‘You’ve come back so soon, dear,’ said Agafya Mikhailovna.
‘I missed it, Agafya Mikhailovna. There’s no place like home,’ he replied and went to his study.
The study was slowly lit up by the candle that was brought. Familiar details emerged: deer’s antlers, shelves of books, the back of the stove with a vent that had long been in need of repair, his father’s sofa, the big desk, an open book on the desk, a broken ashtray, a notebook with his handwriting. When he saw it all, he was overcome by a momentary doubt of the possibility of setting up that new life he had dreamed of on the way. All these traces of his life seemed to seize hold of him and say to him: ‘No, you won’t escape us and be different, you’ll be the same as you were: with doubts, an eternal dissatisfaction with yourself, vain attempts to improve, and failures, and an eternal expectation of the happiness that has eluded you and is not possible for you.’
But that was how his things talked, while another voice in his soul said that he must not submit to his past and that it was possible to do anything with oneself. And, listening to this voice, he went to the corner where he had two thirty-six-pound dumb-bells and began lifting them, trying to cheer himself up with exercise. There was a creak of steps outside the door. He hastily set down the dumb-bells.
The steward came in and told him that everything, thank God, was well, but informed him that the buckwheat had got slightly burnt in the new kiln. This news vexed Levin. The new kiln had been built and partly designed by him. The steward had always been against this kiln and now with concealed triumph announced that the buckwheat had got burnt. Levin, however, was firmly convinced that if it had got burnt, it was only because the measures he had ordered a hundred times had not been taken. He became annoyed and reprimanded the steward. But there had been one important and joyful event: Pava, his best and most valuable cow, bought at a cattle show, had calved.
‘Kuzma, give me my sheepskin coat. And you have them bring a lantern,’ he said to the steward. ‘I’ll go and take a look.’
The shed for the valuable cows was just behind the house. Crossing the yard past a snowdrift by the lilac bush, he approached the shed. There was a smell of warm, dungy steam as the frozen door opened, and the cows, surprised by the unaccustomed light of the lantern, stirred on the fresh straw. The smooth, broad, black-and-white back of a Frisian cow flashed. Berkut, the bull, lay with his ring in his nose and made as if to get up, but changed his mind and only puffed a couple of times as they passed by. The red beauty, Pava, enormous as a hippopotamus, her hindquarters turned, screened the calf from the entering men and sniffed at it.
Levin entered the stall, looked Pava over, and lifted the spotted red calf on its long, tottering legs. The alarmed Pava began to low, but calmed down when Levin pushed the calf towards her, and with a heavy sigh started licking it with her rough tongue. The calf, searching, nudged its mother in the groin and wagged its little tail.
‘Give me some light, Fyodor, bring the lantern here,’ said Levin, looking the calf over. ‘Just like her mother! Though the coat is the father’s. Very fine. Long and deep-flanked. Fine, isn’t she, Vassily Fyodorovich?’ he asked the steward, completely reconciled with him about the buckwheat, under the influence of his joy over the calf.
‘What bad could she take after? And the contractor Semyon came the day after you left. You’ll have to settle the contract with him, Konstantin Dmitrich,’ said the steward. ‘I told you before about the machine.’
This one question led Levin into all the details of running the estate, which was big and complex. From the cowshed he went straight to the office and, after talking with the steward and the contractor Semyon, returned home and went straight upstairs to the drawing room.
XXVII
The house was big, old, and Levin, though he lived alone, heated and occupied all of it. He knew that this was foolish, knew that it was even wrong and contrary to his new plans, but this house was a whole world for Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived a life which for Levin seemed the ideal of all perfection and which he dreamed of renewing with his wife, with his family.
Levin barely remembered his mother. His notion of her was a sacred memory, and his future wife would have to be, in his imagination, the repetition of that lovely, sacred ideal of a woman which his mother was for him.
He was not only unable to picture to himself the love of a woman without marriage, but he first pictured the family to himself and only then the woman who would give him that family. His notion of marriage was therefore not like the notion of the majority of his acquaintances, for whom it was one of the many general concerns of life; for Levin it was the chief concern of life, on which all happiness depended. And now he had to renounce it!
When he went into the small drawing room where he always had tea, and settled into his armchair with a book, and Agafya Mikhailovna brought his tea and, with her usual ‘I’ll sit down, too, dear,’ took a chair by the window, he felt that, strange as it was, he had not parted with his dreams and could not live without them. With her or with someone else, but they would come true. He read the book, thought about what he had read, paused to listen to Agafya Mikhailovna, who chattered tirelessly; and along with that various pictures of farm work and future family life arose disconnectedly in his imagination. He felt that something in the depths of his soul was being established, adjusted and settled.
He listened to Agafya Mikhailovna’s talk of how Prokhor had forgotten God and, with the money Levin had given him to buy a horse, was drinking incessantly and had beaten his wife almost to death; he listened, read the book and remembered the whole course of his thoughts evoked by the reading. This was a book by Tyndall39 on heat. He remembered his disapproval of Tyndall for his self-satisfaction over the cleverness of his experiments and for his lack of a philosophical outlook. And suddenly a joyful thought would surface: ‘In two years I’ll have two Frisian cows in my herd, Pava herself may still be alive, twelve young daughters from Berkut, plus these three to show off - wonderful!’ He picked up his book again.
‘Well, all right, electricity and heat are the same: but is it possible to solve a problem by substituting one quantity for another in an equation? No. Well, what then? The connection between all the forces of nature is felt instinctively as it is ... It’ll be especially nice when Pava’s daughter is already a spotted red cow, and the whole herd, with these three thrown in ... Splendid! To go out with my wife and guests to meet the herd ... My wife will say: “Kostya and I tended this calf like a child.” “How can it interest you so?” a guest will say. “Everything that interests him interests me.” But who is she?’ And he remembered what had happened in Moscow ... ‘Well, what to do? ... I’m not to blame. But now everything will take a new course. It’s nonsense that life won’t allow it, that the past won’t allow it. I must fight to live a better life, much better ...’ He raised his head and pondered. Old Laska, who had not yet quite digested the joy of his arrival and had gone to run around the yard and bark, came back wagging her tail, bringing with her the smell of outdoors, went over to him and thrust her head under his hand, making pitiful little whines and demanding to be patted.
‘She all but speaks,’ said Agafya Mikhailovna. ‘Just a dog ... But she understands that her master’s come back and is feeling sad.’
‘Why sad?’