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FORTY-THREE

Chapter 9
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IT was past five, and some of the visitors had already arrived, when the master of the house came home. He entered together with Sergius Ivanich Koznyshev and Pestsov, who had met on the doorstep. These two were the chief representatives of the Moscow intellectuals, as Oblonsky called them. Both were men respected for their characters and abilities. They respected one another, but in almost everything they were completely and hopelessly at variance, not because they belonged to different schools of thought but just because they belonged to one camp (their enemies confused them one with the other), and in that camp each of them had his own shade. And as there is nothing less amenable to agreement than disagreement on semi-abstract themes, they not only disagreed in their opinions but had long been accustomed without anger to ridicule each other’s incorrigible delusions.
They were entering when Oblonsky overtook them, and were talking about the weather. Prince Alexander Dmitrich Shcherbatsky, and young Shcherbatsky, Turovtsyn, Kitty, and Karenin were already in the drawing-room.
Oblonsky noticed at once that, without him, things were going badly in the drawing-room. His wife in her gala dress, a grey silk, evidently worried both about the children who would have to dine alone in the nursery, and about her husband who had not returned, had not managed in his absence to mix the guests properly. They all sat like ‘a parish priest’s wife visiting’ (as the old Prince Shcherbatsky expressed it), evidently puzzled as to why they were all assembled there, and forcing out words in order not to remain silent. The good-natured Turovtsyn clearly felt quite out of it, and the smile on his thick lips, with which he met Oblonsky, said as clearly as words, ‘Well, my friend, you have planted me among the clever ones! To have a drink at the Chateau des Fleurs would be more in my line.’ The old Prince sat silent, his shining eyes looking askance at Karenin, and Oblonsky saw that he had already prepared some remark wherewith to polish off that dignitary of State, whom people were invited to as to a dish of sturgeon. Kitty kept looking toward the door, gathering courage not to blush when Constantine Levin should enter. Young Shcherbatsky, who had not been introduced to Karenin tried to look as if this did not make him feel at all awkward. Karenin himself, as the Petersburg way is when one dines with ladies, was in evening dress with a white tie, and Oblonsky saw by his face that he had come only to keep his promise, and by being in that company was fulfilling an unpleasant duty. He was the chief cause of the iciness which had frozen all the visitors till Oblonsky’s arrival.
On entering the drawing-room Oblonsky made his excuses, explaining that he had been kept by the particular Prince who was his usual scapegoat whenever he was late or absent, and in a moment he had reintroduced everybody, and having brought Karenin and Koznyshev together, he started them off on the subject of the Russification of Poland, and they immediately caught on, Pestsov joining them. Having patted Turovtsyn on the shoulder, he whispered something funny in his ear, and got him to sit down next to Dolly and the old Prince. Then he told Kitty that she was looking very nice, and introduced young Shcherbatsky to Karenin. In a moment he had kneaded all that Society dough in such a way that the drawing-room was in first-rate form, and was filled with animated voices. Only Constantine Levin had not arrived. However, that was all for the best, for Oblonsky, on looking in at the dining-room, saw to his horror that the port-wine and sherry were from Depret and not from Levé, and having given orders to send the coachman as quickly as possible to Levé he turned to go back to the drawing-room.
But he met Levin at the door.
‘I am not late?’
‘As if you ever could help being late!’ said Oblonsky taking his hand.
‘Are there many people here? Whom have you got?’ asked Levin with a blush, knocking the snow off his cap with his glove.
‘All our own people. Kitty is here. Come, I will introduce you to Karenin.’
Oblonsky, in spite of being Liberal, knew that to be acquainted with Karenin could not but be an honour, and therefore treated his best friends to that honour. But at that moment Constantine Levin was not in a state fully to appreciate the pleasure of such an acquaintance. He had not seen Kitty since the memorable evening when he had met Vronsky, excepting for that one moment when he had caught sight of her on the high road. In the depths of his soul he had felt sure that he should meet her that evening, but to maintain his freedom of thought he had tried to assure himself that he did not know it. Now, when he heard that she was here, he was suddenly filled with such joy and at the same time with such fear, that it took away his breath and he could not utter what he wished to say.
‘What was she like? The same as before, or as she was that morning in the carriage? What if Darya Alexandrovna had spoken the truth? Why should it not be true?’ he thought.
‘Oh, do introduce me to Karenin!’ he brought out with difficulty, and with despairing determination he entered the drawing-room and saw her.
She was not as she had been before nor as he had seen her in the carriage. She was quite different.
