She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the country.

In the town he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, as though he

were afraid someone would be rude to him, and still more to her. At

home in the country, knowing himself distinctly to be in his right

place, he was never in haste to be off elsewhere. He was never

unoccupied. Here in town he was in a continual hurry, as though afraid

of missing something, and yet he had nothing to do. And she felt sorry

for him. To others, she knew, he did not appear an object of pity. On

the contrary, when Kitty looked at him in society, as one sometimes

looks at those one loves, trying to see him as if he were a stranger,

so as to catch the impression he must make on others, she saw with a

panic even of jealous fear that he was far indeed from being a pitiable

figure, that he was very attractive with his fine breeding, his rather

old-fashioned, reserved courtesy with women, his powerful figure, and

striking, as she thought, and expressive face. But she saw him not from

without, but from within; she saw that here he was not himself; that

was the only way she could define his condition to herself. Sometimes

she inwardly reproached him for his inability to live in the town;

sometimes she recognized that it was really hard for him to order his

life here so that he could be satisfied with it.

What had he to do, indeed? He did not care for cards; he did not go to

a club. Spending the time with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky’s type—she

knew now what that meant ... it meant drinking and going somewhere

after drinking. She could not think without horror of where men went on

such occasions. Was he to go into society? But she knew he could only

find satisfaction in that if he took pleasure in the society of young

women, and that she could not wish for. Should he stay at home with

her, her mother and her sisters? But much as she liked and enjoyed

their conversations forever on the same subjects—“Aline-Nadine,” as the

old prince called the sisters’ talks—she knew it must bore him. What

was there left for him to do? To go on writing at his book he had

indeed attempted, and at first he used to go to the library and make

extracts and look up references for his book. But, as he told her, the

more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything. And besides,

he complained that he had talked too much about his book here, and that

consequently all his ideas about it were muddled and had lost their

interest for him.

One advantage in this town life was that quarrels hardly ever happened

between them here in town. Whether it was that their conditions were

different, or that they had both become more careful and sensible in

that respect, they had no quarrels in Moscow from jealousy, which they

had so dreaded when they moved from the country.

One event, an event of great importance to both from that point of

view, did indeed happen—that was Kitty’s meeting with Vronsky.

The old Princess Marya Borissovna, Kitty’s godmother, who had always

been very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her. Kitty, though she

did not go into society at all on account of her condition, went with

her father to see the venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky.

The only thing Kitty could reproach herself for at this meeting was

that at the instant when she recognized in his civilian dress the

features once so familiar to her, her breath failed her, the blood

rushed to her heart, and a vivid blush—she felt it—overspread her face.

But this lasted only a few seconds. Before her father, who purposely

began talking in a loud voice to Vronsky, had finished, she was

perfectly ready to look at Vronsky, to speak to him, if necessary,

exactly as she spoke to Princess Marya Borissovna, and more than that,

to do so in such a way that everything to the faintest intonation and

smile would have been approved by her husband, whose unseen presence

she seemed to feel about her at that instant.

She said a few words to him, even smiled serenely at his joke about the

elections, which he called “our parliament.” (She had to smile to show

she saw the joke.) But she turned away immediately to Princess Marya

Borissovna, and did not once glance at him till he got up to go; then

she looked at him, but evidently only because it would be uncivil not

to look at a man when he is saying good-bye.

She was grateful to her father for saying nothing to her about their

meeting Vronsky, but she saw by his special warmth to her after the

visit during their usual walk that he was pleased with her. She was

pleased with herself. She had not expected she would have had the

power, while keeping somewhere in the bottom of her heart all the

memories of her old feeling for Vronsky, not only to seem but to be

perfectly indifferent and composed with him.

Levin flushed a great deal more than she when she told him she had met

Vronsky at Princess Marya Borissovna’s. It was very hard for her to

tell him this, but still harder to go on speaking of the details of the

meeting, as he did not question her, but simply gazed at her with a

frown.

“I am very sorry you weren’t there,” she said. “Not that you weren’t in

the room ... I couldn’t have been so natural in your presence ... I am

blushing now much more, much, much more,” she said, blushing till the

tears came into her eyes. “But that you couldn’t see through a crack.”

The truthful eyes told Levin that she was satisfied with herself, and

in spite of her blushing he was quickly reassured and began questioning

her, which was all she wanted. When he had heard everything, even to

the detail that for the first second she could not help flushing, but

that afterwards she was just as direct and as much at her ease as with

any chance acquaintance, Levin was quite happy again and said he was

glad of it, and would not now behave as stupidly as he had done at the

election, but would try the first time he met Vronsky to be as friendly

as possible.

“It’s so wretched to feel that there’s a man almost an enemy whom it’s

painful to meet,” said Levin. “I’m very, very glad.”

Chapter 2

“Go, please, go then and call on the Bols,” Kitty said to her husband,

when he came in to see her at eleven o’clock before going out. “I know

you are dining at the club; papa put down your name. But what are you

going to do in the morning?”

“I am only going to Katavasov,” answered Levin.

“Why so early?”

“He promised to introduce me to Metrov. I wanted to talk to him about

my work. He’s a distinguished scientific man from Petersburg,” said

Levin.

“Yes; wasn’t it his article you were praising so? Well, and after

that?” said Kitty.

“I shall go to the court, perhaps, about my sister’s business.”

“And the concert?” she queried.

“I shan’t go there all alone.”

“No? do go; there are going to be some new things.... That interested

you so. I should certainly go.”

“Well, anyway, I shall come home before dinner,” he said, looking at

his watch.

“Put on your frock coat, so that you can go straight to call on

Countess Bola.”

“But is it absolutely necessary?”

“Oh, absolutely! He has been to see us. Come, what is it? You go in,

sit down, talk for five minutes of the weather, get up and go away.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe it! I’ve got so out of the way of all this

that it makes me feel positively ashamed. It’s such a horrible thing to

do! A complete outsider walks in, sits down, stays on with nothing to

do, wastes their time and worries himself, and walks away!”

Kitty laughed.

“Why, I suppose you used to pay calls before you were married, didn’t

you?”

“Yes, I did, but I always felt ashamed, and now I’m so out of the way

of it that, by Jove! I’d sooner go two days running without my dinner

than pay this call! One’s so ashamed! I feel all the while that they’re

annoyed, that they’re saying, ‘What has he come for?’”

“No, they won’t. I’ll answer for that,” said Kitty, looking into his

face with a laugh. She took his hand. “Well, good-bye.... Do go,

please.”

He was just going out after kissing his wife’s hand, when she stopped

him.

“Kostya, do you know I’ve only fifty roubles left?”

“Oh, all right, I’ll go to the bank and get some. How much?” he said,

with the expression of dissatisfaction she knew so well.

“No, wait a minute.” She held his hand. “Let’s talk about it, it

worries me. I seem to spend nothing unnecessary, but money seems to fly

away simply. We don’t manage well, somehow.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” he said with a little cough, looking at her from

under his brows.

That cough she knew well. It was a sign of intense dissatisfaction, not

with her, but with himself. He certainly was displeased not at so much

money being spent, but at being reminded of what he, knowing something

was unsatisfactory, wanted to forget.

“I have told Sokolov to sell the wheat, and to borrow an advance on the

mill. We shall have money enough in any case.”

“Yes, but I’m afraid that altogether....”

“Oh, it’s all right, all right,” he repeated. “Well, good-bye,

darling.”

“No, I’m really sorry sometimes that I listened to mamma. How nice it

would have been in the country! As it is, I’m worrying you all, and

we’re wasting our money.”

“Not at all, not at all. Not once since I’ve been married have I said

that things could have been better than they are....”

“Truly?” she said, looking into his eyes.

He had said it without thinking, simply to console her. But when he

glanced at her and saw those sweet truthful eyes fastened questioningly

on him, he repeated it with his whole heart. “I was positively

forgetting her,” he thought. And he remembered what was before them, so

soon to come.

“Will it be soon? How do you feel?” he whispered, taking her two hands.

“I have so often thought so, that now I don’t think about it or know

anything about it.”

“And you’re not frightened?”

She smiled contemptuously.

“Not the least little bit,” she said.

“Well, if anything happens, I shall be at Katavasov’s.”

“No, nothing will happen, and don’t think about it. I’m going for a

walk on the boulevard with papa. We’re going to see Dolly. I shall

expect you before dinner. Oh, yes! Do you know that Dolly’s position is

becoming utterly impossible? She’s in debt all round; she hasn’t a

penny. We were talking yesterday with mamma and Arseny” (this was her

sister’s husband Lvov), “and we determined to send you with him to talk

to Stiva. It’s really unbearable. One can’t speak to papa about it....

But if you and he....”

“Why, what can we do?” said Levin.

“You’ll be at Arseny’s, anyway; talk to him, he will tell what we

decided.”

“Oh, I agree to everything Arseny thinks beforehand. I’ll go and see

him. By the way, if I do go to the concert, I’ll go with Natalia. Well,

good-bye.”

On the steps Levin was stopped by his old servant Kouzma, who had been

with him before his marriage, and now looked after their household in

town.

“Beauty” (that was the left shaft-horse brought up from the country)

“has been badly shod and is quite lame,” he said. “What does your honor

wish to be done?”

During the first part of their stay in Moscow, Levin had used his own

horses brought up from the country. He had tried to arrange this part

of their expenses in the best and cheapest way possible; but it

appeared that their own horses came dearer than hired horses, and they

still hired too.

“Send for the veterinary, there may be a bruise.”

“And for Katerina Alexandrovna?” asked Kouzma.

Levin was not by now struck as he had been at first by the fact that to

get from one end of Moscow to the other he had to have two powerful

horses put into a heavy carriage, to take the carriage three miles

through the snowy slush and to keep it standing there four hours,

paying five roubles every time.

Now it seemed quite natural.

“Hire a pair for our carriage from the jobmaster,” said he.

“Yes, sir.”

And so, simply and easily, thanks to the facilities of town life, Levin

settled a question which, in the country, would have called for so much

personal trouble and exertion, and going out onto the steps, he called

a sledge, sat down, and drove to Nikitsky. On the way he thought no

more of money, but mused on the introduction that awaited him to the

Petersburg savant, a writer on sociology, and what he would say to him

about his book.

Only during the first days of his stay in Moscow Levin had been struck

by the expenditure, strange to one living in the country, unproductive

but inevitable, that was expected of him on every side. But by now he

had grown used to it. That had happened to him in this matter which is

said to happen to drunkards—the first glass sticks in the throat, the

second flies down like a hawk, but after the third they’re like tiny

little birds. When Levin had changed his first hundred-rouble note to

pay for liveries for his footmen and hall-porter he could not help

reflecting that these liveries were of no use to anyone—but they were

indubitably necessary, to judge by the amazement of the princess and

Kitty when he suggested that they might do without liveries,—that these

liveries would cost the wages of two laborers for the summer, that is,

would pay for about three hundred working days from Easter to Ash

Wednesday, and each a day of hard work from early morning to late

evening—and that hundred-rouble note did stick in his throat. But the

next note, changed to pay for providing a dinner for their relations,

that cost twenty-eight roubles, though it did excite in Levin the

reflection that twenty-eight roubles meant nine measures of oats, which

men would with groans and sweat have reaped and bound and thrashed and

winnowed and sifted and sown,—this next one he parted with more easily.

