Chapter 3

Kitty was particularly glad of a chance of being alone with her husband, for she had noticed the shade of mortification that had passed over his face—always so quick to reflect every feeling—at the moment when he had come onto the terrace and asked what they were talking of, and had got no answer.

When they had set off on foot ahead of the others, and had come out of sight of the house onto the beaten dusty road, marked with rusty wheels and sprinkled with grains of corn, she clung faster to his arm and pressed it closer to her. He had quite forgotten the momentary unpleasant impression, and alone with her he felt, now that the thought of her approaching motherhood was never for a moment absent from his mind, a new and delicious bliss, quite pure from all alloy of sense, in the being near to the woman he loved. There was no need of speech, yet he longed to hear the sound of her voice, which like her eyes had changed since she had been with child. In her voice, as in her eyes, there was that softness and gravity which is found in people continually concentrated on some cherished pursuit.

‘So you’re not tired? Lean more on me,’ said he.

‘No, I’m so glad of a chance of being alone with you, and I must own, though I’m happy with them, I do regret our winter evenings alone.’

‘That was good, but this is even better. Both are better,’ he said, squeezing her hand.

‘Do you know what we were talking about when you came in?’

‘About jam?’

‘Oh, yes, about jam too; but afterwards, about how men make offers.’

‘Ah!’ said Levin, listening more to the sound of her voice than to the words she was saying, and all the while paying attention to the road, which passed now through the forest, and avoiding places where she might make a false step.

‘And about Sergey Ivanovitch and Varenka. You’ve noticed?… I’m very anxious for it,’ she went on. ‘What do you think about it?’ And she peeped into his face.

‘I don’t know what to think,’ Levin answered, smiling. ‘Sergey seems very strange to me in that way. I told you, you know…’

‘Yes, that he was in love with that girl who died….’

‘That was when I was a child; I know about it from hearsay and tradition. I remember him then. He was wonderfully sweet. But I’ve watched him since with women; he is friendly, some of them he likes, but one feels that to him they’re simply people, not women.’

‘Yes, but now with Varenka…I fancy there’s something…’

‘Perhaps there is…. But one has to know him…. He’s a peculiar, wonderful person. He lives a spiritual life only. He’s too pure, too exalted a nature.’

‘Why? Would this lower him, then?’

‘No, but he’s so used to a spiritual life that he can’t reconcile himself with actual fact, and Varenka is after all fact.’

Levin had grown used by now to uttering his thought boldly, without taking the trouble of clothing it in exact language. He knew that his wife, in such moments of loving tenderness as now, would understand what he meant to say from a hint, and she did understand him.

‘Yes, but there’s not so much of that actual fact about her as about me. I can see that he would never have cared for me. She is altogether spiritual.’

‘Oh, no, he is so fond of you, and I am always so glad when my people like you….’

‘Yes, he’s very nice to me; but…’

‘It’s not as it was with poor Nikolay…you really cared for each other,’ Levin finished. ‘Why not speak of him?’ he added. ‘I sometimes blame myself for not; it ends in one’s forgetting. Ah, how terrible and dear he was!… Yes, what were we talking about?’ Levin said, after a pause.

‘You think he can’t fall in love,’ said Kitty, translating into her own language.

‘It’s not so much that he can’t fall in love,’ Levin said, smiling, ‘but he has not the weakness necessary…. I’ve always envied him, and even now, when I’m so happy, I still envy him.’

‘You envy him for not being able to fall in love?’

‘I envy him for being better than I,’ said Levin. ‘He does not live for himself. His whole life is subordinated to his duty. And that’s why he can be calm and contented.’

‘And you?’ Kitty asked, with an ironical and loving smile.

She could never have explained the chain of thought that made her smile; but the last link in it was that her husband, in exalting his brother and abasing himself, was not quite sincere. Kitty knew that this insincerity came from his love for his brother, from his sense of shame at being too happy, and above all from his unflagging craving to be better—she loved it in him, and so she smiled.

‘And you? What are you dissatisfied with?’ she asked, with the same smile.

Her disbelief in his self-dissatisfaction delighted him, and unconsciously he tried to draw her into giving utterance to the grounds of her disbelief.

‘I am happy, but dissatisfied with myself…’ he said.

‘Why, how can you be dissatisfied with yourself if you are happy?’

‘Well, how shall I say?… In my heart I really care for nothing whatever but that you should not stumble—see? Oh, but really you mustn’t skip about like that!’ he cried, breaking off to scold her for too agile a movement in stepping over a branch that lay in the path. ‘But when I think about myself, and compare myself with others, especially with my brother, I feel I’m a poor creature.’

‘But in what way?’ Kitty pursued with the same smile. ‘Don’t you too work for others? What about your co-operative settlement, and your work on the estate, and your book?…’

‘Oh, but I feel, and particularly just now—it’s your fault,’ he said, pressing her hand—‘that all that doesn’t count. I do it in a way halfheartedly. If I could care for all that as I care for you!… Instead of that, I do it in these days like a task that is set me.’

‘Well, what would you say about papa?’ asked Kitty. ‘Is he a poor creature then, as he does nothing for the public good?’

‘He?—no! But then one must have the simplicity, the straightforwardness, the goodness of your father: and I haven’t got that. I do nothing, and I fret about it. It’s all your doing. Before there was you—and this too,’ he added with a glance towards her waist that she understood—‘I put all my energies into work; now I can’t, and I’m ashamed; I do it just as though it were a task set me, I’m pretending….’

‘Well, but would you like to change this minute with Sergey Ivanovitch?’ said Kitty. ‘Would you like to do this work for the general good, and to love the task set you, as he does, and nothing else?’

