Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Anna Karenin.
The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1917.
Chapter XXVI
I
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 sliding sleepily out on to 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 looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, 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 arranging 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, everlasting 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 things 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 dumb-bells, 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 dumb-bells.
The bailiff came in, and said that 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 important and joyful event: Pava, his best cow, an expensive beast, bought at 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 on to 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 colour 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 Dmitritch,’ 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.