Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

Chapter I

PRINCE NEKHLYÚDOV was nineteen years old when, at the end of his Third Course at the University, he came to his estate for the summer vacation and spent the whole summer there by himself. That autumn, in his unformed boyish hand, he wrote the following letter to his aunt, Countess Belorétski, whom he considered to be his best friend and the cleverest woman in the world. It was in French, and ran as follows:

‘My dear Aunt,

‘I have made a resolution which will affect my destiny for life. I am leaving the university to devote myself to life on my estate, because I feel that I was born for it. For heaven’s sake, dear Aunt, don’t laugh at me. You will say that I am young; perhaps I really am still a child, but that does not prevent me from feeling my vocation – from wishing to do good, and from loving goodness.

‘As I wrote you before, I found affairs here in indescribable disorder. Wishing to put them in order and understand them, I discovered that the chief evil lies in the very pitiable and impoverished condition of the peasants, and that this is an evil that can be remedied only by work and patience. If you could only see two of my peasants, David and Iván, and the way they and their families live, I am sure that the mere sight of those two unfortunates would do more to convince you than anything I can say to explain my intention. Is it not my sacred and direct duty to care for the welfare of these seven hundred men for whom I must be responsible to God? Would it not be a sin, for the sake of pleasure or ambition, to abandon them to the caprice of harsh elders and stewards? And why should I seek other opportunities of being useful and doing good, when such a noble, brilliant, and immediate duty lies at hand? I feel that I am capable of being a good landlord; and to be so, as I understand the word, one needs neither university diplomas nor official rank, such as you desire for me. Dear Aunt, don’t make ambitious plans for me; accustom yourself to the thought that I have chosen quite a special path, but a good one which I feel will yield me happiness. I have thought much, very much, about my future duties, and have written down rules of conduct for myself; and if God only grants me life and strength, I shall succeed in my undertaking.

‘Don’t show my brother Vásya this letter: I am afraid of his ridicule. He is accustomed to domineer over me and I am accustomed to submit to him. Ványa even if he does not approve of my intentions will at least understand them.’

The countess answered with the following letter, which is here also translated from the French:

‘Your letter, my dear Dmítri, proved nothing to me except that you have an admirable heart, of which I was always convinced. But, my dear boy, our good qualities do us more harm in life than our bad ones. I must not tell you that you are doing a foolish thing and that your action grieves me; I will try to influence you only by persuasion. Let us consider the matter, my dear. You say you feel a vocation for country life, that you wish to make your serfs happy, and hope to be a good proprietor. I must tell you: first, that we feel our vocation only after we have once mistaken it: secondly, that it is easier to make oneself happy than others, and thirdly, that to be a good landlord one must be a cold and austere man, which you will scarcely be, though you may try to make believe that you are.

‘You think your arguments irrefutable and even accept them as rules for the conduct of life, but at my age, my dear, one does not believe in arguments and rules but only in experience; and experience tells me that your plans are childish. I am getting on for fifty and have known many fine men, but have never heard of a young man of good family and ability burying himself in the country in order to do good. You always wished to appear original, but your originality is really nothing but excessive self-esteem. Believe me, my dear, it is better to choose the trodden paths. They lead more easily to success, and success, even if you don’t want it for yourself, is indispensable to enable you to do the good you desire.

‘The poverty of some peasants is an unavoidable evil or one which can be remedied without forgetting all your obligations to society, to your relations, and to yourself. With your intelligence, your heart, and your love of goodness, there is no career in which you would not obtain success; but choose at any rate one worthy of you and which will bring you honour.

‘I believe in your sincerity when you say you are free from ambition, but you are deceiving yourself. At your age and with your capacity ambition is a virtue, though it becomes a defect and a vulgarity when a man is no longer able to satisfy that passion, and you will experience this if you do not change your intention.

‘Goodbye, dear Dmítri. It seems to me that I love you more than ever for your absurd, but noble and magnanimous plan. Do as you think best, but I confess that I cannot agree with you.’

Having received this letter the young man considered it for a long time, and at last, having come to the conclusion that even the cleverest woman may make mistakes, sent in his petition for discharge from the university, and settled down on his estate.

Chapter II

THE young landowner, as he had written to his aunt, had drawn up rules for his estate management and for his life in general, and had allotted his hours, days, and months to different occupations. Sundays were fixed for receiving petitioners – the domestic and other serfs – for visiting the allotments of the poorest peasants and giving them assistance with the assent of the village Commune (the mir) which met each Sunday evening and decided how much help should be distributed and to whom.

More than a year had passed in such activities and the young man was no longer quite a novice either in practical or theoretical knowledge of estate management.

It was a bright Sunday in June when Nekhlyúdov, having drunk his coffee and glanced through a chapter of Maison Rustique, put a note-book and a packet of ruble notes in the pocket of his light overcoat, and started out from the large wooden house with its colonnades and verandas, in which he occupied one small room downstairs, and went along the unswept weed-grown paths of the old English garden, towards the village which lay along both sides of the high road. Nekhlyúdov was a tall well-knit young man, with a mass of thick curly brown hair, a bright sparkle in his dark eyes, a fresh complexion, and rosy lips above which the first down of young manhood was just appearing. Youthful strength, energy, and good-natured self-satisfaction were apparent in his gait and every movement. The peasants, dressed in their Sunday best, were returning from church in motley groups – old men, maidens, children, and women with babies in their arms – and dispersing into their homes, bowing low to the master and stepping out of his way. After going some way along the street Nekhlyúdov stopped, took out his note-book, and looked at the last page, on which in his unformed hand he had written the names of several peasants, with comments: ‘Iván Chúris asks for props’, he read, and went up to the gate of the second hut on his right.

The Chúrises’ domicile consisted of a half-rotten log building, mouldy at the corners, sloping to one side, and so sunk in the ground that a small, broken sash window, with its shutter half torn off, and a still smaller casement window stopped up with tow, were only just above the manure heap. Attached to the principal hut were a boarded passage with a low door and a rotten threshold, another small building, still older, and even lower than the passage, a gate, and a wattled shed. All this had once been covered by one irregular roof, but the thick, black, rotting thatch now hung only over the eaves, so that in places the rafters and laths were visible. In the front of the yard was a well with dilapidated sides and the remains of a post and pulley, and a dirty cattle-trampled puddle in which ducks were splashing. Near the well stood two ancient willows that were split and had scanty pale-green shoots. Under one of these willows, which witnessed to the fact that there had been a time when someone had cared to beautify the place, sat a fair-haired little girl, about eight years old, making a two-year-old baby girl crawl round her. A puppy playing beside them, seeing Nekhlyúdov, rushed headlong under the gate and burst into frightened, quivering barking.

‘Is Iván at home?’ asked Nekhlyúdov.

The elder girl seemed petrified by the question and opened her eyes wider and wider without answering. The younger one opened her mouth and prepared to cry. A little, old-looking woman in a tattered check gown with an old red girdle tied low down, looked out from behind the door, but did not answer either. Nekhlyúdov went up to the door and repeated his question.

‘He is, master,’ said the old woman in a tremulous voice, bowing low and growing more and more frightened and agitated.

When Nekhlyúdov, having greeted her, passed through the passage into the narrow yard, the old woman went up to the door and, resting her chin on her hand and not taking her eyes off the master, began slowly to shake her head.

The yard was a wretched place. Here and there lay old blackened manure left after carting, and on this lay in disorder a rotting block, a pitchfork, and two harrows. The penthouse round the yard had almost no thatch left on the roof, and one side had fallen in so that the rafters no longer lay on the fork-posts but on the manure. On the other side stood a wooden plough, a cart lacking a wheel, and a heap of empty, useless beehives piled one on another. Chúris, with the edge and head of his axe, was getting the wattle wall clear from the roof which had crushed it. Iván Chúris was a peasant of about fifty, below the average height. His tanned, oval face, surrounded by a dark brown beard streaked with grey and thick hair of the same colour, was handsome and expressive. His dark blue half-closed eyes were intelligent and carelessly good-natured, and when he smiled his small regular mouth, sharply defined under his scanty brown moustache, expressed calm self-confidence and a certain ironical indifference to his surroundings. The coarseness of his skin, his deep wrinkles, the sharply marked sinews of his neck, face, and arms, the unnatural stoop of his shoulders, and his crooked bandy legs, showed that his life had been spent in labour beyond his strength. He wore thick white hempen trousers patched with blue on the knees, a dirty shirt of the same material torn at the back and arms, and a low girdle of tape, from which hung a brass key.

‘Good-day,’ said Nekhlyúdov as he entered the yard.

Chúris looked round and then continued his work, and only when he had cleared the wattle from under the roof by an energetic effort did he stick his axe into a log, adjust his girdle, and come out into the middle of the yard.

‘A pleasant holiday, your honour!’ he said, bowing low and then shaking back his hair.

‘Thank you, friend. You see I’ve come to look at your allotment,’ said Nekhlyúdov, looking at the peasant’s garb with boyish friendliness and timidity. ‘Let me see why you want those props you asked me for at the meeting of the Commune.’

‘The props? Why, you know what props are for, your honour! I’d like to prop things up a bit: there, please see for yourself. Only the other day this corner fell in – but thank God the cattle were not inside at the time. Things hardly hold together,’ said Chúris, looking contemptuously at his unthatched, crooked, and dilapidated sheds. ‘The rafters, gable-ends, and cross-pieces now, if you only touch them you won’t find a single piece of timber that’s any use. And where’s a man to get timber from nowadays – you know yourself.’

‘Then what use would five props be to you, when one shed has fallen in and the others will soon do so? You don’t need props, but new rafters, cross-pieces, and uprights,’ said the master, evidently parading his knowledge of the subject.

Chúris was silent.

‘So what you need is timber and not props. You should have said so.’

‘Of course I want timber, but there’s nowhere to get it. It won’t do to keep going to the master’s house! If the likes of us were allowed to get into the habit of coming to your honour’s house for everything we need, what sort of serfs should we be? But if you will be merciful concerning the oak posts that are lying unused on your threshing-floor,’ he added, bowing and shifting from foot to foot, ‘I might be able to change some of the pieces, cut away others, and fix things up somehow with the old stuff.’

‘With the old stuff? Don’t you yourself say that it’s all old and rotten? To-day this corner falls in, to-morrow that, the day after a third: so if you are to do anything you must rebuild it altogether that the work may not be wasted. Tell me, do you think your place could stand through this winter or not?’

‘Who can tell?’

‘But what do you think? Will it fall in or not?’

Chúris considered.

‘It will all fall in,’ he said suddenly.

‘There, you see you should have said at the meeting that you need to rebuild the whole homestead, and not only put in a few props. You know I should be glad to help you …’

‘We’re very grateful for your favour,’ Chúris replied suspiciously, and without looking at the master. ‘If you would only favour me with four beams and some props I could perhaps fix things up myself; and the rotten wood I’d take out and use for supports in the hut.’

‘Then is your hut in a bad state too?’

‘My old woman and I are expecting from day to day that it will crush someone,’ Chúris remarked indifferently. ‘The other day she did get crushed by a strut from the ceiling.’

‘Crushed? What do you mean?’

‘Why, your honour, it hit her on the back so that she lay more dead than alive till night-time.’

‘Well, and has she recovered?’

‘Yes, she’s recovered, but she’s always ailing. It’s true that she’s been sickly since her birth.’

‘What, are you ill?’ Nekhlyúdov asked the woman who was still standing in the doorway and had begun groaning as soon as her husband mentioned her.

‘Just here it never leaves me,’ she said, pointing to her dirty emaciated chest.

‘Again!’ said Nekhlyúdov, shrugging his shoulders with vexation. ‘Why don’t you go to the dispensary when you’re ill? That’s what the dispensary is for. Haven’t you been told of it?’

