Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [98]
The efforts of Agafya Mikhailovna and the cook to make an especially good dinner had as their only result that the two hungry friends, sitting down to the hors d‘oeuvres, ate their fill of bread and butter, polotok and pickled mushrooms, and that Levin ordered the soup served without the pirozhki with which the cook had wanted especially to surprise the guest. But Stepan Arkadyich, though accustomed to different dinners, found everything excellent: the herb liqueur, the bread and butter, and especially the polotok, the mushrooms, the nettle soup,19 the chicken with white sauce, and the white Crimean wine - everything was excellent and wonderful.
‘Splendid, splendid,’ he said, lighting up a fat cigarette after the roast. ‘Here it’s just as if, after the noise and vibration of a steamer, I’ve landed on a quiet shore. So you say that the element of the worker himself must be studied and serve as a guide in the choice of farming methods. I’m not an initiate, but it seems to me that the theory and its application will influence the worker himself.’
‘Yes, but wait: I’m not talking about political economy, I’m talking about scientific farming. It must be like a natural science, observing given phenomena, and the worker with his economic, ethnographic ...’
Just then Agafya Mikhailovna came in with the preserves.20
‘Well, Agafya Mikhailovna,’ Stepan Arkadyich said to her, kissing the tips of his plump fingers, ‘what polotok you have, what herb liqueur! ... But say, Kostya, isn’t it time?’ he added.
Levin looked out of the window at the sun setting beyond the bare treetops of the forest.
‘It’s time, it’s time,’ he said. ‘Kuzma, harness the trap!’ And he ran downstairs.
Stepan Arkadyich, having come down, carefully removed the canvas cover from the varnished box himself and, opening it, began to assemble his expensive, new-fashioned gun. Kuzma, already scenting a big tip for vodka, would not leave Stepan Arkadyich and helped him on with his stockings and boots, which Stepan Arkadyich willingly allowed him to do.
‘Kostya, tell them that if the merchant Ryabinin comes — I told him to come today - they should receive him and have him wait ...’
‘Are you selling the wood to Ryabinin?’
‘Yes. Do you know him?’
‘That I do. I’ve dealt with him “positively and finally”.’
Stepan Arkadyich laughed. ‘Positively and finally’ were the merchant’s favourite words.
‘Yes, he has a funny way of talking. She knows where her master’s going!’ he added, patting Laska, who was fidgeting around Levin with little squeals, licking now his hand, now his boots and gun.
The trap was already standing by the porch when they came out.
‘I told them to harness up, though it’s not far - or shall we go on foot?’
‘No, better to drive,’ said Stepan Arkadyich, going up to the trap. He got in, wrapped his legs in a tiger rug and lit a cigar. ‘How is it you don’t smoke! A cigar - it’s not so much a pleasure as the crown and hallmark of pleasure. This is the life! How good! This is how I’d like to live!’
‘Who’s stopping you?’ said Levin, smiling.
‘No, you’re a lucky man. You have everything you love. You love horses - you have them; dogs - you have them; hunting - you have it; farming - you have it.’
‘Maybe it’s because I rejoice over what I have and don’t grieve over what I don’t have,’ said Levin, remembering Kitty.
Stepan Arkadyich understood, looked at him, but said nothing.
Levin was grateful to Oblonsky for noticing, with his usual tact, that he was afraid of talking about the Shcherbatskys and saying nothing about them; but now Levin wanted to find out about what tormented him so and did not dare to begin.
‘Well, and how are things with you?’ Levin said, thinking how wrong it was on his part to think only of himself.
Stepan Arkadyich’s eyes twinkled merrily.