第104章

`Impossible, as it seems to me.... For the four thousand square verstas of our district, what with our undersnow waters, 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, at least?'

`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 became heated, 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.

Sergei Ivanovich 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 Agathya Mikhailovna.'

`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 Sergei Ivanovich, 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. `Let me say. 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.

The argument turned out to be far simpler than Konstantin Levin had expected.

`If you admit that it is a benefit,' said Sergei Ivanovich, `then, as an honest man, you cannot help caring about it and sympathizing with the movement, and so wishing to work for it.'

`But I still do not admit this movement to be good,' said Konstantin Levin, reddening.

`What! But you just said now...'

`That's to say, I don't admit it's being either good or possible.'

`That you can't tell without making the trial.'

`Well, supposing that is so,' said Levin, though he did not suppose so at all, `supposing that is so, still I don't see, all the same, why I should worry myself about it.'

`How so?'

`No; since we are talking, explain it to me from the philosophical point of view,' said Levin.

`I can't see where philosophy comes in,' said Sergei Ivanovich, in a tone, Levin fancied, as though he did not admit his brother's right to talk about philosophy. And that irritated Levin.

`I'll tell you, then,' he said with heat, `I imagine the mainspring of all our actions is, after all, self-interest. Now in the Zemstvo institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing that could conduce to my prosperity. The roads are not better and could not be better; my horses carry me well enough over bad ones. Doctors and dispensaries are of no use to me. A justice of the peace is of no use to me - I never appeal to him, and never shall appeal to him. The schools are of no good to me, but positively harmful, as I told you. For me the Zemstvo institutions simply mean the liability of paying eighteen kopecks for every dessiatina, of driving into the town, sleeping with bedbugs, and listening to all sorts of idiocy and blather, and self-interest offers me no inducement.'

`Excuse me,' Sergei Ivanovich interposed with a smile, `self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, yet we did work for it.'

`No!' Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; `the emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. There self-interest did come in. One longed to throw off that yoke that crushed us - all the decent people among us. But to be a member of the Zemstvo and discuss how many street cleaners are needed, and how sewers shall be constructed in the town in which I don't live - to serve on a jury and try a peasant who has stolen a flitch of bacon, and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the president cross-examining my old simpleton Alioshka: ``Do you admit, prisoner at the bar, the fact of the removal of the bacon' - ``Eh?''

Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking the president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it was all to the point.

But Sergei Ivanovich shrugged his shoulders.

`Well, what do you mean to say, then?'

`I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me... my interest, I shall always defend to the best of my ability; that when raids were made on us students, and the police read our letters, I was ready to defend those rights to the utmost, to defend my rights to education and freedom.

I can understand compulsory military service, which affects my children, my brothers, and myself - I am ready to deliberate on what concerns me;but deliberating on how to spend forty thousand roubles of Zemstvo's money, or judging the half-witted Alioshka - that I don't understand, and I can't do it.'

Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had burst open. Sergei Ivanovich smiled.