The other unpleasantness that upset his good mood at first, but at which he later laughed a great deal, was that of all the provisions, which Kitty had sent with them in such abundance that it seemed they could not have been eaten in a week, nothing remained. Coming back from the hunt tired and hungry, Levin had been dreaming so specifically of pirozhki that, as he approached their quarters, he could already feel their smell and taste in his mouth, the way Laska could sense game, and he at once ordered Filipp to serve them. It turned out that there were not only no pirozhki but no chicken either.
‘Quite an appetite!’ said Stepan Arkadyich, laughing and pointing at Vasenka Veslovsky. ‘I don’t suffer from lack of appetite myself, but this is astonishing...’
‘Well, nothing to be done!’ said Levin, giving Veslovsky a dark look. ‘Serve some beef, then, Filipp.’
‘The beef got eaten. I gave the bone to the dogs,’ Filipp replied.
Levin was so upset that he said vexedly:
‘You might have left me at least something!’ and nearly wept.
‘Clean the game,’ he said to Filipp in a trembling voice, trying not to look at Vasenka, ‘and layer it with nettles. And fetch me some milk at least.’
Later on, when he had drunk his fill of milk, he felt ashamed at having shown vexation to a stranger, and he started laughing at his hungry anger.
That evening they hunted in yet another field, where Veslovsky also shot several birds, and at night they returned home.
The way back was as merry as the way there. Veslovsky sang, then recalled with pleasure his exploits with the muzhiks who had treated him to vodka and said ‘No offence’, then his night’s exploits with the nuts and the farm girl, and the muzhik who had asked him whether he was married or not and, on learning that he was not, had told him: ‘Don’t you go looking at other men’s wives; you’d best get one of your own.’ These words especially made Veslovsky laugh.
‘All in all I’m terribly pleased with our trip. And you, Levin?’
‘I’m very pleased,’ Levin said sincerely, especially glad not only that he did not feel the hostility he had felt towards Vasenka Veslovsky at home, but that, on the contrary, he felt the most friendly disposition towards him.
XIV
The next day at ten o‘clock, having already made the round of the farm, Levin knocked at the door of Vasenka’s bedroom.
‘Please don’t be embarrassed.’ Levin sat down by the window. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Like a log. What a good day for hunting!’
‘Yes. Will you take tea or coffee?’
‘Neither one. I’ll wait for lunch. I’m ashamed, really. The ladies must be up already? It would be splendid to take a stroll around. You can show me your horses.’
After strolling in the garden, visiting the stables, and even doing some exercises together on the bars, Levin and his guest returned to the house and went into the drawing room.
‘We had excellent hunting and so many impressions!’ Veslovsky said, going up to Kitty, who was sitting by the samovar. ‘It’s a pity ladies are deprived of such pleasures!’
‘Well, so what? He has to find something to talk about with his hostess,’ Levin said to himself. Again it seemed to him there was something in the smile and the victorious expression with which his guest had addressed Kitty...
The princess, who was sitting at the other end of the table with Marya Vlasyevna and Stepan Arkadyich, called Levin over and started a conversation with him about moving to Moscow for Kitty’s confinement and getting an apartment ready. As Levin had found all the preparations for the wedding unpleasant, insulting in their insignificance to the grandeur of what was taking place, so he found still more insulting the preparations for the future confinement, the date of which was somehow being counted out on their fingers. He tried all the time not to hear those conversations about the ways of swaddling the future baby, tried to turn away and not see some sort of mysterious, endless knitted strips, some sort of linen triangles, to which Dolly attached some special significance, and so on. The event of his son’s birth (he was sure it would be a son), which he had been promised but in which he still could not believe - so extraordinary did it seem to him - appeared on the one hand as such an enormous and therefore impossible happiness, and on the other as such a mysterious event, that this imaginary knowledge of what was going to be and, consequently, the preparation for it as for something ordinary, done by these same people, seemed to him outrageous and humiliating.
