by Leo Tolstoy
'Don't get excited. You must never get excited,' said her mother.
'But I'm not excited, mama. I think he'll propose today.'
'Ah, it's so strange, when and how a man proposes ... There's some obstacle, and suddenly it's broken through,' said Dolly, smiling pensively and recalling her past with Stepan Arkadyich.
'Mama, how did papa propose to you?' Kitty asked suddenly.
'There was nothing extraordinary, it was quite simple,' replied the princess, but her face became all bright at the memory.
'No, but how? Anyway, you loved him before you were allowed to talk?'
Kitty felt a special charm in being able to talk with her mother as an equal about these most important things in a woman's life.
'Of course I loved him. He used to visit us in the country.'
'But how did it get decided? Mama?'
'You probably think you invented something new? It was all the same: it got decided by looks, by smiles ...'
'How well you put it, mama! Precisely by looks and smiles,' Dolly confirmed.
'But what words did he say?'
'What did Kostya say to you?'
'He wrote with chalk. It was amazing ... It seems so long ago!' she said.
And the three women fell to thinking about the same thing. Kitty was the first to break the silence. She recalled that whole last winter before her marriage and her infatuation with Vronsky.
'One thing ... that former passion of Varenka's,' she said, recalling it by a natural train of thought. 'I wanted somehow to tell Sergei Ivanovich, to prepare him. They - all men,' she added, 'are terribly jealous of our past.'
'Not all,' said Dolly. 'You're judging by your husband. He still suffers from the memory of Vronsky. Yes? It's true?'
'It is,' Kitty replied, smiling pensively with her eyes.
'Only I don't know,' the princess-mother defended her motherly supervision of her daughter, 'what past of yours could bother him? That Vronsky courted you? That happens to every girl.'
'Well, that's not what we mean,' Kitty said, blushing.
'No, excuse me,' her mother went on, 'and then you yourself didn't want to let me have a talk with Vronsky. Remember?'
'Oh, mama!' Kitty said with a suffering look.
'Nowadays there's no holding you back... Your relations couldn't go further than was proper: I myself would have called him out. However, it won't do for you to get excited, my dear. Please remember that and calm yourself.'
'I'm perfectly calm.'
'How happily it turned out for Kitty that Anna came then,' said Dolly, 'and how unhappily for her. Precisely the opposite,' she added, struck by the thought. 'Anna was so happy then, and Kitty considered herself unhappy. How completely opposite! I often think about her.'
'A fine one to think about! A vile, disgusting woman, quite heartless,' said the mother, unable to forget that Kitty had married not Vronsky but Levin.
'Who wants to talk about that,' Kitty said in vexation. 'I don't think about it and I don't want to think ... And I don't want to think,' she repeated, hearing her husband's familiar footsteps on the terrace stairs.
'And I don't want to think - about what?' asked Levin, coming out on the terrace.
But no one answered him, and he did not repeat the question.
'I'm sorry I've disturbed your women's kingdom,' he said, looking around at them all with displeasure, realizing that they had been talking about something that they would not have talked about in his presence.
For a second he felt that he shared Agafya Mikhailovna's feeling -displeasure that the raspberry jam had been made without water, and in general with the alien Shcherbatsky influence. He smiled, however, and went over to Kitty.
'Well, how are you?' he asked, looking at her with the same expression with which everyone now addressed her.
'Oh, fine,' said Kitty, smiling, 'and you?'
'They hold three times more than a cart. So, shall we go for the children? I told them to harness up.'
'What, you want to take Kitty in the wagonette?' her mother said reproachfully.
'But at a walk, Princess.'
Levin never called the princess maman, as sons-in-law do, and that displeased her. But, though he loved and respected the princess very much, Levin could not call her that without profaning his feelings for his dead mother.
'Come with us, maman,' said Kitty.
'I don't want to witness this folly.'
'I'll go on foot, then. It's good for me.' Kitty got up, went over to her husband and took him by the hand.
'Good, but everything in moderation,' said the princess.
