‘You have soon come back, sir,’ said Agatha Mikhaylovna.
‘I was homesick, 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 sheepskin. 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 newcomers 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 cowshed 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
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 armchair 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