THIRTY-NINE

Chapter 30
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BY the end of September the timber for the buildings to be erected on the land let to the peasant-group was carted, the butter was all sold and the profits divided. Everything on the estate was going well practically, at least Levin thought so. To elucidate matters theoretically and to finish his book, which, according to his dreams, would not only revolutionize political economy but completely abolish that science and lay the foundation of a new science (that of the relation of the people to the land) it was only necessary to go abroad and there study what had been done on the subject and find convincing proofs that what had been done there was not what was needed. Levin was only waiting for the wheat to be delivered and to get paid for it, before leaving for abroad. But rain set in, making it impossible to get in what remained of the corn and potatoes, stopped all the work, and even prevented the delivery of the wheat. The mud made the roads impassable: two mills had been carried away by floods, and the weather was getting worse and worse.
On the thirtieth of September the sun showed itself in the morning, and, in hopes of fine weather, Levin began seriously preparing for his departure. He gave orders that the grain was to be got ready for carting and sent the steward to the merchant to collect the money for the wheat, while he himself went round to give final instructions before leaving.
Having got through all his business, soaked by the streams of water that had run in at the neck of his leather coat and at the top of his high boots, but in the most buoyant and animated spirits, he returned home in the evening. The weather grew still worse toward evening, and the frozen sleet beat the whole body of his drenched horse so painfully that it shook its head and ears and went sideways. But Levin under his hood felt comfortable; he looked cheerfully round, now at the turbid streams that ran down the ruts, now at the drops that hung from every bare twig, now at the white spots of unthawed sleet that lay on the planks of the bridge or on the heaps of still juicy willow leaves lying in a thick layer round a denuded tree. Notwithstanding the gloomy aspect of nature around him he felt peculiarly elated. His conversation with the peasants of the outlying village showed that they were beginning to get used to the new conditions. An old innkeeper, into whose house he had gone to dry himself, evidently approved of Levin’s plan and had offered to join a group to buy cattle.
‘I need only push on steadily toward my aim and I shall achieve it,’ he thought, ‘and it is worth working and striving for. It is not a personal affair of my own but one of public welfare. The whole system of farming, and above all the position of the people, must be completely altered: instead of poverty — wealth and satisfaction for all; instead of hostility — concord and a bond of common interest. In a word — a revolution bloodless but immense; first in our own small district, then throughout the province, throughout Russia, and the whole world — for a good thought must be fruitful. Yes, it is an aim worth working for! The fact that the author of it is myself, Constantine Levin, who once went to a ball in a black tie, whom Kitty Shcherbatskaya refused, and who seems so pitiful and insignificant to himself, proves nothing. I feel sure that Franklin felt just as insignificant and distrusted himself just as I do when he remembered his past. All that does not matter. He too probably had an Agatha Mikhaylovna to whom he confided his secrets.’
With such thoughts Levin reached home when it was already dark.
The steward, having been to the merchant, had returned bringing an instalment of the money for the wheat. An arrangement had been made with the innkeeper, and the steward, while away, had learnt that the corn had nowhere been got in, so that Levin’s hundred and sixty stacks still in the fields were a trifle compared to what others were losing.
Having dined, Levin as usual sat down in his easy-chair with a book, and while reading continued to think about his impending journey in connection with the book he was writing. To-day the importance of his work presented itself to him with especial clearness, and whole paragraphs of their own accord shaped themselves in his mind, expressing the gist of his thoughts. ‘I must write that down,’ thought he. ‘That must form a short preface, such as I formerly considered unnecessary.’ He rose to go to his writing-table, and Laska, who was lying at his feet, stretched herself, also got up, and looked round at him as if asking where she was to go to. But he had no time to write his thoughts down, for the labourers’ foremen had come, and Levin went into the hall to speak to them.
After arranging about the next day’s work by seeing the peasants who had come on business, Levin went to his study and sat down to his work. Laska lay down under the table, and Agatha Mikhaylovna with her knitting sat down in her usual place.
Having written for some time, Levin suddenly with particular vividness remembered Kitty, her refusal, and their last meeting. He rose and began to pace up and down the room.
‘What is the use of fretting?’ said Agatha Mikhaylovna. ‘Why do you always sit at home? You should go to a watering-place now that you have got ready.’
‘So I shall: I am going the day after to-morrow, Agatha Mikhaylovna, only I must finish my business.’