'Well, Agafya Mikhailovna, is the jam done?' said Levin, smiling at Agafya Mikhailovna and wishing to cheer her up. 'Is it good the new way?'
'Must be good. We'd say it's overcooked.'
'So much the better, Agafya Mikhailovna, it won't get mouldy. Our ice has all melted by now and there's nowhere to keep it,' said Kitty, understanding her husband's intention at once and addressing the old woman with the same feeling. 'Besides, your pickling is so good, my mama says she's never tasted the like anywhere,' she added, smiling and straightening the old woman's kerchief.
Agafya Mikhailovna looked crossly at Kitty.
'Don't comfort me, mistress. I just look at you and him and I feel cheered,' she said, and this crude expression 'him' instead of 'the master' touched Kitty.
'Come mushrooming with us, you can show us the places.' Agafya Mikhailovna smiled and shook her head, as if to say: 'I'd gladly be angry with you, but it's impossible.'
'Please do as I advise you,' said the old princess, 'cover the jam with a piece of paper and wet it with rum: it will never get mouldy, even without ice.'
III
Kitty was especially glad of the chance to be alone with her husband, because she had noticed a shadow of chagrin cross his face, which reflected everything so vividly, when he had come out on the terrace, asked what they were talking about and received no answer.
When they went on foot ahead of the others and were out of sight of the house on the hard-packed, dusty road strewn with ears and grains of rye, she leaned more heavily on his arm and pressed it to her. He had already forgotten the momentary, unpleasant impression, and alone with her now, when the thought of her pregnancy never left him for a moment, he experienced what was for him a new and joyful delight, completely free of sensuality, in the closeness of a loved woman. There was nothing to say, but he wanted to hear the sound of her voice, which had changed now with her pregnancy, as had her look. In her voice, as in her look, there was a softness and seriousness such as occurs in people who are constantly focused on one beloved task.
'So you won't get tired? Lean more on me,' he said.
'No, I'm so glad of the chance to be alone with you, and I confess, good as it is for me to be with them, I miss our winter evenings together.'
'That was good, and this is still better. Both are better,' he said, pressing her arm to him.
'Do you know what we were talking about when you came?'
'Jam?' 'Yes, about jam, too. But also about how men propose.'
'Ah!' said Levin, listening more to the sound of her voice than to what she was saying, and thinking all the while about the road, which now took them through the woods, and avoiding places where she might stumble.
'And about Sergei Ivanych and Varenka. Have you noticed?... I wish it very much,' she went on. 'What do you think about it?' And she looked into his face.
'I don't know what to think,' Levin replied, smiling. 'I find Sergei very strange in that respect. I did tell you ...'
'Yes, that he was in love with that girl who died ...'
'That was when I was a child; I know it by hearsay. I remember him then. He was amazingly nice. But since then I've been observing him with women: he's courteous, he likes some of them, but you feel that they're simply people for him, not women.'
'Yes, but now with Varenka ... It seems there's something ...'
'Maybe there is ... But
you have to know him ... He's a special, astonishing man. He lives only a spiritual life. He's an exceedingly pure and high-minded man.'
'How do you mean? Will it lower him?'
'No, but he's so used to living only a spiritual life that he can't reconcile himself with actuality, and Varenka is after all an actuality.'
Levin was used now to speaking his thought boldly, without troubling to put it into precise words; he knew that his wife, in such loving moments as this, would understand what he wanted to say from a hint, and she did understand him.
'Yes, but it's not the same actuality in her as in me. I can understand that he could never love me. She's all spiritual...'
'Ah, no, he loves you so, and it always pleases me that my people love you.'
'Yes, he's good to me, but...'
'But not like the late Nikolenka ... you really fell in love with each other,' Levin finished. 'Why not speak of it?' he added. 'I sometimes reproach myself: one ends by forgetting. Ah, what a terrible and lovely man he was ... Yes, what were we talking about?' Levin said after a pause.
'You think he's unable to fall in love,' said Kitty, translating it into her own language.