She was frightened, shy, shamefaced, and therefore even more charming. She saw him as soon as he entered. She had been waiting for him. She was filled with joy, and that joy made her feel so confused that for a moment when, as he was approaching the hostess, he again glanced at her, Kitty herself, he, and Dolly all thought she would not be able to control herself but would burst into tears. She blushed again, and quite rigid, with only her lips quivering slightly, sat waiting for him. He came up, bowed, and silently held out his hand. Had it not been for the light quivering of her lips and the moisture that made her eyes brighter, her smile would have appeared almost calm when she said:
‘What a long time it is since we saw one another!’ while with a desperate resolve her cold hand pressed his.
‘You have not seen me but I saw you,’ said Levin with a beaming smile of joy. ‘I saw you on your way to Ergushovo from the station.’
‘When?’ she asked him with surprise.
‘You were driving to Ergushovo,’ said Levin, feeling that the happiness with which his heart was overflowing was taking his breath away. ‘How did I dare to connect anything that was not innocent with this pathetic being! Yes, what Darya Alexandrovna told me seems to be true,’ he thought.
Oblonsky took his arm and led him up to Karenin.
‘Let me introduce you,’ and he gave their names.
‘Very pleased to meet you again,’ said Karenin coldly, as he shook hands with Levin.
‘Are you acquainted?’ asked Oblonsky with surprise.
‘We spent three hours together in a railway carriage,’ said Levin with a smile, ‘but we parted filled with curiosity, as people do after a masquerade, at any rate I did.’
‘Dear me! If you please,’ said Oblonsky, motioning them toward the dining-room.
The men went to the side-table in the dining-room, on which stood bottles with six kinds of vodka and plates with as many sorts of cheese with and without silver cheese-knives, caviar, herrings, different kinds of tinned delicacies, and slices of French rolls.
They stood round the scented vodka and the delicacies, and the conversation about the Russification of Poland between Koznyshev, Karenin, and Pestsov gradually slackened in the expectation of dinner.
Koznyshev, who knew better than anyone how at the end of a most abstract and serious dispute unexpectedly to administer a grain of Attic salt and thereby to change his interlocutor’s frame of mind, did so now.
Karenin was arguing that the Russification of Poland could only be accomplished by high principles which the Russian Administration must introduce.
Pestsov insisted that one nation can assimilate another only when the former is more densely populated.
Koznyshev agreed with both, but with limitations. When they had left the drawing-room Koznyshev, to finish the conversation, remarked with a smile:
‘Consequently for the Russification of the alien nationalities, there is but one means: to breed as many children as possible. . . . So my brother and I are acting worst of all, and you married gentlemen, and especially Stephen Arkadyevich, are acting most patriotically. How many have you got?’ he asked, turning to the host with a kindly smile and holding out a tiny wineglass to be filled.
Everybody laughed, and Oblonsky most merrily of all.
‘Yes, that is the very best way,’ he said, chewing some cheese and filling the glass with a special kind of vodka. And the conversation was really ended by the joke.
‘This cheese is not bad. May I help you to some?’ asked the host.
‘Have you really been doing gymnastics again?’ he went on turning to Levin, and with his left hand he felt Levin’s muscles. Levin smiled, tightening his arm, and under Oblonsky’s fingers a lump like a Dutch cheese and hard as steel bulged out beneath the fine cloth of Levin’s coat.
‘Here’s a biceps! A real Samson!’
‘I expect great strength is needed for bear-hunting,’ said Karenin, who had the vaguest notions about sport, as he helped himself to cheese and broke his slice of bread, cut as fine as a cobweb.
Levin smiled.
‘None at all. On the contrary a child can kill a bear,’ he said, making room, with a slight bow, for the ladies who were coming up to the side-table with the hostess.
‘You have killed a bear, I hear?’ said Kitty, vainly trying to catch a wayward, slippery pickled mushroom with her fork, and so shaking the lace of her sleeve through which her arm gleamed white. ‘Have you any bears near your estate?’ she added, turning her lovely little head toward him and smiling.
There was, it would seem, nothing unusual in what she had said, but for him what a meaning there was, inexpressible in words, in every sound and every movement of her lips, her eyes, and her hands as she said it! There was a prayer for forgiveness, and trust in him, and a caress — a tender, timid caress, and a promise, and hope, and love for him in which he could not but believe and which suffocated him with joy.
‘No, we went to the Tver Province. On my return journey I met your brother-in-law, or rather your brother-in-law’s brother-in-law, on the train,’ he said smiling. ‘It was a funny meeting.’
And gaily and amusingly he told how after not sleeping all night he, in his sheep-skin coat, had rushed into Karenin’s compartment.
