Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [416]
Seeing his uncle, who looked like his mother, was unpleasant for him because it called up in him those very memories that he considered shameful. It was the more unpleasant since, from the few words he had heard while waiting by the door of the study, and especially from the expression on his father’s and uncle’s faces, he guessed that they must have been talking about his mother. And so as not to judge his father, with whom he lived and on whom he depended, and, above all, not to give in to his sentiments, which he considered so humiliating, Seryozha tried not to look at this uncle who had come to disrupt his tranquillity and not to think about what he reminded him of.
But when Stepan Arkadyich, who followed him out, saw him on the stairs, called him back, and asked him how he spent the time between classes at school, Seryozha, away from his father’s presence, got to talking with him.
‘We’ve got a railway going now,’ he said, in answer to the question. ‘It’s like this: two of us sit on a bench. They’re the passengers. And one stands up on the same bench. And everybody else gets in harness. You can do it with hands or with belts, and they start moving through all the rooms. The doors are opened ahead of them. And it’s very hard to be the conductor!’
‘That’s the one who’s standing up?’ Stepan Arkadyich asked, smiling.
‘Yes, he’s got to be brave and agile, especially if they stop all of a sudden or somebody falls down.’
‘Yes, that’s no joke,’ said Stepan Arkadyich, sadly studying those animated eyes, his mother‘s, no longer those of a child, no longer wholly innocent. And though he had promised Alexei Alexandrovich not to speak of Anna, he could not help himself.
‘Do you remember your mother?’ he asked suddenly.
‘No, I don’t,’ Seryozha said quickly and, turning bright red, looked down. And the uncle could get nowhere with him any more.
The Slav tutor found his charge on the stairway half an hour later and for a long time could not tell whether he was angry or crying.
‘You must have fallen and hurt yourself?’ said the tutor. ‘I told you it’s a dangerous game. The director must be informed.’
‘Even if I did hurt myself, nobody would have noticed. That’s for certain.’
‘What’s wrong, then?’
‘Let me be! Remember, don’t remember ... What business is it of his? Why should I remember? Leave me alone!’ he said, not to the tutor now, but to the whole world.
XX
Stepan Arkadyich, as always, did not idle away his time in Petersburg. In Petersburg, besides the business of his sister’s divorce and the post, he had, as always, to refresh himself, as he put it, after the stuffiness of Moscow.
Moscow, in spite of its cafés chantants and omnibuses, was, after all, a stagnant swamp. That Stepan Arkadyich had always felt. Living in Moscow, especially around his family, he felt he was losing his spirits. When he lived in Moscow for a long time without leaving, he reached the point of worrying about his wife’s bad moods and reproaches, his children’s health and education, the petty concerns of his service; he even worried about having debts. But he needed only to go and stay for a while in Petersburg, in the circle to which he belonged, where people lived - precisely lived, and did not vegetate as in Moscow - and immediately all these thoughts vanished and melted away like wax before the face of fire.21
Wife? ... Only that day he had been talking with Prince Chechensky. Prince Chechensky had a wife and family - grown-up boys serving as pages - and there was another illegitimate family,