‘We have, master, but I’ve no time. There’s the obligatory work on the estate, our own work, and the children, and I’m all alone. We are lone people.’

Chapter III

NEKHLYÚDOV went into the hut. The uneven smoke-begrimed walls of one end of the room had all sorts of rags and clothing hanging up on them, and the best corner was literally covered with reddish cockroaches that had collected round the icon and the benches. In the middle of the black, smelly, fourteen-foot-square hovel, there was a large crack in the ceiling, which though propped up in two places was bulging so that it threatened to collapse at any moment.

‘Yes, the hut is very bad,’ said Nekhlyúdov, looking straight at Chúris, who did not seem inclined to begin speaking about this state of things.

‘It will crush us and will crush the children,’ muttered the woman in a tearful voice, leaning against the brick oven under the bunks.

‘Don’t you talk,’ Chúris said sternly, and with a subtle smile showing slightly under his moustache he turned to the master. ‘I can’t think what could be done to it, your honour – to the hut. I have put up props and boards, but nothing can be done.’

‘How are we to live through the winter here? Oh, oh, oh!’ said the woman.

‘If we put up some more props and new struts,’ her husband interrupted her with a quiet business-like expression, ‘and changed one of the rafters, we might somehow get through the winter. We might get along – only the props will crowd the hut, that’s all. But if we touch it, there won’t be a sound bit left. It’s only as long as it’s not touched that it holds together,’ he concluded, evidently well pleased to have realized that fact.

Nekhlyúdov was vexed and grieved that Chúris had let himself come to such a pass and had not applied to him sooner, for ever since his arrival he had never refused help to a peasant, and only tried to get them to come straight to him with their troubles. He even felt a sort of animosity against Chúris, and angrily shrugged his shoulders and frowned; but the sight of the wretchedness around him and Chúris’s quiet, self-satisfied appearance in the midst of it, changed his vexation into a melancholy feeling of hopelessness.

‘Now why didn’t you tell me sooner, Iván?’ he said reproachfully, sitting down on the dirty crooked bench.

‘I daren’t, your honour,’ Chúris replied with the same barely perceptible smile, shifting from one dirty bare foot to the other on the uneven earth floor, but he said this so boldly and calmly that it was hard to believe that he had not dared to apply to his master.

‘We are only peasants: how can we dare …’ began the woman with a sob.

‘Hold your jabber,’ Chúris addressed her again.

‘It’s impossible for you to live in this hut. It’s nonsense!’ said Nekhlyúdov after a pause. ‘Now this is what we’ll do, friend …’

‘Yes, sir,’ Chúris replied.

‘You’ve seen those brick cottages with hollow walls that I have been building in the new village?’

‘Of course I have,’ answered Chúris, showing his still sound and white teeth in a smile. ‘We were quite surprised at the way they were laid. Tricky cottages! The children were laughing and asked if they were going to be store-houses, and the walls filled in to keep the rats out.… Grand cottages!’ he finished, shaking his head with a look of ironical perplexity. ‘Just like jails!’

‘Yes, they are fine cottages, warm and dry, and not so likely to catch on fire,’ said the master with a frown on his young face, evidently annoyed by the peasant’s irony.

‘No gainsaying, your honour – grand cottages!’

‘Well then, one of them is quite ready. It is twenty-three feet square, with a passage and a larder, and is quite ready. I might let you have it at cost price and you could pay me when you can,’ said the master with a self-satisfied smile which he could not control at the thought of his benevolence. ‘You can pull down this old one and use it to build a granary, and we will move the yard buildings too. There is good water there. I will allot you fresh land for your vegetable plots and you will have arable land quite close. You’ll soon live well. Now, don’t you like it?’ he added, noticing that as soon as he spoke of settling somewhere else, Chúris stood quite motionless and looked at the ground no longer smiling.

‘It’s as your honour pleases,’ he said without looking up.

The old woman came forward as if touched to the quick, and prepared to say something, but her husband forestalled her.

‘It’s as your honour pleases,’ he replied, firmly and yet submissively, looking up at his master and tossing back his hair, ‘but it won’t do for us to live in the new village.’

‘Why not?’

‘No, your honour. If you move us there – we’re in a bad way as it is, but there we should never be proper peasants. What sort of peasants should we be there? Why, a man couldn’t possibly live there … but just as you please.’

‘Why not?’

‘We should be quite ruined, your honour.’

‘But why couldn’t a man live there?’

‘What kind of life would it be? Just think. The place has never been lived in, the water not tested, and there’s no pasture. Our hemp plots here have been manured from olden times, but what is there there? There’s nothing! All bare! No wattles, no corn-kilns, no sheds – nothing at all. We shall be ruined, your honour, if you drive us there, we shall be ruined completely. The place is new, unknown …’ he repeated thoughtfully but shaking his head decisively.

Nekhlyúdov began to argue that the change would on the contrary be very advantageous for him, that wattles and sheds would be erected, that the water was good there, and so on; but Chúris’s dull silence confused him and he felt he was not saying the right things. Chúris did not reply, but when his master stopped, remarked with a slight smile that it would be better to house the old domestic serfs and Alëshka, the fool, in the new village, to watch over the grain there.

‘That would be fine,’ he remarked, and laughed calmly. ‘No, it’s a hopeless business, your honour!’

‘Well, what if the place is uninhabited?’ Nekhlyúdov insisted patiently. ‘This place was uninhabited once, but now people live here; and you will be the first to settle in the new village and will bring luck.… You must certainly settle there …’

‘Oh sir, your honour, how can they be compared?’ said Chúris with animation, as if afraid the master might take a definite decision. ‘Here we are in the Commune – it’s lively, and we’re accustomed to it. We have the road, and the pond here for the wife to wash the clothes and water the cattle, and our whole peasant establishment here from days of old: the threshing-floor and little vegetable plot, and these willows that my parents planted. My grandfather and father breathed their last here and if only I can end my days here, your honour, I don’t ask anything more. If you will have the goodness to let my hut be mended, we shall be very grateful for your kindness. If not, we’ll manage to live somehow in the old one to the end of our days. Let us pray for you all our lives,’ he continued, bowing low. ‘Don’t turn us from our nest, master.…’

While Chúris was speaking, louder and louder sobs came from the place under the bunks where his wife stood, and when her husband said ‘master’ she unexpectedly sprang forward and threw herself on her knees at Nekhlyúdov’s feet, weeping bitterly.

‘Don’t ruin us, benefactor! You are like father and mother to us! How could we move? We are old, lonely people. As God, so you …’ and she began her lamentations again.

Nekhlyúdov jumped up from the bench to raise the old woman, but she beat her head on the earthen floor in a kind of passionate despair and pushed away his hand.

‘What are you doing? Please get up. If you don’t wish to go, you needn’t. I won’t force you,’ he said, waving his arms and stepping towards the door.

When Nekhlyúdov had again sat down on the bench and the silence in the hut was only interrupted by the wailing of the woman who had retired under the bunk and stood there wiping her tears with the sleeve of her smock, he realized for the first time what the tumble-down hovel, the broken-down well with the muddy puddle, the rotting sheds and outhouse, and the broken willows which he saw through the crooked window, meant to Chúris and his wife, and he felt depressed, sad, and without knowing why, ashamed.

‘Why didn’t you tell the Commune last Sunday that you needed a cottage, Iván? I don’t know now how to help you. I told you all at the first meeting that I have settled on the estate to devote my life to you; and I was ready to deprive myself of everything to make you contented and happy, and I swear before God that I will keep my word,’ said the young proprietor, ignorant of the fact that outpourings of that kind are ill adapted to arouse faith in anyone, and least of all in a Russian, who likes not words but deeds, and dislikes the expression of feelings however fine.

But the simple-hearted young man was so pleased with the feeling he experienced that he could not help pouring it out.

Chúris bent his head to one side, and blinking slowly listened to his master with forced attention, as to one who had to be listened to though he was saying things that were not very nice, and did not at all concern ‘us’.

‘But I can’t give everybody all I am asked for. If I did not refuse some who ask me for timber, I should soon not have any left myself and should be unable to give to those who really need it. That is why I gave the “Crown wood” for the betterment of the peasants’ buildings, and handed it over completely to the Commune. That wood is now not mine, but belongs to you peasants. I can no longer dispose of it, but the Commune does what it sees fit with it. Come to the meeting to-night. I will tell them of your request, and if they resolve to give you wood for a new hut it will be all right, but I have no timber now. I wish to help you with all my heart, but if you don’t want to move, the matter is not in my hands but rests with the Commune. Do you understand me?’

‘We are very grateful for your kindness, your honour,’ answered Chúris, abashed. ‘If you will oblige us with the timber for the building, we will get straight that way.… Anyhow, what’s the Commune? Everybody knows.…’

‘No, you must come.’

‘Yes, I’ll come. Why not? But all the same I won’t beg of the Commune.’

Chapter IV

THE young landlord evidently wished to ask the couple something more; he did not rise from the bench but looked hesitatingly now at Chúris and now at the empty unheated brick oven.

‘Have you had dinner?’ he asked at last.

A mocking smile showed under Chúris’s moustache, as if it amused him that the master should ask such a silly question, and he did not answer.

‘What dinner, benefactor?’ said the woman with a deep sigh. ‘We’ve eaten bread – that’s our dinner. We had no time to get sorrel to-day, so I had nothing to make soup of, and what kvas there was I gave the children.’

‘To-day we have a strict fast, your honour,’ said Chúris, explaining his wife’s words. ‘Bread and onions – that’s our peasant food. Thank the Lord we have grain, by your honour’s kindness – for many of our peasants haven’t even that. The onions failed everywhere this year. Michael the gardener asked two kopéks¹ a bunch when we sent to him the other day, so there’s nowhere the likes of us can buy any. Since Easter we haven’t been to church. We can’t even afford a candle to put in front of St Nicholas’s icon.’

Nekhlyúdov had long known, not by hearsay or by trusting to other people’s words, but by personal observation, the extreme poverty in which his serfs lived; but that reality was in such contrast with his whole upbringing, his bent of mind, and the course of his life, that he involuntarily kept forgetting it, and whenever he was forcibly reminded of it, as now, he felt intolerably depressed and sad, as though he were tormented by a reminder of some crime committed and unatoned for.

‘Why are you so poor?’ he asked, involuntarily uttering his thought.

‘What else could we be but poor, master, your honour? What is our land like? As you know, it’s clay and mounds, and we must have angered God, for since the cholera year the crops won’t grow. And we have less meadow and less arable land now; some have been taken into the owner’s farm and some added to his fields. I am a lonely man and old.… I’d be glad to bestir myself but I haven’t the strength. My wife is ailing, and hardly a year passes without another girl baby, and they all have to be fed. Here am I working alone, and there are seven of us at home. I often sin before God, thinking that if He took some of them soon, things would be easier, and it would be better for them than suffering here.…’

‘O-oh!’ the woman sighed aloud, as if confirming her husband’s words.

‘Here’s all the help I have,’ Chúris continued, pointing to an unkempt flaxen-haired boy of seven with an enormous belly, who had just then come in timidly, making the door creak, and who now, holding onto his father’s shirt with both his little hands, stood gazing with astonished eyes from under his brow at the master. ‘All the help I have is this,’ Chúris continued in his deep voice, stroking the child’s flaxen hair with his rough hand. ‘How long shall I have to wait for him? The work is getting beyond me. It’s not so much my age as the rupture that is getting the best of me. In bad weather I’m ready to scream, and by rights I ought to be released from serf-labour on account of my age.² There’s Dútlov, Dëmkin, Zyábrev – all younger than me – who have long since stopped working on the land. But I have no one to work for me – that’s the trouble. We have to eat, so I am struggling on, your honour.’

‘I should really be glad to help you. But what can I do?’ said the young master, looking compassionately at the serf.

