“You wouldn’t believe,” he would say to his brother, “what a pleasure
this rural laziness is to me. Not an idea in one’s brain, as empty as a drum!”
But Konstantin Levin found it dull sitting and listening to him, especially
when he knew that while he was away they would be carting dung onto the
fields not ploughed ready for it, and heaping it all up anyhow; and would
not screw the shares in the ploughs, but would let them come off and then
say that the new ploughs were a silly invention, and there was nothing like
the old Andreevna plough, and so on.
“Come, you’ve done enough trudging about in the heat,” Sergey
Ivanovitch would say to him.
“No, I must just run round to the counting-house for a minute,” Levin
would answer, and he would run off to the fields.
Chapter 2
Early in June it happened that Agafea Mihalovna, the old nurse and
housekeeper, in carrying to the cellar a jar of mushrooms she had just
pickled, slipped, fell, and sprained her wrist. The district doctor, a talkative
young medical student, who had just finished his studies, came to see her.
He examined the wrist, said it was not broken, was delighted at a chance of
talking to the celebrated Sergey Ivanovitch Koznishev, and to show his
advanced views of things told him all the scandal of the district,
complaining of the poor state into which the district council had fallen.
Sergey Ivanovitch listened attentively, asked him questions, and, roused by
a new listener, he talked fluently, uttered a few keen and weighty
observations, respectfully appreciated by the young doctor, and was soon in
that eager frame of mind his brother knew so well, which always, with him,
followed a brilliant and eager conversation. After the departure of the
doctor, he wanted to go with a fishing rod to the river. Sergey Ivanovitch
was fond of angling, and was, it seemed, proud of being able to care for
such a stupid occupation.
Konstantin Levin, whose presence was needed in the plough land and
meadows, had come to take his brother in the trap.
It was that time of the year, the turning-point of summer, when the crops
of the present year are a certainty, when one begins to think of the sowing
for next year, and the mowing is at hand; when the rye is all in ear, though
its ears are still light, not yet full, and it waves in gray-green billows in the
wind; when the green oats, with tufts of yellow grass scattered here and
there among it, droop irregularly over the late-sown fields; when the early
buckwheat is already out and hiding the ground; when the fallow lands,
trodden hard as stone by the cattle, are half ploughed over, with paths left
untouched by the plough; when from the dry dung-heaps carted onto the
fields there comes at sunset a smell of manure mixed with meadow-sweet,
and on the low-lying lands the riverside meadows are a thick sea of grass
waiting for the mowing, with blackened heaps of the stalks of sorrel among
it.
It was the time when there comes a brief pause in the toil of the fields
before the beginning of the labors of harvest—every year recurring, every
year straining every nerve of the peasants. The crop was a splendid one, and
bright, hot summer days had set in with short, dewy nights.
The brothers had to drive through the woods to reach the meadows.
Sergey Ivanovitch was all the while admiring the beauty of the woods,
which were a tangled mass of leaves, pointing out to his brother now an old
lime tree on the point of flowering, dark on the shady side, and brightly
spotted with yellow stipules, now the young shoots of this year’s saplings
brilliant with emerald. Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing
about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he
saw. He assented to what his brother said, but he could not help beginning
to think of other things. When they came out of the woods, all his attention
was engrossed by the view of the fallow land on the upland, in parts yellow
with grass, in parts trampled and checkered with furrows, in parts dotted
with ridges of dung, and in parts even ploughed. A string of carts was
moving across it. Levin counted the carts, and was pleased that all that were
wanted had been brought, and at the sight of the meadows his thoughts
passed to the mowing. He always felt something special moving him to the
quick at the hay-making. On reaching the meadow Levin stopped the horse.
The morning dew was still lying on the thick undergrowth of the grass,
and that he might not get his feet wet, Sergey Ivanovitch asked his brother
to drive him in the trap up to the willow tree from which the carp was
caught. Sorry as Konstantin Levin was to crush down his mowing grass, he
drove him into the meadow. The high grass softly turned about the wheels
and the horse’s legs, leaving its seeds clinging to the wet axles and spokes
of the wheels. His brother seated himself under a bush, arranging his tackle,
while Levin led the horse away, fastened him up, and walked into the vast
gray-green sea of grass unstirred by the wind. The silky grass with its ripe
seeds came almost to his waist in the dampest spots.
Crossing the meadow, Konstantin Levin came out onto the road, and met
an old man with a swollen eye, carrying a skep on his shoulder.
“What? taken a stray swarm, Fomitch?” he asked.
“No, indeed, Konstantin Dmitrich! All we can do to keep our own! This
is the second swarm that has flown away…. Luckily the lads caught them.
They were ploughing your field. They unyoked the horses and galloped
after them.”
“Well, what do you say, Fomitch—start mowing or wait a bit?”
“Eh, well. Our way’s to wait till St. Peter’s Day. But you always mow
sooner. Well, to be sure, please God, the hay’s good. There’ll be plenty for
the beasts.”
“What do you think about the weather?”
“That’s in God’s hands. Maybe it will be fine.”
Levin went up to his brother.
Sergey Ivanovitch had caught nothing, but he was not bored, and seemed
in the most cheerful frame of mind. Levin saw that, stimulated by his
conversation with the doctor, he wanted to talk. Levin, on the other hand,
would have liked to get home as soon as possible to give orders about
getting together the mowers for next day, and to set at rest his doubts about
the mowing, which greatly absorbed him.
“Well, let’s be going,” he said.
“Why be in such a hurry? Let’s stay a little. But how wet you are! Even
though one catches nothing, it’s nice. That’s the best thing about every part
of sport, that one has to do with nature. How exquisite this steely water is!”
said Sergey Ivanovitch. “These riverside banks always remind me of the
riddle—do you know it? ‘The grass says to the water: we quiver and we
quiver.’”