And now the notes he changed no longer aroused such reflections, and

they flew off like little birds. Whether the labor devoted to obtaining

the money corresponded to the pleasure given by what was bought with

it, was a consideration he had long ago dismissed. His business

calculation that there was a certain price below which he could not

sell certain grain was forgotten too. The rye, for the price of which

he had so long held out, had been sold for fifty kopecks a measure

cheaper than it had been fetching a month ago. Even the consideration

that with such an expenditure he could not go on living for a year

without debt, that even had no force. Only one thing was essential: to

have money in the bank, without inquiring where it came from, so as to

know that one had the wherewithal to buy meat for tomorrow. And this

condition had hitherto been fulfilled; he had always had the money in

the bank. But now the money in the bank had gone, and he could not

quite tell where to get the next installment. And this it was which, at

the moment when Kitty had mentioned money, had disturbed him; but he

had no time to think about it. He drove off, thinking of Katavasov and

the meeting with Metrov that was before him.

Chapter 3

Levin had on this visit to town seen a great deal of his old friend at

the university, Professor Katavasov, whom he had not seen since his

marriage. He liked in Katavasov the clearness and simplicity of his

conception of life. Levin thought that the clearness of Katavasov’s

conception of life was due to the poverty of his nature; Katavasov

thought that the disconnectedness of Levin’s ideas was due to his lack

of intellectual discipline; but Levin enjoyed Katavasov’s clearness,

and Katavasov enjoyed the abundance of Levin’s untrained ideas, and

they liked to meet and to discuss.

Levin had read Katavasov some parts of his book, and he had liked them.

On the previous day Katavasov had met Levin at a public lecture and

told him that the celebrated Metrov, whose article Levin had so much

liked, was in Moscow, that he had been much interested by what

Katavasov had told him about Levin’s work, and that he was coming to

see him tomorrow at eleven, and would be very glad to make Levin’s

acquaintance.

“You’re positively a reformed character, I’m glad to see,” said

Katavasov, meeting Levin in the little drawing-room. “I heard the bell

and thought: Impossible that it can be he at the exact time!... Well,

what do you say to the Montenegrins now? They’re a race of warriors.”

“Why, what’s happened?” asked Levin.

Katavasov in a few words told him the last piece of news from the war,

and going into his study, introduced Levin to a short, thick-set man of

pleasant appearance. This was Metrov. The conversation touched for a

brief space on politics and on how recent events were looked at in the

higher spheres in Petersburg. Metrov repeated a saying that had reached

him through a most trustworthy source, reported as having been uttered

on this subject by the Tsar and one of the ministers. Katavasov had

heard also on excellent authority that the Tsar had said something

quite different. Levin tried to imagine circumstances in which both

sayings might have been uttered, and the conversation on that topic

dropped.

“Yes, here he’s written almost a book on the natural conditions of the

laborer in relation to the land,” said Katavasov; “I’m not a

specialist, but I, as a natural science man, was pleased at his not

taking mankind as something outside biological laws; but, on the

contrary, seeing his dependence on his surroundings, and in that

dependence seeking the laws of his development.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Metrov.

“What I began precisely was to write a book on agriculture; but

studying the chief instrument of agriculture, the laborer,” said Levin,

reddening, “I could not help coming to quite unexpected results.”

And Levin began carefully, as it were, feeling his ground, to expound

his views. He knew Metrov had written an article against the generally

accepted theory of political economy, but to what extent he could

reckon on his sympathy with his own new views he did not know and could

not guess from the clever and serene face of the learned man.

“But in what do you see the special characteristics of the Russian

laborer?” said Metrov; “in his biological characteristics, so to speak,

or in the condition in which he is placed?”

Levin saw that there was an idea underlying this question with which he

did not agree. But he went on explaining his own idea that the Russian

laborer has a quite special view of the land, different from that of

other people; and to support this proposition he made haste to add that

in his opinion this attitude of the Russian peasant was due to the

consciousness of his vocation to people vast unoccupied expanses in the

East.

“One may easily be led into error in basing any conclusion on the

general vocation of a people,” said Metrov, interrupting Levin. “The

condition of the laborer will always depend on his relation to the land

and to capital.”

And without letting Levin finish explaining his idea, Metrov began

expounding to him the special point of his own theory.

In what the point of his theory lay, Levin did not understand, because

he did not take the trouble to understand. He saw that Metrov, like

other people, in spite of his own article, in which he had attacked the

current theory of political economy, looked at the position of the

Russian peasant simply from the point of view of capital, wages, and

rent. He would indeed have been obliged to admit that in the

eastern—much the larger—part of Russia rent was as yet nil, that for

nine-tenths of the eighty millions of the Russian peasants wages took

the form simply of food provided for themselves, and that capital does

not so far exist except in the form of the most primitive tools. Yet it

was only from that point of view that he considered every laborer,

though in many points he differed from the economists and had his own

theory of the wage-fund, which he expounded to Levin.

Levin listened reluctantly, and at first made objections. He would have

liked to interrupt Metrov, to explain his own thought, which in his

opinion would have rendered further exposition of Metrov’s theories

superfluous. But later on, feeling convinced that they looked at the

matter so differently, that they could never understand one another, he

did not even oppose his statements, but simply listened. Although what

Metrov was saying was by now utterly devoid of interest for him, he yet

experienced a certain satisfaction in listening to him. It flattered

his vanity that such a learned man should explain his ideas to him so

eagerly, with such intensity and confidence in Levin’s understanding of

the subject, sometimes with a mere hint referring him to a whole aspect

of the subject. He put this down to his own credit, unaware that

Metrov, who had already discussed his theory over and over again with

all his intimate friends, talked of it with special eagerness to every

new person, and in general was eager to talk to anyone of any subject

that interested him, even if still obscure to himself.

“We are late though,” said Katavasov, looking at his watch directly

Metrov had finished his discourse.

“Yes, there’s a meeting of the Society of Amateurs today in

commemoration of the jubilee of Svintitch,” said Katavasov in answer to

Levin’s inquiry. “Pyotr Ivanovitch and I were going. I’ve promised to

deliver an address on his labors in zoology. Come along with us, it’s

very interesting.”

“Yes, and indeed it’s time to start,” said Metrov. “Come with us, and

from there, if you care to, come to my place. I should very much like

to hear your work.”

“Oh, no! It’s no good yet, it’s unfinished. But I shall be very glad to

go to the meeting.”

“I say, friends, have you heard? He has handed in the separate report,”

Katavasov called from the other room, where he was putting on his frock

coat.

And a conversation sprang up upon the university question, which was a

very important event that winter in Moscow. Three old professors in the

council had not accepted the opinion of the younger professors. The

young ones had registered a separate resolution. This, in the judgment

of some people, was monstrous, in the judgment of others it was the

simplest and most just thing to do, and the professors were split up

into two parties.

One party, to which Katavasov belonged, saw in the opposite party a

scoundrelly betrayal and treachery, while the opposite party saw in

them childishness and lack of respect for the authorities. Levin,

though he did not belong to the university, had several times already

during his stay in Moscow heard and talked about this matter, and had

his own opinion on the subject. He took part in the conversation that

was continued in the street, as they all three walked to the buildings

of the old university.

The meeting had already begun. Round the cloth-covered table, at which

Katavasov and Metrov seated themselves, there were some half-dozen

persons, and one of these was bending close over a manuscript, reading

something aloud. Levin sat down in one of the empty chairs that were

standing round the table, and in a whisper asked a student sitting near

what was being read. The student, eyeing Levin with displeasure, said:

“Biography.”

Though Levin was not interested in the biography, he could not help

listening, and learned some new and interesting facts about the life of

the distinguished man of science.

When the reader had finished, the chairman thanked him and read some

verses of the poet Ment sent him on the jubilee, and said a few words

by way of thanks to the poet. Then Katavasov in his loud, ringing voice

read his address on the scientific labors of the man whose jubilee was

being kept.

When Katavasov had finished, Levin looked at his watch, saw it was past

one, and thought that there would not be time before the concert to

read Metrov his book, and indeed, he did not now care to do so. During

the reading he had thought over their conversation. He saw distinctly

now that though Metrov’s ideas might perhaps have value, his own ideas

had a value too, and their ideas could only be made clear and lead to

something if each worked separately in his chosen path, and that

nothing would be gained by putting their ideas together. And having

made up his mind to refuse Metrov’s invitation, Levin went up to him at

the end of the meeting. Metrov introduced Levin to the chairman, with

whom he was talking of the political news. Metrov told the chairman

what he had already told Levin, and Levin made the same remarks on his

news that he had already made that morning, but for the sake of variety

he expressed also a new opinion which had only just struck him. After

that the conversation turned again on the university question. As Levin

had already heard it all, he made haste to tell Metrov that he was

sorry he could not take advantage of his invitation, took leave, and

drove to Lvov’s.

Chapter 4

Lvov, the husband of Natalia, Kitty’s sister, had spent all his life in

foreign capitals, where he had been educated, and had been in the

diplomatic service.

During the previous year he had left the diplomatic service, not owing

to any “unpleasantness” (he never had any “unpleasantness” with

anyone), and was transferred to the department of the court of the

palace in Moscow, in order to give his two boys the best education

possible.

In spite of the striking contrast in their habits and views and the

fact that Lvov was older than Levin, they had seen a great deal of one

another that winter, and had taken a great liking to each other.

Lvov was at home, and Levin went in to him unannounced.

Lvov, in a house coat with a belt and in chamois leather shoes, was

sitting in an armchair, and with a pince-nez with blue glasses he was

reading a book that stood on a reading desk, while in his beautiful

hand he held a half-burned cigarette daintily away from him.

His handsome, delicate, and still youthful-looking face, to which his

curly, glistening silvery hair gave a still more aristocratic air,

lighted up with a smile when he saw Levin.

“Capital! I was meaning to send to you. How’s Kitty? Sit here, it’s

more comfortable.” He got up and pushed up a rocking chair. “Have you

read the last circular in the _Journal de St. Pétersbourg?_ I think

it’s excellent,” he said, with a slight French accent.

Levin told him what he had heard from Katavasov was being said in

Petersburg, and after talking a little about politics, he told him of

his interview with Metrov, and the learned society’s meeting. To Lvov

it was very interesting.

“That’s what I envy you, that you are able to mix in these interesting

scientific circles,” he said. And as he talked, he passed as usual into

French, which was easier to him. “It’s true I haven’t the time for it.

My official work and the children leave me no time; and then I’m not

ashamed to own that my education has been too defective.”

“That I don’t believe,” said Levin with a smile, feeling, as he always

did, touched at Lvov’s low opinion of himself, which was not in the

least put on from a desire to seem or to be modest, but was absolutely

sincere.

