Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [323]
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,’