第275章

Levin had been five days in Kashin, visiting the assembly each day, and busily engaged about his sister's business, which still dragged on. The district marshals of nobility were all occupied with the elections, and it was impossible to get the simplest thing done that depended upon the court of wardship. The other matter, the receipt of the sums due, was also met by difficulties. After long negotiations over the lifting of the prohibition, the money was at last ready to be paid; but the notary, a most obliging person, could not hand over the order, because it must have the signature of the president, and the president, though he had not given over his duties to a deputy, was at the elections. All these worrying negotiations, this endless going from place to place, and talking with pleasant and excellent people, who quite saw the unpleasantness of the petitioner's position, but were powerless to assist him - all these efforts that yielded no result, led to a feeling of misery in Levin akin to the mortifying helplessness one experiences in dreams, when one tries to use physical force. He felt this frequently as he talked to his exceedingly good-natured solicitor.

This solicitor did, it seemed, everything possible, and strained every nerve to get him out of his difficulties. `I tell you what you might try,'

he said more than once; `go to so-and-so and so-and-so,' and the solicitor drew up a regular plan for getting round the fatal point that hindered everything. But he would add immediately, `It'll mean some delay, anyway, but you might try it.' And Levin did try, and did go. Everyone was kind and civil, but the point evaded seemed to crop up again in the end, and again to bar the way. What was particularly trying, was that Levin could not make out with whom he was struggling, to whose interest it was that his business should not be done. That no one seemed to know; the solicitor certainly did not know. If Levin could have understood why, just as he saw why one can only approach the booking office of a railway station in single file, it would not have been so vexatious and tiresome to him. But in the case of the hindrances that confronted him in his business, no one could explain why they existed.

But Levin had changed a good deal since his marriage; he was patient, and if he could not see why it was all arranged like this, he told himself that he could not judge without knowing all about it, and that most likely it must be so, and he tried not to resent it.

In attending the elections, too, and taking part in them, he tried now not to judge, not to fall foul of them, but to comprehend as fully as he could the question which was so earnestly and ardently absorbing honest and excellent men whom he respected. Since his marriage there had been revealed to Levin so many new and serious aspects of life which had previously, through his frivolous attitude to them, seemed of no importance, that in the question of the elections, too, he assumed and tried to find some serious significance.

Sergei Ivanovich explained to him the meaning and object of the proposed radical change at the elections. The marshal of the province in whose hands the law had placed the control of so many important public functions - the guardianship of wards (the very department which was giving Levin so much trouble just now), the disposal of large sums subscribed by the nobility of the province, the high schools, for girls, for boys, and military, and primary instruction on the new statute and finally, the Zemstvo - the marshal of the province, Snetkov, was a nobleman of the old school, dissipating an immense fortune, a goodhearted man, honest after his own fashion, but utterly without any comprehension of the needs of modern days. He always took, in every question, the side of the nobility;he was positively antagonistic to the spread of primary education, and he succeeded in giving a purely party character to the Zemstvo which ought by rights to be of such an immense importance. What was needed was to put in his place a fresh, capable, perfectly modern man, of contemporary ideas, and to frame their policy so as to derive, from the rights conferred upon the nobles (not as the nobility, but as an element of the Zemstvo), all the benefits of self-government that could possibly be derived from them.

In the wealthy Kashinsky province, which always took the lead of other provinces in everything, there was now such a preponderance of forces that this policy, once carried through properly there, might serve as a model for other provinces - for all Russia. And hence the whole question was of the greatest importance. It was proposed to elect as marshal in place of Snetkov either Sviiazhsky, or, better still, Neviedovsky, a former university professor, a man of remarkable intelligence, and a great friend of Sergei Ivanovich.

The meeting was opened by the governor, who made a speech to the nobles, urging them to elect the public functionaries, not from regard for persons, but for the service and welfare of the native country, and hoping that the honorable nobility of the Kashinsky province would, as at all former elections, hold their duty as sacred, and vindicate the exalted confidence of the Monarch.

When he had finished his speech, the governor walked out of the hall, and the noblemen noisily and eagerly - some even enthusiastically - followed him and thronged round him while he put on his fur coat and conversed amicably with the marshal of the province. Levin, anxious to see into everything and not miss anything, also stood there in the crowd, and heard the governor say: `Please, tell Marya Ivanovna my wife is very sorry she could not visit the charity school.' And thereupon the nobles in high good humor sorted out their fur coats and all drove off to the cathedral.