Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [55]
And he moved on a little, trying to draw her with him. The host smiled approvingly.
‘No, I won’t stay,’ Anna replied, smiling; but despite her smile, both Korsunsky and the host understood by the resolute tone of her reply that she would not stay.
‘No, as it is I’ve danced more in Moscow at your one ball than all winter in Petersburg,’ Anna said, glancing at Vronsky, who was standing near her. ‘I must rest before the trip.’
‘So you’re set on going tomorrow?’ asked Vronsky.
‘Yes, I think so,’ replied Anna, as if surprised at the boldness of his question; but the irrepressible tremulous light in her eyes and smile burned him as she said it.
Anna Arkadyevna did not stay for supper but left.
XXIV
‘Yes, there’s something disgusting and repulsive in me,’ thought Levin, having left the Shcherbatskys and making his way on foot to his brother’s. ‘And I don’t fit in with other people. It’s pride, they say. No, there’s no pride in me either. If there were any pride in me, I wouldn’t have put myself in such a position.’ And he pictured Vronsky to himself, happy, kind, intelligent and calm, who certainly had never been in such a terrible position as he had been in that evening. ‘Yes, she was bound to choose him. It had to be so, and I have nothing and no one to complain about. I myself am to blame. What right did I have to think she would want to join her life with mine? Who am I? And what am I? A worthless man, of no use to anyone or for anything.’ And he remembered his brother Nikolai and paused joyfully at this remembrance. ‘Isn’t he right that everything in the world is bad and vile? And our judgement of brother Nikolai has hardly been fair. Of course, from Prokofy’s point of view, who saw him drunk and in a ragged fur coat, he’s a despicable man; but I know him otherwise. I know his soul, and I know that we resemble each other. And instead of going to look for him, I went to dinner and then came here.’ Levin went up to the street-lamp, read his brother’s address, which he had in his wallet, and hailed a cab. On the long way to his brother‘s, Levin vividly recalled all the events he knew from the life of his brother Nikolai. He remembered how his brother, while at the university and for a year after the university, despite the mockery of his friends, had lived like a monk, strictly observing all the rituals of religion, services, fasts, and avoiding all pleasures, especially women; and then it was as if something broke loose in him, he began keeping company with the most vile people and gave himself up to the most licentious debauchery. Then he remembered the episode with a boy his brother had brought from the country in order to educate him, and to whom he gave such a beating in a fit of anger that proceedings were started against him for the inflicting of bodily harm. Then he remembered the episode with a card-sharper to whom his brother had lost money, had given a promissory note, and whom he had then lodged a complaint against, claiming that the man had cheated him. (It was this money that Sergei Ivanych had paid.) He also remembered how he had spent a night in the police station for disorderly conduct. He remembered a shameful lawsuit he had started against his brother Sergei Ivanych, whom he accused of not having paid him his share of their mother’s fortune; and the last case, when he went to serve in the western territory and there stood trial for giving his superior a beating ... All this was terribly vile, but for Levin it seemed by no means as vile as it might have seemed to those who did not know Nikolai Levin, did not know his whole story, did not know his heart.
Levin recalled how, during Nikolai’s period of piety, fasts, monks, church services, when he had sought help from religion as a bridle for his passionate nature, not only had no one supported him, but everyone, including Levin himself, had laughed at him. They had teased him, calling him ‘Noah’ and ‘the monk’; and when he broke loose, no one helped him,