‘Have you read his article?’ he said, turning to Kritsky again, sitting down to the table and clearing away from it a heap of half-filled cigarettes to make room.

 

‘I have not read it,’ said Kritsky morosely, evidently not wishing to join in the conversation.

 

‘Why not?’ irritably answered Nicholas, still addressing Kritsky.

 

‘Because I consider it unnecessary to waste time on it.’

 

‘What do you mean? May I ask how you knew it would waste your time? That article is incomprehensible to many; I mean it is above them. But it is a different matter with me. I see through his thought, and therefore know why it is weak.’

 

Every one remained silent. Kritsky rose and took up his hat.

 

‘Don’t you want any supper? Well, good-bye. Come to-morrow and bring the locksmith.’

 

As soon as Kritsky had gone out, Nicholas smiled and winked.

 

‘He also is not much good,’ he remarked. ‘I can see . . .’

 

But at that moment Kritsky called him from outside the door.

 

‘What do you want now?’ said Nicholas and went out into the passage.

 

Left alone with Mary Nikolavna, Levin spoke to her.

 

‘Have you been long with my brother?’ he asked.

 

‘Yes, it is the second year now. His health is very bad, he drinks too much,’ she said.

 

‘Really — what does he drink?’

 

‘He drinks vodka, and it is bad for him.’

 

‘Much vodka?’ whispered Levin.

 

‘Yes,’ she said looking timidly toward the door, just as Nicholas returned.

 

‘What were you talking about?’ he asked frowning and looking from one to the other with frightened eyes. ‘What was it?’

 

‘Nothing,’ replied Levin in confusion.

 

‘If you do not wish to tell me, do as you please. Only you have no business to talk to her. She’s a street girl, and you are a gentleman,’ he muttered jerking his neck. ‘You I see, have examined and weighed everything here, and regard my errors with compassion,’ he continued, again raising his voice.

 

‘Nicholas Dmitrich, Nicholas Dmitrich,’ whispered Mary Nikolavna, again approaching him.

 

‘Well, all right, all right! . . . and how about supper? Ah, here it is,’ he said noticing a waiter who was bringing in a tray. ‘Here, here, put it down here,’ he said crossly, and at once poured out a wine-glass full of vodka and drank it greedily. ‘Have a drink, will you?’ he said to his brother, brightening up at once. ‘Well, we’ve had enough of Sergius Ivanich. I am glad to see you, anyhow. Whatever one may say, after all, we are not strangers. Come, have a drink. Tell me what you are doing,’ he continued, greedily chewing a crust of bread and filling himself another glass. ‘How are you getting on?’

 

‘I am living alone in the country, as I did before, and I look after the farming,’ answered Constantine, observing with horror how greedily his brother ate and drank, and trying not to let it be seen that he noticed it.

 

‘Why don’t you get married?’

 

‘I had not the chance,’ replied Constantine blushing.

 

‘Why not? For me all that is over. I have spoilt my life. I have said, and still say that if I had been given my share of the property when I wanted it, everything would have been different.’

 

Constantine hastened to change the subject. ‘Do you know that your Vanyusha is now a clerk in my office at Pokrovsk?’ he said.

 

Nicholas jerked his head and grew thoughtful.

 

‘Yes, tell me what is happening in Pokrovsk. Is the house still standing, and the birch trees, and our school-room? And is Philip the gardener really still living? How well I remember the garden-house and the sofa! . . . Mind, don’t change anything in the house, but get married soon and set things going again as they used to be. Then I will come to you if you have a good wife.’

 

‘Come to me at once,’ said Levin. ‘How well we might settle down there!’

 

‘I would come if I were sure I should not find Sergius Ivanich there.’

 

‘You won’t find him there. I live quite apart from him.’

 

‘Still, say what you will, you must choose between him and me,’ said Nicholas with a timid look at his brother.

 

His timidity touched Constantine.

 

‘If you want my full confession about it, I will tell you that I take no side in your quarrel with Sergius Ivanich. You are both to blame. You more in external matters and he more in essential ones.’

