Читать книгу Anna Karenina (Maude Translation, Unabridged and Annotated) - Leo Tolstoy - Страница 31

‘YES, there is certainly something objectionable and repellent about me,’ thought Levin after leaving the Shcherbatskys, as he walked toward his brother’s lodgings. ‘I do not get on with other people. They say it is pride! No, I am not even proud. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself into such a position.’ And he pictured to himself, Vronsky, happy, kind, clever, calm, and certainly never placing himself in such a terrible position as he, Levin, had been in that evening. ‘Yes, she was bound to choose him. It had to be so, and I have no cause to complain of anyone or anything. It was my own fault. What right had I to imagine that she would wish to unite her life with mine? Who and what am I? A man of no account, wanted by no one and of no use to anyone.’ And he remembered his brother Nicholas, and kept his mind gladly on that memory. ‘Is he not right that everything on earth is evil and horrid? And have we judged brother Nicholas fairly? Of course, from Prokofy’s point of view, who saw him in a ragged coat and tipsy, he is a despicable fellow; but I know him from another side. I know his soul, and know that we resemble one another. And yet I, instead of looking him up, dined out and came here.’ Levin went up to a lamp-post and read his brother’s address which he had in his pocket-book, and then hired a sledge. On the long way to his brother’s he recalled all the events he knew of Nicholas’s life. He recalled how despite the ridicule of his fellow-students his brother had lived like a monk while at the University and for a year after, strictly observing all the religious rites, attending service, fasting, avoiding all pleasures and especially women; and then how he suddenly broke loose, became intimate with the vilest people and gave himself up to unbridled debauchery. He remembered how his brother had brought a boy from the country to educate, and in a fit of anger had so beaten the lad that proceedings were commenced against him for causing bodily harm. He remembered an affair with a sharper to whom his brother had lost money, and whom he had first given a promissory note and then prosecuted on a charge of fraud. (That was when his brother Sergius had paid the money for him.) Then he remembered the night which Nicholas had spent in the police cells for disorderly conduct, and the disgraceful proceedings he had instigated against his brother Sergius Ivanich, whom he accused of not having paid out to him his share of his mother’s fortune: and lastly, the time when his brother took an official appointment in one of the Western Provinces and was there arrested for assaulting an Elder… . It was all very disgusting, but to Levin it did not seem nearly so disgusting as it must have seemed to those who did not know Nicholas, nor his whole story, nor his heart.

Levin remembered that when Nicholas was passing through his pious stage of fasting, visiting monks, and going to church; when he was seeking in religion for help to curb his passionate nature, not only did no one encourage him, but every one, and Levin among them, made fun of him. He was teased and called ‘Noah’ and ‘monk’, and then when he broke loose no one helped him, but all turned away from him with horror and disgust.

Levin felt that his brother Nicholas, in his soul, in the innermost depths of his soul, despite the depravity of his life, was no worse than those who despised him. It was not his fault that he was born with his ungovernable temper, and with a cramped mind. He always wished to do right. ‘I will tell him everything, I will get him to tell me everything. I will show him that I love and therefore understand him,’ Levin decided in his mind, as toward eleven o’clock he drove up to the hotel of which he had the address.

‘Upstairs, Nos. 12 and 13,’ said the hall porter in reply to Levin’s question.

‘Is he in?’

‘I expect so.’

The door of No. 12 was ajar, and from within, visible in the streak of light, issued dense fumes of inferior and weak tobacco. Levin heard a stranger’s voice, but knew at once that his brother was there, for he heard him coughing.

As he entered the doorway the stranger’s voice was saying: ‘It all depends on how intelligently and rationally the affair is conducted.’

Constantine Levin glanced into the room, which was beyond a partition, and saw that the speaker was a young man with an enormous head of hair, who wore a workman’s coat, and that a young, pockmarked woman in a woollen dress without collar or cuffs was sitting on the sofa. [At that time better-class women always wore something white round their necks and wrists.] He could not see his brother, and his heart sank painfully at the thought that Nicholas lived among such strange people. No one noticed him, and, as he took off his goloshes, he overheard what the man in the workman’s coat was saying. He was talking about some commercial enterprise.

‘Oh, let the privileged classes go to the devil,’ said his brother’s voice, with a cough.

‘Masha, get us some supper and bring the wine if any is left, or send for some.’

The woman rose, came out from behind the partition, and saw Constantine.

‘Here is a gentleman, Nicholas Dmitrich,’ she said.

‘Whom do you want?’ said Nicholas Levin’s voice angrily.

‘It is I,’ answered Constantine Levin, coming forward into the lamplight.

‘Who’s I?’ said the voice of Nicholas Levin still more angrily.

Constantine heard how he rose hurriedly and caught against something, and then in the doorway before him he saw the familiar yet ever strange figure of his brother, wild, sickly, gigantic, lean, and round-shouldered, with large, frightened eyes.

He was even more emaciated than three years before, when Constantine Levin had last seen him. He was wearing a short coat, and his hands and broad bones appeared more immense than ever. His hair was thinner, but the same straight moustache covered his lips; and the same eyes with their peculiar, naïve gaze looked out at the newcomer.

‘Ah! Kostya!’ he said suddenly, recognizing his brother, and his eyes lit up with joy. But at the same moment he turned to look at the young man and convulsively jerked his head and neck as if his necktie were strangling him, a movement Levin knew well, and quite another expression — a wild, suffering, and cruel look — settled on his haggard face.

‘I wrote both to you and to Sergius Ivanich that I do not know you and do not wish to know you. What is it? What do you want?’

He was not at all as Constantine had imagined him. Constantine when thinking of him had forgotten the most trying and worst part of his character, that which made intercourse with him so difficult; but now when he saw his face, and especially that convulsive movement of his head, he remembered it all.

‘I do not want anything of you specially,’ he answered meekly; ‘I have simply come to see you.’

His brother’s timidity obviously softened Nicholas, whose lips quivered.

‘Ah! You have come just for that?’ he said. ‘Well, come in, sit down. Will you have some supper? Masha, get supper for three. No, wait a little. Do you know who this is?’ he added, turning to his brother and pointing to the man in the workman’s coat. ‘It is Mr. Kritsky, my friend ever since my Kiev days, a very remarkable fellow. Of course the police are after him, because he is not a scoundrel.’

And he glanced round at everybody present as was his way. Seeing that the woman in the doorway was about to go out he shouted to her: ‘Wait, I told you,’ and in the awkward and blundering manner familiar to Constantine, he again looked round at everybody, and began to tell his brother about Kritsky: how he had been expelled from the University because he had started a society to help the poorer students, and also Sunday schools, and how he had afterwards taught in an elementary school, and had been turned out from that too, and had then been tried on some charge or other.

‘You were at Kiev University?’ Constantine Levin asked Kritsky, in order to break the awkward silence that followed.

‘Yes, at Kiev,’ Kritsky replied with an angry frown.

‘And this woman,’ said Nicholas Levin, interrupting him, and pointing to her, ‘is my life’s companion, Mary Nikolavna; I took her out of a house …’ and as he said this he again jerked his neck. ‘But I love and respect her and beg all those who wish to know me,’ he added, raising his voice and scowling, ‘to love and respect her. She is just the same to me as a wife, just the same. So now you know whom you have to deal with, and if you fear you will be degraded — there is the door.’

And again his eyes glanced questioningly around.

‘Why should I be degraded? I don’t understand.’

‘Well, Masha, order supper for three, with vodka and wine… . No, wait. No, never mind… . You may go.’