APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/authors/tolstoy/annakareni/ANNA_K_3

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                           XXIV.


When Vronsky had looked at his watch on the Karenins' balcony, he
had been so greatly agitated and lost in his thoughts that, although
he saw the hands on the face of his watch, he could not take in what
time it was. He came out onto the highroad and walked, picking his way
carefully through the mud, to his carriage. He was so completely
absorbed in his feeling for Anna, that he did not even think what
o'clock it was, and whether he had time to go to Briansky's. He
preserved, as often happens, only the external faculty of memory, that
points out each step one has to take, one after the other. He went
up to his coachman, who was dozing on the box in the shadow, already
lengthening, of a thick lime tree; he admired the shifting clouds of
midges circling over the hot horses, and, waking the coachman, he
jumped into the carriage, and told him to drive to Briansky's. It
was only after driving nearly seven verstas that he had sufficiently
recovered himself to look at his watch, and realize that it was half
past five, and that he was late.

There were several races set for that day: the Body Guards' race,
then the officers' two-versta race, then the four-versta race, and
then the race for which he was entered. He could still be in right
time for his race, but if he went to Briansky's he could be only in
full time, and he would arrive when the whole Court would be in
their places. That would be a pity. But he had promised Briansky to
come, and so he decided to drive on, telling the coachman not to spare
the horses.

He reached Briansky's, spent five minutes there, and galloped
back. This rapid drive calmed him. All that was painful in his
relations with Anna, all the feeling of indefiniteness left by their
conversation, had slipped out of his mind. He was thinking now with
pleasure and excitement of the race, of his being in time after all,
and now and then the thought of the happiness of this night's
assignation flashed across his imagination like a dazzling light.

The excitement of the approaching race gained upon him more and more
as he drove farther and farther into the atmosphere of the races,
overtaking carriages driving up from the summer villas or out of
Peterburg.

There was no longer anyone at home at his quarters; all were at
the races, and his valet was looking out for him at the gate. While he
was changing his clothes, his valet told him that the second race
had begun already, that a lot of gentlemen had been to ask for him,
and a boy had twice run up from the stables.

Dressing without hurry (he never hurried himself, and never lost his
self-possession), Vronsky drove to the sheds. From the sheds he
could see a perfect sea of carriages, and people on foot, soldiers
surrounding the racecourse, and pavilions swarming with people. The
second race was apparently going on, for just as he went into the
sheds he heard a bell ringing. Going toward the stable, he met the
white-legged chestnut, Makhotin's Gladiator, being led to the
racecourse in a blue and orange horsecloth, with what looked like huge
ears edged with blue.

"Where's Cord?" he asked the stableboy.

"In the stable, putting on the saddle."

In the open horse box stood Frou-Frou, saddled ready. They were just
going to lead her out.

"I'm not too late?"

"All right! All right!" said the Englishman; "don't upset yourself!"

Vronsky once more took in at one glance the beautiful lines of his
favorite mare, who was quivering all over, and with an effort he
tore himself from the sight of her, and went out of the stable. He
went toward the pavilions at the most favorable moment for escaping
attention. The two-versta race was just finishing, and all eyes were
fixed on the cavalry guard in front and the light hussar behind,
urging their horses on with a last effort close to the winning post.
From the center and outside of the ring all were crowding to the
winning post, and a group of soldiers and officers of the cavalry
guards were shouting loudly their delight at the expected triumph of
their officer and comrade. Vronsky moved into the middle of the
crowd unnoticed, almost at the very moment when the bell rang at the
finish of the race, and the tall, mud-spattered cavalry guard who came
in first, leaning over the saddle, let go the reins of his panting
gray stallion that looked dark with sweat.

The stallion, stiffening out his legs, with an effort stopped his
rapid course, and the officer of the cavalry guards looked round him
like a man waking up from a heavy sleep, and just managed to smile.
A crowd of friends and outsiders pressed round him.

Vronsky intentionally avoided that select crowd of upper world,
which was moving and talking with discreet freedom before the
pavilions. He knew that Madame Karenina was there, and Betsy, and
his brother's wife, and he purposely did not go near them for fear
of something distracting his attention. But he was continually met and
stopped by acquaintances, who told him about the previous races, and
kept asking him why he was so late.

At the time when the racers had to go to the pavilion to receive the
prizes, and all attention was directed to that point, Vronsky's
elder brother, Alexandre, a colonel with the shoulder knot, came up to
him. He was not tall, though as broadly built as Alexei, and handsomer
and rosier than he; he had a red nose, and an open, tipsy face.

"Did you get my note?" he said. "There's never any finding you."

Alexandre Vronsky, in spite of his dissolute life, and
particularly his drunken habits, for which he was notorious, was quite
one of the Court circle.

Now, as he talked to his brother of a matter bound to be exceedingly
disagreeable to him, knowing that the eyes of many people might be
fixed upon him, he kept a smiling countenance, as though he were
jesting with his brother about something of little moment.

"I got it, and I really can't make out what you are worrying
yourself about," said Alexei.

"I'm worrying myself because the remark has just been made to me
that you weren't here, and that you were seen in Peterhof on Monday."

"There are matters which only concern those directly interested in
them, and the matter you are so worried about is of that nature..."

"Yes, but if so, one does not belong in the service, one does
not..."

"I beg you not to meddle, and that is all."

Alexei Vronsky's frowning face turned pale, and his prominent
lower jaw quivered, which happened rarely with him. Being a man of
very warm heart, he was seldom angry; but when he was angry, and
when his chin quivered, then, as Alexandre Vronsky knew, he was
dangerous. Alexandre Vronsky smiled gaily.

"I only wanted to give you mother's letter. Answer it and don't
worry about anything just before the race. Bonne chance," he added,
smiling, and he moved away from him. But after him another friendly
greeting brought Vronsky to a standstill.

"So you won't recognize your friends! How are you, mon cher?" said
Stepan Arkadyevich, as conspicuously brilliant in the midst of all the
Peterburg brilliance as he was in Moscow, his face rosy, and his
whiskers sleek and glossy. "I came up yesterday, and I'm delighted
because I shall see your triumph. When shall we meet?"

"Come tomorrow to the messroom," said Vronsky, and squeezing him
by the sleeve of his greatcoat, with apologies, he moved away to the
center of the racecourse, where the horses were being led for the
great steeplechase.

The horses who had run in the last race were being led home,
steaming and exhausted, by the stableboys, and one after another the
fresh horses for the coming race made their appearance, for the most
part English racers, wearing horsecloths and looking with their
drawn-up bellies like strange, huge birds. On the right Frou-Frou
was led in, lean and beautiful, lifting up her elastic, rather long
pasterns, as though moved by springs. Not far from her they were
taking the caparison off the lop-cared Gladiator. The strong,
exquisite, perfectly correct lines of the stallion, with his superb
hindquarters and excessively short pasterns almost over his hoofs,
attracted Vronsky's attention in spite of himself. He would have
gone up to his mare, but he was again detained by an acquaintance.

"Oh, there's Karenin!" said the acquaintance with whom he was
chatting. "He's looking for his wife, and she's in the middle of the
pavilion. Didn't you see her?"

"No, I didn't," answered Vronsky, and without even glancing round
toward the pavilion where his friend was pointing out Madame Karenina,
he went up to his mare.

Vronsky had not had time to look at the saddle, about which he had
to give some direction, when the entrants were summoned to the
pavilion to receive their numbers and places in the row at starting.
Seventeen officers, looking serious and severe, many with pale
faces, met together in the pavilion and drew the numbers. Vronsky drew
number 7. The cry was heard: "Mount!"

Feeling that, with the others riding in the race, he was the
center upon which all eyes were fastened, Vronsky walked up to his
mare in that state of nervous tension in which he usually became
dilatory and calm in his movements. Cord, in honor of the races, had
put on his best clothes, a black coat buttoned up, a stiffly
starched collar, which propped up his cheeks, a black bowler and
Hessian boots. He was calm and dignified as ever, and was with his own
hands holding Frou-Frou by both reins, standing straight in front of
her. Frou-Frou was still trembling as though in a fever. Her eye, full
of fire, glanced sideways at Vronsky. Vronsky slipped his finger under
the saddle girth. The mare glanced aslant at him, drew up her lip, and
twitched her ear. The Englishman puckered up his lips, intending to
indicate a smile that anyone should verify his saddling.

"Get up; you won't feel so excited."

Vronsky looked round for the last time at his rivals. He knew that
he would not see them during the race. Two were already riding forward
to the point from which they were to start. Galtsin, a friend of
Vronsky's and one of his more formidable rivals, was moving round a
bay horse that would not let him mount. A little hussar of the life
guards in tight riding breeches rode off at a gallop, crouched up like
a cat over the porridge, in imitation of English jockeys. Prince
Kuzovlev sat with a white face on his thoroughbred mare from the
Grabovsky stud, while an English groom led her by the bridle.
Vronsky and all his comrades knew Kuzovlev and his peculiarity of
"weak nerves" and terrible vanity. They knew that he was afraid of
everything- afraid of riding a line horse. But now, just because it
was terrible, because people broke their necks, and there was a doctor
standing at each obstacle, and an ambulance with a cross on it, and
a sister of mercy, he had made up his mind to take part in the race.
Their eyes met, and Vronsky gave him a friendly and encouraging nod.
Only one he did not see, his chief rival, Makhotin on Gladiator.

"Don't be in a hurry," said Cord to Vronsky, "and remember one
thing: don't hold her in at the fences, and don't urge her on; let her
go as she likes."

"All right, all right," said Vronsky, taking the reins.

"If you can, lead the race; but don't lose heart till the last
minute, even if you're behind."

Before the mare had time to move, Vronsky stepped with an agile,
vigorous movement into the steel-toothed stirrup, and lightly and
firmly placed his compacted body on the creaking leather of the
saddle. Getting his right foot in the stirrup, he with habitual moving
smoothed the double reins between his fingers, and Cord let go. As
though she did not know which foot to put first, Frou-Frou started,
dragging at the reins with her long neck, and as though she were on
springs, shaking her rider from side to side. Cord quickened his step,
following him. The excited mare, trying to deceive her rider, pulled
at the reins, first on one side and then the other, and Vronsky
tried in vain with voice and hand to soothe her.

They were just reaching the dammed-up stream on their way to the
starting point. Several of the riders were in front and several
behind, when suddenly Vronsky heard the sound of a horse galloping
in the behind him, and he was overtaken by Makhotin on his
white-legged, lop-eared Gladiator. Makhotin smiled, showing his long
teeth, but Vronsky looked at him angrily. He did not like him, and
regarded him now as his most formidable rival. He was angry with him
for galloping past and exciting his mare. Frou-Frou started into a
gallop, her left foot forward, made two bounds, and fretting at the
tightened reins, passed into a jolting trot, bumping her rider up
and down. Cord, too, scowled, and followed Vronsky almost ambling.

                           XXV.


There were seventeen officers in all riding in this race. The
racecourse was a large four-versta ring in the form of an ellipse in
front of the pavilion. On this course nine obstacles had been
arranged: the stream, a big and solid barrier two arsheenes high, just
before the pavilion, a dry ditch, a ditch full of water, a precipitous
slope, an Irish barricade (one of the most difficult obstacles,
consisting of a mound fenced with brushwood, beyond which was a
ditch out of sight for the horses, so that the horse had to clear both
obstacles or possibly be killed); then two more ditches filled with
water, and one dry one; and the end of the race was just facing the
pavilion. But the race began not in the ring, but a hundred
arsheenes away from it, and in that part of the course was the first
obstacle, a dammed-up stream, three arsheenes in breadth, which the
racers could leap or wade through as they preferred.

Three times they were ranged ready to start, but each time some
horse thrust itself out of line, and they had to begin again. The
starter, Colonel Sestrin, was beginning to lose his temper, when at
last, for the fourth time, he shouted "Away!" and the riders started.

Every eye, every opera glass, was turned on the brightly colored
group of riders at the moment they were in line to start.

"They're off! They're starting!" was heard on all sides after the
hush of expectation.

And little groups and solitary figures among the public began
running from place to place to get a better view. In the very first
minute the close group of horsemen spread out, and it could be seen
that they were approaching the stream in twos and threes and one
behind another. To the spectators it seemed as though they had all
started simultaneously, but to the racers there were seconds of
difference that had great value to them.

Frou-Frou, excited and overnervous, had lost the first moment, and
several horses had started before her, but before reaching the stream,
Vronsky, who was holding in the mare with all his force as she
tugged at the bridle, easily overtook three, and there were left in
front of him Makhotin's chestnut Gladiator, whose hindquarters were
moving lightly and rhythmically up and down exactly in front of
Vronsky, and, in front of all, the dainty mare Diana bearing the
more dead than alive Kuzovlev.

For the first instant Vronsky was not master either of himself or
his mare. Up to the first obstacle, the stream, he could not guide the
motions of his mare.

Gladiator and Diana came up to it together and almost at the same
instant; at a stroke they rose above the stream and flew across to the
other side; Frou-Frou darted after them easily, as if flying; but at
the very moment when Vronsky felt himself in the air, he suddenly
saw almost under his mare's hoofs Kuzovlev, who was floundering with
Diana on the further side of the stream. (Kuzovlev had let go the
reins as he took the leap, and the mare had fallen together with him
over her head.) Those details Vronsky learned later; at the moment all
he saw was that just under him, where Frou-Frou must alight, Diana's
legs or head might be in the way. But Frou-Frou drew up her legs and
back in the very act of leaping, like a falling cat, and, clearing the
other mare, alighted beyond her.

"Oh, you darling!" flashed through Vronsky's head.

After crossing the stream Vronsky had complete control of his
mare, and began holding her in, intending to cross the great barrier
behind Makhotin, and to try to overtake him in the clear ground of
about two hundred sazhenes that followed it.

The great barrier stood just in front of the Imperial Pavilion.
The Czar and the whole Court, and crowds of people, were all gazing at
them- at him, and at Makhotin, a length ahead of him, as they drew
near the "devil," as the solid barrier was called. Vronsky was aware
of those eyes fastened upon him from all sides, but he saw nothing
except the ears and neck of his own mare, the ground racing to meet
him, and the back and white legs of Gladiator beating time swiftly
before him, and keeping always the same distance ahead. Gladiator
rose, with no sound of knocking against anything. With a wave of his
short tail he disappeared from Vronsky's sight.

"Bravo!" cried a voice.

At the same instant, under Vronsky's eyes, right before him
flashed the palings of the barrier. Without the slightest change in
her action his mare flew over it; the palings vanished, and he heard
only a crash behind him. The mare, excited by Gladiator's keeping
ahead, had risen too soon before the barrier, and grazed it with one
of her hind hoofs. But her pace never changed, and Vronsky, feeling
a spatter of mud in his face, realized that he was once more the
same distance from Gladiator. Once more he perceived in front of him
the same back and short tail, and again the same swiftly moving
white legs that got no further away.

At the very moment when Vronsky thought that now was the time to
overtake Makhotin, Frou-Frou herself, understanding his thoughts,
without any incitement on his part, gained considerably, and began
getting alongside of Makhotin on the most favorable side, close to the
inner rope. Makhotin would not let her pass that side. Vronsky had
hardly formed the thought that he could perhaps pass on the outer
side, when Frou-Frou shifted her pace and began overtaking him on
the other side. Frou-Frou's shoulder, beginning by now to be dark with
sweat, was even with Gladiator's back. For a few bounds they moved
evenly. But before the obstacle they were approaching, Vronsky began
working at the reins, anxious to avoid having to take the outer
circle, and swiftly passed Makhotin just upon the declivity. He caught
a glimpse of his mud-stained face as he flashed by. He even fancied
that he smiled. Vronsky passed Makhotin, but he was immediately
aware of him close upon him, and he never ceased hearing just behind
him the even-thudding hoofs and the rapid and still quite fresh
breathing of Gladiator.

The next two obstacles, the watercourse and the barrier, were easily
crossed, but Vronsky began to hear the snorting and thud of
Gladiator closer upon him. He urged on his mare, and to his delight
felt that she easily quickened her pace, and the thud of Gladiator's
hoofs was again heard at the same distance away.

Vronsky was at the head of the race, just as he wanted to be and
as Cord had advised, and now he felt sure of being the winner. His
excitement, his delight, and his tenderness for Frou-Frou grew
keener and keener. He longed to look round, but he did not dare do
this, and tried to be cool and not to urge on his mare, so as to
keep the same reserve of force in her as he felt that Gladiator
still kept. There remained only one obstacle, the most difficult; if
he could cross it ahead of the others, he would come in first. He
was flying toward the Irish barricade; Frou-Frou and he both
together saw the barricade in the distance, and both the man and the
mare had a moment's hesitation. He saw the uncertainty in the mare's
ears and lifted the whip, but at the same time felt that his fears
were groundless; the mare knew what was wanted. She quickened her pace
and rose rhythmically, just as he had fancied she would, and as she
left the ground gave herself up to the force of her rush, which
carried her far beyond the ditch; and with the same rhythm, without
effort, with the same leg forward, Frou-Frou fell back into her pace
again.

"Bravo, Vronsky!" he heard shouts from a knot of men- he knew they
were his friends and his regiment comrades- who were standing at the
obstacle. He could not fail to recognize Iashvin's voice, though he
did not see him.

"O my sweet!" he said inwardly to Frou-Frou, as he listened for what
was happening behind. "He's cleared it!" he thought, catching the thud
of Gladiator's hoofs behind him. There remained only the last ditch,
filled with water and two arsheenes wide. Vronsky did not even look at
it, but anxious to come in a long way ahead began sawing away at the
reins, lifting the mare's head and letting it go in time with her
paces. He felt that the mare was at her very last reserve of strength;
not her neck and shoulders merely were wet, but the sweat was standing
in drops on her mane, her head, her sharp ears, and her breath came in
short, sharp gasps. But he knew that she had strength left more than
enough for the remaining two hundred sazhenes. It was only from
feeling himself nearer the ground and from the peculiar smoothness
of his motion that Vronsky knew how greatly the mare had quickened her
pace. She flew over the ditch as though not noticing it. She flew over
it like a bird; but at the same instant Vronsky, to his horror, felt
that failing to keep up with the mare's pace, he had, he did not
know how, made an abominable, unpardonable move in recovering his seat
in the saddle. All at once his position had shifted and he knew that
something awful had happened. He could not yet make out what had
happened, when the white legs of a chestnut horse flashed by close
to him, and Makhotin passed at a swift gallop. Vronsky was touching
the ground with one foot, and his mare was sinking on that foot. He
just had time to free his leg when she fell on one side, gasping
painfully, and, making vain efforts to rise with her delicate, soaking
neck, she fluttered on the ground at his feet like a shot bird. The
clumsy movement made by Vronsky had broken her back. But that he
only knew much later. At that moment he knew only that Makhotin had
flown swiftly by, while he stood staggering alone on the muddy,
motionless ground, and Frou-Frou lay gasping before him, bending her
head back and gazing at him with her exquisite eye. Still unable to
realize what had happened, Vronsky tugged at his mare's reins. Again
she struggled all over like a fish, and, her shoulders making the
wings of the saddle crackle, she rose on her front legs; but unable to
lift her back, she quivered all over and again fell on her side.
With his face hideous with passion, pale, his lower jaw trembling,
Vronsky kicked her with his heel in the stomach and again fell to
tugging at the rein. She did not stir, but thrusting her nose into the
ground, she simply gazed at her master with her speaking eyes.

"A-a-a!" groaned Vronsky, clutching at his head. "Ah! what have I
done!" he cried. "The race lost! And my fault! shameful, unpardonable!
And the poor darling, ruined mare! Ah, what have I done!"

A crowd of men, a doctor and his assistant, the officers of his
regiment, ran up to him. To his misery he felt that he was whole and
unhurt. The mare had broken her back, and it was decided to shoot her.
Vronsky could not answer questions, could not speak to anyone. He
turned, and without picking up his fallen cap, walked away from the
racecourse, unconscious of where he was going. He felt utterly
wretched. For the first time in his life he knew the bitterest sort of
misfortune, misfortune beyond remedy, and caused by his own fault.

Iashvin overtook him with his cap, and led him home, and half an
hour later Vronsky had regained his self-possession. But the memory of
that race remained for long in his heart, the cruelest and bitterest
memory of his life.

                           XXVI.


The external relations of Alexei Alexandrovich and his wife had
remained unchanged. The sole difference lay in the fact that he was
more busily occupied than ever. As in former years, at the beginning
of the spring he had gone to a foreign watering place for the sake
of his health, being deranged every year with his strenuous winter
work. And just as always he returned in July and at once fell to his
usual work with increased energy. Just as always, too, his wife had
moved for the summer to a villa out of town, while he remained in
Peterburg.

From the date of their conversation after the party at Princess
Tverskaia's he had never spoken again to Anna of his suspicions and
his jealousies, and that habitual tone of his of bantering mimicry was
the most convenient tone possible for his present attitude to his
wife. He was a little colder to his wife. He simply seemed to be
slightly displeased with her for that first midnight conversation,
which she had repelled. In his attitude to her there was a shade of
vexation, but nothing more. "You would not be open with me," he seemed
to say, mentally addressing her; "so much the worse for you. Now you
may beg as you please, but I won't be open with you. So much the worse
for you!" he said mentally, like a man who, after vainly attempting to
extinguish a fire, should fly in a rage with his vain efforts and say,
"Oh, very well then! You shall burn for this!"

This man, so subtle and astute in official life, did not realize all
the insanity of such an attitude to his wife. He did not realize it,
because it was too terrible to him to realize his actual position, and
he shut down and locked and sealed up in his heart that secret place
where lay hid his feelings toward his family- that is, his wife and
son. He who had been such a considerate father, had from the end of
that winter become peculiarly frigid to his son, and adopted to him
just the same bantering tone as he used with his wife. "Aha, young
man!" was the greeting with which he met him.

Alexei Alexandrovich asserted, and believed, that he had never in
any previous year had so much official business as that year. But he
was not aware that he sought work for himself that year, that this was
one of the means for keeping shut that secret place where lay hid
his feelings toward his wife and son, and his thoughts about them,
which became more terrible the longer they lay there. If anyone had
had the right to ask Alexei Alexandrovich what he thought of his
wife's behavior, the mild and peaceable Alexei Alexandrovich would
have made no answer, but he would have been greatly angered with any
man who should question him on that subject. It was precisely for this
reason that there came into Alexei Alexandrovich's face a look of
haughtiness and severity whenever anyone inquired after his wife's
health. Alexei Alexandrovich did not want to think at all about his
wife's behavior and feelings, and he actually succeeded in not
thinking about them at all.

Alexei Alexandrovich's permanent summer villa was in Peterhof, and
the Countess Lidia Ivanovna used to spend the summer there, close to
Anna, and constantly seeing her. That year Countess Lidia Ivanovna
declined to settle in Peterhof, did not call once at Anna
Arkadyevna's, and had hinted to Alexei Alexandrovich about the
unsuitability of Anna's close intimacy with Betsy and Vronsky.
Alexei Alexandrovich had sternly cut her short, roundly declaring
his wife to be above suspicion, and from that time began to avoid
Countess Lidia Ivanovna. He did not want to see, and did not see, that
many people in society cast dubious glances on his wife; he did not
want to understand, and did not understand, why his wife had so
particularly insisted on staying at Tsarskoe, where Betsy was staying,
and not far from the camp of Vronsky's regiment. He did not allow
himself to think about it, and he did not think about it; but, all the
same, though he never admitted it to himself, and had no proofs, nor
even suspicious evidence, at the bottom of his heart he knew beyond
all doubt that he was a deceived husband, and he was profoundly
miserable about it.

How often during those eight years of happy life with his wife had
Alexei Alexandrovich looked at other men's faithless wives and other
deceived husbands and asked himself: "How can people descend to
that? How is it they don't put an end to such a hideous situation?"
But now, when the misfortune had come upon himself, he was so far from
thinking of putting an end to the situation that he would not
recognize it at all- would not recognize it just because it was too
awful, too unnatural.

Since his return from abroad Alexei Alexandrovich had been twice
at their country villa. Once he dined there, another time he spent the
evening there with a party of friends, but he had not once stayed
the night there, as it had been his habit to do in previous years.