‘Eh, what is your business? Have you not done enough for the peasants as it is! Why, they are saying, “Your master will get a reward from the Tsar for it!” And it is strange: why should you bother about the peasants?’
‘I am not bothering about them: I am doing it for myself.’
Agatha Mikhaylovna knew all the details of Levin’s farming plans. He often laid bare his thoughts before her in all their details, and frequently argued with her and disagreed with her explanations. But this time she quite misunderstood what he said.
‘Of course one must think of one’s soul before everything else,’ she remarked with a sigh. ‘There was Parfen Denisich, who was no scholar at all, but may God grant every one to die as he did!’ she said, referring to a servant who had died recently: ‘he received Holy Communion and Extreme Unction.’
‘I am not speaking about that,’ he said. ‘I mean that I am doing it for my own profit. My gains are bigger when the peasants work better.’
‘But, whatever you do, an idler will always bungle. If he has a conscience he will work, if not, you can do nothing with him.’
‘But you yourself say that Ivan looks after the cattle better now.’
‘I only say,’ answered Agatha Mikhaylovna, evidently not speaking at random but with strict sequence of thought, ‘you must marry, that is all!’
Her mention of the very thing he was just thinking about grieved and hurt him. He frowned, and without replying again sat down to his work, repeating to himself all that he had been thinking about its importance. Only occasionally, in the stillness, he listened to the clicking of her needles and, remembering what he did not wish to remember, made a wry face.
At nine o’clock he heard the sound of a bell and the heavy lurching of a carriage through the mud.
‘There now! Visitors have come to you,’ said Agatha Mikhaylovna, rising and going toward the door. ‘Now you won’t feel dull.’
But Levin overtook her. His work was not getting on now and he was glad of a visitor, whoever it might be.
Chapter 31
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HALF-WAY to the front door Levin heard a familiar sound of coughing in the hall, but the noise of his own footsteps prevented his hearing it clearly and he hoped he was mistaken. Then he saw the whole of his brother’s long, bony, familiar figure, and it seemed that there could be no mistake, but he still hoped he was mistaken and that this tall man, who was taking off his overcoat and coughing, was not his brother Nicholas.
Levin was fond of his brother, but to be with him was always a torment. Under the sway of the thoughts that had come to him and of Agatha Mikhaylovna’s reminders, he was in an unsettled and confused state of mind and the forthcoming meeting with his brother seemed particularly distressing. Instead of a cheerful, healthy stranger who, he hoped, would have diverted him from his mental perplexity, he had to meet his brother, who knew him through and through and would disturb his innermost thoughts and force him to make a clean breast of everything. And that was what he did not desire.
Angry with himself for this bad feeling Levin ran into the hall; and as soon as he had a near view of his brother this feeling of disappointment vanished and was replaced by pity. Dreadful as his emaciation and illness had previously made Nicholas, he was now still thinner and weaker. He was a mere skeleton covered with skin.
He stood in the hall jerking his long, thin neck, drawing a scarf from it, and smiling in a strangely piteous manner. When he saw this meek, submissive smile, Levin felt his throat contract convulsively.
‘There! I have come to see you,’ said Nicholas in a hollow voice, without taking his eyes for an instant from his brother’s face. ‘I have long wanted to, but did not feel well. Now I am much better,’ and he wiped his beard with the thin palms of his hands.
‘Yes, yes!’ answered Levin. He was still more terrified when, kissing his brother’s face, his lips felt the dryness of the skin and he saw his large strangely brilliant eyes close at hand.
Some weeks before this Constantine Levin had written to tell his brother that, after the sale of a few things which till then had remained undivided, Nicholas was entitled to his share, which came to about 2000 roubles.
Nicholas said that he had now come to fetch that money, but chiefly to visit his own nest and touch his native soil, in order like the heroes of old to gather strength from it for the work that lay before him. In spite of the fact that he was more round-shouldered than ever and that, being so tall, his leanness was startling, his movements were quick and sudden as formerly. Levin took him to his room.
Nicholas dressed carefully, a thing he never used to do, brushed his thin, straight hair and went smiling upstairs.
He was in a most affectionate and cheerful mood, such as Levin remembered his often being in as a child: and he even mentioned Sergius Ivanich without irritation. When he met Agatha Mikhaylovna he joked with her and questioned her about the other old servants. The news of Parfen Denisich’s death affected him strangely. A look of fear appeared on his face but he immediately recovered himself
‘After all, he was old,’ he remarked and changed the subject. ‘Well, I will spend a month or two with you and then I will go to Moscow. D’you know, Myagkov has promised me a post and I am entering the Civil Service. I will now arrange my life quite differently,’ he continued. ‘You know, I have got rid of that woman?’
