Resurrection - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (interesting novels in english .TXT) 📗

thought his

offer would be accepted with pleasure, but no signs of pleasure

were visible.

 

One thing only showed Nekhludoff that his offer was a profitable

one to the peasants. The question as to who would rent the land,

the whole commune or a special society, was put, and a violent

dispute arose among those peasants who were in favour of

excluding the weak and those not likely to pay the rent

regularly, and the peasants who would have to be excluded on that

score. At last, thanks to the steward, the amount and the terms

of the rent were fixed, and the peasants went down the hill

towards their villages, talking noisily, while Nekhludoff and the

steward went into the office to make up the agreement. Everything

was settled in the way Nekhludoff wished and expected it to be.

The peasants had their land 30 per cent. cheaper than they could

have got it anywhere in the district, the revenue from the land

was diminished by half, but was more than sufficient for

Nekhludoff, especially as there would be money coming in for a

forest he sold, as well as for the agricultural implements, which

would be sold, too. Everything seemed excellently arranged, yet

he felt ashamed of something. He could see that the peasants,

though they spoke words of thanks, were not satisfied, and had

expected something greater. So it turned out that he had deprived

himself of a great deal, and yet not done what the peasants had

expected.

 

The next day the agreement was signed, and accompanied by several

old peasants, who had been chosen as deputies, Nekhludoff went

out, got into the steward’s elegant equipage (as the driver from

the station had called it), said “goodbye” to the peasants, who

stood shaking their heads in a dissatisfied and disappointed

manner, and drove off to the station. Nekhludoff was dissatisfied

with himself without knowing why, but all the time he felt sad

and ashamed of something.

 

CHAPTER III.

 

OLD ASSOCIATIONS.

 

From Kousminski Nekhludoff went to the estate he had inherited

from his aunts, the same where he first met Katusha. He meant to

arrange about the land there in the way he had done in

Kousminski. Besides this, he wished to find out all he could

about Katusha and her baby, and when and how it had died. He got

to Panovo early one morning, and the first thing that struck him

when he drove up was the look of decay and dilapidation that all

the buildings bore, especially the house itself. The iron roofs,

which had once been painted green, looked red with rust, and a

few sheets of iron were bent back, probably by a storm. Some of

the planks which covered the house from outside were torn away in

several places; these were easier to get by breaking the rusty

nails that held them. Both porches, but especially the side porch

he remembered so well, were rotten and broken; only the banister

remained. Some of the windows were boarded up, and the building

in which the foreman lived, the kitchen, the stables—all were

grey and decaying. Only the garden had not decayed, but had

grown, and was in full bloom; from over the fence the cherry,

apple, and plum trees looked like white clouds. The lilac bushes

that formed the hedge were in full bloom, as they had been when,

14 years ago, Nekhludoff had played gorelki with the 15-year-old

Katusha, and had fallen and got his hand stung by the nettles

behind one of those lilac bushes. The larch that his aunt Sophia

had planted near the house, which then was only a short stick,

had grown into a tree, the trunk of which would have made a beam,

and its branches were covered with soft yellow green needles as

with down. The river, now within its banks, rushed noisily over

the mill dam. The meadow the other side of the river was dotted

over by the peasants’ mixed herds. The foreman, a student, who

had left the seminary without finishing the course, met

Nekhludoff in the yard, with a smile on his face, and, still

smiling, asked him to come into the office, and, as if promising

something exceptionally good by this smile, he went behind a

partition. For a moment some whispering was heard behind the

partition. The isvostchik who had driven Nekhludoff from the

station, drove away after receiving a tip, and all was silent.

Then a barefooted girl passed the window; she had on an

embroidered peasant blouse, and long earrings in her ears; then a

man walked past, clattering with his nailed boots on the trodden

path.

 

Nekhludoff sat down by the little casement, and looked out into

the garden and listened. A soft, fresh spring breeze, smelling of

newly-dug earth, streamed in through the window, playing with the

hair on his damp forehead and the papers that lay on the

windowsill, which was all cut about with a knife.

 

“Tra-pa-trop, tra-pa-trop,” comes a sound from the river, as the

women who were washing clothes there slapped them in regular

measure with their wooden bats, and the sound spread over the

glittering surface of the mill pond while the rhythmical sound of

the falling water came from the mill, and a frightened fly

suddenly flew loudly buzzing past his ear.

 

And all at once Nekhludoff remembered how, long ago, when he was

young and innocent, he had heard the women’s wooden bats slapping

the wet clothes above the rhythmical sound from the mill, and in

the same way the spring breeze had blown about the hair on his

wet forehead and the papers on the windowsill, which was all cut

about with a knife, and just in the same way a fly had buzzed

loudly past his car.

