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By Root 1316 0

do it in a trice.’ The ploughs were no good, because it did not occur to the worker to lower the raised shear and, resorting to force, he wore out the horses and ruined the soil; and they asked him not to worry. Horses were let into the wheat fields, because not one worker wanted to be night-watchman, and, despite orders to the contrary, the workers took turns looking after the horses at night, and some Vanka, after working all day, would fall asleep and then confess his sin, saying: ‘Do as you like, sir.’ The three best calves died from overfeeding, having been let out into a regrown clover field without being watered, and in no way would they believe that they became bloated by the clover, but told him in consolation how a neighbour had lost a hundred and twelve head in three days. All this was done not because anyone wished evil to Levin or his farming; on the contrary, he knew he was loved and considered a simple master (which was the highest praise); it was done only because of the wish to work merrily and carelessly, and his interests were not only foreign and incomprehensible to them, but fatally opposed to their own most just interests. For a long time Levin had felt displeased with his attitude towards farming. He had seen that his boat was leaking, but he could not find and did not look for the leak, perhaps deceiving himself on purpose. But now he could no longer deceive himself. The farming he had been engaged in not only ceased to interest him but disgusted him, and he could no longer be occupied with it.

To that was added the presence some twenty miles away of Kitty Shcherbatsky, whom he wanted to see and could not. Darya Alexandrovna Oblonsky, when he had visited her, had invited him to come: to come in order to renew his proposal to her sister, who, as she let him feel, would now accept him. Levin himself, when he saw Kitty Shcherbatsky, realized that he had never ceased to love her; but he could not go to the Oblonskys knowing that she was there. The fact that he had proposed and she had refused him put an insuperable obstacle between them. ‘I can’t ask her to be my wife only because she couldn’t be the wife of the one she wanted,’ he said to himself. The thought of it turned him cold and hostile towards her. ‘I’d be unable to speak to her without a feeling of reproach, to look at her without anger, and she’ll hate me still more, as she ought to. And then, too, how can I go to them now, after what Darya Alexandrovna told me? How can I not show that I know what she told me? And I’ll come with magnanimity - to forgive, to show mercy to her. Me in the role of a man forgiving her and deigning to offer her his love! ... Why did Darya Alexandrovna say that? I might have seen her accidentally, and then everything would have happened by itself, but now it’s impossible, impossible!’

Darya Alexandrovna sent him a note, asking him for a side-saddle for Kitty. ‘I’ve been told you have a side-saddle,’ she wrote to him. ‘I hope you’ll bring it yourself.’

That he simply could not bear. How could an intelligent, delicate woman so humiliate her sister! He wrote ten notes, tore them all up, and sent the saddle without any reply. To write that he would come was impossible, because he could not come; to write that he could not come because something prevented him or he was leaving, was still worse. He sent the saddle without a reply and, with the awareness of doing something shameful, handed over his detested farming to the steward the very next day and left for a far-off district to visit his friend Sviyazhsky, who had excellent snipe marshes near by and who had written recently asking him to fulfil his long-standing intention of visiting him. The snipe marshes in the Surov district had long tempted Levin, but he kept putting off the trip on account of farming matters. Now, though, he was glad to get away both from the Shcherbatskys’ neighbourhood and, above all, from farming, precisely in order to hunt, which in all troubles served him as the best consolation.

XXV

There was no railway or post road to the Surov