Anna Karenina

Chapter 27
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.

Chapter 28
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.

Chapter 29
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.'

Chapter 30
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.
Fürst 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 Fürstin, 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.

Chapter 31
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.

Chapter 32
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.

Chapter 33
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.

Chapter 34
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.

Chapter 35
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
Chapter 1
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.

Chapter 2
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.

Chapter 3
`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.

Chapter 4
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.

Chapter 5
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.

Chapter 6
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 primesautière 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.

Chapter 7
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.

Chapter 8
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.

Chapter 9
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.

Chapter 10
`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.

Chapter 11
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.