The day of the races had been a very busy day for Alexei
Alexandrovich; but when sketching out the day in the morning he made
up his mind to go immediately after his early dinner, to their
summer villa to see his wife and from there to the races, which all
the Court were to witness, and at which he was bound to be present. He
was going to see his wife, because he had determined to see her once a
week to keep up appearances. And besides, on that day, as it was the
fifteenth, he had to give his wife some money for her expenses,
according to their usual arrangement.

With his habitual control over his thoughts, though he thought all
this about his wife, he did not let his thoughts stray further in
regard to her.

That morning was a very full one for Alexei Alexandrovich. The
evening before, Countess Lidia Ivanovna had sent him a pamphlet by a
celebrated traveler in China, who was staying in Peterburg, and with
it she enclosed a note begging him to see the traveler himself, as
he was an extremely interesting person from various points of view,
and likely to be useful. Alexei Alexandrovich had not had time to read
the pamphlet through in the evening, and finished it in the morning.
Then people began arriving with petitions, and then came the
reports, interviews, appointments, dismissals, apportionment of
rewards, pensions, payments, papers- the workday round, as Alexei
Alexandrovich called it, that always took up so much time. Then
there was a private business of his own, a visit from the doctor,
and from the steward who managed his property. The steward did not
take up much time. He simply gave Alexei Alexandrovich the money he
needed, together with a brief statement of the position of his
affairs, which was not altogether satisfactory, as during that year,
owing to increased expenses, more had been paid out than usual, and
there was a deficit. But the doctor, a celebrated Peterburg doctor,
who was an intimate acquaintance of Alexei Alexandrovich, had taken up
a great deal of time. Alexei Alexandrovich had not expected him that
day, and was surprised at his visit, and still more so when the doctor
questioned him very carefully about his health, listened to his
breathing, and tapped at his liver. Alexei Alexandrovich did not
know that his friend Lidia Ivanovna, noticing that he was not as
well as usual that year, had begged the doctor to go and examine
him. "Do this for my sake," the Countess Lidia Ivanovna had said to
him.

"I will do it for the sake of Russia, Countess," replied the doctor.

"A priceless man!" said the Countess Lidia Ivanovna.

The doctor was extremely dissatisfied with Alexei Alexandrovich.
He found the liver considerably enlarged, and the digestive powers
weakened, while the course of mineral waters had been quite without
effect. He prescribed more physical exercise as far as possible, and
as far as possible less mental strain, and above all no worry- in
other words, just what was as much out of Alexei Alexandrovich's power
as abstaining from breathing. Then he withdrew, leaving in Alexei
Alexandrovich an unpleasant sense that something was wrong with him,
and that there was no chance of curing it.

As he was coming away, the doctor chanced to meet on the steps an
acquaintance of his, Sludin, who was head clerk in Alexei
Alexandrovich's office. They had been comrades at the university, and,
though they rarely met, they thought highly of each other and were
excellent friends, and hence there was no one to whom the doctor would
have given his opinion of a patient so freely as to Sludin.

"How glad I am you've been seeing him!" said Sludin. "He's not well,
and I fancy... Well, what do you think of him?"

"I'll tell you," said the doctor, beckoning over Sludin's head to
his coachman to bring the carriage round. "It's just this," said the
doctor, taking a finger of his kid glove in his white hands and
pulling it, "if you don't strain the strings, and then try to break
them, you'll find it a difficult job; but strain a string to its
very utmost, and the mere weight of one finger on the strained
string will snap it. And with his close assiduity, his conscientious
devotion to his work, he's strained to the utmost; and there's some
outside burden weighing on him, and that not a light one," concluded
the doctor, raising his eyebrows significantly. "Will you be at the
races?" he added, as he came down to his carriage. "Yes, yes, to be
sure; it does waste a lot of time," the doctor responded vaguely to
some reply of Sludin's he had not caught.

Directly after the doctor, who had taken up so much time, came the
celebrated traveler, and Alexei Alexandrovich, by means of the
pamphlet he had only just finished reading, and his previous
acquaintance with the subject, impressed the traveler by the depth
of his knowledge of the subject and the breadth and enlightenment of
his view of it.

At the same time with the traveler there was announced a
provincial marshal of nobility on a visit to Peterburg, with whom
Alexei Alexandrovich had to have some conversation. After his
departure, he had to finish the daily routine of business with his
head clerk, and then he still had to drive round to call on a
certain personage on a matter of grave and serious import. Alexei
Alexandrovich hardly managed to be back by five o'clock, his dinner
hour, and, after dining with his head clerk, he invited him to drive
with him to his summer villa and to the races.

Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, Alexei Alexandrovich
always tried nowadays to secure the presence of a third person in
his interviews with his wife.

                           XXVII.


Anna was upstairs, standing before the looking glass, and, with
Annushka's assistance, pinning the last ribbon on her gown when she
heard carriage wheels crunching the gravel at the entrance.

"It's too early for Betsy," she thought, and, glancing out of the
window, she caught sight of the carriage and, protruded from it, the
black hat of Alexei Alexandrovich, and the ears that she knew so well.
"How unlucky! Can he be going to stay the night?" she wondered, and
the thought of all that might come of such a chance struck her as so
awful and terrible that, without dwelling on it for a moment, she went
down to meet him with a bright and radiant face; and conscious of
the presence of that spirit of falsehood and deceit in herself that
she had come to know of late, she abandoned herself to that spirit and
began talking, hardly knowing what she was saying.

"Ah, how lovely of you!" she said, giving her husband her hand,
and with a smile greeting Sludin, who was like one of the family.
"You're staying the night, I hope?" was the first word the spirit of
falsehood prompted her to utter. "And now we'll go together. Only it's
a pity I've promised Betsy. She's coming for me."

Alexei Alexandrovich knit his brows at Betsy's name.

"Oh, I'm not going to separate the inseparables," he said in his
usual bantering tone. "I'm going with Mikhail Vassilyevich. Even the
doctors order me to walk. I'll walk, and fancy myself at the springs
again."

"There's no hurry," said Anna. "Would you like tea?"

She rang.

"Bring in tea, and tell Seriozha that Alexei Alexandrovich is
here. Well, tell me, how have you been? Mikhail Vassilyevich, you've
not been to see me before. Look how lovely it is out on the
terrace," she said, turning first to one and then to the other.

She spoke very simply and naturally, but too much and too fast.
She was the more aware of this from noticing in the inquisitive look
which Mikhail Vassilyevich turned on her that he was, as it were,
keeping watch on her.

Mikhail Vassilyevich promptly went out on the terrace.

She sat down beside her husband.

"You don't look quite well," she said.

"Yes," he said; "the doctor's been with me today and wasted an
hour of my time. I feel that some one of our friends must have sent
him: my health's so precious...."

"Come: what did he say?"

She questioned him about his health, and what he had been doing, and
tried to persuade him to take a rest and come out to her.

All this she said brightly, rapidly, and with a peculiar
brilliance in her eyes. But Alexei Alexandrovich did not now attach
any special significance to this tone of hers. He heard only her words
and gave them only the direct sense they bore. And he answered simply,
though jestingly. There was nothing remarkable in all this
conversation, but never after could Anna recall this brief scene
without an agonizing pang of shame.

Seriozha came in, preceded by his governess. If Alexei Alexandrovich
had allowed himself to observe he would have noticed the timid and
bewildered eyes with which Seriozha glanced first at his father and
then at his mother. But he would not see anything, and he did not
see it.

"Ah, the young man! He's grown. Really, he's getting quite a man.
How are you, young man?"

And he gave his hand to the scared child.

Seriozha had been shy of his father before, and now, ever since
Alexei Alexandrovich had taken to calling him "young man," and since
that insolvable question had occurred to him as to whether Vronsky
were friend or foe, he avoided his father. He looked round toward
his mother, as though seeking refuge. It was only with his mother that
he was at ease. Meanwhile, Alexei Alexandrovich was holding his son by
the shoulder, while he was speaking to the governess, and Seriozha was
so miserably uncomfortable that Anna saw he was on the point of tears.

Anna, who had flushed a little the instant her son had come in,
noticing that Seriozha was uncomfortable, got up hurriedly, took
Alexei Alexandrovich's hand from her son's shoulder, and, kissing
the boy, led him out onto the terrace, and quickly came back.

"It's time to start, though," said she, glancing at her watch.
"How is it Betsy doesn't come?..."

"Yes," said Alexei Alexandrovich, and, getting up, he folded his
hands and cracked his fingers. "I've come to bring you some money,
too- for nightingales, we know, can't live on fairy tales," he said.
"You want it, I expect?"

"No, I don't... Yes, I do," she said, without looking at him, and
crimsoning to the roots of her hair. "But you'll come back here
after the races, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes!" answered Alexei Alexandrovich. "And here's the glory of
Peterhof- Princess Tverskaia," he added, looking out of the window
at the English harnessed carriage, with the tiny seats placed
extremely high. "What elegance! Charming! Well, let us be starting
too, then."

Princess Tverskaia did not get out of her carriage, but her
liveryman, in spatterdashes, a cape and black high hat, jumped off
at the entrance.

"I'm going; good-by!" said Anna, and, kissing her son, she went up
to Alexei Alexandrovich and held out her hand to him. "It was ever
so lovely of you to come."

Alexei Alexandrovich kissed her hand.

"Well, au revoir, then! You'll come back for some tea- that'll be
delightful!" she said, and went out, radiant and gay. But as soon as
he was out of sight, she became aware of the spot on her hand that his
lips had touched, and she shuddered with repulsion.

                           XXVIII.


When Alexei Alexandrovich reached the racecourse Anna was already
sitting in the pavilion beside Betsy, in that pavilion where the
highest society had gathered. She caught sight of her husband in the
distance. Two men, her husband and her lover, were the two centers
of her existence, and, unaided by her external senses, she was aware
of their proximity. She was aware of her husband approaching a long
way off, and she could not help following him in the surging crowd
in the midst of which he was moving. She watched his progress toward
the pavilion, saw him now responding condescendingly to an
ingratiating bow, now exchanging friendly, nonchalant greetings with
his equals, now assiduously trying to catch the eye of some great
one of this world, and taking off his big round hat that pressed
down the tips of his ears. All these ways of his she knew, and all
were hateful to her. "Nothing but ambition, nothing but desire to
get on- that's all there is in his soul," she thought; "as for his
lofty ideals, love of culture, religion, they are only so many tools
for getting on."

From his glances toward the ladies' pavilion (he was staring
straight at her, but did not distinguish his wife in the sea of
muslin, ribbons, feathers, parasols and flowers) she saw that he was
looking for her, but she purposely avoided noticing him.

"Alexei Alexandrovich!" Princess Betsy called to him; "I'm sure
you don't see your wife: here she is."

He smiled his chilly smile.

"There's so much splendor here that one's eyes are dazzled," he
said, and he went into the pavilion. He smiled to his wife as a man
should smile on meeting his wife after only just parting from her, and
greeted the princess and other acquaintances, giving to each what
was due- that is to say, jesting with the ladies and dealing out
friendly greetings among the men. Below, near the pavilion, was
standing an adjutant general of whom Alexei Alexandrovich had a high
opinion, noted for his intelligence and culture. Alexei
Alexandrovich entered into conversation with him.

There was an interval between the races, and so nothing hindered
conversation. The adjutant general expressed his disapproval of races.
Alexei Alexandrovich replied defending them. Anna heard his high,
measured tones, without losing one word, and every word struck her
as false, and stabbed her ears with pain.

When the four-versta steeplechase was beginning, she bent forward
and gazed with fixed eyes at Vronsky as he went up to his horse and
mounted, and at the same time she heard that loathsome,
never-ceasing voice of her husband. She was in an agony of terror
for Vronsky, but a still greater agony was the never-ceasing, as it
seemed to her, stream of her husband's shrill voice with its
familiar intonations.

"I'm a wicked woman, a lost woman," she thought; "but I don't like
lying, I can't endure falsehood, while as for him [her husband],
falsehood is the breath of life to him. He knows all about it, he sees
it all; what does he care if he can talk so calmly? If he were to kill
me, if he were to kill Vronsky, I might respect him. No, all he
wants is falsehood and propriety," Anna said to herself, not
considering exactly what it was she wanted of her husband, and how she
would have liked to see him behave. She did not understand either that
Alexei Alexandrovich's peculiar loquacity that day, so exasperating to
her, was merely the expression of his inward distress and
uneasiness. As a child that has been hurt hops about, putting all
his muscles into movement to drown the pain, in the same way Alexei
Alexandrovich needed mental exercise to drown the thoughts of his
wife, that in her presence and in Vronsky's, and with the continual
iteration of his name, would force themselves on his attention. And it
is as natural for a child to hop about, as it was natural for him to
talk well and cleverly. He was saying:

"Danger in the races to officers, to cavalrymen, is an essential
element in the race. If England can point to the most brilliant
feats of cavalry in military history, it is simply owing to the fact
that she has historically developed this force both in beasts and in
men. Sport has, in my opinion, a great value, and, as is always the
case, we see nothing but what is most superficial."

"It's not superficial," said Princess Tverskaia. "One of the
officers, they say, has broken two ribs."

Alexei Alexandrovich smiled his smile, which uncovered his teeth,
but revealed nothing more.

"We'll admit, Princess, that that's not superficial," he said,
"but internal. But that's not the point," and he turned again to the
general with whom he talked seriously; "we mustn't forget that those
who are taking part in the race are military men, who have chosen that
career, and one must allow that every calling has its disagreeable
side. It forms an integral part of the duties of an officer. Low
sports, such as prize fighting or Spanish bullfights, are a sign of
barbarity. But specialized trials of skill are a sign of development."

"No, I shan't come another time; it's too upsetting," said
Princess Betsy. "Isn't it, Anna?"

"It is upsetting, but one can't tear oneself away," said another
lady. "If I'd been a Roman woman I should never have missed a single
circus."

Anna said nothing, and, keeping her opera glass up, gazed always
at the same spot.

At that moment a tall general walked through the pavilion.
Breaking off what he was saying, Alexei Alexandrovich got up
hurriedly, though with dignity, and bowed low to the general.

"You're not racing?" the officer asked, chaffing him.

"My race is a harder one," Alexei Alexandrovich responded
deferentially.

And though the answer meant nothing, the general looked as though he
had heard a witty remark from a witty man, and fully relished la
pointe de la sauce.

"There are two aspects," Alexei Alexandrovich resumed: "those who
take part and those who look on; and love for such spectacles is an
unmistakable proof of a low degree of development in the spectator,
I admit, but..."

"Any bets, Princess?" sounded Stepan Arkadyevich's voice from below,
addressing Betsy. "Who's your favorite?"

"Anna and I are for Kuzovlev," replied Betsy.

"I'm for Vronsky. A pair of gloves?"

"Done!"

"But it is a pretty sight, isn't it?"

Alexei Alexandrovich paused while the others were talking near
him, but he began again directly.

"I admit that manly sports do not..." he made an attempt to
continue.

But at that moment the racers started, and all conversation
ceased. Alexei Alexandrovich also fell silent, and everyone stood up
and turned toward the stream. Alexei Alexandrovich took no interest in
the race, and so he did not watch the racers, but fell listlessly to
scanning the spectators with his weary eyes. His eyes rested upon
Anna.

Her face was white and stern. She was obviously seeing nothing and
no one but one man. Her hand had convulsively clutched her fan, and
she held her breath. He looked at her and hastily turned away,
scrutinizing other faces.

"But here's this lady too, and others very much moved as well;
it's very natural," Alexei Alexandrovich told himself He tried not
to look at her, but unconsciously his eyes were drawn to her. He
examined that face again, trying not to read what was so plainly
written on it, and against his own will, with horror, read in it
what he did not want to know.

The first fall- Kuzovlev's, at the stream- agitated everyone, but
Alexei Alexandrovich saw distinctly on Anna's pale, triumphant face
that the man she was watching had not fallen. When, after Makhotin and
Vronsky had cleared the worst barrier, the next officer had been
thrown straight on his head at it and fatally injured, and a shudder
of horror passed over the whole public, Alexei Alexandrovich saw
that Anna did not even notice it, and had some difficulty in realizing
what they were saying around her. But more and more often, and with
greater persistence, he watched her. Anna, wholly engrossed as she was
with the sight of Vronsky racing, became aware of her husband's cold
eyes fixed upon her from aside.

She glanced round for an instant, looked inquiringly at him, and
with a slight frown turned away again.

"Ah, I don't care!" she seemed to say to him, and she did not once
glance at him again.

The race was an unlucky one, and of the seventeen officers who
rode in it more than half had been thrown and hurt. Toward the end
of the race everyone was in a state of agitation, which was
intensified by the fact that the Czar was displeased.

                           XXIX.


Everyone was loudly expressing disapprobation, everyone was
repeating a phrase someone had uttered: "The lions and gladiators will
be the next thing," and everyone was feeling horrified; so that when
Vronsky fell to the ground, and Anna moaned aloud, there was nothing
very much out of the way in it. But afterward a change came over
Anna's face which really went beyond decorum. She utterly lost her
head. She began fluttering like a caged bird, at one moment wanting to
get up and move away, and at the next turning to Betsy.

"Let us go, let us go!" she said.

But Betsy did not hear her. She was bending down, talking to a
general who had come up to her.

Alexei Alexandrovich went up to Anna and courteously offered her his
arm.

"Let us go, if you like," he said in French, but Anna was
listening to the general and did not notice her husband.

"He's broken his leg too, so they say," the general was saying.
"This surpasses everything."

Without answering her husband, Anna lifted her opera glass and gazed
toward the place where Vronsky had fallen; but it was so far off,
and there was such a crowd of people about it, that she could make out
nothing. She put down the opera glass, and would have moved away,
but at that moment an officer galloped up and made some announcement
to the Czar. Anna craned forward, listening.

"Stiva! Stiva!" she cried to her brother.

But her brother did not hear her. Again she would have moved away.

"Once more I offer you my arm if you want to be going," said
Alexei Alexandrovich, reaching for her hand.

She drew back from him with aversion, and without looking at his
face answered:

"No, no, leave me alone- I'll stay."

She saw now that from the place of Vronsky's accident an officer was
running across the course toward the pavilion. Betsy waved her
handkerchief to him. The officer brought the news that the rider was
not killed, but that the back of the horse had been broken.

On hearing this Anna sat down hurriedly, and hid her face in her
fan. Alexei Alexandrovich saw that she was weeping, and could not
control her tears, nor even the sobs that were shaking her bosom.
Alexei Alexandrovich stood so as to screen her, giving her time to
recover herself.

"For the third time I offer you my arm," he said to her after a
short interval, turning to her. Anna gazed at him and did not know
what to say. Princess Betsy came to her rescue.

"No, Alexei Alexandrovich; I brought Anna and I promised to take her
home," put in Betsy.

"Excuse me, Princess," he said smiling courteously, but looking
her very firmly in the face, "but I see that Anna's not very well, and
I wish her to come home with me."

Anna looked about her in a frightened way, got up submissively,
and laid her hand on her husband's arm.

"I'll send to him and find out, and let you know," Betsy whispered
to her.

As they left the pavilion, Alexei Alexandrovich, as always, talked
to those he met, and Anna had, as always, to talk and answer; but
she was utterly beside herself, and moved hanging on her husband's
arm, as though in a dream.

"Is he killed or not? Is it true? Will he come or not? Shall I see
him today?" she was thinking.

She took her seat in her husband's carriage in silence, and in
silence drove out of the press of carriages. In spite of all he had
seen, Alexei Alexandrovich still did not allow himself to consider his
wife's real condition. He merely saw the outward symptoms. He saw that
she was behaving unbecomingly, and considered it his duty to tell
her so. But it was very difficult for him not to say more, to tell her
nothing but that. He opened his mouth to tell her she had behaved
unbecomingly, but he could not help saying something utterly
different.

"What an inclination we all have, though, for these cruel
spectacles! he said. "I observe..."

"Eh? I don't understand," said Anna contemptuously.

He was offended, and at once began to say what he had meant to say.

"I am obliged to tell you..." he began.

"So now we are to have it out," she thought, and she felt
frightened.

"I am obliged to tell you that your behavior has been unbecoming
today," he said to her, in French.

"In what way has my behavior been unbecoming?" she said aloud,
turning her head swiftly and looking him straight in the face, not
with the bright expression that seemed covering something, but with
a look of determination, under which she concealed with difficulty the
dismay she was feeling.

"Be careful," he said, pointing to the open window opposite the
coachman.

He got up and pulled up the window.

"What did you consider unbecoming?" she repeated.

"The despair you were unable to conceal at the accident to one of
the riders."

He waited for her to retort, but she was silent, looking straight
before her.

"I have already begged you so to conduct yourself in society that
even malicious tongues can find nothing to say against you. There
was a time when I spoke of your inward attitude, but I am not speaking
of that now. Now I speak only of your external attitude. You have
behaved improperly, and I would wish it not to occur again."

She did not hear half of what he was saying; she felt panic-stricken
before him, and was thinking whether it was true that Vronsky was
not killed. Was it of him they were speaking when they said the
rider was unhurt, but that the back of the horse had been broken?
She merely smiled with a forced smile when he finished, and made no
reply, because she had not heard what he said. Alexei Alexandrovich
had begun to speak boldly, but as he realized plainly what he was
speaking of, the dismay she was feeling infected him too. He saw the
smile, and a strange misapprehension came over him.

"She is smiling at my suspicions. Yes, she will tell me directly
what she told me before; that there is no foundation for my
suspicions, that the whole thing is absurd."

At that moment, when the revelation of everything was hanging over
him, there was nothing he expected so much as that she would answer
mockingly, as before, that his suspicions were absurd and utterly
groundless. So terrible to him was what he knew that now he was
ready to believe anything. But the expression of her face, scared
and gloomy, did not now promise even deception.

"Possibly I was mistaken," said he. "If so, I beg your pardon."

"No, you were not mistaken," she said slowly, looking desperately
into his frigid face. "You were not mistaken. I was in despair, nor
could I help being in despair. I am listening to you, but I am
thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress; I can't bear you;
I'm afraid of you, and I hate you... You can do what you like to me."

And dropping back into the corner of the carriage, she broke into
sobs, hiding her face in her hands. Alexei Alexandrovich did not stir,
and kept looking straight before him. But his whole face suddenly bore
the solemn rigidity of the dead, and his expression did not change
during the whole time of the drive home. On reaching the house he
turned his head to her, still with the same expression.

"Very well! But I expect a strict observance of the external forms
of propriety till such time"- his voice shook- "as I may take measures
to secure my honor, and communicate them to you."

He got out first and helped her to get out. Before the servants he
pressed her hand, took his seat in the carriage, and drove back to
Peterburg.

Immediately afterward a footman came from Princess Betsy and brought
Anna a note.

"I sent to Alexei to find out how he is, and he writes me he is
quite well and unhurt, but in despair."

"So he will be here," she thought. "What a good thing I told him
all."

She glanced at her watch. She had still three hours to wait, and the
memories of their last meeting set her blood in flame.

"My God, how light it is! It's dreadful, but I do love to see his
face, and I do love this fantastic light.... My husband! Oh! yes...
Well, thank God! everything's at an end with him."

                           XXX.


In the little German watering place to which the Shcherbatskys had
betaken themselves, as in all places indeed where people are
gathered together, the usual process, as it were, of the
crystallization of society went on, assigning to each member of that
society a definite and unalterable place. Just as the particle of
water in frost, definitely and unalterably, takes the special form
of the crystal of snow, so each new person that arrived at the springs
was at once placed in his or her peculiar place.

Furst Shcherbatsky, samt Gemahlin und Tochter, by the apartments
they took, and from their name and from the friends they made, were
immediately crystallized into a definite place marked out for them.

