Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [338]
He wanted to keep calm, but it was the same thing all over again. His finger pulled the trigger before the bird was in his sights. It all went worse and worse.
There were only five birds in his game bag when he came out of the marsh to the alder grove where he was to meet Stepan Arkadyich.
Before he saw Stepan Arkadyich, he saw his dog. Krak leaped from behind the upturned roots of an alder, all black with the stinking slime of the marsh, and with a victorious look began sniffing Laska. Behind Krak the stately figure of Stepan Arkadyich appeared in the shade of the alders. He came towards Levin, red, sweaty, his collar open, still limping in the same way.
‘Well, so? You did a lot of shooting!’ he said, smiling gaily.
‘And you?’ asked Levin. But there was no need to ask, because he already saw the full game bag.
‘Not too bad.’
He had fourteen birds.
‘A fine marsh! Veslovsky must have hampered you. It’s inconvenient for two with one dog,’ said Stepan Arkadyich, softening his triumph.
XI
When Levin and Stepan Arkadyich came to the cottage of the muzhik with whom Levin always stayed, Veslovsky was already there. He was sitting in the middle of the cottage, holding on with both hands to a bench from which a soldier, the brother of the mistress of the house, was pulling him by the slime-covered boots, and laughing his infectiously gay laugh.
‘I’ve just come. Ils ont été charmants.bd Imagine, they wined me and dined me. Such bread, a wonder! Délicieux! And the vodka - I never drank anything tastier! And they absolutely refused to take money. And they kept saying “No offence”, or something.’
‘Why take money? They were treating you. As if they’d sell their vodka!’ said the soldier, finally pulling off the wet boot and the blackened stocking along with it.
Despite the filth in the cottage, muddied by the hunters’ boots and the dirty dogs licking themselves, the smell of marsh and powder that filled it, and the absence of knives and forks, the hunters drank their tea and ate dinner with a relish that only comes from hunting. Washed and clean, they went to the swept-out hay barn where the coachmen had prepared beds for the masters.
Though it was already dark, none of the hunters wanted to sleep.
After wavering between reminiscences and stories about shooting, about dogs, about previous hunts, the conversation hit upon a subject that interested them all. Prompted by Vasenka’s repeated expressions of delight at the charm of the night and the smell of the hay, at the charm of the broken cart (it seemed broken to him because its front end had been detached), the affability of the muzhiks who had given him vodka, the dogs who lay each at its master’s feet, Oblonsky told about the charm of the hunting at Malthus’s place, which he had taken part in during the past summer. Malthus was a well-known railway magnate. Stepan Arkadyich told about the marshlands this Malthus had bought up in Tver province, and how he kept them as a reserve, and what carriages - dog-carts - the hunters drove in, and the tent they set up for lunch by the marsh.
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Levin, sitting up on his hay. ‘How is it you’re not disgusted by those people? I understand that Lafite with lunch is very agreeable, but aren’t you disgusted precisely by that luxury? All those people make their money, as our old tax farmers3 used to, in a way that earns them people’s contempt. They ignore it and then use their dishonestly earned money to buy off the former contempt.’
‘Absolutely right!’ responded Vasenka Veslovsky. ‘Absolutely! Of course, Oblonsky does it out of bonhomie, and the others say, “Well, if Oblonsky goes there...” ’
‘Not a bit of it,’ Levin sensed Oblonsky’s smile as he said it. ‘I simply don’t consider him more dishonest than any other wealthy merchant or nobleman. He and they both make money by the same hard work and intelligence.’
‘Yes, but where’s the hard