“Oh, yes, indeed! I feel now how badly educated I am. To educate my

children I positively have to look up a great deal, and in fact simply

to study myself. For it’s not enough to have teachers, there must be

someone to look after them, just as on your land you want laborers and

an overseer. See what I’m reading”—he pointed to Buslaev’s _Grammar_ on

the desk—“it’s expected of Misha, and it’s so difficult.... Come,

explain to me.... Here he says....”

Levin tried to explain to him that it couldn’t be understood, but that

it had to be taught; but Lvov would not agree with him.

“Oh, you’re laughing at it!”

“On the contrary, you can’t imagine how, when I look at you, I’m always

learning the task that lies before me, that is the education of one’s

children.”

“Well, there’s nothing for you to learn,” said Lvov.

“All I know,” said Levin, “is that I have never seen better brought-up

children than yours, and I wouldn’t wish for children better than

yours.”

Lvov visibly tried to restrain the expression of his delight, but he

was positively radiant with smiles.

“If only they’re better than I! That’s all I desire. You don’t know yet

all the work,” he said, “with boys who’ve been left like mine to run

wild abroad.”

“You’ll catch all that up. They’re such clever children. The great

thing is the education of character. That’s what I learn when I look at

your children.”

“You talk of the education of character. You can’t imagine how

difficult that is! You have hardly succeeded in combating one tendency

when others crop up, and the struggle begins again. If one had not a

support in religion—you remember we talked about that—no father could

bring children up relying on his own strength alone without that help.”

This subject, which always interested Levin, was cut short by the

entrance of the beauty Natalia Alexandrovna, dressed to go out.

“I didn’t know you were here,” she said, unmistakably feeling no

regret, but a positive pleasure, in interrupting this conversation on a

topic she had heard so much of that she was by now weary of it. “Well,

how is Kitty? I am dining with you today. I tell you what, Arseny,” she

turned to her husband, “you take the carriage.”

And the husband and wife began to discuss their arrangements for the

day. As the husband had to drive to meet someone on official business,

while the wife had to go to the concert and some public meeting of a

committee on the Eastern Question, there was a great deal to consider

and settle. Levin had to take part in their plans as one of themselves.

It was settled that Levin should go with Natalia to the concert and the

meeting, and that from there they should send the carriage to the

office for Arseny, and he should call for her and take her to Kitty’s;

or that, if he had not finished his work, he should send the carriage

back and Levin would go with her.

“He’s spoiling me,” Lvov said to his wife; “he assures me that our

children are splendid, when I know how much that’s bad there is in

them.”

“Arseny goes to extremes, I always say,” said his wife. “If you look

for perfection, you will never be satisfied. And it’s true, as papa

says,—that when we were brought up there was one extreme—we were kept

in the basement, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it’s

just the other way—the parents are in the wash house, while the

children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live at

all, but to exist altogether for their children.”

“Well, what if they like it better?” Lvov said, with his beautiful

smile, touching her hand. “Anyone who didn’t know you would think you

were a stepmother, not a true mother.”

“No, extremes are not good in anything,” Natalia said serenely, putting

his paper-knife straight in its proper place on the table.

“Well, come here, you perfect children,” Lvov said to the two handsome

boys who came in, and after bowing to Levin, went up to their father,

obviously wishing to ask him about something.

Levin would have liked to talk to them, to hear what they would say to

their father, but Natalia began talking to him, and then Lvov’s

colleague in the service, Mahotin, walked in, wearing his court

uniform, to go with him to meet someone, and a conversation was kept up

without a break upon Herzegovina, Princess Korzinskaya, the town

council, and the sudden death of Madame Apraksina.

Levin even forgot the commission intrusted to him. He recollected it as

he was going into the hall.

“Oh, Kitty told me to talk to you about Oblonsky,” he said, as Lvov was

standing on the stairs, seeing his wife and Levin off.

“Yes, yes, maman wants us, _les beaux-frères,_ to attack him,” he said,

blushing. “But why should I?”

“Well, then, I will attack him,” said Madame Lvova, with a smile,

standing in her white sheepskin cape, waiting till they had finished

speaking. “Come, let us go.”

Chapter 5

At the concert in the afternoon two very interesting things were

performed. One was a fantasia, _King Lear;_ the other was a quartette

dedicated to the memory of Bach. Both were new and in the new style,

and Levin was eager to form an opinion of them. After escorting his

sister-in-law to her stall, he stood against a column and tried to

listen as attentively and conscientiously as possible. He tried not to

let his attention be distracted, and not to spoil his impression by

looking at the conductor in a white tie, waving his arms, which always

disturbed his enjoyment of music so much, or the ladies in bonnets,

with strings carefully tied over their ears, and all these people

either thinking of nothing at all or thinking of all sorts of things

except the music. He tried to avoid meeting musical connoisseurs or

talkative acquaintances, and stood looking at the floor straight before

him, listening.

But the more he listened to the fantasia of _King Lear_ the further he

felt from forming any definite opinion of it. There was, as it were, a

continual beginning, a preparation of the musical expression of some

feeling, but it fell to pieces again directly, breaking into new

musical motives, or simply nothing but the whims of the composer,

exceedingly complex but disconnected sounds. And these fragmentary

musical expressions, though sometimes beautiful, were disagreeable,

because they were utterly unexpected and not led up to by anything.

Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one

another without any connection, like the emotions of a madman. And

those emotions, like a madman’s, sprang up quite unexpectedly.

During the whole of the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching

people dancing, and was in a state of complete bewilderment when the

fantasia was over, and felt a great weariness from the fruitless strain

on his attention. Loud applause resounded on all sides. Everyone got

up, moved about, and began talking. Anxious to throw some light on his

own perplexity from the impressions of others, Levin began to walk

about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see a well-known

musical amateur in conversation with Pestsov, whom he knew.

“Marvelous!” Pestsov was saying in his mellow bass. “How are you,

Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to

say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia’s

approach, where woman, _das ewig Weibliche,_ enters into conflict with

fate. Isn’t it?”

“You mean ... what has Cordelia to do with it?” Levin asked timidly,

forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to represent King Lear.

“Cordelia comes in ... see here!” said Pestsov, tapping his finger on

the satiny surface of the program he held in his hand and passing it to

Levin.

Only then Levin recollected the title of the fantasia, and made haste

to read in the Russian translation the lines from Shakespeare that were

printed on the back of the program.

“You can’t follow it without that,” said Pestsov, addressing Levin, as

the person he had been speaking to had gone away, and he had no one to

talk to.

In the _entr’acte_ Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the

merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that

the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take

music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it

tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an

instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble

certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the

pedestal. “These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they

were positively clinging on the ladder,” said Levin. The comparison

pleased him, but he could not remember whether he had not used the same

phrase before, and to Pestsov, too, and as he said it he felt confused.

Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest

manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art.

The second piece that was performed Levin could not hear. Pestsov, who

was standing beside him, was talking to him almost all the time,

condemning the music for its excessive affected assumption of

simplicity, and comparing it with the simplicity of the Pre-Raphaelites

in painting. As he went out Levin met many more acquaintances, with

whom he talked of politics, of music, and of common acquaintances.

Among others he met Count Bol, whom he had utterly forgotten to call

upon.

“Well, go at once then,” Madame Lvova said, when he told her; “perhaps

they’ll not be at home, and then you can come to the meeting to fetch

me. You’ll find me still there.”

Chapter 6

“Perhaps they’re not at home?” said Levin, as he went into the hall of

Countess Bola’s house.

“At home; please walk in,” said the porter, resolutely removing his

overcoat.

“How annoying!” thought Levin with a sigh, taking off one glove and

stroking his hat. “What did I come for? What have I to say to them?”

As he passed through the first drawing-room Levin met in the doorway

Countess Bola, giving some order to a servant with a care-worn and

severe face. On seeing Levin she smiled, and asked him to come into the

little drawing-room, where he heard voices. In this room there were

sitting in armchairs the two daughters of the countess, and a Moscow

colonel, whom Levin knew. Levin went up, greeted them, and sat down

beside the sofa with his hat on his knees.

“How is your wife? Have you been at the concert? We couldn’t go. Mamma

had to be at the funeral service.”

“Yes, I heard.... What a sudden death!” said Levin.

The countess came in, sat down on the sofa, and she too asked after his

wife and inquired about the concert.

Levin answered, and repeated an inquiry about Madame Apraksina’s sudden

death.

“But she was always in weak health.”

“Were you at the opera yesterday?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Lucca was very good.”

“Yes, very good,” he said, and as it was utterly of no consequence to

him what they thought of him, he began repeating what they had heard a

hundred times about the characteristics of the singer’s talent.

Countess Bola pretended to be listening. Then, when he had said enough

and paused, the colonel, who had been silent till then, began to talk.

The colonel too talked of the opera, and about culture. At last, after

speaking of the proposed _folle journée_ at Turin’s, the colonel

laughed, got up noisily, and went away. Levin too rose, but he saw by

the face of the countess that it was not yet time for him to go. He

must stay two minutes longer. He sat down.

But as he was thinking all the while how stupid it was, he could not

find a subject for conversation, and sat silent.

“You are not going to the public meeting? They say it will be very

interesting,” began the countess.

“No, I promised my _belle-sœur_ to fetch her from it,” said Levin.

A silence followed. The mother once more exchanged glances with a

daughter.

“Well, now I think the time has come,” thought Levin, and he got up.

The ladies shook hands with him, and begged him to say _mille choses_

to his wife for them.

The porter asked him, as he gave him his coat, “Where is your honor

staying?” and immediately wrote down his address in a big handsomely

bound book.

“Of course I don’t care, but still I feel ashamed and awfully stupid,”

thought Levin, consoling himself with the reflection that everyone does

it. He drove to the public meeting, where he was to find his

sister-in-law, so as to drive home with her.

At the public meeting of the committee there were a great many people,

and almost all the highest society. Levin was in time for the report

which, as everyone said, was very interesting. When the reading of the

report was over, people moved about, and Levin met Sviazhsky, who

invited him very pressingly to come that evening to a meeting of the

Society of Agriculture, where a celebrated lecture was to be delivered,

and Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had only just come from the races, and

many other acquaintances; and Levin heard and uttered various

criticisms on the meeting, on the new fantasia, and on a public trial.

But, probably from the mental fatigue he was beginning to feel, he made

a blunder in speaking of the trial, and this blunder he recalled

several times with vexation. Speaking of the sentence upon a foreigner

who had been condemned in Russia, and of how unfair it would be to

punish him by exile abroad, Levin repeated what he had heard the day

before in conversation from an acquaintance.

“I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp by

putting it into the water,” said Levin. Then he recollected that this

idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and uttered as his own,

came from a fable of Krilov’s, and that the acquaintance had picked it

up from a newspaper article.

After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in good

spirits and quite well, Levin drove to the club.