‘How can it be helped? Of course if a man holds land he must work for his master – we know that well enough. I’ll have somehow to wait for my lad to grow up. Only, if you’ll be so good, excuse him from school! The other day the clerk came round and said that your honour ordered him to go to school. Do let him off, your honour. What sense has he got? He’s too young to understand anything.’

‘Oh, no, friend. Say what you will, your boy can understand,’ replied Nekhlyúdov, ‘and it’s time for him to be learning. I’m saying it for your own good. Just think: when he grows up and is head of the house he’ll be able to read and write, and to read in church too – with God’s help everything will go right in the home,’ he added, trying to express himself so as to be understood, but yet blushing and hesitating without knowing why.

‘There’s no denying it, your honour, you don’t wish us any harm, but there’s no one to stay at home when my wife and I go to work on the owner’s land; of course he’s small, but still he’s useful to drive in the cattle and water the horses. Such as he is, still he’s a peasant,’ and Chúris smiled and took hold of the child’s nose with his thick fingers and blew it for him.

‘All the same, send him when you are at home and he has time. Do you hear? Be sure to send him.’

Chúris sighed deeply and gave no reply.

Chapter V

‘YES, and I wanted to ask why your manure has not been carted,’ continued Nekhlyúdov.

‘What manure have I got, sir, your honour? There’s nothing to cart. What live-stock have I got? I have a little mare and a foal. The heifer I sold to the inn-keeper as a calf last autumn. That’s all the live-stock I have.’

‘How is that? You haven’t enough cattle, yet you sold a heifer as a calf?’ the master asked with surprise.

‘But what could I feed it on?’

‘Haven’t you enough straw to feed a cow? Others have enough.’

‘Others have manured land, but mine is nothing but clay. I can’t do anything with it.’

‘Well then dress it, so that it should not be all clay, then it will yield grain and there’ll be something to feed the cattle on.’

‘But I have no cattle, so how can there be any manure?’

‘This is a strange vicious circle,’ thought Nekhlyúdov, but could not imagine how to advise the peasant.

‘And then again, your honour,’ Chúris went on, ‘it is not manure that makes the corn grow, but only God. Last year I got six ricks from an unmanured plot, but from the manured land we got almost nothing. It’s only God!’ he added with a sigh. ‘And then cattle do not thrive in our yard. This is the sixth year they have died. Last year one calf died, the other I sold, as we had nothing to live on, and the year before last a fine cow perished: she was driven home from the pasture all right, then suddenly she staggered and staggered and died. Just my bad luck!’

‘Well friend, so that you should not say you have no cattle because you have no fodder, and no fodder because you have no cattle, here’s something to buy a cow with,’ said Nekhlyúdov, blushing as he took some crumpled paper money out of his trouser pocket and began sorting it. ‘Buy yourself a cow, and I wish you luck; and you can have fodder from the threshing ground; I’ll give orders. Mind you have a cow by next Sunday. I’ll look in.’

Chúris stood so long smiling and shifting from foot to foot without stretching out his hand for the money, that Nekhlyúdov at last put it on the table, blushing still more.

‘We are greatly satisfied with your kindness,’ Chúris said with his usual rather sarcastic smile.

His wife stood under the bunks sighing heavily, and seemed to be saying a prayer.

The young master felt embarrassed; he hurriedly rose from his seat, went out into the passage, and called Chúris to follow. The sight of the man he was befriending was so pleasant that he did not wish to part from him at once.

‘I am glad to help you,’ he said, stopping by the well. ‘I can help you because I know you are not lazy. If you take pains I’ll help you, and with God’s aid you’ll get straight.’

‘It’s not a case of getting straight, your honour,’ said Chúris, his face suddenly assuming a serious and even stern expression as if quite dissatisfied that the master should suppose he could get straight. ‘In my father’s time I lived with my brothers and we did not know any want, but when he died and we broke up, everything went from bad to worse. It’s all from being alone!’

‘Why did you separate?’

‘All because of our wives, your honour. Your grandfather was not living then. In his time we should not have dared to, there used to be real order then. Like yourself he looked into everything, and we should not have dared to think of separating. Your grandfather did not like to let the peasants get into bad ways. But after him Andrew Ilých managed us. God forgive him! He’s left different memories behind – he was a drunken and unreliable man. We went to ask him once and again. “The women make life impossible,” we said, “allow us to separate.” Well he had us thrashed once and again, but in the end the women got their way and the families separated and lived apart. Of course everyone knows what a one-man home is! Besides there was no kind of order. Andrew Ilých ruled us as he pleased. “See that you have everything that’s needed,” – but how a peasant was to get it he didn’t ask. Then the poll-tax was increased, and more provisions were requisitioned and we had less land, and the crops began to fail. And when the time came for re-allotting the land, he took away from our manured land to add to the owner’s – the rascal – and did for us altogether. We might as well die! Your father – the kingdom of heaven be his! – was a kind master, but we rarely had sight of him; he always lived in Moscow, and of course we had to cart more produce there. Sometimes when a thaw set in and the roads were impassable and we had no fodder left we still had to cart! The master could not do without it. We dare not complain of that, but there was no order. Now that your honour lets every peasant come to you, we are a different people and the steward is a different man. At least we know now that we have a master. And it’s impossible to say how grateful the peasants are to your honour! During the time you were under guardianship we had no real master. Everybody was master – your guardian and Ilých, and his wife was mistress, and the clerk from the police-office was a master too. At that time we peasants suffered a great deal – oh God! How much sorrow!’

Again Nekhlyúdov experienced something like shame or remorse. He raised his hat and went his way.

Chapter VI

‘EPIFÁN WISEMAN wishes to sell a horse,’ Nekhlyúdov read in his note-book, and he crossed the street to Epifán’s home.

This hut was carefully thatched with straw from the threshing-floor of the estate, and was built of light grey aspen timber – also from the master’s forest. It had two red painted shutters to each window, a little roofed porch, and board railings with fancy patterns cut in them. The passage and unheated portion of the house were also sound; but the general look of well-being and sufficiency was rather marred by a shed with an unfinished wattle wall and unthatched roof adjoining the gateway. Just as Nekhlyúdov reached the porch from one side, two women came up from the other carrying between them a full tub slung from a pole. One was Epifán Wiseman’s wife, the other his mother. The former was a sturdy red-cheeked woman with a very fully developed bosom and broad fleshy cheeks. She wore a clean smock with embroidered sleeves and collar, an apron with similar embroidery, a new linen skirt, shoes, glass beads and a smart square head-dress embroidered with red cotton and spangles.

The end of the pole did not sway but lay firmly on her broad solid shoulder. The easy effort noticeable in her red face, in the curve of her back, and the measured movement of her arms and legs, indicated excellent health and extraordinary masculine strength.

Epifán’s mother who carried the other end of the pole was, on the contrary, one of those elderly women who seem to have reached the utmost limit of age and decrepitude possible to a living person. Her bony figure, clad in a dirty torn smock and discoloured skirt, was so bent that the pole rested rather on her back than on her shoulder. Her hands were of a dark red-brown colour, with crooked fingers which seemed unable to unbend and with which she seemed to clutch the pole for support. Her drooping head, wrapped in some clout, bore the unsightly evidence of want and great age. From under her low forehead, furrowed in all directions by deep wrinkles, her two red, lashless eyes looked dimly on the ground. One yellow tooth protruded from under her sunken upper lip and, constantly moving, touched at times her pointed chin. The folds on the lower part of her face and throat were like bags that swung with every movement. She breathed heavily and hoarsely, but her bare deformed feet, though they dragged along the ground with effort, moved evenly one after the other.

Chapter VII

HAVING almost collided with the master, the young woman looked abashed, briskly set down the tub, bowed, glanced at him with sparkling eyes from under her brow, and clattering with her shoes ran up the steps, trying to hide a slight smile with the embroidered sleeve of her smock.

‘You go and take the yoke back to Aunt Nastásya, mother,’ she said to the old woman, pausing at the door.

The modest young man looked attentively but sternly at the rosy-faced woman, frowned, and turned to the old one, who having disengaged the yoke from the tub with her rough hands and lifted it onto her shoulders, was submissively directing her steps towards the neighbouring hut.

‘Is your son at home?’ the master asked.

The old woman, bending still lower, bowed and was about to speak, but lifting her hand to her mouth began coughing so that Nekhlyúdov did not wait, but went into the hut.

Epifán, who was sitting on the bench in the best corner, rushed to the oven when he saw his master, as if trying to hide from him, hurriedly shoved something onto the bunk, and with mouth and eyes twitching, pressed himself against the wall as if to make way for the master.

Epifán was a man of about thirty; slender, well set, with brown hair and a young pointed beard, he would have been rather good-looking had it not been for the evasive little brown eyes that looked unpleasantly from under his puckered brows, and for the absence of two front teeth, which at once caught the eye as his lips were short and constantly moving. He had on a holiday shirt with bright red gussets, striped cotton trousers, and heavy boots with wrinkled legs. The interior of his hut was not so crowded and gloomy as Chúris’s, though it was also stuffy, smelt of smoke and sheepskin coats, and was littered in the same untidy way with peasant garments and implements. Two things struck one as strange: a small dented samovar which stood on a shelf, and the portrait of an archimandrite with a red nose and six fingers, that hung near the icon with its brass facings, in a black frame with the remnant of a dirty piece of glass. Nekhlyúdov looked with dissatisfaction at the samovar, the archimandrite’s portrait, and the bunk where the end of a brass-mounted pipe protruded from under some rags, and addressed the peasant.

‘Good morning, Epifán,’ he said, looking into his eyes.

Epifán bowed and muttered, ‘Hope you’re well, y’r Ex’cency,’ pronouncing the last word with peculiar tenderness while his eyes ran rapidly over his master’s whole figure, the hut, the floor, and the ceiling, not resting on anything. Then he hurriedly went to the bunk and pulled down from it a coat which he began putting on.

‘Why are you doing that?’ said Nekhlyúdov, sitting down on the bench and trying to look at Epifán as sternly as possible.

‘What else could I do, y’r Ex’cency? I think we know our place.…’

‘I have come to ask what you need to sell a horse for, and how many horses you have, and which horse you want to sell,’ said Nekhlyúdov drily, evidently repeating questions he had prepared.

‘We are very pleased that y’r Ex’cency deigns to come to peasants like us,’ replied Epifán with a rapid glance at the archimandrite’s portrait, at the oven, at Nekhlyúdov’s boots, and at everything except his master’s face. ‘We always pray God for y’r Ex’cency.…’

‘Why must you sell a horse?’ Nekhlyúdov repeated, raising his voice and clearing his throat.

Epifán sighed, shook back his hair, his glance again roving over the whole hut, and noticing a cat that lay quietly purring on the bench, shouted to it, ‘Sss, get away, beast!’ and hurriedly turned to the master.

‘It’s a horse, y’r Ex’cency, that’s no good.… If it were a good beast I wouldn’t sell it, y’r Ex’cency.’

‘And how many horses have you?’

‘Three horses, y’r Ex’cency.’

‘And no foals?’

‘Why certainly, y’r Ex’cency, I have a foal too.’

Chapter VIII

‘COME, let me see your horses. Are they in the yard?’

‘Exactly so, y’r Ex’cency. I have done as I was ordered, y’r Ex’cency. As if we could disobey y’r Ex’cency! Jacob Alpátych told me not to let the horses out into the field. “The prince will look at them,” he said, so we did not let them out. We dare not disobey y’r Ex’cency.’

As Nekhlyúdov was passing out of the hut, Epifán snatched his pipe from the bunk and shoved it behind the oven; his lips continued to move restlessly even when the master was not looking at him.

A lean little grey mare was rummaging among some rotten straw under the penthouse, and a two-months-old long-legged foal of some nondescript colour, with bluish legs and muzzle, kept close to her thin tail which was full of burrs. In the middle of the yard, with its eyes shut and pensively hanging its head, stood a thick-bellied sorrel gelding – by his appearance a good peasant horse.