 

It was not exactly that he remembered himself as a lad of 15, but

he seemed to feel himself the same as he was then, with the same

freshness and purity, and full of the same grand possibilities

for the future, and at the same time, as it happens in a dream,

he knew that all this could be no more, and he felt terribly sad.

“At what time would you like something to eat?” asked the

foreman, with a smile.

 

“When you like; I am not hungry. I shall go for a walk through

the village.”

 

“Would you not like to come into the house? Everything is in

order there. Have the goodness to look in. If the outside–”

 

“Not now; later on. Tell me, please, have you got a woman here

called Matrona Kharina?” (This was Katusha’s aunt, the village

midwife.)

 

“Oh, yes; in the village she keeps a secret pot-house. I know she

does, and I accuse her of it and scold her; but as to taking her

up, it would be a pity. An old woman, you know; she has

grandchildren,” said the foreman, continuing to smile in the same

manner, partly wishing to be pleasant to the master, and partly

because he was convinced that Nekhludoff understood all these

matters just as well as he did himself.

 

“Where does she live? I shall go across and see her.”

 

“At the end of the village; the further side, the third from the

end. To the left there is a brick cottage, and her hut is beyond

that. But I’d better see you there,” the foreman said with a

graceful smile.

 

“No, thanks, I shall find it; and you be so good as to call a

meeting of the peasants, and tell them that I want to speak to

them about the land,” said Nekhludoff, with the intention of

coming to the same agreement with the peasants here as he had

done in Kousminski, and, if possible, that same evening.

 

CHAPTER IV.

 

THE PEASANTS’ LOT.

 

When Nekhludoff came out of the gate he met the girl with the

long earrings on the well-trodden path that lay across the

pasture ground, overgrown with dock and plantain leaves. She had

a long, brightly-coloured apron on, and was quickly swinging her

left arm in front of herself as she stepped briskly with her fat,

bare feet. With her right arm she was pressing a fowl to her

stomach. The fowl, with red comb shaking, seemed perfectly calm;

he only rolled up his eyes and stretched out and drew in one

black leg, clawing the girl’s apron. When the girl came nearer to

“the master,” she began moving more slowly, and her run changed

into a walk. When she came up to him she stopped, and, after a

backward jerk with her head, bowed to him; and only when he had

passed did she recommence to run homeward with the cock. As he

went down towards the well, he met an old woman, who had a coarse

dirty blouse on, carrying two pails full of water, that hung on a

yoke across her bent back. The old woman carefully put down the

pails and bowed, with the same backward jerk of her head.

 

After passing the well Nekhludoff entered the village. It was a

bright, hot day, and oppressive, though only ten o’clock. At

intervals the sun was hidden by the gathering clouds. An

unpleasant, sharp smell of manure filled the air in the street.

It came from carts going up the hillside, but chiefly from the

disturbed manure heaps in the yards of the huts, by the open

gates of which Nekhludoff had to pass. The peasants, barefooted,

their shirts and trousers soiled with manure, turned to look at

the tall, stout gentleman with the glossy silk ribbon on his grey

hat who was walking up the village street, touching the ground

every other step with a shiny, bright-knobbed walking-stick. The

peasants returning from the fields at a trot and jotting in their

empty carts, took off their hats, and, in their surprise,

followed with their eyes the extraordinary man who was walking up

their street. The women came out of the gates or stood in the

porches of their huts, pointing him out to each other and gazing

at him as he passed.

 

When Nekhludoff was passing the fourth gate, he was stopped by a

cart that was coming out, its wheels creaking, loaded high with

manure, which was pressed down, and was covered with a mat to sit

on. A six-year-old boy, excited by the prospect of a drive,

followed the cart. A young peasant, with shoes plaited out of

bark on his feet, led the horse out of the yard. A long-legged

colt jumped out of the gate; but, seeing Nekhludoff, pressed

close to the cart, and scraping its legs against the wheels,

jumped forward, past its excited, gently-neighing mother, as she

was dragging the heavy load through the gateway. The next horse

was led out by a barefooted old man, with protruding

shoulder-blades, in a dirty shirt and striped trousers.

 

When the horses got out on to the hard road, strewn over with

bits of dry, grey manure, the old man returned to the gate, and

bowed to Nekhludoff.

 

“You are our ladies’ nephew, aren’t you?”

 

“Yes, I am their nephew.”

 

“You’ve kindly come to look us up, eh?” said the garrulous old

man.

 

“Yes, I have. Well, how are you getting on?”

 

“How do we get on? We get on very badly,” the old man drawled, as

if it gave him pleasure.

 

“Why so badly?” Nekhludoff asked, stepping inside the gate.

 

“What is our life but the very worst life?” said the old man,

following Nekhludoff into that part of the yard which was roofed

over.

 

Nekhludoff stopped under the roof.

 

“I have got 12 of them there,” continued the old man, pointing to

two women on the remainder of the manure heap,