第110章

`I think you are partly right. Our difference of opinion amounts to this: that you make the mainspring self-interest, while I contend that interest in the common weal is bound to exist in every man of a certain degree of advancement. Possibly you are right too - that action founded on material interest would be more desirable. You are altogether, as the French say, too primesautière a nature; you must have intense, energetic action, or nothing.'

Levin listened to his brother and did not understand a single word, and did not want to understand. He was only afraid his brother might ask him some question which would make it evident he had not heard.

`So that's what I think it is, my dear boy,' said Sergei Ivanovich, touching him on the shoulder.

`Yes, of course. But, do you know? I won't stand up for my view,'

answered Levin, with a guilty, childlike smile. `Whatever was it I was disputing about?' he wondered. `Of course, I'm right, and he's right, and it's all first-rate. Only I must go round to the countinghouse and see to things.' He got up, stretching and smiling.

Sergei Ivanovich smiled too.

`If you want to go out, let's go together,' he said, disinclined to be parted from his brother, who seemed positively breathing out freshness and energy. `Come, we'll go to the countinghouse, if you have to go there.'

`Oh, heavens!' shouted Levin, so loudly that Sergei Ivanovich was quite frightened.

`What, what is the matter?

`How's Agathya Mikhailovna's hand?' said Levin, slapping himself on the head. `I'd positively forgotten her.'

`It's much better.'

`Well, anyway, I'll run down to her. Before you've time to get your hat on, I'll be back.'

And he ran downstairs, clattering with his heels like a spring rattle.

[Next Chapter] [Table of Contents] TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 3, Chapter 07[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 7 Stepan Arkadyevich had gone to Peterburg to perform the most natural and essential official duty - so familiar to everyone in the government service, though incomprehensible to outsiders - that duty but for which one could hardly be in government service: of reminding the ministry of his existence;and having, for the due performance of this rite, taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably spending his days at the races and in the summer villas. Meanwhile Dolly and the children had moved into the country, to cut down expenses as much as possible. She had gone to Ergushovo, the estate that had been her dowry, and the one where in spring the forest had been sold. It was nearly fifty verstas from Levin's Pokrovskoe.

The big old house at Ergushovo had been pulled down long ago, and the old Prince had had the wing done up and added to. Twenty years before, when Dolly was a child, the wing had been roomy and comfortable, though, like all wings, it stood sideways to the entrance avenue, and to the south. But by now this wing was old and dilapidated. When Stepan Arkadyevich had gone down in the spring to sell the forest, Dolly had begged him to look over the house and order what repairs might be needed. Stepan Arkadyevich, like an unfaithful husbands indeed, was very solicitous for his wife's comfort, and he had himself looked over the house, and given instructions about everything that he considered necessary. What he considered necessary was to cover all the furniture with new cretonne, to put up curtains, to weed the garden, to make a little bridge on the pond, and to plant flowers.

But he forgot many other essential matters, the want of which greatly distressed Darya Alexandrovna later on.

In spite of Stepan Arkadyevich's efforts to be an attentive father and husband, he never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and children.

He had bachelor tastes, and it was in accordance with them that he shaped his life. On his return to Moscow he informed his wife with pride that everything was ready, that the house would be a pretty toy, and that he most certainly advised her to go. His wife's staying away in the country was very agreeable to Stepan Arkadyevich from every point of view: it did the children good, it decreased expenses, and it left him more at liberty.

Darya Alexandrovna regarded staying in the country for the summer as essential for the children, especially for the little girl, who had not succeeded in regaining her strength after the scarlatina, and also as a means of escaping the petty humiliations, the little bills owing to the wood merchant, the fishmonger, the shoemaker, which made her miserable. Besides this, she was pleased to go away to the country because she was dreaming of getting her sister Kitty to stay with her there. Kitty was to be back from abroad in the middle of the summer, and bathing had been prescribed for her. Kitty wrote that no prospect was so alluring as to spend the summer with Dolly at Ergushovo, full of childhood associations for both of them.

The first days of her existence in the country were very hard for Dolly. She used to stay in the country as a child, and the impression she had retained of it was that the country was a refuge from all the unpleasantness of the town, that life there, though not luxurious - Dolly could easily make up her mind to that - was cheap and comfortable; that there was plenty of everything, everything was cheap, everything could be got, and children were happy. But now, coming to the country as the head of a family, she perceived that it was all utterly unlike what she had fancied.