Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [417]
Children? In Petersburg children did not hinder their father’s life. Children were brought up in institutions, and there existed nothing like that wild idea spreading about Moscow - as with Lvov, for instance - that children should get all the luxuries of life and parents nothing but toil and care. Here they understood that a man is obliged to live for himself, as an educated person ought to live.
Service? Here the service was also not that persistent, unrewarded drudgery that it was in Moscow; here there was interest in it. An encounter, a favour, an apt word, an ability to act out various jokes - and a man’s career was suddenly made, as with Briantsev, whom Stepan Arkadyich had met yesterday and who was now a leading dignitary. Such service had some interest in it.
But the Petersburg view of money matters had an especially soothing effect on Stepan Arkadyich. Bartniansky, who had run through at least fifty thousand, judging by his train,dh had spoken a remarkable word to him about it yesterday.
In a conversation before dinner, Stepan Arkadyich had said to Bartniansky :
‘It seems to me that you’re close to Mordvinsky; you might do me a favour and kindly put in a word for me. There’s a post I’d like to get. Member of the Agency ...’
‘Well, I won’t remember it anyway ... Only who wants to get into all these railway affairs with the Jews? ... As you wish, but all the same it’s vile!’
Stepan Arkadyich did not tell him that it was a living matter; Bartniansky would not have understood it.
‘I need money, I have nothing to live on.’
‘You do live, though?’
‘I live, but in debt.’
‘Really? How deep?’ Bartniansky said with sympathy.
‘Very deep - about twenty thousand.’
Bartniansky burst into merry laughter.
‘Oh, lucky man!’ he said. ‘I owe a million and a half and have nothing, and, as you see, I can still live.’
And Stepan Arkadyich could see that it was true not only in words but in reality. Zhivakhov had debts of three hundred thousand and not a kopeck to his name, and yet he lived, and how! The requiem had long been sung for Count Krivtsov, yet he kept two women. Petrovsky ran through five million and lived the same as ever, and was even a financial director and received a salary of twenty thousand. But, besides that, Petersburg had a physically pleasant effect on Stepan Arkadyich. It made him younger. In Moscow he sometimes looked at his grey hair, fell asleep after dinner, stretched, climbed the stairs slowly, breathing heavily, became bored in the company of young women, did not dance at balls. In Petersburg he always felt he had shaken off ten years.
He experienced in Petersburg the same thing that he had been told only yesterday by the sixty-year-old prince Pyotr Oblonsky, just returned from abroad.
‘Here we don’t know how to live,’ Pyotr Oblonsky had said. ‘Would you believe, I spent the summer in Baden. Well, really, I felt myself quite a young man. I’d see a young woman, and thoughts ... You dine, drink a little - strength, vigour. I came to Russia - had to see my wife, and also the estate - well, you wouldn’t believe it, two weeks later I got into my dressing gown, stopped changing for dinner. No more thinking about young lovelies! Turned into a real old man. Only thing left was saving my soul. Went to Paris - rallied again.’
Stepan Arkadyich felt exactly the same difference as Pyotr Oblonsky. In Moscow he went so much to seed that, in fact, if he lived there long enough, he would, for all he knew, reach the point of saving his soul; in Petersburg he felt himself a decent human being again.
Between Princess Betsy Tverskoy and Stepan Arkadyich there existed long-standing and quite strange relations. Stepan Arkadyich had always jokingly paid court to her and told her, also jokingly, the most