Chapter 7

Levin reached the club just at the right time. Members and visitors

were driving up as he arrived. Levin had not been at the club for a

very long while—not since he lived in Moscow, when he was leaving the

university and going into society. He remembered the club, the external

details of its arrangement, but he had completely forgotten the

impression it had made on him in old days. But as soon as, driving into

the wide semicircular court and getting out of the sledge, he mounted

the steps, and the hall-porter, adorned with a crossway scarf,

noiselessly opened the door to him with a bow; as soon as he saw in the

porter’s room the cloaks and galoshes of members who thought it less

trouble to take them off downstairs; as soon as he heard the mysterious

ringing bell that preceded him as he ascended the easy, carpeted

staircase, and saw the statue on the landing, and the third porter at

the top doors, a familiar figure grown older, in the club livery,

opening the door without haste or delay, and scanning the visitors as

they passed in—Levin felt the old impression of the club come back in a

rush, an impression of repose, comfort, and propriety.

“Your hat, please,” the porter said to Levin, who forgot the club rule

to leave his hat in the porter’s room. “Long time since you’ve been.

The prince put your name down yesterday. Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch is

not here yet.”

The porter did not only know Levin, but also all his ties and

relationships, and so immediately mentioned his intimate friends.

Passing through the outer hall, divided up by screens, and the room

partitioned on the right, where a man sits at the fruit buffet, Levin

overtook an old man walking slowly in, and entered the dining-room full

of noise and people.

He walked along the tables, almost all full, and looked at the

visitors. He saw people of all sorts, old and young; some he knew a

little, some intimate friends. There was not a single cross or

worried-looking face. All seemed to have left their cares and anxieties

in the porter’s room with their hats, and were all deliberately getting

ready to enjoy the material blessings of life. Sviazhsky was here and

Shtcherbatsky, Nevyedovsky and the old prince, and Vronsky and Sergey

Ivanovitch.

“Ah! why are you late?” the prince said smiling, and giving him his

hand over his own shoulder. “How’s Kitty?” he added, smoothing out the

napkin he had tucked in at his waistcoat buttons.

“All right; they are dining at home, all the three of them.”

“Ah, ‘Aline-Nadine,’ to be sure! There’s no room with us. Go to that

table, and make haste and take a seat,” said the prince, and turning

away he carefully took a plate of eel soup.

“Levin, this way!” a good-natured voice shouted a little farther on. It

was Turovtsin. He was sitting with a young officer, and beside them

were two chairs turned upside down. Levin gladly went up to them. He

had always liked the good-hearted rake, Turovtsin—he was associated in

his mind with memories of his courtship—and at that moment, after the

strain of intellectual conversation, the sight of Turovtsin’s

good-natured face was particularly welcome.

“For you and Oblonsky. He’ll be here directly.”

The young man, holding himself very erect, with eyes forever twinkling

with enjoyment, was an officer from Petersburg, Gagin. Turovtsin

introduced them.

“Oblonsky’s always late.”

“Ah, here he is!”

“Have you only just come?” said Oblonsky, coming quickly towards them.

“Good day. Had some vodka? Well, come along then.”

Levin got up and went with him to the big table spread with spirits and

appetizers of the most various kinds. One would have thought that out

of two dozen delicacies one might find something to one’s taste, but

Stepan Arkadyevitch asked for something special, and one of the

liveried waiters standing by immediately brought what was required.

They drank a wine-glassful and returned to their table.

At once, while they were still at the soup, Gagin was served with

champagne, and told the waiter to fill four glasses. Levin did not

refuse the wine, and asked for a second bottle. He was very hungry, and

ate and drank with great enjoyment, and with still greater enjoyment

took part in the lively and simple conversation of his companions.

Gagin, dropping his voice, told the last good story from Petersburg,

and the story, though improper and stupid, was so ludicrous that Levin

broke into roars of laughter so loud that those near looked round.

“That’s in the same style as, ‘that’s a thing I can’t endure!’ You know

the story?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Ah, that’s exquisite! Another

bottle,” he said to the waiter, and he began to relate his good story.

“Pyotr Illyitch Vinovsky invites you to drink with him,” a little old

waiter interrupted Stepan Arkadyevitch, bringing two delicate glasses

of sparkling champagne, and addressing Stepan Arkadyevitch and Levin.

Stepan Arkadyevitch took the glass, and looking towards a bald man with

red mustaches at the other end of the table, he nodded to him, smiling.

“Who’s that?” asked Levin.

“You met him once at my place, don’t you remember? A good-natured

fellow.”

Levin did the same as Stepan Arkadyevitch and took the glass.

Stepan Arkadyevitch’s anecdote too was very amusing. Levin told his

story, and that too was successful. Then they talked of horses, of the

races, of what they had been doing that day, and of how smartly

Vronsky’s Atlas had won the first prize. Levin did not notice how the

time passed at dinner.

“Ah! and here they are!” Stepan Arkadyevitch said towards the end of

dinner, leaning over the back of his chair and holding out his hand to

Vronsky, who came up with a tall officer of the Guards. Vronsky’s face

too beamed with the look of good-humored enjoyment that was general in

the club. He propped his elbow playfully on Stepan Arkadyevitch’s

shoulder, whispering something to him, and he held out his hand to

Levin with the same good-humored smile.

“Very glad to meet you,” he said. “I looked out for you at the

election, but I was told you had gone away.”

“Yes, I left the same day. We’ve just been talking of your horse. I

congratulate you,” said Levin. “It was very rapidly run.”

“Yes; you’ve race horses too, haven’t you?”

“No, my father had; but I remember and know something about it.”

“Where have you dined?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“We were at the second table, behind the columns.”

“We’ve been celebrating his success,” said the tall colonel. “It’s his

second Imperial prize. I wish I might have the luck at cards he has

with horses. Well, why waste the precious time? I’m going to the

‘infernal regions,’” added the colonel, and he walked away.

“That’s Yashvin,” Vronsky said in answer to Turovtsin, and he sat down

in the vacated seat beside them. He drank the glass offered him, and

ordered a bottle of wine. Under the influence of the club atmosphere or

the wine he had drunk, Levin chatted away to Vronsky of the best breeds

of cattle, and was very glad not to feel the slightest hostility to

this man. He even told him, among other things, that he had heard from

his wife that she had met him at Princess Marya Borissovna’s.

“Ah, Princess Marya Borissovna, she’s exquisite!” said Stepan

Arkadyevitch, and he told an anecdote about her which set them all

laughing. Vronsky particularly laughed with such simplehearted

amusement that Levin felt quite reconciled to him.

“Well, have we finished?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up with a

smile. “Let us go.”

Chapter 8

Getting up from the table, Levin walked with Gagin through the lofty

room to the billiard room, feeling his arms swing as he walked with a

peculiar lightness and ease. As he crossed the big room, he came upon

his father-in-law.

“Well, how do you like our Temple of Indolence?” said the prince,

taking his arm. “Come along, come along!”

“Yes, I wanted to walk about and look at everything. It’s interesting.”

“Yes, it’s interesting for you. But its interest for me is quite

different. You look at those little old men now,” he said, pointing to

a club member with bent back and projecting lip, shuffling towards them

in his soft boots, “and imagine that they were _shlupiks_ like that

from their birth up.”

“How _shlupiks_?”

“I see you don’t know that name. That’s our club designation. You know

the game of rolling eggs: when one’s rolled a long while it becomes a

_shlupik_. So it is with us; one goes on coming and coming to the club,

and ends by becoming a _shlupik_. Ah, you laugh! but we look out, for

fear of dropping into it ourselves. You know Prince Tchetchensky?”

inquired the prince; and Levin saw by his face that he was just going

to relate something funny.

“No, I don’t know him.”

“You don’t say so! Well, Prince Tchetchensky is a well-known figure. No

matter, though. He’s always playing billiards here. Only three years

ago he was not a _shlupik_ and kept up his spirits and even used to

call other people _shlupiks_. But one day he turns up, and our porter

... you know Vassily? Why, that fat one; he’s famous for his _bon

mots_. And so Prince Tchetchensky asks him, ‘Come, Vassily, who’s here?

Any _shlupiks_ here yet?’ And he says, ‘You’re the third.’ Yes, my dear

boy, that he did!”

Talking and greeting the friends they met, Levin and the prince walked

through all the rooms: the great room where tables had already been

set, and the usual partners were playing for small stakes; the divan

room, where they were playing chess, and Sergey Ivanovitch was sitting

talking to somebody; the billiard room, where, about a sofa in a

recess, there was a lively party drinking champagne—Gagin was one of

them. They peeped into the “infernal regions,” where a good many men

were crowding round one table, at which Yashvin was sitting. Trying not

to make a noise, they walked into the dark reading room, where under

the shaded lamps there sat a young man with a wrathful countenance,

turning over one journal after another, and a bald general buried in a

book. They went, too, into what the prince called the intellectual

room, where three gentlemen were engaged in a heated discussion of the

latest political news.

“Prince, please come, we’re ready,” said one of his card party, who had

come to look for him, and the prince went off. Levin sat down and

listened, but recalling all the conversation of the morning he felt all

of a sudden fearfully bored. He got up hurriedly, and went to look for

Oblonsky and Turovtsin, with whom it had been so pleasant.

Turovtsin was one of the circle drinking in the billiard room, and

Stepan Arkadyevitch was talking with Vronsky near the door at the

farther corner of the room.

“It’s not that she’s dull; but this undefined, this unsettled

position,” Levin caught, and he was hurrying away, but Stepan

Arkadyevitch called to him.

“Levin,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and Levin noticed that his eyes were

not full of tears exactly, but moist, which always happened when he had

been drinking, or when he was touched. Just now it was due to both

causes. “Levin, don’t go,” he said, and he warmly squeezed his arm

above the elbow, obviously not at all wishing to let him go.

“This is a true friend of mine—almost my greatest friend,” he said to

Vronsky. “You have become even closer and dearer to me. And I want you,

and I know you ought, to be friends, and great friends, because you’re

both splendid fellows.”

“Well, there’s nothing for us now but to kiss and be friends,” Vronsky

said, with good-natured playfulness, holding out his hand.

Levin quickly took the offered hand, and pressed it warmly.

“I’m very, very glad,” said Levin.

“Waiter, a bottle of champagne,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“And I’m very glad,” said Vronsky.

But in spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s desire, and their own desire,

they had nothing to talk about, and both felt it.

“Do you know, he has never met Anna?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to

Vronsky. “And I want above everything to take him to see her. Let us

go, Levin!”

“Really?” said Vronsky. “She will be very glad to see you. I should be

going home at once,” he added, “but I’m worried about Yashvin, and I

want to stay on till he finishes.”

“Why, is he losing?”

“He keeps losing, and I’m the only friend that can restrain him.”

“Well, what do you say to pyramids? Levin, will you play? Capital!”

said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Get the table ready,” he said to the marker.

“It has been ready a long while,” answered the marker, who had already

set the balls in a triangle, and was knocking the red one about for his

own diversion.

“Well, let us begin.”

After the game Vronsky and Levin sat down at Gagin’s table, and at

Stepan Arkadyevitch’s suggestion Levin took a hand in the game.

