Chapter XXVI
In the morning Konstantin Levin left
Moscow, and towards evening he reached home. On the journey in the
train he talked to his neighbors about politics and the new
railways,1 and,
just as in Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of
ideas, dissatisfaction with himself, shame of something or other.
But when he got out at his own station, when he saw his one-eyed
coachman, Ignat, with the collar of his coat turned up; when, in
the dim light reflected by the station fires, he saw his own
sledge, his own horses with their tails tied up, in their harness
trimmed with rings and tassels; when the coachman Ignat, as he put
in his luggage, told him the village news, that the contractor had
arrived, and that Pava had calved,—he felt that little by little
the confusion was clearing up, and the shame and
self-dissatisfaction were passing away. He felt this at the mere
sight of Ignat and the horses; but when he had put on the sheepskin
brought for him, had sat down wrapped up in the sledge, and had
driven off pondering on the work that lay before him in the
village, and staring at the side-horse, that had been his
saddle-horse, past his prime now, but a spirited beast from the
Don,2 he began
to see what had happened to him in quite a different light. He felt
himself, and did not want to be any one else. All he wanted now was
to be better than before. In the first place he resolved that from
that day he would give up hoping for any extraordinary happiness,
such as marriage must have given him, and consequently he would not
so disdain what he really had. Secondly, he would never again let
himself give way to low passion, the memory of which had so
tortured him when he had been making up his mind to make an offer.
Then remembering his brother Nikolay, he resolved to himself that
he would never allow himself to forget him, that he would follow
him up, and not lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help when
things should go ill with him. And that would be soon, he felt.
Then, too, his brother’s talk of communism, which he had treated so
lightly at the time, now made him think. He considered a revolution
in economic conditions nonsense. But he always felt the injustice
of his own abundance in comparison with the poverty of the
peasants, and now he determined that so as to feel quite in the
right, though he had worked hard and lived by no means luxuriously
before, he would now work still harder, and would allow himself
even less luxury. And all this seemed to him so easy a conquest
over himself that he spent the whole drive in the pleasantest
day-dreams. With a resolute feeling of hope in a new, better life,
he reached home before nine o’clock at night.
The snow of the little quadrangle before the house
was lit up by a light in the bedroom windows of his old nurse,
Agafea Mihalovna, who performed the duties of housekeeper in his
house. She was not yet asleep. Kouzma, waked up by her, came
sidling sleepily out onto the steps. A setter bitch, Laska, ran out
too, almost upsetting Kouzma, and whining, turned round about
Levin’s knees, jumping up and longing, but not daring, to put her
forepaws on his chest.
“You’re soon back again, sir,” said Agafea
Mihalovna.
“I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends,
one is well; but at home, one is better,”3 he
answered, and went into his study.
The study was slowly lit up as the candle was
brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag’s horns, the
bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator,
which had long wanted mending, his father’s sofa, a large table, on
the table an open book, a broken ash-tray, a manuscript-book with
his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an
instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging the new life, of
which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his
life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: “No, you’re not going
to get away from us, and you’re not going to be different, but
you’re going to be the same as you’ve always been; with doubts,
everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend,
and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you
won’t get, and which isn’t possible for you.”
This the things said to him, but another voice in
his heart was telling him that he must not fall under the sway of
the past, and that one can do anything with oneself. And hearing
that voice, he went into the corner where stood his two heavy
dumb-bells, and began brandishing them like a gymnast, trying to
restore his confident temper. There was a creak of steps at the
door. He hastily put down the dumb-bells.
The bailiff came in, and said everything, thank
God, was doing well; but informed him that the buckwheat in the new
drying-machine had been a little scorched. This piece of news
irritated Levin. The new drying-machine had been constructed and
partly invented by Levin. The bailiff had always been against the
drying-machine, and now it was with suppressed triumph that he
announced that the buckwheat had been scorched. Levin was firmly
convinced that if the buckwheat had been scorched, it was only
because the precautions had not been taken, for which he had
hundreds of times given orders. He was annoyed, and reprimanded the
bailiff. But there had been an important and joyful event: Pava,
his best cow, an expensive beast, bought at a show, had
calved.
“Kouzma, give me my sheepskin. And you tell them to
take a lantern. I’ll come and look at her,” he said to the
bailiff.
The cowhouse for the more valuable cows was just
behind the house. Walking across the yard, passing a snowdrift by
the lilac-tree, he went into the cowhouse. There was the warm,
steamy smell of dung when the frozen door was opened, and the cows,
astonished at the unfamiliar light of the lantern, stirred on the
fresh straw. He caught a glimpse of the broad, smooth, black and
piebald back of Hollandka. Berkoot, the bull, was lying down with
his ring in his lip, and seemed about to get up, but thought better
of it, and only gave two snorts as they passed by him. Pava, a
perfect beauty, huge as a hippopotamus, with her back turned to
them, prevented their seeing the calf, as she sniffed her all
over.
Levin went into the pen, looked Pava over, and
lifted the red and spotted calf onto her long, tottering legs.
Pava, uneasy, began lowing, but when Levin put the calf close to
her she was soothed, and, sighing heavily, began licking her with
her rough tongue. The calf, fumbling, poked her nose under her
mother’s udder, and stiffened her tail out straight.
“Here, bring the light, Fyodor, this way,” said
Levin, examining the calf. “Like the mother! though the color takes
after the father; but that’s nothing. Very good. Long and broad in
the haunch. Vassily Fedorovitch, isn’t she splendid?” he said to
the bailiff, quite forgiving him for the buckwheat under the
influence of his delight in the calf.
“How could she fail to be? Oh, Semyon the
contractor came the day after you left. You must settle with him,
Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said the bailiff, “I did inform you about
the machine.”
This question was enough to take Levin back to all
the details of his work on the estate, which was on a large scale,
and complicated. He went straight from the cowhouse to the
counting-house, and after a little conversation with the bailiff
and Semyon the contractor, he went back to the house and straight
up-stairs to the drawing-room.