch. Vassily Fedorovitch, isn’t she splendid?” he said to the bailiff, quite forgiving him for the buckwheat under the influence of his delight in the calf.

“How could she fail to be? Oh, Semyon the contractor came the day after you left. You must settle with him, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said the bailiff. “I did inform you about the machine.”

This question was enough to take Levin back to all the details of his work on the estate, which was on a large scale, and complicated. He went straight from the cowhouse to the counting house, and after a little conversation with the bailiff and Semyon the contractor, he went back to the house and straight upstairs to the drawing-room.

Chapter 27

 

The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived alone, had the whole house heated and used. He knew that this was stupid, he knew that it was positively not right, and contrary to his present new plans, but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived just the life that to Levin seemed the ideal of perfection, and that he had dreamed of beginning with his wife, his family.

Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in his imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a woman that his mother had been.

He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from marriage that he positively pictured to himself first the family, and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And now he had to give up that.

When he had gone into the little drawing-room, where he always had tea, and had settled himself in his armchair with a book, and Agafea Mihalovna had brought him tea, and with her usual, “Well, I’ll stay a while, sir,” had taken a chair in the window, he felt that, however strange it might be, he had not parted from his daydreams, and that he could not live without them. Whether with her, or with another, still it would be. He was reading a book, and thinking of what he was reading, and stopping to listen to Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet with all that, all sorts of pictures of family life and work in the future rose disconnectedly before his imagination. He felt that in the depth of his soul something had been put in its place, settled down, and laid to rest.

He heard Agafea Mihalovna talking of how Prohor had forgotten his duty to God, and with the money Levin had given him to buy a horse, had been drinking without stopping, and had beaten his wife till he’d half killed her. He listened, and read his book, and recalled the whole train of ideas suggested by his reading. It was Tyndall’s Treatise on Heat. He recalled his own criticisms of Tyndall of his complacent satisfaction in the cleverness of his experiments, and for his lack of philosophic insight. And suddenly there floated into his mind the joyful thought: “In two years’ time I shall have two Dutch cows; Pava herself will perhaps still be alive, a dozen young daughters of Berkoot and the three others—how lovely!”

He took up his book again. “Very good, electricity and heat are the same thing; but is it possible to substitute the one quantity for the other in the equation for the solution of any problem? No. Well, then what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature is felt instinctively.... It’s particularly nice if Pava’s daughter should be a red-spotted cow, and all the herd will take after her, and the other three, too! Splendid! To go out with my wife and visitors to meet the herd.... My wife says, ‘Kostya and I looked after that calf like a child.’ ‘How can it interest you so much?’ says a visitor. ‘Everything that interests him, interests me.’ But who will she be?” And he remembered what had happened at Moscow.... “Well, there’s nothing to be done.... It’s not my fault. But now everything shall go on in a new way. It’s nonsense to pretend that life won’t let one, that the past won’t let one. One must struggle to live better, much better.”... He raised his head, and fell to dreaming. Old Laska, who had not yet fully digested her delight at his return, and had run out into the yard to bark, came back wagging her tail, and crept up to him, bringing in the scent of fresh air, put her head under his hand, and whined plaintively, asking to be stroked.

“There, who’d have thought it?” said Agafea Mihalovna. “The dog now ... why, she understands that her master’s come home, and that he’s low-spirited.”

“Why low-spirited?”

“Do you suppose I don’t see it, sir? It’s high time I should know the gentry. Why, I’ve grown up from a little thing with them. It’s nothing, sir, so long as there’s health and a clear conscience.”

Levin looked intently at her, surprised at how well she knew his thought.

“Shall I fetch you another cup?” said she, and taking his cup she went out.

Laska kept poking her head under his hand. He stroked her, and she promptly curled up at his feet, laying her head on a hind paw. And in token of all now being well and satisfactory, she opened her mouth a little, smacked her lips, and settling her sticky lips more comfortably about her old teeth, she sank into blissful repose. Levin watched all her movements attentively.

“That’s what I’ll do,” he said to himself; “that’s what I’ll do! Nothing’s amiss.... All’s well.”

Chapter 28

 

After the ball, early next morning, Anna Arkadyevna sent her husband a telegram that she was leaving Moscow the same day.

“No, I must go, I must go”; she explained to her sister-in-law the change in her plans in a tone that suggested that she had to remember so many things that there was no enumerating them: “no, it had really better be today!”

Stepan Arkadyevitch was not dining at home, but he promised to come and see his sister off at seven o’clock.