There was visiting the watering place that year a real German
Furstin, in consequence of which the crystallizing process went on
more vigorously than ever. Princess Shcherbatsky wished, above
everything, to present her daughter to this German Princess, and the
day after their arrival she duly performed this rite. Kitty made a low
and graceful curtsy in the "very simple," that is to say, very elegant
frock that had been ordered for her from Paris. The German Princess
said, "I hope the roses will soon come back to this pretty little
face," and for the Shcherbatskyg certain definite lines of existence
were at once laid down, from which there was no departing. The
Shcherbatskys made the acquaintance too of the family of an English
lady, and of a German Countess and her son, wounded in the last war,
and of a learned Swede, and of M. Canut and his sister. Yet inevitably
the Shcherbatskys were thrown most into the society of a Moscow
lady, Marya Eugenyevna Rtishcheva and her daughter, whom Kitty
disliked, because she had fallen ill, like herself, over a love
affair; and a Moscow colonel, whom Kitty had known from childhood, and
had always seen in uniform and epaulets, and who now, with his
little eyes and his open neck and flowered cravat, was uncommonly
ridiculous and tedious, because there was no getting rid of him.
When all this was so firmly established, Kitty began to be very much
bored, especially as the Prince went off to Carlsbad and she was
left alone with her mother. She took no interest in the people she
knew, feeling that nothing fresh would come of them. Her chief
mental interest in the watering place consisted in watching and making
theories about the people she did not know. It was characteristic of
Kitty that she always imagined everything in people in the most
favorable light possible, especially so in those she did not know. And
now, as she made surmises as to who people were, what were their
relations to one another, and what they were like, Kitty endowed
them with the most marvelous and noble characters, and found
confirmation in her observations.

Of these people the one that attracted her most was a Russian girl
who had come to the watering place with an invalid Russian lady,
Madame Stahl, as everyone called her. Madame Stahl belonged to the
highest society, but she was so ill that she could not walk, and
only on exceptionally fine days made her appearance at the springs
in an invalid carriage. But it was not so much from ill-health as from
pride- so Princess Shcherbatskaia interpreted it- that Madame Stahl
had not made the acquaintance of anyone among the Russians there.
The Russian girl looked after Madame Stahl, and besides that, she was,
as Kitty observed, on friendly terms with all the invalids who were
seriously ill- and there were many of them at the springs- and was
solicitous over them in the most natural way. This Russian girl was
not, as Kitty gathered, related to Madame Stahl, nor was she a paid
attendant. Madame Stahl called her Varenka, and other people called
her "Mademoiselle Varenka." Apart from the interest Kitty took in this
girl's relations with Madame Stahl and with other unknown persons,
Kitty, as often happened, felt an inexplicable attraction to
Mademoiselle Varenka, and was aware when their eyes met that she too
liked her.

Of Mademoiselle Varenka one would not say that she had passed her
first youth, but she was, as it were, a creature without youth; she
might have been taken for nineteen or for thirty. If her features were
criticized separately, she was handsome rather that plain, in spite of
the sickly hue of her face. Hers would have been a good figure, too,
if it had not been for her extreme thinness and the size of her
head, which was too large for her medium height. But she was not
likely to be attractive to men. She was like a fine flower, already
past its bloom and without fragrance, though the petals were still
unwithered. Moreover, she would have been unattractive to men also
from the lack of just what Kitty had too much of- of the suppressed
fire of vitality, and the consciousness of her own attractiveness.

She always seemed absorbed in work, beyond a doubt, and so it seemed
as if she could take no interest in anything outside it. It was just
this contrast with her own position that was for Kitty the great
attraction of Mademoiselle Varenka. Kitty felt that in her, in her
manner of life, she would find an example of what she was now so
painfully seeking: interest in life, a dignity in life- apart from the
worldly relations of girls with men, which so revolted Kitty, and
appeared to her now as a shameful exhibition of goods in search of a
purchaser. The more attentively Kitty watched her unknown friend,
the more convinced she was that this girl was the perfect creature she
fancied her, and the more eagerly she wished to make her acquaintance.

The two girls used to meet several times a day, and every time
they met Kitty's eyes said: "Who are you? What are you? Are you really
the exquisite creature I imagine you to be? But for goodness' sake
don't suppose," her eyes added, "that I would force my acquaintance on
you- I simply admire you and like you." "I like you too, and you're
very, very sweet. And I should like you better still, if I had
time," answered the eyes of the unknown girl. Kitty saw, indeed,
that she was always busy. Either she was taking the children of a
Russian family home from the springs, or fetching a shawl for a sick
lady, and wrapping her up in it, or trying to interest an irritable
invalid, or selecting and buying teacakes for someone.

Soon after the arrival of the Shcherbatskys there appeared in the
morning crowd at the springs two persons who attracted universal and
unfavorable attention. These were a tall man with a stooping figure
and huge hands, in an old coat too short for him, with black,
simple, and yet terrible eyes, and a pock-marked, kind-looking
woman, very badly and tastelessly dressed. Recognizing these persons
as Russians, Kitty had already in her imagination begun constructing a
delightful and touching romance about them. But the Princess, having
ascertained from the Kurliste that this was Nikolai Levin and Marya
Nikolaevna, explained to Kitty what a bad man this Levin was, and
all her fancies about these two people vanished. Not so much from what
her mother told her, as from the fact that it was Konstantin's
brother, this pair suddenly seemed to Kitty in the highest degree
unpleasant. This Levin, with his continual twitching of his head,
aroused in her now an irrepressible feeling of disgust.

It seemed to her that his big, terrible eyes, which persistently
pursued her, expressed a feeling of hatred and contempt, and she tried
to avoid meeting him.

                           XXXI.


It was a foul day; it had been raining all the morning, and the
invalids, with their parasols, had flocked into the arcades.

Kitty was walking there with her mother and the Moscow colonel,
smart and jaunty in his European coat, bought ready-made at Frankfort.
They were walking on one side of the arcade, trying to avoid Levin,
who was walking on the other side. Varenka, in her dark dress, in a
black hat with a turndown brim, was walking up and down the whole
length of the arcade with a blind Frenchwoman, and, every time she met
Kitty, they exchanged friendly glances.

"Mamma, couldn't I speak to her?" said Kitty, watching her unknown
friend, and noticing that she was going up to the spring, and that
they might come there together.

"Oh, if you want to so much, I'll find out about her first and
make her acquaintance myself," answered her mother. "What do you see
in her out of the way? A companion, most probably. If you like, I'll
make acquaintance with Madame Stahl; I used to know her
belle-soeur," added the Princess, lifting her head haughtily.

Kitty knew that the Princess was offended because Madame Stahl had
apparently avoided making her acquaintance. Kitty did not insist.

"How wonderfully sweet she is!" she said, gazing at Varenka just
as she handed a glass to the Frenchwoman. "Look how natural and
sweet it all is."

"It's so funny to see your engouements," said the Princess. "No,
we'd better go back," she added, noticing Levin coming toward them
with his companion and a German doctor, to whom he was talking very
noisily and angrily.

They turned to go back, when suddenly they heard, not merely noisy
talk, but actual shouting. Levin, stopping short, was shouting at
the doctor, and the doctor, too, was excited. A crowd gathered about
them. The Princess and Kitty beat a hasty retreat, while the colonel
joined the crowd to find out what was up.

A few minutes later the colonel overtook them.

"What was it?" inquired the Princess.

"Scandalous and disgraceful!" answered the colonel. "The one thing
to be dreaded is meeting Russians abroad. That tall gentleman was
abusing the doctor, flinging all sorts of insults at him because he
wasn't treating him quite as he liked, and he began waving his stick
at him. It's simply scandalous!"

"Oh, how unpleasant!" said the Princess. "Well, and how did it end?"

"Luckily at that point that miss... the one in the mushroom hat...
intervened. She is a Russian lady, I think," said the colonel.

"Mademoiselle Varenka?" Kitty asked joyously.

"Yes, yes. She came to the rescue before anyone else; she took the
man by the arm and led him away."

"There, mamma," said Kitty, "yet you wonder why I'm enthusiastic
about her."

The next day, as she watched her unknown friend, Kitty noticed
that Mademoiselle Varenka was already on the same terms with Levin and
his companion as with her other proteges. She went up to them, entered
into conversation with them, and served as interpreter for the
woman, who could not speak any foreign language.

Kitty began to entreat her mother still more urgently to let her
make acquaintance with Varenka. And, disagreeable as it was to the
Princess to seem to take the first step in wishing to make the
acquaintance of Madame Stahl, who thought fit to give herself airs,
she made inquiries about Varenka, and, having ascertained
particulars about her tending to prove that there could he no harm,
even if little good in the acquaintance, she herself approached
Varenka and made acquaintance with her.

Choosing a time when her daughter had gone to the spring, while
Varenka had stopped outside the baker's, the Princess approached her.

"Allow me to make your acquaintance," she said, with her dignified
smile. "My daughter has lost her heart to you," she said. "Possibly
you do not know me. I am..."

"That feeling is more than reciprocal, Princess," Varenka answered
hurriedly.

"What a good deed you did yesterday to our poor compatriot!" said
the Princess.

Varenka flushed a little.

"I don't remember. I don't think I did anything," she said.

"Why, you saved that Levin from disagreeable consequences."

"Yes, sa compagne called me, and I tried to pacify him; he's very
ill, and was dissatisfied with the doctor. I'm used to looking after
such invalids."

"Yes, I've heard you live at Mentone with your aunt- I think- Madame
Stahl: I used to know her belle-soeur."

"No, she's not my aunt. I call her maman, but I am not related to
her; I was brought up by her," answered Varenka, flushing a little
again.

This was so simply said, and so sweet was the truthful and candid
expression of her face, that the Princess saw why Kitty had taken such
a fancy to Varenka.

"Well, and what's this Levin going to do?" asked the Princess.

"He's going away," answered Varenka.

At that instant Kitty came up from the spring beaming with delight
because her mother had become acquainted with her unknown friend.

"See, Kitty, your intense desire to make friends with
Mademoiselle..."

"Varenka," Varenka put in smiling, "that's what everyone calls me."

Kitty blushed with pleasure, and slowly, without speaking,
squeezed her new friend's hand, which did not respond to her pressure,
but lay motionless in her hand. The hand did not respond to her
pressure, but the face of Mademoiselle Varenka glowed with a soft,
glad, though rather mournful, smile, that showed large but handsome
teeth.

"I have long wished for this too," she said.

"But "But you are so busy..."

"Oh, no I'm not at all busy," answered Varenka, but at that moment
she had to leave her new friends because two little Russian girls,
children of an invalid, ran up to her.

"Varenka, mamma's calling!" they cried.

And Varenka went after them.

                           XXXII.


The particulars which the Princess had learned in regard to
Varenka's past and her relations with Madame Stahl were as follows:

Madame Stahl, of whom some people said that she had worried her
husband out of his life, while others said it was he who had made
her wretched by his immoral behavior, had always been a woman of
weak health and enthusiastic temperament. When, after her separation
from her husband, she gave birth to her only child, the child had died
almost immediately, and the family of Madame Stahl, knowing her
sensibility and fearing the news would kill her, had substituted
another child, a baby born the same night and in the same house in
Peterburg, the daughter of the chief cook of the Imperial Household.
This was Varenka. Madame Stahl learned later on that Varenka was not
her own child, but she went on bringing her up, especially as very
soon afterward Varenka had not a relation of her own living.

Madame Stahl had now been living without a break, more than ten
years abroad, in the south, never leaving her couch. And some people
said that Madame Stahl had made her social position as a
philanthropic, highly religious woman; other people said she really
was at heart the highly ethical being, living for nothing but the good
of her fellow creatures, which she represented herself to be. No one
knew what her faith was- Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox. But one
fact was indubitable- she was in amicable relations with the highest
dignitaries of all the churches and sects.

Varenka lived with her all the while abroad, and everyone who knew
Madame Stahl knew and liked Mademoiselle Varenka, as everyone called
her.

Having learned all these facts, the Princess found nothing to object
to in her daughter's intimacy with Varenka, more especially as
Varenka's breeding and education were of the best- she spoke French
and English extremely well- and, what was of the most weight,
brought a message from Madame Stahl expressing her regret that she had
been prevented by her ill-health from making the acquaintance of the
Princess.

After getting to know Varenka, Kitty became more and more fascinated
by her friend, and every day she discovered new virtues in her.

The Princess, hearing that Varenka had a good voice, asked her to
come and sing to them in the evening.

"Kitty plays, and we have a piano; not a good one, it's true, but
you will give us so much pleasure," said the Princess with her
affected smile, which Kitty disliked particularly just then, because
she noticed that Varenka had no inclination to sing. Varenka came,
however, in the evening, and brought a roll of music with her. The
Princess had invited Marya Eugenyevna and her daughter, and the
colonel.

Varenka seemed quite unaffected by the presence of persons whom
she did not know, and she went directly to the piano. She could not
accompany herself, but she could sing music at sight very well. Kitty,
who played well, accompanied her.

"You have an extraordinary talent," the Princess said to her after
Varenka had sung the first song excellently.

Marya Eugenyevna and her daughter expressed their thanks and
admiration.

"Look," said the colonel, looking out of the window, "what an
audience has collected to listen to you."

There actually was a considerable crowd under the windows.

"I am very glad it gives you pleasure," Varenka answered simply.

Kitty looked with pride at her friend. She was enchanted by her
talent, and her voice, and her face, but most of all by her manner, by
Varenka's obviously thinking nothing of her singing and being quite
unmoved by their praise. She seemed only to be asking: "Am I to sing
again, or is that enough?"

"If it had been I," thought Kitty, "how proud I should have been!
How delighted I should have been to see that crowd under the
windows! But she's utterly unmoved by it. Her only motive is to
avoid refusing and to please maman. What is there about her? What is
it gives her the power to look down on everything, to be calm
independently of everything? How I should like to know it, and to
learn it from her!" thought Kitty, gazing into her serene face. The
Princess asked Varenka to sing again, and Varenka sang another song,
also smoothly, distinctly, and well, standing erect at the piano and
beating time on it with her thin, dark-skinned hand.

The next song in the book was an Italian one. Kitty played the
opening bars, and looked round at Varenka.

"Let's skip that," said Varenka, flushing a little.

Kitty let her eyes rest on Varenka's face, with a look of dismay and
inquiry.

"Very well, the next one," she said hurriedly, turning over the
pages, and at once feeling that there was something connected with the
song.

"No," answered Varenka with a smile, laying her hand on the music,
"no, let's have that one." And she sang it just as quietly, as coolly,
and as well as the others.

When she had finished, they all thanked her again, and went off to
tea. Kitty and Varenka went out into the little garden that adjoined
the house.

"Am I right, that you have some reminiscences connected with that
song?" said Kitty. "Don't tell me," she added hastily, "only say if
I'm right."

"No, why not? I'll tell you," said Varenka simply, and, without
waiting for a reply, she went on: "Yes, it brings up memories, once
painful ones. I cared for someone once, and I used to sing him that
song."

Kitty with big, wide-open eyes gazed silently, sympathetically at
Varenka.

"I cared for him, and he cared for me; but his mother was opposed,
and he married another girl. He's living now not far from us, and I
see him sometimes. You didn't think I had a love story, too," she
said, and there was a faint gleam in her handsome face of that fire
which Kitty felt must once have glowed all over her.

"I didn't think so? Why, if I were a man, I could never care for
anyone else after knowing you. Only I can't understand how he could,
to please his mother, forget you and make you unhappy; he had no
heart."

"Oh, no, he's a very good man, and I'm not unhappy; quite the
contrary- I'm very happy. Well, we shan't be singing any more now,"
she added, turning toward the house.

"How good you are! How good you are!" cried Kitty, and stopping her,
she kissed her. "If I could only be even a little like you!"

"Why should you be like anyone? You're lovely as you are," said
Varenka, smiling her gentle, weary smile.

"No, I'm not lovely at all. Come, tell me... Stop a minute, let's
sit down," said Kitty, making her sit down again beside her. "Tell me,
isn't it humiliating to think that a man has disdained your love, that
he hasn't cared for it?..."

"But he didn't disdain it; I believe he cared for me, but he was a
dutiful son...."

"Yes, but if it hadn't been on account of his mother, if it had been
his own doing?..." said Kitty, feeling she was giving away her secret,
and that her face, burning with the flush of shame, had betrayed her
already.

"In that case he would have done wrong, and I should not have
regretted him," answered Varenka, evidently realizing that they were
now talking not of her, but of Kitty.

"But the humiliation," said Kitty, "the humiliation one can never
forget- never!" she said, remembering her look at the last ball during
the pause in the music.

"Where is the humiliation? Why, you did nothing wrong?"

"Worse than wrong- shameful."

Varenka shook her head and laid her hand on Kitty's.

"Why, what's shameful about it?" she said. "You didn't tell a man
who didn't care for you, that you loved him, did you?"

"Of course not; I never said a word, but he knew it. No, no, there
are looks, there are ways; I can't forget it, if I live a hundred
years."

"Why so? I don't understand. The whole point is whether you love him
now or not," said Varenka, who called everything by its name.

"I hate him; I can't forgive myself."

"Why, what for?"

"The shame, the humiliation!"

"Oh! if everyone were as sensitive as you are!" said Varenka. "There
isn't a girl who hasn't been through the same. And it's all so
unimportant."

"Why, what is important?" said Kitty, looking into her face with
inquisitive wonder.

"Oh, there's so much that's important," said Varenka, smiling.

"Why, what?"

"Oh, so much that's more important," answered Varenka, not knowing
what to say. But at that instant they heard the Princess's voice
from the window. "Kitty, it's cold! Either get a shawl, or come
indoors."

"It really is time to go in!" said Varenka, getting up. "I have to
go on to Madame Berthe's; she asked me to."

Kitty held her by the hand, and with passionate curiosity and
entreaty her eyes asked her: "What is it, what is this of such
importance, that gives you such tranquility? You know, tell me!" But
Varenka did not even know what Kitty's eyes were asking her. She
merely thought that she had to go to see Madame Berthe too that
evening, and to make haste home in time for maman's tea at twelve
o'clock. She went indoors, collected her music, and saying good-by
to everyone, was about to go.

"Allow me to see you home," said the colonel.

"Yes, how can you go alone at night like this?" chimed in the
Princess. "Anyway, I'll send Parasha."

Kitty saw that Varenka could hardly restrain a smile at the idea
that she needed an escort.

"No, I always go about alone and nothing ever happens to me," she
said, taking her hat. And kissing Kitty once more, without saying what
was important, she stepped out courageously with the music under her
arm and vanished into the twilight of the summer night, bearing away
with her her secret of what was important, and what gave her that calm
and dignity so much to be envied.

                           XXXIII.


Kitty made the acquaintance of Madame Stahl too, and this
acquaintance, together with her friendship with Varenka, did not
merely exercise a great influence on her- it also comforted her in her
mental distress. She found this comfort through a completely new world
being opened to her by means of this acquaintance, a world having
nothing in common with her past; an exalted, noble world, from the
height of which she could contemplate her past calmly. It was revealed
to her that besides the instinctive life to which Kitty had given
herself up hitherto there was a spiritual life. This life was
disclosed in religion, but a religion having nothing in common with
that one which Kitty had known from childhood, and which found
expression in masses and evening services at the Widow's Home, where
one might meet one's friends; and in learning by heart Slavonic
texts with the priest. This was a lofty, mysterious religion connected
with a whole series of noble thoughts and feelings, which one could
not merely believe because one was told to believe, but which one
could love.

Kitty found all this out not from words. Madame Stahl talked to
Kitty as to a charming child that one regards with pleasure, as one
regards the memory of one's youth, and only once she said in passing
that in all human sorrows nothing gives comfort but love and faith,
and that in the sight of Christ's compassion for us no sorrow is
trifling- and immediately talked of other things. But in every gesture
of Madame Stahl, in every word, in every heavenly- as Kitty called it-
look; and, above all, in the whole story of her life, which she
heard from Varenka, Kitty recognized that something "that was
important," of which, till then, she had known nothing.

Yet, elevated as Madame Stahl's character was, touching as was her
story, and exalted and moving as was her speech, Kitty could not
help detecting in her some traits which perplexed her. She noticed
that, when questioning her about her family, Madame Stahl had smiled
contemptuously, which was not in accord with Christian meekness. Kitty
noticed, too, that when she had found a Catholic priest with her,
Madame Stahl had studiously kept her face in the shadow of the lamp
shade and had smiled in a peculiar way. Trivial as these two
observations were, they perplexed her, and she had her doubts as to
Madame Stahl. But on the other hand Varenka, alone in the world,
without friends or relations, with a melancholy disappointment in
the past, desiring nothing, regretting nothing, was just that
perfection of which Kitty dared hardly dream. In Varenka she
realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one
will be calm, happy and good. And that was what Kitty longed to be.
Seeing now clearly what was most important, Kitty was not satisfied
with being enthusiastic over it; she at once gave herself up with
her whole soul to the new life that was opening to her. From Varenka's
accounts of the doings of Madame Stahl and other people whom she
mentioned, Kitty had already constructed the plan of her own future
life. She would, like Madame Stahl's niece, Aline, of whom Varenka had
talked to her a great deal, seek out those who were in trouble,
wherever she might be living, help them as far as she could, giving
them the Gospel; she would read the Gospel to the sick, to the
criminals, to the dying. The idea of reading the Gospel to
criminals, as Aline did, particularly fascinated Kitty. But all
these were secret dreams, of which Kitty did not talk either to her
mother or to Varenka.

While awaiting the time for carrying out her plans on a large scale,
however, Kitty, even then at the springs, where there were so many
people ill and unhappy, readily found a chance for practicing her
new principles in imitation of Varenka.

At first the Princess noticed nothing but that Kitty was much
under the influence of her engouement, as she called it, for Madame
Stahl, and still more for Varenka. She saw that Kitty did not merely
imitate Varenka in her conduct, but unconsciously imitated her in
her manner of walking, of talking, of blinking her eyes. But later
on the Princess noticed that, apart from this adoration, some kind
of serious spiritual change was taking place in her daughter.

The Princess saw that in the evenings Kitty read a French
Testament that Madame Stahl had given her- a thing she had never
done before; that she avoided society acquaintances and associated
with the sick people who were under Varenka's protection, and
especially one poor family, that of a sick painter, Petrov. Kitty
was unmistakably proud of playing the part of a sister of mercy in
that family. All this was well enough, and the Princess had nothing to
say against it, especially as Petrov's wife was a perfectly
respectable woman, and that the German Princess, noticing Kitty's
devotion, praised her, calling her an angel of consolation. All this
would have been very well, if there had been no exaggeration. But
the Princess saw that her daughter was rushing into extremes, and so
indeed she told her.

"Il ne faut jamais rien outrer," she said to her.

Her daughter made her no reply, but in her heart she thought that
one could not talk about exaggeration where Christianity was
concerned. What exaggeration could there be in the practice of a
doctrine wherein one was bidden to turn the other cheek when one was
smitten, and give one's shirt if one's coat were taken? But the
Princess disliked this exaggeration, and disliked even more the fact
that she felt her daughter did not care to show her all her heart.
Kitty did in fact conceal her new views and feelings from her
mother. She concealed them not because she did not respect or did
not love her mother, but simply because she was her mother. She
would have revealed them to anyone sooner than to her mother.

"How is it Anna Pavlovna's not been to see us for so long?" the
Princess said one day, referring to Madame Petrov. "I've asked her,
but she seems put out about something."

"No, I've not noticed it, maman," said Kitty, flushing hotly.

"Is it long since you've been to see them?"

"We intend making an excursion to the mountains tomorrow,"
answered Kitty.

"Well, you may go," answered the Princess, gazing at her
daughter's embarrassed face and trying to guess the cause of her
embarrassment.

That day Varenka came to dinner and told them that Anna Pavlovna had
changed her mind and given up the excursion for the morrow. And the
Princess noticed again that Kitty reddened.

"Kitty, haven't you had some misunderstanding with the Petrovs?"
said the Princess, when they were left alone. "Why has she given up
sending the children and coming to see us?"

Kitty answered that nothing had happened between them, and that
she could not tell why Anna Pavlovna seemed displeased with her. Kitty
answered perfectly truthfully. She did not know the reason Anna
Pavlovna had changed toward her, but she guessed it. She guessed at
something which she could not tell her mother, which she did not put
into words to herself It was one of those things which one knows but
which one can never speak of even to oneself, so terrible and shameful
would it be to be mistaken.