‘The guard (regardless of the proverb [which is: ‘At meeting you’re judged by your clothes; at parting you’re judged by your wits’]) judged me by my clothes and wished to turn me out, but I began to use long words and . . . you too,’ he went on turning to Karenin (whose Christian name and patronymic he had forgotten), ‘judging me by my peasant coat were going to turn me out, but afterwards you took my part, for which I am very grateful.’
‘The rights of passengers to a choice of seats are very ill-defined,’ said Karenin, wiping the tips of his fingers on his handkerchief.
‘I noticed that you were not quite sure what to make of me,’ said Levin with a good-natured smile, ‘so I hastened to start an intellectual conversation, to expiate my sheep-skin.’
Koznyshev, while continuing his conversation with the hostess, listened with one ear to his brother, turning his eyes toward him, and thought, ‘What has happened to him to-day? He behaves like a conqueror.’ He did not know that Levin felt as if he had grown a pair of wings. Levin knew that she was listening to his words and liked hearing him, and that was the only thing he cared about. Not only in that room but in the whole world there existed for him nothing but Kitty and himself; and he had now acquired a great significance and importance. He felt himself at a height that made him giddy, and there, somewhere far below, were all these good excellent Karenins, Oblonskys, and the rest of the world.
Quite casually, without looking at them and just as if there was no other place to put them, Oblonsky placed Levin and Kitty side by side.
‘Well, you might sit here,’ he said to Levin.
The dinner was as good as the dinner service, a thing of which Oblonsky was a connoisseur. The soup, Marie Louise, had succeeded to perfection, the tiny pasties melted in one’s mouth and were flawless. Two footmen and Matthew, wearing white ties, manipulated the food and the wines unostentatiously, quietly, and quickly. The dinner was a success on the material side, and no less so on the non-material side. The conversation, sometimes general and sometimes tête-à-tête, never ceased, and toward the end became so animated that the men left the table without ceasing to talk, and even Karenin was infected.
Chapter 10
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PESTSOV liked to bring his discussions to a finish, and had not been satisfied with Koznyshev’s remark, especially as he felt the fallacy of his own opinion.
‘I did not mean,’ he began over his soup, addressing Karenin, ‘the density of population alone, but that, combined with firm foundations. It is not principles that count.’
‘It seems to me,’ replied Karenin deliberately and languidly, ‘that it is one and the same thing. In my opinion only that nation which is more highly developed can influence another, only that. . . .’
‘But the question is,’ interrupted Pestsov in his deep voice — he was always in a hurry to speak and always seemed to stake his whole soul on what he was talking about — ‘what does “higher development” consist of? The English, the French, or the Germans, which of them is more highly developed? Which will nationalize the other? We see that the Rhine has become Frenchified, yet the Germans do not stand on a lower level!’ he shouted. ‘There is some other law!’
‘I think that the influence will always be on the side of the truly educated,’ said Karenin slightly raising his eyebrows.
‘But what should we consider to be the signs of “true education”?’ said Pestsov.
‘I fancy that those signs are well known,’ replied Karenin.
‘Are they fully known?’ intervened Koznyshev with a subtle smile. ‘At present a purely classical education is regarded as the only real education, but we hear lively discussions from both sides and cannot deny that the opposite view has many arguments in its favour.’
‘You are a classic, Sergius Ivanich! Have a glass of claret?’ said Oblonsky.
‘I am not expressing my opinion of either kind of education,’ replied Koznyshev, smiling at him condescendingly as at a child and holding out his glass. ‘All I say is that both sides have weighty arguments in their favour,’ he continued addressing himself to Karenin. ‘I have had a classical education, but can personally find no place in that controversy. I see no clear proofs that a classical education should be preferred to a modern education.’
‘Natural science has just as great an educational and mind-developing influence,’ Pestsov joined in. ‘Take astronomy, take botany, or zoology with its system of general laws!’
‘I can’t quite agree with you,’ answered Karenin. ‘It seems to me that we must admit that the process of studying the forms of a language has in itself a beneficial effect on spiritual development. Besides it is impossible to deny that the influence of the classics is in the highest degree a moral one, whereas unfortunately with instruction in natural science are connected those dangerous and false teachings which are the bane of the present times.’
Koznyshev was going to say something but Pestsov’s deep bass interrupted him. He began with great warmth to prove the falseness of this opinion. Koznyshev quietly waited to put in his word, evidently ready with a triumphant retort.
