Leo Tolstoy
Page 36
‘No, like it or not, Prince, their institutions are interesting,’ said the colonel.
‘What’s so interesting? They’re all pleased as Punch: they’ve beaten everybody.[35] Well, but what’s there for me to be pleased about? I didn’t beat anybody, I just have to take my boots off myself and put them outside the door myself. In the morning I get up, dress myself at once,
* Your grace, your excellency, your highness.
go downstairs and drink vile tea. Home is quite another thing! You wake up without hurrying, get angry at something, grumble a little, come properly to your senses, think things over, don’t have to hurry.’
‘But time is money, you’re forgetting that,’ said the colonel.
‘Which time! There are times when you’d give a whole month away for fifty kopecks, and others when you wouldn’t give up half an hour for any price. Right, Katenka? Why are you so dull?’
‘I’m all right.’
‘Where are you going? Stay longer,’ he said to Varenka.
‘I must go home,’ said Varenka, getting up and again dissolving in laughter.
Having recovered, she said good–bye and went into the house to get her hat. Kitty followed her. Even Varenka looked different to her now. She was not worse, but she was different from what she had formerly imagined her to be.
‘Ah, I haven’t laughed like that for a long time!’ said Varenka, collecting her parasol and bag. ‘He’s so nice, your father!’
Kitty was silent.
‘When shall we see each other?’ asked Varenka.
‘Matnan wanted to call on the Petrovs. You won’t be there?’ Kitty said, testing Varenka.
‘I will,’ replied Varenka. ‘They’re leaving, so I promised to come and help them pack.’
‘Well, I’ll come, too.’
‘No, why should you?’
‘Why not? why not? why not?’ Kitty said, opening her eyes wide and taking hold of Varenka’s parasol to keep her from leaving. ‘No, wait, why not?’
‘It’s just that your father has come, and, then, they’re embarrassed with you.’
‘No, tell me, why don’t you want me to visit the Petrovs often? You don’t want it, do you? Why?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Varenka said calmly.
‘No, please tell me!’
‘Tell you everything?’ asked Varenka.
‘Everything, everything!’ Kitty repeated.
‘There’s nothing special, only that Mikhail Alexeevich’ – that was the painter’s name – ‘wanted to leave sooner, and now he doesn’t want to leave at all,’ Varenka said, smiling.
‘Well? Well?’ Kitty urged, giving Varenka a dark look.
‘Well, and for some reason Anna Pavlovna said he didn’t want to leave because you are here. Of course, it was inappropriate, but because of it, because of you, there was a quarrel. And you know how irritable these sick people are.’
Kitty, frowning still more, kept silent, and Varenka alone talked, trying to soothe and calm her and seeing the explosion coming – whether of tears or of words, she did not know.
‘So it’s better if you don’t go … And you understand, you won’t be offended…’
‘It serves me right, it serves me right!’ Kitty began quickly, snatching the parasol out of Varenka’s hands and looking past her friend’s eyes.
Varenka wanted to smile, seeing her friend’s childish anger, but she was afraid of insulting her.
‘How does it serve you right? I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘It serves me right because it was all pretence, because it was all contrived and not from the heart. What did I have to do with some stranger? And it turned out that I caused a quarrel and that I did what nobody asked me to do. Because it was all pretence! pretence! pretence!…’
‘But what was the purpose of pretending?’ Varenka said softly.
‘Oh, how vile and stupid! There was no need at all .. . It was all pretence!…’ she said, opening and closing the parasol.
‘But for what purpose?’
‘So as to seem better to people, to myself, to God – to deceive everyone. No, I won’t fall into that anymore! Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!’
‘But who is a deceiver?’ Varenka said reproachfully. ‘You talk as if…’
But Kitty was having her fit of temper. She did not let her finish.
‘I’m not talking about you, not about you at all. You are perfection. Yes, yes, I know you’re perfection; but what’s there to do if I’m bad? This wouldn’t have happened if I weren’t bad. So let me be as I am, but I won’t pretend. What do I care about Anna Pavlovna! Let them live as they please, and me as I please. I can’t be different… And all this is not it, not it! …’
‘What is not it?’ Varenka said in perplexity.
‘It’s all not it. I can only live by my heart, and you live by rules. I loved you simply, but you probably only so as to save me, to teach me!’ ‘You’re unfair,’ said Varenka.
‘But I’m not talking about others, I’m talking about myself.’
‘Kitty!’ came her mother’s voice. ‘Come here, show Papa your corals.’
Kitty, with a proud look, not having made peace with her friend, took the little box of corals from the table and went to her mother.
