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By Root 1136 0

beard, but he carefully freed it. Going into the shady front hall, he took down his net that hung from a peg in the wall, put it on, and, hands in pockets, went out to the fenced apiary where, in the middle of a mowed space, in even rows, tied to stakes with strips of bast, the old hives stood - all of them familiar to him, each with its own story - and, along the wattle fence, the young ones started that year. Bees and drones played, dizzying the eye, before the flightholes, circling and swarming in one spot, and among them the worker bees flew, all in the same direction, out to the blossoming lindens in the forest and back to the hives with their booty.

His ears were ceaselessly filled with various sounds, now of a busy worker bee flying quickly by, now of a trumpeting, idle drone, now of alarmed, sting-ready sentry bees guarding their property against the enemy. On the other side of the fence, the old man was shaving a hoop and did not see Levin. Levin stopped in the middle of the apiary without calling to him.

He was glad of the chance to be alone, in order to recover from reality, which had already brought his mood down so much.

He remembered that he had already managed to get angry with Ivan, to show coldness to his brother, and to talk light-mindedly with Katavasov.

‘Can it have been only a momentary mood that will pass without leaving a trace?’ he thought.

But in that same moment, returning to his mood, he felt with joy that something new and important had taken place in him. Reality had only veiled for a time the inner peace he had found, but it was intact within him.

Just as the bees now circling around him, threatening and distracting him, deprived him of full physical ease, made him shrink to avoid them, so the cares that had surrounded him from the moment he got into the gig had deprived him of inner freedom; but that lasted only as long as he was among them. As his bodily strength was wholly intact in him, despite the bees, so, too, was his newly realized spiritual strength intact.

XV

‘And do you know, Kostya, whom Sergei Ivanovich travelled with on the way here?’ Dolly asked, after distributing the cucumbers and honey among the children. ‘Vronsky! He’s going to Serbia.’

‘And not alone - he’s taking a squadron at his own expense!’ said Katavasov.

‘That suits him well,’ said Levin. ‘And are the volunteers still going?’ he added, glancing at Sergei Ivanovich.

Sergei Ivanovich, without replying, was carefully probing with a blunt knife in the bowl, where a square of white honeycomb lay, for a still-living bee stuck in the liquid honey.

‘And how they are! You should have seen what went on at the station yesterday!’ said Katavasov, noisily crunching on a cucumber.

‘Well, how are we to understand that? For Christ’s sake, Sergei Ivanovich, explain to me where all these volunteers go, who are they fighting?’ asked the old prince, evidently continuing a conversation started without Levin.

‘The Turks,’ Sergei Ivanovich replied with a calm smile, having liberated the bee, dark with honey and helplessly waving its legs, and transferred it from the knife to a sturdy aspen leaf.

‘But who declared war on the Turks? Ivan Ivanych Ragozov and Countess Lydia Ivanovna, along with Mme Stahl?’

‘No one declared war, but people sympathize with the suffering of their neighbours and want to help them,’ said Sergei Ivanovich.

‘But the prince is not talking about help,’ said Levin, interceding for his father-in-law, ‘but about war. The prince is saying that private persons cannot take part in a war without the permission of the government.’

‘Kostya, look, it’s a bee! We’ll really get stung!’ said Dolly, waving away a wasp.

‘It’s not a bee, it’s a wasp,’ said Levin.

‘Well, sir, what’s your theory?’ Katavasov said to Levin with a smile, obviously challenging him to an argument. ‘Why do private persons not have the right?’

‘My theory is this. On the one hand, war is such a beastly, cruel and terrible thing that no man, to say nothing of a Christian, can personally take upon himself the responsibility for starting