Anna Karenina

s he rode up to the house in the happiest frame of mind, Levin heard
the bell ring at the side of the principal entrance of the house.

“Yes, that’s someone from the railway station,” he thought, “just the
time to be here from the Moscow train ... Who could it be? What if it’s
brother Nikolay? He did say: ‘Maybe I’ll go to the waters, or maybe
I’ll come down to you.’” He felt dismayed and vexed for the first
minute, that his brother Nikolay’s presence should come to disturb his
happy mood of spring. But he felt ashamed of the feeling, and at once
he opened, as it were, the arms of his soul, and with a softened
feeling of joy and expectation, now he hoped with all his heart that it
was his brother. He pricked up his horse, and riding out from behind
the acacias he saw a hired three-horse sledge from the railway station,
and a gentleman in a fur coat. It was not his brother. “Oh, if it were
only some nice person one could talk to a little!” he thought.

“Ah,” cried Levin joyfully, flinging up both his hands. “Here’s a
delightful visitor! Ah, how glad I am to see you!” he shouted,
recognizing Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“I shall find out for certain whether she’s married, or when she’s
going to be married,” he thought. And on that delicious spring day he
felt that the thought of her did not hurt him at all.

“Well, you didn’t expect me, eh?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting out
of the sledge, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his
cheek, and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits.
“I’ve come to see you in the first place,” he said, embracing and
kissing him, “to have some stand-shooting second, and to sell the
forest at Ergushovo third.”

“Delightful! What a spring we’re having! How ever did you get along in
a sledge?”

“In a cart it would have been worse still, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,”
answered the driver, who knew him.

“Well, I’m very, very glad to see you,” said Levin, with a genuine
smile of childlike delight.

Levin led his friend to the room set apart for visitors, where Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s things were carried also—a bag, a gun in a case, a
satchel for cigars. Leaving him there to wash and change his clothes,
Levin went off to the counting house to speak about the ploughing and
clover. Agafea Mihalovna, always very anxious for the credit of the
house, met him in the hall with inquiries about dinner.

“Do just as you like, only let it be as soon as possible,” he said, and
went to the bailiff.

When he came back, Stepan Arkadyevitch, washed and combed, came out of
his room with a beaming smile, and they went upstairs together.

“Well, I am glad I managed to get away to you! Now I shall understand
what the mysterious business is that you are always absorbed in here.
No, really, I envy you. What a house, how nice it all is! So bright, so
cheerful!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting that it was not always
spring and fine weather like that day. “And your nurse is simply
charming! A pretty maid in an apron might be even more agreeable,
perhaps; but for your severe monastic style it does very well.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch told him many interesting pieces of news;
especially interesting to Levin was the news that his brother, Sergey
Ivanovitch, was intending to pay him a visit in the summer.

Not one word did Stepan Arkadyevitch say in reference to Kitty and the
Shtcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin was
grateful to him for his delicacy and was very glad of his visitor. As
always happened with him during his solitude, a mass of ideas and
feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could not
communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon Stepan
Arkadyevitch his poetic joy in the spring, and his failures and plans
for the land, and his thoughts and criticisms on the books he had been
reading, and the idea of his own book, the basis of which really was,
though he was unaware of it himself, a criticism of all the old books
on agriculture. Stepan Arkadyevitch, always charming, understanding
everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming on
this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as it were,
and a new tone of respect that flattered him.

The efforts of Agafea Mihalovna and the cook, that the dinner should be
particularly good, only ended in the two famished friends attacking the
preliminary course, eating a great deal of bread and butter, salt goose
and salted mushrooms, and in Levin’s finally ordering the soup to be
served without the accompaniment of little pies, with which the cook
had particularly meant to impress their visitor. But though Stepan
Arkadyevitch was accustomed to very different dinners, he thought
everything excellent: the herb brandy, and the bread, and the butter,
and above all the salt goose and the mushrooms, and the nettle soup,
and the chicken in white sauce, and the white Crimean wine—everything
was superb and delicious.