‘Of course not,’ said Levin. ‘But I’m so happy that I don’t understand anything. So you think he’ll make her an offer today?’ he added after a brief silence.

‘I think so, and I don’t think so. Only, I’m awfully anxious for it. Here, wait a minute.’ She stooped down and picked a wild camomile at the edge of the path. ‘Come, count: he does propose, he doesn’t,’ she said, giving him the flower.

‘He does, he doesn’t,’ said Levin, tearing off the white petals.

‘No, no!’ Kitty, snatching at his hand, stopped him. She had been watching his fingers with interest. ‘You picked off two.’

‘Oh, but see, this little one shan’t count to make up,’ said Levin, tearing off a little half-grown petal. ‘Here’s the wagonette overtaking us.’

‘Aren’t you tired, Kitty?’ called the princess.

‘Not in the least.’

‘If you are you can get in, as the horses are quiet and walking.’

But it was not worth while to get in, they were quite near the place, and all walked on together.

Chapter 4

Varenka, with her white kerchief on her black hair, surrounded by the children, gaily and good-humoredly looking after them, and at the same time visibly excited at the possibility of receiving a declaration from the man she cared for, was very attractive. Sergey Ivanovitch walked beside her, and never left off admiring her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something special that he had felt long, long ago, and only once, in his early youth. The feeling of happiness in being near her continually grew, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge, slender-stalked agaric fungus in her basket, he looked straight into her face, and noticing the flush of glad and alarmed excitement that overspread her face, he was confused himself, and smiled to her in silence a smile that said too much.

‘If so,’ he said to himself, ‘I ought to think it over and make up my mind, and not give way like a boy to the impulse of a moment.’

‘I’m going to pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my efforts will make no show,’ he said, and he left the edge of the forest where they were walking on low silky grass between old birch trees standing far apart, and went more into the heart of the wood, where between the white birch trunks there were gray trunks of aspen and dark bushes of hazel. Walking some forty paces away, Sergey Ivanovitch, knowing he was out of sight, stood still behind a bushy spindle-tree in full flower with its rosy red catkins. It was perfectly still all round him. Only overhead in the birches under which he stood, the flies, like a swarm of bees, buzzed unceasingly, and from time to time the children’s voices were floated across to him. All at once he heard, not far from the edge of the wood, the sound of Varenka’s contralto voice, calling Grisha, and a smile of delight passed over Sergey Ivanovitch’s face. Conscious of this smile, he shook his head disapprovingly at his own condition, and taking out a cigar, he began lighting it. For a long while he could not get a match to light against the trunk of a birch tree. The soft scales of the white bark rubbed off the phosphorus, and the light went out. At last one of the matches burned, and the fragrant cigar smoke, hovering uncertainly in flat, wide coils, stretched away forwards and upwards over a bush under the overhanging branches of a birch tree. Watching the streak of smoke, Sergey Ivanovitch walked gently on, deliberating on his position.

‘Why not?’ he thought. ‘If it were only a passing fancy or a passion, if it were only this attraction—this mutual attraction (I can call it a mutual attraction), but if I felt that it was in contradiction with the whole bent of my life—if I felt that in giving way to this attraction I should be false to my vocation and my duty…but it’s not so. The only thing I can say against it is that, when I lost Marie, I said to myself that I would remain faithful to her memory. That’s the only thing I can say against my feeling…. That’s a great thing,’ Sergey Ivanovitch said to himself, feeling at the same time that this consideration had not the slightest importance for him personally, but would only perhaps detract from his romantic character in the eyes of others. ‘But apart from that, however much I searched, I should never find anything to say against my feeling. If I were choosing by considerations of suitability alone, I could not have found anything better.’

However many women and girls he thought of whom he knew, he could not think of a girl who united to such a degree all, positively all, the qualities he would wish to see in his wife. She had all the charm and freshness of youth, but she was not a child; and if she loved him, she loved him consciously as a woman ought to love; that was one thing. Another point: she was not only far from being worldly, but had an unmistakable distaste for worldly society, and at the same time she knew the world, and had all the ways of a woman of the best society, which were absolutely essential to Sergey Ivanovitch’s conception of the woman who was to share his life. Thirdly: she was religious, and not like a child, unconsciously religious and good, as Kitty, for example, was, but her life was founded on religious principles. Even in trifling matters, Sergey Ivanovitch found in her all that he wanted in his wife: she was poor and alone in the world, so she would not bring with her a mass of relations and their influence into her husband’s house, as he saw now in Kitty’s case. She would owe everything to her husband, which was what he had always desired too for his future family life. And this girl, who united all these qualities, loved him. He was a modest man, but he could not help seeing it. And he loved her. There was one consideration against it—his age. But he came of a long-lived family, he had not a single gray hair, no one would have taken him for forty, and he remembered Varenka’s saying that it was only in Russia that men of fifty thought themselves old, and that in France a man of fifty considers himself dans la force de l’age, while a man of forty is un jeune homme. But what did the mere reckoning of years matter when he felt as young in heart as he had been twenty years ago? Was it not youth to feel as he felt now, when coming from the other side to the edge of the wood he saw in the glowing light of the slanting sunbeams the gracious figure of Varenka in her yellow gown with her basket, walking lightly by the trunk of an old birch tree, and when this impression of the sight of Varenka blended so harmoniously with the beauty of the view, of the yellow oatfield lying bathed in the slanting sunshine, and beyond it the distant ancient forest flecked with yellow and melting into the blue of the distance? His heart throbbed joyously. A softened feeling came over him. He felt that he had made up his mind. Varenka, who had just crouched down to pick a mushroom, rose with a supple movement and looked round. Flinging away the cigar, Sergey Ivanovitch advanced with resolute steps towards her.