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 upstairs to the drawing-room.
Chapter 27
The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived alone,
had the whole house heated and used. He knew that this was stupid, he
knew that it was positively not right, and contrary to his present 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 just the life that to
Levin seemed the ideal of perfection, and that he had dreamed of beginning
with his wife, his family.
Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was for
him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in his
imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a woman that his
mother had been.
He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from marriage
that he positively pictured to himself first the family, and only secondarily
the woman who would give him a family. His ideas of marriage were,
consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances,
for whom getting married was one of the numerous facts of social life. For
Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned.
And now he had to give up that.
When he had gone into the little drawing-room, where he always had tea,
and had settled himself in his armchair with a book, and Agafea Mihalovna
had brought him tea, and with her usual, “Well, I’ll stay a while, sir,” had
taken a chair in the window, he felt that, however strange it might be, he
had not parted from his daydreams, and that he could not live without them.
Whether with her, or with another, still it would be. He was reading a book,
and thinking of what he was reading, and stopping to listen to Agafea
Mihalovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet with all that, all
sorts of pictures of family life and work in the future rose disconnectedly
before his imagination. He felt that in the depth of his soul something had
been put in its place, settled down, and laid to rest.
He heard Agafea Mihalovna talking of how Prohor had forgotten his duty
to God, and with the money Levin had given him to buy a horse, had been
drinking without stopping, and had beaten his wife till he’d half killed her.
He listened, and read his book, and recalled the whole train of ideas
suggested by his reading. It was Tyndall’s Treatise on Heat. He recalled his
own criticisms of Tyndall of his complacent satisfaction in the cleverness of
his experiments, and for his lack of philosophic insight. And suddenly there
floated into his mind the joyful thought: “In two years’ time I shall have two
Dutch cows; Pava herself will perhaps still be alive, a dozen young
daughters of Berkoot and the three others—how lovely!”
He took up his book again. “Very good, electricity and heat are the same
thing; but is it possible to substitute the one quantity for the other in the
equation for the solution of any problem? No. Well, then what of it? The
connection between all the forces of nature is felt instinctively…. It’s
particulary nice if Pava’s daughter should be a red-spotted cow, and all the
herd will take after her, and the other three, too! Splendid! To go out with
my wife and visitors to meet the herd…. My wife says, ‘Kostya and I looked
after that calf like a child.’ ‘How can it interest you so much?’ says a visitor.
‘Everything that interests him, interests me.’ But who will she be?” And he
remembered what had happened at Moscow…. “Well, there’s nothing to be
done…. It’s not my fault. But now everything shall go on in a new way. It’s
nonsense to pretend that life won’t let one, that the past won’t let one. One
must struggle to live better, much better.”… He raised his head, and fell to