Again and again she went over in her memory all her relations with
the family. She remembered the simple delight expressed on the
round, good-natured face of Anna Pavlovna at their meetings; she
remembered their secret confabulations about the invalid, their
plots to draw him away from the work which was forbidden him, and to
get him out of doors; the devotion of the youngest boy, who used to
call her "my Kitty," and would not go to bed without her. How lovely
it all was! "Then she recalled the thin, terribly thin figure of
Petrov, with his long neck, in his brown coat, his scant, curly
hair, his questioning blue eyes that were so terrible to Kitty at
first, and his painful attempts to seem hearty and lively in her
presence. She recalled the efforts she had made at first to overcome
the repugnance she felt for him, as for all consumptive people, and
the pains it had cost her to think of things to say to him. She
recalled the timid, softened look with which he gazed at her, and
the strange feeling of compassion and awkwardness, and later of a
sense of her own goodness, which she had felt at it. How lovely it all
was! But all that was at first. Now, a few days ago, everything was
suddenly spoiled. Anna Pavlovna had met Kitty with affected
cordiality, and had kept continual watch on her and on her husband.

Could that touching pleasure he showed when she came near be the
cause of Anna Pavlovna's coolness?

"Yes," she mused, "there was something unnatural about Anna
Pavlovna, and utterly unlike her good nature, when she said angrily
the day before yesterday: 'There, he will keep waiting for you; he
wouldn't drink his coffee without you, though he's grown so dreadfully
weak.'"

"Yes, perhaps, too, she didn't like it when I gave him the rug. It
was all so simple, but he took it so awkwardly, and was so long
thanking me, that I felt awkward too. And then that portrait of me
he did so well. And most of all that look of confusion and tenderness!
Yes, yes, that's it!" Kitty repeated to herself with horror. "No, it
can't be, it oughtn't to be! He's so much to be pitied!" she said to
herself directly after.

This doubt poisoned the charm of her new life.

                           XXXIV.


Before the end of the water cure, Prince Shcherbatsky, who had
gone on from Carlsbad to Baden and Kissingen to Russian friends- to
get a breath of Russian atmosphere, as he said- came back to his
wife and daughter.

The views of the Prince and of the Princess on life abroad were
completely opposed. The Princess thought everything delightful, and in
spite of her established position in Russian society, she tried abroad
to be like a European fashionable lady, which she was not for the
simple reason that she was a typical Russian gentlewoman; and so she
was affected, which did not altogether suit her. The Prince, on the
contrary, thought everything foreign detestable, got sick of
European life, kept to his Russian habits, and purposely tried to show
himself abroad less European than he was in reality.

The Prince returned thinner, with the skin hanging in loose bags
on his cheeks, but in the most cheerful frame of mind. His good
humor was even greater when he saw Kitty completely recovered. The
news of Kitty's friendship with Madame Stahl and Varenka, and the
reports the Princess gave him of some kind of change she had noticed
in Kitty, troubled the Prince and aroused his habitual feeling of
jealousy of everything that drew his daughter away from him, and a
dread that his daughter might have got out of the reach of his
influence into regions inaccessible to him. But this unpleasant news
was all drowned in the sea of kindliness and good humor which was
always within him, and more so than ever since his course of
Carlsbad waters.

The day after his arrival the Prince, in his long overcoat, with his
Russian wrinkles and baggy cheeks propped up by a starched collar, set
off with his daughter to the spring in the greatest good humor.

It was a lovely morning: the tidy, cheerful houses with their little
gardens, the sight of the red-faced, red-armed, beer-drinking German
waitresses, working away merrily, and bright sun did one's heart good.
But the nearer they got to the springs the oftener they met sick
people; and their appearance seemed more pitiable than ever among
the everyday conditions of prosperous German life. Kitty was no longer
struck by this contrast. The bright sun, the brilliant green of the
foliage, the strains of the music were for her the natural setting
of all these familiar faces, with their changes to greater
emaciation or to convalescence, for which she watched. But to the
Prince the brightness and gaiety of the June morning, and the sound of
the orchestra playing a gay waltz then in fashion, and above all,
the appearance of the robust waitresses, seemed something unseemly and
monstrous, in conjunction with these slowly moving cadavers gathered
together from all parts of Europe.

In spite of his feeling of pride and, as it were, of the return of
youth, when he walked with his favorite daughter on his arm, he felt
awkward, and almost ashamed of his vigorous step and his sturdy, stout
and fat limbs. He felt almost like a man not dressed in a crowd.

"Present, present me to your new friends," he said to his
daughter, squeezing her hand with his elbow. "I like even your
horrid Soden for making you so well again. Only it's melancholy,
very melancholy here. Who's that?"

Kitty mentioned the names of all the people they met, of some with
whom she was acquainted, and some with whom she was not. At the very
entrance of the garden they met the blind lady, Madame Berthe, with
her guide, and the Prince was delighted to see the old Frenchwoman's
face light up when she heard Kitty's voice. She at once began
talking to him with the exaggerated politeness of the French,
applauding him for having such a delightful daughter, extolling
Kitty to the skies before her face, and calling her a treasure, a
pearl and a consoling angel.

"Well, she's the second angel, then," said the Prince, smiling. "She
calls Mademoiselle Varenka angel number one."

"Oh! Mademoiselle Varenka- she's a real angel, allez," Madame Berthe
assented.

In the arcade they met Varenka herself. She was walking rapidly
toward them, carrying an elegant red bag.

"Here is papa come," Kitty said to her.

Varenka made- simply and naturally as she did everything- a movement
between a bow and curtsy, and immediately began talking to the Prince,
without shyness, naturally, as she talked to everyone.

"Of course I know you; I know you very well," the Prince said to her
with a smile, in which Kitty detected with joy that her father liked
her friend. "Where are you off to in such haste?"

"Maman's here," she said, turning to Kitty. "She has not slept all
night, and the doctor advised her to go out. I'm taking her her work."

"So that's angel number one?" said the Prince when Varenka had
gone on.

Kitty saw that her father had meant to make fun of Varenka, but that
he could not do it because he liked her.

"Come, so we shall see all your friends," he went on, "even Madame
Stahl, if she deigns to recognize me."

"Why, did you know her, papa?" Kitty asked apprehensively,
catching the gleam of irony that kindled in the Prince's eyes at the
mention of Madame Stahl.

"I used to know her husband, and her too a little, before she'd
joined the Pietists."

"What is a Pietist, papa?" asked Kitty, dismayed to find that what
she prized so highly in Madame Stahl had a name.

"I don't quite know myself. I only know that she thanks God for
everything, for every misfortune, and thanks God too that her
husband died. And that's rather droll, as they didn't get on together.
Who's that? What a piteous face!" he asked, noticing a sick man of
medium height sitting on a bench, wearing a brown overcoat and white
trousers that fell in strange folds about his long, fleshless legs.
This man lifted his straw hat, showed his scanty curly hair and high
forehead, painfully reddened by the pressure of the hat.

"That's Petrov, an artist," answered Kitty blushing. "And that's his
wife," she added, indicating Anna Pavlovna, who, as though on purpose,
at the very instant they approached, walked away after a child that
had run off along a path.

"Poor fellow! And what a fine face he has!" said the Prince. "Why
don't you go up to him? He wanted to speak to you."

"Well, let us go, then," said Kitty, turning round resolutely.
"How are you feeling today?" she asked Petrov.

Petrov got up, leaning on his stick, and looked shyly at the Prince.

"This is my daughter," said the Prince. "Let me introduce myself."

The painter bowed and smiled, showing his strangely dazzling white
teeth.

"We expected you yesterday, Princess," he said to Kitty.

He staggered as he said this, and then repeated the motion, trying
to make it seem as if it had been intentional.

"I meant to come, but Varenka said that Anna Pavlovna sent word
you were not going."

"Not going!" said Petrov, blushing, and immediately beginning to
cough, and his eyes sought his wife. "Aneta! Aneta!" he said loudly,
and the swollen veins stood out like cords on his thin white neck.

Anna Pavlovna came up.

"So you sent word to the Princess that we weren't going!" he
whispered to her angrily, losing his voice.

"Good morning, Princess," said Anna Pavlovna, with an assumed
smile utterly unlike her former manner. "Very glad to make your
acquaintance," she said to the Prince. "You've long been expected,
Prince."

"Why did you send word to the Princess that we weren't going?" the
artist whispered hoarsely again, still more angrily, obviously
exasperated that his voice failed him so that he could not give his
words the expression he would have liked to.

"Oh, mercy on us! I thought we weren't going," his wife answered
crossly.

"What, when..." He coughed and waved his hand.

The Prince took off his hat and moved away with his daughter.

"Ah! ah!" he sighed deeply. "Oh, poor things!"

"Yes, papa," answered Kitty. "And you must know they've three
children, no servant, and scarcely any means. He gets something from
the Academy," she went on briskly, trying to drown the distress that
queer change in Anna Pavlovna's manner toward her had aroused in
her. "Oh, here's Madame Stahl," said Kitty, indicating an invalid
carriage, where, propped on pillows, something in gray and blue was
lying under a sunshade. This was Madame Stahl. Behind her stood the
gloomy, robust German workman who pushed the carriage. Close by was
standing a flaxen-headed Swedish Count, whom Kitty knew by name.
Several invalids were lingering near the low carriage, staring at
the lady as though she were some curiosity.

The Prince walked up to her, and Kitty detected that disconcerting
gleam of irony in his eyes. He walked up to Madame Stahl, and
addressed her with extreme courtesy and charm in that excellent French
which so few speak nowadays.

"I don't know if you remember me, but I must recall myself to
thank you for your kindness to my daughter," he said taking off his
hat and not putting it on again.

"Prince Alexandre Shcherbatsky," said Madame Stahl, lifting upon him
her heavenly eyes, in which Kitty discerned a look of annoyance.
"Delighted! I have taken a great fancy to your daughter."

"You are still in weak health?"

"Yes; I'm used to it," said Madame Stahl, and she introduced the
Prince to the Swedish Count.

"You are scarcely changed at all," the Prince said to her. "It's ten
or eleven years since I had the honor of seeing you."

"Yes; God sends the cross and sends the strength to bear it. Often
one wonders what is the goal of this life?... The other side!" she
said angrily to Varenka, who had rearranged the rug over her feet
not to her satisfaction.

"To do good, probably," said the Prince with a twinkle in his eye.

"That is not for us to judge," said Madame Stahl, perceiving the
shade of expression on the Prince's face. "So you will send me that
book, dear Count? I'm very grateful to you," she said to the young
Swede.

"Ah!" cried the Prince, catching sight of the Moscow colonel
standing near, and with a bow to Madame Stahl he walked away with
his daughter and the Moscow colonel, who joined them.

"That's our aristocracy, Prince!" the Moscow colonel said with
ironical intention. He cherished a grudge against Madame Stahl for not
making his acquaintance.

"She's the same as ever," replied the Prince.

"Did you know her before her illness, Prince- that's to say,
before she took to her bed?"

"Yes. She took to her bed before my eyes," said the Prince.

"They say it's ten years since she has stood on her feet."

"She doesn't stand up because her legs are too short. She has a very
bad figure."

"Papa, it's not possible!" cried Kitty.

"That's what wicked tongues say, my darling. And your Varenka is
to endure still," he added. "Oh, these invalid ladies!"

"Oh, no, papa!" Kitty objected warmly. "Varenka worships her. And
then she does so much good! Ask anyone! Everyone knows her and Aline
Stahl."

"Perhaps so," said the Prince, squeezing her hand with his elbow;
"but it's better when one does good so that you may ask everyone and
no one knows."

Kitty did not answer, not because she had nothing to say, but
because she did not care to reveal her secret thoughts even to her
father. But, strange to say, although she had made up her mind so
firmly not to be influenced by her father's views, not to let him into
her inmost sanctuary, she felt that the heavenly image of Madame
Stahl, which she had carried for a whole month in her heart, had
vanished, never to return, just as the fantastic figure made up of
some clothes thrown down at random vanishes when one sees that it is
only some fallen garment. All that was left was a woman with short
legs, who lay down because she had a bad figure, and worried patient
Varenka for not arranging her rug to her liking. And by no effort of
her imagination could Kitty bring back the former Madame Stahl.

                           XXXV.


The Prince communicated his good humor to his own family and his
friends, and even to the German landlord in whose rooms the
Shcherbatskys were staying.

On coming back with Kitty from the springs, the Prince, who had
asked the colonel, and Marya Eugenyevna, and Varenka all to come and
have coffee with them, gave orders for a table and chairs to be
taken into the tiny garden under the chestnut tree, and lunch to be
laid there. The landlord and the servants, too, grew brisker under the
influence of his good spirits. They knew his openhandedness; and
half an hour later the invalid doctor from Hamburg, who lived on the
top floor, looked enviously out of his window at the merry party of
healthy Russians assembled under the chestnut tree. In the trembling
circles of shadow cast by the leaves, at a table covered with a
white cloth, and set with coffeepot, bread, butter, cheese, and cold
game, sat the Princess in a high cap with lilac ribbons,
distributing cups and sandwiches. At the other end sat the Prince,
eating heartily, and talking loudly and merrily. The Prince had spread
out near him his purchases- carved boxes, and knickknacks, and paper
knives of all sorts, of which he had bought a heap at every watering
place, and bestowed them upon everyone, including Lieschen, the
servant girl, and the landlord, with whom he jested in his comically
bad German, assuring him that it was not the water had cured Kitty,
but his splendid cookery- especially his plum soup. The Princess
laughed at her husband for his Russian ways, but she was more lively
and good-humored than she had been all the while she had been at the
waters. The colonel smiled, as he always did, at the Prince's jokes,
but as far as regards Europe, of which he believed himself to be
making a careful study, he took the Princess's side. The goodhearted
Marya Eugenyevna simply roared with laughter at everything absurd
the Prince said, and his jokes made Varenka helpless with feeble but
infectious laughter, which was something Kitty had never seen before.

Kitty was glad of all this, but she could not be lighthearted. She
could not solve the problem her father had unconsciously set her by
his good-humored view of her friends, and of the life that had so
attracted her. To this doubt there was joined the change in her
relations with the Petrovs, which had been so conspicuously and
unpleasantly marked that morning. Everyone was good-humored, but Kitty
could not feel good-humored, and this increased her distress. She felt
a feeling such as she had known in childhood, when she had been shut
in her room as a punishment, and had heard her sisters' merry laughter
outside.

"Well, but what did you buy this mass of things for? said the
Princess, smiling, and handing her husband a cup of coffee.

"One goes for a walk, one looks in a shop, and they ask you to
buy. 'Erlaucht, Excellenz, Durchlaucht?' Directly they say
'Durchlaucht,' I can't hold out- and ten thalers are gone."

"It's simply from boredom," said the Princess.

"Of course it is. Such boredom, my dear, that one doesn't know
what to do with oneself."

"How can you be bored, Prince? There's so much that's interesting
now in Germany," said Marya Eugenyevna.

"But I know everything that's interesting: the plum soup I know
and the pea sausages I know. I know everything."

"No, you may say what you like, Prince- there's the interest of
their institutions," said the colonel.

"But what is there interesting? They're all as beaming with joy as
brass halfpence; they've conquered everybody. And why am I to be
pleased at that? I haven't conquered anyone; only I have myself to
take off my own boots, and, besides, to expose them before the door;
in the morning, get up and dress at once, and go to the coffeeroom
to drink bad tea! How different it is at home! You get up in no haste,
you get cross, grumble a little and come round again. You've time to
think things over, and no hurry."

"But time's money, you forget that," said the colonel.

"Time, indeed! Why, there are times one would give a month of for
half a rouble, and times you wouldn't give half an hour of for any
money. Isn't that so, Katenka? What is it? Why are you so depressed?"

"I'm not depressed."

"Where are you off to? Stay a little longer," he said to Varenka.

"I must be going home," said Varenka, getting up, and again she
broke out laughing. When she had recovered, she said good-by, and went
into the house to get her hat.

Kitty followed her. Even Varenka struck her as different. She was
not inferior, but different from what she had fancied her before.

"Oh, dear! It's a long while since I've laughed so much!" said
Varenka, gathering up her parasol and her handbag. "What a dear your
father is!"

Kitty did not speak.

"When shall I see you again?" asked Varenka.

"Maman meant to go and see the Petrovs. Won't you be there?" said
Kitty, to try Varenka.

"Yes," answered Varenka. "They're getting ready to go away, so I
promised to help them pack."

"Well, I'll come too, then."

"No, why should you?"

"Why not? Why not? Why not?" said Kitty, opening her eyes wide,
and clutching at Varenka's parasol, so as not to let her go. "No, wait
a minute- why not?"

"Oh, nothing; your father has come, and, besides, they will feel
awkward at your helping."

"No, tell me why you don't want me to be often at the Petrovs? You
don't want me to- why not?"

"I didn't say that," said Varenka quietly.

"No, please tell me!"

"Tell you everything?" asked Varenka.

"Everything, everything!" Kitty assented.

"Well, there's really nothing of any consequence; only that
Mikhail Alexeievich" (that was the artist's name) "had meant to
leave earlier, and now he doesn't want to go away," said Varenka,
smiling.

"Go on, go on!" Kitty urged impatiently, looking somberly at
Varenka.

"Well, and for some reason Anna Pavlovna told him that he didn't
want to go because you are here. Of course, that was nonsense; but
there was a dispute over it- over you. You know how irritable these
sick people are."

Kitty, scowling more than ever, kept silent, and Varenka went on
speaking alone, trying to soften or soothe her, and seeing a storm
coming- she did not know whether of tears or of words.

"So you'd better not go... You understand; you won't be
offended?..."

"And it serves me right! And it serves me right!" Kitty cried
quickly, snatching the parasol out of Varenka's hand, and avoiding
looking at her friend's face.

Varenka felt inclined to smile, looking at her friend's childish
fury, but she was afraid of wounding her.

"How does it serve you right? I don't understand," she said.

"It serves me right, because it was all sham; because it was all
done on purpose, and not from the heart. What business had I to
interfere with outsiders? And so it's come about that I'm the cause of
a quarrel, and that I've done what nobody asked me to do. Because it
was all a sham! A sham! A sham!..."

"A sham? With what object?" said Varenka gently.

"Oh, it's so idiotic! So hateful! There was no need whatever for
me... Nothing but sham!" she said, opening and shutting the parasol.

"But with what object?"

"To seem better to people, to myself, to God; to deceive everyone.
No! Now I won't descend to that. One could be bad; but anyway not a
liar, not a cheat."

"But who is a cheat?" said Varenka reproachfully. "You speak as
if..."

But Kitty was in one of her gusts of fury, and she would not let her
finish.

"I don't talk about you- not about you at all. You're perfection.
Yes, yes, I know you're all perfection; but what am I to do if I'm
bad? This would never have been if I weren't bad. So let me be what
I am, but not to be a sham. What have I to do with Anna Pavlovna?
Let them go their way, and me go mine. I can't be different.... And
yet it's not that, it's not that."

"What is it?" asked Varenka in bewilderment.

"Everything. I can't act except from the heart, and you act from
principle. I simply liked you, but you most likely only wanted to save
me, to improve me."

"You are unjust," said Varenka.

"But I'm not speaking of other people, I'm speaking of myself."

"Kitty," they heard her mother's voice, "come here, show papa your
necklace."

Kitty, with a haughty air, without making peace with her friend,
took the necklace in a little box from the table and went to her
mother.

"What's the matter? Why are you so red?" her mother and father
said to her with one voice.

"Nothing," she answered. "I'll be back directly," and she ran back.

"She's still here," she thought. "What am I to say to her? Oh, dear!
What have I done, what have I said? Why was I rude to her? What am I
to do? What am I to say to her?" thought Kitty, and she stopped in the
doorway.

Varenka in her hat and with the parasol in her hands was sitting
at a table examining the parasol spring which Kitty had broken. She
lifted her head.

"Varenka, forgive me, do forgive me," whispered Kitty, going up to
her. "I don't remember what I said. I..."

"I really didn't mean to hurt you," said Varenka, smiling.


Peace was made. But with her father's coming all the world in
which she had been living was transformed for Kitty. She did not
give up everything she had learned, but she became aware that she
had deceived herself in supposing she could be what she wanted to
be. Her eyes were, it seemed, opened; she felt all the difficulty of
maintaining herself without hypocrisy and self-conceit on the pinnacle
to which she had wished to mount. Moreover, she became aware of all
the dreariness of the world of sorrow, of sick and dying people, in
which she had been living. The efforts she had made to like it
seemed to her intolerable, and she felt a longing to get back
quickly into the fresh air, to Russia, to Ergushovo, where, as she
knew from letters, her sister Dolly had already gone with her
children.

But her affection for Varenka did not wane. Parting Kitty begged her
to come to them in Russia.

"I'll come when you get married," said Varenka.

"I shall never marry."

"Well, then, I shall never come."

"Well, then, I shall be married simply for that. Mind now,
remember your promise," said Kitty.

The doctor's prediction was fulfilled. Kitty returned home, to
Russia, cured. She was not as gay and thoughtless as before, but she
was serene. Her Moscow troubles had become a memory to her.

                       PART THREE


                           I.


Sergei Ivanovich Koznishev wanted a rest from mental work, and
instead of going abroad as he usually did, he came toward the end of
May to stay in the country with his brother. In his judgment the
best sort of life was a country life. He had come now to enjoy such
a life at his brother's. Konstantin Levin was very glad to have him,
especially as he did not expect his brother Nikolai that summer. But
in spite of his affection and respect for Sergei Ivanovich, Konstantin
Levin was uncomfortable with his brother in the country. It made him
uncomfortable, and it even annoyed him, to see his brother's
attitude to the country. To Konstantin Levin the country was the
background of life- that is of pleasures, endeavors, labor; to
Sergei Ivanovich the country meant on one hand rest from work, on
the other a valuable antidote to laxness- an antidote which he took
with satisfaction and a sense of its salutariness. To Konstantin Levin
the country was good because it afforded a field for labor, of the
usefulness of which there could be no doubt; to Sergei Ivanovich the
country was particularly good, because there it was possible and
fitting to do nothing. Moreover, Sergei Ivanovich's attitude toward
"the people" rather piqued Konstantin. Sergei Ivanovich used to say
that he knew and liked "the people," and he often talked to the
peasants, which he knew how to do without affectation or
condescension, and from every such conversation he would deduce
general conclusions in favor of "the people" and in confirmation of
his knowing them. Konstantin Levin did not like such an attitude
toward "the people." To Konstantin "the people" was simply the chief
partner in the common labor, and in spite of all the respect and the
love, almost like that of kinship, he had for the peasant (sucked in
probably, as he said himself, with the milk of his peasant nurse),
Konstantin as a fellow worker with them, while sometimes
enthusiastic over the vigor, gentleness, and justice of these men, was
very often, when their common labors called for other qualities,
exasperated with the peasant for his carelessness, slovenliness,
drunkenness and lying. If he had been asked whether he liked or didn't
like "the people," Konstantin Levin would have been absolutely at a
loss what to reply. He liked and did not like "the people," just as he
liked and did not like men in general. Of course, being a
goodhearted man, he liked men more than he disliked them, and so too
with "the people." But like or dislike "the people" as something
peculiar he could not, not only because he lived with "the people,"
and all his interests were bound up with theirs, but also because he
regarded himself as a part of "the people," did not see any peculiar
qualities or failings distinguishing himself from "the people," and
could not contrast himself with them. Moreover, although he had
lived so long in the closest relations with the peasants, as farmer
and arbitrator, and what was more, as adviser (the peasants trusted
him, and for forty verstas round they would come to ask his advice),
he had no definite views of "the people," and would have been as
much at a loss to answer the question whether he knew "the people"
as the question whether he liked them. For him to say he knew "the
people" would have been the same as to say he knew men. He was
continually watching and getting to know people of all sorts, and
among them peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting
people, and he was continually observing new points in them,
altering his former views of them and forming new ones.

With Sergei Ivanovich it was quite the contrary. Just as he liked
and praised a country life in comparison with the life he did not
like, so too he liked "the people" in contradistinction to the class
of men he did not like, and so too he knew "the people" as something
distinct from, and opposed to, men in general. In his methodical brain
there were distinctly formulated certain aspects of peasant life,
deduced partly from that life itself, but chiefly from contrast with
other modes of life. He never changed his opinion of "the people"
and his sympathetic attitude toward them.

In the discussions that arose between the brothers on their views of
"the people," Sergei Ivanovich always got the better of his brother,
precisely because Sergei Ivanovich had definite ideas about the
peasant- his character, his qualities, and his tastes; Konstantin
Levin had no definite and unalterable idea on the subject, and so in
their arguments Konstantin was readily convicted of contradicting
himself.

