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Chapter 7.
Stephan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to perform the most
natural and essential official duty—so familiar to everyone in the gov-
ernment service, though incomprehensible to outsiders— that duty,
but for which one could hardly be in government service, of reminding
the ministry of his existence—and having, for the due performance of
this rite, taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agree-
ably spending his days at the races and in the summer villas. Mean-
while Dolly and the children had moved into the country, to cut down
expenses as much as possible. She had gone to Ergushovo, the estate
that had been her dowry, and the one where in spring the forest had
been sold. It was nearly forty miles from Levin’s Pokrovskoe. The big,
old house at Ergushovo had been pulled down long ago, and the old
prince had had the lodge done up and built on to. Twenty years before,
when Dolly was a child, the lodge had been roomy and comfortable,
though, like all lodges, it stood sideways to the entrance avenue, and
faced the south. But by now this lodge was old and dilapidated. When
Stepan Arkadyevitch had gone down in the spring to sell the forest,
Dolly had begged him to look over the house and order what repairs
might be needed. Stepan Arkadyevitch, like all unfaithful husbands
indeed, was very solicitous for his wife’s comfort, and he had himself
looked over the house, and given instructions about everything that he
considered necessary. What he considered necessary was to cover all
the furniture with cretonne, to put up curtains, to weed the garden, to
make a little bridge on the pond, and to plant flowers. But he forgot
many other essential matters, the want of which greatly distressed
Darya Alexandrovna later on.
In spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s efforts to be an attentive father
and husband, he never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and
children. He had bachelor tastes, and it was in accordance with them
that he shaped his life. On his return to Moscow he informed his wife
with pride that everything was ready, that the house would be a little
paradise, and that he advised her most certainly to go. His wife’s
staying away in the country was very agreeable to Stepan Arkadyevitch
from every point of view: it did the children good, it decreased ex-
penses, and it left him more at liberty. Darya Alexandrovna regarded
staying in the country for the summer as essential for the children,
especially for the little girl, who had not succeeded in regaining her
strength after the scarlatina, and also as a means of escaping the petty
humiliations, the little bills owing to the wood-merchant, the fishmon-
ger, the shoemaker, which made her miserable. Besides this, she was
pleased to go away to the country because she was dreaming of getting
her sister Kitty to stay with her there. Kitty was to be back from abroad
in the middle of the summer, and bathing had been prescribed for her.
Kitty wrote that no prospect was so alluring as to spend the summer
with Dolly at Ergushovo, full of childish associations for both of them.
The first days of her existence in the country were very hard for
Dolly. She used to stay in the country as a child, and the impression
she had retained of it was that the country was a refuge from all the
unpleasantness of the town, that life there, though not luxurious—
Dolly could easily make up her mind to that—was cheap and comfort-