930 931
Though it was dusk, not one of them wanted to go to sleep.
After wavering among reminiscences and anecdotes of guns, of
dogs, and of former shooting parties, the conversation rested on a topic
that interested all of them. After Vassenka had several times over
expressed his appreciation of this delightful sleeping place among the
fragrant hay, this delightful broken cart (he supposed it to be broken
because the shafts had been taken out), of the good nature of the
peasants that had treated him to vodka, of the dogs who lay at the feet
of their respective masters, Oblonsky began telling them of a delight-
ful shooting party at Malthus’s, where he had stayed the previous
summer.
Malthus was a well-known capitalist, who had made his money by
speculation in railway shares. Stepan Arkadyevitch described what
grouse moors this Malthus had bought in the Tver province, and how
they were preserved, and of the carriages and dogcarts in which the
shooting party had been driven, and the luncheon pavilion that had
been rigged up at the marsh.
“I don’t understand you,” said Levin, sitting up in the hay; “how is
it such people don’t disgust you? I can understand a lunch with Lafitte
is all very pleasant, but don’t you dislike just that very sumptuousness?
All these people, just like our spirit monopolists in old days, get their
money in a way that gains them the contempt of everyone. They don’t
care for their contempt, and then they use their dishonest gains to buy
off the contempt they have deserved.”
“Perfectly true!” chimed in Vassenka Veslovsky. “Perfectly! Oblonsky,
of course, goes out of bonhomie, but other people say: ‘Well, Oblonsky
stays with them.’...”
“Not a bit of it.” Levin could hear that Oblonsky was smiling as he
spoke. “I simply don’t consider him more dishonest than any other
wealthy merchant or nobleman. They’ve all made their money alike—
by their work and their intelligence.”
“Oh, by what work? Do you call it work to get hold of concessions
and speculate with them?”
“Of course it’s work. Work in this sense, that if it were not for him
and others like him, there would have been no railways.”
“But that’s not work, like the work of a peasant or a learned profes-
sion.”
“Granted, but it’s work in the sense that his activity produces a
result—the railways. But of course you think the railways useless.”
“No, that’s another question; I am prepared to admit that they’re
useful. But all profit that is out of proportion to the labor expended is
dishonest.”
“But who is to define what is proportionate?”
“Making profit by dishonest means, by trickery,” said Levin, con-
scious that he could not draw a distinct line between honesty and
dishonesty. “Such as banking, for instance,” he went on. “It’s an evil—
the amassing of huge fortunes without labor, just the same thing as
with the spirit monopolies, it’s only the form that’s changed. Le roi est
mort, vive le roi. No sooner were the spirit monopolies abolished than
the railways came up, and banking companies; that, too, is profit with-
out work.”
“Yes, that may all be very true and clever.... Lie down, Krak!”
Stepan Arkadyevitch called to his dog, who was scratching and turning
over all the hay. He was obviously convinced of the correctness of his
position, and so talked serenely and without haste. “But you have not
drawn the line between honest and dishonest work. That I receive a
bigger salary than my chief clerk, though he knows more about the
work than I do—that’s dishonest, I suppose?”