 

‘Ah, ah! Then you have grasped it, you have grasped it!’ joyfully exclaimed Nicholas.

 

‘But personally if you care to know it, I value your friendship more because . . .’

 

‘Why, why?’

 

Constantine could not tell him that it was because Nicholas was unfortunate and needed friendship. But Nicholas understood that he meant just that, and frowning, again took hold of the vodka bottle.

 

‘Enough, Nicholas Dmitrich!’ said Mary Nikolavna, stretching out her plump arm with its bare wrist to take the bottle.

 

‘Let go! Leave me alone! I’ll thrash you!’ shouted he.

 

Mary Nikolavna gave a mild, kindly smile, which evoked one from Nicholas, and she took away the bottle.

 

‘Do you think she doesn’t understand?’ said Nicholas. ‘She understands it all better than any of us. There really is something good and sweet about her.’

 

‘You were never in Moscow before?’ Constantine asked very politely, just in order to say something.

 

‘Don’t speak to her in that way. It frightens her. No one but the magistrate, when she was tried for an attempt to escape from the house of ill-fame, ever spoke to her so politely. . . . Oh heavens, how senseless everything is in this world!’ he suddenly exclaimed. ‘All these new institutions, these magistrates, these Zemstvos. . . . What a confusion it all is!’

 

And he began to relate all his encounters with these new institutions.

 

Constantine Levin listened to him, and the condemnation of the social institutions, which he shared with him and had often expressed, was unpleasant to him when he heard it from his brother’s lips.

 

‘We shall understand it better in the next world,’ he said playfully.

 

‘In the next world? Ah, I do dislike that next world,’ said Nicholas, fixing his wild, frightened eyes on his brother’s face. ‘One would think that to leave all these abominations, these muddles (one’s own and other people’s), would be good, yet I fear death — I fear it terribly.’ He shuddered. ‘Do drink something. Would you like some champagne? Or let us go out somewhere or other. Let us go to the Gipsies! Do you know I have become fond of the gipsies and the Russian folk-songs?’

 

His speech began to grow confused and he jumped from one subject to another. With Masha’s help Constantine succeeded in persuading him not to go out anywhere, and got him into bed quite tipsy.

 

Masha promised to write to Constantine in case of need, and to try to persuade Nicholas to go and live with him.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 26

 

 

 

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NEXT morning Constantine Levin left Moscow and toward evening he reached home. On his way back in the train he talked with his fellow-passengers about politics and the new railways, and felt oppressed, just as in Moscow, by the confusion of the views expressed, by discontent with himself and a vague sense of shame. But when he got out of the train at his station and by the dim light from the station windows saw his one-eyed coachman, Ignat, with his coat-collar turned up, and his sledge with its carpet-lined back, his horses with their tied-up tails, and the harness with its rings and tassels, and when Ignat, while still putting the luggage into the sledge, began telling him the village news: how the contractor had come, and Pava had calved, — Levin felt that the confusion was beginning to clear away and his shame and self-dissatisfaction to pass. He felt this at the mere sight of Ignat and the horses; but when he had put on the sheepskin coat that had been brought for him and, well wrapped up, had seated himself in the sledge and started homeward, turning over in his mind the orders he would give about the work on the estate, and as he watched the side horse (once a saddle-horse that had been overridden, a spirited animal from the Don), he saw what had befallen him in quite a different light. He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be better than he had been formerly. First of all he decided that he would no longer hope for the exceptional happiness which marriage was to have given him, and consequently he would not underrate the present as he had done. Secondly, he would never again allow himself to be carried away by passion, the repulsive memory of which had so tormented him when he was making up his mind to propose. Then, remembering his brother Nicholas, he determined that he would never allow himself to forget him again, but would watch over him, keep him in sight, and be ready to help when things went hard with him. And he felt that that would be soon. Then his brother’s talk about communism, which he had taken lightly at the time, now made him think. He considered an entire change of economic conditions nonsense; but he had always felt the injustice of his superfluities compared with the peasant’s poverty, and now decided, in order to feel himself quite justified, that though he had always worked hard and lived simply, he would in future work still more and allow himself still less luxury. And it all seemed to him so easy to carry out that he was in a pleasant reverie the whole way home, and it was with cheerful hopes for a new and better life that he reached his house toward nine o’clock in the evening.