Kitty, too, did not come, sending a note that she had a headache. Dolly and Anna dined alone with the children and the English governess. Whether it was that the children were fickle, or that they had acute senses, and felt that Anna was quite different that day from what she had been when they had taken such a fancy to her, that she was not now interested in them,—but they had abruptly dropped their play with their aunt, and their love for her, and were quite indifferent that she was going away. Anna was absorbed the whole morning in preparations for her departure. She wrote notes to her Moscow acquaintances, put down her accounts, and packed. Altogether Dolly fancied she was not in a placid state of mind, but in that worried mood, which Dolly knew well with herself, and which does not come without cause, and for the most part covers dissatisfaction with self. After dinner, Anna went up to her room to dress, and Dolly followed her.

“How queer you are today!” Dolly said to her.

“I? Do you think so? I’m not queer, but I’m nasty. I am like that sometimes. I keep feeling as if I could cry. It’s very stupid, but it’ll pass off,” said Anna quickly, and she bent her flushed face over a tiny bag in which she was packing a nightcap and some cambric handkerchiefs. Her eyes were particularly bright, and were continually swimming with tears. “In the same way I didn’t want to leave Petersburg, and now I don’t want to go away from here.”

“You came here and did a good deed,” said Dolly, looking intently at her.

Anna looked at her with eyes wet with tears.

“Don’t say that, Dolly. I’ve done nothing, and could do nothing. I often wonder why people are all in league to spoil me. What have I done, and what could I do? In your heart there was found love enough to forgive....”

“If it had not been for you, God knows what would have happened! How happy you are, Anna!” said Dolly. “Everything is clear and good in your heart.”

“Every heart has its own skeletons, as the English say.”

“You have no sort of skeleton, have you? Everything is so clear in you.”

“I have!” said Anna suddenly, and, unexpectedly after her tears, a sly, ironical smile curved her lips.

“Come, he’s amusing, anyway, your skeleton, and not depressing,” said Dolly, smiling.

“No, he’s depressing. Do you know why I’m going today instead of tomorrow? It’s a confession that weighs on me; I want to make it to you,” said Anna, letting herself drop definitely into an armchair, and looking straight into Dolly’s face.

And to her surprise Dolly saw that Anna was blushing up to her ears, up to the curly black ringlets on her neck.

“Yes,” Anna went on. “Do you know why Kitty didn’t come to dinner? She’s jealous of me. I have spoiled ... I’ve been the cause of that ball being a torture to her instead of a pleasure. But truly, truly, it’s not my fault, or only my fault a little bit,” she said, daintily drawling the words “a little bit.”

“Oh, how like Stiva you said that!” said Dolly, laughing.

Anna was hurt.

“Oh no, oh no! I’m not Stiva,” she said, knitting her brows. “That’s why I’m telling you, just because I could never let myself doubt myself for an instant,” said Anna.

But at the very moment she was uttering the words, she felt that they were not true. She was not merely doubting herself, she felt emotion at the thought of Vronsky, and was going away sooner than she had meant, simply to avoid meeting him.

“Yes, Stiva told me you danced the mazurka with him, and that he....”

“You can’t imagine how absurdly it all came about. I only meant to be matchmaking, and all at once it turned out quite differently. Possibly against my own will....”

She crimsoned and stopped.

“Oh, they feel it directly?” said Dolly.

“But I should be in despair if there were anything serious in it on his side,” Anna interrupted her. “And I am certain it will all be forgotten, and Kitty will leave off hating me.”

“All the same, Anna, to tell you the truth, I’m not very anxious for this marriage for Kitty. And it’s better it should come to nothing, if he, Vronsky, is capable of falling in love with you in a single day.”

“Oh, heavens, that would be too silly!” said Anna, and again a deep flush of pleasure came out on her face, when she heard the idea, that absorbed her, put into words. “And so here I am going away, having made an enemy of Kitty, whom I liked so much! Ah, how sweet she is! But you’ll make it right, Dolly? Eh?”

Dolly could scarcely suppress a smile. She loved Anna, but she enjoyed seeing that she too had her weaknesses.

“An enemy? That can’t be.”

“I did so want you all to care for me, as I do for you, and now I care for you more than ever,” said Anna, with tears in her eyes. “Ah, how silly I am today!”

She passed her handkerchief over her face and began dressing.

At the very moment of starting Stepan Arkadyevitch arrived, late, rosy and good-humoured, smelling of wine and cigars.

Anna’s emotionalism infected Dolly, and when she embraced her sister-in-law for the last time, she whispered: “Remember, Anna, what you’ve done for me—I shall never forget. And remember that I love you, and shall always love you as my dearest friend!”

“I don’t know why,” said Anna, kissing her and hiding her tears.

“You understood me, and you understand. Good-bye, my darling!”

To be continued

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