But three months passed and he did not grow indifferent to it, and it was as painful for him to remember it as in the first days. He could not be at peace, because he, who had dreamed of family life for so long, who felt himself so ripe for it, was still not married and was further than ever from marriage. He himself felt painfully, as all those around him also felt, that at his age it was not good for a man to be alone. He remembered how, before his departure for Moscow, he had said once to his cow-man Nikolai, a naive muzhik with whom he liked to talk: ‘Well, Nikolai, I mean to get married!’ — and Nikolai had quickly replied, as if to something of which there could be no doubt: ‘It’s high time you did, Konstantin Dmitrich.’ But marriage was now further from him than ever. The place was taken, and when in imagination he put some of the girls he knew into that place, he felt it was completely impossible. Besides, the memory of the refusal and of the role he had played then tormented him with shame. However often he said to himself that he was in no way to blame, this memory, on a par with other shameful memories of the same sort, made him start and blush. In his past, as in any man’s past, there were actions he recognized as bad, for which his conscience ought to have tormented him; yet the memory of the bad actions tormented him far less than these insignificant but shameful memories. These wounds never healed. And alongside these memories there now stood the refusal and the pitiful position in which he must have appeared to others that evening. But time and work did their part. Painful memories were screened from him more and more by the inconspicuous but significant events of country life. With every week he remembered Kitty less often. He impatiently awaited the news that she was already married or would be married any day, hoping that this news, like the pulling of a tooth, would cure him completely.
Meanwhile spring had come, beautiful, harmonious, without spring’s anticipations and deceptions, one of those rare springs that bring joy to plants, animals and people alike. This beautiful spring aroused Levin still more and strengthened him in the intention to renounce all former things, in order to arrange his solitary life firmly and independently. Though many of those plans with which he had returned to the country had not been carried out, he had observed the main thing - purity of life. He did not experience the shame that usually tormented him after a fall and was able to look people boldly in the eye. Already in February he had received a letter from Marya Nikolaevna saying that his brother Nikolai’s health had worsened but that he did not want to be treated, and as a result of this letter Levin had gone to see his brother in Moscow and had succeeded in persuading him to consult a doctor and go to a watering-place abroad. He had succeeded so well in persuading his brother and in lending him money for the trip without vexing him, that in this respect he was pleased with himself. Apart from managing the estate, which required special attention in the spring, apart from reading, Levin had also begun that winter to write a work on farming, the basis of which was that the character of the worker had to be taken as an absolute given in farming, like climate and soil, and that, consequently, all propositions in the science of farming ought to be deduced not from the givens of soil and climate alone, but also from the known, immutable character of the worker. So that, in spite of his solitude, or else owing to it, his life was extremely full, and only once in a while did he feel an unsatisfied desire to tell the thoughts that wandered through his head to someone besides Agafya Mikhailovna, though with her, too, he often happened to discuss physics, the theory of farming, and especially philosophy. Philosophy was Agafya Mikhailovna’s favourite subject.
Spring was a long time unfolding. During the last weeks of Lent the weather was clear and frosty. In the daytime it thawed in the sun, but at night it went down to seven below;15 there was such a crust that carts could go over it where there was no road. There was still snow at Easter. Then suddenly, on Easter Monday, a warm wind began to blow, dark clouds gathered, and for three days and three nights warm, heavy rain poured down. On Thursday the wind dropped, and a thick grey mist gathered, as if concealing the mysteries of the changes taking place in nature. Under the mist waters flowed, ice blocks cracked and moved off, the muddy, foaming streams ran quicker, and on the eve of Krasnaya Gorka16 the mist scattered, the dark clouds broke up into fleecy white ones, the sky cleared, and real spring unfolded. In the morning the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water, and the warm air was all atremble, filled with the vapours of the reviving earth. The old grass and the sprouting needles of new grass greened, the buds on the guelder-rose, the currants and the sticky, spiritous birches swelled, and on the willow, all sprinkled with golden catkins, the flitting, newly hatched bee buzzed. Invisible larks poured trills over the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble, the peewit wept over the hollows and marshes still filled with brown water; high up the cranes and geese flew with their spring honking. Cattle, patchy, moulted in all but a few places, lowed in the meadows, bow-legged lambs played around their bleating, shedding mothers, fleet-footed children ran over the drying paths covered with the prints of bare feet, the merry voices of women with their linen chattered by the pond, and from the yards came the knock of the peasants’ axes, repairing ploughs and harrows.17 The real spring had come.
XIII
Levin put on big boots and, for the first time, a cloth jacket instead of his fur coat, and went about the farm, striding across streams that dazzled the eyes with their shining in the sun, stepping now on ice, now in sticky mud.
Spring is the time of plans and projects. And, going out to the yard, Levin, like a tree in spring, not yet knowing where and how its young shoots and branches, still confined in swollen buds, will grow, did not himself know very well which parts of his beloved estate he would occupy himself with now, but felt that he was filled with the very best plans and projects. First of all he went to see the cattle. The cows had been let out into the pen and, their new coats shining, warmed by the sun, they lowed, asking to go to pasture. Having admired the cows, familiar to him down to the smallest details, Levin ordered them driven to pasture and the calves let out into the pen. The cowherd ran merrily to get ready for the pasture. The dairymaids, hitching up their skirts, their bare, white, as yet untanned legs splashing in the mud, ran with switches after the calves and drove them, lowing and crazed with spring joy, into the yard.
After admiring that year’s young, which were exceptionally good - the early calves were as big as a peasant’s cow, Pava’s three-month-old daughter was the size of a yearling - Levin gave orders for a trough to be brought out and hay to be put in the racks. But it turned out that the racks, made in the autumn and left for winter in the unused pen, were broken. He sent for the carpenter, who by his order ought to have been working on the thresher. But it turned out that the carpenter was repairing the harrows, which ought to have been repaired before Lent.18 That was extremely vexing to Levin. What vexed him was the repetition of this eternal slovenliness of farm work, which he had fought against with all his strength for so many years. The racks, as he learned, not needed in winter, had been taken to the work horses’ stable and there had got broken, since they had been lightly made, for calves. Besides that, it also turned out that the harrows and all the agricultural tools, which he had ordered to be looked over and repaired back in the winter, and for which purpose three carpenters had been hired, were still not repaired, and the harrows were being repaired when it was already time for the harrowing. Levin sent for the steward, but at once went himself to look for him. The steward, radiant as everything else that day, was coming from the threshing floor in his fleece-trimmed coat, snapping a straw in his hands.