‘But one cannot help admitting,’ he said with his subtle smile, turning to Karenin, ‘one cannot help admitting that it is difficult to weigh exactly all the pros and cons of the different studies, and that the question, which kind of education should be preferred, would not have been so easily decided had there not been on the side of classical education that advantage which you have just mentioned: the moral advantage, disons le mot [let us say it] — the anti-nihilistic influence.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Were it not for the advantage of this anti-nihilistic influence on the side of classical education we should have considered the question longer, and should have weighed the arguments on both sides,’ said Koznyshev, subtly smiling. ‘We should have given a free field to both systems. But now we know that those classical education-pills contain the salutary virtue of anti-nihilism and we offer them boldly to our patients. . . . But supposing it has not that salutary virtue after all?’ he concluded, adding the grain of Attic salt.
Everybody laughed at Koznyshev’s ‘pills’, and Turovtsyn, who had at last heard the something funny for which he had been waiting as he listened to the conversation, laughed particularly loudly and merrily.
Oblonsky had made no mistake in inviting Pestsov. With Pestsov there, intellectual conversation could not stop for a moment. Hardly had Koznyshev with his joke put an end to the discussion of one question before Pestsov immediately raised another.
‘One cannot even admit that the Government had that aim in view,’ he said. ‘The Government is evidently guided by general considerations and is indifferent to the influence its measures may have. For instance, it ought to consider the education of women injurious, yet it established courses of lectures and universities for women.’
And the conversation at once veered to a new subject — the education of women.
Karenin expressed the view that the higher education of women is generally confounded with the question of women’s emancipation, and that was the only reason for considering it injurious.
‘I, on the contrary, think that these two questions are firmly bound together,’ said Pestsov. ‘It is a vicious circle. Women are deprived of rights because of their lack of education, and their lack of education results from their lack of rights. We must not forget that the subjection of women is so widespread and so old that we often refuse to recognize the abyss that separates them from us.’
‘You said “rights”,’ remarked Koznyshev, who had been waiting for Pestsov to stop, ‘the right of serving on a jury, on Town Councils, of being presidents of Local Government Boards, Civil Servants, Members of Parliament . . . ?’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘But if women, in some rare exceptional cases, can fill these posts, it seems to me that you should not speak of “rights”. It would be more correct to say “duties”. Everybody will agree that when we fill the office of juryman, town councillor, or telegraph clerk, we feel that we are fulfilling a duty. So it would be more correct to say that women are seeking for duties, and quite rightly. And we must sympathize with this desire of others to help in man’s work for the community.’
‘You are quite right,’ said Karenin. ‘I think the only question is whether they are capable of fulfilling these duties.’
‘In all probability they will be extremely capable,’ interjected Oblonsky, ‘when education is more widely diffused among them. We see this. . . .’
‘And how about the old proverb?’ remarked the old Prince, who had long been listening to the conversation with a humorous twinkle in his small glittering eyes. ‘My daughters won’t mind my mentioning it. Women’s hair is long, but their wits. . . . [‘are short,’ per the Russian proverb]’
‘They thought the same of the Negroes before their emancipation,’ said Pestsov angrily.
‘The thing that seems strange to me is that women should look for new duties,’ said Koznyshev, ‘while, as we see, men unfortunately generally avoid theirs.’
‘Duties are connected with rights, power, money, honours: that is what women are seeking,’ said Pestsov.
‘It is just as if I were to strive for the right of being a wet-nurse, and were offended because they pay women for it and won’t pay me,’ said the old Prince.
Turovtsyn burst into loud laughter, and Koznyshev felt sorry he had not made that remark himself. Even Karenin smiled.
‘Yes, but a man can’t be a wet nurse,’ said Pestsov, ‘while a woman . . .’
‘Oh yes, an Englishman on board ship did once nurse his baby,’ said the old Prince, allowing himself this indelicacy in his daughters’ presence.
‘There will be about as many women officials as there are of such Englishmen,’ said Koznyshev.
‘Yes, but what is a girl to do if she has no home?’ said Oblonsky, agreeing with Pestsov and supporting him, and thinking of the dancer Chibisova, whom he had in his mind all the time.
‘If you looked carefully into that girl’s story, you would find that she had left her family or a sister’s family, where she might have done woman’s work,’ said Dolly, irritably and unexpectedly intervening in the conversation. She probably guessed what girl her husband had in his mind.
‘But we are defending a principle, an ideal!’ said Pestsov in his sonorous bass. ‘Women wish to have the right to be independent and educated. They are hampered, and oppressed by the consciousness that this is impossible for them.’
‘And I am hampered and oppressed by the knowledge that they won’t take me as a wet-nurse in the Foundlings’ Hospital,’ repeated the old Prince, to the great joy of Turovtsyn, who laughed till he dropped the thick end of a piece of asparagus into the sauce.