‘Are these all the horses you have?’

‘No, sir, y’r Ex’cency, there’s also the mare and the foal,’ Epifán said, pointing to the horses which his master could not have helped seeing.

‘I see. And which of them do you want to sell?’

‘Why, this one, y’r Ex’cency,’ replied Epifán, shaking the skirt of his coat towards the drowsy gelding and continually blinking and twitching his lips. The gelding opened its eyes and lazily turned its tail to him.

‘He doesn’t look old and is a sturdy horse,’ said Nekhlyúdov. ‘Just catch him, and let me see his teeth. I can tell if he is old.’

‘It’s impossible for one person to catch him, Ex’cency. The beast is not worth a penny and has a temper – he bites and kicks, Ex’cency,’ replied Epifán, smiling gaily and letting his eyes rove in all directions.

‘What nonsense! Catch him, I tell you.’

Epifán smiled for a long time, shuffling from foot to foot, and only when Nekhlyúdov cried angrily: ‘Well, what are you about?’ did he rush under the penthouse, bring out a halter, and begin running after the horse, frightening it and following it.

The young master was evidently weary of seeing this, and perhaps wished to show his skill.

‘Let me have the halter!’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon, how can y’r Ex’cency? Please don’t.…’

But Nekhlyúdov went up to the horse’s head and suddenly seized it by the ears with such force that the gelding, which was after all a very quiet peasant horse, swayed and snorted, trying to get away. When Nekhlyúdov noticed that it was quite unnecessary to use such force, and looked at Epifán who continued to smile, the idea – most humiliating to one of his age – occurred to him that Epifán was making fun of him and regarded him as a child. He flushed, let go of the horse’s ears, and without making use of the halter opened its mouth and examined its teeth: the eye-teeth were sound and the double teeth full – which the young master knew the meaning of. Of course the horse was a young one.

Meanwhile Epifán had gone to the penthouse, and noticing that a harrow was not lying in its place, moved it and stood it up against the wattle wall.

‘Come here!’ cried Nekhlyúdov with an expression of childish annoyance on his face and a voice almost tearful with vexation and anger. ‘Now, is this horse old?’

‘Please, y’r Ex’cency, very old. It must be twenty.… Some horses …’

‘Silence! You’re a liar and a good-for-nothing! A decent peasant does not lie – he has no need to!’ said Nekhlyúdov, choking with angry tears. He stopped, in order not to disgrace himself by bursting into tears before the peasant. Epifán too was silent, and looking as if he would begin to cry at any moment, sniffed and slightly jerked his head.

‘Tell me, what will you plough with if you sell this horse?’ Nekhlyúdov went on when he had calmed down sufficiently to speak in his ordinary tone. ‘You are being sent to do work on foot so as to let your horses be in better condition for the ploughing, and you want to sell your last one? And above all, why do you tell lies?’

As soon as his master grew calm Epifán quieted down too. He stood straight, still twitching his lips and his eyes roaming from one object to another.

‘We’ll come out to work for y’r Ex’cy no worse than the others.’

‘But what will you plough with?’

‘Don’t trouble about that, we’ll get y’r Ex’cency’s work done!’ said Epifán, shooing at the horse and driving it away. ‘If I didn’t need the money would I sell him?’

‘What do you need the money for?’

‘We have no flour left, y’r Ex’cency, and I must pay my debts to other peasants, y’r Ex’cency.’

‘No flour? How is it that others with families still have flour, while you without a family have none? What have you done with it?’

‘Eaten it up, y’r Ex’cency, and now there’s none left at all. I’ll buy a horse before the autumn, y’r Ex’cency.’

‘Don’t dare to think of selling the horse!’

‘But if I don’t sell it, y’r Ex’cency, what kind of a life will ours be, when we’ve no flour and daren’t sell anything …’ replied Epifán turning aside, twitching his lips, and suddenly casting an insolent look at his master’s face – ‘it means we’re to starve!’

‘Mind, my man!’ Nekhlyúdov shouted, pale with anger and experiencing a feeling of personal animosity towards the peasant. ‘I won’t keep such peasants as you. It will go ill with you.’

‘That’s as you wish, if I’ve not satisfied y’r Ex’cency,’ replied Epifán, closing his eyes with an expression of feigned humility, ‘but it seems that no fault has been noticed in me. Of course if y’r Ex’cency doesn’t like me, it’s all in your power: but I don’t know what I am to be punished for.’

‘For this: that your sheds are not thatched, your wattle walls are broken, your manure is not ploughed in, and you sit at home smoking a pipe and not working; and because you don’t give your mother, who turned the whole farm over to you, a bit of bread, but let your wife beat her so that she has to come to me with complaints.’

‘Oh no, y’r Ex’cency, I don’t even know what a pipe is!’ replied Epifán in confusion, apparently hurt most of all by being accused of smoking a pipe. ‘It is possible to say anything about a man …’

‘There you are, lying again! I saw it myself.’

‘How should I dare to lie to y’r Ex’cency?’

Nekhlyúdov bit his lip silently and began pacing up and down the yard. Epifán stood in one spot and without lifting his eyes watched his master’s feet.

‘Listen, Epifán!’ said Nekhlyúdov suddenly in a voice of childlike gentleness, stopping in front of the peasant and trying to conceal his excitement. ‘You can’t live like that – you will ruin your life. Bethink yourself. If you want to be a good peasant change your way of life, give up your bad habits, stop lying, don’t get drunk, and respect your mother. You see I know all about you. Attend to your allotment, don’t steal from the Crown forest, and stop going to the tavern. What good is all that? – just think. If you need anything come to me and ask straight out for what you want, and tell me why you want it. Don’t lie, but tell the whole truth, and then I shan’t refuse anything I can do for you.’

‘Excuse me, y’r Ex’cency, I think we can understand y’r Ex’cency!’ Epifán replied smiling, as if he quite understood the excellence of the master’s joke.

That smile and that reply completely disillusioned Nekhlyúdov of his hope of touching Epifán and bringing him to the right path by persuasion. Moreover he felt all the time as if it were indecorous for him, who had authority, to persuade his own serf, as if all that he had said was not at all what he ought to have said. He sadly bowed his head and went into the passage. The old woman was sitting on the threshold groaning aloud, as if to show her sympathy with the master’s words which she had overheard.

‘Here is something to buy yourself bread with,’ Nekhlyúdov whispered, giving her a ruble note. ‘But buy it yourself, and don’t give it to Epifán or he will drink it.’

The old woman took hold of the door-post with her bony hand, trying to rise and thank the master, but her head began shaking, and Nekhlyúdov had already crossed the road before she had got to her feet.

Chapter IX

‘WHITE DAVID wants grain and posts,’ was the next entry in Nekhlyúdov’s note-book.

After passing several homesteads, he met his steward, Jacob Alpátych, at the corner of the lane. The latter having seen his master in the distance had removed his oilskin cap, produced a foulard kerchief, and begun wiping his fat red face.

‘Put on your cap, Jacob! Put it on I tell you.…’

‘Where has your Excellency been pleased to go?’ said Jacob, holding up his cap to shade the sun, but not putting it on.

‘I’ve been to see Wiseman. Now tell me, why has he become like that?’ asked the master continuing on his way.

‘Like what, your Excellency?’ replied the steward, who followed his master at a respectful distance and having put on his cap was smoothing his moustache.

‘What indeed! He is a perfect scamp – lazy, a thief, a liar, ill-treats his mother, and seems to be such a confirmed good-for-nothing that there is no reforming him.’

‘I don’t know, your Excellency, why he has displeased you so.…’

‘And his wife too,’ his master interrupted him, ‘seems to be a horrid creature. The mother is dressed worse than any beggar and has nothing to eat, but the wife is all dressed up, and so is he. I don’t at all know what to do with him.’

Jacob grew visibly confused when Nekhlyúdov mentioned Epifán’s wife.

‘Well if he has let himself go like that,’ he began, ‘we ought to take measures. It’s true he’s poor, like all one-man householders, but unlike some others he does keep himself in hand a bit. He’s intelligent, can read and write, and seems pretty honest. He is always sent round to collect the poll-tax, and he has been village elder for three years while I have been here, and nothing wrong has been noticed. Three years ago it pleased your guardian to dismiss him, but he was all right also when he worked on the estate. Only he has taken rather to drink, having lived at the Post Station in town, so measures should be taken against that. When he misbehaved in the past we used to threaten him with a flogging and he’d come to his senses, and it was good for him and there was peace in the family; but as you don’t approve of such measures, I really don’t know what we are to do with him. I know he has let himself go pretty badly. He can’t be sent as a soldier because he has lost two teeth, as you will have noticed. He knocked them out purposely a long time ago.³ But he is not the only one, if I may take the liberty of reporting to your Excellence, who has got quite out of hand.’

‘Let that matter alone, Jacob!’ said Nekhlyúdov with a slight smile. ‘We have discussed it over and over again. You know what I think about it, and say what you will I shall still not change my mind.…’⁴

‘Of course your Excellence knows best,’ said Jacob, shrugging his shoulders and gazing at his master from behind as if what he saw boded no good. ‘As to the old woman, you are pleased to trouble about her needlessly,’ he continued. ‘It’s true she brought up her fatherless children, and raised Epifán and married him off and all that; but among the peasants it is the custom, when a mother or father hands over the homestead to a son, that the son and his wife become the masters and the old woman has to earn her bread as best she can. Of course they have no delicate feelings, but it is the usual way among the peasants. So I make bold to say that the old woman has troubled you needlessly. She is an intelligent woman and a good housekeeper, but why trouble the master about every trifle? Well, she had a dispute with her daughter-in-law, and the daughter-in-law may have pushed her – those are women’s affairs! They might have made it up again instead of troubling you. And besides, you take it all too much to heart,’ added the steward, looking with fatherly tenderness and condescension at his master who was walking silently up the street before him with long strides.

‘Are you going home, sir?’ he asked.

‘No, to see White David, or the Goat … how is he called?’

‘Now that’s another sluggard, let me tell you. The whole Goat family are like that. Whatever you may do with him nothing helps. I drove over the peasant fields yesterday, and he has not even sown his buckwheat. What is one to do with such people? If only the old man at least taught his son, but he is just such a sluggard himself – whether it’s for himself or for the owner he always bungles it.… Both your guardian and I – what have we not done to them? He’s been sent to the police-station, and been flogged at home – which is what you are pleased to disapprove of.…’

‘Who? Surely not the old man?’

‘The old man, sir. Your guardian has many a time had him flogged before the whole Commune. But would your Excellence believe it, it had no effect! He would give himself a shake, go home, and behave just the same. And I must admit that David is a quiet peasant and not stupid; he doesn’t smoke or drink, that is,’ Jacob explained, ‘but yet you see he’s worse than some drunkards. The only thing would be to conscript him, or exile him – nothing else can be done. The whole Goat family are like that. Matryúshka, who lives in that hovel, is of the same family and is a damned sluggard too. But your Excellence does not require me?’ added the steward, noticing that his master was not listening to him.

‘No, you may go,’ replied Nekhlyúdov absent-mindedly, and went on towards White David’s hut.

David’s hut stood crooked and solitary at the end of the village. It had no yard, no kiln, and no barn; only some dirty cattle sheds clung to one side of it while on the other brushwood and beams, prepared for outbuildings, lay all in a heap. Tall green grass was growing where there had once been a yard. There was not a living being near the hut, except a pig that lay grunting in a puddle by the threshold.

Nekhlyúdov knocked at a broken window, but as no one answered he went into the entry and shouted, ‘Hullo there!’ but got no reply to this either. He entered the passage, looked into the empty cattle stalls, and entered the open door of the hut. An old red cock and two hens, jerking their crops and clattering with their claws, were strutting about the floor and benches. Seeing a man they spread their wings and, cackling desperately, flew against the walls, one of them jumping up on the oven. The hut, which was not quite fourteen-foot square, was almost filled by the brick oven with its broken chimney, a weaving loom that had not been put away though it was summer, and a blackened table with a warped and cracked top.

