Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 11
Chapter 11
WHEN Levin and Stepan Arkadyevitch reached the peasant’s hut where Levin
always used to stay, Veslovsky was already there. He was sitting in the middle
of the hut, clinging with both hands to the bench from which he was being pulled by
a soldier, the brother of the peasant’s wife, who was helping him off with his miry
boots. Veslovsky was laughing his infectious, good-humored laugh.
“I’ve only just come. Ils ont été charmants. Just fancy, they gave me drink, fed me!
Such bread, it was exquisite! Delicieux! And the vodka, I never tasted any better.
And they would not take a penny for anything. And they kept saying: ‘Excuse our
homely ways.”’
“What should they take anything for? They were entertaining you, to be sure. Do
you suppose they keep vodka for sale?” said the soldier, succeeding at last in pulling
the soaked boot off the blackened stocking.
In spite of the dirtiness of the hut, which was all muddied by their boots and the
filthy dogs licking themselves clean, and the smell of marsh mud and powder that
filled the room, and the absence of knives and forks, the party drank their tea and
ate their supper with a relish only known to sportsmen. Washed and clean, they
went into a hay-barn swept ready for them, where the coachman had been making
up beds for the gentlemen.
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 delightful 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.”
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