Anna Karenina полностью

‘This cheese isn’t bad. Would you care for some?’ said the host. ‘So you’ve gone back to doing exercises?’ He turned to Levin, feeling his muscle with his left hand. Levin smiled, flexed his arm, and under Stepan Arkadyich’s fingers a steely bump rose like a round cheese under the thin cloth of the frock coat.

‘What a biceps! Samson!’

‘I suppose it takes great strength to hunt bear,’ said Alexei Alexandrovich, who had very foggy notions of hunting, spreading some cheese and tearing through the gossamer-thin slice of bread.

Levin smiled.

‘None at all. On the contrary, a child can kill a bear,’ he said with a slight bow, stepping aside before the ladies who, together with the hostess, were approaching the table of hors d‘oeuvres.

‘And you killed a bear, I’m told?’ said Kitty, trying in vain to spear a disobedient, slippery mushroom with her fork and shaking the lace through which her arm showed white. ‘Do you really have bears there?’ she added, half turning her lovely head towards him and smiling.

It seemed there was nothing extraordinary in what she said, yet for him, what meaning, inexpressible in words, there was in every sound, in every movement of her lips, eyes, arm, as she said it! Here was a plea 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 choked him with happiness.

‘No, we went to Tver province. On my way back I met your beau-frère ^ah on the train, or your beau-frère’s brother-in-law,’ he said with a smile. ‘It was a funny encounter.’

And he told, gaily and amusingly, how, after not sleeping all night, he had burst into Alexei Alexandrovich’s compartment in his sheepskin jacket.

‘The conductor, contrary to the proverb, judged me by my clothes and wanted to throw me out. But at that point I began talking in high-flown language, and ... you, too,’ he said, forgetting Karenin’s name as he turned to him, ‘wanted to chase me out at first, judging by my jacket, but then stood up for me, for which I’m very grateful.’

‘In general, passengers’ rights in the choice of seats are rather vague,’ said Alexei Alexandrovich, wiping the tips of his fingers with a handkerchief.

‘I could see you were uncertain about me,’ Levin said, smiling good-naturedly, ‘but I hastened to start an intelligent conversation, so as to smooth over my sheepskin jacket.’

Sergei Ivanovich, continuing his conversation with the hostess while listening with one ear to his brother, cast a sidelong glance at him. ‘What’s got into him tonight? Such a triumphant look,’ he thought. He did not know that Levin felt he had grown wings. Levin knew that she was listening to his words and liked listening to them. And that was the only thing that mattered to him. Not just in that room, but in all the world, there existed for him only he, who had acquired enormous significance, and she. He felt himself on a height that made his head spin, and somewhere below, far away, were all these kind, nice Karenins, Oblonskys, and the rest of the world.

Quite inconspicuously, without looking at them, but just like that, as if there were nowhere else to seat them, Stepan Arkadyich placed Levin and Kitty next to each other.

‘Well, why don’t you sit here,’ he said to Levin.

The dinner was as good as the dinner ware, of which Stepan Arkadyich was a great fancier. The soup Marie-Louise succeeded splendidly; the pirozhki, which melted in the mouth, were irreproachable. The two servants and Matvei, in white ties, went about their duties with the food and wine quite unobtrusively, quietly and efficiently. On the material side, the dinner was a success; it was no less of a success on the non-material side. The conversation, now general, now particular, never lapsed and became so lively by the end of dinner that the men got up from the table still talking and even Alexei Alexandrovich grew animated.

X

Pestsov liked to argue to the end and was not satisfied with Sergei Ivanovich’s words, the less so as he sensed the incorrectness of his own opinion.

‘I never meant population density alone,’ he said over the soup, addressing Alexei Alexandrovich, ‘but as combined with fundamentals, and not with principles.’

‘It seems to me,’ Alexei Alexandrovich replied unhurriedly and listlessly, ‘that they are one and the same thing. In my opinion, only that nation which is more highly developed can influence another, which ...’

‘But that’s just the question,’ Pestsov interrupted in his bass voice, always in a hurry to speak and always seeming to put his whole soul into what he said. ‘What is this higher development supposed to be? The English, the French, the Germans - which of them stands on a higher level of development? Which will nationalize the other? We see the Rhine frenchified, yet the Germans are not on a lower level!’ he cried. ‘There’s a different law here!’