Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy
Chapter 194
1597 words | Chapter 194
“Go, please, go then and call on the Bols,” Kitty said to her husband,
when he came in to see her at eleven o’clock before going out. “I know
you are dining at the club; papa put down your name. But what are you
going to do in the morning?”
“I am only going to Katavasov,” answered Levin.
“Why so early?”
“He promised to introduce me to Metrov. I wanted to talk to him about
my work. He’s a distinguished scientific man from Petersburg,” said
Levin.
“Yes; wasn’t it his article you were praising so? Well, and after
that?” said Kitty.
“I shall go to the court, perhaps, about my sister’s business.”
“And the concert?” she queried.
“I shan’t go there all alone.”
“No? do go; there are going to be some new things.... That interested
you so. I should certainly go.”
“Well, anyway, I shall come home before dinner,” he said, looking at
his watch.
“Put on your frock coat, so that you can go straight to call on
Countess Bola.”
“But is it absolutely necessary?”
“Oh, absolutely! He has been to see us. Come, what is it? You go in,
sit down, talk for five minutes of the weather, get up and go away.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe it! I’ve got so out of the way of all this
that it makes me feel positively ashamed. It’s such a horrible thing to
do! A complete outsider walks in, sits down, stays on with nothing to
do, wastes their time and worries himself, and walks away!”
Kitty laughed.
“Why, I suppose you used to pay calls before you were married, didn’t
you?”
“Yes, I did, but I always felt ashamed, and now I’m so out of the way
of it that, by Jove! I’d sooner go two days running without my dinner
than pay this call! One’s so ashamed! I feel all the while that they’re
annoyed, that they’re saying, ‘What has he come for?’”
“No, they won’t. I’ll answer for that,” said Kitty, looking into his
face with a laugh. She took his hand. “Well, good-bye.... Do go,
please.”
He was just going out after kissing his wife’s hand, when she stopped
him.
“Kostya, do you know I’ve only fifty roubles left?”
“Oh, all right, I’ll go to the bank and get some. How much?” he said,
with the expression of dissatisfaction she knew so well.
“No, wait a minute.” She held his hand. “Let’s talk about it, it
worries me. I seem to spend nothing unnecessary, but money seems to fly
away simply. We don’t manage well, somehow.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” he said with a little cough, looking at her from
under his brows.
That cough she knew well. It was a sign of intense dissatisfaction, not
with her, but with himself. He certainly was displeased not at so much
money being spent, but at being reminded of what he, knowing something
was unsatisfactory, wanted to forget.
“I have told Sokolov to sell the wheat, and to borrow an advance on the
mill. We shall have money enough in any case.”
“Yes, but I’m afraid that altogether....”
“Oh, it’s all right, all right,” he repeated. “Well, good-bye,
darling.”
“No, I’m really sorry sometimes that I listened to mamma. How nice it
would have been in the country! As it is, I’m worrying you all, and
we’re wasting our money.”
“Not at all, not at all. Not once since I’ve been married have I said
that things could have been better than they are....”
“Truly?” she said, looking into his eyes.
He had said it without thinking, simply to console her. But when he
glanced at her and saw those sweet truthful eyes fastened questioningly
on him, he repeated it with his whole heart. “I was positively
forgetting her,” he thought. And he remembered what was before them, so
soon to come.
“Will it be soon? How do you feel?” he whispered, taking her two hands.
“I have so often thought so, that now I don’t think about it or know
anything about it.”
“And you’re not frightened?”
She smiled contemptuously.
“Not the least little bit,” she said.
“Well, if anything happens, I shall be at Katavasov’s.”
“No, nothing will happen, and don’t think about it. I’m going for a
walk on the boulevard with papa. We’re going to see Dolly. I shall
expect you before dinner. Oh, yes! Do you know that Dolly’s position is
becoming utterly impossible? She’s in debt all round; she hasn’t a
penny. We were talking yesterday with mamma and Arseny” (this was her
sister’s husband Lvov), “and we determined to send you with him to talk
to Stiva. It’s really unbearable. One can’t speak to papa about it....