 

A light fell on the snow-covered space in front of the house from the windows of the room of his old nurse, Agatha Mikhaylovna, who now acted as his housekeeper. She had not yet gone to bed, and Kuzma, whom she had roused, came running out barefoot and still half-asleep into the porch. Laska, a setter bitch, ran out too, almost throwing Kuzma off his feet, and whined and rubbed herself against Levin’s knees, jumping up and wishing but not daring to put her front paws on his chest.

 

‘You have soon come back, sir,’ said Agatha Mikhaylovna.

 

‘I was home-sick, Agatha Mikhaylovna. Visiting is all very well, but “there is no place like home,” ’ he replied, and went into his study.

 

A candle just brought in gradually lit up the study and its familiar details became visible: the stag’s horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the hot-air aperture of the stove with its brass lid, which had long been in need of repair, his father’s couch, the large table on which were an open volume, a broken ash-tray, and an exercise-book in his handwriting. When he saw all this, he was overcome by a momentary doubt of the possibility of starting the new life of which he had been dreaming on his way. All these traces of his old life seemed to seize hold of him and say, ‘No, you will not escape us and will not be different, but will remain such as you have been: full of doubts; full of dissatisfaction with yourself, and of vain attempts at improvement followed by failures, and continual hopes of the happiness which has escaped you and is impossible for you.’

 

That was what the things said, but another voice within his soul was saying that one must not submit to the past and that one can do anything with oneself. And obeying the latter voice he went to the corner where two thirty-six pound dumb-bells lay and began doing gymnastic exercises with them to invigorate himself. He heard a creaking of steps at the door and hurriedly put down the dumb-bells.

 

His steward entered and said that, ‘the lord be thanked,’ everything was all right, but that the buckwheat had burned in the new drying kiln. This news irritated Levin. The new kiln had been built and partly invented by him. The steward had always been against the new kiln, and now proclaimed with suppressed triumph that the buckwheat had got burnt. Levin felt quite certain that if it had been burnt it was only because the precautions about which he had given instructions over and over again had been neglected. He was vexed, and he reprimanded the steward. But the steward had one important and pleasant event to report. Pava, his best and most valuable cow, bought at the cattle-show, had calved.

 

‘Kuzma, bring me my sheep-skin. And you tell them to bring a lantern. I will go and have a look at her,’ he said to the steward.

 

The sheds where the most valuable cattle were kept were just behind the house. Crossing the yard past the heap of snow by the lilac bush, he reached the shed. There was a warm steaming smell of manure when the frozen door opened, and the cows, astonished at the unaccustomed light of the lantern, began moving on their clean straw. Levin saw the broad smooth black-mottled back of a Dutch cow. The bull, Berkut, with a ring through his nose, was lying down, and almost rose up, but changed his mind and only snorted a couple of times as they passed by. The red beauty Pava, enormous as a hippopotamus, turned her back, hiding her calf from the new-comers and sniffing at it.

 

Levin entered the stall and examined Pava, who, becoming excited, was about to low, but quieted down when Levin moved the calf toward her, and sighing heavily began licking it with her rough tongue. The calf fumbled about, pushing its nose under its mother’s belly and swinging its little tail.

 

‘Show a light here, Theodore, here,’ said Levin examining the calf. ‘Like its mother,’ he said, ‘although the colour is its father’s; very fine, big-boned and deep-flanked. Vasily Fedorich, isn’t she fine?’ he said, turning to the steward, and quite forgiving him for the buckwheat under the influence of his satisfaction about the calf.

 

‘Whom could she take after, not to be good? Simon, the contractor, came the day after you left. We shall have to employ him, Constantine Dmitrich,’ said the steward. ‘I told you about the machine.’

