Chapter 7
IN THE EARLY DAYS after his return from Moscow, whenever Levin shuddered and grew red, remembering the disgrace of his rejection, he said to himself: This was just how I used to shudder and blush, thinking myself utterly lost, when I was plucked in physics and did not get my remove; and how I thought myself utterly ruined after I built that first surface mine and it collapsed. And yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much. It will be the same thing too with this trouble. Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.
But three months had passed and he had not left off minding about it; and it was as painful for him to think of it as it had been those first days. He could not be at peace because after dreaming so long of family life, and feeling himself so ripe for it, he was still not married, and was further than ever from marriage.
Meanwhile spring came on, beautiful and kindly, without the delays and treacheries of spring—one of those rare springs in which plants, beasts, and man rejoice alike. This lovely spring roused Levin still more, and strengthened him in his resolution of renouncing all his past and building up his lonely life firmly and independently.
One day, as he rode up to the house in this happy frame of mind, Levin heard the bell ring at the side of the principal entrance of the house.
’Yes, that’s someone from the station,” he said to Socrates. “Just the time to be here from the Moscow Grav. . . . Who could it be? What if it’s brother Nikolai? He did say: ‘Maybe I’ll go to the waters, or maybe I’ll come down to you.’”
He felt dismayed and vexed for the first minute, that his brother Nikolai’s presence should come to disturb his happy mood of spring. But he felt ashamed of the feeling, and at once he opened, as it were, the arms of his soul, and with a softened feeling of joy and expectation, now he hoped with all his heart that it was his brother. He pricked up his horse, and riding out from behind the acacias he saw a hired three-horse sledge from the Grav station, and a gentleman in a fur coat.
“Ah,” cried Levin joyfully, flinging up both his hands. “Here’s a delightful visitor! Ah, how glad I am to see you!” he shouted, recognizing Stepan Arkadyich, with Small Stiva balanced like a fat, happy child between his legs.
“Now you shall find out for certain whether she’s married, or when she’s going to be married,” Socrates muttered to him with a cautious tone, anxious to protect his master’s feelings. But on that delicious spring day Levin felt that the thought of Kitty did not hurt him at all.
“Well, you didn’t expect me, eh?” said Stepan Arkadyich, getting out of the sledge, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his cheek, and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits. “I’ve come to see you in the first place,” he said, embracing and kissing him, while Socrates plucked an air-blasting end-effector to clean the mud from Small Stiva’s frontal display. “To participate in the Hunt-and-be-Hunted second, and to sell that little patch of soil at Ergushovo third.”
Stepan Arkadyich told him many interesting pieces of news, but not one word in reference to Kitty and the Shcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin was grateful to him for his delicacy and was very glad of his visitor. As always happened with him during his solitude, a mass of ideas and feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could not communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon Stepan Arkadyich his poetic joy in the spring, and his failures and plans for the seasonal extraction. Stepan Arkadyich, always charming, understanding everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming on this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as it were, and a new tone of respect that flattered him.
They determined that they would Hunt-and-be-Hunted the very next day, and Levin ordered the Huntbears to be warmed and baited overnight.