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well.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch told him many interesting pieces of news;
especially interesting to Levin was the news that his brother, Sergey
Ivanovitch, was intending to pay him a visit in the summer.
Not one word did Stepan Arkadyevitch say in reference to Kitty
and the Shtcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife.
Levin was grateful to him for his delicacy and was very glad of his
visitor. 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 Arkadyevitch his poetic joy in 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 Arkadyevitch, 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 Agafea Mihalovna and the cook, that the dinner
should be particularly good, only ended in two famished friends at-
tacking 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 pies, with which
the cook had particularly meant to impress their visitor. But though
Stepan Arkadyevitch 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 superb and delicious.
“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 meth-
ods 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 Agafea Mihalovna came in with jam.
“Oh, Agafea Mihalovna,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, kissing the
tips of his plump fingers, “what salt goose, what herb brandy!...What
do yo think, isn’t it time to start, Kostya?” he added.
Levin looked out of the window at the sun sinking behind the bare
tree-tops of the forest.
“Yes, it’s time,” he said. “Kouzma, get ready the trap,” and he ran
downstairs.
Stepan Arkadyevitch, 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 Arkadyevitch’s side, and put on him
both his stockings and boots, a task which Stepan Arkadyevitch readily
left him.
“Kostya, give orders that if the merchant Ryabinin comes...I told
him to come today, he’s to be brought in and to wait for me...”
“Why, do you mean to say you’re selling the forest to Ryabinin?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”