148 149
happiness, such as marriage must have given him, and consequently
he would not so disdain what he really had. Secondly, he would never
again let himself give way to low passion, the memory of which had so
tortured him when he had been making up his mind to make an offer.
Then remembering his brother Nikolay, he resolved to himself that he
would never allow himself to forget him, that he would follow him up,
and not lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help when things should
go ill with him. And that would be soon, he felt. Then, too, his brother’s
talk of communism, which he had treated so lightly at the time, now
made him think. He considered a revolution in economic conditions
nonsense. But he always felt the injustice of his own abundance in
comparison with the poverty of the peasants, and now he determined
that so as to feel quite in the right, though he had worked hard and
lived by no means luxuriously before, he would now work still harder,
and would allow himself even less luxury. And all this seemed to him
so easy a conquest over himself that he spent the whole drive in the
pleasantest daydreams. With a resolute feeling of hope in a new,
better life, he reached home before nine o’clock at night.
The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by a
light in the bedroom windows of his old nurse, Agafea Mihalovna, who
performed the duties of housekeeper in his house. She was not yet
asleep. Kouzma, waked up by her, came sidling sleepily out onto the
steps. A setter bitch, Laska, ran out too, almost upsetting Kouzma, and
whining, turned round about Levin’s knees, jumping up and longing,
but not daring, to put her forepaws on his chest.
“You’re soon back again, sir,” said Agafea Mihalovna.
“I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well; but
at home, one is better,” he answered, and went into his study.
The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The
familiar details came out: the stag’s horns, the bookshelves, the look-
ing-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mend-
ing, his father’s sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken
ash tray, a manuscript book with his handwriting. As he saw all this,
there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arrang-
ing the new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these
traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: “No, you’re not
going to get away from us, and you’re not going to be different, but
you’re going to be the same as you’ve always been; with doubts, ever-
lasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls,
and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won’t get, and
which isn’t possible for you.”
This the tings said to him, but another voice in his heart was telling
him that he must not fall under the sway of the past, and that one can
do anything with oneself. And hearing that voice, he went into the
corner where stood his two heavy dumbbells, and began brandishing
them like a gymnast, trying to restore his confident temper. There was
a creak of steps at the door. He hastily put down the dumbbells.
The bailiff came in, and said everything, thank God, was doing
well; but informed him that the buckwheat in the new drying machine
had been a little scorched. This piece of news irritated Levin. The new
drying machine had been constructed and partly invented by Levin.
The bailiff had always been against the drying machine, and now it
was with suppressed triumph that he announced that the buckwheat
had been scorched. Levin was firmly convinced that if the buckwheat
had been scorched, it was only because the precautions had not been
taken, for which he had hundreds of times given orders. He was
annoyed, and reprimanded the bailiff. But there had been an impor-
tant and joyful event: Pava, his best cow, an expensive beast, bought at