'Not exactly unable,' said Levin, smiling, 'but he doesn't have the weakness necessary... I've always envied him, and I still envy him even now, when I'm so happy.'
'You envy him for being unable to fall in love?'
'I envy him for being better than I am,' said Levin, smiling. 'He doesn't live for himself. His whole life is subordinated to duty. And therefore he can be calm and satisfied.'
'And you?' said Kitty, with a mocking, loving smile.
She would never have been able to express the train of thought that made her smile; but the final conclusion was that her husband, in admiring his brother and demeaning himself before him, was insincere. Kitty knew that this insincerity came from his love for his brother, from his embarrassment at being too happy, and especially from the desire to be better, which never left him - she loved that in him, and so she smiled.
'And you? What are you dissatisfied with?' she asked with the same smile.
Her disbelief in his dissatisfaction with himself delighted him, and he unconsciously provoked her to give the reasons for her disbelief.
'I'm happy, but dissatisfied with myself...' he said.
'How can you be dissatisfied if you're happy?'
'I mean, how shall I tell you?... In my heart I wish for nothing except that you shouldn't stumble now. Ah, no, you mustn't jump like that!' He interrupted his talk with a reproach, because she had made too quick a movement stepping over a branch that lay in the path. 'But when I consider myself and compare myself with others, especially with my brother, I feel that I'm bad.'
'But in what?' Kitty went on with the same smile. 'Don't you also do things for others? And your farmsteads, and your farming, and your book?...'
'No, I feel - especially now, and it's your fault,' he said, pressing her arm to him, 'that that is not it. I do it casually, lightly. If I could love all this as I love you ... but lately I've been doing it as a set task.'
'Well, what would you say of papa?' asked Kitty. 'Is he bad, too, since he's done nothing for the common cause?'
'He? No. But one must have the simplicity, clarity and kindness that your father has, and do I have that? I do nothing and I suffer. It's all your doing. When there was no you and no this,' he said, with a glance at her stomach, which she understood, 'I put all my strength into my work. But now I can't and I'm ashamed; I do it just like a set task, I pretend ...' 'Well, and would you like to change places with Sergei Ivanych now?' said Kitty. 'Would you like to work for this common cause and love this set task as he does, and only that?'
'Of course not,' said Levin. 'Anyhow, I'm so happy that I don't understand anything. And you really think he's going to propose today?' he added after a pause.
T do and don't. Only I want it terribly. Wait a second.' She bent down and picked a wild daisy by the roadside. 'Here, count: he will propose, he won't propose,' she said, handing him the daisy.
'He will, he won't,' Levin said, tearing off the narrow, white, grooved petals.
'No, no!' Kitty, who was excitedly watching his fingers, seized his hand. 'You've torn off two.'
'Well, but this little one doesn't count,' said Levin, tearing off a short, undeveloped petal. 'And here's the wagonette catching up with us.'
'Aren't you tired, Kitty?' the princess shouted.
'Not in the least.'
'You could get in, if the horses stay quiet and walk slowly.'
But it was not worthwhile getting in. They were nearly there, and everybody went on foot.
IV
Varenka, with her white kerchief over her dark hair, surrounded by children, good-naturedly and cheerfully occupied with them, and apparently excited by the possibility of a declaration from a man she liked, was very attractive. Sergei Ivanovich walked beside her and kept admiring her. Looking at her, he recalled all the nice conversation he had heard from her, all the good he had heard about her, and realized more and more that the feeling he had for her was something special, which he had experienced long, long ago, and only once, in his early youth. The feeling of joy at her nearness, ever increasing, reached the point where, as he put into her basket a huge mushroom he had found, with a slender foot and upturned edge, he glanced into her eyes and, noticing the blush of joyful and frightened excitement that spread over her face, became confused himself and silently smiled to her the sort of smile that says all too much.
'If it's so,' he said to himself, 'I must think it over and decide, and not give myself like a boy to some momentary infatuation.'
