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“Why don’t you get married?”
“It hasn’t happened so,” Konstantin answered, reddening a little.
“Why not? For me now...everything’s at an end! I’ve made a mess
of my life. But this I’ve said, and I say still, that if my share had been
given me when I needed it, my whole life would have been different.”
Konstantin made haste to change the conversation.
“Do you know your little Vanya’s with me, a clerk in the counting-
house at Pokrovskoe.”
Nikolay jerked his neck, and sank into thought.
“Yes, tell me what’s going on at Pokrovskoe. Is the house standing
still, and the birch trees, and our schoolroom? And Philip the gardener,
is he living? How I remember the arbor and the seat! Now mind and
don’t alter anything in the house, but make haste and get married, and
make everything as it used to be again. Then I’ll come and see you, if
your wife is nice.”
“But come to me now,” said Levin. “How nicely we would arrange
it!”
I’d come and see you if I were sure I should not find Sergey
Ivanovitch.”
“You wouldn’t find him there. I live quite independently of him.”
“Yes, but say what you like, you will have to choose between me
and him,” he said, looking timidly into his brother’s face.
This timidity touch Konstantin.
“If you want to hear my confession of faith on the subject, I tell you
that in your quarrel with Sergey Ivanovitch I take neither side. You’re
both wrong. You’re more wrong externally, and he inwardly.”
“Ah, ah! You see that, you see that!” Nikolay shouted joyfully.
“But I personally value friendly relations with you more because...”
“Why, why?”
Konstantin could not say that he valued it more because Nikolay
was unhappy, and needed affection. But Nikolay knew that this was
just what he meant to say, and scowling he took up the vodka again.
“Enough, Nikolay Dmitrievitch!” said Marya Nikolaevna, stretch-
ing out her plump, bare arm towards the decanter.
“Let it be! Don’t insist! I’ll beat you!” he shouted.
Marya Nikolaevna smiled a sweet and good-humored smile, which
was at once reflected on Nikolay’s face, and she took the bottle.
“And do you suppose she understands nothing?” said Nikolay.
“She understands it all better than any of us. Isn’t it true there’s some-
thing good and sweet in her?”
“Were you never before in Moscow?” Konstantin said to her, for
the sake of saying something.
“Only you mustn’t be polite and stiff with her. It frightens her. No
one ever spoke to her so but the justices of the peace who tried her for
trying to get out of a house of ill-fame. Mercy on us, the senselessness
in the world!” he cried suddenly. “These new institutions, these jus-
tices of the peace, rural councils, what hideousness it all is!”
And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new institu-
tions.
Konstantin Levin heard him, and the disbelief in the sense of all
public institutions, which he shared with him, and often expressed,
was distasteful to him now from his brother’s lips.
“In another world we shall understand it all,” he said lightly.
“In another world! Ah, I don’t like that other world! I don’t like it,”
he said, letting his scared eyes rest on his brother’s eyes. “Here one
would think that to get out of all the baseness and the mess, one’s own
and other people’s, would be a good thing, and yet I’m afraid of death,
awfully afraid of death.” He shuddered. “But do drink something.