Levin remembered that during the time when Nikolay was going through his phase of piety, fasts, monks, and church services, when he sought help in religion, and a way of curbing his passionate nature, not only had no one supported him but everyone had laughed at him, himself included. They had all teased him and called him Noah, or ‘the monk’;* but when he had cracked, no one helped him; instead, everyone had turned their backs on him in horror and disgust.
Levin felt that in his soul, in the very depths of his soul, his brother Nikolay was no more in the wrong than those people who despised him, despite all the depravity of his life. It was not his fault that he had been born with his unruly character and a mind that was constrained by something. But he had always wanted to be good. ‘I’ll tell him everything, I’ll make him tell me everything, and I’ll show him that I love him and therefore understand him,’ Levin resolved while driving up to the hotel indicated in the address, some time after ten.
‘Twelve and thirteen are upstairs,’ said the porter in answer to Levin’s question.
‘Is he there?’
‘He ought to be.’
The door of room twelve was half-open, and from it, in a shaft of light, came the thick smoke of low-grade, weak tobacco and the sound of a voice which Levin did not recognize; but Levin immediately knew his brother was there, as he heard his intermittent coughing.
When he walked in, the unfamiliar voice was saying:
‘Everything depends on how intelligently and conscientiously it’s managed.’
Konstantin Levin looked through the doorway and saw that the speaker was a young man with a great shock of hair, dressed in a short kaftan, while a young, slightly pockmarked woman in a woollen dress without cuffs or collar* was sitting on a sofa. His brother was not visible. Konstantin’s heart froze at the thought of his brother living amongst such alien people. No one had heard him, and while he took off his galoshes, Konstantin listened to what the gentleman in the short kaftan was saying. He was talking about some kind of venture.
‘Well, to hell with the privileged classes,’ said the voice of his brother, coughing. ‘Masha! Get us some supper and let us have wine, if there is any left, otherwise send for some.’
The woman stood up, stepped out from behind the screen and saw Konstantin.
‘There’s some gentleman here, Nikolay Dmitrich,’ she said.
‘Who does he want?’ Nikolay Levin’s voice asked angrily.
‘It’s me,’ answered Konstantin Levin, coming into the light.
‘Who’s me?’ repeated Nikolay’s voice even more angrily. He could be heard quickly getting up and stumbling against something, and then Levin saw before him in the doorway the huge, thin, stooping figure of his brother with his large, frightened eyes, a figure so familiar yet nevertheless shocking in its savage and unhealthy demeanour.
He was even thinner than he had been three years earlier, when Konstantin Levin had seen him last. He was wearing a short frock-coat. And his hands and broad bones seemed even more enormous. His hair had thinned, the same straight moustache hung over his upper lips, and the same eyes looked strangely and naively at the person who had come in.
‘Ah, Kostya!’ he exclaimed suddenly when he recognized his brother, and his eyes lit up with happiness. But the very next second he looked round to the young man and made the convulsive movement with his head and neck which Konstantin knew so well, as if his tie was too tight; and then a completely different, savage, anguished, and cruel expression settled on his emaciated face.
‘I wrote to both you and Sergey Ivanyich that I neither know you or want to know you. What is it you’re after, what do you both want?’
He was not at all as Konstantin had imagined. The toughest and worst side of his character, which was what made being with him so difficult, had been forgotten by Konstantin Levin when he was thinking about him; and now, when he saw his face, particularly that convulsive jerking of his head, it all came flooding back.
‘There isn’t anything I want,’ he answered timidly. ‘I’ve just come to see you.’
Nikolay was clearly mollified by his brother’s timidity. His lips twitched.
‘Ah, you’re just stopping by?’ he asked. ‘Well, come in, sit down. Do you want some supper? Masha, bring three portions. No, wait. Do you know who this is?’ he said, turning to his brother and indicating the gentleman in the short kaftan. ‘This is Mr Kritsky, who I have been friends with from my Kiev days, a very remarkable person. He is being hounded by the police, of course, because he is not a scoundrel.’
And he eyed everyone in the room, as was his custom. When he saw that the woman standing in the doorway was making a move to go, he shouted to her: ‘I told you to wait.’ And with that awkwardness and conversational clumsiness which Konstantin knew so well, he eyed everyone again and proceeded to tell his brother Kritsky’s story: how he was thrown out of university for starting Sunday schools* and a society to help poor students, and how he had then gone to work as a teacher in a peasant school, and how they had thrown him out there too, and how he had been taken to court for something.
‘You were at Kiev university?’ Konstantin Levin asked Kritsky, in order to break the awkward silence which ensued.
‘Kiev, yes,’ Kritsky said with an angry frown.
‘And this woman,’ Nikolay Levin interrupted him, pointing to her, ‘is my life partner, Marya Nikolayevna. I took her from the brothel,’ and his neck jerked as he said this. ‘But I love her and respect her, and I ask that everyone who wants to know me,’ he added, raising his voice and glowering, ‘loves and respects her. She is just the same as my wife, just the same. So now you know who you are dealing with. And if you think you are demeaning yourself, goodbye and good riddance.’*
And again he ran his eyes over them all searchingly.
‘I don’t understand why I should be demeaning myself.’
‘Well then, Masha, ask them to bring supper: three portions, vodka and wine … No, wait … No, never mind … Off you go.’
25
‘SO you see,’ Nikolay Levin continued, wrinkling his brow with effort and twitching. He clearly found it difficult to work out what to say and do. ‘You see now …’ He pointed to some kind of iron bars tied up with twine in the corner of the room. ‘You see this? It’s the beginning of a new project we are launching. It’s a manufacturing co-operative …’