Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 12
Chapter 12
THE 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 goodhumoredly, 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
259