Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 20
Stepan Arkadyevitch did not say to Bartnyansky that it was a “growing thing“–
Bartnyansky would not have understood that.
“I want the money, I’ve nothing to live on.”
“You’re living, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but in debt.”
“Are you, though? Heavily?” said Bartnyansky sympathetically.
“Very heavily: twenty thousand.”
Bartnyansky broke into good-humored laughter.
“Oh, lucky fellow!” said he. “My debts mount up to a million and a half, and I’ve
nothing, and still I can live, as you see!”
And Stepan Arkadyevitch saw the correctness of this view not in words only but
in actual fact. Zhivahov owed three hundred thousand, and hadn’t a farthing to
bless himself with, and he lived, and in style too! Count Krivtsov was considered
a hopeless case by everyone, and yet he kept two mistresses. Petrovsky had run
through five millions, and still lived in just the same style, and was even a manager
in the financial department with a salary of twenty thousand. But besides this, Petersburg
had physically an agreeable effect on Stepan Arkadyevitch. It made him
younger. In Moscow he sometimes found a gray hair in his head, dropped asleep
after dinner, stretched, walked slowly upstairs, breathing heavily, was bored by the
society of young women, and did not dance at balls. In Petersburg he always felt ten
years younger.
His experience in Petersburg was exactly what had been described to him on the
previous day by Prince Pyotr Oblonsky, a man of sixty, who had just come back from
abroad:
“We don’t know the way to live here,” said Pyotr Oblonsky. “I spent the summer
in Baden, and you wouldn’t believe it, I felt quite a young man. At a glimpse of
a pretty woman, my thoughts.... One dines and drinks a glass of wine, and feels
strong and ready for anything. I came home to Russia–had to see my wife, and,
what’s more, go to my country place; and there, you’d hardly believe it, in a fortnight
I’d got into a dressing gown and given up dressing for dinner. Needn’t say I had no
thoughts left for pretty women. I became quite an old gentleman. There was nothing
left for me but to think of my eternal salvation. I went off to Paris–I was as right as
could be at once.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt exactly the difference that Pyotr Oblonsky described. In
Moscow he degenerated so much that if he had had to be there for long together, he
might in good earnest have come to considering his salvation; in Petersburg he felt
himself a man of the world again.
Between Princess Betsy Tverskaya and Stepan Arkadyevitch there had long existed
rather curious relations. Stepan Arkadyevitch always flirted with her in jest,
and used to say to her, also in jest, the most unseemly things, knowing that nothing
delighted her so much. The day after his conversation with Karenin, Stepan
Arkadyevitch went to see her, and felt so youthful that in this jesting flirtation and
nonsense he recklessly went so far that he did not know how to extricate himself, as
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