Vronsky sat down at the table, surrounded by friends, who were

incessantly coming up to him. Every now and then he went to the

“infernal” to keep an eye on Yashvin. Levin was enjoying a delightful

sense of repose after the mental fatigue of the morning. He was glad

that all hostility was at an end with Vronsky, and the sense of peace,

decorum, and comfort never left him.

When the game was over, Stepan Arkadyevitch took Levin’s arm.

“Well, let us go to Anna’s, then. At once? Eh? She is at home. I

promised her long ago to bring you. Where were you meaning to spend the

evening?”

“Oh, nowhere specially. I promised Sviazhsky to go to the Society of

Agriculture. By all means, let us go,” said Levin.

“Very good; come along. Find out if my carriage is here,” Stepan

Arkadyevitch said to the waiter.

Levin went up to the table, paid the forty roubles he had lost; paid

his bill, the amount of which was in some mysterious way ascertained by

the little old waiter who stood at the counter, and swinging his arms

he walked through all the rooms to the way out.

Chapter 9

“Oblonsky’s carriage!” the porter shouted in an angry bass. The

carriage drove up and both got in. It was only for the first few

moments, while the carriage was driving out of the clubhouse gates,

that Levin was still under the influence of the club atmosphere of

repose, comfort, and unimpeachable good form. But as soon as the

carriage drove out into the street, and he felt it jolting over the

uneven road, heard the angry shout of a sledge driver coming towards

them, saw in the uncertain light the red blind of a tavern and the

shops, this impression was dissipated, and he began to think over his

actions, and to wonder whether he was doing right in going to see Anna.

What would Kitty say? But Stepan Arkadyevitch gave him no time for

reflection, and, as though divining his doubts, he scattered them.

“How glad I am,” he said, “that you should know her! You know Dolly has

long wished for it. And Lvov’s been to see her, and often goes. Though

she is my sister,” Stepan Arkadyevitch pursued, “I don’t hesitate to

say that she’s a remarkable woman. But you will see. Her position is

very painful, especially now.”

“Why especially now?”

“We are carrying on negotiations with her husband about a divorce. And

he’s agreed; but there are difficulties in regard to the son, and the

business, which ought to have been arranged long ago, has been dragging

on for three months past. As soon as the divorce is over, she will

marry Vronsky. How stupid these old ceremonies are, that no one

believes in, and which only prevent people being comfortable!” Stepan

Arkadyevitch put in. “Well, then their position will be as regular as

mine, as yours.”

“What is the difficulty?” said Levin.

“Oh, it’s a long and tedious story! The whole business is in such an

anomalous position with us. But the point is she has been for three

months in Moscow, where everyone knows her, waiting for the divorce;

she goes out nowhere, sees no woman except Dolly, because, do you

understand, she doesn’t care to have people come as a favor. That fool

Princess Varvara, even she has left her, considering this a breach of

propriety. Well, you see, in such a position any other woman would not

have found resources in herself. But you’ll see how she has arranged

her life—how calm, how dignified she is. To the left, in the crescent

opposite the church!” shouted Stepan Arkadyevitch, leaning out of the

window. “Phew! how hot it is!” he said, in spite of twelve degrees of

frost, flinging his open overcoat still wider open.

“But she has a daughter: no doubt she’s busy looking after her?” said

Levin.

“I believe you picture every woman simply as a female, _une couveuse,_”

said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “If she’s occupied, it must be with her

children. No, she brings her up capitally, I believe, but one doesn’t

hear about her. She’s busy, in the first place, with what she writes. I

see you’re smiling ironically, but you’re wrong. She’s writing a

children’s book, and doesn’t talk about it to anyone, but she read it

to me and I gave the manuscript to Vorkuev ... you know the publisher

... and he’s an author himself too, I fancy. He understands those

things, and he says it’s a remarkable piece of work. But are you

fancying she’s an authoress?—not a bit of it. She’s a woman with a

heart, before everything, but you’ll see. Now she has a little English

girl with her, and a whole family she’s looking after.”

“Oh, something in a philanthropic way?”

“Why, you will look at everything in the worst light. It’s not from

philanthropy, it’s from the heart. They—that is, Vronsky—had a trainer,

an Englishman, first-rate in his own line, but a drunkard. He’s

completely given up to drink—delirium tremens—and the family were cast

on the world. She saw them, helped them, got more and more interested

in them, and now the whole family is on her hands. But not by way of

patronage, you know, helping with money; she’s herself preparing the

boys in Russian for the high school, and she’s taken the little girl to

live with her. But you’ll see her for yourself.”

The carriage drove into the courtyard, and Stepan Arkadyevitch rang

loudly at the entrance where sledges were standing.

And without asking the servant who opened the door whether the lady

were at home, Stepan Arkadyevitch walked into the hall. Levin followed

him, more and more doubtful whether he was doing right or wrong.

Looking at himself in the glass, Levin noticed that he was red in the

face, but he felt certain he was not drunk, and he followed Stepan

Arkadyevitch up the carpeted stairs. At the top Stepan Arkadyevitch

inquired of the footman, who bowed to him as to an intimate friend, who

was with Anna Arkadyevna, and received the answer that it was M.

Vorkuev.

“Where are they?”

“In the study.”

Passing through the dining-room, a room not very large, with dark,

paneled walls, Stepan Arkadyevitch and Levin walked over the soft

carpet to the half-dark study, lighted up by a single lamp with a big

dark shade. Another lamp with a reflector was hanging on the wall,

lighting up a big full-length portrait of a woman, which Levin could

not help looking at. It was the portrait of Anna, painted in Italy by

Mihailov. While Stepan Arkadyevitch went behind the _treillage_, and

the man’s voice which had been speaking paused, Levin gazed at the

portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown

on it, and he could not tear himself away from it. He positively forgot

where he was, and not even hearing what was said, he could not take his

eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture, but a living,

charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders,

with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; triumphantly

and softly she looked at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not

living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.

“I am delighted!” He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably

addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in the

portrait. Anna had come from behind the _treillage_ to meet him, and

Levin saw in the dim light of the study the very woman of the portrait,

in a dark blue shot gown, not in the same position nor with the same

expression, but with the same perfection of beauty which the artist had

caught in the portrait. She was less dazzling in reality, but, on the

other hand, there was something fresh and seductive in the living woman

which was not in the portrait.

Chapter 10

She had risen to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing him;

and in the quiet ease with which she held out her little vigorous hand,

introduced him to Vorkuev and indicated a red-haired, pretty little

girl who was sitting at work, calling her her pupil, Levin recognized

and liked the manners of a woman of the great world, always

self-possessed and natural.

“I am delighted, delighted,” she repeated, and on her lips these simple

words took for Levin’s ears a special significance. “I have known you

and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship with Stiva

and for your wife’s sake.... I knew her for a very short time, but she

left on me the impression of an exquisite flower, simply a flower. And

to think she will soon be a mother!”

She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from Levin to

her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making was good,

and he felt immediately at home, simple and happy with her, as though

he had known her from childhood.

“Ivan Petrovitch and I settled in Alexey’s study,” she said in answer

to Stepan Arkadyevitch’s question whether he might smoke, “just so as

to be able to smoke”—and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether

he would smoke, she pulled closer a tortoise-shell cigar-case and took

a cigarette.

“How are you feeling today?” her brother asked her.

“Oh, nothing. Nerves, as usual.”

“Yes, isn’t it extraordinarily fine?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,

noticing that Levin was scrutinizing the picture.

“I have never seen a better portrait.”

“And extraordinarily like, isn’t it?” said Vorkuev.

Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar brilliance

lighted up Anna’s face when she felt his eyes on her. Levin flushed,

and to cover his confusion would have asked whether she had seen Darya

Alexandrovna lately; but at that moment Anna spoke. “We were just

talking, Ivan Petrovitch and I, of Vashtchenkov’s last pictures. Have

you seen them?”

“Yes, I have seen them,” answered Levin.

“But, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you ... you were saying?...”

Levin asked if she had seen Dolly lately.

“She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high school

people on Grisha’s account. The Latin teacher, it seems, had been

unfair to him.”

“Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn’t care for them very much,”

Levin went back to the subject she had started.

Levin talked now not at all with that purely businesslike attitude to

the subject with which he had been talking all the morning. Every word

in his conversation with her had a special significance. And talking to

her was pleasant; still pleasanter it was to listen to her.

Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and

carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great weight

to the ideas of the person she was talking to.

The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new

illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the

artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness.

Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further than

anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the return to

realism. In the fact of not lying they see poetry.

Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much pleasure as

this remark. Anna’s face lighted up at once, as at once she appreciated

the thought. She laughed.

“I laugh,” she said, “as one laughs when one sees a very true portrait.

What you said so perfectly hits off French art now, painting and

literature too, indeed—Zola, Daudet. But perhaps it is always so, that

men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and

then—all the _combinaisons_ made—they are tired of the fictitious

figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.”

“That’s perfectly true,” said Vorknev.

“So you’ve been at the club?” she said to her brother.

“Yes, yes, this is a woman!” Levin thought, forgetting himself and

staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment

was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she was

talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by the

change of her expression. Her face—so handsome a moment before in its

repose—suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But

this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though

recollecting something.

“Oh, well, but that’s of no interest to anyone,” she said, and she

turned to the English girl.

“Please order the tea in the drawing-room,” she said in English.

The girl got up and went out.

“Well, how did she get through her examination?” asked Stepan

Arkadyevitch.

“Splendidly! She’s a very gifted child and a sweet character.”

“It will end in your loving her more than your own.”

“There a man speaks. In love there’s no more nor less. I love my

daughter with one love, and her with another.”

“I was just telling Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuev, “that if she were

to put a hundredth part of the energy she devotes to this English girl

to the public question of the education of Russian children, she would

be doing a great and useful work.”

“Yes, but I can’t help it; I couldn’t do it. Count Alexey Kirillovitch

urged me very much” (as she uttered the words _Count Alexey

Kirillovitch_ she glanced with appealing timidity at Levin, and he

unconsciously responded with a respectful and reassuring look); “he

urged me to take up the school in the village. I visited it several

times. The children were very nice, but I could not feel drawn to the

work. You speak of energy. Energy rests upon love; and come as it will,

there’s no forcing it. I took to this child—I could not myself say

why.”

And she glanced again at Levin. And her smile and her glance—all told

him that it was to him only she was addressing her words, valuing his

good opinion, and at the same time sure beforehand that they understood

each other.

“I quite understand that,” Levin answered. “It’s impossible to give

one’s heart to a school or such institutions in general, and I believe

that’s just why philanthropic institutions always give such poor

results.”

She was silent for a while, then she smiled.

“Yes, yes,” she agreed; “I never could. _Je n’ai pas le cœur assez_

large to love a whole asylum of horrid little girls. _Cela ne m’a

jamais réussi._ There are so many women who have made themselves _une

position sociale_ in that way. And now more than ever,” she said with a

mournful, confiding expression, ostensibly addressing her brother, but

unmistakably intending her words only for Levin, “now when I have such

need of some occupation, I cannot.” And suddenly frowning (Levin saw

that she was frowning at herself for talking about herself) she changed

the subject. “I know about you,” she said to Levin; “that you’re not a

public-spirited citizen, and I have defended you to the best of my

ability.”

