Anna Karenina (Louise Maude's Translation). Leo Tolstoy

      Chapter 26

      NEXT morning Constantine Levin left Moscow and toward evening he reached home. On his way back in the train he talked with his fellow-passengers about politics and the new railways, and felt oppressed, just as in Moscow, by the confusion of the views expressed, by discontent with himself and a vague sense of shame. But when he got out of the train at his station and by the dim light from the station windows saw his one-eyed coachman, Ignat, with his coat-collar turned up, and his sledge with its carpet-lined back, his horses with their tied-up tails, and the harness with its rings and tassels, and when Ignat, while still putting the luggage into the sledge, began telling him the village news: how the contractor had come, and Pava had calved, — Levin felt that the confusion was beginning to clear away and his shame and self-dissatisfaction to pass. He felt this at the mere sight of Ignat and the horses; but when he had put on the sheepskin coat that had been brought for him and, well wrapped up, had seated himself in the sledge and started homeward, turning over in his mind the orders he would give about the work on the estate, and as he watched the side horse (once a saddle-horse that had been overridden, a spirited animal from the Don), he saw what had befallen him in quite a different light. He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be better than he had been formerly. First of all he decided that he would no longer hope for the exceptional happiness which marriage was to have given him, and consequently he would not underrate the present as he had done. Secondly, he would never again allow himself to be carried away by passion, the repulsive memory of which had so tormented him when he was making up his mind to propose. Then, remembering his brother Nicholas, he determined that he would never allow himself to forget him again, but would watch over him, keep him in sight, and be ready to help when things went hard with him. And he felt that that would be soon. Then his brother’s talk about communism, which he had taken lightly at the time, now made him think. He considered an entire change of economic conditions nonsense; but he had always felt the injustice of his superfluities compared with the peasant’s poverty, and now decided, in order to feel himself quite justified, that though he had always worked hard and lived simply, he would in future work still more and allow himself still less luxury. And it all seemed to him so easy to carry out that he was in a pleasant reverie the whole way home, and it was with cheerful hopes for a new and better life that he reached his house toward nine o’clock in the evening.

      A light fell on the snow-covered space in front of the house from the windows of the room of his old nurse, Agatha Mikhaylovna, who now acted as his housekeeper. She had not yet gone to bed, and Kuzma, whom she had roused, came running out barefoot and still half-asleep into the porch. Laska, a setter bitch, ran out too, almost throwing Kuzma off his feet, and whined and rubbed herself against Levin’s knees, jumping up and wishing but not daring to put her front paws on his chest.

      ‘You have soon come back, sir,’ said Agatha Mikhaylovna.

      ‘I was homesick, Agatha Mikhaylovna. Visiting is all very well, but “there is no place like home,” ’ he replied, and went into his study.

      A candle just brought in gradually lit up the study and its familiar details became visible: the stag’s horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the hot-air aperture of the stove with its brass lid, which had long been in need of repair, his father’s couch, the large table on which were an open volume, a broken ash-tray, and an exercise-book in his handwriting. When he saw all this, he was overcome by a momentary doubt of the possibility of starting the new life of which he had been dreaming on his way. All these traces of his old life seemed to seize hold of him and say, ‘No, you will not escape us and will not be different, but will remain such as you have been: full of doubts; full of dissatisfaction with yourself, and of vain attempts at improvement followed by failures, and continual hopes of the happiness which has escaped you and is impossible for you.’

      That was what the things said, but another voice within his soul was saying that one must not submit to the past and that one can do anything with oneself. And obeying the latter voice he went to the corner where two thirty-six pound dumb-bells lay and began doing gymnastic exercises with them to invigorate himself. He heard a creaking of steps at the door and hurriedly put down the dumb-bells.

      His steward entered and said that, ‘the lord be thanked,’ everything was all right, but that the buckwheat had burned in the new drying kiln. This news irritated Levin. The new kiln had been built and partly invented by him. The steward had always been against the new kiln, and now proclaimed with suppressed triumph that the buckwheat had got burnt. Levin felt quite certain that if it had been burnt it was only because the precautions about which he had given instructions over and over again had been neglected. He was vexed, and he reprimanded the steward. But the steward had one important and pleasant event to report. Pava, his best and most valuable cow, bought at the cattle-show, had calved.

      ‘Kuzma, bring me my sheepskin. And you tell them to bring a lantern. I will go and have a look at her,’ he said to the steward.

      The sheds where the most valuable cattle were kept were just behind the house. Crossing the yard past the heap of snow by the lilac bush, he reached the shed. There was a warm steaming smell of manure when the frozen door opened, and the cows, astonished at the unaccustomed light of the lantern, began moving on their clean straw. Levin saw the broad smooth black-mottled back of a Dutch cow. The bull, Berkut, with a ring through his nose, was lying down, and almost rose up, but changed his mind and only snorted a couple of times as they passed by. The red beauty Pava, enormous as a hippopotamus, turned her back, hiding her calf from the newcomers and sniffing at it.

      Levin entered the stall and examined Pava, who, becoming excited, was about to low, but quieted down when Levin moved the calf toward her, and sighing heavily began licking it with her rough tongue. The calf fumbled about, pushing its nose under its mother’s belly and swinging its little tail.

      ‘Show a light here, Theodore, here,’ said Levin examining the calf. ‘Like its mother,’ he said, ‘although the colour is its father’s; very fine, big-boned and deep-flanked. Vasily Fedorich, isn’t she fine?’ he said, turning to the steward, and quite forgiving him for the buckwheat under the influence of his satisfaction about the calf.

      ‘Whom could she take after, not to be good? Simon, the contractor, came the day after you left. We shall have to employ him, Constantine Dmitrich,’ said the steward. ‘I told you about the machine.’

      This one question led Levin back to all the details of his farming, which was on a large and elaborate scale. He went straight from the cowshed to the office, and after talking things over with the steward and with Simon the contractor, he returned to the house and went directly upstairs to the drawing-room.

      Chapter 27

      IT was a large old-fashioned house, and though only Levin was living in it, he used and heated the whole of it. He knew this to be foolish and even wrong, and contrary to his new plans, but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived a life which appeared to him ideally perfect, and which he had dreamed of renewing with a wife and family of his own.

      Levin could scarcely remember his mother. His conception of her was to him a sacred memory, and in his imagination his future wife was to be a repetition of the enchanting and holy ideal of womanhood that his mother had been.

      He could not imagine the love of woman without marriage, and even pictured to himself a family first and then the woman who would give him the family. His views on marriage therefore did not resemble those of most of his acquaintances, for whom marriage was only one of many social affairs; for Levin it was the chief thing in life, on which the whole happiness of life depended. And now he had to renounce it.

      When he had settled in the armchair in the little drawing-room where he always had his tea, and Agatha Mikhaylovna had brought it in for him and had sat down at the window with her usual remark, ‘I will sit down, sir!’ he felt that, strange to say, he had not really forgotten his dreams and that he could not live without them. With her, or with another, they would come true. He read his book, and followed