‘Mary Nikolavna? Why, what for?’
‘Oh, she was a horrid woman! She has caused me a lot of unpleasantness,’ but he did not say in what the unpleasantness consisted. He could not explain that he had turned Mary Nikolavna away because she made his tea too weak, and chiefly because she waited on him as on an invalid.
‘Besides, I want to alter my life completely. Of course, like everybody else, I have done stupid things, but property is the least consideration and I don’t regret mine. Health is the great thing, and my health, thank God, has improved.’
Levin listened, trying but unable to think of what to say. Nicholas probably felt the same; he began questioning his brother about his affairs, and Levin was glad to talk about himself because he could do so without any pretence. He told Nicholas of his plans and activities.
Nicholas listened but evidently was not interested.
These two men were so near akin and so intimate with one another, that between them the least movement or intonation expressed more than could be said in words.
At present the same thought filled both their minds and dominated all else: Nicholas’s illness and approaching death. But neither of them dared speak of it, and not having expressed the one thing that occupied their thoughts, whatever they said rang false. Never before had Levin felt so glad when an evening was over and it was time to go to bed. Never had he been so unnatural and artificial, even with an outsider or when making a formal call, as he was that day. And his consciousness of this artificiality and his repentance made him more unnatural. He wished to weep over his dear, dying brother, but had to listen and keep up a conversation about how Nicholas was going to live.
The house being damp, and only his bedroom heated, Levin put his brother to sleep behind a partition in that room.
Nicholas went to bed but, whether he slept or not, kept tossing and coughing like a sick man and, when unable to clear his throat, muttering some complaint. Sometimes he sighed deeply and said, ‘Oh, my God!’ Sometimes, when the phlegm choked him, he muttered angrily, ‘Oh, the devil!’ Levin long lay awake listening to him. His thoughts were very various, but they all led up to death.
Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible force. And that Death which was present in this dear brother (who, waking up, moaned and by habit called indiscriminately on God and on the devil) was not so far away as it had hitherto seemed to be. It was within himself too — he felt it. If not to-day, then to-morrow or thirty years hence, was it not all the same? But what that inevitable Death was, he not only did not know, not only had never considered, but could not and dared not consider.
‘I am working, I want to do something, and I had forgotten that it will all end in Death!’
He sat on his bed in the dark, doubled his arms round his knees and thought, scarcely breathing from the mental strain. But the more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life — that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it. Yes, it was terrible, but true.
‘But I am still alive: what am I to do now? What am I to do?’ he said despairingly. He lit a candle, got up carefully, went to the looking-glass, and began examining his face and hair. Yes! There were grey hairs on his temples. He opened his mouth: his double teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, he was very strong. But Nicholas, who was breathing there with the remains of his lungs, had once had a healthy body too; and he suddenly remembered how as children they used to go to bed together and only waited till Theodore Bogdanich had left the room, to throw pillows at one another and to laugh and laugh so irrepressibly that even the fear of Theodore Bogdanich could not stop that overflowing bubbling consciousness of the joy of living. ‘And now that sunk and hollow chest. . . . And I, who do not know what will happen to me, or why . . .’
‘Kha, kha! Oh, the devil! What are you fidgeting for? Why don’t you sleep?’ his brother’s voice called to him.
‘Oh, I don’t know, just sleeplessness.’
‘And I have slept well; I don’t perspire now. See, feel my shirt, it’s not damp!’
Levin felt it, returned behind the partition, and put out the candle, but was long unable to sleep. Just when the question of how to live had become a little clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself — Death.
‘Well, he is dying, he will die before spring. How can he be helped. What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I had forgotten there was such a thing!’
Chapter 32
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LEVIN had long ago noticed that after people have made one uncomfortable by their pliancy and submissiveness they soon become unbearably exacting and aggressive. He felt that this would happen with his brother. And really Nicholas’s meekness did not last long. The very next morning he grew irritable and cavilled at everything his brother said, touching his most sensitive spots.