“How have you defended me?”

“Oh, according to the attacks made on you. But won’t you have some

tea?” She rose and took up a book bound in morocco.

“Give it to me, Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuev, indicating the book.

“It’s well worth taking up.”

“Oh, no, it’s all so sketchy.”

“I told him about it,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to his sister, nodding

at Levin.

“You shouldn’t have. My writing is something after the fashion of those

little baskets and carving which Liza Mertsalova used to sell me from

the prisons. She had the direction of the prison department in that

society,” she turned to Levin; “and they were miracles of patience, the

work of those poor wretches.”

And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so

extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She had

no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. As she

said that she sighed, and her face suddenly taking a hard expression,

looked as it were turned to stone. With that expression on her face she

was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was

utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating

happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin

looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her

brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors and he felt for her

a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.

She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing-room, while she

stayed behind to say a few words to her brother. “About her divorce,

about Vronsky, and what he’s doing at the club, about me?” wondered

Levin. And he was so keenly interested by the question of what she was

saying to Stepan Arkadyevitch, that he scarcely heard what Vorkuev was

telling him of the qualities of the story for children Anna Arkadyevna

had written.

At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting matter,

continued. There was not a single instant when a subject for

conversation was to seek; on the contrary, it was felt that one had

hardly time to say what one had to say, and eagerly held back to hear

what the others were saying. And all that was said, not only by her,

but by Vorkuev and Stepan Arkadyevitch—all, so it seemed to Levin,

gained peculiar significance from her appreciation and her criticism.

While he followed this interesting conversation, Levin was all the time

admiring her—her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same

time her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and

talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to

divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so severely hitherto,

now by some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her and was

also sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully understand

her. At eleven o’clock, when Stepan Arkadyevitch got up to go (Vorkuev

had left earlier), it seemed to Levin that he had only just come.

Regretfully Levin too rose.

“Good-bye,” she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face with

a winning look. “I am very glad _que la glace est rompue._”

She dropped his hand, and half closed her eyes.

“Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot

pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never

pardon it. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through,

and may God spare her that.”

“Certainly, yes, I will tell her....” Levin said, blushing.

Chapter 11

“What a marvelous, sweet and unhappy woman!” he was thinking, as he

stepped out into the frosty air with Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“Well, didn’t I tell you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, seeing that Levin

had been completely won over.

“Yes,” said Levin dreamily, “an extraordinary woman! It’s not her

cleverness, but she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I’m awfully

sorry for her!”

“Now, please God, everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t be

hard on people in future,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, opening the

carriage door. “Good-bye; we don’t go the same way.”

Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in

their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her

expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling

sympathy for her, Levin reached home.

At home Kouzma told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well,

and that her sisters had not long been gone, and he handed him two

letters. Levin read them at once in the hall, that he might not

overlook them later. One was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote

that the corn could not be sold, that it was fetching only five and a

half roubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. The

other letter was from his sister. She scolded him for her business

being still unsettled.

“Well, we must sell it at five and a half if we can’t get more,” Levin

decided the first question, which had always before seemed such a

weighty one, with extraordinary facility on the spot. “It’s

extraordinary how all one’s time is taken up here,” he thought,

considering the second letter. He felt himself to blame for not having

got done what his sister had asked him to do for her. “Today, again,

I’ve not been to the court, but today I’ve certainly not had time.” And

resolving that he would not fail to do it next day, he went up to his

wife. As he went in, Levin rapidly ran through mentally the day he had

spent. All the events of the day were conversations, conversations he

had heard and taken part in. All the conversations were upon subjects

which, if he had been alone at home, he would never have taken up, but

here they were very interesting. And all these conversations were right

enough, only in two places there was something not quite right. One was

what he had said about the carp, the other was something not “quite the

thing” in the tender sympathy he was feeling for Anna.

Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three

sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for

him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had

been left alone.

“Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight

into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But

that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed

her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his

account of how he had spent the evening.

“Well, I’m very glad I met Vronsky. I felt quite at ease and natural

with him. You understand, I shall try not to see him, but I’m glad that

this awkwardness is all over,” he said, and remembering that by way of

trying not to see him, he had immediately gone to call on Anna, he

blushed. “We talk about the peasants drinking; I don’t know which

drinks most, the peasantry or our own class; the peasants do on

holidays, but....”

But Kitty took not the slightest interest in discussing the drinking

habits of the peasants. She saw that he blushed, and she wanted to know

why.

“Well, and then where did you go?”

“Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna.”

And as he said this, Levin blushed even more, and his doubts as to

whether he had done right in going to see Anna were settled once for

all. He knew now that he ought not to have done so.

Kitty’s eyes opened in a curious way and gleamed at Anna’s name, but

controlling herself with an effort, she concealed her emotion and

deceived him.

“Oh!” was all she said.

“I’m sure you won’t be angry at my going. Stiva begged me to, and Dolly

wished it,” Levin went on.

“Oh, no!” she said, but he saw in her eyes a constraint that boded him

no good.

“She is a very sweet, very, very unhappy, good woman,” he said, telling

her about Anna, her occupations, and what she had told him to say to

her.

“Yes, of course, she is very much to be pitied,” said Kitty, when he

had finished. “Whom was your letter from?”

He told her, and believing in her calm tone, he went to change his

coat.

Coming back, he found Kitty in the same easy chair. When he went up to

her, she glanced at him and broke into sobs.

“What? what is it?” he asked, knowing beforehand what.

“You’re in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you! I saw

it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can it all lead to? You were drinking

at the club, drinking and gambling, and then you went ... to her of all

people! No, we must go away.... I shall go away tomorrow.”

It was a long while before Levin could soothe his wife. At last he

succeeded in calming her, only by confessing that a feeling of pity, in

conjunction with the wine he had drunk, had been too much for him, that

he had succumbed to Anna’s artful influence, and that he would avoid

her. One thing he did with more sincerity confess to was that living so

long in Moscow, a life of nothing but conversation, eating and

drinking, he was degenerating. They talked till three o’clock in the

morning. Only at three o’clock were they sufficiently reconciled to be

able to go to sleep.

Chapter 12

After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began

walking up and down the room. She had unconsciously the whole evening

done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had

fallen into doing with all young men—and she knew she had attained her

aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and

conscientious man. She liked him indeed extremely, and, in spite of the

striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky

and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had

made Kitty able to love both. Yet as soon as he was out of the room,

she ceased to think of him.

One thought, and one only, pursued her in different forms, and refused

to be shaken off. “If I have so much effect on others, on this man, who

loves his home and his wife, why is it _he_ is so cold to me?... not

cold exactly, he loves me, I know that! But something new is drawing us

apart now. Why wasn’t he here all the evening? He told Stiva to say he

could not leave Yashvin, and must watch over his play. Is Yashvin a

child? But supposing it’s true. He never tells a lie. But there’s

something else in it if it’s true. He is glad of an opportunity of

showing me that he has other duties; I know that, I submit to that. But

why prove that to me? He wants to show me that his love for me is not

to interfere with his freedom. But I need no proofs, I need love. He

ought to understand all the bitterness of this life for me here in

Moscow. Is this life? I am not living, but waiting for an event, which

is continually put off and put off. No answer again! And Stiva says he

cannot go to Alexey Alexandrovitch. And I can’t write again. I can do

nothing, can begin nothing, can alter nothing; I hold myself in, I

wait, inventing amusements for myself—the English family, writing,

reading—but it’s all nothing but a sham, it’s all the same as morphine.

He ought to feel for me,” she said, feeling tears of self-pity coming

into her eyes.

She heard Vronsky’s abrupt ring and hurriedly dried her tears—not only

dried her tears, but sat down by a lamp and opened a book, affecting

composure. She wanted to show him that she was displeased that he had

not come home as he had promised—displeased only, and not on any

account to let him see her distress, and least of all, her self-pity.

She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did not want

strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put

herself into an attitude of antagonism.

“Well, you’ve not been dull?” he said, eagerly and good-humoredly,

going up to her. “What a terrible passion it is—gambling!”

“No, I’ve not been dull; I’ve learned long ago not to be dull. Stiva

has been here and Levin.”

“Yes, they meant to come and see you. Well, how did you like Levin?” he

said, sitting down beside her.

“Very much. They have not long been gone. What was Yashvin doing?”

“He was winning—seventeen thousand. I got him away. He had really

started home, but he went back again, and now he’s losing.”

“Then what did you stay for?” she asked, suddenly lifting her eyes to

him. The expression of her face was cold and ungracious. “You told

Stiva you were staying on to get Yashvin away. And you have left him

there.”

The same expression of cold readiness for the conflict appeared on his

face too.

“In the first place, I did not ask him to give you any message; and

secondly, I never tell lies. But what’s the chief point, I wanted to

stay, and I stayed,” he said, frowning. “Anna, what is it for, why will

you?” he said after a moment’s silence, bending over towards her, and

he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.

She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force of

evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though the

rules of warfare would not permit her to surrender.

“Of course you wanted to stay, and you stayed. You do everything you

want to. But what do you tell me that for? With what object?” she said,

getting more and more excited. “Does anyone contest your rights? But

you want to be right, and you’re welcome to be right.”

His hand closed, he turned away, and his face wore a still more

obstinate expression.

“For you it’s a matter of obstinacy,” she said, watching him intently

and suddenly finding the right word for that expression that irritated

her, “simply obstinacy. For you it’s a question of whether you keep the

upper hand of me, while for me....” Again she felt sorry for herself,

and she almost burst into tears. “If you knew what it is for me! When I

feel as I do now that you are hostile, yes, hostile to me, if you knew

what this means for me! If you knew how I feel on the brink of calamity

at this instant, how afraid I am of myself!” And she turned away,

hiding her sobs.

“But what are you talking about?” he said, horrified at her expression

of despair, and again bending over her, he took her hand and kissed it.

“What is it for? Do I seek amusements outside our home? Don’t I avoid

the society of women?”

“Well, yes! If that were all!” she said.

“Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of mind? I am ready

to do anything to make you happy,” he said, touched by her expression

of despair; “what wouldn’t I do to save you from distress of any sort,

as now, Anna!” he said.

“It’s nothing, nothing!” she said. “I don’t know myself whether it’s

the solitary life, my nerves.... Come, don’t let us talk of it. What

about the race? You haven’t told me!” she inquired, trying to conceal

her triumph at the victory, which had anyway been on her side.

He asked for supper, and began telling her about the races; but in his

tone, in his eyes, which became more and more cold, she saw that he did

not forgive her for her victory, that the feeling of obstinacy with

which she had been struggling had asserted itself again in him. He was

colder to her than before, as though he were regretting his surrender.

And she, remembering the words that had given her the victory, “how I

feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of myself,” saw that

this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could not be used a second

time. And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there

had grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could

not exorcise from his, and still less from her own heart.