Though it was dry outside there was still a dirty puddle inside near the threshold, which had been formed by a leak in the roof and ceiling during previous rain. There were no beds. It was difficult to believe that the place was inhabited – there was such an appearance of absolute neglect and disorder both within the hut and outside. Yet White David and his whole family lived there, and at that very moment, though it was a hot June day, David, wrapped head and all in his sheepskin, lay huddled in a corner on the top of the oven fast asleep. The frightened hen that had alighted there and had not yet quieted down was walking over his back without waking him.

Not seeing anyone in the hut Nekhlyúdov was about to leave, when a long-drawn slobbering sigh betrayed the sleeper’s presence.

‘Hullo, who’s there?’ shouted the master.

Another long-drawn sigh came from the oven.

‘Who is there? Come here!’

Another sigh, a moan, and a loud yawn replied to the master’s call.

‘Well, what are you about?’

Something moved slowly on the oven. The skirt of a worn-out sheepskin coat appeared, one big foot in a tattered bast shoe came down, and then another, and finally the whole of White David appeared, sitting on the oven and lazily and discontentedly rubbing his eyes with his big fist. Slowly bending his head he looked round the hut with a yawn, and, seeing his master, began to move a little quicker than before, but still so slowly that Nekhlyúdov had time to walk some three times from the puddle to the loom and back while David was getting down from the oven.

White David was really white: his hair, body, and face were all quite white. He was tall and very stout, but stout as peasants are – that is, his whole body was stout and not only his stomach – but it was a flabby and unhealthy stoutness. His rather comely face, with pale blue quiet eyes and broad, full beard, bore the impress of ill-health: there was no vestige of sunburn or colour in it; it was all of a pale yellowish tint with a purple shadow under the eyes, and seemed swollen and bloated. His hands were puffy and yellow, like those of people suffering from dropsy, and were covered with fine white hair. He was so drowsy that he could hardly open his eyes or stand without staggering and yawning.

‘How is it you are not ashamed,’ Nekhlyúdov began, ‘to sleep in broad daylight when you ought to be building your out-houses and when you are short of grain.…’

As soon as David came to his senses and began to realize that his master was standing before him, he folded his hands below his stomach, hung his head, inclining it a little on one side, and did not stir a limb. He was silent; but the expression of his face and the pose of his whole body said: ‘I know, I know, it’s not the first time I have heard this. Well, beat me if you must. I’ll endure it.’ He seemed to wish that his master would stop speaking and be quick and beat him, even beat him painfully on his plump cheeks, if having done so he would but leave him in peace. Noticing that David did not understand him, Nekhlyúdov tried by various questions to rouse the peasant from his submissively patient taciturnity.

‘Why did you ask me for timber, and then leave it lying about here a whole month, and that too at the time when you have most leisure, eh?’

David remained persistently silent and did not stir.

‘Come now, answer me!’

David muttered something and blinked his white eyelashes.

‘You know one has to work, friend. What would there be without work? You see you have no grain now, and why? Because your land was badly ploughed, not harrowed, and sown too late – and all from laziness. You ask me for grain: well suppose I give you some, since you must not starve – but that sort of thing won’t do. Whose grain am I to give you? Whose do you think? Come, answer me! Whose grain am I to give you?’ Nekhlyúdov insisted.

‘The proprietor’s,’ muttered David, raising his eyes timidly and questioningly.

‘But where does the proprietor’s grain come from? Think of it. Who ploughed and harrowed the land? Who sowed and reaped it? The peasants. Is that not so? Then you see if I am to give away the grain, I ought to give more to those who worked most to produce it, and you have worked least. They complain about your work on the estate too. You work least, but ask for your master’s grain more than anyone. Why should I give it to you and not to others? You know if everybody lay on their backs as you do, we should all have starved long ago. One must work, friend. This sort of thing is wrong. Do you hear me, David?’

‘I hear, sir,’ muttered David slowly through his teeth.

Chapter X

JUST then the head of a peasant woman carrying linen hung on a wooden yoke was seen through the window, and a moment later David’s mother, a tall, very fresh-looking and active woman of about fifty, entered the hut. Her pock-marked and wrinkled face was not handsome, but her straight firm nose, her thin compressed lips and keen grey eyes, expressed intelligence and energy. The squareness of her shoulders and flatness of her bosom, the leanness of her arms and the solid muscles of her dark bare legs, bore witness to the fact that she had long since ceased to be a woman and had become simply a labourer. She hurried into the hut, closed the door, pulled down her skirt, and looked angrily at her son. Nekhlyúdov was about to speak to her, but she turned her back on him and began crossing herself before a grimy icon that was visible behind the loom. Having finished doing this, she adjusted the dirty checked kerchief she wore on her head and bowed low to her master.

‘A pleasant Lord’s day to your Excellency,’ she said. ‘God bless you, our father.…’

When David saw his mother he evidently became confused, and stooped and hung his head still more.

‘Thanks, Arína,’ replied Nekhlyúdov. ‘I’ve just been speaking to your son about your household.’

‘Arína the barge-hauler’, as the peasants had called her since she was a girl, rested her chin on her right fist, supporting that elbow on the palm of her left hand, and without waiting for the master to finish began to speak in such a shrill and ringing tone that her voice filled the whole hut, and from outside it might have seemed as if several women were talking together.

‘What’s the use of talking to him, dear sir? He can’t even speak like a man. There he stands, the lout!’ she continued, contemptuously wagging her head at David’s pathetic massive figure. ‘What’s my household, sir, your Excellency? We’re paupers. You’ve got none worse than us in the whole village! We can’t do anything for ourselves or for the estate – it’s a disgrace! And it’s him that’s brought us to it. I bore, fed, and reared him, and could scarcely wait for him to grow up, and now this is what we’ve got at last! He eats the bread, but we get no more work out of him than from that rotten log. All he does is to lie on the oven, or stand like that and scratch his empty pate,’ she went on, mimicking him. ‘If only you would frighten him a bit, sir! I ask it myself – punish him for God’s sake, or send him to the army. There’s no other way out. I can do nothing with him – that’s how it is.’

‘Now isn’t it a sin for you to bring your mother to this, David?’ said Nekhlyúdov reproachfully, turning to the peasant.

David did not budge.

‘If he were sickly now,’ Arína continued with the same animated gestures, ‘but look at him, he’s as big as the mill chimney! You would think there’d be enough of him to do some work, the lubberly lout; but no, he’s taking a rest on the oven, the sluggard. And if he does start on anything my eyes grow tired of looking at him before he’s had time to get up, turn round, and get anything done!’ she added in a drawling tone, turning her square shoulders awkwardly from side to side. ‘To-day, for instance, my old man himself went to fetch brushwood from the forest and told him to dig holes for the posts: but not he, didn’t so much as take the spade in his hands.…’ She paused for a moment. ‘He’s done for me, lone woman that I am!’ she suddenly shrieked, flourishing her arms and going up to her son with a threatening gesture. ‘You fat lazy mug! God forgive me.…’

She turned contemptuously and yet with desperation from him, spat, and with tears in her eyes again addressed her master with the same animation, still waving her arms. ‘I’m all alone, benefactor! My old man is ill, old, and there’s not much good in him either, and I have always to do everything alone. It’s enough to crush a stone. To die would be better, that would end it. He has worn me out, the wretch! Really, father, I’m at the end of my tether! My daughter-in-law died of overwork, and so shall I.’

Chapter XI

‘DIED of what?’ Nekhlyúdov asked incredulously.

‘From overwork, benefactor, as God is holy, she was used up. We took her from Babúrino the year before last,’ continued Arína, and her angry expression suddenly changed to a sad and tearful one. ‘She was a quiet, fresh-looking young woman, dear sir. She had lived in comfort as a girl at her father’s and had not known want; but when she came to us and knew what our work was – work on the master’s estate and at home and everywhere.… She and I alone to do it. It is nothing to me! I’m used to it. But she was with child, dear sir, and began to suffer pain, and was always working beyond her strength, and she overdid it poor thing. A year ago, during St Peter’s Fast,⁵ to her misfortune, she bore a son. We had no bread: we had to eat anything, just anything, and there was urgent work to be done – and her milk dried up. It was her first baby, we had no cow, and how can we peasants rear a baby by hand? Well, she was a woman and foolish – that made her grieve still more. And when the baby died she wept and wept for him, lamented and lamented, and there was want and the work had to be done, and things got worse and worse: she was so worn out in the summer that at the Feast of the Intercession⁶ she herself died. It was he who destroyed her – the beast!’ she repeated, turning with despairing anger to her son. ‘What I wanted to ask of your Excellence …’ she went on after a pause, lowering her voice and bowing.

‘What is it?’ Nekhlyúdov asked absent-mindedly, still agitated by her story.

‘You see he is still a young man. What work can be expected from me? I’m alive to-day but shall be dead to-morrow. How is he to get on without a wife? He won’t be a worker for you.… Think of something for us. You are as a father to us.’

‘You mean you want to get him married? Well, all right.’

‘Be merciful, you who are a father and mother to us!’ and on her making a sign to her son, they both dropped on their knees at their master’s feet.

‘Why do you bow in such a way?’ Nekhlyúdov said irritably, raising her by the shoulder. ‘Can’t you say what you want to say simply? You know I don’t like grovellings. Get your son married if you like. I shall be very glad if you know of a wife for him.’

The old woman rose and began rubbing her dry eyes with her sleeve. David followed her example and having rubbed his eyes with his puffy fist continued to stand in the same patiently meek attitude listening to what Arína said.

‘There are girls – of course there are. There’s Váska Mikháy’s girl, she’s all right, but she won’t consent unless it’s your wish.’

‘Doesn’t she agree?’

‘No, benefactor, not if she’s to marry by consent.’

‘Then what’s to be done? I can’t compel her. Look out for someone else – if not one of ours, one from another village. I’ll buy her out if she comes willingly, but I won’t force her to marry. There is no law that allows that, and it would be a great sin.’

‘Eh, eh, benefactor! Is it likely, seeing what our life is and our poverty, that any girl would come of her own accord? Even the poorest soldier’s wife wouldn’t agree to such poverty. What peasant will give his girl into a house like this? A desperate man wouldn’t do it. Why, we’re paupers, beggars. They’d say that we have starved one to death and that the same would happen to their daughter. Who would give his girl?’ she added, shaking her head dubiously. ‘Just consider, your Excellence.’

‘But what can I do?’

‘Think of something for us, dear sir,’ Arína repeated earnestly. ‘What are we to do?’

‘But what can I contrive? I can’t do anything at all in such a case.’

‘Who is to arrange it for us if not you?’ said Arína, hanging down her head and spreading her arms out in mournful perplexity.

‘As to the grain you asked for, I’ll give orders that you shall have some —’ said the master after a pause, during which Arína kept sighing and David echoed her. ‘I can’t do anything more.’

And Nekhlyúdov went out into the passage. The mother and son followed him, bowing.

Chapter XII

‘OH, what a life mine is!’ Arína said, sighing deeply.

She stopped and looked angrily at her son. David at once turned and clumsily lifting his thick foot in its enormous and dirty bast shoe heavily over the threshold, disappeared through the door.

