Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Three/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
The men had mowed the Mashkin Verkh, they had finished the last rows, and had taken their kaftans, and were gayly going home. Levin mounted his horse and regretfully took leave of his companions. On the hilltop he turned round to take a last look; but the evening's mist, rising from the bottoms, hid them from sight; but he could hear their loud, happy voices and laughter and the sound of their clinging scythes.
Sergyeï Ivanovitch had long finished dinner, and, sitting in his room, was taking iced lemonade, and reading the papers and reviews which had just come from the post, when Levin, with his disordered hair matted down on his brow with perspiration, and with his back and chest black and wet, came into the room and joined him, full of lively talk.
"Well! we mowed the whole meadow. Akh! How good, how delightful! And how has the day passed with you?" he asked, completely forgetting the unpleasant conversation of the evening before.
"Ye saints! How you look!" exclaimed Sergyeï Ivanovitch, staring at first not over-pleasantly at his brother. "There, shut the door, shut the door!" he cried. "You've certainly let in more than a dozen!"
Sergyeï Ivanovitch could not endure flies; and he never opened his bedroom windows except at night, and he made it a point to keep his doors always shut.
"Indeed, not a one! If I have, I'll catch him!.... If you knew what fun I've had! And how has it gone with you?"
"First-rate. But you don't mean to say that you have been mowing all day? You must be hungry as a wolf. Kuzma has your dinner all ready for you."
"No; I am not hungry. I ate yonder. But I'm going to polish myself up."
"All right, I'll join you later," said Sergyeï Ivanovitch, shaking his head and gazing at his brother. "Be quick about it," he added, with a smile, arranging his papers and getting ready to follow; he also suddenly felt enlivened, and was unwilling to be away from his brother. "Well, but where were you during the shower?"
"What shower? Only a drop or two fell. I'll soon be back. And did the day go pleasantly with you? Well, that's capital!"
And Levin went to dress.
About five minutes afterwards the brothers met in the dining-room. Although Levin imagined that he was not hungry, and he sat down only so as not to hurt Kuzma's feelings, yet when he once began eating, he found it excellent. Sergyeï Ivanovitch looked at him with a smile.
"Oh, yes, there 's a letter for you," he said. "Kuzma, go and get it. Be careful and see that you shut the door."
The letter was from Oblonsky. Levin read it aloud. It was dated from Petersburg:—
I have just heard from Dolly; she is at Yergushovo; everything is going wrong with her. Please go and see her, and give her your advice,—you who know everything. She will be so glad to see you! She is all alone, wretched. The mother-in-law is still abroad with the family.
"This is admirable! Certainly I will go to see her," said Levin. "Let us go together. She is a glorious woman; don't you think so?"
"And they live near you?"
"About thirty versts, possibly forty. But there's a good road. We can cover it quickly."
"I shall be delighted," said Sergyeï Ivanovitch, smiling. The sight of his brother immediately filled him with happiness. "Well there! what an appetite you have!" he added, looking at his tanned, sunburned, glowing face and neck, as he bent over his plate.
"Excellent! You can't imagine how useful this régime is against whims! I am going to enrich medicine with a new term, arbeitskur—labor-cure."
"Well , you don't seem to need it much, it seems to me.
"Yes; it is a sovereign specific against nervous troubles."
"It must be looked into. I was coming to see you mow, but the heat was so insupportable that I did not go farther than the wood. I rested awhile, and then I went to the village. I met your nurse there, and sounded her as to what the muzhiks thought about you. As I understand it, they don't approve of you. She said, 'Not gentlemen's work.' I think that, as a general thing, the peasantry form very definite ideas about what is becoming for the gentry to do, and they don't like to have them go outside of certain fixed limits."
"Maybe; but you see I have never enjoyed anything more in all my life, and I do not do anybody any harm, do I?" asked Levin. "And suppose it does n't please them, what is to be done? Whose business is it?"
"Well, I see you are well satisfied with your day," replied Sergyeï Ivanovitch.
"Very well satisfied. We mowed the whole meadow, and I made such friends with an old man—the elder. You can't imagine how he pleased me."
"Well, you are satisfied with your day! So am I with mine. In the first place, I solved two chess problems, and one was a beauty—it opened with a pawn. I'll show it to you. And then—I thought of our last evening's discussion."
"What? Our last evening's discussion?" said Levin, half closing his eyes, and drawing a long breath with a sensation of comfort after his dinner, and really unable to recollect the subject of their discussion.
"I come to the conclusion that you are partly in the right. The discrepancy in our views lies in the fact that you assume personal interest as the motive power of our actions, while I claim that every man who has reached a certain stage of intellectual development must have for his motive the public interest. But you are probably right in saying that materially interested activity would be more to be desired. Your nature is, as the French say, primesautière[1] . You want strong, energetic activity, or nothing."
Levin listened to his brother, but he did not understand him at all, and did not try to understand. His only fear was that his brother would ask him some question, by which it would become evident that he was not listening.
"How is this, my dear boy?" asked Sergyeï Ivanovitch, touching him on the shoulder.
"Yes, of course. But, then, I don't set much store on my own opinions," replied Levin, smiling like a guilty child. His thought was, "What was our discussion about? Of course; I am right, and he is right, and all is charming. But I must go the office and give my orders." He arose, stretching himself and smiling.
Sergyeï Ivanovitch also smiled.
"If you want to go out, let's go together," he said, not wanting to be away from his brother, from whom emanated such a spirit of freshness and good cheer. "If you must go the office, I'll go with you."
"O ye saints!" exclaimed Levin, so loud that Sergyeï Ivanovitch was startled.
"What's the matter?"
"Agafya Mikhaïlovna's hand," said Levin, striking his forehead. "I had forgotten all about her."
"She is much better."
"Well, I must go to her, all the same. I'll be back before you get on your hat."
And he started down-stairs on the run, his heels clattering on the steps.
- ↑ Off-hand.