Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [143]
It was that time when a short break comes in the farm work, before the beginning of the harvest, annually repeated and annually calling on all the strength of the peasantry. The crops were excellent, and clear, hot summer days set in, with short, dewy nights.
The brothers had to pass through a wood in order to reach the meadows. Sergei Ivanovich kept admiring the beauty of the wood overgrown with leaves, pointing out to his brother now an old linden, dark on its shady side, rippling with yellow stipules and ready to flower, now the brilliant emerald of that year’s young shoots on the trees. Konstantin Levin did not like talking or hearing about the beauty of nature. For him words took away the beauty of what he saw. He agreed with his brother, but involuntarily began thinking of other things. When they reached the other side of the wood, all his attention was absorbed by the sight of a fallow field on a hillock, in some places yellow with grass, in others trodden down and cut criss-cross or dotted with heaps, or even ploughed under. A file of carts moved across the field. Levin counted the carts and was pleased that they were bringing out all that was necessary, and at the sight of the meadows his thoughts turned to the mowing. He always experienced something that especially touched him to the quick during the haymaking. Driving up to the meadow, Levin stopped the horse.
The morning dew lingered below in the thick undergrowth of the grass, and Sergei Ivanovich, to avoid getting his feet wet, asked to be taken across the meadow in the cabriolet, to that willow bush where the perch took the bait so well. Sorry as Konstantin Levin was to crush his grass, he drove into the meadow. The tall grass softly twined around the wheels and the horse’s legs, leaving its seeds on the wet spokes and hubs.
His brother sat down under the bush, sorting his fishing rods, while Levin led the horse away, tied it up, and went into the enormous grey-green sea of the meadow, unstirred by the wind. The silky grass with its ripening seeds reached his waist in the places flooded in spring.
Cutting across the meadow, Konstantin Levin came out on the road and met an old man with a swollen eye, carrying a hive of bees.
‘Did you catch it, Fomich?’ he asked.
‘Catch it, Konstantin Dmitrich! I’ll be happy to keep the one I have. It’s the second time a swarm got away ... Thanks be, the boys rode after it. Yours are ploughing. They unhitched a horse and rode after it ...’
‘Well, what do you say, Fomich - shall we mow or wait?’
‘There, now! We’d say wait till St Peter’s.1 But you always mow earlier. Why not? The grass is fine, thank God. The cattle will have plenty.’
‘And the weather, what do you think?’
‘That’s God’s doing. Maybe the weather’ll hold.’
Levin went back to his brother. He had caught nothing, but Sergei Ivanovich was not bored and seemed in the most cheerful spirits. Levin saw that he had been stirred by the conversation with the doctor and wanted to talk. Levin, on the contrary, wanted to get home quickly, to arrange for mowers to be called in by tomorrow and resolve the doubt concerning the mowing, which greatly preoccupied him.
‘Let’s go then,’ he said.
‘What’s the hurry? Let’s sit here. How soaked you are, though! I’m not catching anything, but it’s nice here. Any hunting is good in that you have to do with