‘What am I to do with him, master?’ Arína went on. ‘You see yourself what he is like. He is not a bad man, doesn’t drink, is gentle, and wouldn’t harm a child – it would be a sin to say otherwise. There’s nothing bad in him, and God only knows what has happened to make him his own enemy. He himself is sad about it. Would you believe it, sir, my heart bleeds when I look at him and see how he suffers. Whatever he may be, I bore him and pity him – oh, how I pity him! … You see it’s not as if he went against me, or his father, or the authorities. He’s timid – like a little child, so to say. How can he live a widower? Arrange something for us, benefactor!’ she said again, evidently anxious to remove the bad impression her bitter words might have produced on the master. ‘Do you know, sir, your Excellence,’ she went on in a confidential whisper, ‘I have thought one thing and another and can’t imagine why he is like that. It can only be that bad folk have bewitched him.’

She remained silent for a while.

‘If I could find the right man, he might be cured.’

‘What nonsense you talk, Arína. How can a man be bewitched?’

‘Oh, my dear sir, a man can be so bewitched that he’s never again a man! As if there were not many bad people in the world! Out of spite they’ll take a handful of earth from a man’s footprints … or something of that sort … and he is no longer a man. Is evil far from us? I’ve been thinking – shouldn’t I go to old Dundúk, who lives in Vorobëvka? He knows all sorts of charms and herbs, and removes spells and makes water flow from a cross. Perhaps he would help!’ said the old woman. ‘Maybe he would cure him.’

‘Now there is poverty and ignorance!’ thought the young master as he strode with big steps through the village, sorrowfully hanging his head. ‘What am I to do with him? It’s impossible to leave him like that, both for my own sake and on account of the example to others, as well as for himself,’ he said, counting off these different reasons on his fingers. ‘I can’t bear to see him in such a state, but how am I to get him out of it? He ruins all my best plans for the estate.… As long as there are peasants like that my dreams will never be realized,’ he reflected, experiencing vexation and anger against White David for ruining his plans. ‘Shall I have him sent to Siberia, as Jacob suggests, since he doesn’t want to get on; or send him to be a soldier? I should at least be rid of him and should save another and better peasant from being conscripted,’ he argued to himself.

He thought of this with satisfaction; but at the same time a vague consciousness told him that he was thinking with only one side of his mind and that it was not right. He stopped. ‘Wait a bit, what was I thinking about?’ he asked himself. ‘Oh yes, into the army or to exile. But what for? He is a good man, better than many others – and besides what do I know.… Shall I set him free?’ he thought, not now considering the question with only one side of his mind as previously. ‘That would be unfair and impossible.’ But suddenly a thought occurred to him which pleased him very much, and he smiled with the expression of a man who has solved a difficult problem. ‘Take him into my house,’ he reflected, ‘observe him myself and get him used to work and reform him by kindness, persuasion, and a proper choice of occupation.’

Chapter XIII

‘THAT’S what I will do,’ said Nekhlyúdov to himself with cheerful self-satisfaction, and remembering that he still had to see the rich peasant Dútlov he turned towards a tall roomy homestead with two chimneys, that stood in the middle of the village. As he drew near it he met at the neighbouring hut a plainly dressed woman of about forty coming to meet him.

‘A pleasant holiday, sir!’ said she without any sign of timidity, stopping beside him, smiling pleasantly and bowing.

‘Good morning, nurse,’ he replied. ‘How are you? I am going to see your neighbour.’

‘Yes, your Excellence, that’s a good thing. But won’t you please come in? My old man would be so glad!’

‘Well, I’ll come in and we’ll have a talk, nurse. Is this your hut?’

‘That’s it, sir.’

The woman, who had been his wet-nurse, ran on in front. Following her into the entry Nekhlyúdov sat down on a barrel and lit a cigarette.

‘It’s hot in there. Let’s sit out here and have a chat,’ he said in answer to his nurse’s invitation to enter the hut. The nurse was still a fresh-looking and handsome woman. Her features, and especially her large dark eyes, much resembled those of her master. She folded her arms under her apron and looking fearlessly at Nekhlyúdov, and continually moving her head, began to talk.

‘Why are you pleased to honour Dútlov with a visit, sir?’

‘I want him to rent land from me, about thirty desyatíns,⁷ and start a farm, and also buy a forest jointly with me. You see he has money, so why should it lie idle? What do you think of it, nurse?’

‘Well, why not? Of course, sir, everyone knows that the Dútlovs are strong people. I reckon he’s the leading peasant on the whole estate,’ the nurse answered, swaying her head. ‘Last year they put up another building with their own timber, without troubling you. They must have at least eighteen horses, apart from foals and colts, and as to cattle and sheep – when the women go out into the street to drive them in it’s a sight to see how they crowd the gateway, and they must also have two hundred hives of bees if not more. Dútlov is a very strong peasant and must have money.’

‘Do you think he has much money?’ asked Nekhlyúdov.

‘People say – it may be their spite – that the old man has a good lot of money. Naturally he won’t talk about it or tell his sons, but he must have. Why shouldn’t he be interested in a forest? Unless he may be afraid of the talk spreading of his having money. Some five years back he took up meadows in a small way, in shares with Shkálik, the inn-keeper, but either Shkálik swindled him or something happened, and the old man lost some three hundred rubles and since then he has given it up. How can they help being well-to-do, your Excellency?’ the nurse went on. ‘They have three allotments of lands, a big family all of them workers, and the old man himself – there’s no denying it – is a capital manager. He has such luck everywhere that people all wonder; what with his grain, his horses, and cattle, and bees, and his sons. He’s got them all married now. He used to find wives for them among our own people, but now he’s got Ilyúshka married to a free girl – he paid for her emancipation himself— and she, too, has turned out well.’

‘And do they live peaceably?’

‘Where there’s a real head to a house there’s always peace. Take the Dútlovs – of course the daughters-in-law have words behind the oven, but with their father at the head the sons live in unity all the same.’

The nurse paused a little.

‘It seems that the old man wants to make his eldest son Karp head of the house now. “I am getting old,” he says. “My place is to see to the bees.” Well, Karp is a good peasant, a careful peasant, but all the same he won’t be anything like the old man was as a manager – he hasn’t the same sense.’

‘Then Karp may like to take up the land and the forest. What do you think?’ Nekhlyúdov asked, wishing to get from his nurse all that she knew about her neighbours.

‘Scarcely, sir,’ she replied. ‘The old man hasn’t told his son anything about his money. As long as he lives and the money is in his house, the old man will control things; besides, they go in chiefly for carting.’

‘And you think the old man won’t consent?’

‘He will be afraid.’

‘But what of?’

‘But how can a serf belonging to a master let it be known what he has got, sir? In a hapless hour he might lose all his money! When he went into business with the inn-keeper and made a mistake, how could he go to law with him? So the money was lost. And with his proprietor he’d get settled at once.’

‘Oh, is that it? …’ said Nekhlyúdov flushing. ‘Well, goodbye nurse.’

‘Good-bye, dear sir, your Excellence. Thank you kindly.’

Chapter XIV

‘HADN’T I better go home?’ thought Nekhlyúdov as he approached Dútlov’s gate, feeling an indefinite sadness and moral weariness.

But at that moment the new plank gates opened before him with a creak, and in the gateway appeared a handsome, ruddy, fair-haired lad of eighteen dressed as a stage-coach-driver and leading three strong-limbed shaggy horses, which were still perspiring. Briskly shaking back his flaxen hair he bowed to the master.

‘Is your father at home, Ilyá?’ asked Nekhlyúdov.

‘He’s in the apiary at the back of the yard,’ replied the lad, leading one horse after the other out through the half-open gate.

‘No, I’ll keep to my intention and make him the offer, and do what depends on me,’ Nekhlyúdov thought, and letting the horses pass out he entered Dútlov’s large yard. He could see that the manure had recently been carted away: the earth was still dark and damp, and here and there, especially by the gateway, lay bits of reddish, fibrous manure. In the yard and under the high penthouse stood many carts, ploughs, sledges, troughs, tubs, and peasant property of all kinds, in good order. Pigeons flew about and cooed in the shade under the broad strong rafters. There was a smell of manure and tar in the place. In one corner Karp and Ignát were fixing a new transom under a large iron-bound three-horse cart. Dútlov’s three sons all bore a strong family resemblance. The youngest, Ilyá, whom Nekhlyúdov had met by the gate, had no beard and was shorter, ruddier, and more smartly dressed than the others. The second, Ignát, was taller, darker, had a pointed beard, and though also wearing boots, a driver’s shirt, and a felt hat, had not such a festive and carefree appearance as his younger brother. The eldest, Karp, was still taller, and was wearing bast shoes, a grey coat, and a shirt without gussets. He had a large red beard and looked not only serious but almost gloomy.

‘Shall I send father to you, your Excellence?’ he asked, coming up to his master and awkwardly making a slight bow.

‘No, I’ll go myself to the apiary and see his arrangements there … but I want to speak to you,’ said Nekhlyúdov stepping to the opposite side of the yard so that Ignát should not hear what he was about to say to Karp.

The self-confidence of these two peasants and a certain pride in their deportment, as well as what his nurse had told him, so embarrassed the young master that he did not find it easy to speak of the business he had in mind. He had a sort of guilty feeling and it seemed to him easier to speak to one brother out of hearing of the others. Karp seemed surprised that the master should take him aside, but followed him.

‘This is what it is,’ Nekhlyúdov began hesitatingly. ‘I wanted to ask, have you many horses?’

‘We can muster five tróyka teams, and there are some foals too,’ Karp answered readily, scratching his back.

‘Do your brothers drive the stage-coach?’

‘We drive stage-coaches with three tróykas, and Ilyá has been away carting; he’s only just back.’

‘And does that pay? What do you earn by it?’

‘Earnings, your Excellence? At most we feed ourselves and the horses – and thank God for that.’

‘Then why don’t you take up something else? You might buy some forest or rent land.’

‘Of course, your Excellence, we might rent land if there were any handy.’

‘That is what I want to propose to you. Instead of the carting business that does no more than keep you, why not rent some thirty desyatíns of land from me? I’ll let you have that whole strip beyond Sápov and you could start your own farming on a large scale.’

And Nekhlyúdov, carried away by the plan for a peasant farm which he had repeatedly thought out and considered, went on to explain his offer, no longer hesitatingly. Karp listened very attentively to his master’s words.

‘We are very grateful to your honour,’ he said when Nekhlyúdov, having finished, looked at him inquiringly expecting an answer. ‘Of course it is not a bad plan. It’s better for a peasant to work on the land than to drive with a whip in his hand. Getting among strangers and seeing all sorts of people, the likes of us get spoilt. There is nothing better for a peasant than to work the land.’

‘Then what do you think of it?’

‘As long as father is alive what can I think, your Excellence? It is as he pleases.’

‘Take me to the apiary. I’ll talk to him.’

‘This way, please,’ said Karp, walking slowly towards the barn at the back. He opened a low door that led to the apiary, and having let his master pass, and shut the door behind him, returned to Ignát and silently resumed his interrupted work.

Chapter XV

NEKHLYÚDOV, stooping, passed from under the shade of the penthouse through the low doorway to the apiary beyond the yard. Symmetrically placed hives covered with pieces of board stood in a small space surrounded by a loosely-woven fence of straw and wattle. Golden bees circled noisily round the hives, and the place was flooded by the hot brilliant beams of the June sun. From the door a trodden path led to a wooden shrine on which stood a small tinsel-faced icon which glittered in the sunlight. Several graceful young lime trees, stretching their curly crowns above the thatch of the neighbouring building, mingled the just audible rustle of their fresh dark-green foliage with the humming of the bees. On the fine curly grass that crept in between the hives lay black and sharply defined shadows of the roofed fence, of the lime trees, and of the hives with their board roofs. At the door of a freshly-thatched wooden shed that stood among the limes could be seen the short, bent figure of an old man whose uncovered grey head, with a bald patch, shone in the sun. On hearing the creak of the door the old man turned and, wiping his perspiring sunburnt face with the skirt of his smock, came with a mild and pleasant smile to meet his master.