'I'll go now and gather mushrooms on my own, otherwise my acquisitions won't be noticed,' he said and went alone away from the edge of the wood, where they were walking over silky, low grass among sparse old birches, towards the depths of the wood, where grey aspen trunks and dark hazel bushes showed among the white birch trunks. Going some forty paces away and stepping behind a spindle-tree in full bloom with its pinkish-red catkins, Sergei Ivanovich stopped, knowing he could not be seen. Around him it was perfectly still. Only the flies made a ceaseless noise like a swarm of bees in the tops of the birches he was standing under, and now and then the children's voices reached him. Suddenly, from the edge of the wood not far away, he heard Varenka's contralto calling Grisha, and a joyful smile lit up Sergei Ivanovich's face. Conscious of this smile, Sergei Ivanovich shook his head disapprovingly at the state he was in and, taking out a cigar, began to light it. For a long time he was unable to strike a match against the birch trunk. The tender film of the white bark stuck to the phosphorus and the flame went out. Finally a match flared up, and the strong-scented smoke of the cigar, clearly outlined in a broad, undulating sheet, spread forward and up over the bush under the hanging birch branches. Following the strip of smoke with his eyes, Sergei Ivanovich walked on at a slow pace, reflecting on his state.
'And why not?' he thought. 'If it were a momentary flash or passion, if I experienced only this attraction - this mutual attraction (I may call it "mutual") - but felt that it went against my whole mode of life, if I felt that in yielding to this attraction I would betray my calling and my duty ... but it's not so. The only thing I can say against it is that, when I lost Marie, I told myself I would remain faithful to her memory. That is all I can say against my feeling... That's important,' Sergei Ivanovich said to himself, feeling at the same time that for him personally this consideration could have no importance at all, but would only spoil his poetic role in the eyes of others. 'But apart from that, search as I may, I won't find anything to say against my feeling. If I were to choose with my mind alone, I couldn't find anything better.'
He recalled any number of women and girls he knew, but could not recall one who would combine to such a degree all, precisely all, the qualities that he, reasoning coldly, would wish to see in his wife. She had all the loveliness and freshness of youth, yet she was not a child, and if she lov
ed him, she loved him consciously, as a woman should love: that was one thing. Another: she was not only far from worldliness, but obviously had a loathing for the world, yet at the same time she knew that world and had all the manners of a woman of good society, without which a life's companion was unthinkable for Sergei Ivanovich. Third: she was religious, and not unaccountably religious and good, like a child, like Kitty, for instance, but her life was based on religious convictions. Even to the smallest details, Sergei Ivanovich found in her everything he could wish for in a wife: she was poor and alone, so she would not bring a heap of relations and their influence into the house, as he saw with Kitty, but would be obliged to her husband in all things, which he had also always wished for his future family life. And this girl, who combined all these qualities in herself, loved him. He was modest, but he could not fail to see it. And he loved her. One negative consideration was his age. But his breed was long-lived, he did not have a single grey hair, no one would have taken him for forty, and he remembered Varenka saying that it was only in Russia that people considered themselves old at the age of fifty, that in France a fifty-year-old man considered himself dans la force de l'age,* and a forty-year-old un jeune homme.* But what did the counting of years mean if he felt himself young in his soul, as he had been twenty years ago? Was it not youth, the feeling he experienced now, when, coming out to the edge of the wood again from the other side, he saw in the bright light of the sun's slanting rays Varenka's graceful figure, in a yellow dress and with her basket, walking with a light step past the trunk of an old birch, and when this impression from the sight of Varenka merged with the sight, which struck him with its beauty, of a yellowing field of oats bathed in the slanting light, and of an old wood far beyond the field, spotted with yellow, melting into the blue distance? His heart was wrung with joy. A feeling of tenderness came over him. He felt resolved. Varenka, who had just crouched down to pick a mushroom, stood up with a supple movement and looked over her shoulder. Throwing his cigar away, Sergei Ivanovich walked towards her with resolute strides.
