第102章

The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich, and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not led by any impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take an interest in public affairs, and consequently took an interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this conjecture by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a new machine.

Besides this, Konstantin Levin was not at his ease with his brother, because in the country, especially in summertime, Levin was continually busy with work on the land, and the long summer day was not long enough for him to get through all he had to do, while Sergei Ivanovich was merely taking a holiday. But though he was taking a holiday now - that is to say, he was doing no writing - he was so used to intellectual activity that he liked to put into concise and eloquent shape the ideas that occurred to him, and liked to have someone listen to him. His most usual and natural listener was his brother. And so, in spite of the friendliness and directness of their relations, Konstantin felt an awkwardness in leaving him alone.

Sergei Ivanovich liked to stretch himself on the grass in the sun, and to lie so, basking and chatting lazily.

`You wouldn't believe,' he would say to his brother, `what a pleasure this rural laziness is to me. Not an idea in one's brain - as empty as a drum!'

But Konstantin Levin found it dull sitting and listening to him, especially when he knew that while he was away manure would be carted into fields not plowed ready for it, and heaped up God knows how; and the shares in the plows would not be screwed in, so that they would come off, and then his men would say the new plows were a silly invention, and there was nothing like the old wooden plow, and so on.

`Come, you've done enough trudging about in the heat,' Sergei Ivanovich would say to him.

`No, I must just run round to the countinghouse for a minute,'

Levin would answer, and would run off to the fields.

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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 3, Chapter 02[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 2 Early in June Agathya Mikhailovna, the old nurse and housekeeper, in carrying to the cellar a jar of mushrooms she had just pickled, happened to slip, fall and sprain her wrist. The district doctor, a talkative young medico who had just finished his studies, came to see her. He examined the wrist, said it was not luxated, bandaged it, and being asked to dinner evidently was delighted at a chance of talking to the celebrated Sergei Ivanovich Koznishev, and to show his advanced views of things told him all the scandal of the district, complaining of the poor state into which the Zemstvo affairs had fallen. Sergei Ivanovich listened attentively, asked him questions, and, roused by a new listener, he talked fluently, uttered a few keen and weighty observations, respectfully appreciated by the young doctor, and was soon in that animated frame of mind his brother knew so well, which always, with him, followed a brilliant and animated conversation. After the departure of the doctor, he wanted to go with a fishing rod to the river. Sergei Ivanovich was fond of angling, and was, it seemed, proud of being able to care for such a stupid occupation.

Konstantin Levin, whose presence was needed in the plowland and the meadows, had come to take his brother in the cabriolet.

It was that time of the year, the turning point of summer, when the crops of the present year are a certainty, when one begins to think of the sowing for next year, and the mowing is at hand; when the rye is all in ear, though its ears are still light, not yet full, and it waves in gray-green billows in the wind; when the green oats, with tufts of yellow grass scattered here and there among it, droop irregularly over the late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat is already out and hiding the ground;when the fallow lands, trodden hard as stone by the cattle, are half-plowed over, with paths left untouched by the plow; when the odor from the dry manure heaps carted into the fields mingles at sunset with the smell of meadowsweet, and on the low-lying lands the preserved meadows are a thick sea of grass waiting for the mowing, with blackened heaps of sorrel stalks among it.

It was the time when there comes a brief pause in the toil of the fields before the beginning of the labors of harvest - every year recurring, every year claiming all the peasant's thews. The crop was a splendid one, and bright, hot summer days had set in with short, dewy nights.

The brothers had to drive through the woods to reach the meadows.

Sergei Ivanovich was all the while admiring the beauty of the woods, which were a tangled mass of leaves, pointing out to his brother now an old lime tree on the point of flowering, dark on the shady side, and brightly spotted with yellow stipules, now the young shoots of this year's saplings brilliant with emerald. Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw. He assented to what his brother said, but could not help thinking of other things. When they came out of the woods, all his attention was engrossed by the view of the fallow land on the upland, in parts yellow with grass, in parts trampled and checkered with furrows, in parts dotted with ridges of manure, and in parts even plowed. A string of telegas was moving across it. Levin counted the telegas, and was pleased that all that were wanted had been brought, and at the sight of the meadows his thoughts passed to the mowing. He always felt something peculiar moving him to the quick at haymaking. On reaching the meadow Levin stopped the horse.