It was so cosy, pleasant, and quiet in the sun-lit apiary; the grey-haired old man with the fine, close wrinkles radiating from his eyes who, with large shoes on his bare feet, came waddling and smiling with good-natured self-satisfaction to welcome his master to his own private domain, was so simple-hearted and kind that Nekhlyúdov immediately forgot the unpleasant impressions he had received that morning, and his cherished dream vividly recurred to him. He saw all his peasants as well off and kindly as old Dútlov, and all smiling happily and affectionately at him because they were indebted to him alone for their wealth and happiness.

‘Wouldn’t you like a net, your Excellence? The bees are angry now, and sting,’ said the old man, taking down from the fence a dirty linen bag attached to a bark hoop and smelling of honey, and offering it to his master. ‘The bees know me and don’t sting me,’ he added with the mild smile that seldom left his handsome sunburnt face.

‘Then I don’t want it either. Are they swarming yet?’ Nekhlyúdov asked, also smiling, without knowing why.

‘Hardly swarming, sir, Dmítri Nikoláevich,’ replied the old man, expressing a special endearment by addressing his master by his Christian name and patronymic. ‘Why, they’ve only just begun to be active. You know what a cold spring it has been.’

‘I have been reading in a book,’ Nekhlyúdov began, driving off a bee which had got into his hair and buzzed just above his ear, ‘that if the combs are placed straight up, fixed to little laths, the bees swarm earlier. For this purpose hives are made of boards with cross-pieces.

‘Please don’t wave your arm about, it makes them worse,’ said the old man. ‘Hadn’t you better have the net?’

Nekhlyúdov was in pain; but a certain childish vanity made him reluctant to own it, and so he again declined the net and continued to tell the old man about the construction of beehives of which he had read in Maison Rustique and in which, he believed, there would be twice as many swarms; but a bee stung him on the neck and he grew confused and hesitated in the midst of his description.

‘It’s true, sir, Dmítri Nikoláevich,’ said the old man, looking with fatherly condescension at his master, ‘people do write in books. But it may be that it is written wrongly. Perhaps they say “He’ll do as we advise, and then we’ll laugh at him.” That does happen! How can one teach the bees where to build their comb? They do it themselves according to the hive, sometimes across it and sometimes lengthways. There, please look in,’ he added, opening one of the nearest hives and looking into the opening where buzzing bees were crawling about on the crooked combs. ‘These are young ones: they have their mind on the queen bee, but they make the comb straight or to one side as best fits the hive,’ continued the old man, evidently carried away by his favourite subject and not noticing his master’s condition. ‘See, they’re coming in laden today. It’s a warm day and everything can be seen,’ he added, closing the opening and pressing a crawling bee with a rag and then with his hand brushing several from his wrinkled neck. The bees did not sting him, but Nekhlyúdov could hardly refrain from running away from the apiary: they had stung him in three places and were buzzing all round his head and neck.

‘How many hives have you?’ he asked, stepping back towards the door.

‘As many as God has given,’ replied Dútlov laughingly. ‘One mustn’t count them, sir. The bees don’t like it. There now, your Excellence, I wanted to ask your honour something,’ he continued, pointing to some narrow hives standing near the fence. ‘It’s about Osip, your nurse’s husband – if you would only speak to him. It’s wrong to act so to a neighbour in one’s own village.’

‘What is bad?… Oh, but they do sting!’ said the master, with his hand already on the door-handle.

‘Well, you see, every year he lets his bees out among my young ones. They ought to have a chance to improve, but the strange bees enter the combs and take the wax from them,’ said the old man, not noticing his master’s grimaces.

‘All right … afterwards … in a moment …’ muttered Nekhlyúdov, and unable to bear the pain any longer he ran quickly through the door waving both hands.

‘Rub it with earth and it will be all right,’ said the old man, following the master into the yard. The master rubbed the places that had been stung with earth, flushed as he gave a quick glance at Karp and Ignát, who were not looking at him, and frowned angrily.

Chapter XVI

‘WHAT I wanted to ask your Excellency,’ … said the old man, pretending not to notice or really not noticing his master’s angry look.

‘What?’

‘Well, you see, we are well off for horses, thank God, and have a labourer, so that the owner’s work will not be neglected by us.’

‘Well, what about it?’

‘If you would be so kind as to accept quit-rent and excuse my lads from service, Ilyá and Ignát could go carting all summer with three teams of horses, and might earn something.’

‘Where would they go?’

‘Well, that all depends,’ interposed Ilyá who had tied the horses under the penthouse and came up to his father. ‘The Kadmínski lads went to Rómen with eight tróykas and earned their keep and brought back about thirty rubles for each tróyka; or there’s Odessa where they say fodder is cheap.’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,’ said the master, turning to the old man and trying tactfully to introduce the question of farming. ‘Tell me, is it more profitable to go carting than to farm at home?’

‘Much more profitable, your Excellence,’ Ilyá again broke in, vigorously shaking back his hair. ‘At home we’ve no fodder for the horses.’

‘And how much will you earn in a summer?’

‘Well, after the spring – though fodder was dear – we carted goods to Kiev and loaded up grits for Moscow in Kursk, and kept ourselves, fed the horses well, and brought fifteen rubles home.’

‘There’s no harm in working at an honest job be it what it may,’ said the master, again addressing the old man, ‘but it seems to me that other work might be found. This carting work makes a young fellow go anywhere and see all sorts of people and he may get spoilt,’ he added, repeating Karp’s words.

‘What are we peasants to take up, if not carting?’ rejoined the old man, with a mild smile. ‘On a good carting job a man has enough to eat himself, and the horses have enough. As to getting spoilt, it’s not the first time the lads have been carting, and I used to go myself and got nothing bad from anyone – nothing but good.’

‘There’s plenty of work you could do at home: land, meadows …’

‘How could we, your Excellency?’ Ilyá interrupted with animation. ‘We are born to this, we know all about it, it’s suitable work for us: the pleasantest work for us, your Excellence, is carting.’

‘May we ask your Excellence to do us the honour to come to the hut? You have not been there since our house-warming,’ said the old man, bowing low and making a sign to his son. Ilyá raced into the hut and the old man followed with Nekhlyúdov.

Chapter XVII

ON entering the hut the old man bowed again, dusted the front bench with the skirt of his smock, and asked with a smile:

‘What may I offer your Excellency?’

The hut was clean and roomy, with sleeping places near the ceiling, and bunks. It also had a chimney. The fresh aspen logs, between which the moss-caulking could be seen, had not yet turned dark; the new benches and sleeping places had not yet worn smooth, and the earthen floor was not yet trodden hard. Ilyá’s wife, a thin young peasant woman with a dreamy oval face, sat on a bunk and rocked a cradle that hung by a long pole from the ceiling. In the cradle, breathing softly, lay an infant with eyes closed and outstretched limbs. Karp’s wife, a plump, red-cheeked woman, stood by the oven shredding onions over a wooden bowl, her sleeves turned up above her elbows, showing her hands and arms tanned to above her wrists. A pock-marked pregnant woman stood beside the oven hiding her face with her sleeve. It was hot in the hut, for besides the heat of the sun there was the heat of the oven, and there was a strong smell of freshly-baked bread. From the sleeping places aloft two fair-haired little boys and a girl, who had climbed up there while awaiting dinner, looked down with curiosity on the master.

The sight of this prosperity pleased Nekhlyúdov and yet he felt embarrassed in the presence of these women and children, who were all looking at him. He sat down on the bench, blushing.

‘Give me a bit of hot bread, I like it,’ he said, and flushed still more.

Karp’s wife cut off a big bit, and handed it to the master on a plate. Nekhlyúdov said nothing, not knowing what to say; the women were also silent, and the old man kept mildly smiling.

‘Really now, what am I ashamed of – just as if I had done something wrong?’ thought Nekhlyúdov. ‘Why shouldn’t I suggest their starting a farm? What stupidity …!’ Yet he still kept silent.

‘Well, sir, how about the lads? What are your orders?’ said the old man.

‘Well I should advise you not to let them go but to find them work here,’ Nekhlyúdov said, suddenly gaining courage. ‘Do you know what I have thought of for you? Join me in buying a grove in the State forest, and some land too.’

‘How could I, your Excellence? Where is the money to come from?’ the old man interrupted him.

‘Only a small grove, you know, for about two hundred rubles,’ Nekhlyúdov remarked.

The old man smiled grimly.

‘If I had the money, why not buy it?’ he said.

‘Have you no longer that amount?’ said the master reproachfully.

‘Oh sir, your Excellence!’ said the old man in a sorrowful voice, looking towards the door. ‘I have enough to do to keep the family. It’s not for us to buy groves.’

‘But you have the money, why should it lie idle?’ insisted Nekhlyúdov.

The old man suddenly became greatly agitated; his eyes glittered and his shoulders began to twitch.

‘Maybe evil persons have said it of me,’ he began in a trembling voice, ‘but believe me, I say before God,’ he went on, becoming more and more excited and turning towards the icon, ‘may my eyes burst, may I fall through the ground here, if I have anything but the fifteen rubles Ilyá brought home and even then I have the poll-tax to pay. You know yourself we have built the cottage …’

‘Well, all right, all right!’ said the master, rising. ‘Good-bye, friends.’

Chapter XVIII

‘MY God, my God!’ thought Nekhlyúdov as he walked home with big strides through the shady avenues of his neglected garden, absent-mindedly plucking twigs and leaves on his way. ‘Can it be that all my dreams of the aims and duties of my life are mere nonsense? When I planned this path of life I fancied that I should always experience the complete moral satisfaction I felt when the idea first occurred to me – so why do I now feel so depressed and sad and dissatisfied with myself?’ And he remembered with extraordinary vividness and distinctness that happy moment a year before.

He had got up very early that May morning, before anyone else in the house, feeling painfully agitated by the secret, unformulated impulses of youth, and had gone first into the garden and then into the forest, where he wandered about alone amid the vigorous, luscious, yet peaceful works of nature, suffering from an exuberance of vague feeling and finding no expression for it. With all the charm of the unknown his youthful imagination pictured to him the voluptuous form of a woman, and it seemed to him that here it was – the fulfilment of that unexpressed desire. But some other, deeper feeling told him: ‘Not that,’ and impelled him to seek something else. Then his inexperienced, ardent mind, rising higher and higher into realms of abstraction, discovered, as it seemed to him, the laws of being, and he dwelt on those thoughts with proud delight. But again a higher feeling told him: ‘Not that,’ and once more agitated him and forced him to continue his search. Empty of thought and feeling – a condition which always follows intensive activity – he lay on his back under a tree and began to gaze at the translucent morning clouds drifting across the limitless blue sky above him. Suddenly without any reason tears filled his eyes and, Heaven knows why, a definite thought to which he clung with delight entered his mind, filling his whole soul – the thought that love and goodness are truth and happiness – the only truth and the only happiness possible in the world. And this time his deeper feeling did not say: ‘Not that,’ and he rose and began to verify this new thought. ‘This is it! This! So it is!’ he said to himself in ecstasy, looking at all the phenomena of life in the light of this newly-discovered and as it seemed to him perfectly novel truth, which displaced his former convictions. ‘What rubbish is all I knew and loved and believed in,’ he said to himself. ‘Love, self-denial – that is the only true happiness – a happiness independent of chance!’ and he smiled and flourished his arms. Applying this thought to all sides of life and finding it confirmed by life as well as by the inner voice which told him, ‘This is it,’ he experienced a new sensation of joyful agitation and delight. ‘And so, to be happy I must do good,’ he thought, and his whole future presented itself to him no longer in the abstract, but in vivid pictures of a landed proprietor’s life.