“Splendid, splendid!” he said, lighting a fat cigar after the roast. “I
feel as if, coming to you, I had landed on a peaceful shore after the
noise and jolting of a steamer. And so you maintain that the laborer
himself is an element to be studied and to regulate the choice of
methods in agriculture. Of course, I’m an ignorant outsider; but I
should fancy theory and its application will have its influence on the
laborer too.”

“Yes, but wait a bit. I’m not talking of political economy, I’m talking
of the science of agriculture. It ought to be like the natural
sciences, and to observe given phenomena and the laborer in his
economic, ethnographical....”

At that instant Agafea Mihalovna came in with jam.

“Oh, Agafea Mihalovna,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, kissing the tips of
his plump fingers, “what salt goose, what herb brandy!... What do you
think, isn’t it time to start, Kostya?” he added.

Levin looked out of the window at the sun sinking behind the bare
tree-tops of the forest.

“Yes, it’s time,” he said. “Kouzma, get ready the trap,” and he ran
downstairs.

Stepan Arkadyevitch, going down, carefully took the canvas cover off
his varnished gun case with his own hands, and opening it, began to get
ready his expensive new-fashioned gun. Kouzma, who already scented a
big tip, never left Stepan Arkadyevitch’s side, and put on him both his
stockings and boots, a task which Stepan Arkadyevitch readily left him.

“Kostya, give orders that if the merchant Ryabinin comes ... I told him
to come today, he’s to be brought in and to wait for me....”

“Why, do you mean to say you’re selling the forest to Ryabinin?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“To be sure I do. I have had to do business with him, ‘positively and
conclusively.’”

Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed. “Positively and conclusively” were the
merchant’s favorite words.

“Yes, it’s wonderfully funny the way he talks. She knows where her
master’s going!” he added, patting Laska, who hung about Levin, whining
and licking his hands, his boots, and his gun.

The trap was already at the steps when they went out.

“I told them to bring the trap round; or would you rather walk?”

“No, we’d better drive,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting into the
trap. He sat down, tucked the tiger-skin rug round him, and lighted a
cigar. “How is it you don’t smoke? A cigar is a sort of thing, not
exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of pleasure. Come,
this is life! How splendid it is! This is how I should like to live!”

“Why, who prevents you?” said Levin, smiling.

“No, you’re a lucky man! You’ve got everything you like. You like
horses—and you have them; dogs—you have them; shooting—you have it;
farming—you have it.”

“Perhaps because I rejoice in what I have, and don’t fret for what I
haven’t,” said Levin, thinking of Kitty.

Stepan Arkadyevitch comprehended, looked at him, but said nothing.

Levin was grateful to Oblonsky for noticing, with his never-failing
tact, that he dreaded conversation about the Shtcherbatskys, and so
saying nothing about them. But now Levin was longing to find out what
was tormenting him so, yet he had not the courage to begin.

“Come, tell me how things are going with you,” said Levin, bethinking
himself that it was not nice of him to think only of himself.

Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes sparkled merrily.

“You don’t admit, I know, that one can be fond of new rolls when one
has had one’s rations of bread—to your mind it’s a crime; but I don’t
count life as life without love,” he said, taking Levin’s question his
own way. “What am I to do? I’m made that way. And really, one does so
little harm to anyone, and gives oneself so much pleasure....”

“What! is there something new, then?” queried Levin.

“Yes, my boy, there is! There, do you see, you know the type of
Ossian’s women.... Women, such as one sees in dreams.... Well, these
women are sometimes to be met in reality ... and these women are
terrible. Woman, don’t you know, is such a subject that however much
you study it, it’s always perfectly new.”

“Well, then, it would be better not to study it.”

“No. Some mathematician has said that enjoyment lies in the search for
truth, not in the finding it.”

Levin listened in silence, and in spite of all the efforts he made, he
could not in the least enter into the feelings of his friend and
understand his sentiments and the charm of studying such women.