Anna Karenina
cattle yard at the further end of the estate, and to dig a pond and to
construct movable pens for the cattle as a means of manuring the land.
And then eight hundred acres of wheat, three hundred of potatoes, and
four hundred of clover, and not one acre exhausted.
Absorbed in such dreams, carefully keeping his horse by the hedges, so
as not to trample his young crops, he rode up to the laborers who had
been sent to sow clover. A cart with the seed in it was standing, not
at the edge, but in the middle of the crop, and the winter corn had
been torn up by the wheels and trampled by the horse. Both the laborers
were sitting in the hedge, probably smoking a pipe together. The earth
in the cart, with which the seed was mixed, was not crushed to powder,
but crusted together or adhering in clods. Seeing the master, the
laborer, Vassily, went towards the cart, while Mishka set to work
sowing. This was not as it should be, but with the laborers Levin
seldom lost his temper. When Vassily came up, Levin told him to lead
the horse to the hedge.
“It’s all right, sir, it’ll spring up again,” responded Vassily.
“Please don’t argue,” said Levin, “but do as you’re told.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Vassily, and he took the horse’s head. “What a
sowing, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” he said, hesitating; “first rate.
Only it’s a work to get about! You drag a ton of earth on your shoes.”
“Why is it you have earth that’s not sifted?” said Levin.
“Well, we crumble it up,” answered Vassily, taking up some seed and
rolling the earth in his palms.
Vassily was not to blame for their having filled up his cart with
unsifted earth, but still it was annoying.
Levin had more than once already tried a way he knew for stifling his
anger, and turning all that seemed dark right again, and he tried that
way now. He watched how Mishka strode along, swinging the huge clods of
earth that clung to each foot; and getting off his horse, he took the
sieve from Vassily and started sowing himself.
“Where did you stop?”
Vassily pointed to the mark with his foot, and Levin went forward as
best he could, scattering the seed on the land. Walking was as
difficult as on a bog, and by the time Levin had ended the row he was
in a great heat, and he stopped and gave up the sieve to Vassily.
“Well, master, when summer’s here, mind you don’t scold me for these
rows,” said Vassily.
“Eh?” said Levin cheerily, already feeling the effect of his method.
“Why, you’ll see in the summer time. It’ll look different. Look you
where I sowed last spring. How I did work at it! I do my best,
Konstantin Dmitrievitch, d’ye see, as I would for my own father. I
don’t like bad work myself, nor would I let another man do it. What’s
good for the master’s good for us too. To look out yonder now,” said
Vassily, pointing, “it does one’s heart good.”
“It’s a lovely spring, Vassily.”
“Why, it’s a spring such as the old men don’t remember the like of. I
was up home; an old man up there has sown wheat too, about an acre of
it. He was saying you wouldn’t know it from rye.”
“Have you been sowing wheat long?”
“Why, sir, it was you taught us the year before last. You gave me two
measures. We sold about eight bushels and sowed a rood.”
“Well, mind you crumble up the clods,” said Levin, going towards his
horse, “and keep an eye on Mishka. And if there’s a good crop you shall
have half a rouble for every acre.”
“Humbly thankful. We are very well content, sir, as it is.”
Levin got on his horse and rode towards the field where was last year’s
clover, and the one which was ploughed ready for the spring corn.
The crop of clover coming up in the stubble was magnificent. It had
survived everything, and stood up vividly green through the broken
stalks of last year’s wheat. The horse sank in up to the pasterns, and
he drew each hoof with a sucking sound out of the half-thawed ground.
Over the ploughland riding was utterly impossible; the horse could only
keep a foothold where there was ice, and in the thawing furrows he sank
deep in at each step. The ploughland was in splendid condition; in a
couple of days it would be fit for harrowing and sowing. Everything was
capital, everything was cheering. Levin rode back across the streams,
hoping the water would have gone down. And he did in fact get across,
and startled two ducks. “There must be snipe too,” he thought, and just
as he reached the turning homewards he met the forest keeper, who
confirmed his theory about the snipe.
Levin went home at a trot, so as to have time to eat his dinner and get
his gun ready for the evening.
Chapter 14
As he rode up to the house in the happiest frame of mind, Levin heard
the bell ring at the side of the principal entrance of the house.
“Yes, that’s someone from the railway station,” he thought, “just the
time to be here from the Moscow train ... Who could it be? What if it’s
brother Nikolay? He did say: ‘Maybe I’ll go to the waters, or maybe
I’ll come down to you.’” He felt dismayed and vexed for the first
minute, that his brother Nikolay’s presence should come to disturb his
happy mood of spring. But he felt ashamed of the feeling, and at once
he opened, as it were, the arms of his soul, and with a softened
feeling of joy and expectation, now he hoped with all his heart that it
was his brother. He pricked up his horse, and riding out from behind
the acacias he saw a hired three-horse sledge from the railway station,
and a gentleman in a fur coat. It was not his brother. “Oh, if it were
only some nice person one could talk to a little!” he thought.
