Leo Tolstoy - Leo Tolstoy - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 4)

Crossing the meadow, Konstantin Levin came out onto the road, and met an old man with a swollen eye, carrying a skep on his shoulder.

“What? taken a stray swarm, Fomitch?” he asked.

“No, indeed, Konstantin Dmitrich! All we can do to keep our own! This is the second swarm that has flown away…. Luckily the lads caught them. They were ploughing your field. They unyoked the horses and galloped after them.”

“Well, what do you say, Fomitch—start mowing or wait a bit?”

“Eh, well. Our way’s to wait till St. Peter’s Day. But you always mow sooner. Well, to be sure, please God, the hay’s good. There’ll be plenty for the beasts.”

“What do you think about the weather?”

“That’s in God’s hands. Maybe it will be fine.”

Levin went up to his brother.

Sergey Ivanovitch had caught nothing, but he was not bored, and seemed in the most cheerful frame of mind. Levin saw that, stimulated by his conversation with the doctor, he wanted to talk. Levin, on the other hand, would have liked to get home as soon as possible to give orders about getting together the mowers for next day, and to set at rest his doubts about the mowing, which greatly absorbed him.

“Well, let’s be going,” he said.

“Why be in such a hurry? Let’s stay a little. But how wet you are! Even though one catches nothing, it’s nice. That’s the best thing about every part of sport, that one has to do with nature. How exquisite this steely water is!” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “These riverside banks always remind me of the riddle—do you know it? ‘The grass says to the water: we quiver and we quiver.’”

“I don’t know the riddle,” answered Levin wearily.

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“Do you know, I’ve been thinking about you,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “It’s beyond everything what’s being done in the district, according to what this doctor tells me. He’s a very intelligent fellow. And as I’ve told you before, I tell you again: it’s not right for you not to go to the meetings, and altogether to keep out of the district business. If decent people won’t go into it, of course it’s bound to go all wrong. We pay the money, and it all goes in salaries, and there are no schools, nor district nurses, nor midwives, nor drugstores— nothing.”

“Well, I did try, you know,” Levin said slowly and unwillingly.

“I can’t! and so there’s no help for it.”

“But why can’t you? I must own I can’t make it out. Indifference, incapacity—I won’t admit; surely it’s not simply laziness?”

“None of those things. I’ve tried, and I see I can do nothing,” said Levin.

He had hardly grasped what his brother was saying. Looking towards the plough land across the river, he made out something black, but he could not distinguish whether it was a horse or the bailiff on horseback.

“Why is it you can do nothing? You made an attempt and didn’t succeed, as you think, and you give in. How can you have so little self-respect?”

“Self-respect!” said Levin, stung to the quick by his brother’s words; “I don’t understand. If they’d told me at college that other people understood the integral calculus, and I didn’t, then pride would have come in. But in this case one wants first to be convinced that one has certain qualifications for this sort of business, and especially that all this business is of great importance.”

“What! do you mean to say it’s not of importance?” said Sergey Ivanovitch, stung to the quick too at his brother’s considering anything of no importance that interested him, and still more at his obviously paying little attention to what he was saying.

“I don’t think it important; it does not take hold of me, I can’t help it,” answered Levin, making out that what he saw was the bailiff, and that the bailiff seemed to be letting the peasants go off the ploughed land. They were turning the plough over. “Can they have finished ploughing?” he wondered.

“Come, really though,” said the elder brother, with a frown on his handsome, clever face, “there’s a limit to everything. It’s very well to be original and genuine, and to dislike everything conventional—I know all about that; but really, what you’re saying either has no meaning, or it has a very wrong meaning. How can you think it a matter of no importance whether the peasant, whom you love as you assert…”

“I never did assert it,” thought Konstantin Levin.

“…dies without help? The ignorant peasant-women starve the children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping them, and don’t help them because to your mind it’s of no importance.”

And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you are so undeveloped that you can’t see all that you can do, or you won’t sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.

Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to submit, or to confess to a lack of zeal for the public good. And this mortified him and hurt his feelings.

“It’s both,” he said resolutely: “I don’t see that it was possible…”

“What! was it impossible, if the money were properly laid out, to provide medical aid?”

“Impossible, as it seems to me…. For the three thousand square miles of our district, what with our thaws, and the storms, and the work in the fields, I don’t see how it is possible to provide medical aid all over. And besides, I don’t believe in medicine.”

“Oh, well, that’s unfair…I can quote to you thousands of instances…. But the schools, anyway.”

“Why have schools?”

“What do you mean? Can there be two opinions of the advantage of education? If it’s a good thing for you, it’s a good thing for everyone.”

Konstantin Levin felt himself morally pinned against a wall, and so he got hot, and unconsciously blurted out the chief cause of his indifference to public business.

“Perhaps it may all be very good; but why should I worry myself about establishing dispensaries which I shall never make use of, and schools to which I shall never send my children, to which even the peasants don’t want to send their children, and to which I’ve no very firm faith that they ought to send them?” said he.

Sergey Ivanovitch was for a minute surprised at this unexpected view of the subject; but he promptly made a new plan of attack. He was silent for a little, drew out a hook, threw it in again, and turned to his brother smiling.

“Come, now…. In the first place, the dispensary is needed. We ourselves sent for the district doctor for Agafea Mihalovna.”

“Oh, well, but I fancy her wrist will never be straight again.”

“That remains to be proved…. Next, the peasant who can read and write is as a workman of more use and value to you.”

“No, you can ask anyone you like,” Konstantin Levin answered with decision, “the man that can read and write is much inferior as a workman. And mending the highroads is an impossibility; and as soon as they put up bridges they’re stolen.”

“Still, that’s not the point,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning. He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply. “Do you admit that education is a benefit for the people?”

“Yes, I admit it,” said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious immediately that he had said what he did not think. He felt that if he admitted that, it would be proved that he had been talking meaningless rubbish. How it would be proved he could not tell, but he knew that this would inevitably be logically proved to him, and he awaited the proofs.