But if you and he....”
“Why, what can we do?” said Levin.
“You’ll be at Arseny’s, anyway; talk to him, he will tell what we
decided.”
“Oh, I agree to everything Arseny thinks beforehand. I’ll go and see
him. By the way, if I do go to the concert, I’ll go with Natalia. Well,
good-bye.”
On the steps Levin was stopped by his old servant Kouzma, who had been
with him before his marriage, and now looked after their household in
town.
“Beauty” (that was the left shaft-horse brought up from the country)
“has been badly shod and is quite lame,” he said. “What does your honor
wish to be done?”
During the first part of their stay in Moscow, Levin had used his own
horses brought up from the country. He had tried to arrange this part
of their expenses in the best and cheapest way possible; but it
appeared that their own horses came dearer than hired horses, and they
still hired too.
“Send for the veterinary, there may be a bruise.”
“And for Katerina Alexandrovna?” asked Kouzma.
Levin was not by now struck as he had been at first by the fact that to
get from one end of Moscow to the other he had to have two powerful
horses put into a heavy carriage, to take the carriage three miles
through the snowy slush and to keep it standing there four hours,
paying five roubles every time.
Now it seemed quite natural.
“Hire a pair for our carriage from the jobmaster,” said he.
“Yes, sir.”
And so, simply and easily, thanks to the facilities of town life, Levin
settled a question which, in the country, would have called for so much
personal trouble and exertion, and going out onto the steps, he called
a sledge, sat down, and drove to Nikitsky. On the way he thought no
more of money, but mused on the introduction that awaited him to the
Petersburg savant, a writer on sociology, and what he would say to him
about his book.
Only during the first days of his stay in Moscow Levin had been struck
by the expenditure, strange to one living in the country, unproductive
but inevitable, that was expected of him on every side. But by now he
had grown used to it. That had happened to him in this matter which is
said to happen to drunkards—the first glass sticks in the throat, the
second flies down like a hawk, but after the third they’re like tiny
little birds. When Levin had changed his first hundred-rouble note to
pay for liveries for his footmen and hall-porter he could not help
reflecting that these liveries were of no use to anyone—but they were
indubitably necessary, to judge by the amazement of the princess and
Kitty when he suggested that they might do without liveries,—that these
liveries would cost the wages of two laborers for the summer, that is,
would pay for about three hundred working days from Easter to Ash
Wednesday, and each a day of hard work from early morning to late
evening—and that hundred-rouble note did stick in his throat. But the
next note, changed to pay for providing a dinner for their relations,
that cost twenty-eight roubles, though it did excite in Levin the
reflection that twenty-eight roubles meant nine measures of oats, which
men would with groans and sweat have reaped and bound and thrashed and
winnowed and sifted and sown,—this next one he parted with more easily.
And now the notes he changed no longer aroused such reflections, and
they flew off like little birds. Whether the labor devoted to obtaining
the money corresponded to the pleasure given by what was bought with
it, was a consideration he had long ago dismissed. His business
calculation that there was a certain price below which he could not
sell certain grain was forgotten too. The rye, for the price of which
he had so long held out, had been sold for fifty kopecks a measure
cheaper than it had been fetching a month ago. Even the consideration
that with such an expenditure he could not go on living for a year
without debt, that even had no force. Only one thing was essential: to
have money in the bank, without inquiring where it came from, so as to
know that one had the wherewithal to buy meat for tomorrow. And this
condition had hitherto been fulfilled; he had always had the money in
the bank. But now the money in the bank had gone, and he could not
quite tell where to get the next installment. And this it was which, at
the moment when Kitty had mentioned money, had disturbed him; but he
had no time to think about it. He drove off, thinking of Katavasov and
the meeting with Metrov that was before him.
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