‘What’s the matter? Why are you so red?’ her mother and father said in one voice.
‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘I’ll come straight back.’ And she ran inside again.
‘She’s still here!’ she thought. ‘What shall I tell her? My God, what have I done, what have I said! Why did I offend her? What am I to do? What shall I tell her?’ thought Kitty, and she stopped by the door.
Varenka, her hat on and the parasol in her hands, was sitting at the table, examining the spring that Kitty had broken. She raised her head.
‘Varenka, forgive me, forgive me!’ Kitty whispered, coming up to her. ‘I didn’t know what I was saying. I…’
‘I really didn’t mean to upset you,’ Varenka said, smiling.
Peace was made. But with the arrival of her father that whole world in which Kitty had been living changed for her. She did not renounce all that she had learned, but she understood that she had deceived herself in thinking that she could be what she wished to be. It was as if she came to her senses; she felt all the difficulty of keeping herself, without pretence and boastfulness, on that level to which she had wished to rise; besides, she felt all the weight of that world of grief, sickness and dying people in which she had been living; the efforts she had made to force herself to love it seemed tormenting to her, and she wished all the sooner to go to the fresh air, to Russia, to Yergushovo, where, as she learned from a letter, her sister Dolly had already moved with the children.
But her love for Varenka did not weaken. As she was saying good–bye, Kitty begged her to come and see them in Russia.
‘I’ll come when you get married,’ said Varenka.
‘I’ll never get married.’
‘Well, then I’ll never come.’
‘Well, then I’ll get married only for that. Watch out, now, remember your promise!’ said Kitty.
The doctor’s predictions came true. Kitty returned home to Russia cured. She was not as carefree and gay as before, but she was at peace. Her Moscow griefs became memories.
Part Three
* * *
I
Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev wanted to rest from intellectual work and, instead of going abroad, as usual, went at the end of May to stay with his brother in the country. He was convinced that country life was the best life. He had now come to enjoy that life at his brother’s. Konstantin Levin was very glad, the more so as he no longer expected his brother Nikolai that summer. But, despite his love and respect for Sergei Ivanovich, Konstantin Levin felt awkward in the country with his brother. It was awkward and even unpleasant for him to see his brother’s attitude towards the country. For Konstantin Levin the country was the place of life, that is, of joy, suffer
ing, labour; for Sergei Ivanovich the country was, on the one hand, a rest from work and, on the other, an effective antidote to corruption, which he took with pleasure and an awareness of its effectiveness. For Konstantin Levin the country was good in that it presented a field for labour that was unquestionably useful; for Sergei Ivanovich the country was especially good because there one could and should do nothing. Besides that, Sergei Ivanovich’s attitude towards the peasantry also made Levin cringe slightly. Sergei Ivanovich said that he loved and knew the peasantry and often conversed with muzhiks, something he was good at doing, without pretence or affectation, and from each such conversation he deduced general data in favour of the peasantry and as proof that he knew them. Konstantin Levin did not like such an attitude towards the peasantry. For Konstantin the peasantry was simply the chief partner in the common labour, and, despite all his respect and a sort of blood–love for the muzhiks that he had probably sucked in, as he himself said, with the milk of his peasant nurse, he, as partner with them in the common cause, while sometimes admiring the strength, meekness and fairness of these people, very often, when the common cause demanded other qualities, became furious with them for their carelessness, slovenliness, drunkenness and lying. If Konstantin Levin had been asked whether he loved the peasantry, he would have been quite at a loss to answer. He loved and did not love the peasantry, as he did people in general. Of course, being a good man, he tended to love people more than not to love them, and therefore the peasantry as well. But it was impossible for him to love or not love the peasantry as something special, because not only did he live with them, not only were all his interests bound up with theirs, but he considered himself part of the peasantry, did not see any special qualities or shortcomings in himself or in them, and could not contrast himself to them. Besides that, though he had lived for a long time in the closest relations with the muzhiks as a master and a mediator, and above all as an adviser (the muzhiks trusted him and came from twenty–five miles away for his advice), he had no definite opinion of the peasantry and would have had the same difficulty replying to the question whether he knew the peasantry as to the question whether he loved the peasantry. To say that he knew them would be the same for him as to say that he knew people. He constantly observed and came to know all sorts of people, muzhik–people among them, whom he considered good and interesting people, and continually noticed new traits in them, changed his previous opinions and formed new ones. Sergei Ivanovich did the contrary. Just as he loved and praised country life in contrast to the life he did not love, so he loved the peasantry in contrast to the class of people he did not love, and so he knew the peasantry as something in contrast to people in general. In his methodical mind certain forms of peasant life acquired a clear shape, deduced in part from peasant life itself, but mainly from this contrast. He never changed his opinion about the peasantry or his sympathetic attitude towards them.