In Sergei Ivanovich's eyes his younger brother was a capital fellow,
with his heart in the right place (as he expressed it in French),
but with a mind which, though fairly quick, was too much influenced by
the impressions of the moment, and consequently filled with
contradictions. With all the condescension of an elder brother he
sometimes explained to him the true import of things, but he derived
little satisfaction from arguing with him because he got the better of
him too easily.

Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of immense
intellect and culture, as generous in the highest sense of the word,
and possessed of a special faculty for working for the public good.
But in the depths of his heart, the older he became, and the more
intimately he knew his brother, the more and more frequently the
thought struck him that this faculty of working for the public good,
of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a
quality as a lack of something- not a lack of good, honest, noble
desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force, of what is called
heart, of that impulse which drives a man to choose some one out of
the innumerable paths of life, and to care only for that one. The
better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich,
and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not
led by any impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but
reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to
take an interest in public affairs, and consequently took an
interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this conjecture by
observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public
welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to
heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a
new machine.

Besides this, Konstantin Levin was not at his ease with his brother,
because in the country, especially in summertime, Levin was
continually busy with work on the land, and the long summer day was
not long enough for him to get through all he had to do, while
Sergei Ivanovich was merely taking a holiday. But though he was taking
a holiday now- that is to say, he was doing no writing- he was so used
to intellectual activity that he liked to put into concise and
eloquent shape the ideas that occurred to him, and liked to have
someone listen to him. His most usual and natural listener was his
brother. And so, in spite of the friendliness and directness of
their relations, Konstantin felt an awkwardness in leaving him
alone. Sergei Ivanovich liked to stretch himself on the grass in the
sun, and to lie so, basking and chatting lazily.

"You wouldn't believe," he would say to his brother, "what a
pleasure this rural laziness is to me. Not an idea in one's brain-
as empty as a drum!"

But Konstantin Levin found it dull sitting and listening to him,
especially when he knew that while he was away manure would be
carted into fields not plowed ready for it, and heaped up God knows
how; and the shares in the plows would not be screwed in, so that they
would come off, and then his men would say the new plows were a
silly invention, and there was nothing like the old wooden plow, and
so on.

"Come, you've done enough trudging about in the heat," Sergei
Ivanovich would say to him.

"No, I must just run round to the countinghouse for a minute," Levin
would answer, and would run off to the fields.

                           II.


Early in June Agathya Mikhailovna, the old nurse and housekeeper, in
carrying to the cellar a jar of mushrooms she had just pickled,
happened to slip, fall and sprain her wrist. The district doctor, a
talkative young medico who had just finished his studies, came to
see her. He examined the wrist, said it was not luxated, bandaged
it, and being asked to dinner evidently was delighted at a chance of
talking to the celebrated Sergei Ivanovich Koznishev, and to show
his advanced views of things told him all the scandal of the district,
complaining of the poor state into which the Zemstvo affairs had
fallen. Sergei Ivanovich listened attentively, asked him questions,
and, roused by a new listener, he talked fluently, uttered a few
keen and weighty observations, respectfully appreciated by the young
doctor, and was soon in that animated frame of mind his brother knew
so well, which always, with him, followed a brilliant and animated
conversation. After the departure of the doctor, he wanted to go
with a fishing rod to the river. Sergei Ivanovich was fond of angling,
and was, it seemed, proud of being able to care for such a stupid
occupation.

Konstantin Levin, whose presence was needed in the plowland and
the meadows, had come to take his brother in the cabriolet.

It was that time of the year, the turning point of summer, when
the crops of the present year are a certainty, when one begins to
think of the sowing for next year, and the mowing is at hand; when the
rye is all in ear, though its ears are still light, not yet full,
and it waves in gray-green billows in the wind; when the green oats,
with tufts of yellow grass scattered here and there among it, droop
irregularly over the late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat is
already out and hiding the ground; when the fallow lands, trodden hard
as stone by the cattle, are half-plowed over, with paths left
untouched by the plow; when the odor from the dry manure heaps
carted into the fields mingles at sunset with the smell of
meadowsweet, and on the low-lying lands the preserved meadows are a
thick sea of grass waiting for the mowing, with blackened heaps of
sorrel stalks among it.

It was the time when there comes a brief pause in the toil of the
fields before the beginning of the labors of harvest- every year
recurring, every year claiming all the peasant's thews. The crop was a
splendid one, and bright, hot summer days had set in with short,
dewy nights.

The brothers had to drive through the woods to reach the meadows.
Sergei Ivanovich was all the while admiring the beauty of the woods,
which were a tangled mass of leaves, pointing out to his brother now
an old lime tree on the point of flowering, dark on the shady side,
and brightly spotted with yellow stipules, now the young shoots of
this year's saplings brilliant with emerald. Konstantin Levin did
not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him
took away the beauty of what he saw. He assented to what his brother
said, but could not help thinking of other things. When they came
out of the woods, all his attention was engrossed by the view of the
fallow land on the upland, in parts yellow with grass, in parts
trampled and checkered with furrows, in parts dotted with ridges of
manure, and in parts even plowed. A string of telegas was moving
across it. Levin counted the telegas, and was pleased that all that
were wanted had been brought, and at the sight of the meadows his
thoughts passed to the mowing. He always felt something peculiar
moving him to the quick at haymaking. On reaching the meadow Levin
stopped the horse.

The morning dew was still lying on the thick undergrowth of the
grass, and, that he might not get his feet wet, Sergei Ivanovich asked
his brother to drive him in the cabriolet up to the willow tree from
which the perch were caught. Sorry as Konstantin Levin was to crush
down his mowing grass, he drove him into the meadow. The high grass
softly turned about the wheels and the horse's legs, leaving its seeds
clinging to the wet axles and spokes of the wheels.

His brother seated himself under a bush, arranging his tackle, while
Levin led the horse away, tied him up and walked into the vast
gray-green sea of grass unstirred by the wind. The silky grass with
its ripe seeds came almost to his waist in the riverside spots.

Crossing the meadow, Konstantin Levin came out on the road, and
met an old man with a swollen eye, carrying a swarming basket with
bees.

"What? Taken a stray swarm, Fomich?" he asked.

"No, indeed, Konstantin Mitrich! All we can do to keep our own! This
is the second new swarm that has flown away.... Luckily the lads
caught them. They were plowing your field. They unyoked the horses and
galloped after them."

"Well, what do you say, Fomich- start mowing or wait a bit?"

"Well, now! Our way's to wait till St. Peter's Day. But you always
mow sooner. Well, to be sure, please God, the hay's good. There'll
be plenty for the beasts."

"What do you think about the weather?"

"That's in God's hands. Maybe even the weather will favor us."

Levin walked up to his brother.

Sergei Ivanovich had caught nothing, but he was not bored, and
seemed in the most cheerful frame of mind. Levin saw that,
stimulated by his conversation with the doctor, he wanted to talk.
Levin, on the other hand, would have liked to get home as soon as
possible, to give orders about getting together the mowers for next
day, and to set at rest his doubts about the mowing, which greatly
absorbed him.

"Well, let's be going," he said.

"Why be in such a hurry? Let's stay a little. But how wet you are!
Even though one catches nothing, it's fine. That's the best thing
about every part of sport, that one has to do with nature. How
exquisite this steely water is!" said Sergei Ivanovich. "These
riverside banks always remind me of the riddle- do you know it? 'The
grass says to the river: we quiver and we quiver.'"

"I don't know the riddle," answered Levin cheerlessly.

                           III.


"Do you know I've been thinking about you," said Sergei Ivanovich.
"It's beyond everything what's being done in the district, according
to what this doctor tells me. He's a very intelligent fellow. And as
I've told you before, I tell you again: it's not right for you not
to go to the meetings, and to keep out of the Zemstvo affairs
entirely. If decent people won't go into it, of course it's bound to
go all wrong. We pay the money, and it all goes in salaries, and there
are no schools, nor district dressers, nor midwives, nor pharmacies-
nothing."

"Well, I did try, you know," Levin said gently and unwillingly. "I
can't! And so there's no help for it."

"But why can't you? I must own I can't make it out. Indifference,
incapacity- I won't admit; surely it's not simply laziness?"

"None of those things. I've tried, and I see I can do nothing," said
Levin.

He had hardly grasped what his brother was saying. Looking toward
the plowland across the river, he made out something black, but he
could not distinguish whether it was a horse or the bailiff on
horseback.

"Why is it you can do nothing? You made an attempt and didn't
succeed, as you think, and you give in. How can you have so little
ambition?"

"Ambition!" said Levin, stung to the quick by his brother's words;
"I don't understand. If they'd told me at college that other people
understood the integral calculus, and I didn't, then ambition would
have come in. But in this case one wants first to be convinced that
one has certain abilities for this sort of business, and especially
that all this business is of great importance."

"What! Do you mean to say it's not of importance?" said Sergei
Ivanovich, stung to the quick in his turn by his brother's considering
of no importance anything that interested him, and still more at his
obviously paying little attention to what he was saying.

"I don't think it important; it does not take hold of me- I can't
help it," answered Levin, making out that what he saw was the bailiff,
and that the bailiff seemed to be letting the peasants go off the
plowed land. They were turning the plow over. "Can they have
finished plowing?" he wondered.

"Come, really though," said the elder brother, with a frown on his
handsome, clever face, "there's a limit to everything. It's very
well to be original and genuine, and to dislike everything
hypocritical- I know all about that; but really, what you're saying
either has no meaning, or it has a very wrong meaning. How can you
think it a matter of no importance whether 'the people,' whom you love
as you assert..."

"I never did assert it," thought Konstantin Levin.

"...die without help? The ignorant peasant women starve the
children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the
hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a
means of helping them, and don't help them because to your mind it's
of no importance!"

And Sergei Ivanovich put before him the dilemma: Either you are so
undeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't
sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.

Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to
submit, or to confess to a lack of zeal for the public good. And
this mortified him and hurt his feelings.

"It's both," he said resolutely; "I don't see that it is
possible..."

"What! Is it impossible, if the money were properly laid out, to
provide medical aid?"

"Impossible, as it seems to me.... For the four thousand square
verstas of our district, what with our undersnow waters, and the
storms, and the work in the fields, I don't see how it is possible
to provide medical aid all over. And besides, I don't believe in
medicine."

"Oh, well, that's unfair.... I can quote to you thousands of
instances.... But the schools, at least?"

"Why have schools?"

"What do you mean? Can there be two opinions of the advantage of
education? If it's a good thing for you, it's a good thing for
everyone."

Konstantin Levin felt himself morally pinned against a wall, and
so he became heated, and unconsciously blurted out the chief cause
of his indifference to public business.

"Perhaps it may all be very good; but why should I worry myself
about establishing dispensaries which I shall never make use of, and
schools to which I shall never send my children, to which even the
peasants don't want to send their children, and to which I've no
very firm faith that they ought to send them?" said he.

Sergei Ivanovich was for a minute surprised at this unexpected
view of the subject; but he promptly made a new plan of attack.

He was silent for a little, drew out a hook, threw it in again,
and turned to his brother smiling.

"Come, now.... In the first place, the dispensary is needed. We
ourselves sent for the district doctor for Agathya Mikhailovna."

"Oh, well, but I fancy her wrist will never be straight again."

"That remains to be proved.... Next, the peasant who can read and
write is as a workman of more use and value to you."

"No; you can ask anyone you like," Konstantin Levin answered with
decision, "the man that can read and write is much inferior as a
workman. And mending the highroads is an impossibility; and as soon as
they put up bridges they're stolen."

"Still, that's not the point," said Sergei Ivanovich, frowning. He
disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were
continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and
disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.
"Let me say. Do you admit that education is a benefit for the people?"

"Yes, I admit it," said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious
immediately that he had said what he did not think. He felt that if he
admitted that, it would be proved that he had been talking meaningless
rubbish. How it would be proved he could not tell, but he knew that
this would inevitably be logically proved to him, and he awaited the
proofs.

The argument turned out to be far simpler than Konstantin Levin
had expected.

"If you admit that it is a benefit," said Sergei Ivanovich, "then,
as an honest man, you cannot help caring about it and sympathizing
with the movement, and so wishing to work for it."

"But I still do not admit this movement to be good," said Konstantin
Levin, reddening.

"What! But you just said now..."

"That's to say, I don't admit it's being either good or possible."

"That you can't tell without making the trial."

"Well, supposing that is so," said Levin, though he did not
suppose so at all, "supposing that is so, still I don't see, all the
same, why I should worry myself about it."

"How so?"

"No; since we are talking, explain it to me from the philosophical
point of view," said Levin.

"I can't see where philosophy comes in," said Sergei Ivanovich, in a
tone, Levin fancied, as though he did not admit his brother's right to
talk about philosophy. And that irritated Levin.

"I'll tell you, then," he said with heat, "I imagine the
mainspring of all our actions is, after all, self-interest. Now in the
Zemstvo institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing that could
conduce to my prosperity. The roads are not better and could not be
better; my horses carry me well enough over bad ones. Doctors and
dispensaries are of no use to me. A justice of the peace is of no
use to me- I never appeal to him, and never shall appeal to him. The
schools are of no good to me, but positively harmful, as I told you.
For me the Zemstvo institutions simply mean the liability of paying
eighteen kopecks for every dessiatina, of driving into the town,
sleeping with bedbugs, and listening to all sorts of idiocy and
blather, and self-interest offers me no inducement."

"Excuse me," Sergei Ivanovich interposed with a smile,
"self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the
serfs, yet we did work for it."

"No!" Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; "the
emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. There
self-interest did come in. One longed to throw off that yoke that
crushed us- all the decent people among us. But to be a member of
the Zemstvo and discuss how many street cleaners are needed, and how
sewers shall be constructed in the town in which I don't live- to
serve on a jury and try a peasant who has stolen a flitch of bacon,
and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from
the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the president
cross-examining my old simpleton Alioshka: 'Do you admit, prisoner
at the bar, the fact of the removal of the bacon'- 'Eh?'"

Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking
the president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it
was all to the point.

But Sergei Ivanovich shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, what do you mean to say, then?"

"I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me... my
interest, I shall always defend to the best of my ability; that when
raids were made on us students, and the police read our letters, I was
ready to defend those rights to the utmost, to defend my rights to
education and freedom. I can understand compulsory military service,
which affects my children, my brothers, and myself- I am ready to
deliberate on what concerns me; but deliberating on how to spend forty
thousand roubles of Zemstvo's money, or judging the half-witted
Alioshka- that I don't understand, and I can't do it."

Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had
burst open. Sergei Ivanovich smiled.

"But tomorrow it'll be your turn to be tried; would it have suited
your tastes better to be tried in the old criminal court?"

"I'm not going to be tried. I shan't murder anybody, and I've no
need of it. Well, I tell you what," he went on, flying off again to
a subject quite beside the point, "our district self-government and
all the rest of it- it's just like the birch saplings we stick in
the ground, as we would do it on Trinity Day, to look like a copse
which has grown up of itself in Europe, and I can't gush over these
birch saplings and believe in them."

Sergei Ivanovich merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to express
his wonder how the birch saplings had come into their argument at that
point, though he did really understand at once what his brother meant.

"Excuse me, but you know one really can't argue in that way," he
observed.

But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the failing, of
which he was conscious, of a lack of zeal for the public welfare,
and he went on.

"I imagine," Konstantin said, "that no sort of activity is likely to
be lasting if it is not founded on self-interest- that's a universal
principle, a philosophical principle," he said, repeating the word
"philosophical" with determination, as though wishing to show that
he had as much right as anyone else to talk of philosophy.

Sergei Ivanovich smiled. "He too has a philosophy of his own at
the service of his natural tendencies," he thought.

"Come, you'd better let philosophy alone," he said. "The chief
problem of the philosophy of all ages consists precisely in finding
that indispensable connection which exists between individual and
social interests. But that's not to the point; what is to the point is
a correction I must make in your comparison. The birches are not
simply stuck in, but some are sown and some are planted, and one
must deal carefully with them. It's only those peoples that have an
intuitive sense of what's of importance and significance in their
institutions, and know how to value them, who have a future before
them- it's only those peoples that one can truly call historical."

And Sergei Ivanovich carried the subject into the regions of
philosophical history where Konstantin Levin could not follow him, and
showed him all the incorrectness of his outlook.

"As for your dislike of it- excuse my saying so- that's simply our
Russian sloth and old serfowners' ways, and I'm convinced that in
you it's a temporary error and will pass."

Konstantin was silent. He felt himself vanquished on all sides,
but he felt at the same time that what he wanted to say was
unintelligible to his brother. Only he could not make up his mind
whether it was unintelligible because he was not capable of expressing
his meaning clearly, or because his brother would not or could not
understand him. But he did not pursue the speculation, and, without
replying, he fell to musing on a quite different and personal matter.

Sergei Ivanovich wound up the last line, unhitched the horse, and
they drove off.

                           IV.


The personal matter that absorbed Levin during his conversation with
his brother was this. Once, the year previous, he had gone to look
at the mowing, and being made very angry by the bailiff he had had
recourse to his favorite means for regaining his temper- he had
taken a scythe from a peasant and begun mowing.

He liked the work so much that he had several times tried his hand
at mowing since. He had cut the whole of the meadow in front of his
house, and this year, ever since the early spring, he had cherished
a plan for mowing for whole days together with the peasants. Ever
since his brother's arrival he had been in doubt as to whether to
mow or not. He was loath to leave his brother alone all day long,
and he was afraid his brother would laugh at him about it. But as he
drove into the meadow, and recalled the sensations of mowing, he
came near deciding that he would go mowing. After the irritating
discussion with his brother, he pondered over this intention again.

"I must have physical exercise, or my temper'll certainly be
ruined," he thought, and he determined he would go mowing, however
awkward he might feel about it with his brother or the peasants.

Toward evening Konstantin Levin went to his countinghouse, gave
directions as to the work to be done, and sent about the village to
summon the mowers for the morrow, to cut the hay in Kalinov meadow,
the largest and best of his grasslands.

"And send my scythe, please, to Tit, for him to set it, and bring it
round tomorrow. I may do some mowing myself, too," he said, trying not
to be embarrassed.

The bailiff smiled and said:

"Yes, sir."

At tea the same evening Levin said to his brother too.

"I fancy the fine weather will last," said he. "Tomorrow I shall
start mowing."

"I'm so fond of that form of field labor," said Sergei Ivanovich.

"I'm awfully fond of it. I sometimes mow myself with the peasants,
and tomorrow I want to try mowing the whole day."

Sergei Ivanovich lifted his head, and looked with curiosity at his
brother.

"How do you mean? Just like one of the peasants, all day long?"

"Yes, it's very pleasant," said Levin.

"It's splendid as exercise, only you'll hardly be able to stand it,"
said Sergei Ivanovich, without a shade of irony.

"I've tried it. It's hard work at first, but you get into it. I dare
say I shall manage to keep it up...."

"Oh, so that's it! But tell me, how do the peasants look at it? I
suppose they laugh in their sleeves at their master's being such a
queer fish?"

"No, I don't think so; but it's so delightful, and at the same
time such hard work, that one has no time to think about it."

"But how will you do about dining with them? To send you a bottle of
Lafitte and roast turkey out there would be a little awkward."

"No, I'll simply come home at the time of their noonday rest."

Next morning Konstantin Levin got up earlier than usual, but he
was detained giving directions on the farm, and when he reached the
mowing grass the mowers were already at their second swath.

From the uplands he could get a view of the shaded cut part of the
meadow below, with the grayish swaths and the black heaps of coats,
taken off by the mowers at the place from which they had started
cutting.

Gradually, as he rode toward the meadow, the peasants came into
sight, some in coats, some in their shirts, mowing, one behind another
in a long string, each swinging his scythe in his own way. He
counted forty-two of them.

They were mowing slowly over the uneven, low-lying parts of the
meadow, where there had been an old dam. Levin recognized some of
his own men. Here was old Iermil in a very long white smock, bending
forward to swing a scythe; there was a young fellow, Vaska, who had
been a coachman of Levin's, taking every swath with a wide sweep.
Here, too, was Tit, Levin's preceptor in the art of mowing, a thin
little peasant. He went on ahead, and cut his wide swath without
bending, as though playing with his scythe.

Levin got off his mare, and fastening her up by the roadside went to
meet Tit, who took a second scythe out of a bush and gave it him.

"It's ready, sir; it's like a razor- it cuts of itself," said Tit,
taking off his cap with a smile and giving him the scythe.

Levin took the scythe, and began trying it. As they finished their
swaths, the mowers, hot and good-humored, came out into the road one
after another, and smirking, greeted the master. They all stared at
him, but no one made any remark, till a tall old man, with a wrinkled,
beardless face, wearing a short sheepskin jacket, came out into the
road and accosted him.

"Look'ee now, master, once take hold of the rope, there's no letting
go!" he said, and Levin heard smothered laughter among the mowers.

"I'll try not to let it go," he said, taking his stand behind Tit,
and waiting for the time to begin.

"Mind'ee," repeated the old man.

Tit made room, and Levin started behind him. The grass was short
close to the road, and Levin, who had not done any mowing for a long
while, and was disconcerted by the eyes fastened upon him, cut badly
for the first moments, though he swung his scythe vigorously. Behind
him he heard voices:

"It's not set right; handle's too high; see how he has to stoop to
it," said one.

"Press more on the heel of the scythe," said another.

"Never mind, he'll get on all right," the old man resumed. "See,
he's made a start.... You swing it too wide, you'll tire yourself
out.... The master, sure, does his best for himself! But see the grass
missed out! For such work us fellows would catch it!"

The grass became lusher, and Levin, listening without answering,
followed Tit, trying to do the best he could. They moved a hundred
paces. Tit kept moving on, without stopping, nor showing the slightest
weariness, but Levin was already beginning to fear he would not be
able to keep it up- so tired was he.

He felt as he swung his scythe that he was at the very end of his
strength, and was making up his mind to ask Tit to stop. But at that
very moment Tit stopped of his own accord, and, stooping down,
picked up some grass, rubbed his scythe, and began whetting it.
Levin straightened himself, and drawing a deep breath looked round.
Behind him came a peasant, and he too was evidently tired, for he
stopped at once without waiting to mow up to Levin, and began whetting
his scythe. Tit sharpened his scythe and Levin's, and they went on.

The next time it was just the same. Tit moved on with sweep after
sweep of his scythe, without stopping or showing signs of weariness.
Levin followed him, trying not to get left behind, and he found it
harder and harder: the moment came when he felt he had no strength
left, but at that very moment Tit stopped and whetted the scythes.

So they mowed the first row. And this long row seemed particularly
hard work to Levin; but when the end was reached, and Tit, shouldering
his scythe, began with deliberate stride returning on the tracks
left by his heels in the cut grass, and Levin walked back in the
same way over the space he had cut, in spite of the sweat that ran
in streams over his face and fell in drops down his nose, and drenched
his back as though he had been soaked in water, he felt very happy.
What delighted him particularly was that now he knew he would be
able to hold out.

His pleasure was only disturbed by his swath not being well cut.
"I will swing less with my arm and more with my whole body," he
thought, comparing Tit's swath, which looked as if it had been cut
along a surveyor's cord, with his own scattered and irregularly
lying grass.

The first swath, as Levin noticed, Tit had mowed especially quickly,
probably wishing to put his master to the test, and the swath happened
to be a long one. The next swaths were easier, but still Levin had
to strain every nerve not to drop behind the peasants.

He thought of nothing, wished for nothing, save not to be left
behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible. He
heard nothing save the swish of scythes, and saw before him Tit's
upright figure mowing away, the crescent-shaped curve of the cut
grass, the grass and flowers slowly and rhythmically falling before
the blade of his scythe, and ahead of him the end of the swath,
where would come the rest.

Suddenly, in the midst of his toil, without understanding what it
was or whence it came, he felt a pleasant sensation of chill on his
hot, moist shoulders. He glanced at the sky in the interval for
whetting the scythes. A heavy, lowering storm cloud had blown up,
and big raindrops were falling. Some of the peasants went to their
coats and put them on; others- just like Levin himself- merely
shrugged their shoulders, enjoying the pleasant coolness of it.

Another swath, and yet another swath followed- long swaths and short
swaths, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of
time, and could not have told whether it were late or early now. A
change began to come over his work, which gave him immense
satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which
he forgot what he was doing, and it all came easy to him, and at those
same moments his swath was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit's. But
as soon as he recollected what he was doing, and began trying to do
better, he was at once conscious of all the difficulty of his task,
and the swath was badly mown.