Chapter 13

There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially

if he sees that all around him are living in the same way. Levin could

not have believed three months before that he could have gone quietly

to sleep in the condition in which he was that day, that leading an

aimless, irrational life, living too beyond his means, after drinking

to excess (he could not call what happened at the club anything else),

forming inappropriately friendly relations with a man with whom his

wife had once been in love, and a still more inappropriate call upon a

woman who could only be called a lost woman, after being fascinated by

that woman and causing his wife distress—he could still go quietly to

sleep. But under the influence of fatigue, a sleepless night, and the

wine he had drunk, his sleep was sound and untroubled.

At five o’clock the creak of a door opening waked him. He jumped up and

looked round. Kitty was not in bed beside him. But there was a light

moving behind the screen, and he heard her steps.

“What is it?... what is it?” he said, half-asleep. “Kitty! What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said, coming from behind the screen with a candle in her

hand. “I felt unwell,” she said, smiling a particularly sweet and

meaning smile.

“What? has it begun?” he said in terror. “We ought to send....” and

hurriedly he reached after his clothes.

“No, no,” she said, smiling and holding his hand. “It’s sure to be

nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It’s all over now.”

And getting into bed, she blew out the candle, lay down and was still.

Though he thought her stillness suspicious, as though she were holding

her breath, and still more suspicious the expression of peculiar

tenderness and excitement with which, as she came from behind the

screen, she said “nothing,” he was so sleepy that he fell asleep at

once. Only later he remembered the stillness of her breathing, and

understood all that must have been passing in her sweet, precious heart

while she lay beside him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest

event in a woman’s life. At seven o’clock he was waked by the touch of

her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle whisper. She seemed struggling

between regret at waking him, and the desire to talk to him.

“Kostya, don’t be frightened. It’s all right. But I fancy.... We ought

to send for Lizaveta Petrovna.”

The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed, holding some

knitting, which she had been busy upon during the last few days.

“Please, don’t be frightened, it’s all right. I’m not a bit afraid,”

she said, seeing his scared face, and she pressed his hand to her bosom

and then to her lips.

He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his eyes fixed on her,

as he put on his dressing gown; then he stopped, still looking at her.

He had to go, but he could not tear himself from her eyes. He thought

he loved her face, knew her expression, her eyes, but never had he seen

it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed to himself, thinking

of the distress he had caused her yesterday. Her flushed face, fringed

with soft curling hair under her night cap, was radiant with joy and

courage.

Though there was so little that was complex or artificial in Kitty’s

character in general, Levin was struck by what was revealed now, when

suddenly all disguises were thrown off and the very kernel of her soul

shone in her eyes. And in this simplicity and nakedness of her soul,

she, the very woman he loved in her, was more manifest than ever. She

looked at him, smiling; but all at once her brows twitched, she threw

up her head, and going quickly up to him, clutched his hand and pressed

close up to him, breathing her hot breath upon him. She was in pain and

was, as it were, complaining to him of her suffering. And for the first

minute, from habit, it seemed to him that he was to blame. But in her

eyes there was a tenderness that told him that she was far from

reproaching him, that she loved him for her sufferings. “If not I, who

is to blame for it?” he thought unconsciously, seeking someone

responsible for this suffering for him to punish; but there was no one

responsible. She was suffering, complaining, and triumphing in her

sufferings, and rejoicing in them, and loving them. He saw that

something sublime was being accomplished in her soul, but what? He

could not make it out. It was beyond his understanding.

“I have sent to mamma. You go quickly to fetch Lizaveta Petrovna ...

Kostya!... Nothing, it’s over.”

She moved away from him and rang the bell.

“Well, go now; Pasha’s coming. I am all right.”

And Levin saw with astonishment that she had taken up the knitting she

had brought in in the night and begun working at it again.

As Levin was going out of one door, he heard the maid-servant come in

at the other. He stood at the door and heard Kitty giving exact

directions to the maid, and beginning to help her move the bedstead.

He dressed, and while they were putting in his horses, as a hired

sledge was not to be seen yet, he ran again up to the bedroom, not on

tiptoe, it seemed to him, but on wings. Two maid-servants were

carefully moving something in the bedroom.

Kitty was walking about knitting rapidly and giving directions.

“I’m going for the doctor. They have sent for Lizaveta Petrovna, but

I’ll go on there too. Isn’t there anything wanted? Yes, shall I go to

Dolly’s?”

She looked at him, obviously not hearing what he was saying.

“Yes, yes. Do go,” she said quickly, frowning and waving her hand to

him.

He had just gone into the drawing-room, when suddenly a plaintive moan

sounded from the bedroom, smothered instantly. He stood still, and for

a long while he could not understand.

“Yes, that is she,” he said to himself, and clutching at his head he

ran downstairs.

“Lord have mercy on us! pardon us! aid us!” he repeated the words that

for some reason came suddenly to his lips. And he, an unbeliever,

repeated these words not with his lips only. At that instant he knew

that all his doubts, even the impossibility of believing with his

reason, of which he was aware in himself, did not in the least hinder

his turning to God. All of that now floated out of his soul like dust.

To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself,

his soul, and his love?

The horse was not yet ready, but feeling a peculiar concentration of

his physical forces and his intellect on what he had to do, he started

off on foot without waiting for the horse, and told Kouzma to overtake

him.

At the corner he met a night cabman driving hurriedly. In the little

sledge, wrapped in a velvet cloak, sat Lizaveta Petrovna with a

kerchief round her head. “Thank God! thank God!” he said, overjoyed to

recognize her little fair face which wore a peculiarly serious, even

stern expression. Telling the driver not to stop, he ran along beside

her.

“For two hours, then? Not more?” she inquired. “You should let Pyotr

Dmitrievitch know, but don’t hurry him. And get some opium at the

chemist’s.”

“So you think that it may go on well? Lord have mercy on us and help

us!” Levin said, seeing his own horse driving out of the gate. Jumping

into the sledge beside Kouzma, he told him to drive to the doctor’s.

Chapter 14

The doctor was not yet up, and the footman said that “he had been up

late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon.” The

footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and seemed very busy about

them. This concentration of the footman upon his lamps, and his

indifference to what was passing in Levin, at first astounded him, but

immediately on considering the question he realized that no one knew or

was bound to know his feelings, and that it was all the more necessary

to act calmly, sensibly, and resolutely to get through this wall of

indifference and attain his aim.

“Don’t be in a hurry or let anything slip,” Levin said to himself,

feeling a greater and greater flow of physical energy and attention to

all that lay before him to do.

Having ascertained that the doctor was not getting up, Levin considered

various plans, and decided on the following one: that Kouzma should go

for another doctor, while he himself should go to the chemist’s for

opium, and if when he came back the doctor had not yet begun to get up,

he would either by tipping the footman, or by force, wake the doctor at

all hazards.

At the chemist’s the lank shopman sealed up a packet of powders for a

coachman who stood waiting, and refused him opium with the same

callousness with which the doctor’s footman had cleaned his lamp

chimneys. Trying not to get flurried or out of temper, Levin mentioned

the names of the doctor and midwife, and explaining what the opium was

needed for, tried to persuade him. The assistant inquired in German

whether he should give it, and receiving an affirmative reply from

behind the partition, he took out a bottle and a funnel, deliberately

poured the opium from a bigger bottle into a little one, stuck on a

label, sealed it up, in spite of Levin’s request that he would not do

so, and was about to wrap it up too. This was more than Levin could

stand; he took the bottle firmly out of his hands, and ran to the big

glass doors. The doctor was not even now getting up, and the footman,

busy now in putting down the rugs, refused to wake him. Levin

deliberately took out a ten rouble note, and, careful to speak slowly,

though losing no time over the business, he handed him the note, and

explained that Pyotr Dmitrievitch (what a great and important personage

he seemed to Levin now, this Pyotr Dmitrievitch, who had been of so

little consequence in his eyes before!) had promised to come at any

time; that he would certainly not be angry! and that he must therefore

wake him at once.

The footman agreed, and went upstairs, taking Levin into the waiting

room.

Levin could hear through the door the doctor coughing, moving about,

washing, and saying something. Three minutes passed; it seemed to Levin

that more than an hour had gone by. He could not wait any longer.

“Pyotr Dmitrievitch, Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” he said in an imploring voice

at the open door. “For God’s sake, forgive me! See me as you are. It’s

been going on more than two hours already.”

“In a minute; in a minute!” answered a voice, and to his amazement

Levin heard that the doctor was smiling as he spoke.

“For one instant.”

“In a minute.”

Two minutes more passed while the doctor was putting on his boots, and

two minutes more while the doctor put on his coat and combed his hair.

“Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” Levin was beginning again in a plaintive voice,

just as the doctor came in dressed and ready. “These people have no

conscience,” thought Levin. “Combing his hair, while we’re dying!”

“Good morning!” the doctor said to him, shaking hands, and, as it were,

teasing him with his composure. “There’s no hurry. Well now?”

Trying to be as accurate as possible, Levin began to tell him every

unnecessary detail of his wife’s condition, interrupting his account

repeatedly with entreaties that the doctor would come with him at once.

“Oh, you needn’t be in any hurry. You don’t understand, you know. I’m

certain I’m not wanted, still I’ve promised, and if you like, I’ll

come. But there’s no hurry. Please sit down; won’t you have some

coffee?”

Levin stared at him with eyes that asked whether he was laughing at

him; but the doctor had no notion of making fun of him.

“I know, I know,” the doctor said, smiling; “I’m a married man myself;

and at these moments we husbands are very much to be pitied. I’ve a

patient whose husband always takes refuge in the stables on such

occasions.”

“But what do you think, Pyotr Dmitrievitch? Do you suppose it may go

all right?”

“Everything points to a favorable issue.”

“So you’ll come immediately?” said Levin, looking wrathfully at the

servant who was bringing in the coffee.

“In an hour’s time.”

“Oh, for mercy’s sake!”

“Well, let me drink my coffee, anyway.”

The doctor started upon his coffee. Both were silent.

“The Turks are really getting beaten, though. Did you read yesterday’s

telegrams?” said the doctor, munching some roll.

“No, I can’t stand it!” said Levin, jumping up. “So you’ll be with us

in a quarter of an hour.”

“In half an hour.”

“On your honor?”

When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as the princess, and

they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had tears in

her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him,

and burst into tears.

“Well, my dear Lizaveta Petrovna?” she queried, clasping the hand of

the midwife, who came out to meet them with a beaming and anxious face.

“She’s going on well,” she said; “persuade her to lie down. She will be

easier so.”

From the moment when he had waked up and understood what was going on,

Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was before him, and

without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid upsetting his

wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her courage.

Without allowing himself even to think of what was to come, of how it

would end, judging from his inquiries as to the usual duration of these

ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced himself to bear up and to

keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had seemed to

him he could do this. But when he came back from the doctor’s and saw

her sufferings again, he fell to repeating more and more frequently:

“Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” He sighed, and flung his head

up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would burst

into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had

passed.

But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the

full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings,

and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it

because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling

that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his

heart would break with sympathy and pain.

But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more,

and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.

