________________________________________________
_ The day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of
Levin's most painful days. It was the very busiest working-time,
when all the peasantry show an extraordinary intensity of
self-sacrifice in labor, such as is never shown in any other
conditions of life, and would be highly esteemed if the men who
showed these qualities themselves thought highly of them, and if
it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this
intense labor were not so simple.
To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the
meadows, turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the
winter corn--all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to
succeed in getting through it all every one in the village, from
the old man to the young child, must toil incessantly for three
or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on rye-beer,
onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the sheaves at
night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the
twenty-four to sleep. And every year this is done all over
Russia.
Having lived the greater part of his life in the country and in
the closest relations with the peasants, Levin always felt in
this busy time that he was infected by this general quickening of
energy in the people.
In the early morning he rode over to the first sowing of the rye,
and to the oats, which were being carried to the stacks, and
returning home at the time his wife and sister-in-law were
getting up, he drank coffee with them and walked to the farm,
where a new thrashing-machine was to be set working to get ready
the seed-corn.
He was standing in the cool granary, still fragrant with the
leaves of the hazel branches interlaced on the freshly peeled
aspen beams of the new thatch roof. He gazed through the open
door in which the dry bitter dust of the thrashing whirled and
played, at the grass of the thrashingfloor in the sunlight and
the fresh straw that had been brought in from the barn, then at
the speckly-headed, white-breasted swallows that flew chirping in
under the roof and, fluttering their wings, settled in the
crevices of the doorway, then at the peasants bustling in the
dark, dusty barn, and he thought strange thoughts.
"Why is it all being done?" he thought. "Why am I standing here,
making them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show
their zeal before me? What is that old Matrona, my old friend,
toiling for? (I doctored her, when the beam fell on her in the
fire)" he thought, looking at a thin old woman who was raking up
the grain, moving painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet
over the uneven, rough floor. "Then she recovered, but to-day or
to-morrow or in ten years she won't; they'll bury her, and
nothing will be left either of her or of that smart girl in the
red jacket, who with that skilful, soft action shakes the ears
out of their husks. They'll bury her and this piebald horse, and
very soon too," he thought, gazing at the heavily moving, panting
horse that kept walking up the wheel that turned under him. "And
they will bury her and Fyodor the thrasher with his curly beard
full of chaff and his shirt torn on his white shoulders--they
will bury him. He's untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and
shouting to the women, and quickly setting straight the strap on
the moving wheel. And what's more, it's not them alone--me
they'll bury too, and nothing will be left. What for?"
He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to
reckon how much they thrashed in an hour. He wanted to know this
so as to judge by it the task to set for the day.
"It'll soon be one, and they're only beginning the third sheaf,"
thought Levin. He went up to the man that was feeding the
machine, and shouting over the roar of the machine he told him to
put it in more slowly. "You put in too much at a time, Fyodor. Do
you see--it gets choked, that's why it isn't getting on. Do it
evenly."
Fyodor, black with the dust that clung to his moist face, shouted
something in response, but still went on doing it as Levin did
not want him to.
Levin, going up to the machine, moved Fyodor aside, and began
feeding the corn in himself. Working on till the peasants'
dinner-hour, which was not long in coming, he went out of the
barn with Fyodor and fell into talk with him, stopping beside a
neat yellow sheaf of rye laid on the thrashing-floor for seed.
Fyodor came from a village at some distance from the one in which
Levin had once allotted land to his cooperative association. Now
it had been let to a former house-porter.
Levin talked to Fyodor about this land and asked whether Platon,
a well-to-do peasant of good character belonging to the same
village, would not take the land for the coming year.
"It's a high rent; it wouldn't pay Platon, Konstantin
Dmitrievitch," answered the peasant, picking the ears off his
sweat-drenched shirt.
"But how does Kirillov make it pay?"
"Mituh!" (so the peasant called the house-porter, in a tone of
contempt), "you may be sure he'll make it pay, Konstantin
Dmitrievitch! He'll get his share, however he has to squeeze to
get ill He's no mercy on a Christian. But Uncle Fokanitch" (so he
called the old peasant Platon), "do you suppose he'd flay the
skin off a many Where there's debt, he'll let any one off. And
he'll not wring the last penny out. He's a man too."
"But why will he let any one off?"
"Oh, well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for his
own wants and nothing else, like Mituh, he only thinks of filling
his belly, but Fokanitch is a righteous man. He lives for his
soul. He does not forget God."
"How thinks of God? How does he live for his soul?" Levin almost
shouted.
"Why, to be sure, in truth, in God's way. Folks are different.
Take you now, you wouldn't wrong a man...."
"Yes, yes, good-bye!" said Levin, breathless with excitement, and
turning round he took his stick and walked quickly away towards
home. At the peasant's words that Fokanitch lived for his soul,
in truth, in God's way, undefined but significant ideas seemed to
burst out as though they had been locked up, and all striving
towards one goal, they thronged whirling through his head,
blinding him with their light. _
Read next: Part Eight: Chapter 12
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