Anna Karenina

he load was tied on. Ivan jumped down and took the quiet, sleek horse
by the bridle. The young wife flung the rake up on the load, and with a
bold step, swinging her arms, she went to join the women, who were
forming a ring for the haymakers’ dance. Ivan drove off to the road and
fell into line with the other loaded carts. The peasant women, with
their rakes on their shoulders, gay with bright flowers, and chattering
with ringing, merry voices, walked behind the hay cart. One wild
untrained female voice broke into a song, and sang it alone through a
verse, and then the same verse was taken up and repeated by half a
hundred strong healthy voices, of all sorts, coarse and fine, singing
in unison.

The women, all singing, began to come close to Levin, and he felt as
though a storm were swooping down upon him with a thunder of merriment.
The storm swooped down, enveloped him and the haycock on which he was
lying, and the other haycocks, and the wagon-loads, and the whole
meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing to the
measures of this wild merry song with its shouts and whistles and
clapping. Levin felt envious of this health and mirthfulness; he longed
to take part in the expression of this joy of life. But he could do
nothing, and had to lie and look on and listen. When the peasants, with
their singing, had vanished out of sight and hearing, a weary feeling
of despondency at his own isolation, his physical inactivity, his
alienation from this world, came over Levin.

Some of the very peasants who had been most active in wrangling with
him over the hay, some whom he had treated with contumely, and who had
tried to cheat him, those very peasants had greeted him good-humoredly,
and evidently had not, were incapable of having any feeling of rancor
against him, any regret, any recollection even of having tried to
deceive him. All that was drowned in a sea of merry common labor. God
gave the day, God gave the strength. And the day and the strength were
consecrated to labor, and that labor was its own reward. For whom the
labor? What would be its fruits? These were idle considerations—beside
the point.

Often Levin had admired this life, often he had a sense of envy of the
men who led this life; but today for the first time, especially under
the influence of what he had seen in the attitude of Ivan Parmenov to
his young wife, the idea presented itself definitely to his mind that
it was in his power to exchange the dreary, artificial, idle, and
individualistic life he was leading for this laborious, pure, and
socially delightful life.

The old man who had been sitting beside him had long ago gone home; the
people had all separated. Those who lived near had gone home, while
those who came from far were gathered into a group for supper, and to
spend the night in the meadow. Levin, unobserved by the peasants, still
lay on the haycock, and still looked on and listened and mused. The
peasants who remained for the night in the meadow scarcely slept all
the short summer night. At first there was the sound of merry talk and
laughing all together over the supper, then singing again and laughter.

All the long day of toil had left no trace in them but lightness of
heart. Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard
but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh, and
the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before the
morning. Rousing himself, Levin got up from the haycock, and looking at
the stars, he saw that the night was over.

“Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?” he said to
himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings he
had passed through in that brief night. All the thoughts and feelings
he had passed through fell into three separate trains of thought. One
was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education.
This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was easy and simple.
Another series of thoughts and mental images related to the life he
longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life
he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content,
the peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably
conscious. But a third series of ideas turned upon the question how to
effect this transition from the old life to the new. And there nothing
took clear shape for him. “Have a wife? Have work and the necessity of
work? Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land? Become a member of a peasant
community? Marry a peasant girl? How am I to set about it?” he asked
himself again, and could not find an answer. “I haven’t slept all
night, though, and I can’t think it out clearly,” he said to himself.
“I’ll work it out later. One thing’s certain, this night has decided my
fate. All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing,”
he told himself. “It’s all ever so much simpler and better....”

“How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange, as it were,
mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right over his
head in the middle of the sky. “How exquisite it all is in this
exquisite night! And when was there time for that cloud-shell to form?
Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it—only two
white streaks. Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!”

He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad towards the
village. A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and sullen. The
gloomy moment had come that usually precedes the dawn, the full triumph
of light over darkness.

Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the ground.
“What’s that? Someone coming,” he thought, catching the tinkle of
bells, and lifting his head. Forty paces from him a carriage with four
horses harnessed abreast was driving towards him along the grassy road
on which he was walking. The shaft-horses were tilted against the
shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver sitting on the box held
the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels ran on the smooth part of
the road.

This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be, he
gazed absently at the coach.

In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the window,
evidently only just awake, sat a young girl holding in both hands the
ribbons of a white cap. With a face full of light and thought, full of
a subtle, complex inner life, that was remote from Levin, she was
gazing beyond him at the glow of the sunrise.

At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the truthful
eyes glanced at him. She recognized him, and her face lighted up with
wondering delight.

He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the
world. There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate
for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was
Kitty. He understood that she was driving to Ergushovo from the railway
station. And everything that had been stirring Levin during that
sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all vanished at once.
He recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a peasant girl. There
only, in the carriage that had crossed over to the other side of the
road, and was rapidly disappearing, there only could he find the
solution of the riddle of his life, which had weighed so agonizingly
upon him of late.

She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage-springs was no
longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The barking of dogs
showed the carriage had reached the village, and all that was left was
the empty fields all round, the village in front, and he himself
isolated and apart from it all, wandering lonely along the deserted
highroad.

He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he had
been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and feelings of
that night. There was nothing in the sky in the least like a shell.
There, in the remote heights above, a mysterious change had been
accomplished. There was no trace of shell, and there was stretched over
fully half the sky an even cover of tiny and ever tinier cloudlets. The
sky had grown blue and bright; and with the same softness, but with the
same remoteness, it met his questioning gaze.

“No,” he said to himself, “however good that life of simplicity and
toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love her.”