Chapter 26

Levin still hesitated, but Kitty, who saw that he was bored in Moscow, and urged him to go, on her own authority ordered him the proper nobleman's uniform, costing eighty roubles. And this eighty roubles paid for the uniform was the chief reason that finally decided Levin to go. He went to Kashin.

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