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a show, had calved.
“Kouzma, give me my sheepskin. And you tell them to take a
lantern. I’ll come and look at her,” he said to the bailiff.
The cowhouse for the more valuable cows was just behind the
house. Walking across the yard, passing a snowdrift by the lilac tree, he
went into the cowhouse. There was the warm, steamy smell of dung
when the frozen door was opened, and the cows, astonished at the
unfamiliar light of the lantern, stirred on the fresh straw. He caught a
glimpse of the broad, smooth, black and piebald back of Hollandka.
Berkoot, the bull, was lying down with his ring in his lip, and seemed
about to get up, but thought better of it, and only gave two snorts as
they passed by him. Pava, a perfect beauty, huge as a hippopotamus,
with her back turned to them, prevented their seeing the calf, as she
sniffed her all over.
Levin went into the pen, looked Pava over, and lifted the red and
spotted calf onto her long, tottering legs. Pava, uneasy, began lowing,
but when Levin put the calf close to her she was soothed, and, sighing
heavily, began licking her with her rough tongue. The calf, fumbling,
poked her nose under her mother’s udder, and stiffened her tail out
straight.
“Here, bring the light, Fyodor, this way,” said Levin, examining the
calf. “Like the mother! though the color takes after the father; but
that’s nothing. Very good. Long and broad in the haunch. Vassily
Fedorovitch, isn’t she splendid?” he said to the bailiff, quite forgiving
him for the buckwheat under the influence of his delight in the calf.
“How could she fail to be? Oh, Semyon the contractor came the
day after you left. You must settle with him, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,”
said the bailiff. “I did inform you about the machine.”
This question was enough to take Levin back to all the details of
his work on the estate, which was on a large scale, and complicated. He
went straight from the cowhouse to the counting house, and after a
little conversation with the bailiff and Semyon the contractor, he went
back to the house and straight upstairs to the drawing room.