第118章

The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it its content, its peace, and its dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably conscious. But a third series of ideas turned upon the question of how to effect this transition from the old life to the new. And there nothing took clear shape for him. `Awife. 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 Ilooked 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 toward 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 and four with the luggage on its top was driving toward him along the grassy highroad 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 from the window 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 all 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 comprehended that she was driving to Ergushovo from the railway station.

And everything that had been stirring Levin during this 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 this 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 a 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.'

[Next Chapter] [Table of Contents] TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 3, Chapter 13[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 13 None but those who were most intimate with Alexei Alexandrovich knew that, while on the surface the coldest and most rational of men, he had one weakness quite opposed to the general trend of his character. Alexei Alexandrovich could not hear or see a child or woman crying without being moved. The sight of tears threw him into a state of nervous agitation, and he utterly lost all power of reflection. The head clerk of his board and the secretary were aware of this, and used to warn women who came with petitions on no account to give way to tears, if they did not want to ruin their chances.

`He will get angry, and will not listen to you,' they used to say. And, as a fact, in such cases the emotional disturbance set up in Alexei Alexandrovich by the sight of tears found expression in hasty anger. `I can do nothing.

Kindly leave the room!' he would usually shout in such cases.

When, returning from the races, Anna had informed him of her relations with Vronsky, and immediately afterward had burst into tears, hiding her face in her hands, Alexei Alexandrovich, for all the fury aroused in him against her, was aware at the same time of a rush of that emotional disturbance always produced in him by tears. Conscious of it, and conscious that any expression of his feelings at that minute would be out of keeping with the situation, he tried to suppress every manifestation of life in himself, and so neither stirred nor looked at her. This was what had caused that strange expression of deathlike rigidity in his face which had so impressed Anna.