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“Self-respect!” said Levin, stung to the quick by his brother’s words;
“I don’t understand. If they’d told me at college that other people
understood the integral calculus, and I didn’t, then pride would have
come in. But in this case one wants first to be convinced that one has
certain qualifications for this sort of business, and especially that all
this business is of great importance.”
“What! do you mean to say it’s not of importance?” said Sergey
Ivanovitch, stung to the quick too at his brother’s considering anything
of no importance that interested him, and still more at his obviously
paying little attention to what he was saying.
“I don’t think it important; it does not take hold of me, I can’t help
it,” answered Levin, making out that what he saw was the bailiff, and
that the bailiff seemed to be letting the peasants go off the ploughed
land. They were turning the plough over. “Can they have finished
ploughing?” he wondered.
“Come, really though,” said the elder brother, with a frown on his
handsome, clever face, “there’s a limit to everything. It’s very well to be
original and genuine, and to dislike everything conventional—I know
all about that; but really, what you’re saying either has no meaning, or
it has a very wrong meaning. How can you think it a matter of no
importance whether the peasant, whom you love as you assert...”
“I never did assert it,” thought Konstantin Levin.
“...dies without help? The ignorant peasant-women starve the chil-
dren, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the
hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of
helping them, and don’t help them because to your mind it’s of no
importance.”
And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you
are so undeveloped that you can’t see all that you can do, or you won’t
sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.
Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to
submit, or to confess to a lack of zeal for the public good. And this
mortified him and hurt his feelings.
“It’s both,” he said resolutely: “I don’t see that it was possible...”
“What! was it impossible, if the money were properly laid out, to
provide medical aid?”
“Impossible, as it seems to me.... For the three thousand square
miles of our district, what with our thaws, and the storms, and the work
in the fields, I don’t see how it is possible to provide medical aid all over.
And besides, I don’t believe in medicine.”
“Oh, well, that’s unfair...I can quote to you thousands of instances....
But the schools, anyway.”
“Why have schools?”
“What do you mean? Can there be two opinions of the advantage
of education? If it’s a good thing for you, it’s a good thing for everyone.”
Konstantin Levin felt himself morally pinned against a wall, and so
he got hot, and unconsciously blurted out the chief cause of his indif-
ference to public business.
“Perhaps it may all be very good; but why should I worry myself
about establishing dispensaries which I shall never make use of, and
schools to which I shall never send my children, to which even the
peasants don’t want to send their children, and to which I’ve no very
firm faith that they ought to send them?” said he.
Sergey Ivanovitch was for a minute surprised at this unexpected
view of the subject; but he promptly made a new plan of attack. He
was silent for a little, drew out a hook, threw it in again, and turned to
his brother smiling.
“Come, now.... In the first place, the dispensary is needed. We