Levin felt guilty but could do nothing. He felt that if they both spoke without dissimulation and straight from the heart, they would only look into one another’s eyes and Constantine would say nothing but, ‘You will die! You will die!’ and Nicholas would only say in reply: ‘I know I shall die and I am afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That was all they would say if only they spoke straight from the heart. But that would make life impossible; therefore Constantine tried to do what all his life he had tried and never known how to do (although he had often observed that many people were able to do it well), something without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought; and he felt all the time that it sounded false and that his brother detected him and grew irritable.
On the third day of his stay Nicholas challenged his brother to explain his plans to him once more, and not only found fault with them but purposely confused them with communism.
‘You have only taken an idea from others, and distorted it, and you wish to apply it where it is inapplicable.’
‘But I tell you that the two things have nothing in common! Communists deny the justice of property, capital, or inheritance, while I do not deny that main stimulus’ (it was repulsive to Levin to find himself using such words, but since he had been engrossed in his work he had involuntarily begun using more and more foreign words), ‘but want only to regulate labour.’
‘That is it. You have taken other people’s idea, dropped all that gave it force, and wish to make one believe that it is something new,’ said Nicholas, angrily jerking his neck.
‘But my idea has nothing in common . . .’
‘That idea,’ said Nicholas Levin with a sarcastic smile and angrily glistening eyes, ‘that idea at any rate, if one may say so, has a geometric charm of definiteness and certainty. It may be utopian; but granting the possibility of making a tabula rasa of the past — and abolishing private property and families — then labour comes by its own. But you have nothing . . .’
‘Why do you muddle it? I never was a communist.’
‘But I have been, and now I think it is premature but reasonable, and that it has a future as Christianity had in the first centuries.’
‘I only think that the force of labour must be dealt with in a scientifically experimental manner. It must be studied and its characteristics . . .’
‘But that is quite unnecessary! That force finds its own form of activity in accord with its degree of development. There used to be slaves everywhere, then villeins; and we have labour paid in kind, and leaseholders, and hired labour: so what are you looking for?’
At these words Levin suddenly grew warm, for at the bottom of his heart he felt that it was true — true that he wished to balance between communism and the existing forms of life, and that this was hardly possible.
‘I am seeking for a way of making labour profitable for me and for the labourers,’ he answered hotly. ‘I want to establish . . .’
‘You do not want to establish anything. You simply want to be original, as you always have done, and to show that you are not just exploiting the peasants, but have ideas!’
‘You think so? Well, then, leave me alone!’ said Levin, and he felt that a muscle was uncontrollably quivering in his left cheek.
‘You have no convictions and never had any; you only want to flatter your self-esteem.’
‘Well, all right! But leave me alone.’
‘I will, and high time too! You can go to the devil! And I am sorry I came!’
However much Levin tried afterwards to pacify his brother, Nicholas would not listen to it, but said that it was much better for them to part. And Levin saw that life had become simply intolerable for his brother.
Nicholas had quite made up his mind to go. Constantine came to him again and in an unnatural manner asked his forgiveness if he had offended him in any way.
‘Ah, this is magnanimity!’ said Nicholas, and smiled. ‘If you wish to be in the right, I can let you have that pleasure. You are in the right: but all the same I shall go away.’
Only just before he left Nicholas kissed Constantine, and suddenly said with a strange and serious look at his brother, ‘Do not think too badly of me, Kostya!’ and his voice trembled.
These were the only sincere words that had passed between them. Levin understood that they were meant to say, ‘You see that I am in a bad way, and perhaps we shall not meet again.’ He understood this, and tears trembled in his eyes. He again kissed his brother, but he did not know what to answer.
Three days after his brother’s departure Levin left for abroad. He surprised young Shcherbatsky, Kitty’s cousin, whom he happened to meet at a railway station, by his moroseness.
‘What is the matter with you?’ asked Shcherbatsky.
‘Nothing much, but there is little to be happy about in this world.’
‘Little? You’d better come to Paris with me instead of going to some Mulhausen or other. You’ll see how jolly it will be!’
‘No, I have done with that; it is time for me to die.’
‘That is a fine thing!’ said Shcherbatsky, laughing. ‘I am only preparing to begin to live.’
‘Yes, I thought so too till lately; but now I know that I shall soon die.’
Levin was saying what of late he had really been thinking. He saw death and the approach of death in everything; but the work he had begun interested him all the more. After all, he had to live his life somehow, till death came. Everything for him was wrapped in darkness; but just because, of the darkness, feeling his work to be the only thread to guide him through that darkness, he seized upon it and clung to it with all his might.