“Ah,” cried Levin joyfully, flinging up both his hands. “Here’s a
delightful visitor! Ah, how glad I am to see you!” he shouted,
recognizing Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“I shall find out for certain whether she’s married, or when she’s
going to be married,” he thought. And on that delicious spring day he
felt that the thought of her did not hurt him at all.
“Well, you didn’t expect me, eh?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting out
of the sledge, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his
cheek, and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits.
“I’ve come to see you in the first place,” he said, embracing and
kissing him, “to have some stand-shooting second, and to sell the
forest at Ergushovo third.”
“Delightful! What a spring we’re having! How ever did you get along in
a sledge?”
“In a cart it would have been worse still, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,”
answered the driver, who knew him.
“Well, I’m very, very glad to see you,” said Levin, with a genuine
smile of childlike delight.
Levin led his friend to the room set apart for visitors, where Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s things were carried also—a bag, a gun in a case, a
satchel for cigars. Leaving him there to wash and change his clothes,
Levin went off to the counting house to speak about the ploughing and
clover. Agafea Mihalovna, always very anxious for the credit of the
house, met him in the hall with inquiries about dinner.
“Do just as you like, only let it be as soon as possible,” he said, and
went to the bailiff.
When he came back, Stepan Arkadyevitch, washed and combed, came out of
his room with a beaming smile, and they went upstairs together.
“Well, I am glad I managed to get away to you! Now I shall understand
what the mysterious business is that you are always absorbed in here.
No, really, I envy you. What a house, how nice it all is! So bright, so
cheerful!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting that it was not always
spring and fine weather like that day. “And your nurse is simply
charming! A pretty maid in an apron might be even more agreeable,
perhaps; but for your severe monastic style it does very well.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch told him many interesting pieces of news;
especially interesting to Levin was the news that his brother, Sergey
Ivanovitch, was intending to pay him a visit in the summer.
Not one word did Stepan Arkadyevitch say in reference to Kitty and the
Shtcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin was
grateful to him for his delicacy and was very glad of his visitor. As
always happened with him during his solitude, a mass of ideas and
feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could not
communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon Stepan
Arkadyevitch his poetic joy in the spring, and his failures and plans
for the land, and his thoughts and criticisms on the books he had been
reading, and the idea of his own book, the basis of which really was,
though he was unaware of it himself, a criticism of all the old books
on agriculture. Stepan Arkadyevitch, always charming, understanding
everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming on
this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as it were,
and a new tone of respect that flattered him.
The efforts of Agafea Mihalovna and the cook, that the dinner should be
particularly good, only ended in the two famished friends attacking the
preliminary course, eating a great deal of bread and butter, salt goose
and salted mushrooms, and in Levin’s finally ordering the soup to be
served without the accompaniment of little pies, with which the cook
had particularly meant to impress their visitor. But though Stepan
Arkadyevitch was accustomed to very different dinners, he thought
everything excellent: the herb brandy, and the bread, and the butter,
and above all the salt goose and the mushrooms, and the nettle soup,
and the chicken in white sauce, and the white Crimean wine—everything
was superb and delicious.
“Splendid, splendid!” he said, lighting a fat cigar after the roast. “I
feel as if, coming to you, I had landed on a peaceful shore after the
noise and jolting of a steamer. And so you maintain that the laborer
himself is an element to be studied and to regulate the choice of
methods in agriculture. Of course, I’m an ignorant outsider; but I
should fancy theory and its application will have its influence on the
laborer too.”
“Yes, but wait a bit. I’m not talking of political economy, I’m talking
of the science of agriculture. It ought to be like the natural
sciences, and to observe given phenomena and the laborer in his
economic, ethnographical....”
At that instant Agafea Mihalovna came in with jam.
“Oh, Agafea Mihalovna,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, kissing the tips of
his plump fingers, “what salt goose, what herb brandy!... What do you
think, isn’t it time to start, Kostya?” he added.
Levin looked out of the window at the sun sinking behind the bare
tree-tops of the forest.
“Yes, it’s time,” he said. “Kouzma, get ready the trap,” and he ran
downstairs.
Stepan Arkadyevitch, going down, carefully took the canvas cover off
his varnished gun case with his own hands, and opening it, began to get
ready his expensive new-fashioned gun. Kouzma, who already scented a
big tip, never left Stepan Arkadyevitch’s side, and put on him both his
stockings and boots, a task which Stepan Arkadyevitch readily left him.
“Kostya, give orders that if the merchant Ryabinin comes ... I told him
to come today, he’s to be brought in and to wait for me....”
“Why, do you mean to say you’re selling the forest to Ryabinin?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“To be sure I do. I have had to do business with him, ‘positively and
conclusively.’”
Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed. “Positively and conclusively” were the
merchant’s favorite words.
“Yes, it’s wonderfully funny the way he talks. She knows where her
master’s going!” he added, patting Laska, who hung about Levin, whining
and licking his hands, his boots, and his gun.
The trap was already at the steps when they went out.
“I told them to bring the trap round; or would you rather walk?”
“No, we’d better drive,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting into the