第139章

To this now was joined the presence, only thirty verstas off, of Kitty Shcherbatskaia, whom he longed to see and could not. Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaia had invited him, when he was over there, to come; to come with the object of renewing his proposal to her sister, who would, so she gave him to understand, accept it now. Levin himself had felt on seeing Kitty Shcherbatskaia that he had never ceased to love her; but he could not go over to the Oblonskys', knowing she was there. The fact that he had proposed to her, and that she had refused him, had placed an insuperable barrier between her and him. `I can't ask her to be my wife merely because she can't be the wife of the man she wanted to marry,' he said to himself.

The thought of this made him cold and hostile to her. `I should not be able to speak to her without a feeling of reproach; I could not look at her without resentment; and she will only hate me all the more, as she's bound to. And besides, how can I now, after what Darya Alexandrovna told me, go to see them? Can I help showing that I know what she told me? And I shall come to forgive her magnanimously, and take pity on her! And go through a performance before her of forgiving, and deigning to bestow my love on her!... Why did Darya Alexandrovna tell me that? I might have seen her by chance - then everything would have happened of itself; but, as it is, it's out of the question - out of the question!'

Darya Alexandrovna sent him a letter, asking him for a sidesaddle for Kitty's use. `I'm told you have a sidesaddle,' she wrote to him; `Ihope you will bring it over yourself.'

This was more than he could stand. How could a woman of any intelligence, of any delicacy, put her sister in such a humiliating position! He wrote ten notes, and tore them all up, and then sent the saddle without any reply.

To write that he would come was impossible, because he could not come;to write that he could not come because something prevented him, or that he would be away, would be still worse. He sent the saddle without any answer; and with a sense of having done something shameful, he handed over all the now revolting business of the estate to his bailiff, and set off next day to a remote district to see his friend Sviiazhsky, who had splendid marshes for double snipes in his neighborhood, and had lately written, asking him to keep a long-standing promise to visit him. The snipe marsh, in the Surovsky district, had long tempted Levin, but he had continually put off this visit on account of his work on the estate. Now he was glad to get away from the neighborhood of the Shcherbatskys, and still more from his farmwork, especially on a shooting expedition, which always served as the best consolation in trouble.

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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 3, Chapter 25[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 25 In the Surovsky district there was neither railway nor mail coach, and Levin drove there with his own horses in his tarantass .

He stopped halfway at a well-to-do peasant's to feed his horses.

A bald, well-preserved old man, with a broad, red beard, grizzled on his cheeks, opened the gate, squeezing against the gatepost to let the troika pass. Directing the coachman to a place under the shed in the big, clean, tidy new yard, with charred, wooden plows in it, the old man asked Levin to come into the room. A cleanly dressed young housewife, with clogs on her bare feet, was scrubbing the floor in the new outer room. She was frightened by the dog that ran in after Levin, and uttered a shriek, but began laughing at her own fright at once when she was told the dog would not hurt her.

Pointing out to Levin with her bare arm the door into the room, she bent down again, hiding her handsome face, and went on scrubbing.

`Would you like a samovar?' she asked.

`Yes, please.'

The room was a big one, with a tile stove, and a partition dividing it into two. Under the icons stood a table painted in patterns, a bench and two chairs. Near the entrance was a dresser full of crockery. The shutters were closed, there were few flies, and it was so clean that Levin was anxious that Laska, who had been running along the road and bathing in puddles, should not muddy the floor, and ordered her to a place in the corner by the door. After looking round the room, Levin went out in the back yard.

The comely young housewife in clogs, swinging the empty pails on the yoke, ran on before him to the well for water.

`Look sharp, my girl!' the old man shouted after her, good-humoredly, and he walked up to Levin. `Well, sir, are you going to Nikolai Ivanovich Sviiazhsky? He comes to us too,' he began chatting, leaning his elbows on the railing of the steps. In the middle of the old man's account of his acquaintance with Sviiazhsky, the gates creaked again, and laborers came into the yard from the fields, with wooden plows and harrows. The horses harnessed to the plows and harrows were sleek and fat. The laborers were obviously of the household: two were young men in cotton-print shirts and caps, the two others were hired laborers in homespun shirts, one an old man, the other a young fellow.

Moving off from the steps, the old man went up to the horses and began unharnessing them.

`What have they been plowing?' asked Levin.

`Plowing up the potatoes. We rent a bit of land too. Fedot, don't let out the gelding, but take it to the trough, and we'll put another in harness.'

`Oh, father, about the plowshares I ordered - has he brought them along?' asked the big, robust fellow, obviously the old man's son.

`There... in the sledge,' answered the old man, rolling up the reins he had taken off, and flinging them on the ground. `You can put them right, while they have dinner.'

The comely young housewife came into the outer room with the full pails dragging at her shoulders. More women came on the scene from somewhere, young and handsome, middle-aged, old and ugly, with children and without children.