第68章

`Didn't expect me, did you?' said Stepan Arkadyevich, getting out of the sleigh, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his cheek, and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits. `I've come primarily to see you,' he said, embracing and kissing him, `secondly, to have some stand shooting, and thirdly, to sell the forest at Ergushovo.'

`Delightful! What a spring we're having! How ever did you get along in a sleigh?'

`In a wagon it would have been worse still, Konstantin Dmitrievich,'

answered the driver, who knew him.

`Well, I'm very, very glad to see you,' said Levin, with a genuine smile of childlike delight.

Levin led his friend to the guest room, where Stepan Arkadyevich's things were also carried - a bag, a gun in a case, a satchel for cigars.

Leaving him there to wash and change his clothes, Levin went off to the countinghouse to speak about the plowing and the clover. Agathya Mikhailovna, always very anxious for the credit of the house, met him in the hall with inquiries about dinner.

`Do just as you like, only let it be as soon as possible,' he said, and went to the bailiff.

When he came back, Stepan Arkadyevich, washed and combed, came out of his room with a beaming smile, and they went upstairs together.

`Well, I am glad I managed to get away to you! Now I shall understand what the mysterious business is that you are always absorbed in here. No, really, I envy you. What a house, how splendid it all is! So bright, so cheerful!' said Stepan Arkadyevich, forgetting that it was not always spring and fine weather as on this day. `And your old nurse is simply charming!

A pretty maid in an apron might be even more agreeable, perhaps; but for your severe monastic style it does very well.'

Stepan Arkadyevich imparted to him many interesting bits of news;especially interesting to Levin was the news that his brother, Sergei Ivanovich, was intending to spend the summer with him in the country.

Not one word did Stepan Arkadyevich say in reference to Kitty and the Shcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin was grateful to him for his delicacy, and rejoiced exceedingly over his guest. As always happened with him during his solitude, a mass of ideas and feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could not communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon Stepan Arkadyevich his poetic joy over the spring, and his failures and plans for the land, and his thoughts and criticisms on the books he had been reading, and the idea of his own book, the basis of which really was, though he was unaware of it himself, a criticism of all the old books on agriculture. Stepan Arkadyevich, always charming, understanding everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming on this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as it were, and a new tone of respect that flattered him.

The efforts of Agathya Mikhailovna and the cook to have the dinner particularly good, only ended in the two famished friends attacking the preliminary course, eating a great deal of bread and butter, salt goose and salted mushrooms, and in Levin's finally ordering the soup to be served without the accompaniment of little patties, with which the cook had particularly meant to impress their visitor. But though Stepan Arkadyevich was accustomed to very different dinners, he thought everything excellent: the herb brandy, and the bread, and the butter, and, above all, the salt goose and the mushrooms, and the nettle soup, and the chicken in white sauce, and the white Crimean wine - everything was excellent and marvelous.

`Splendid, splendid!' he said, lighting a fat cigar after the roast. `I feel as if, coming to you, I had landed on a peaceful shore after the noise and jolting of a steamer. And so you maintain that the laborer himself is an element to be studied, and to regulate the choice of methods in agriculture. Of course, I'm an ignorant outsider; but I should fancy theory and its application will have its influence on the laborer too.'

`Yes, but wait a bit. I'm not talking of political economy - I'm talking of the science of agriculture. It ought to be like the natural sciences, and to observe given phenomena and the laborer in his economic, ethnographical...'

At that instant Agathya Mikhailovna came in with jam.

`Oh, Agathya Fiodorovna,' said Stepan Arkadyevich, kissing the tips of his plump fingers, `what salt goose, what herb brandy!... What do you think, isn't it time to start, Kostia?' he added.

Levin looked out of the window at the sun sinking behind the bare treetops of the forest.

`Yes, it's time,' he said. `Kouzma, get ready the wide droshky,'

and he ran downstairs.

Stepan Arkadyevich, going down, carefully took the canvas cover off his varnished gun case with his own hands, and opening it, began to get ready his expensive, new-fashioned gun. Kouzma, who already scented a big tip, never left Stepan Arkadyevich's side, and put on him both his stockings and boots, a task which Stepan Arkadyevich readily left to him.

`Kostia, give orders that if the merchant Riabinin comes - I told him to come today - he's to be shown in and asked to wait for me...'

`Why, do you mean to say you're selling the forest to Riabinin?'

`Yes. Do you know him?'

`To be sure I do. I have had to do business with him, ``positively and definitively.''

Stepan Arkadyevich laughed. ``Positively and definitively'' were the merchant's favorite words.

`Yes, it's wonderfully funny the way he talks. She knows where her master's going!' he added, patting Laska, who hung about Levin, whining and licking his hands, his boots, and his gun.

The droshky was already at the steps when they went out.

`I told them to bring the droshky round, though it's not far to go; or would you rather walk?'