said to himself. The thought of this made him cold and hostile to her. “I
should not be able to speak to her without a feeling of reproach; I could not
look at her without resentment; and she will only hate me all the more, as
she’s bound to. And besides, how can I now, after what Darya
Alexandrovna told me, go to see them? Can I help showing that I know
what she told me? And me to go magnanimously to forgive her, and have
pity on her! Me go through a performance before her of forgiving, and
deigning to bestow my love on her!… What induced Darya Alexandrovna to
tell me that? By chance I might have seen her, then everything would have
happened of itself; but, as it is, it’s out of the question, out of the question!”
Darya Alexandrovna sent him a letter, asking him for a side-saddle for
Kitty’s use. “I’m told you have a side-saddle,” she wrote to him; “I hope
you will bring it over yourself.”
This was more than he could stand. How could a woman of any
intelligence, of any delicacy, put her sister in such a humiliating position!
He wrote ten notes, and tore them all up, and sent the saddle without any
reply. To write that he would go was impossible, because he could not go;
to write that he could not come because something prevented him, or that
he would be away, that was still worse. He sent the saddle without an
answer, and with a sense of having done something shameful; he handed
over all the now revolting business of the estate to the bailiff, and set off
next day to a remote district to see his friend Sviazhsky, who had splendid
marshes for grouse in his neighborhood, and had lately written to ask him to
keep a long-standing promise to stay with him. The grouse-marsh, in the
Surovsky district, had long tempted Levin, but he had continually put off
this visit on account of his work on the estate. Now he was glad to get away
from the neighborhood of the Shtcherbatskys, and still more from his farm
work, especially on a shooting expedition, which always in trouble served
as the best consolation.
Chapter 25
In the Surovsky district there was no railway nor service of post horses,
and Levin drove there with his own horses in his big, old-fashioned
carriage.
He stopped halfway at a well-to-do peasant’s to feed his horses. A bald,
well-preserved old man, with a broad, red beard, gray on his cheeks, opened
the gate, squeezing against the gatepost to let the three horses pass.
Directing the coachman to a place under the shed in the big, clean, tidy
yard, with charred, old-fashioned ploughs in it, the old man asked Levin to
come into the parlor. A cleanly dressed young woman, with clogs on her
bare feet, was scrubbing the floor in the new outer room. She was
frightened of the dog, that ran in after Levin, and uttered a shriek, but began
laughing at her own fright at once when she was told the dog would not hurt
her. Pointing Levin with her bare arm to the door into the parlor, she bent
down again, hiding her handsome face, and went on scrubbing.
“Would you like the samovar?” she asked.
“Yes, please.”
The parlor was a big room, with a Dutch stove, and a screen dividing it
into two. Under the holy pictures stood a table painted in patterns, a bench,
and two chairs. Near the entrance was a dresser full of crockery. The
shutters were closed, there were few flies, and it was so clean that Levin
was anxious that Laska, who had been running along the road and bathing
in puddles, should not muddy the floor, and ordered her to a place in the
corner by the door. After looking round the parlor, Levin went out in the
back yard. The good-looking young woman in clogs, swinging the empty
pails on the yoke, ran on before him to the well for water.
“Look sharp, my girl!” the old man shouted after her, good-humoredly,
and he went up to Levin. “Well, sir, are you going to Nikolay Ivanovitch
Sviazhsky? His honor comes to us too,” he began, chatting, leaning his
elbows on the railing of the steps. In the middle of the old man’s account of
his acquaintance with Sviazhsky, the gates creaked again, and laborers came
into the yard from the fields, with wooden ploughs and harrows. The horses
harnessed to the ploughs and harrows were sleek and fat. The laborers were
obviously of the household: two were young men in cotton shirts and caps,
the two others were hired laborers in homespun shirts, one an old man, the
other a young fellow. Moving off from the steps, the old man went up to the
horses and began unharnessing them.
“What have they been ploughing?” asked Levin.
“Ploughing up the potatoes. We rent a bit of land too. Fedot, don’t let out
the gelding, but take it to the trough, and we’ll put the other in harness.”
“Oh, father, the ploughshares I ordered, has he brought them along?”
asked the big, healthy-looking fellow, obviously the old man’s son.
“There … in the outer room,” answered the old man, bundling together
the harness he had taken off, and flinging it on the ground. “You can put
them on, while they have dinner.”
The good-looking young woman came into the outer room with the full
pails dragging at her shoulders. More women came on the scene from
somewhere, young and handsome, middle-aged, old and ugly, with children
and without children.
The samovar was beginning to sing; the laborers and the family, having
disposed of the horses, came in to dinner. Levin, getting his provisions out
of his carriage, invited the old man to take tea with him.
“Well, I have had some today already,” said the old man, obviously
accepting the invitation with pleasure. “But just a glass for company.”
Over their tea Levin heard all about the old man’s farming. Ten years
before, the old man had rented three hundred acres from the lady who
owned them, and a year ago he had bought them and rented another three
hundred from a neighboring landowner. A small part of the land—the worst
part—he let out for rent, while a hundred acres of arable land he cultivated
himself with his family and two hired laborers. The old man complained
that things were doing badly. But Levin saw that he simply did so from a
feeling of propriety, and that his farm was in a flourishing condition. If it
had been unsuccessful he would not have bought land at thirty-five roubles
the acre, he would not have married his three sons and a nephew, he would
not have rebuilt twice after fires, and each time on a larger scale. In spite of
the old man’s complaints, it was evident that he was proud, and justly
proud, of his prosperity, proud of his sons, his nephew, his sons’ wives, his
horses and his cows, and especially of the fact that he was keeping all this
farming going. From his conversation with the old man, Levin thought he
was not averse to new methods either. He had planted a great many
potatoes, and his potatoes, as Levin had seen driving past, were already past
flowering and beginning to die down, while Levin’s were only just coming
into flower. He earthed up his potatoes with a modern plough borrowed
from a neighboring landowner. He sowed wheat. The trifling fact that,
thinning out his rye, the old man used the rye he thinned out for his horses,
specially struck Levin. How many times had Levin seen this splendid
