To that was added the presence some twenty miles away of Kitty Shcherbatsky, whom he wanted to see and could not. Darya Alexandrovna Oblonsky, when he had visited her, had invited him to come: to come in order to renew his proposal to her sister, who, as she let him feel, would now accept him. Levin himself, when he saw Kitty Shcherbatsky, realized that he had never ceased to love her; but he could not go to the Oblonskys knowing that she was there. The fact that he had proposed and she had refused him put an insuperable obstacle between them. ‘I can’t ask her to be my wife only because she couldn’t be the wife of the one she wanted,’ he said to himself. The thought of it turned him cold and hostile towards her. ‘I’d be unable to speak to her without a feeling of reproach, to look at her without anger, and she’ll hate me still more, as she ought to. And then, too, how can I go to them now, after what Darya Alexandrovna told me? How can I not show that I know what she told me? And I’ll come with magnanimity - to forgive, to show mercy to her. Me in the role of a man forgiving her and deigning to offer her his love! ... Why did Darya Alexandrovna say that? I might have seen her accidentally, and then everything would have happened by itself, but now it’s impossible, impossible!’
Darya Alexandrovna sent him a note, asking him for a side-saddle for Kitty. ‘I’ve been told you have a side-saddle,’ she wrote to him. ‘I hope you’ll bring it yourself.’
That he simply could not bear. How could an intelligent, delicate woman so humiliate her sister! He wrote ten notes, tore them all up, and sent the saddle without any reply. To write that he would come was impossible, because he could not come; to write that he could not come because something prevented him or he was leaving, was still worse. He sent the saddle without a reply and, with the awareness of doing something shameful, handed over his detested farming to the steward the very next day and left for a far-off district to visit his friend Sviyazhsky, who had excellent snipe marshes near by and who had written recently asking him to fulfil his long-standing intention of visiting him. The snipe marshes in the Surov district had long tempted Levin, but he kept putting off the trip on account of farming matters. Now, though, he was glad to get away both from the Shcherbatskys’ neighbourhood and, above all, from farming, precisely in order to hunt, which in all troubles served him as the best consolation.
XXV
There was no railway or post road to the Surov district, and Levin drove there with his own horses in the tarantass.
Half-way there he stopped for feeding at a wealthy muzhik’s. A fresh, bald old man with a broad red beard, grey at the cheeks, opened the gates, pressing himself to the post to let the troika pass. Directing the coachman to a place under a shed in the big, clean and tidy new yard with fire-hardened wooden ploughs in it, the old man invited Levin in. A cleanly dressed young woman, galoshes on her bare feet, was bending over, wiping the floor in the new front hall. Frightened of the dog that came running in with Levin, she cried out, but immediately laughed at her fright, learning that the dog would not touch her. Pointing Levin to the inner door with her bared arm, she bent again, hiding her handsome face, and went on washing.
‘The samovar, maybe?’ she asked.
‘Yes, please.’
The room was big, with a Dutch stove and a partition. Under the icons stood a table with painted decorations, a bench and two chairs. By the entrance was a small cupboard. The shutters were closed, the flies were few, and it was so clean that Levin took care that Laska, who had been running in the road and bathing in puddles, should not dirty the floor, pointing her to a place in the corner by the door. After looking round the room, Levin went out to the back yard. The comely young woman in galoshes, empty buckets swinging on the yoke, ran ahead of him to fetch water from the well.
‘Look lively!’ the old man shouted merrily after her and came up to Levin. ‘Well, sir, are you on your way to see Nikolai Ivanovich Sviyazhsky ? He stops here, too,’ he began garrulously, leaning on the porch rail.
In the middle of the old man’s story of his acquaintance with Sviyazhsky, the gates creaked again and the field workers drove into the yard with ploughs and harrows. The horses hitched to the ploughs and harrows were well fed and large. Two of the workers were apparently family members, young men in cotton shirts and peaked caps; the other two were hired men in hempen shirts - one an old man and the other a young lad. Leaving the porch, the old man went to the horses and began to unhitch them.
‘What have you been ploughing?’ asked Levin.
‘Earthing up the potatoes. We’ve also got a bit of land. You, Fedot, don’t turn the gelding loose, put him to the trough, we’ll hitch up another one.’