In the disagreements that occurred between the brothers during their discussions of the peasantry, Sergei Ivanovich always defeated his brother, precisely because Sergei Ivanovich had definite notions about the peasantry, their character, properties and tastes; whereas Konstantin Levin had no definite and unchanging notions, so that in these arguments Konstantin was always caught contradicting himself.
For Sergei Ivanovich his younger brother was a nice fellow with a heart well placed (as he put it in French), but with a mind which, though rather quick, was subject to momentary impressions and therefore filled with contradictions. With the condescension of an older brother, he occasionally explained the meaning of things to him, but could find no pleasure in arguing with him, because he beat him too easily.
Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of great intelligence and education, noble in the highest sense of the word, and endowed with the ability to act for the common good. But, in the depths of his soul, the older he became and the more closely he got to know his brother, the more often it occurred to him that this ability to act for the common good, of which he felt himself completely deprived, was perhaps not a virtue but, on the contrary, a lack of something – not a lack of good, honest and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone. The more he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich and many other workers for the common good had not been brought to this love of the common good by the heart, but had reasoned in their minds that it was good to be concerned with it and were concerned with it only because of that. And Levin was confirmed in this surmise by observing that his brother took questions about the common good and the immortality of the soul no closer to heart than those about a game of chess or the clever construction of a new machine.
Besides that, Konstantin Levin also felt awkward in the country with his brother because in the country, especially during the summer, he was constantly busy with the farming, and the long summer day was not long enough for him to do everything he had to do, while Sergei Ivanovich rested. But though he rested now, that is, did not work on his book, he was so used to intellectual activity that he liked to utter in beautifully concise form the thoughts that occurred to him and liked it when there was someone there to listen to him. His most usual and natural listener was his brother. And therefore, despite the friendly simplicity of their relations, Konstantin felt awkward leaving him alone. Sergei Ivanovich liked to stretch out on the grass in the sun and lie there like that, baking and lazily chatting.
‘You wouldn’t believe,’ he said to his brother, ‘how I love this rustic idleness. There’s not a thought in my head, you could play ninepins in it.’
But Konstantin Levin was bored sitting and listening to him, especially since he knew that, without him, they were carting dung to the fields that were not yet crossploughed, and would heap it up any old way if he was not watching; and they would not screw the shares to the ploughs, but would take them off and then say that iron ploughs were a worthless invention, nothing like the good old wooden plough, and so on.
‘Enough walking about in the heat for you,’ Sergei Ivanovich would say to him.
‘No, I’ll just run over to the office for a minute,’ Levin would say, and dash off to the fields.
II
In the first days of June it so happened that the nurse and housekeeper Agafya Mikhailovna, while carrying a jar of freshly pickled mushrooms to the cellar, slipped, fell, and dislocated her wrist. The district doctor came, a talkative young man who had just finished his studies. He examined the wrist, said it was not dislocated, applied compresses and, having stayed for dinner, obviously enjoyed conversing with the famous Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev, and to show his enlightened view of things, told him all the local gossip, complaining about the bad state of zemstvo affairs. Sergei Ivanovich listened attentively, asked questions and, excited to have a new listener, talked a lot and produced several apt and weighty observations, respectfully appreciated by the young doctor, and recovered the animated state of mind, so familiar to his brother, to which he was usually brought by a brilliant and lively conversation. After the doctor’s departure, Sergei Ivanovich expressed a wish to go to the river with a fishing rod. He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.
Konstantin Levin, who had to go to the ploughing and the meadows, volunteered to take his brother in the cabriolet.
It was that time of year, the turning point of summer, when the harvest of the current year is assured, when concerns about the sowing for the year to come begin and the mowing is at hand, when the rye has all come into ear and its grey–green, unswollen, still light ears sway in the wind, when green oats, with clumps of yellow grass scattered among them, thrust themselves unevenly amidst the late–sown crops, when the early buckwheat is already bushing out, covering the ground, when the fallow fields are half ploughed, leaving the cattle paths beaten down hard as stone, which the plough could not break
up; when crusted–over heaps of dung give off their smell at dawn and sunset together with the honeyed grasses, and in the bottoms, awaiting the scythe, the intact meadows stand in an unbroken sea, with blackening piles of weeded sorrel stalks here and there.