On finishing yet another swath he would have gone back to the top of
the meadow again to begin the next, but Tit stopped, and going up to
the old man said something in a low voice to him. They both looked
at the sun. "What are they talking about, and why doesn't he go back?"
thought Levin, without guessing that the peasants had been mowing no
less than four hours without stopping, and that it was time for
their lunch.

"Lunch, sir," said the old man.

"Is it really time? Lunch it is, then."

Levin gave his scythe to Tit, and, together with the peasants, who
were crossing the long stretch of mown grass, slightly sprinkled
with rain, to get their bread from the heap of coats, he went toward
his horse. Only then did he suddenly awake to the fact that he had
been wrong about the weather and that the rain was drenching his hay.

"The hay will be spoiled," he said.

"Not a bit of it, sir; mow in the rain, and you'll rake in fine
weather!" said the old man.

Levin untied his horse and rode home to his coffee.

Sergei Ivanovich was just getting up. When he had drunk his
coffee, Levin rode back again to the mowing before Sergei Ivanovich
had had time to dress and come down to the dining room.

                           V.


After lunch Levin was not in the same place in the string of
mowers as before, but stood between the old man who had accosted him
jocosely, and now invited him to be his neighbor, and a young peasant,
who had only been married in the autumn, and who was mowing this
summer for the first time.

The old man, holding himself erect, moved in front, with his feet
turned out, taking long, regular strides, and with a precise and
regular action which seemed to cost him no more effort than swinging
one's arms in walking, as though it were in play, he laid down the
high, even swath of grass. It was as though it were not he but the
sharp scythe of itself swishing through the juicy grass.

Behind Levin came the lad Mishka. His comely, youthful face, with
a twist of fresh grass bound round his hair, was all working with
effort; but whenever anyone looked at him he smiled. He would
clearly have died sooner than own it was hard work for him.

Levin kept between them. In the very heat of the day the mowing
did not seem such hard work to him. The perspiration with which he was
drenched cooled him, while the sun, that burned his back, his head,
and his arms, bare to the elbow, gave a vigor and dogged energy to his
labor; and more and more often now came those moments of
unconsciousness, when it was possible not to think of what one was
doing. The scythe cut of itself. These were happy moments. Still
more delightful were the moments when they reached the stream where
the swaths ended, and the old man rubbed his scythe with the wet,
thick grass, rinsed its blade in the fresh water of the stream, ladled
out a little in a whetstone case, and offered Levin a drink.

"What do you say to my kvass, eh? Good, eh?" he would say, winking.

And truly Levin had never drunk any liquor as good as this warm
water with green bits floating in it, and a taste of rust from the tin
whetstone case. And immediately after this came the delicious, slow
saunter, with his hand on the scythe, during which he could wipe
away the streaming sweat, take deep breaths of air, and look about
at the long string of mowers, and at what was happening around in
the forest and the field.

The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of
unconsciousness in which it seemed that it was not his hands which
swung the scythe, but that the scythe was moving together with
itself a body full of life and consciousness of its own; and as though
by magic, without thinking of it, the work turned out regular and
well-finished of itself. These were the most blissful moments.

It was only hard work when he had to break off the motion, which had
become unconscious, and to think; when he had to mow round a hummock
or an unweeded tuft of sorrel. The old man did this easily. When a
hummock came he changed his action, and at one time with the heel, and
at another with the tip of his scythe, clipped the hummock round
both sides with short strokes. And while he did this he kept looking
about and watching what came into his view: at one moment he picked
a wild berry and ate it or offered it to Levin, then he flung away a
twig with the blade of the scythe, then he looked at a quail's nest,
from which the bird flew just under the scythe, or caught a snake that
crossed his path, and lifting it on the scythe as though on a fork
showed it to Levin and threw it away.

For both Levin and the young peasant behind him, such changes of
position were difficult. Both of them, repeating over and over again
the same strained movement, were in a perfect frenzy of toil, and were
incapable of shifting their position and at the same time watching
what was before them.

Levin did not notice how time was passing. If he had been asked
how long he had been working he would have said half an hour- yet it
was getting on to dinnertime. As they were walking back over the cut
grass, the old man called Levin's attention to the little girls and
boys who were coming from different directions, hardly visible through
the long grass, and along the road toward the mowers, carrying sacks
of bread that stretched their little arms, and lugging small
pitchers of kvass, stopped up with rags.

"Look'ee at the little doodlebugs crawling!" he said, pointing to
them, and he shaded his eyes with his hand to look at the sun.

They mowed two more swaths; the old man stopped.

"Come, master, dinnertime!" he said decidedly. And on reaching the
stream the mowers moved off across the swaths toward their pile of
coats, where the children who had brought their dinners were sitting
waiting for them. The peasants gathered- those who came from afar
under their telegas, those who lived near under a willow bush, covered
with grass.

Levin sat down by them; he felt disinclined to go away.

All constraint with the master had disappeared long ago. The
peasants got ready for dinner. Some washed, the young lads bathed in
the stream, others made a place comfortable for a rest, untied their
sacks of bread, and uncovered the pitchers of kvass. The old man
crumbled up some bread in a cup, stirred it with the handle of a
spoon, poured water on it from his whetstone case, broke up some
more bread, and having seasoned it with salt, he turned to the east to
say his prayer.

"Come, master, taste my sop," said he, kneeling down before the cup.

The sop was so good that Levin gave up the idea of going home for
dinner. He ate with the old man, and talked to him about his family
affairs, taking the keenest interest in them, and told him about his
own affairs and all the circumstances that could be of interest to the
old man. He felt much nearer to him than to his brother, and could not
help smiling at the affection he felt for this man. When the old man
got up again, said his prayer, and lay down under a bush, putting some
grass under his head for a pillow, Levin did the same, and, in spite
of the clinging flies that were so persistent in the sunshine, and the
midges that tickled his hot face and body, he fell asleep at once
and only waked when the sun had passed to the other side of the bush
and reached him. The old man had been awake a long while, and was
sitting up whetting the scythes of the younger lads.

Levin looked about him and hardly recognized the place, everything
was so changed. The immense stretch of meadow had been mown and was
sparkling with a peculiar fresh brilliance, with its lines of
already sweet-smelling grass in the slanting rays of the evening
sun. And the bushes about the river, mowed around, and the river
itself, not visible before, now gleaming, like steel in its bends, and
the moving, ascending peasants, and the sharp wall of grass of the
unmown part of the meadow, and the hawks hovering over the stripped
meadow- all was perfectly new. Raising himself, Levin began
considering how much had been cut and how much more could still be
done that day.

The work done was exceptionally great for forty-two men. They had
cut the whole of the big meadow, which had, in the years of corvee,
taken thirty scythes two days to mow. Only the corners remained to do,
where the swaths were short. But Levin felt a longing to get as much
mowing done that day as possible, and was vexed with the sun sinking
so quickly in the sky. He felt no weariness; all he wanted was to
get his work done more and more quickly, and as much of it as
possible.

"Could we cut the Mashkin Upland too?- what do you think?" he said
to the old man.

"As God wills- the sun's not high. A little vodka for the lads?"

At the afternoon rest, when they were sitting down again, and
those who smoked had lighted their pipes, the old man told the men
that "the Mashkin Upland's to be cut- there'll be vodka."

"Why not cut it? Come on, Tit! We'll look sharp! We can eat at
night. Come on!" voices cried out, and eating up their bread, the
mowers went back to work.

"Come, lads, keep it up!" said Tit, and ran on ahead almost at a
trot.

"Get along, get along!" said the old man, hurrying after him and
easily overtaking him, "I'll mow thee down, look out!"

And young and old mowed away, as though they were racing with one
another. But however fast they worked, they did not spoil the grass,
and the swaths were laid just as neatly and exactly. The little
piece left uncut in the corner was mown in five minutes. The last of
the mowers were just ending their swaths while the foremost snatched
up their coats onto their shoulders, and crossed the road toward the
Mashkin Upland.

The sun was already sinking among the trees when they went with
their jingling whetstone cases into the wooded ravine of the Mashkin
Upland. The grass was up to their waists in the middle of the
hollow, lush, tender, and feathery, spotted here and there among the
trees with wild heartsease.

After a brief consultation- whether to take the swaths lengthwise or
diagonally- Prokhor Iermilin, also a doughty mower, a huge,
black-haired peasant, went on ahead. He went up to the top, turned
back again and started mowing, and they all proceeded to form in
line behind him, going downhill through the hollow and uphill right up
to the edge of the forest. The sun sank behind the forest. The dew was
falling by now; the mowers were in the sun only on the hillside, but
below, where a mist was rising, and on the opposite side, they mowed
into the fresh, dewy shade. The work went rapidly.

The spicily fragrant grass cut with a succulent sound, was at once
laid in high swaths. The mowers from all sides, brought closer
together in the short swath, kept urging one another on to the sound
of jingling whetstone cases, and clanging scythes, and the hiss of the
whetstones sharpening them, and good-humored shouts.

Levin still kept between the young peasant and the old man. The
old man, who had put on his short sheepskin jacket, was just as
good-humored, jocose, and free in his movements. Among the trees
they were continually cutting with their scythes the so-called
"birch mushrooms," swollen fat in the succulent grass. But the old man
bent down every time he came across a mushroom, picked it up and put
it in his bosom. "Another present for my old woman," he would say as
he did so.

Easy as it was to mow the wet, lush grass, it was hard work going up
and down the steep sides of the ravine. But this did not trouble the
old man. Swinging his scythe just as ever, and moving his feet in
their big, plaited bast sandals, with firm short steps, he climbed
slowly up the steep place, and though his breeches hanging out below
his smock, and his whole frame, trembled with effort, he did not
miss one blade of grass or one mushroom on his way, and kept making
jokes with the peasants and Levin. Levin walked after him and often
thought he must fall, as he climbed with a scythe up a steep
hillock, where it would have been hard work to clamber even without
the scythe. But he climbed up and did what he had to do. He felt as
though some external force were moving him.

                           VI.


The Mashkin Upland was mown, the last swaths finished, the
peasants had put on their coats and were gaily trudging home. Levin
got on his horse, and, parting regretfully from the peasants, rode
homeward. On the hillside he looked back; he could not see them in the
mist that had risen from the valley; he could only hear their rough,
good-humored voices, their laughter, and the sound of clanking
scythes.

Sergei Ivanovich had long ago finished dinner, and was drinking iced
lemonade in his own room, looking through the reviews and papers which
he had just received by post, when Levin rushed into the room, talking
merrily, with his wet and matted hair sticking to his forehead, and
his back and chest grimed and moist.

"We mowed the whole meadow! Oh, it is fine, wonderful! And how
have you been getting on?" said Levin, completely forgetting the
disagreeable conversation of the previous day.

"Dear me! What you look like!" said Sergei Ivanovich, for the
first moment looking round with some dissatisfaction. "And the door-
do shut the door!" he cried. "You must have let in a dozen at least."

Sergei Ivanovich could not endure flies, and in his own room he
never opened the window except at night, and carefully kept the door
shut.

"Not one, on my honor. But if I have, I'll catch them. You
wouldn't believe what a pleasure mowing is! How have you spent the
day?"

"Very well. But have you really been mowing the whole day? I
expect you're as hungry as a wolf. Kouzma has got everything ready for
you."

"No, I don't feel hungry even. I had something to eat there. But
I'll go and wash."

"Yes, go along, go along, and I'll come to you directly," said
Sergei Ivanovich, shaking his head as he looked at his brother. "Go
along, make haste," he added smiling, and, gathering up his books,
he prepared to go too. He, too, felt suddenly good-humored and
disinclined to leave his brother's side. "But what did you do while it
was raining?"

"Rain? Why, there was scarcely a drop. I'll come directly. So you
had a good day too? That's first-rate." And Levin went off to change
his clothes.

Five minutes later the brothers met in the dining room. Although
it seemed to Levin that he was not hungry, and he sat down to dinner
simply so as not to hurt Kouzma's feelings, yet when he began to eat
the dinner struck him as extraordinarily good. Sergei Ivanovich
watched him with a smile.

"Oh, by the way, there's a letter for you," said he. "Kouzma,
bring it from below, please. And mind you shut the doors."

The letter was from Oblonsky. Levin read it aloud. Oblonsky wrote to
him from Peterburg: "I have had a letter from Dolly; she's at
Ergushovo, and everything seems going wrong there. Do ride over and
see her, please; help her with advice; you know all about it. She will
be so glad to see you. She's quite alone, poor thing. My mother-in-law
and all of them are still abroad."

"That's capital! I will certainly ride over to her," said Levin. "Or
we'll go together. She's such a good woman, isn't she?"

"They're not far from here, then?"

"Thirty verstas. Or perhaps forty. But a capital road. It will be
a capital drive."

"I shall be delighted," said Sergei Ivanovich, still smiling.

The sight of his younger brother's appearance had immediately put
him in a good humor.

"Well, you have an appetite!" he said, looking at his dark-red,
sunburned face and neck bent over the plate.

"Splendid! You can't imagine what an effective remedy it is for
every sort of foolishness. I want to enrich medicine with a new
word: Arbeitskur."

"Well, but you don't need it, I should fancy."

"No- but for all sorts of nervous invalids."

"Yes, it ought to be tried. I had meant to come to the mowing to
look at you, but it was so unbearably hot that I got no further than
the forest. I sat there a little, and went on by the forest to the
village, met your old nurse, and sounded her as to the peasant's
view of you. As far as I can make out, they don't approve of this. She
said: 'It's not a gentleman's work.' Altogether, I fancy that in the
people's ideas there are very clear and definite notions of certain,
as they call it, 'gentlemanly' lines of action. And they don't
sanction the gentlefolk's moving outside bounds clearly laid down in
their ideas."

"Maybe so; but anyway, it's a pleasure such as I have never known in
my life. And there's no harm in it, you know. Is there?" answered
Levin. "I can't help it if they don't like it. Though I do believe
it's all right. Eh?"

"Altogether," pursued Sergei Ivanovich, "you're satisfied with
your day?"

"Quite satisfied. We cut the whole meadow. And I made friends with
such a splendid old man there! You can't fancy how delightful he was!"

"Well, so you're satisfied with your day. And so am I. First, I
solved two chess problems, and one a very pretty one- a pawn
opening. I'll show it to you. And then- I thought over our
conversation of yesterday."

"Eh! Our conversation of yesterday?" said Levin, blissfully dropping
his eyelids and drawing deep breaths after finishing his dinner, and
absolutely incapable of recalling what their conversation of yesterday
had been about.

"I think you are partly right. Our difference of opinion amounts
to this: that you make the mainspring self-interest, while I contend
that interest in the common weal is bound to exist in every man of a
certain degree of advancement. Possibly you are right too- that action
founded on material interest would be more desirable. You are
altogether, as the French say, too prime-sautiere a nature; you must
have intense, energetic action, or nothing."

Levin listened to his brother and did not understand a single
word, and did not want to understand. He was only afraid his brother
might ask him some question which would make it evident he had not
heard.

"So that's what I think it is, my dear boy," said Sergei
Ivanovich, touching him on the shoulder.

"Yes, of course. But, do you know? I won't stand up for my view,"
answered Levin, with a guilty, childlike smile. "Whatever was it I was
disputing about?" he wondered. "Of course, I'm right, and he's
right, and it's all first-rate. Only I must go round to the
countinghouse and see to things." He got up, stretching and smiling.

Sergei Ivanovich smiled too.

"If you want to go out, let's go together," he said, disinclined
to be parted from his brother, who seemed positively breathing out
freshness and energy. "Come, we'll go to the countinghouse, if you
have to go there."

"Oh, heavens!" shouted Levin, so loudly that Sergei Ivanovich was
quite frightened.

"What, what is the matter?

"How's Agathya Mikhailovna's hand?" said Levin, slapping himself
on the head. "I'd positively forgotten her."

"It's much better."

"Well, anyway, I'll run down to her. Before you've time to get
your hat on, I'll be back."

And he ran downstairs, clattering with his heels like a spring
rattle.

                           VII.


Stepan Arkadyevich had gone to Peterburg to perform the most natural
and essential official duty- so familiar to everyone in the government
service, though incomprehensible to outsiders- that duty but for which
one could hardly be in government service: of reminding the ministry
of his existence; and having, for the due performance of this rite,
taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably
spending his days at the races and in the summer villas. Meanwhile
Dolly and the children had moved into the country, to cut down
expenses as much as possible. She had gone to Ergushovo, the estate
that had been her dowry, and the one where in spring the forest had
been sold. It was nearly fifty verstas from Levin's Pokrovskoe.

The big old house at Ergushovo had been pulled down long ago, and
the old Prince had had the wing done up and added to. Twenty years
before, when Dolly was a child, the wing had been roomy and
comfortable, though, like all wings, it stood sideways to the entrance
avenue, and to the south. But by now this wing was old and
dilapidated. When Stepan Arkadyevich had gone down in the spring to
sell the forest, Dolly had begged him to look over the house and order
what repairs might be needed. Stepan Arkadyevich, like an unfaithful
husbands indeed, was very solicitous for his wife's comfort, and he
had himself looked over the house, and given instructions about
everything that he considered necessary. What he considered
necessary was to cover all the furniture with new cretonne, to put
up curtains, to weed the garden, to make a little bridge on the
pond, and to plant flowers. But he forgot many other essential
matters, the want of which greatly distressed Darya Alexandrovna later
on.

In spite of Stepan Arkadyevich's efforts to be an attentive father
and husband, he never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and
children. He had bachelor tastes, and it was in accordance with them
that he shaped his life. On his return to Moscow he informed his
wife with pride that everything was ready, that the house would be a
pretty toy, and that he most certainly advised her to go. His wife's
staying away in the country was very agreeable to Stepan Arkadyevich
from every point of view: it did the children good, it decreased
expenses, and it left him more at liberty. Darya Alexandrovna regarded
staying in the country for the summer as essential for the children,
especially for the little girl, who had not succeeded in regaining her
strength after the scarlatina, and also as a means of escaping the
petty humiliations, the little bills owing to the wood merchant, the
fishmonger, the shoemaker, which made her miserable. Besides this, she
was pleased to go away to the country because she was dreaming of
getting her sister Kitty to stay with her there. Kitty was to be
back from abroad in the middle of the summer, and bathing had been
prescribed for her. Kitty wrote that no prospect was so alluring as to
spend the summer with Dolly at Ergushovo, full of childhood
associations for both of them.

The first days of her existence in the country were very hard for
Dolly. She used to stay in the country as a child, and the
impression she had retained of it was that the country was a refuge
from all the unpleasantness of the town, that life there, though not
luxurious- Dolly could easily make up her mind to that- was cheap
and comfortable; that there was plenty of everything, everything was
cheap, everything could be got, and children were happy. But now,
coming to the country as the head of a family, she perceived that it
was all utterly unlike what she had fancied.

The day after their arrival there was a heavy fall of rain and in
the night the water came through in the corridor and in the nursery,
so that the beds had to be carried into the drawing room. There was no
kitchenmaid to be found; of the nine cows, it appeared from the
words of the cowherd woman that some were about to calve, others had
just calved, others were old, and others again hard-uddered; there was
neither butter nor milk enough even for the children. There were no
eggs. They could get no fowls; old, purplish, stringy roosters were
all they had for roasting and boiling. Impossible to get women to
scrub the floors- all were potato hoeing. Driving was out of the
question, because one of the horses was restive, and bolted in the
shafts. There was no place where they could bathe; the whole of the
riverbank was trampled by the cattle and open to the road; even
walks were impossible, for the cattle strayed into the garden
through a gap in the hedge, and there was one terrible bull, who
bellowed, and therefore might be expected to gore somebody. There were
no proper cupboards for their clothes; what cupboards there were
either would not close at all, or flew open whenever anyone passed
by them. There were no pots and kettles; there was no boiler in the
washhouse, nor even an ironing board in the maids' room.

Finding instead of peace and rest all these, from her point of view,
fearful calamities, Darya Alexandrovna was at first in despair. She
exerted herself to the utmost, felt the hopelessness of the
position, and was every instant suppressing the tears that started
into her eyes. The bailiff, a retired quartermaster, whom Stepan
Arkadyevich had taken a fancy to and had appointed bailiff on
account of his handsome and respectful appearance as a hall porter,
showed no sympathy for Darya Alexandrovna's woes. He would say
respectfully, "Nothing can be done, the peasants are such a wretched
lot," and did nothing to help her.

The position seemed hopeless. But in the Oblonskys' household, as in
all families indeed, there was one inconspicuous but most valuable and
useful person- Matriona Philimonovna. She soothed her mistress,
assured her that everything would come round (it was her expression,
and Matvei had borrowed it from her), and without fuss or hurry
proceeded to set to work herself.

She had immediately made friends with the bailiff's wife, and on the
very first day she drank tea with her and the bailiff under the
acacias, and reviewed all the circumstances of the position. Very soon
Matriona Philimonovna had established her club, so to say, under the
acacias, and there it was, in this club, consisting of the bailiff's
wife, the village elder, and the countinghouse clerk, that the
difficulties of existence were gradually smoothed away, and in a
week's time everything actually had come round. The roof was mended, a
kitchenmaid was found- a crony of the village elder's- hens were
bought, the cows began giving milk, the garden hedge was stopped up
with stakes, the carpenter made a mangle, hooks were put in the
cupboards, and they ceased to fly open spontaneously and an ironing
board covered with army cloth was placed across from the arm of a
chair to the chest of drawers, and there was a smell of flatirons in
the maids' room.

"Just see, now, and you were quite in despair," said Matriona
Philimonovna, pointing to the ironing board.

They even rigged up a bathing shed of straw hurdles. Lily began to
bathe, and Darya Alexandrovna began to realize, if only in part, her
expectations, if not of a peaceful, at least of a comfortable, life in
the country. Peaceful with six children Darya Alexandrovna could not
be. One would fall ill, another might easily become so, a third
would be without something necessary, a fourth would show symptoms
of a bad disposition, and so on. Rare indeed were the brief periods of
peace. But these cares and anxieties were for Darya Alexandrovna the
sole happiness possible. Had it not been for them, she would have been
left alone to brood over her husband who did not love her. And
besides, hard though it was for the mother to bear the dread of
illness, the illnesses themselves, and the grief of seeing signs of
evil propensities in her children- the children themselves were even
now repaying her in small joys for her pains. Those joys were so small
that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments
she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were
good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.

Now, in the solitude of the country, she began to be more and more
frequently aware of those joys. Often, looking at them, she would make
every possible effort to persuade herself that she was mistaken,
that she as a mother was partial to her children. All the same, she
could not help saying to herself that she had charming children, all
six of them in different ways, but a set of children such as is not
often to be met with- and she was happy in them, and proud of them.

                           VIII.


Toward the end of May, when everything had been more or less
satisfactorily arranged, she received her husband's answer to her
complaints of the disorganized state of things in the country. He
wrote begging her forgiveness for not having thought of everything
before, and promised to come down at the first chance. This chance did
not present itself, and till the beginning of June Darya
Alexandrovna stayed alone in the country.

On the Sunday in St. Peter's week Darya Alexandrovna drove to mass
to have all her children take the sacrament. Darya Alexandrovna in her
intimate, philosophical talks with her sister, her mother, and her
friends very often astonished them by the freedom of her views in
regard to religion. She had a strange religion, all her own, of the
transmigration of souls, in which she had firm faith, troubling
herself little about the dogmas of the Church. But in her family she
was strict in carrying out all that was required by the Church- and
not merely in order to set an example, but with all her heart. The
fact that the children had not been at the sacrament for nearly a year
worried her extremely, and with the full approval and sympathy of
Matriona Philimonovna she decided that this should take place now,
in the summer.

For several days before Darya Alexandrovna was busily deliberating
on how to dress all the children. Frocks were made, or altered and
washed, seams and flounces were let out, buttons were sewn on and
ribbons got ready. One dress, Tania's, which the English governess had
undertaken, cost Darya Alexandrovna much loss of temper. The English
governess in altering it had made the seams in the wrong place, had
taken up the sleeves too much, and altogether spoiled the dress. It
was so narrow on Tania's shoulders that it was quite painful to look
at her. But Matriona Philimonovna had the happy thought of putting
in gussets, and adding a little shoulder-cape. The dress was set
right, but there was nearly a quarrel with the English governess. In
the morning, however, all was happily arranged, and about nine
o'clock- the time at which they had asked the priest to wait for
them for the mass- the children in their new dresses stood with
beaming faces on the step before the carriage, waiting for their
mother.