He saw before him an immense field of action for his whole life, which he would devote to well-doing and in which consequently he would be happy. There was no need to search for a sphere of activity: it lay ready before him; he had a direct duty – he owned serfs.… And what a joyful and grateful task lay before him! ‘To influence this simple, receptive, unperverted class of people; to save them from poverty, give them a sufficiency, transmit to them an education which fortunately I possess, to reform their vices arising from ignorance and superstition, to develop their morality, to make them love the right.… What a brilliant, happy future! And I, who do it all for my own happiness, shall in return enjoy their gratitude, and see myself advancing day by day further and further towards the appointed aim. A marvellous future! How could I have failed to see it before?

‘And besides all that,’ he thought at the same time, ‘what prevents my being happy in the love of a woman, in the joys of family life?’ And his youthful imagination painted a still more enchanting future. ‘I and my wife, whom I love as no one ever before loved anyone in the world, will always live amid this peaceful poetic nature, with our children and perhaps with my old aunt. We have our mutual love, our love for our children, and we both know that our aim is to do good. We help each other to move towards that goal. I shall make general arrangements, give general and just assistance, carry on the farm, a savings-bank and workshops, while she, with her pretty little head, wearing a simple white dress which she lifts above her dainty foot, walks through the mud to the peasant school, to the infirmary, to some unfortunate peasant who strictly speaking does not deserve aid, and everywhere brings consolation and help. The children, the old men, and the old women, adore her and look on her as an angel – as Providence. Then she returns, and conceals from me the fact that she has been to see the unfortunate peasant and given him some money; but I know it all and embrace her tightly, and firmly and tenderly kiss her lovely eyes, her shyly blushing cheeks, and her smiling rosy lips.’

Chapter XIX

‘WHERE are those dreams?’ thought the young man now as he neared his house after his visits. ‘For more than a year I have been seeking happiness in that way, and what have I found? It is true I sometimes feel that I have a right to be satisfied with myself, but it is a dry, reasoning sort of satisfaction. No, that is not true, I am simply dissatisfied with myself! I am dissatisfied because I do not find happiness here, and I long for happiness so passionately. I have not only experienced no enjoyment, I have cut myself off from all that gives it. Why? What for? Who is the better for it? My aunt was right when she wrote that it is easier to find happiness for oneself than to give it to others. Have my peasants grown richer? Are they more educated or morally more developed? Not at all! They are no better off, and it grows harder for me every day. If I saw my plans succeeding, or met with any gratitude … but no, I see a false routine, vice, suspicion, helplessness. I am wasting the best years of my life in vain,’ he thought, and remembered that he had heard from his nurse that his neighbours called him a whipper-snapper; that he had no money left in the counting-house, that his newly-introduced threshing machine, to the general amusement of the peasants, had only whistled and had not threshed anything when for the first time it was started at the threshing-floor before a large audience; and that he had to expect officials from the Land Court any day to take an inventory of his estate because, tempted by different new undertakings, he had let the payments on his mortgage lapse. And suddenly, as vividly as the walk in the forest and the dream of a landlord’s life had presented themselves to his mind before, so now did his little room in Moscow, where as a student he had sat late at night, by the light of one candle, with his beloved sixteen-year-old friend and comrade. They had read and repeated some dry notes on civic law for five hours on end, and having finished them had sent for supper and gone shares in the price of a bottle of champagne, and discussed the future awaiting them. How very different the future had appeared to the young student! Then it had been full of enjoyment, of varied activities, of brilliant success, and indubitably led them both to what then seemed the greatest blessing in the world – fame!

‘He is already getting on, rapidly getting on, along that road,’ thought Nekhlyúdov of his friend, ‘while I …’

But by this time he was already approaching the porch of his house, where ten or more peasant- and domestic-serfs stood awaiting him with various requests, and his dreams were replaced by realities.

There was a tattered, dishevelled, blood-stained peasant woman who complained with tears that her father-in-law wanted to kill her: there were two brothers, who for two years had been quarrelling about the division of a peasant farm between them, and now stood gazing at one another with desperate hatred: and there was an unshaven grey-headed domestic serf, with hands trembling from drunkenness, whom his son, the gardener, had brought to the master with a complaint of his depraved conduct: there was a peasant who had turned his wife out of the house because she had not worked all spring: and there was his wife, a sick woman who did not speak, but sat on the grass near the entrance, sobbing and showing an inflamed and swollen leg roughly bandaged with dirty rags.…

Nekhlyúdov listened to all the petitions and complaints, and having given advice to some, settled the disputes of others, and made promises to yet others, went to his room with a mixed feeling of weariness, shame, helplessness, and remorse.

Chapter XX

IN the room occupied by Nekhlyúdov – which was not a large one – there was an old leather couch studded with brass nails, several arm-chairs of a similar kind, an old-fashioned carved and inlaid card-table with a brass rim, which stood open and on which were some papers, and an open, old-fashioned English grand piano with a yellowish case and worn and warped narrow keys. Between the windows hung a large mirror in an old gilt carved frame. On the floor beside the table lay bundles of papers, books, and accounts. In general the whole room had a disorderly and characterless appearance, and this air of untidy occupancy formed a sharp contrast to the stiff, old-fashioned aristocratic arrangement of the other rooms of the large house.

On entering the room Nekhlyúdov angrily flung his hat on the table and sat down on a chair before the piano, crossing his legs and hanging his head.

‘Will you have lunch, your Excellence?’ asked a tall, thin, wrinkled old woman who entered the room in a cap, a print dress, and a large shawl.

Nekhlyúdov turned to look at her and was silent for a moment as if considering something.

‘No, I don’t want any, nurse,’ he said, and again sank into thought.

The old nurse shook her head at him with vexation, and sighed.

‘Eh, Dmítri Nikoláevich, why are you moping? There are worse troubles! It will pass – be sure it will …’

‘But I’m not moping. What has put that into your head, Malánya Finogénovna?’ replied Nekhlyúdov trying to smile.

‘How can you help moping – don’t I see?’ the old nurse retorted warmly. ‘All alone the whole day long. And you take everything so to heart and see to everything yourself – and now you hardly eat anything. Is it reasonable? If only you went to town or visited your neighbours, but who ever saw the likes of this? You are young to trouble so about everything.… Excuse me, master, I’ll sit down,’ she continued, taking a chair near the door. ‘Why, you’ve been so indulgent with them that they’re not afraid of anyone. Does a master behave like that? There is nothing good in it; you only ruin yourself and let the people get spoilt. Our people are like that: they don’t understand it – really they don’t. You might at least go to see your aunt. What she wrote was true.…’ she ended admonishingly.

Nekhlyúdov grew more and more dejected. He wearily touched the keys with his right hand, his elbow resting on his knee. Some sort of chord resulted, then another, and another.… He drew up his chair, took his other hand out of his pocket and began to play. The chords he struck were sometimes unprepared and not even quite correct; they were often trivial and commonplace, and did not indicate that he had any musical talent, but this occupation gave him a kind of indefinite, melancholy pleasure. At every change of harmony he waited with bated breath to see how it would resolve itself, and when a fresh harmony resulted his imagination vaguely supplied what was lacking. It seemed to him that he heard hundreds of melodies: a chorus and an orchestra in conformity with his harmony. What chiefly gave him pleasure was the intensified activity of his imagination which incoherently and fragmentarily, but with amazing clearness, presented him with the most varied, confused, and absurd pictures and images of the past and the future. Now it was the plump figure of White David responding to torment and privation with patience and submission: he saw his round shoulders, his immense hands covered with white hair, and his white lashes fluttering timidly at the sight of his mother’s brown sinewy fist. Then he saw his self-confident wet-nurse, emboldened by residence at the master’s house, and he imagined her for some reason going about the village and preaching to the serfs that they should hide their money from the landlord, and he unconsciously repeated to himself: ‘Yes, one must hide one’s money from the landlord.’ Then suddenly the small brown head of his future wife – for some reason in tears – presented itself to him, resting on his shoulder. Then he saw Chúris’s kindly blue eyes looking tenderly at his pot-bellied little son. ‘Yes, he sees in him not only a son, but a helper and deliverer. That is love!’ whispered Nekhlyúdov to himself. Then he remembered Epifán’s mother and the patient, all-forgiving expression he had noticed on her aged face in spite of her one protruding tooth and ugly features. ‘Probably I am the first person in the whole seventy years of her life to notice that,’ he thought, and whispering, ‘Strange!’ he unconsciously continued to touch the keys and listen to the sounds they produced. Then he vividly recalled his flight from the apiary and the expression on Ignát’s and Karp’s faces when they obviously wanted to laugh but pretended not to see him. He blushed, and involuntarily looked round at his nurse, who was still sitting silently by the door gazing intently at him and occasionally shaking her grey head. Then suddenly he seemed to see three sweating horses, and Ilyá’s fine powerful figure with his fair curls, his merrily beaming narrow blue eyes, his fresh ruddy cheeks, and the light-coloured down just beginning to appear on his lips and chin. He remembered how afraid Ilyá had been that he would not be allowed to go carting, and how warmly he had pleaded for that favourite job; and he suddenly saw a grey, misty early morning, a slippery highway and a long row of three-horsed carts, loaded high and covered by bast-matting marked with big black lettering. The strong-limbed, well-fed horses, bending their backs, tugging at the traces and jingling their bells, pull evenly uphill, tenaciously gripping the slippery road with their rough-shod hoofs. Rapidly descending the hill a mail-coach gallops towards the train of loaded carts, jingling its bells which re-echo far into the depth of the forest that extends along both sides of the road.

‘Hey, hey, hey!’ shouts the driver of the first cart in a boyish voice. He has a brass number-plate on his felt hat and flourishes his whip above his head.

Karp, with his red beard and gloomy looks, strides heavily in his huge boots beside the front wheel of the first cart. From the second cart Ilyá thrusts his handsome head out from under a piece of matting where he has been getting pleasantly warm in the early sunlight. Three tróykas loaded with boxes dash by with rattling wheels, jingling bells, and shouts. Ilyá again hides his handsome head under the matting and drops asleep. And now it is evening, clear and warm. The boarded gates open with a creak for the weary tróykas crowded together in the station yard, and one after another the high, mat-covered carts jolt over the board that lies in the gateway and come to rest under the roomy penthouse. Ilyá gaily exchanges greetings with the fair-faced, broad-bosomed hostess, who asks, ‘Have you come far? And how many of you will want supper?’ and with her bright kindly eyes looks with pleasure at the handsome lad. Now having seen to his horses he goes into the hot crowded house, crosses himself, sits down before a full wooden bowl, and chats merrily with the landlady and his comrades. And here, under the penthouse, is his place for the night, where the open starry sky is visible and where he will lie on the scented hay near the horses, which changing from foot to foot and snorting pick out the fodder from the wooden mangers. He goes up to the hay, turns to the east and, crossing his broad powerful chest some thirty times and shaking back his fair curls, repeats ‘Our Father’ and ‘Lord have mercy!’ some twenty times, covers himself head and all with his coat, and falls into the healthy careless sleep of strong young manhood. And now he dreams of the towns: Kiev with its saints and throngs of pilgrims, Rómen with its traders and merchandise, Odessa and the distant blue sea with its white sails, and Tsar-grad⁸ with its golden houses and white-breasted, dark-browed Turkish women – and thither he flies lifted on invisible wings. He flies freely and easily further and further, and sees below him golden cities bathed in bright radiance, and the blue sky with its many stars, and the blue sea with its white sails, and it is gladsome and gay to fly on further and further.…

‘Splendid!’ Nekhlyúdov whispered to himself, and the thought came to him: ‘Why am I not Ilyá?’

¹Two kopéks were about a halfpenny.

² Under serfdom a man and his wife had to work some days each week for the owner, and they were reckoned as one unit.

³ The proprietors had to send a certain proportion of their serfs to serve in the army, but they had to be fit men with sound teeth.

⁴ As to the desirability of flogging the peasants.

⁵ The feast of St Peter and St Paul is June 9th, o.s.

⁶ October 1st, o.s.

⁷ A desyatín is nearly two and three-quarter acres.

⁸ Constantinople.