Levin entered the stall, looked Pava over, and lifted the red-and-white calf on to its spindly long legs. The anxious Pava began to low, but calmed down when Levin moved the calf over to her, and after sighing deeply, she started licking it with her rough tongue. The calf pushed its nose under its mother’s groin, looking for her udder, and twirled its little tail.
‘Shine the light here, Fyodor, bring the lantern here,’ said Levin, looking over the calf. ‘Just like its mother! But she’s got her father’s coat. Very good-looking. Long and deep-flanked. Don’t you think she’s good-looking, Vasily Fyodorovich?’ he said turning to the steward, completely reconciled with him about the buckwheat thanks to his joy about the calf.
‘How could she be ugly coming from that stock? Semyon the contractor came the day after you left, by the way. You’ll have to settle up with him, Konstantin Dmitrich,’ said the steward. ‘I told you before about the machine.’
This one question plunged Levin into all the details of managing his estate, which was large and complicated, so from the cowshed he went straight to the office, and after talking to the steward and Semyon the contractor, he returned to his house and went straight upstairs into the drawing room.
27
THE house was large and old, and although Levin lived on his own, he heated and occupied all of it. He knew this was stupid, and that it was even quite bad and flew in the face of his current new plans, but this house was a whole world for Levin. It was a world in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived a life which to Levin seemed the acme of perfection, and which he dreamed of reviving with his own wife and with his family.
Levin could hardly remember his mother. The idea of her was a sacred memory for him, and in his imagination his future wife had to be a replica of that enchanting, holy ideal of womanhood which his mother had been for him.
Not only could he not imagine loving a woman outside marriage, but first and foremost imagined having a family, and only then the woman who would give him a family. His ideas about marriage were therefore not like those of the majority of his acquaintances, for whom marriage was one of many routine undertakings; for Levin it was the main undertaking in life, on which depended all happiness. And now he had to renounce it!
After he had come into the small drawing room where he always drank tea, and had settled into his armchair with a book, and Agafya Mikhailovna had brought him his tea with her usual ‘I’ll just sit down for a minute, sir,’ and had sat down on the chair by the window, he felt that, however strange it was, he had not parted from his dreams and indeed could not live without them. Whether it be with her or someone else, it was going to happen. He read his book and thought about what he was reading, stopping in order to listen to Agafya Mikhailovna, who was chattering away incessantly; and at the same time various disconnected pictures of the estate and his future family life came into his mind. He felt that deep within his soul something was taking shape, settling down, and falling into place.
He listened to Agafya Mikhailovna talking about how Prokhor had forgotten God and was drinking round the clock on the money Levin had given him to buy a horse, and had almost beaten his wife to death; he listened and read his book, and retraced his whole sequence of thoughts stimulated by what he was reading. This was Tyndall’s book about heat.* He was recalling his censure of Tyndall for being so smug about conducting such clever experiments, and lacking a philosophical approach. And then suddenly a joyous thought came bobbing into his mind: ‘In two years I will have two Friesians, Pava herself may still be alive, and with twelve of Berkut’s young daughters, plus these three to put on show—wonderful!’ He picked up his book again.
‘Well, all right, electricity and heat are one and the same thing; but is it possible to substitute one quantity for another in order to solve a problem in an equation? No. So what does that mean? The connection between all forces of nature is felt instinctively anyway … It is particularly nice that Pava’s daughter is going to be a red-and-white cow, and the whole herd, to which these three will be added … It’s excellent! I can see myself going out with my wife and our guests to greet the herd … My wife will say: “Kostya and I reared this little calf like a child.” “How can you find this so interesting?” a guest will ask her. “I’m interested in everything that interests him.” But who is she?’ And he remembered what happened in Moscow … ‘Well, what can I do? It’s not my fault. But now everything will proceed differently. It’s nonsense to think that life won’t allow it, that the past won’t allow it. I must do my utmost to live a better life, a much better life …’ He lifted his head and became pensive. Old Laska, who had still not fully digested the joyous event of his arrival and had run off to go and bark in the yard, came back wagging her tail and bringing in with her the smell of fresh air, and she now went up to him and pushed her head under his hand, whimpering plaintively and demanding that he pet her.
‘She can almost talk,’ said Agafya Mikhailovna. ‘Not bad for a dog … After all, she does understand her master has come home and is sad.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Do you think I can’t see, sir? Ought to know the gentry by now. Grew up with them since I was a mite. Not to worry, sir. The main thing is to be healthy and have a pure heart.’
Levin stared at her, amazed that she could read his thoughts.
‘Well, how about another nice cup of tea?’ she said, and she picked up the cup and went out.
Laska was still pushing her head under his hand. He stroked her, and she immediately curled up into a ball by his feet, resting her head on her outstretched back paw. And as a sign that everything was now all right in the world, she opened her mouth a fraction, and after arranging her sticky lips better around her old teeth, smacked them and settled down into a state of blissful rest. Levin watched these last movements of hers closely.
‘I’m just the same!’ he said to himself. ‘Just the same! Never mind … All is well.’
28
EARLY in the morning after the ball, Anna Arkadyevna sent her husband a telegram to say she was leaving Moscow that same day.
‘No, I must go, I really must,’ she said, explaining her change of plan to her sister-in-law, in a tone implying she had remembered so many things to do there were too many to count. ‘No, it’s best if I go today!’
Stepan Arkadyich was not dining at home, but had promised to come home so he could see his sister off at seven o’clock.
Kitty also did not come over, having sent a note to say she had a headache. Dolly and Anna ate on their own, with the children and the English governess. Whether it was because the children were fickle or very sensitive, and felt that Anna on this day was not at all like how she had been on the one when they had so fallen in love with her, and was no longer interested in them, they abruptly put a halt to their game with their aunt and their fondness for her, and were completely unconcerned about her leaving. Anna was busy all morning with preparations for her departure. She wrote notes to her Moscow acquaintances, settled her accounts, and packed. Dolly had the general impression she was not in a calm frame of mind, but in that state of unease Dolly knew well from her own experience, and which does not materialize without cause and is more often than not a mask for dissatisfaction with oneself. After dinner Anna went to her room to get dressed, and Dolly followed her.
‘How strange you are today!’ Dolly said to her.
‘Strange? You think so? I’m not strange, but I don’t feel right. It happens to me sometimes. I keep wanting to cry. It’s very silly, but it does pass,’ said Anna quickly, and she bent her flushed face over the miniature bag into which she was packing a nightcap and some lawn handkerchiefs. Her eyes were shining with a particular sparkle and they kept filling with tears. ‘I so didn’t want to leave Petersburg, and now I don’t want to leave here.’