In the carriage, instead of the restive Raven, they had harnessed,
thanks to the representations of Matriona Philimonovna, the
bailiff's horse, Brownie, and Darya Alexandrovna, delayed by anxiety
over her own attire, came out and got in, dressed in a white muslin
gown.

Darya Alexandrovna had done her hair, and dressed with care and
excitement. In the old days she had dressed for her own sake, to
look pretty and be admired; later on, as she got older, dress became
more and more distasteful to her; she saw that she was losing her good
looks. But now she began to feel pleasure and interest in dress again.
Now she did not dress for her own sake, nor for the sake of her own
beauty, but simply that, as the mother of those exquisite creatures,
she might not spoil the general effect. And looking at herself for the
last time in the looking glass she was satisfied with herself. She
looked well. Not as well as she wished to look in the old days, at a
ball, but well for the object she now had in view.

In the church there was no one but the peasants, the servants, and
their womenfolk. But Darya Alexandrovna saw, or fancied she saw, the
sensation produced by her children and herself. The children were
not only beautiful to look at in their smart little dresses, but
they were charming in the way they behaved. Aliosha, it is true, did
not stand quite correctly; he kept turning round, trying to look at
his little jacket from behind; but all the same he was wonderfully
sweet. Tania behaved like a grown-up person, and looked after the
little ones. And the smallest, Lily, was bewitching in her naive
astonishment at everything, and it was difficult not to smile when,
after taking the sacrament, she said in English, "Please, some more."

On the way home the children felt that something solemn had
happened, and were very sedate.

Everything went happily at home too; but at lunch Grisha began
whistling, and, what was worse, was disobedient to the English
governess, and was forbidden to have any tart. Darya Alexandrovna
would not have let things go as far as the punishment on such a day
had she been present; but she had to support the English governess's
authority, and she upheld her decision that Grisha should have no
tart. This rather spoiled the general good humor.

Grisha cried, declaring that Nikolinka had whistled too, yet was not
punished, and that he wasn't crying for the tart- he didn't care-
but at being unjustly treated. This was really too tragic, and Darya
Alexandrovna made up her mind to persuade the English governess to
forgive Grisha, and she went to speak to her. But on her way, as she
passed the drawing room, she beheld a scene, filling her heart with
such pleasure that the tears came into her eyes, and she forgave the
delinquent herself.

The culprit was sitting at the window in the corner of the drawing
room; beside him was standing Tania with a plate. On the pretext of
wanting to give some dinner to her dolls, she had asked the
governess's permission to take her share of tart to the nursery, and
had taken it instead to her brother. While still weeping over the
injustice of his punishment, he was eating the tart, and kept saying
through his sobs, "Eat yourself; let's eat it together... together."

Tania had at first been under the influence of her pity for
Grisha, then of a sense of her noble action, and tears were standing
in her eyes too; but she did not refuse, and ate her share.

On catching sight of their mother they were dismayed, but, looking
into her face, they saw they were not doing wrong. They burst out
laughing, and, with their mouths full of tart, they began wiping their
smiling lips with their hands, and smearing their radiant faces all
over with tears and jam.

"Mercy! Your new white frock- Tania! Grisha!" said their mother,
trying to save the frock, but with tears in her eyes, smiling a
blissful, rapturous smile.

The new frocks were taken off, and orders were given for the
little girls to have their blouses put on, and the boys their old
jackets, and the wide droshky to be harnessed- with Brownie, to the
bailiff's annoyance, again in the shafts- to drive out for mushroom
picking and bathing. A roar of delighted shrieks arose in the nursery,
and never ceased till they had set off for the bathing place.

They gathered a whole basketful of mushrooms; even Lily found a
birch mushroom. It had always happened before that Miss Hoole found
them and pointed them out to her; but this time she found a big one
quite by herself, and there was a general scream of delight; "Lily has
found a mushroom!"

Then they reached the river, put the horses under the birch trees,
and went to the bathing place. The coachman, Terentii, hitched the
horses, who kept whisking away the horseflies, to a tree, and,
treading down the grass, lay down in the shade of a birch and smoked
his shag, while the never-ceasing shrieks of delight of the children
floated across to him from the bathing place.

Though it was hard work to look after all the children and
restrain their pranks, though it was difficult, too, to keep one's
head and not mix up all the stockings, little breeches, and shoes
for the different legs, and to undo and to do up again all the tapes
and buttons, Darya Alexandrovna, who had always liked bathing herself,
and believed it to be very good for the children, enjoyed nothing so
much as bathing with all the children. To go over all those fat little
legs, pulling on their stockings, to take in her arms and dip those
little naked bodies, and to hear their screams of delight and alarm,
to see the breathless faces with wide-open, scared, and happy eyes
of all her splashing cherubs, was a great pleasure to her.

When half the children had been dressed, some peasant women in
holiday dress, out picking herbs, came up to the bathing shed and
stopped shyly. Matriona Philimonovna called one of them and handed her
a sheet and a shirt that had dropped into the water for her to dry
them, and Darya Alexandrovna began to talk to the women. At first they
laughed behind their hands and did not understand her questions, but
soon they grew bolder and began to talk, winning Darya
Alexandrovna's heart at once by the genuine admiration of the children
that they showed.

"My, what a beauty! As white as sugar," said one, admiring Tanechka,
and shaking her head, "but thin...."

"Yes, she has been ill."

"Lookee, they've been bathing him too," said another, pointing to
the breast baby.

"No; he's only three months old," answered Darya Alexandrovna with
pride.

"You see!"

"And have you any children?"

"I've had four; I've two living- a boy and a girl. I weaned her last
carnival."

"How old is she?"

"Why, more than one year old."

"Why did you nurse her so long?"

"It's our custom; for three fasts...."

And the conversation became most interesting to Darya
Alexandrovna. What sort of time did she have? What was the matter with
the boy? Where was her husband? Did it often happen?

Darya Alexandrovna felt disinclined to leave the peasant women, so
interesting to her was their conversation, so completely identical
were all their interests. What pleased her most of all was that she
saw clearly what all the women admired more than anything was her
having so many children, and such fine ones. The peasant women even
made Darya Alexandrovna laugh, and offended the English governess,
because she was the cause of the laughter she did not understand.
One of the younger women kept staring at the Englishwoman, who was
dressing after all the rest, and when she put on her third petticoat
she could not refrain from the remark, "My, she keeps putting on and
putting on, and she'll never have done!" she said, and they all went
off into peals of laughter.

                           IX.


On the drive home, as Darya Alexandrovna, with all her children
round her, their heads still wet from their baths, and a kerchief tied
over her own head, was getting near the house, the coachman said:
"There's some gentleman coming: the master of Pokrovskoe, I do
believe."

Darya Alexandrovna peeped out in front, and was delighted when she
recognized in the gray hat and gray coat the familiar figure of
Levin walking to meet them. She was glad to see him at any time, but
at this moment she was specially glad he should see her in all her
glory. No one was better able to appreciate her grandeur than Levin.

Seeing her, he found himself face to face with one of the pictures
of his daydream of family life.

"You're like a hen with your brood, Darya Alexandrovna."

"Ah, how glad I am to see you!" she said, holding out her hand to
him.

"Glad to see me- but you didn't let me know. My brother's staying
with me. I got a note from Stiva that you were here."

"From Stiva?" Darya Alexandrovna asked with surprise.

"Yes; he writes that you are here, and that he thinks you might
allow me to be of use to you," said Levin, and as he said it he became
suddenly embarrassed, and, stopping abruptly, he walked on in
silence by the droshky, snapping off the buds of the lime trees and
nibbling them. He was embarrassed through a sense that Darya
Alexandrovna would be annoyed by receiving from an outsider help
that should by rights have come from her own husband. Darya
Alexandrovna certainly did not like this little way of Stepan
Arkadyevich's of foisting his domestic duties on others. And she was
at once aware that Levin was aware of this. It was just for this
fineness of perception, for this delicacy, that Darya Alexandrovna
liked Levin.

"I know, of course," said Levin, "that this simply means that you
would like to see me, and I'm exceedingly glad. Though I can fancy
that, used to town housekeeping as you are, you must feel you are in
the wilds here, and if there's anything wanted, I'm altogether at your
disposal."

"Oh, no!" said Dolly. "At first things were rather uncomfortable,
but now we've settled everything capitally- thanks to my old nurse,"
she said, indicating Matriona Philimonovna, who, seeing that they were
speaking of her, smiled brightly and cordially to Levin. She knew him,
and knew that he would be a good match for her young lady, and was
very keen to see the matter settled.

"Won't you get in, sir, we'll make room on this side!" she said to
him.

"No, I'll walk. Children, who'd like to race the horses with me?"

The children knew Levin very little, and could not remember when
they had seen him, but they experienced in regard to him none of
that strange feeling of shyness and hostility which children so
often experience toward hypocritical, grown-up people, and for which
they are so often and miserably punished. Hypocrisy in anything
whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the
least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it,
however ingeniously it may be disguised. Whatever faults Levin had,
there was not a trace of hypocrisy in him, and so the children
showed him the same friendliness that they saw in their mother's face.
On his invitation, the two elder ones at once jumped out to him and
ran with him as simply as they would have done with their nurse, or
Miss Hoole, or their mother. Lily, too, began begging to go to him,
and her mother handed her over to him; he sat her on his shoulder
and ran along with her.

"Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, Darya Alexandrovna!" he said,
smiling good-humoredly to the mother; "there's no chance of my hurting
or dropping her."

And, looking at his strong, agile, assiduously careful and extremely
strained movements, the mother felt her mind at rest, and smiled gaily
and approvingly as she watched him.

Here, in the country, with children, and with Darya Alexandrovna,
with whom he was in sympathy, Levin was in a mood not infrequent
with him, of childlike lightheartedness that she particularly liked in
him. As he ran with the children, he taught them gymnastic feats,
set Miss Hoole laughing with his queer English accent, and talked to
Darya Alexandrovna of his pursuits in the country.

After dinner, Darya Alexandrovna, sitting alone with him on the
balcony, began to speak of Kitty.

"You know, Kitty's coming here, and is going to spend the summer
with me."

"Really," he said, flushing; and at once, to change the
conversation, he said: "Then I'll send you two cows, shall I? If you
insist on a bill you shall pay me five roubles a month- if you
aren't ashamed."

"No, thank you. We can manage very well now."

"Oh, well, then, I'll have a look at your cows, and if you'll
allow me, I'll give directions about their food. Everything depends on
their food."

And Levin, to turn the conversation, explained to Darya Alexandrovna
the theory of cowkeeping, based on the principle that the cow is
simply a machine for the transformation of food into milk, and so on.

He talked of this, and passionately longed to hear more of Kitty,
and, at the same time, was afraid of hearing it. He dreaded the
breaking up of the inward peace he had gained with such effort.

"Yes, but still all this has to be looked after, and who is there to
look after it?" Darya Alexandrovna responded reluctantly.

She had by now got her household matters so satisfactorily arranged,
thanks to Matriona Philimonovna, that she was disinclined to make
any change in them; besides, she had no faith in Levin's knowledge
of farming. General principles, as to the cow being a machine for
the production of milk, she looked on with suspicion. It seemed to her
that such principles could only be a hindrance in farm management.
It all seemed to her a far simpler matter: all that was needed, as
Matriona Philimonovna had explained, was to give Brindle and
Whitebreast more food and drink, and not to let the cook carry all the
kitchen slops to the laundrymaid's cow. That was clear. But general
propositions as to feeding on meal and on grass were doubtful and
obscure. And, what was most important, she wanted to talk about Kitty.

                           X.


"Kitty writes to me that there's nothing she longs for so much as
quiet and solitude," Dolly said after the silence that had followed.

"And how is she- better?" Levin asked in agitation.

"Thank God, she's quite well again. I never believed her lungs
were affected."

"Oh, I'm very glad!" said Levin, and Dolly fancied she saw something
touching, helpless, in his face as he said this and looked silently
into her face.

"Let me ask you, Konstantin Dmitrievich," said Darya Alexandrovna,
smiling her kindly and rather mocking smile, "why are you angry with
Kitty?"

"I? I'm not angry with her," said Levin.

"Yes, you are. Why was it you did not come to see us or them when
you were in Moscow?"

"Darya Alexandrovna," he said, blushing up to the roots of his hair,
"I wonder really that with your kind heart you don't feel this. How it
is you feel no pity for me, if nothing else, when you know..."

"What do I know?"

"You know that I proposed and was refused," said Levin, and all
the tenderness he had been feeling for Kitty a minute before was
replaced by a feeling of anger for the slight he had suffered.

"What makes you suppose I know?"

"Because everybody knows it...."

"That's just where you are mistaken; I did not know it, though I had
guessed it was so."

"Well, now you know it."

"All I knew was that something had happened that made her dreadfully
miserable, and that she begged me never to speak of it. And if she
would not tell me, she would certainly not speak of it to anyone else.
But what did pass between you? Tell me."

"I have told you."

"When was it?"

"When I was at their house the last time."

"Do you know," said Darya Alexandrovna, "I am awfully, awfully sorry
for her. You suffer only from pride...."

"Perhaps so," said Levin, "but..."

She interrupted him.

"But she, poor girl... I am awfully, awfully sorry for her. Now I
see it all."

"Well, Darya Alexandrovna, you must excuse me," he said, getting up.
"Good-by, Darya Alexandrovna, till we meet again."

"No, wait a minute," she said, clutching him by the sleeve. "Wait
a minute, sit down."

"Please, please, don't let us talk of this," he said, sitting
down, and at the same time feeling rise up and stir within his heart a
hope he had believed to be buried.

"If I did not like you," she said, and tears came into her eyes; "if
I did not know you, as I do know you..."

The feeling that had seemed dead revived more and more, rose up
and took possession of Levin's heart.

"Yes, I understand it all now," said Darya Alexandrovna. "You
can't understand it; for you men, who are free and make your own
choice, it's always clear whom you love. But a girl's in a position of
suspense, with all a woman's or maiden's modesty, a girl who sees
you men from afar, who takes everything on trust- a girl may have, and
often has, such a feeling that she cannot tell what to say."

"Yes, if the heart does not speak...."

"No, the heart does speak; but just consider: you men have views
about a girl, you come to the house, you make friends, you
criticize, you wait to see if you have found what you love, and
then, when you are sure you love her, you propose..."

"Well, that's not quite it."

"Anyway you propose, when your love is ripe, or when the balance has
completely turned between the two you are choosing from. But a girl is
not asked. She is expected to make her choice, and yet she cannot
choose- she can only answer 'yes' or 'no.'"

"Yes, to choose between me and Vronsky," thought Levin, and the dead
thing that had come to life within him died again, and only weighed on
his heart and set it aching.

"Darya Alexandrovna," he said, "that's how one chooses a new
dress, or some purchase or other- not love. The choice has been
made, and so much the better.... And there can be no repetition."

"Ah, pride, pride!" said Darya Alexandrovna, as though despising him
for the baseness of this feeling in comparison with that other feeling
which only women know. "At the time when you proposed to Kitty she was
just in a position in which she could not answer. She was in doubt.
Doubt between you and Vronsky. Him she was seeing every day, and you
she had not seen for a long while. Supposing she had been older...
I, for instance, in her place, could have felt no doubt. I always
disliked him, and my dislike proved to be justified."

Levin recalled Kitty's answer. She had said: "No, that cannot
be...."

"Darya Alexandrovna," he said dryly, "I appreciate your confidence
in me; I believe you are making a mistake. But whether I am right or
wrong, that pride you so despise makes any thought of Katerina
Alexandrovna out of the question for me; you understand- utterly out
of the question."

"I will only say one thing more: you know that I am speaking of my
sister, whom I love as I love my own children. I don't say she cared
for you; all I meant to say is that her refusal at that moment
proves nothing."

"I don't know!" said Levin, jumping up. "you only knew how you are
hurting me. It's just as if a child of yours were dead, and they
were to say to you: He would have been like this and like that, and he
might have lived, and how happy you would have been in him. But he's
dead, dead, dead!..."

"How absurd you are!" said Darya Alexandrovna, looking with mournful
tenderness at Levin's excitement. "Yes, I see it all more and more
clearly," she went on musingly. "So you won't come to see us, then,
when Kitty's here?"

"No, I shan't come. Of course I won't avoid meeting Katerina
Alexandrovna; but, as far as I can, I will try to save her the
annoyance of my presence."

"You are very, very absurd," repeated Darya Alexandrovna, looking
with tenderness into his face. "Very well then, let it be as though we
had not spoken of this. What have you come for, Tania?" she said in
French to the little girl who had come in.

"Where's my spade, mamma?"

"I speak French, and you must too."

The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember
the French for spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in
French where to look for the spade. And this made a disagreeable
impression on Levin.

Everything in Darya Alexandrovna's house and children struck him now
as by no means so charming as a little while before.

"And why does she talk French with the children?" he thought. "How
unnatural and false it is! And the children feel it so: Learning
French and unlearning sincerity," he thought to himself, unaware
that Darya Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty times
already, and yet, even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, believed
it necessary to teach her children French in that way.

"But why are you going? Do stay a little."

Levin stayed to tea; but his good humor had vanished, and he felt
ill at ease.

After tea he went out into the hall to order his horses to be put
in, and, when he came back, he found Darya Alexandrovna greatly
disturbed, with a troubled face, and tears in her eyes. While Levin
had been outside, an incident had occurred which had all at once
shattered all the happiness she had been feeling that day, and her
pride in her children. Grisha and Tania had been fighting over a ball.
Darya Alexandrovna, hearing a scream in the nursery, ran in and saw
a terrible sight. Tania was pulling Grisha's hair, while he, with a
face hideous with rage, was beating her with his fists wherever he
could get at her. Something snapped in Darya Alexandrovna's heart when
she saw this. It was as if darkness had swooped down upon her life;
she felt that these children of hers, that she was so proud of, were
not merely most ordinary, but positively bad, ill-bred children,
with coarse, brutal propensities- wicked children.

She could not talk or think of anything else, and she could not help
speaking to Levin of her misery.

Levin saw she was unhappy and tried to comfort her, saying that it
showed nothing bad, that all children fight; but, even as he said
it, he was thinking in his heart: "No, I won't be artificial and
talk French with my children; but my children won't be like that.
All one has to do is not spoil children, not to distort their
nature, and they'll be delightful. No, my children won't be like
that."

He said good-by and drove away, and she did not try to detain him.

                           XI.


In the middle of July the elder of the village on Levin's sister's
estate, about twenty verstas from Pokrovskoe, came to Levin to
report about the hay, and how things were going there. The chief
source of income on his sister's estate was from the water meadows. In
former years the hay had been bought by the peasants for twenty
roubles the dessiatina. When Levin took over the management of the
estate, he thought on examining the grasslands that they were worth
more, and he fixed the price at twenty-five roubles the dessiatina.
The peasants would not give that price, and, as Levin suspected,
kept off other purchasers. Then Levin had driven over himself, and
arranged to have the grass cut, partly by hired labor, partly at a
payment of a certain proportion of the crop. The peasants of this
village put every hindrance they could in the way of this new
arrangement, but it was carried out, and the first year the meadows
had yielded a profit almost double. Two years ago and the previous
year the peasants had maintained the same opposition to the
arrangement, and the hay had been cut on the same system. This year
the peasants were doing all the mowing for a third of the hay crop,
and the village elder had come now to announce that the hay had been
cut, and that, fearing rain, he had invited the countinghouse clerk
over, had divided the crop in his presence, and had raked together
eleven stacks as the owner's share. From the vague answers to his
question how much hay had been cut on the principal meadow, from the
hurry of the village elder who had made the division, without asking
leave, from the whole tone of the peasant, Levin perceived that
there was something wrong in the division of the hay, and made up
his mind to drive over himself to look into the matter.

Arriving by dinnertime at the village, and leaving his horse at
the cottage of an old friend of his, the husband of his brother's
wet nurse, Levin went to see the old man in his beehouse, wanting to
find out from him the truth about the hay. Parmenich, a talkative,
comely old man, gave Levin a very warm welcome, showed him all he
was doing, told him everything about his bees and the swarms of that
year; but gave vague and unwilling answers to Levin's inquiries
about the mowing. This confirmed Levin still more in his suspicions.
He went to the hayfields and examined the stacks. The haystacks
could not possibly contain fifty wagonloads each, and to convict the
peasants Levin ordered the wagons that had carried the hay to be
brought up directly, to lift one stack, and carry it into the barn.
There turned out to be only thirty-two loads in the stack. In spite of
the village elder's assertions about the compressibility of hay, and
its having settled down in the stacks, and his swearing that
everything had been done in fear of God, Levin stuck to his point that
the hay had been divided without his orders, and that, therefore, he
would not accept that hay as fifty loads to a stack. After a prolonged
dispute the matter was decided by the peasants taking, as their share,
these eleven stacks, reckoning them as fifty loads each, and
apportioning the owner's share anew. The arguments and the division of
the haycocks lasted the whole afternoon. When the last of the hay
had been divided, Levin, entrusting the superintendence of the rest to
the countinghouse clerk, sat down on a haycock marked off by a stake
of willow, and looked admiringly at the meadow swarming with peasants.

In front of him, in the bend of the river beyond the little marsh,
moved a bright-colored line of peasant women, merrily chattering
with their ringing voices, and the scattered hay was being rapidly
formed into gray winding rows over the pale green aftermath. After the
women came the men with pitchforks, and from the gray rows there
were growing up broad, high, soft haycocks. To the left telegas were
rumbling over the meadow that had been already cleared, and one
after another the haycocks vanished, flung up in huge forkfuls, and in
their place there were rising heavy cartloads of fragrant hay
hanging over the horses' hindquarters.

"What weather for haying! What hay it'll be!" said an old man,
squatting down beside Levin. "It's tea, not hay It's like scattering
grain to the ducks, the way they pick it up!" he added, pointing to
the growing haycocks. "Since dinnertime they've carried a good half of
it."

"The last load, eh?" he shouted to a young peasant, who drove by,
standing in the front of an empty telega box, shaking the reins of
hemp.

"The last, dad!" the lad shouted back, pulling in the horse, and,
smiling, he looked round at a bright, rosy-cheeked peasant girl who
sat in the telega box, smiling too, and drove on.

"Who's that? Your son?" asked Levin.

"My dear youngest," said the old man with a tender smile.

"What a fine fellow!"

"The lad's all right."

"Married already?"

"Yes, it's two years last St. Philip's day."

"Any children?"

"Children, indeed! Why, for over a year he was innocent as a babe
himself, and bashful too," answered the old man. "What hay this is!
It's tea indeed!" he repeated, wishing to change the subject.

Levin looked more attentively at Vanka Parmenov and his wife. They
were loading a haycock onto the wagon not far from him. Ivan
Parmenov was standing on the wagon, taking, laying in place, and
stamping down the huge bundles of hay, which his pretty young wife
deftly handed up to him, at first in armfuls, and then on the
pitchfork. The young wife worked easily, merrily, and deftly. The
close-packed hay did not once break away by her fork. First she tedded
it, stuck the fork into it, then with a rapid, supple movement
leaned the whole weight of her body on it, and at once with a bend
of her back under the red belt she drew herself up, and arching her
full bosom under the long white apron, with a deft turn swung the fork
in her arms, and flung the bundle of hay high onto the wagon. Ivan,
obviously doing his best to save her every minute of unnecessary
labor, made haste, opening wide his arms to clutch the bundle and
lay it in the wagon. As she raked together what was left of the hay,
the young wife shook off the bits of hay that had fallen on her
neck, and, arranging the red kerchief that was gone backward baring
her white brow, not browned by the sun, she crept under the wagon to
tie up the load. Ivan directed her how to fasten the cord to the
crosspiece, and at something she said he laughed aloud. In the
expressions of both faces was to be seen vigorous, young, freshly
awakened love.

                           XII.


