Levin looked more attentively at Ivan Parmenov and his wife. They were loading a haystack not far from him. Ivan Parmenov stood on the cart, receiving, spreading and stamping down the enormous loads of hay that his young beauty of a wife deftly heaved up to him, first in armfuls and then on the fork. The young woman worked easily, cheerfully and skilfully. The thick, packed-down hay would not go right on the fork. She first loosened it up, stuck the fork in, then leaned the whole weight of her body on it with a supple and quick movement and, straightening up at once, curving her back tightly girded with a red sash, her full breasts showing under the white smock, deftly shifted her grip on the fork and heaved the load high up on to the cart. Ivan, obviously trying to spare her every moment of extra work, hastily picked up the load pitched to him in his wide-open arms and spread it on the cart. After pitching him the last of the hay on a rake, the woman shook off the hay dust that had got on her neck, straightened the red kerchief that had gone askew on her white, untanned forehead, and went under the cart to tie down the load. Ivan showed her how to loop it under the axle-tree and burst into loud laughter at something she said. Strong, young, recently awakened love showed in the expression on both their faces.
XII
The load was tied down. Ivan jumped off and led the fine, well-fed horse by the bridle. The woman threw the rake up on to the load and went with brisk steps, swinging her arms, to join the women gathered in a circle. Ivan drove out to the road and joined the line of other carts. The women, with rakes on their shoulders, bright colours flashing, chattering in ringing, merry voices, walked behind the carts. One coarse, wild female voice struck up a song and sang till the refrain, and then, all at once, with one accord, the same song was taken up from the beginning by some fifty different coarse, high, healthy voices.
The singing women approached Levin, and it seemed to him that a thundercloud of merriment was coming upon him. The cloud came over him and enveloped him; and the haystack on which he lay, and all the other haystacks and carts, and the whole meadow with the distant fields all started moving and heaving to the rhythm of this wild, rollicking song with its shouts, whistles and whoops. Levin was envious of this healthy merriment; he would have liked to take part in expressing this joy of life. But he could do nothing and had to lie there and look and listen. When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him.
Some of those same muzhiks who had argued most of all with him over the hay, whom he had offended or who had wanted to cheat him, those same muzhiks greeted him cheerfully and obviously did not and could not have any malice towards him, nor any repentance or even memory of having wanted to cheat him. It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labour. God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward. And whom was this labour for? What would its fruits be? These considerations were irrelevant and insignificant.
Levin had often admired this life, had often experienced a feeling of envy for the people who lived this life, but that day for the first time, especially under the impression of what he had seen in the relations of Ivan Parmenov and his young wife, the thought came clearly to Levin that it was up to him to change that so burdensome, idle, artificial and individual life he lived into this laborious, pure and common, lovely life.
The old man who had been sitting with him had long since gone home; the peasants had all dispersed. Those who lived near by had gone home, those from far away had gathered to have supper and spend the night in the meadow. Levin, unnoticed by the peasants, went on lying on the haystack, watching, listening and thinking. The peasants who were staying overnight in the meadow spent almost the whole short summer night without sleeping. First there was general, merry talk and loud laughter over supper, then again songs and laughter.
The long, laborious day had left no other trace in them than merriment. Before dawn everything quieted down. Only the night sounds of the never silent frogs in the swamp and the horses snorting in the morning mist rising over the meadow could be heard. Coming to his senses, Levin got down off the haystack, looked at the stars and realized that night was over.
