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Sergey Ivanovitch had caught nothing, but he was not bored, and
seemed in the most cheerful frame of mind. Levin saw that, stimulated
by his conversation with the doctor, he wanted to talk. Levin, on the
other hand, would have liked to get home as soon as possible to give
orders about getting together the mowers for next day, and to set at rest
his doubts about the mowing, which greatly absorbed him.
“Well, let’s be going,” he said.
“Why be in such a hurry? Let’s stay a little. But how wet you are!
Even though one catches nothing, it’s nice. That’s the best thing about
every part of sport, that one has to do with nature. How exquisite this
steely water is!” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “These riverside banks al-
ways remind me of the riddle—do you know it? ‘The grass says to the
water: we quiver and we quiver.’”
“I don’t know the riddle,” answered Levin wearily.
Chapter 3.
“Do you know I’ve been thinking about you,” said Sergey Ivanovitch.
“It’s beyond everything what’s being done in the district, according to
what this doctor tells me. He’s a very intelligent fellow. And as I’ve told
you before, I tell you again: it’s not right for you not to go to the
meetings, and altogether to keep out of the district business. If decent
people won’t go into it, of course it’s bound to go all wrong. We pay the
money, and it all goes in salaries, and there are no schools, nor district
nurses, nor midwives, nor drugstores— nothing.”
“Well, I did try, you know,” Levin said slowly and unwillingly. “I
can’t! and so there’s no help for it.”
“But why can’t you? I must own I can’t make it out. Idifference,
incapacity—I won’t admit; surely it’s not simply laziness?”
“None of those things. I’ve tried, and I see I can do nothing,” said
Levin.
He had hardly grasped what his brother was saying. Looking
towards the plough land across the river, he made out something black,
but he could not distinguish whether it was a horse or the bailiff on
horseback.
“Why is it you can do nothing? You made an attempt and didn’t
succeed, as you think, and you give in. How can you have so little self-
respect?”