 

This one question led Levin back to all the details of his farming, which was on a large and elaborate scale. He went straight from the cow-shed to the office, and after talking things over with the steward and with Simon the contractor, he returned to the house and went directly upstairs to the drawing-room.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 27

 

 

 

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IT was a large old-fashioned house, and though only Levin was living in it, he used and heated the whole of it. He knew this to be foolish and even wrong, and contrary to his new plans, but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived a life which appeared to him ideally perfect, and which he had dreamed of renewing with a wife and family of his own.

 

Levin could scarcely remember his mother. His conception of her was to him a sacred memory, and in his imagination his future wife was to be a repetition of the enchanting and holy ideal of womanhood that his mother had been.

 

He could not imagine the love of woman without marriage, and even pictured to himself a family first and then the woman who would give him the family. His views on marriage therefore did not resemble those of most of his acquaintances, for whom marriage was only one of many social affairs; for Levin it was the chief thing in life, on which the whole happiness of life depended. And now he had to renounce it.

 

When he had settled in the arm-chair in the little drawing-room where he always had his tea, and Agatha Mikhaylovna had brought it in for him and had sat down at the window with her usual remark, ‘I will sit down, sir!’ he felt that, strange to say, he had not really forgotten his dreams and that he could not live without them. With her, or with another, they would come true. He read his book, and followed what he read, stopping now and then to listen to Agatha Mikhaylovna, who chattered indefatigably; and at the same time various pictures of farming and future family life arose disconnectedly in his mind. He felt that in the depth of his soul something was settling down, adjusting and composing itself.

 

He listened to Agatha Mikhaylovna’s talk of how Prokhor had forgotten the Lord, was spending on drink the money Levin had given him to buy a horse with, and had beaten his wife nearly to death; he listened and read, and remembered the whole sequence of thoughts raised by what he was reading. It was a book of Tyndall’s on heat. He recalled his disapproval of Tyndall’s self-conceit concerning the cleverness of his experiments, and his lack of a philosophic outlook. And suddenly the joyous thought came uppermost: ‘In two years’ time I shall have two Dutch cows in my herd and Pava herself may still be alive; there will be twelve cows by Berkut, and these three to crown all — splendid!’ He returned to his book. ‘Well, let us grant that electricity and heat are one and the same, but can we substitute the one quantity for the other in solving an equation? No. Then what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature can be felt instinctively without all that. . . . It will be especially good when Pava’s calf is already a red-mottled cow, and the whole herd in which these three will be . . . ! Splendid! To go out with my wife and the visitors and meet the herd. . . . My wife will say: “We, Constantine and I, reared this calf like a baby.” “How can you be interested in these things?” the visitor will ask. “All that interests him interests me . . .” But who is she?’ and he remembered what had happened in Moscow. ‘Well, what is to be done? . . . It is not my fault. But now everything will be on new lines. It is nonsense to say that life will prevent it, that the past prevents it. I must struggle to live a better, far better, life.’ He lifted his head and pondered. Old Laska, who had not yet quite digested her joy at her master’s return and had run out to bark in the yard, now came back, bringing a smell of fresh air with her into the room and, wagging her tail, she approached him and putting her head under his hand whined plaintively, asking to be patted.

 

‘She all but speaks,’ said Agatha Mikhaylovna. ‘She is only a dog, but she understands that her master has come back feeling depressed.’

 

‘Why depressed?’

 

‘Oh, don’t I see? I ought to understand gentlefolk by this time. I have grown up among them from a child. Never mind, my dear, as long as you have good health and a clean conscience!’

 

Levin looked at her intently, surprised that she knew so well what was in his mind.

 

‘Shall I bring you a little more tea?’ she said and went out with his cup.

 

Laska kept on pushing her head under his hand. He patted her a little, and she curled herself up at his feet with her head on her outstretched hind paw. And to show that all was now well and satisfactory, she slightly opened her mouth, smacked her sticky lips, and drawing them more closely over her old teeth lay still in blissful peace. Levin attentively watched this last movement of hers.

 

‘And it is just the same with me!’ he said to himself. ‘It is just the same with me. What does it matter. . . . All is well.’