Anna Karenina - Part 6 - Page 13/121

Varenka, with her white kerchief on her black hair, surrounded

by the children, gaily and good-humoredly looking after them, and

at the same time visibly excited at the possibility of receiving

a declaration from the man she cared for, was very attractive.

Sergey Ivanovitch walked beside her, and never left off admiring

her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he

had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and

became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her

was something special that he had felt long, long ago, and only

once, in his early youth. The feeling of happiness in being near

her continually grew, and at last reached such a point that, as

he put a huge, slender-stalked agaric fungus in her basket, he

looked straight into her face, and noticing the flush of glad and

alarmed excitement that overspread her face, he was confused

himself, and smiled to her in silence a smile that said too much.

"If so," he said to himself, "I ought to think it over and make

up my mind, and not give way like a boy to the impulse of a

moment."

"I'm going to pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my

efforts will make no show," he said, and he left the edge of the

forest where they were walking on low silky grass between old

birch trees standing far apart, and went more into the heart of

the wood, where between the white birch trunks there were gray

trunks of aspen and dark bushes of hazel. Walking some forty

paces away, Sergey Ivanovitch, knowing he was out of sight, stood

still behind a bushy spindle-tree in full flower with its rosy

red catkins. It was perfectly still all round him. Only

overhead in the birches under which he stood, the flies, like a

swarm of bees, buzzed unceasingly, and from time to time the

children's voices were floated across to him. All at once he

heard, not far from the edge of the wood, the sound of Varenka's

contralto voice, calling Grisha, and a smile of delight passed

over Sergey Ivanovitch's face. Conscious of this smile, he shook

his head disapprovingly at his own condition, and taking out a

cigar, he began lighting it. For a long while he could not get a

match to light against the trunk of a birch tree. The soft

scales of the white bark rubbed off the phosphorus, and the light

went out. At last one of the matches burned, and the fragrant

cigar smoke, hovering uncertainly in flat, wide coils, stretched

away forwards and upwards over a bush under the overhanging

branches of a birch tree. Watching the streak of smoke, Sergey

Ivanovitch walked gently on, deliberating on his position.