fragrant as tea!” he repeated, wishing to change the subject.
Levin looked more attentively at Ivan Parmenov and his wife. They were
loading a haycock onto the cart not far from him. Ivan Parmenov was
standing on the cart, taking, laying in place, and stamping down the huge
bundles of hay, which his pretty young wife deftly handed up to him, at first
in armfuls, and then on the pitchfork. The young wife worked easily,
merrily, and dexterously. The close-packed hay did not once break away off
her fork. First she gathered it together, stuck the fork into it, then with a
rapid, supple movement leaned the whole weight of her body on it, and at
once with a bend of her back under the red belt she drew herself up, and
arching her full bosom under the white smock, with a smart turn swung the
fork in her arms, and flung the bundle of hay high onto the cart. Ivan,
obviously doing his best to save her every minute of unnecessary labor,
made haste, opening his arms to clutch the bundle and lay it in the cart. As
she raked together what was left of the hay, the young wife shook off the
bits of hay that had fallen on her neck, and straightening the red kerchief
that had dropped forward over her white brow, not browned like her face by
the sun, she crept under the cart to tie up the load. Ivan directed her how to
fasten the cord to the cross-piece, and at something she said he laughed
aloud. In the expressions of both faces was to be seen vigorous, young,
freshly awakened love.
Chapter 12
The load was tied on. Ivan jumped down and took the quiet, sleek horse
by the bridle. The young wife flung the rake up on the load, and with a bold
step, swinging her arms, she went to join the women, who were forming a
ring for the haymakers’ dance. Ivan drove off to the road and fell into line
with the other loaded carts. The peasant women, with their rakes on their
shoulders, gay with bright flowers, and chattering with ringing, merry
voices, walked behind the hay cart. One wild untrained female voice broke
into a song, and sang it alone through a verse, and then the same verse was
taken up and repeated by half a hundred strong healthy voices, of all sorts,
coarse and fine, singing in unison.
The women, all singing, began to come close to Levin, and he felt as
though a storm were swooping down upon him with a thunder of
merriment. The storm swooped down, enveloped him and the haycock on
which he was lying, and the other haycocks, and the wagon-loads, and the
whole meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing to
the measures of this wild merry song with its shouts and whistles and
clapping. Levin felt envious of this health and mirthfulness; he longed to
take part in the expression of this joy of life. But he could do nothing, and
had to lie and look on and listen. When the peasants, with their singing, had
vanished out of sight and hearing, a weary feeling of despondency at his
own isolation, his physical inactivity, his alienation from this world, came
over Levin.
Some of the very peasants who had been most active in wrangling with
him over the hay, some whom he had treated with contumely, and who had
tried to cheat him, those very peasants had greeted him good-humoredly,
and evidently had not, were incapable of having any feeling of rancor
against him, any regret, any recollection even of having tried to deceive
him. All that was drowned in a sea of merry common labor. God gave the
day, God gave the strength. And the day and the strength were consecrated
to labor, and that labor was its own reward. For whom the labor? What
would be its fruits? These were idle considerations—beside the point.
Often Levin had admired this life, often he had a sense of envy of the
men who led this life; but today for the first time, especially under the
influence of what he had seen in the attitude of Ivan Parmenov to his young
wife, the idea presented itself definitely to his mind that it was in his power
to exchange the dreary, artificial, idle, and individualistic life he was
leading for this laborious, pure, and socially delightful life.
The old man who had been sitting beside him had long ago gone home;
the people had all separated. Those who lived near had gone home, while
those who came from far were gathered into a group for supper, and to
spend the night in the meadow. Levin, unobserved by the peasants, still lay
on the haycock, and still looked on and listened and mused. The peasants
who remained for the night in the meadow scarcely slept all the short
summer night. At first there was the sound of merry talk and laughing all
together over the supper, then singing again and laughter.
All the long day of toil had left no trace in them but lightness of heart.
Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard but the
night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh, and the horses
snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before the morning. Rousing
himself, Levin got up from the haycock, and looking at the stars, he saw
that the night was over.
“Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?” he said to
himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings he had
passed through in that brief night. All the thoughts and feelings he had
passed through fell into three separate trains of thought. One was the
renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education. This
renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was easy and simple. Another series
of thoughts and mental images related to the life he longed to live now. The
simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was
convinced he would find in it the content, the peace, and the dignity, of the
lack of which he was so miserably conscious. But a third series of ideas
turned upon the question how to effect this transition from the old life to the
new. And there nothing took clear shape for him. “Have a wife? Have work
and the necessity of work? Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land? Become a
member of a peasant community? Marry a peasant girl? How am I to set
about it?” he asked himself again, and could not find an answer. “I haven’t
slept all night, though, and I can’t think it out clearly,” he said to himself.
“I’ll work it out later. One thing’s certain, this night has decided my fate.
All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing,” he told
himself. “It’s all ever so much simpler and better….”
“How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange, as it were, mother-
of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right over his head in the
middle of the sky. “How exquisite it all is in this exquisite night! And when
was there time for that cloud-shell to form? Just now I looked at the sky,
and there was nothing in it—only two white streaks. Yes, and so
imperceptibly too my views of life changed!”
He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad towards the
village. A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and sullen. The
gloomy moment had come that usually precedes the dawn, the full triumph
of light over darkness.
Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the ground.
“What’s that? Someone coming,” he thought, catching the tinkle of bells,
and lifting his head. Forty paces from him a carriage with four horses
harnessed abreast was driving towards him along the grassy road on which
he was walking. The shaft-horses were tilted against the shafts by the ruts,
but the dexterous driver sitting on the box held the shaft over the ruts, so
that the wheels ran on the smooth part of the road.
This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be, he
gazed absently at the coach.
In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the window,
evidently only just awake, sat a young girl holding in both hands the
ribbons of a white cap. With a face full of light and thought, full of a subtle,
complex inner life, that was remote from Levin, she was gazing beyond him
at the glow of the sunrise.
At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the truthful eyes
glanced at him. She recognized him, and her face lighted up with
wondering delight.
He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the
world. There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate for
him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty. He
understood that she was driving to Ergushovo from the railway station. And
everything that had been stirring Levin during that sleepless night, all the
resolutions he had made, all vanished at once. He recalled with horror his
dreams of marrying a peasant girl. There only, in the carriage that had
crossed over to the other side of the road, and was rapidly disappearing,
there only could he find the solution of the riddle of his life, which had
weighed so agonizingly upon him of late.
She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage-springs was no
longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The barking of dogs
showed the carriage had reached the village, and all that was left was the
empty fields all round, the village in front, and he himself isolated and apart
from it all, wandering lonely along the deserted highroad.
He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he had been
admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and feelings of that night.
There was nothing in the sky in the least like a shell. There, in the remote
heights above, a mysterious change had been accomplished. There was no
