Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [204]
‘I’m not concerned with them, I’m doing it for myself.’
Agafya Mikhailovna knew all the details of Levin’s plans for the estate. Levin often told her his thoughts in fine detail and not infrequently argued with her and disagreed with her explanations. But this time she completely misunderstood what he said to her.
‘It’s a known fact, a man had best think of his own soul,’ she said with a sigh. ‘There’s Parfen Denisych, illiterate as they come, but God grant everybody such a death,’ she said of a recently deceased house servant. ‘Took communion, got anointed.’33
‘I’m not talking about that,’ he said. ‘I mean that I’m doing it for my own profit. The better the muzhiks work, the more profitable it is for me.’
‘Whatever you do, if he’s a lazybones, everything will come out slapdash. If he’s got a conscience, he’ll work, if not, there’s no help for it.’
‘Yes, but you say yourself that Ivan takes better care of the cattle now.’
‘I say one thing,’ Agafya Mikhailovna answered, evidently not at random but with a strictly consistent train of thought, ‘you’ve got to get married, that’s what!’
Agafya Mikhailovna’s mention of the very thing he had just been thinking about upset and offended him. Levin frowned and, without answering her, sat down to his work, repeating to himself everything he thought about the significance of that work. Only occasionally he listened in the silence to the sound of Agafya Mikhailovna’s needles and, recalling what he did not want to recall, winced again.
At nine o‘clock they heard a bell and the dull heaving of a carriage through the mud.
‘Well, here’s guests coming to see you, so you won’t be bored,’ said Agafya Mikhailovna, getting up and going to the door. But Levin went ahead of her. His work was not going well now, and he was glad of a guest, whoever it might be.
XXXI
Having run half-way down the stairs, Levin heard the familiar sound of a little cough in the front hall; but he did not hear it clearly because of the noise of his footsteps and hoped that he was mistaken. Then he saw the whole long, bony, familiar figure, and it seemed no longer possible to deceive himself, yet he still hoped that he was mistaken and that this tall man taking off his fur coat and coughing was not his brother Nikolai.
Levin loved his brother, but being with him was always a torment. Now, under the influence of the thought that had come to him and of Agafya Mikhailovna’s reminder, he was in a vague, confused state, and the imminent meeting with his brother seemed especially difficult. Instead of a cheerful, healthy stranger for a guest, who he hoped would divert him in his state of uncertainty, he had to confront his brother, who understood him thoroughly, who would call up all his innermost thoughts, would make him speak his whole mind. And that he did not want.
Angry with himself for this nasty feeling, Levin ran down to the front hall. As soon as he saw his brother up close, this feeling of personal disappointment vanished at once and was replaced by pity. Frightening as his brother Nikolai’s thinness and sickliness had been before, he was now still thinner, still more wasted. He was a skeleton covered with skin.
He stood in the front hall, twitching his long, thin neck and tearing his scarf from it, and smiled with a strange pitifulness. Seeing this smile, humble and obedient, Levin felt his throat contract spasmodically.
‘You see, I’ve come to visit you,’ Nikolai said in a dull voice, not taking his eyes off his brother’s face for a second. ‘I’ve long been wanting to, but I wasn’t feeling well. Now I’m much better,’ he said, wiping his beard with big, thin palms.
‘Yes, yes!’ Levin replied. And he felt still more frightened when, as he kissed him, his lips felt the dryness of his brother’s body and he saw his big, strangely glinting eyes up close.
A few weeks earlier Levin had written to his brother that, following the sale of a small, as