Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Three/Chapter 25
CHAPTER XXV
In the district of Surof there were neither railways nor post-roads; and Levin took his own horses, and went in a tarantas or traveling-carriage.
When he was halfway, he stopped to get a meal at the house of a rich muzhik. The host, who was a bald, robust old man, with a great red beard, growing gray on the cheeks, opened the gate, crowding up against the post to let the troika enter. Pointing the coachman to a place under the shed in his large, neat, and orderly new courtyard, with charred sokhas or wooden-plows, the old man invited Levin to enter the room. A neatly clad young girl, with galoshes on her bare feet, stooping down, was washing up the floor in the new entry. When she saw Levin's dog, she was startled, and screamed, but immediately laughed at her own terror when she found that the dog would not bite. With her bare arm she pointed Levin to the living-room, then stooping down again, she hid her handsome face, and continued her scrubbing.
"Will you have the samovar?" she asked.
"Yes, please."
The living-room was large, with a Dutch stove and a partition. Under the sacred images stood a table ornamented with colored designs, a bench, and two chairs. Near the doorway was a cupboard with dishes. The window-shutters were closed; there were few flies; and it was so neat that Levin took care that Laska, who had been flying over the road, and was covered with splashes of mud, should not soil the floor, and bade her lie down in the corner near the door. After glancing into the living-room. Levin went to the back of the house. A good-looking girl in galoshes, swinging her empty pails on the yoke, ran to get him water from the well.
"Lively there," gayly shouted the old man to her; and then he turned to Levin. "So, sir, you are going to see Nikolaï Ivanovitch Sviazhsky? He often stops with us," he began to say in his garrulous style, as he leaned on the balustrade of the steps. But just as he was in the midst of telling about his acquaintance with Sviazhsky, again the gate creaked on its hinges, and the workmen came in from the fields with their harrows and wooden-plows. The horses attached to them were fat and in good condition. The laborers evidently belonged to the family: two were young fellows, and wore colored cotton shirts, and caps. The other two were hired men, and wore shabby shirts: one was an old man, the other middle-aged.
The old peasant, starting down from the porch, went to the horses and began to unharness them.
"Where have you been plowing?"
"In the potato-fields. We've finished with one. .... You, Fyodot, don't bring the gelding, but leave him at the trough; we'll harness another."
"Say, batyushka, shall I tell 'em to take out the plow-shares, or to bring 'em?" asked a big-framed, healthy-looking lad,evidently the old peasant's son.
"Put 'em in the drags," replied the old man, coiling up the reins and throwing them on the ground. "Put things in order; then we'11 have dinner."
The handsome girl in galoshes came back to the house with her brimming pails swinging from her shoulders. Other women appeared from different quarters,—some young and comely, others old and ugly, with children and without children.
The samovar began to sing on the stove. The workmen and the men of the household, having taken out their horses, came in to dinner. Levin, sending for his provisions from the tarantas, begged the old peasant to take tea with him.
"Well, I have already drunk my tea," said the old peasant, evidently flattered by the invitation. "However, for company's sake...."
At tea Levin learned the whole history of the old man's domestic economy. Ten years before, he had rented of a lady one hundred and twenty desyatins, and the year before had bought them; and he had rented three hundred more of a neighboring landowner. A small portion of this land, and that the poorest, he sublet; but forty desyatins he himself worked, with the help of his sons and two hired men. The old peasant complained that all was going bad; but Levin saw that he complained only for form's sake, and that his affairs were flourishing. If they had been bad he would not have bought land for five hundred rubles, or married off his three sons and his nephew, or built twice after his izba was burned, and each time better. Notwithstanding the old peasant's complaints, it was evident that he felt pride in his prosperity, pride in his sons, in his nephew, his daughters, his horses, his cows, and especially in the fact that he owned all this domain.
From his conversation with the old man. Levin learned that he believed in modern improvements. He planted many potatoes; and his potatoes, which Levin saw in the storehouse, he had already dug and brought in, while on Levin's estate they had only begun to dig them. He used the "ploog" on the potato-fields, as he called the plow which he got from the proprietor. He sowed wheat. The little detail that the old peasant sowed rye, and fed his horses with it, especially struck Levin. How many times Levin, seeing this beautiful fodder going to waste on his own estate, had wished to harvest it; but he found it impossible to accomplish it. The muzhik used it, and could not find sufficient praise for it.
"How do the women do it?"
"Oh! they pile it up on one side, and then the cart comes for it."
"But with us proprietors everything goes wrong with the hired men," said Levin, filling his teacup and offering it to him.
"Thank you," replied the old man, taking the cup, but refusing the sugar, pointing to the lumps which lay in front of him.
"How can you get along with hired men?" said he. "It is ruinous. Here's Sviazhsky, for example. We know what splendid land.... but they don't get decent crops, all from lack of care."
"Yes; but how do you do with your workmen?"
"It's all among ourselves. We watch everything. Lazybones, off they go! We work with our own hands."
"Batyushka, Finogen wants you to give him the tar-water," said the woman in galoshes, looking in through the door.
"So it is, sir," said the old man, rising; and, having crossed himself many times before the ikons or sacred pictures, he once more thanked Levin, and left the room.
When Levin went into the dark izba to give orders to his coachman, he found all the "men-folks" sitting down to dinner. The peasant women were on their feet helping. The healthy-looking young son, with his mouth full of kasha- gruel, got off some joke, and all broke into loud guffaws; and more hilariously than the others laughed the woman in galoshes, who was pouring shchi, or cabbage soup, into a cup.
It well might be that the jolly face of the woman in the galoshes cooperated powerfully with the whole impression of orderliness which this peasant home produced on Levin; but the impression was so strong that Levin could never get rid of it; and all the way from the old man's to Sviazhsky's, again and again he thought of what he had seen at the farm-house as something deserving special attention.