‘You said a couple of words, but I cannot answer in a couple of words, because … Excuse me for a moment …’
The secretary entered with unceremonious deference and a certain modest awareness, common to all secretaries, of his superiority to his chief in his knowledge of matters, came up to Oblonsky with some papers, and under the guise of a question started to explain some difficulty. Without hearing him out, Stepan Arkadyich gently placed his hand on the secretary’s sleeve.
‘No, you just do as I have told you,’ he said, softening the remark with a smile, and after briefly explaining to him how he understood the matter, he pushed the papers aside and said: ‘Just do as I have told you, please. If you wouldn’t mind, Zakhar Nikitich.’
The flustered secretary departed. Having completely recovered from his embarrassment during the consultation with the secretary, Levin stood leaning both his elbows on a chair, and there was an expression of scornful attention on his face.
‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘What don’t you understand?’ said Oblonsky, smiling just as merrily as he reached for a cigarette. He was expecting some strange outburst from Levin.
‘I don’t understand what you are all doing,’ said Levin, shrugging his shoulders. ‘How can you seriously do this?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Because there is nothing to do.’
‘You might think that, but we are overwhelmed with work.’
‘Paperwork. Well, yes, you have a gift for that,’ added Levin.
‘You mean you think I am lacking in something?’
‘Maybe you are,’ said Levin. ‘All the same, I am in awe of your eminence and am proud to count such an eminent man as my friend. However, you haven’t answered my question,’ he added, with a desperate effort looking Oblonsky straight in the eye.
‘Well, all right, all right. Wait a bit and you’ll come round. All right, you might have eight thousand acres in the Karazin district,* and all those muscles, and the freshness of a twelve-year-old girl, but you will come round to our way of thinking. Now, about what you were asking: no change, but it is a shame you haven’t been here for such a long time.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Levin in alarm.
‘Oh, nothing,’ answered Oblonsky. ‘We will talk about it. But why actually have you come this time?’
‘Oh, we will talk about that later too,’ said Levin, blushing to his roots again.
‘Well, all right. I understand,’ said Stepan Arkadyich. ‘The thing is: I would invite you home, but my wife’s not terribly well. Here’s what I suggest, though: if you want to see them, they are bound to be in the Zoological Gardens today from four to five. Kitty goes skating. You go there, I’ll drop by, and then we will go off and have dinner together somewhere.’
‘Excellent. I’ll see you later then.’
‘But look, I know you, you are bound to forget, or you’ll suddenly go off back to the country!’ Stepan Arkadyich exclaimed with a laugh.
‘No, I won’t, really.’
And Levin left the office, remembering that he had forgotten to bow to Oblonsky’s colleagues only when he was already in the doorway.
‘He must be a very energetic person,’ said Grinevich, after Levin had left.
‘Oh yes indeed, my friend,’ said Stepan Arkadyich, shaking his head. ‘He’s a lucky man! Three thousand acres in the Karazin district, everything ahead of him, and such vigour! Not like yours truly.’
‘What have you got to complain of, Stepan Arkadyich?’
‘Oh, things are grim, not good at all,’ said Stepan Arkadyich with a heavy sigh.
6
WHEN Oblonsky had asked Levin the real reason for his visit, Levin had blushed and been angry with himself for blushing, because he could not reply: ‘I have come to propose to your sister-in-law,’ although this was the only reason for his visit.
The Levin and Shcherbatsky families belonged to the old Moscow nobility, and there had always been close and friendly relations between them. The tie had been further strengthened during Levin’s student days. He had prepared for and entered university alongside the young Prince Shcherbatsky, Dolly and Kitty’s brother. Levin had been a frequent visitor to the Shcherbatsky household at that time, and had fallen in love with the Shcherbatsky family. However strange it may seem, Konstantin Levin really had fallen in love with the household, with the family, and particularly its female half. Levin could not remember his own mother, and his only sister was older than him, so it was in the Shcherbatsky household that he encountered for the first time the old noble, educated, and honest family milieu that had been denied him by the death of his father and mother. All the members of this family, particularly its female half, seemed to him to be enveloped in some mysterious, poetic veil, and not only did he fail to see any faults in them, but presumed the most elevated feelings and every possible perfection behind this poetic veil enveloping them. Why these three young ladies had to speak French one day and English the next; why at certain times they took turns in playing the piano, the sounds of which always could be heard in their brother’s room upstairs, where the students were working; why all those French literature, music, drawing, and dancing teachers came to the house; why at certain times all three young ladies drove off in a carriage with Mademoiselle Linon to Tverskoy Boulevard wearing their satin pelisses—Dolly in a long one, Natalie in a half-length one, and Kitty in one that was so short that her shapely young legs in their tightly pulled-up red stockings were on full display; why they had to walk along Tverskoy Boulevard accompanied by a footman with a gold cockade on his hat—none of this, nor many other things which went on in their mysterious world, did he understand, but he knew that everything that went on was wonderful, and he was in love with precisely the mysteriousness of what was taking place.
During his student years he had almost fallen in love with Dolly, the eldest, but she was soon married off to Oblonsky. Then he was on the verge of falling in love with the second. He somehow felt he had to fall in love with one of the sisters, but could not work out exactly which one. But Natalie went and married the diplomat Lvov as soon as she came out. Kitty was still a child when Levin left university. The young Shcherbatsky, who joined the navy, drowned in the Baltic, and Levin’s contacts with the family became fewer, despite his friendship with Oblonsky. But at the beginning of that winter, when Levin came to Moscow after a year in the country and saw the Shcherbatskys, he realized which of the three he was really destined to fall in love with.
It would seem nothing could be simpler than for him, a wealthy rather than poor man from a good family, thirty-two years old, to propose to Princess Shcherbatskaya; in all probability he would immediately be accepted as a good match. But Levin was in love, and therefore it seemed to him that Kitty was such perfection in every respect, and a being so far above everything ordinary, while he himself was such an ordinary, lowly being, that there could not be even the remotest thought that either she herself or others could acknowledge him as being worthy of her.
After spending two months in Moscow as if in a daze, seeing Kitty almost every day in society, which he had started to frequent in order to meet her, Levin had suddenly decided it could never happen, and so he had left for the country.
Levin’s conviction that it could never happen rested on the notion that in the eyes of her family he was an unsuitable, unworthy match for the lovely Kitty, and that Kitty herself could never love him. In the eyes of her family he had no regular fixed occupation or position in society, while his contemporaries, now that he was thirty-two years old, had already become colonels and aides-de-camp, professors and respected leaders—directors of banks or railways, or chairmen of government institutions, like Oblonsky; whereas he (and he knew very well how he must seem to others) was a landowner who bred cattle, shot snipe, and put up buildings, in other words, a talentless fellow who had not come to anything, and who, in the eyes of society, was doing exactly what good-for-nothing people do.