Levin tried but could not understand him, and regarded him and his life as animated riddles.
The Sviyazhskys were friendly with Levin, and therefore he allowed himself to sound Sviyazhsky and try to get to the very foundation of his philosophy of life; but it was all in vain. Each time that Levin tried to penetrate deeper than the reception rooms of the other’s mind, which were always open to anybody, he noticed Sviyazhsky seemed a little confused. A just perceptible look of fear appeared on his face, as if he were afraid that he would be understood by Levin, whom he met with good-natured, jocose resistance.
Now, after his disillusion with the work on his estate, Levin was especially pleased to stay a while with Sviyazhsky. Not to mention the fact that the sight of the happy doves in their well-ordered nest, so content with themselves and everybody else, had a cheering effect on him, he now wanted, dissatisfied with life as he was, to get at the secret which gave Sviyazhsky such clearness, definiteness, and cheerfulness.
Levin also knew that he would meet neighbouring landowners at the Sviyazhskys’; and it would be very interesting to talk and hear about farming, the harvest, the hire of labour, and all those questions which, though considered very low, seemed to him most important.
‘These matters might not have been so important in the time of serfdom and may be unimportant in England. In these cases the conditions were or are settled; but with us everything has only just been changed, and is only beginning to settle down. The question of how things will settle down is the only important question in the whole of Russia,’ thought Levin.
The shooting did not prove as good as he had expected. The marsh had dried up and there were hardly any snipe. He went about all day and only brought back three, but on the other hand he brought back, as he always did after a day’s shooting, a splendid appetite, good spirits, and the stimulated mental condition which in his case always accompanied physical exertion. And when out shooting, while he did not seem to be thinking at all, he again and again thought about the old peasant and his family, and felt as if the impression made on him called not only for his attention, but for the solution of some problem related thereto.
In the evening at tea a very interesting conversation sprang up, just as Levin had expected, in the company of two landlords who had come about some guardianship business.
Levin sat beside the hostess at the tea-table, and was obliged to converse with her and her sister, who was sitting opposite him. The hostess was a short, fair, round-faced woman, beaming with smiles and dimples. Levin tried to find out through her the answer to the riddle, so important to him, presented by her husband; but he had not full freedom of thought because he felt painfully uncomfortable. This painful discomfort was due to the fact that her sister sat opposite to him in a dress that seemed to him to have been put on especially for his benefit, with a particularly low, square-cut decolletage showing her white bosom. Though her bosom was so white, or perhaps because it was so white, this square-cut deprived Levin of his freedom of thought. He imagined, probably quite mistakenly, that the bodice was cut like that on his account; he felt that he had no right to look at it and tried not to do so, but felt guilty because it was cut so. Levin felt as if he were deceiving some one, as if he ought to offer some explanation which was impossible, and therefore he kept blushing and was restless and uncomfortable. His discomfort communicated itself to the pretty sister, but the hostess did not seem to notice anything and purposely drew her sister into the conversation.
‘You say,’ the hostess continued, ‘that my husband cannot feel an interest in anything Russian? On the contrary, though he is happy abroad, he is never so happy there as here. He feels in his own sphere. He is so busy, and he has a gift for taking an interest in everything. Oh! you have not been to see our school!’
‘I saw it… . It is a little ivy-covered house?’
‘Yes, that is Nastya’s business,’ she said, pointing to her sister.
‘You yourself teach?’ asked Levin, trying to look beyond the bodice, but conscious that if he looked in her direction he must see it.
‘Yes, I have been and am still teaching, but we have a splendid master. And we have introduced gymnastics.’
‘No thanks! No more tea,’ said Levin, and unable to continue the conversation, though he knew he was behaving rudely, he got up blushing. ‘I hear a very interesting conversation there,’ he added, and went to the other end of the table where his host and the two landlords were sitting. Sviyazhsky sat sideways, leaning his elbow on the table and turning his cup round with one hand, while with the other he gathered his beard together, lifted it to his nose as if smelling it, and let it go again. He looked with his glittering black eyes straight at an excited landowner, with a grey moustache, whose words evidently amused him. The landowner was complaining about the peasants. Levin saw clearly that Sviyazhsky could have answered the landowner’s complaint so that the meaning of the latter’s words would have been destroyed at once, but owing to his position he could not give that answer, and listened not without pleasure to the landowner’s funny speech.
This landowner with the grey moustache was evidently an inveterate believer in serfdom, and a passionate farmer who had lived long in the country.
Levin saw signs of this in the way the man was dressed — he wore an old-fashioned shiny coat which he was evidently not used to — and in his intelligent, dismal eyes, his well-turned Russian, his authoritative tone, evidently acquired by long practice, and in the firm movement of his fine large sunburnt hands, the right one having an old wedding-ring on the third finger.
Chapter 27
‘IF it were not a pity to give up what has been set going … after spending so much toil … I would throw it all up, sell out and, like Nicholas Ivanich, go away … to hear La belle Hélène,’ said the landowner, a pleasant smile lighting up his wise old face.
‘But we see you don’t give it up,’ said Nicholas Ivanich Sviyazhsky, ‘so it seems it has its advantages.’
‘Just one advantage: I live in my own house, which is neither bought nor hired. And there is always the hope that the people will come to their senses. You would hardly believe what drunkenness and debauchery there is! The families have all separated; they have not a horse nor a cow left. They are starving, yet if you hire one of them as a labourer, he’ll spoil and break things, and will even lodge complaints with the magistrate.’
‘On the other hand you, too, complain to the magistrate.’
‘I complain? Never! Nothing could induce me to! It would cause such gossip that one would be sorry one tried it. At the works now they took money in advance, and went off. And what did the magistrate do? Why, acquitted them! Things are only kept going by the village tribunal and the village elder. He thrashes them in the old style. If it were not for that, one had better give up everything and flee to the ends of the earth.’ The landowner evidently meant to tease Sviyazhsky, but the latter did not take offence; on the contrary, he evidently enjoyed it.
‘Well, you see, we carry on our work without such measures, I and Levin and he,’ Sviyazhsky said smiling, and pointing to the other landowner.
‘Yes, Michael Petrovich gets on, but ask him how? Is his what you would call “rational” farming?’ said the landowner, ostentatiously using the word ‘rational’.
‘My farming is very simple, thank heaven!’ said Michael Petrovich. ‘My farming is to have money ready for the autumn taxes.