All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no

conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all

sense of time. Minutes—those minutes when she sent for him and he held

her moist hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence

and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him

minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a

candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five o’clock in the

afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten o’clock in the morning,

he would not have been more surprised. Where he was all this time, he

knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen face,

sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to

reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought,

with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down her

tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat

cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm, resolute, reassuring

face, and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning

face. But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not

know. The princess was with the doctor in the bedroom, then in the

study, where a table set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not

there, but Dolly was. Then Levin remembered he had been sent somewhere.

Once he had been sent to move a table and sofa. He had done this

eagerly, thinking it had to be done for her sake, and only later on he

found it was his own bed he had been getting ready. Then he had been

sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor had answered

and then had said something about the irregularities in the municipal

council. Then he had been sent to the bedroom to help the old princess

to move the holy picture in its silver and gold setting, and with the

princess’s old waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and

had broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried to reassure

him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried the holy picture

and set it at Kitty’s head, carefully tucking it in behind the pillow.

But where, when, and why all this had happened, he could not tell. He

did not understand why the old princess took his hand, and looking

compassionately at him, begged him not to worry himself, and Dolly

persuaded him to eat something and led him out of the room, and even

the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration at him and offered

him a drop of something.

All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened

nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed

of his brother Nikolay. But that had been grief—this was joy. Yet that

grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of

life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through

which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the

contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to

inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while

reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

“Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” he repeated to himself

incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete

alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and

simply as he had in his childhood and first youth.

All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was away

from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after

another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ashtray, with

Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner,

about politics, about Marya Petrovna’s illness, and where Levin

suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he

had waked up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow,

where his heart seemed breaking and still did not break from

sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And every

time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream reaching

him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror that had

come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped

up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he was not to

blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her. But as he looked at

her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was filled with

terror and prayed: “Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!” And as time

went on, both these conditions became more intense; the calmer he

became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agonizing

became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before them.

He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her.

Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but

seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, “I am worrying

you,” he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell

to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.

Chapter 15

He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all

burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the

doctor that he should lie down. Levin sat listening to the doctor’s

stories of a quack mesmerizer and looking at the ashes of his

cigarette. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into

oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard

the doctor’s chat and understood it. Suddenly there came an unearthly

shriek. The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but

holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The

doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly.

Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as

strange. “I suppose it must be so,” he thought, and still sat where he

was. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the bedroom,

edged round Lizaveta Petrovna and the princess, and took up his

position at Kitty’s pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was some

change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend, and he

had no wish to see or comprehend. But he saw it by the face of Lizaveta

Petrovna. Lizaveta Petrovna’s face was stern and pale, and still as

resolute, though her jaws were twitching, and her eyes were fixed

intently on Kitty. Kitty’s swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair

clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his eyes. Her

lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill hands in her

moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.

“Don’t go, don’t go! I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid!” she said rapidly.

“Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me. You’re not afraid? Quick,

quick, Lizaveta Petrovna....”

She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly her

face was drawn, she pushed him away.

“Oh, this is awful! I’m dying, I’m dying! Go away!” she shrieked, and

again he heard that unearthly scream.

Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s all right,” Dolly called after him.

But they might say what they liked, he knew now that all was over. He

stood in the next room, his head leaning against the door post, and

heard shrieks, howls such as he had never heard before, and he knew

that what had been Kitty was uttering these shrieks. He had long ago

ceased to wish for the child. By now he loathed this child. He did not

even wish for her life now, all he longed for was the end of this awful

anguish.

“Doctor! What is it? What is it? By God!” he said, snatching at the

doctor’s hand as he came up.

“It’s the end,” said the doctor. And the doctor’s face was so grave as

he said it that Levin took _the end_ as meaning her death.

Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. The first thing he saw was the

face of Lizaveta Petrovna. It was even more frowning and stern. Kitty’s

face he did not know. In the place where it had been was something that

was fearful in its strained distortion and in the sounds that came from

it. He fell down with his head on the wooden framework of the bed,

feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful scream never paused, it

became still more awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit

of terror, suddenly it ceased. Levin could not believe his ears, but

there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued

stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive,

tender, and blissful, uttered softly, “It’s over!”

He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the quilt,

looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence

and tried to smile, and could not.

And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful far-away world in which he

had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself all

in an instant borne back to the old every-day world, glorified though

now, by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The

strained chords snapped, sobs and tears of joy which he had never

foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook, that for

long they prevented him from speaking.

Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife’s hand before his

lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers,

responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in

the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a flickering light in a lamp,

lay the life of a human creature, which had never existed before, and

which would now with the same right, with the same importance to

itself, live and create in its own image.

“Alive! alive! And a boy too! Set your mind at rest!” Levin heard

Lizaveta Petrovna saying, as she slapped the baby’s back with a shaking

hand.

“Mamma, is it true?” said Kitty’s voice.

The princess’s sobs were all the answers she could make. And in the

midst of the silence there came in unmistakable reply to the mother’s

question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices speaking in the room.

It was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive squall of the new human

being, who had so incomprehensibly appeared.

If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and that he had died

with her, and that their children were angels, and that God was

standing before him, he would have been surprised at nothing. But now,

coming back to the world of reality, he had to make great mental

efforts to take in that she was alive and well, and that the creature

squalling so desperately was his son. Kitty was alive, her agony was

over. And he was unutterably happy. That he understood; he was

completely happy in it. But the baby? Whence, why, who was he?... He

could not get used to the idea. It seemed to him something extraneous,

superfluous, to which he could not accustom himself.

Chapter 16

At ten o’clock the old prince, Sergey Ivanovitch, and Stepan

Arkadyevitch were sitting at Levin’s. Having inquired after Kitty, they

had dropped into conversation upon other subjects. Levin heard them,

and unconsciously, as they talked, going over the past, over what had

been up to that morning, he thought of himself as he had been yesterday

till that point. It was as though a hundred years had passed since

then. He felt himself exalted to unattainable heights, from which he

studiously lowered himself so as not to wound the people he was talking

to. He talked, and was all the time thinking of his wife, of her

condition now, of his son, in whose existence he tried to school

himself into believing. The whole world of woman, which had taken for

him since his marriage a new value he had never suspected before, was

now so exalted that he could not take it in in his imagination. He

heard them talk of yesterday’s dinner at the club, and thought: “What

is happening with her now? Is she asleep? How is she? What is she

thinking of? Is he crying, my son Dmitri?” And in the middle of the

conversation, in the middle of a sentence, he jumped up and went out of

the room.

“Send me word if I can see her,” said the prince.

“Very well, in a minute,” answered Levin, and without stopping, he went

to her room.

She was not asleep, she was talking gently with her mother, making

plans about the christening.

Carefully set to rights, with hair well-brushed, in a smart little cap

with some blue in it, her arms out on the quilt, she was lying on her

back. Meeting his eyes, her eyes drew him to her. Her face, bright

before, brightened still more as he drew near her. There was the same

change in it from earthly to unearthly that is seen in the face of the

dead. But then it means farewell, here it meant welcome. Again a rush

of emotion, such as he had felt at the moment of the child’s birth,

flooded his heart. She took his hand and asked him if he had slept. He

could not answer, and turned away, struggling with his weakness.

“I have had a nap, Kostya!” she said to him; “and I am so comfortable

now.”

She looked at him, but suddenly her expression changed.

“Give him to me,” she said, hearing the baby’s cry. “Give him to me,

Lizaveta Petrovna, and he shall look at him.”

“To be sure, his papa shall look at him,” said Lizaveta Petrovna,

getting up and bringing something red, and queer, and wriggling. “Wait

a minute, we’ll make him tidy first,” and Lizaveta Petrovna laid the

red wobbling thing on the bed, began untrussing and trussing up the

baby, lifting it up and turning it over with one finger and powdering

it with something.

Levin, looking at the tiny, pitiful creature, made strenuous efforts to

discover in his heart some traces of fatherly feeling for it. He felt

nothing towards it but disgust. But when it was undressed and he caught

a glimpse of wee, wee, little hands, little feet, saffron-colored, with

little toes, too, and positively with a little big toe different from

the rest, and when he saw Lizaveta Petrovna closing the wide-open

little hands, as though they were soft springs, and putting them into

linen garments, such pity for the little creature came upon him, and

such terror that she would hurt it, that he held her hand back.

Lizaveta Petrovna laughed.

“Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened!”

When the baby had been put to rights and transformed into a firm doll,

Lizaveta Petrovna dandled it as though proud of her handiwork, and

stood a little away so that Levin might see his son in all his glory.

Kitty looked sideways in the same direction, never taking her eyes off

the baby. “Give him to me! give him to me!” she said, and even made as

though she would sit up.

“What are you thinking of, Katerina Alexandrovna, you mustn’t move like

that! Wait a minute. I’ll give him to you. Here we’re showing papa what

a fine fellow we are!”

And Lizaveta Petrovna, with one hand supporting the wobbling head,

lifted up on the other arm the strange, limp, red creature, whose head

was lost in its swaddling clothes. But it had a nose, too, and slanting

eyes and smacking lips.

“A splendid baby!” said Lizaveta Petrovna.

Levin sighed with mortification. This splendid baby excited in him no

feeling but disgust and compassion. It was not at all the feeling he

had looked forward to.

He turned away while Lizaveta Petrovna put the baby to the unaccustomed

breast.

Suddenly laughter made him look round. The baby had taken the breast.

“Come, that’s enough, that’s enough!” said Lizaveta Petrovna, but Kitty

would not let the baby go. He fell asleep in her arms.

“Look, now,” said Kitty, turning the baby so that he could see it. The

aged-looking little face suddenly puckered up still more and the baby

sneezed.

Smiling, hardly able to restrain his tears, Levin kissed his wife and

went out of the dark room. What he felt towards this little creature

was utterly unlike what he had expected. There was nothing cheerful and

joyous in the feeling; on the contrary, it was a new torture of

apprehension. It was the consciousness of a new sphere of liability to

pain. And this sense was so painful at first, the apprehension lest

this helpless creature should suffer was so intense, that it prevented

him from noticing the strange thrill of senseless joy and even pride

that he had felt when the baby sneezed.

Chapter 17

Stepan Arkadyevitch’s affairs were in a very bad way.

The money for two-thirds of the forest had all been spent already, and

he had borrowed from the merchant in advance at ten per cent discount,

almost all the remaining third. The merchant would not give more,

especially as Darya Alexandrovna, for the first time that winter

insisting on her right to her own property, had refused to sign the

receipt for the payment of the last third of the forest. All his salary

went on household expenses and in payment of petty debts that could not

be put off. There was positively no money.

This was unpleasant and awkward, and in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s opinion

things could not go on like this. The explanation of the position was,

in his view, to be found in the fact that his salary was too small. The

post he filled had been unmistakably very good five years ago, but it

was so no longer.

Petrov, the bank director, had twelve thousand; Sventitsky, a company

director, had seventeen thousand; Mitin, who had founded a bank,

received fifty thousand.