The load was tied on. Ivan jumped down and took the quiet, sleek
horse by the bridle. The young wife flung the rake up on the load;
with a bold step, swinging her arms, she went to join the women, who
were forming a ring for the haymakers' dance. Ivan drove off to the
road and fell into line with the other loaded wagons. The peasant
women, with their rakes on their shoulders, gay with bright flowers,
and chattering with ringing, merry voices, walked behind the hay
wagon. One wild untrained female voice broke into a song, and sang
it alone through a verse, and then the same verse was unanimously
taken up and repeated by half a hundred strong healthy voices, of
all sorts, coarse and fine.

The women, all singing, began to come close to Levin, and he felt as
though a storm were swooping down upon him with a thunder of
merriment. The storm swooped down, enveloped him and the haycock on
which he was lying, and the other haycocks, and wagonloads, and the
whole meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing
to the measures of this wild merry song, with its shouts and
whistles and clapping. Levin felt envious of this health and
mirthfulness; he longed to take part in the expression of this joy
of life. But he could do nothing, and had to lie and look on and
listen. When the peasants, with their singing, had vanished out of
sight and hearing, a weary feeling of despondency at his own
isolation, his physical inactivity, his alienation from this world,
came over Levin.

Some of the very peasants who had been most active in wrangling with
him over the hay, some whom he had treated with contumely, and who had
tried to cheat him- those very peasants had greeted him
good-humoredly, and evidently had not, were incapable of having, any
feeling of rancor against him, any regret, any recollection even of
having tried to deceive him. All that was drowned in a sea of merry
common labor. God gave the day, God gave the strength. And the day and
the strength were consecrated to labor, and that labor was its own
reward. For whom the labor? What would be its fruits? These were
idle considerations- beside the point.

Often Levin had admired this life, often he had a sense of envy of
the men who led this life; but today, for the first time, especially
under the influence of what he had seen in the attitude of Ivan
Parmenov to his young wife, the idea presented itself definitely to
his mind that it was in his power to exchange the dreary,
artificial, idle, and individualistic life he was leading for this
laborious, pure, and generally delightful life.

The old man who had been sitting beside him had long ago gone
home; the people had all gone their different ways. Those who lived
near had gone home, while those who came from afar were gathered
into a group for supper, and to spend the night in the meadow.
Levin, unobserved by the peasants, still lay on the haycock, and still
looked on, and listened, and mused. The peasants who remained for
the night in the meadow scarcely slept all the short summer night.
At first there was the sound of merry talk and general laughing over
the supper, then singing again, and laughter.

All the long day of toil had left no trace in them save lightness of
heart. Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard
but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh,
and the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before
morning. Rousing himself, Levin got up from the haycock, and,
looking at the stars, he saw that the night was over.

"Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?" he said
to himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings
he had passed through in this brief night. All the thoughts and
feelings he had passed through fell into three separate trains of
thought. One was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly
useless education. This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was
easy and simple. Another series of thoughts and mental images
related to the life he longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity,
the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would
find in it its content, its peace, and its dignity, of the lack of
which he was so miserably conscious. But a third series of ideas
turned upon the question of how to effect this transition from the old
life to the new. And there nothing took clear shape for him. "A
wife. Work and the necessity of work. Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land?
Become a member of a peasant community? Marry a peasant girl? How am I
to set about it?" he asked himself again, and could not find an
answer. "I haven't slept all night, though, and I can't think it out
clearly," he said to himself. "I'll work it out later. One thing's
certain- this night has decided my fate. All my old dreams of home
life were absurd, not the real thing," he told himself. "It's all ever
so much simpler and better...."

"How beautiful!" he thought, looking at the strange, as it were,
mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right over his
head in the middle of the sky. "How exquisite it all is in this
exquisite night! And when was there time for that cloud shell to form?
Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it- only two
white streaks. Yes, and so imperceptibly, too, my views of life
changed!"

He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad toward the
village. A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and sullen.
The gloomy moment had come that usually precedes the dawn, the full
triumph of light over darkness.

Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the
ground. "What's that? Someone coming," he thought, catching the tinkle
of bells, and lifting his head. Forty paces from him a carriage and
four with the luggage on its top was driving toward him along the
grassy highroad on which he was walking. The shaft horses were
tilted against the shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver
sitting on the box held the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels
ran on the smooth part of the road.

This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be,
he gazed absently at the coach.

In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the
window, evidently only just awake, sat a young girl holding in both
hands the ribbons of a white cap. With a face full of light and
thought, full of a subtle, complex inner life, that was remote from
Levin, she was gazing from the window at the glow of the sunrise.

At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the truthful
eyes glanced at him. She recognized him, and her face lighted up
with wondering delight.

He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in all
the world. There was only one creature in the world that could
concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was
she. It was Kitty. He comprehended that she was driving to Ergushovo
from the railway station. And everything that had been stirring
Levin during this sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made,
all vanished at once. He recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a
peasant girl. There only, in this carriage that had crossed over to
the other side of the road, and was rapidly disappearing- there only
could he find the solution of the riddle of his life, which had
weighed so agonizingly upon him of late.

She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage springs was no
longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The barking of dogs
showed the carriage had reached the village, and all that was left was
the empty fields all round, the village in front, and he himself
isolated and apart from it all, wandering lonely along the deserted
highroad.

He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he
had been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and feelings
of that night. There was nothing in the sky in the least like a shell.
There, in the remote heights above, a mysterious change had been
accomplished. There was no trace of a shell, and there was stretched
over fully half the sky an even cover of tiny, and ever tinier,
cloudlets. The sky had grown blue and bright; and with the same
softness, but with the same remoteness, it met his questioning gaze.

"No," he said to himself, "however good that life of simplicity
and toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love her."

                           XIII.


None but those who were most intimate with Alexei Alexandrovich knew
that, while on the surface the coldest and most rational of men, he
had one weakness quite opposed to the general trend of his
character. Alexei Alexandrovich could not hear or see a child or woman
crying without being moved. The sight of tears threw him into a
state of nervous agitation, and he utterly lost all power of
reflection. The head clerk of his board and the secretary were aware
of this, and used to warn women who came with petitions on no
account to give way to tears, if they did not want to ruin their
chances. "He will get angry, and will not listen to you," they used to
say. And, as a fact, in such cases the emotional disturbance set up in
Alexei Alexandrovich by the sight of tears found expression in hasty
anger. "I can do nothing. Kindly leave the room!" he would usually
shout in such cases.

When, returning from the races, Anna had informed him of her
relations with Vronsky, and immediately afterward had burst into
tears, hiding her face in her hands, Alexei Alexandrovich, for all the
fury aroused in him against her, was aware at the same time of a
rush of that emotional disturbance always produced in him by tears.
Conscious of it, and conscious that any expression of his feelings
at that minute would be out of keeping with the situation, he tried to
suppress every manifestation of life in himself, and so neither
stirred nor looked at her. This was what had caused that strange
expression of deathlike rigidity in his face which had so impressed
Anna.

When they reached the house he helped her to get out of the
carriage, and, making an effort to master himself, took leave of her
with his usual urbanity, and uttered that phrase that bound him to
nothing; he said that tomorrow he would let her know his decision.

His wife's words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a
cruel pang to the heart of Alexei Alexandrovich. That pang was
intensified by the strange feeling of physical pity for her engendered
by her tears. But when he was all alone in the carriage Alexei
Alexandrovich, to his surprise and delight, felt complete relief
both from this pity and from the doubts and agonies of jealousy.

He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out after
suffering long from toothache. After a fearful agony and a sense of
something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn out of his
jaw, the sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own good luck,
feels all at once that what has so long envenomed his existence and
enchained his attention, exists no longer, and that he can live and
think again, and take an interest in other things besides his tooth.
This feeling Alexei Alexandrovich was experiencing. The agony had been
strange and terrible, but now it was over; he felt that he could
live again and think of something other than his wife.

"No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew
it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare
her," he said to himself. And it actually seemed to him that he always
had seen it: he recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had
never seen anything wrong before- now these incidents proved clearly
that she had always been a corrupt woman. "I made a mistake in linking
my life to hers; but there was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I
cannot be unhappy. It's not I who am to blame," he told himself,
"but she. But I have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for
me."

All that would befall her and her son, toward whom his sentiments
were as much changed as toward her, ceased to interest him. The only
thing that interested him now was the question in what way he could
best, with most propriety and comfort for himself, and so with most
justice, shake clear the mud with which she had spattered him in her
fall, and then proceed along his path of active, honorable, and useful
existence.

"I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman
has committed a crime. I have only to find the best way out of the
difficult position in which she has placed me. And I shall find it,"
he said to himself, frowning more and more. "I'm neither the first nor
the last." And to say nothing of historical instances dating from
Menelaus, recently revived in the memory of all by La Belle Helene,
a whole list of contemporary examples of husbands with unfaithful
wives in the highest society rose before Alexei Alexandrovich's
imagination. "Daryalov, Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin,
Dram... Yes, even Dram... such an honest, capable fellow...
Semionov, Chagin, Sigonin," Alexei Alexandrovich remembered.
"Admitting that a certain quite irrational ridicule falls to the lot
of these men, yet I never saw anything but a misfortune in it, and
always felt sympathy for it," Alexei Alexandrovich said to himself,
though indeed this was not the fact, and he had never felt sympathy
for misfortunes of that kind, but the more often he had heard of
instances of unfaithful wives betraying their husbands, the more
highly he had thought of himself. "It is a misfortune which may befall
anyone. And this misfortune has befallen me. The only thing to be done
is to make the best of the situation." And he began passing in
review the methods of proceeding of men who had been in the same
position that he was in.

"Daryalov fought a duel...."

The duel had particularly fascinated the thoughts of Alexei
Alexandrovich in his youth, just because he was physically a
fainthearted man, and was himself well aware of the fact. Alexei
Alexandrovich could not without horror contemplate the idea of a
pistol aimed at himself, and never made use of any weapon in his life.
This horror had in his youth set him often pondering on dueling, and
picturing himself in a position in which he would have to expose his
life to danger. Having attained success and an established position in
the world, he had long ago forgotten this feeling; but the habitual
bent of feeling reasserted itself, and dread of his own cowardice
proved even now so strong that Alexei Alexandrovich spent a long while
thinking over the question of dueling in all its aspects, and
hugging the idea of a duel, though he was fully aware beforehand
that he would never under any circumstances fight one.

"There's no doubt our society is still so barbarous (it's not the
same in England) that very many"- and among these were those whose
opinion Alexei Alexandrovich particularly valued- "look favorably on
the duel; but what result is attained by it? Suppose I call him
out," Alexei Alexandrovich went on to himself, and vividly picturing
the night he would spend after the challenge, and the pistol aimed
at him, he shuddered, and knew that he never would do it- "suppose I
call him out. Suppose I am taught," he went on musing, "I am placed, I
press the trigger," he said to himself, closing his eyes, "and it
turns out I have killed him," Alexei Alexandrovich said to himself,
and he shook his head as though to dispel such silly ideas. "What
sense is there in murdering a man in order to define one's relation to
a guilty wife and son? I should still have to decide what I ought to
do with her. But what is more probable, and what would doubtlessly
occur- I should be killed or wounded. I, the innocent person, should
be the victim- killed or wounded. It's even more senseless. But, apart
from that, a challenge to fight would be an act hardly honest on my
side. Don't I know beforehand that my friends would never allow me
to fight a duel- would never allow the life of a statesman, needed
by Russia, to be exposed to danger? What would come of it? It would
come of it that, knowing beforehand that the matter would never come
to real danger, it would amount to my simply trying to gain a
certain sham reputation by such a challenge. That would be
dishonest, that would be false, that would be deceiving myself and
others. A duel is quite impossible, and no one expects it of me. My
aim is simply to safeguard my reputation, which is essential for the
uninterrupted pursuit of my public duties." Official duties, which had
always been of great consequence in Alexei Alexandrovich's eyes,
seemed of special importance to his mind at this moment.

Considering and rejecting the duel, Alexei Alexandrovich turned to
divorce- another solution selected by several of the husbands he
remembered. Passing in mental review all the instances he knew of
divorces (there were plenty of them in the very highest society with
which he was very familiar), Alexei Alexandrovich could not find a
single example in which the object of divorce was that which he had in
view. In all these instances the husband had practically ceded or sold
his unfaithful wife, and the very party who, being in fault, had not
the right to contract a marriage, had formed counterfeit,
pseudo-matrimonial ties with a new husband. In his own case, Alexei
Alexandrovich saw that a legal divorce, that is to say, one in which
only the guilty wife would be repudiated, was impossible of
attainment. He saw that the complex conditions of the life they led
made the coarse proofs of his wife's guilt, required by the law, out
of the question; he saw that a certain refinement in that life would
not admit of such proofs being brought forward, even if he had them,
and that to bring forward such proofs would damage him in the public
estimation more than it would her.

An attempt at divorce could lead to nothing but a public scandal,
which would be a perfect godsend to his enemies for calumny and
attacks on his high position in society. His chief object, to define
the position with the least amount of disturbance possible, would
not be attained by divorce either. Moreover, in the event of
divorce, or even of an attempt to obtain a divorce, it was obvious
that the wife broke off all relations with the husband and threw in
her lot with the lover. And, in spite of the complete, as he supposed,
contempt and indifference he now felt for his wife, at the bottom of
his heart Alexei Alexandrovich still had one feeling left in regard to
her- a disinclination to see her free to throw in her lot with
Vronsky, so that her crime would be to her advantage. The mere
notion of this so exasperated Alexei Alexandrovich, that directly it
rose to his mind he groaned with inward agony, and got up and
changed his place in the carriage, and for a long while after he sat
with scowling brows, wrapping his numbed and bony legs in the fleecy
rug.

"Apart from formal divorce, one might still do as Karibanov,
Paskudin, and that good fellow Dram did- that is, separate from
one's wife," he went on thinking, when he had regained his
composure. But this step too presented the same drawback of public
scandal as a divorce, and, what was more, a separation, quite as
much as a regular divorce, flung his wife into the arms of Vronsky.
"No, it's out of the question, out of the question!" he said aloud,
twisting his rug about him again. "I cannot be unhappy, but neither
she nor he ought to be happy."

The feeling of jealousy, which had tortured him during the period of
uncertainty, had passed away at the instant when, with agony, the
tooth had been extracted by his wife's words. But that feeling had
been replaced by another- the desire, not merely that she should not
triumph, but that she should get due punishment for her crime. He
did not acknowledge this feeling, but at the bottom of his heart he
longed for her to suffer for having destroyed his peace of mind, and
having dishonored him. And once again going over the conditions
inseparable from a duel, a divorce, a separation, and once again
rejecting them, Alexei Alexandrovich felt convinced that there was
only one solution- to keep her with him, concealing what had
happened from the world, and using every measure in his power to break
off the intrigue, and still more- though this he did not admit to
himself- to punish her. "I must communicate to her my decision;
that, thinking over the terrible position in which she has placed
her family, all other solutions will be worse for both sides than an
external status quo, and that such I agree to retain, on the strict
condition of obedience on her part to my wishes- that is to say,
cessation of all intercourse with her lover." When this decision had
been finally adopted, another weighty consideration occurred to Alexei
Alexandrovich in support of it. "By such a course only shall I be
acting in accordance with the dictates of religion," he told
himself. "In adopting this course, I am not casting off a guilty wife,
but giving her a chance of amendment; and, indeed, difficult as the
task will be to me, I shall devote part of my energies to her
reformation and salvation." Though Alexei Alexandrovich was
perfectly aware that he could not exert any moral influence over his
wife, that such an attempt at reformation could lead to nothing but
falsity; though in passing through these difficult moments he had
not once thought of seeking guidance in religion; yet now, when his
conclusion corresponded, as it seemed to him, with the requirements of
religion, this religious sanction to his decision gave him complete
satisfaction, and to some extent restored his peace of mind. He was
pleased to think that, even in such an important crisis in life, no
one would be able to say that he had not acted in accordance with
the principles of that religion whose banner he had always held
aloft amid the general coolness and indifference. As he pondered
over subsequent developments, Alexei Alexandrovich did not see,
indeed, why his relations with his wife should not remain
practically the same as before. No doubt, she could never regain his
esteem, but there was not, and there could not be, any sort of
reason why his existence should be troubled, and why he should
suffer because she was a bad and faithless wife. "Yes, time will pass-
time, which arranges all things; and the old relations will be
reestablished," Alexei Alexandrovich told himself; so far
reestablished, that is, that I shall not be sensible of a break in the
continuity of my life. She is bound to be unhappy, but I am not to
blame, and so I cannot be unhappy."

                           XIV.


As he neared Peterburg, Alexei Alexandrovich not only adhered
entirely to his decision, but was even composing in his head the
letter he would write to his wife. Going into the hall Alexei
Alexandrovich glanced at the letters and papers brought from his
Ministry and directed that they should be brought to him in his study.

"The horses can be taken out, and I will see no one," he said in
answer to the porter, with a certain pleasure, indicative of his
agreeable frame of mind, emphasizing the words, "see no one."

In his study Alexei Alexandrovich walked up and down twice, and
stopped at an immense writing table, on which six candles had
already been lighted by the valet who had preceded him. He cracked his
knuckles, and sat down, sorting out his writing appurtenances. Putting
his elbows on the table, he bent his head on one side, thought a
minute, and began to write, without pausing for a second. He wrote
without using any form of address to her, and wrote in French,
making use of the plural "vous," which has not the same note of
coldness as the corresponding Russian form.


"At our last conversation, I notified you of my intention of
communicating to you my decision in regard to the subject of that
conversation. Having carefully considered everything, I am writing now
with the object of fulfilling that promise. My decision is as follows.
Whatever your conduct may have been, I do not consider myself
justified in breaking the ties in which we are bound by a Higher
Power. The family cannot be broken up by a whim, a caprice, or even by
the sin of one of the partners in the marriage, and our life must go
on as it has done in the past. This is essential for me, for you,
and for our son. I am fully persuaded that you have repented, and do
repent, of what has called forth the present letter, and that you will
co-operate with me in eradicating the cause of our estrangement, and
forgetting the past. In the contrary event, you can conjecture what
awaits you and your son. All this I hope to discuss more in detail
in a personal interview. As the season is drawing to a close, I
would beg you to return to Peterburg as quickly as possible- not later
than Tuesday. All necessary preparations shall be made for your
arrival here. I beg you to note that I attach particular
significance to compliance with this request.

                                         "A. Karenin


"P.S.- I enclose the money which may be needed for your expenses."


He read the letter through and felt pleased with it, and
especially because he had remembered to enclose money: there was not a
harsh word, not a reproach in it, nor was there undue indulgence. Most
of all, it was a golden bridge for a return. Folding the letter and
smoothing it with a massive ivory knife, and putting it in an envelope
with the money, he rang the bell with the gratification it always
afforded him to use the well-arranged appointments of his writing
table.

"Give this to a messenger to be delivered to Anna Arkadyevna
tomorrow, at the summer villa," he said, getting up.

"Certainly, Your Excellency; is tea to be served in the study?"

Alexei Alexandrovich ordered tea to be brought to the study, and
playing with the massive paper knife, he moved to his easy chair, near
which there had been placed ready for him a lamp and the French work
on les tables Eugubines that he had begun. Over the easy chair there
hung in a gold frame an oval portrait of Anna, a fine painting by a
celebrated artist. Alexei Alexandrovich glanced at it. The
unfathomable eyes gazed ironically and insolently at him, as they
did that night of their last explanation. Insufferably insolent and
challenging was the effect in Alexei Alexandrovich's eyes of the black
lace about the head, admirably touched in by the painter, the black
hair and handsome white hand the fourth finger of which was covered
with rings. After looking at the portrait for a minute, Alexei
Alexandrovich shuddered so that his lips quivered and produced "brrr,"
and turned away. He made haste to sit down in his easy chair and
opened the book. He tried to read, but he could not revive the very
vivid interest he had felt before in Eugubine inscriptions. He
looked at the book and thought of something else. He thought not of
his wife, but of a complication that had arisen in his official
life, which at the time constituted the chief interest of it. He
felt that he had penetrated more deeply than ever before into this
intricate affair, and that he had originated a leading idea- he
could say it without self-flattery- calculated to clear up the whole
business, to strengthen him in his official career, to discomfit his
enemies, and thereby to be of the greatest benefit to the State.
Directly the servant had set the tea and left the room, Alexei
Alexandrovich got up and went to the writing table. Moving into the
middle of the table a portfolio of current papers, with a scarcely
perceptible smile of self-satisfaction, he took a pencil from a rack
and plunged into the perusal of a complex report relating to the
present complication. The complication was of this nature: Alexei
Alexandrovich's characteristic quality as a politician, that special
individual qualification that every rising functionary possesses,
the qualification that with his unflagging ambition, his reserve,
his honesty, and his self-confidence had made his career, was his
contempt for red tape, his cutting down of correspondence, his
direct contact, wherever possible, with the living fact, and his
economy. It happened that the famous Commission of the 2nd of June had
set on foot an inquiry into the irrigation of lands in the Zaraisky
province, which fell under Alexei Alexandrovich's department, and
was a glaring example of fruitless expenditure and paper reforms.
Alexei Alexandrovich was aware of the truth of this. The irrigation of
these lands in the Zaraisky province had been initiated by the
predecessor of Alexei Alexandrovich's predecessor. And vast sums of
money had actually been spent, and were still being spent, on this
business, and utterly unproductively, and the whole business could
obviously lead to nothing whatever. Alexei Alexandrovich had perceived
this at once on entering office, and would have liked to lay hands
on the business. But at first, when he did not yet feel secure in
his position, he knew it would affect too many interests, and would be
imprudent; later on he had been engrossed in other questions, and
had simply forgotten this case. It went of itself, like all such
cases, by the mere force of inertia. (Many people gained their
livelihood by this business, especially one highly conscientious and
musical family: all the daughters played on stringed instruments,
and Alexei Alexandrovich knew the family and had stood godfather to
one of the elder daughters.) The raising of this question by a hostile
Ministry was in Alexei Alexandrovich's opinion a dishonorable
proceeding, seeing that in every Ministry there were things similar
and worse, which no one inquired into, for well-known reasons of
official etiquette. However, now that the gauntlet had been thrown
down to him, he had boldly picked it up and demanded the appointment
of a special commission to investigate and verify the working of the
Commission of Irrigation of the lands in the Zaraisky province; but in
compensation he gave no quarter to the enemy either. He demanded
also the appointment of another special commission to inquire into the
question of the Native Tribes Organization. The question of the Native
Tribes had been brought up incidentally in the Committee of the 2nd of
June, and had been pressed forward actively by Alexei Alexandrovich,
as one admitting of no delay on account of the deplorable condition of
the native tribes. In the Committee this question had been a ground of
contention between several Ministries. The Ministry hostile to
Alexei Alexandrovich proved that the condition of the native tribes
was exceedingly flourishing, that the proposed reconstruction might be
the ruin of their prosperity, and that if there were anything wrong,
it arose mainly from the failure on the part of Alexei Alexandrovich's
Ministry to carry out the measures prescribed by law. Now Alexei
Alexandrovich intended to demand: First, that a new commission
should be formed which should be empowered to investigate the
condition of the native tribes on the spot; secondly, if it should
appear that the condition of the native tribes actually was such as it
appeared to be from the official data in the hands of the Committee,
that another new scientific commission should be appointed to
investigate the deplorable condition of the native tribes from the-
(a) political, (b) administrative, (c) economic, (d) ethnographical,
(e) material, and (f) religious points of view; thirdly, that evidence
should be required from the rival Ministry of the measures that had
been taken during the last ten years by that Ministry for averting the
disastrous conditions in which the native tribes were now placed; and,
fourthly and finally, that that Ministry be asked to explain why it
had, as appeared from the reports submitted before the Committee,
under Nos. 17,015 and 18,308, dated December 5, 1863, and June 7, 1864
respectively, acted in direct contravention of the intention of the
basic and organic law, T... Statute 18, and the note to Statute 36.
A flush of eagerness suffused the face of Alexei Alexandrovich as he
rapidly wrote out a synopsis of these ideas for his own benefit.
Having filled a sheet of paper, he got up, rang, and sent a note to
the head clerk to look up certain necessary facts for him. Getting
up and walking about the room, he glanced again at the portrait,
frowned, and smiled contemptuously. After reading a little more of the
book on Eugubine inscriptions, and renewing his interest in it, Alexei
Alexandrovich went to bed at eleven o'clock, and recollecting as he
lay in bed the incident with his wife, he saw it now in by no means so
gloomy a light.