The singing women were drawing nearer to Levin and he felt as if a thundercloud of merriment were approaching. The cloud moved past, enveloping him and the haycock upon which he sat, and the other haycocks, the carts, the whole of the meadow, and the distant fields. They all seemed to vibrate and heave with the strains of that wild, madly-merry song, interspersed with screams and whistling. Levin envied them their healthy gaiety and felt a wish to take part in that expression of the joy of living; but he could do nothing except lie and look and listen. When the company and their songs vanished out of sight and hearing, an oppressive feeling of discontent with his own lonely lot, his physical idleness and his hostility to the world overcame Levin. Some of those very peasants who had disputed with him about the hay — whom either he had wronged or who had tried to cheat him — those very peasants had bowed pleasantly to him, evidently not harbouring, and unable to harbour, any ill-will toward him, being not only unrepentant but even forgetful that they had been trying to cheat him. All had been drowned in the sea of their joyful common toil. God had given them the day and the strength, and both the day and the strength had been devoted to labour which had brought its own reward. For whom they had laboured and what the fruits of their labour would be was an extraneous and unimportant affair.
Levin had often admired that kind of life, had often envied the folk who lived it; but that day, especially after what he had seen for the first time of the relations between Vanka Parmenich and his young wife, it struck him that it depended on himself to change his wearisome, idle, and artificial personal life for that pure, delightful life of common toil.
The old man who had been sitting beside him had long since gone home. The peasants who lived near by had also gone home, and those from a distance had gathered together to have supper and spend the night in the meadow. Levin, unnoticed by them, still lay on the haycock, looking, listening, and thinking. The peasants who were staying in the meadow kept awake almost all the short summer night. At first the sounds of merry general talk and shouts of laughter over their supper could be heard, then songs and more laughter. The whole long day of toil had left upon them no trace of anything but merriment.
Just before dawn all became silent. The sounds of night — the ceaseless croaking of frogs, the snorting of horses through the morning mist over the meadow — could alone be heard. Awaking to reality Levin rose from his haycock, and glancing up at the stars realized that the night was nearly over.
‘Well, then, what shall I do? How shall I do it?’ he asked himself, trying to find expression for what he had been thinking and the feelings he had lived through in that short night. All his ideas and feelings separated themselves into three different lines of thought. The first was how to renounce his old life and discard his quite useless education. This renunciation would afford him pleasure and was quite easy and simple. The second was concerned with his notion of the life he now wished to lead. He was distinctly conscious of the simplicity, purity, and rightness of that life, and was convinced that in it he would find satisfaction, peace, and dignity, the absence of which was so painful to him. But the third thought was the question of how to make the change from his present life to that other one. And here no clear idea presented itself to his mind. Should he have a wife? Should he have work and the necessity to work? Should he leave Pokrovsk, buy land, join a peasant commune, marry a peasant girl? ‘How am I to do it?’ he again asked himself and could find no reply. ‘However, I have not slept all night and can’t render a clear account of myself now,’ he thought, ‘but I’ll clear it up later. One thing is certain: this night has decided my fate. All my former dreams of a family life were nonsense — not the right thing. Everything is much simpler and better than that… .’
‘How beautiful!’ he thought, looking up at a strange mother-of-pearl-coloured shell formed of fleecy clouds, in the centre of the sky just over his head. ‘How lovely everything is, this lovely night! And how did this shell get formed so quickly? A little while ago when I looked at the sky all was clear, but for two white strips. My views of life have changed in just the same unnoticeable way.’
Leaving the meadow, he went down the high road toward the village. A slight breeze was blowing and all looked grey and dull. There is generally a period of gloom just before daybreak and the complete triumph of light over darkness. Shivering with cold Levin walked rapidly with his eyes fixed on the ground.
‘What’s that? Who can it be coming?’ thought he, hearing the tinkling of bells and raising his head. At a distance of forty paces along the road on which he was walking he saw a coach with four horses abreast and luggage on top approaching him. The horses were pressing close together away from the ruts, but the skilful driver, sitting sideways on the box, guided them so that the coach wheels ran smoothly in the ruts.
That was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who might be inside he glanced in at the window absent-mindedly.
In one corner an elderly woman was dozing; and close to the window sat a young girl who had just wakened and was holding the ribbons of her white nightcap with both hands. Bright and thoughtful, full of that complicated refinement of a life to which Levin was a stranger, she looked across him at the glow of dawn.
At the very moment when this vision was about to disappear, her candid eyes fell on him. She recognized him and joyful surprise lit up her face. He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes in the world like them. In the whole world there was only one being able to unite in itself the universe and the meaning of life for him. It was Kitty. He guessed that she was on her way from the station to her sister’s house at Ergushovo. All that had so disturbed Levin during the sleepless night and all his resolutions vanished suddenly. He recalled with disgust his thoughts of marrying a peasant girl. There alone, inside that coach on the other side of the road, so rapidly receding from him, was the one possible solution of that riddle which had been weighing on him so painfully of late.
She did not look out again. The sound of the wheels could no longer be heard; the tinkling of the bells grew fainter. The barking of dogs proved that the coach was passing through the village, and only the empty fields, the village before him, and he himself walking solitary on the deserted road, were left.
He looked up at the sky, hoping to find there the shell he had been admiring, which had typified for him the reflections and feelings of the night. There in the unfathomable height a mystic change was going on and he could see no sign of anything like a shell; but a large cover of gradually diminishing fleecy cloudlets was spreading over half the sky, which had turned blue and grown brighter. It answered his questioning look with the same tenderness and the same remoteness.
‘No,’ said he to himself. ‘Beautiful as is that life of simplicity and toil, I cannot turn to it. I love her!’
Chapter 13
NONE but those who knew Karenin most intimately knew that this apparently cold and sober-minded man had one weakness, quite inconsistent with the general trend of his character. Karenin could not with equanimity hear or see a child or a woman weeping. The sight of tears upset him and made him quite incapable of reasoning. The chief of his staff and his secretary knew this and warned women who came with petitions that they should on no account give way to tears if they did not want to spoil their case. ‘He will get angry and won’t listen to you,’ they said; and in such cases the mental perturbation which tears produced in Karenin really found expression in hurried bursts of anger. ‘I can do nothing for you. Kindly go away!’ he would shout on these occasions.
When Anna on their way home from the races announced to him what her relations with Vronsky were and immediately hid her face in her hands and began crying, Karenin, despite his indignation with her, was as usual overcome by that mental perturbation. Being aware of this