Anna Karenina
the hay had been bought by the peasants for twenty roubles the three
acres. When Levin took over the management of the estate, he thought on
examining the grasslands that they were worth more, and he fixed the
price at twenty-five roubles the three acres. The peasants would not
give that price, and, as Levin suspected, kept off other purchasers.
Then Levin had driven over himself, and arranged to have the grass cut,
partly by hired labor, partly at a payment of a certain proportion of
the crop. His own peasants put every hindrance they could in the way of
this new arrangement, but it was carried out, and the first year the
meadows had yielded a profit almost double. The previous year—which was
the third year—the peasants had maintained the same opposition to the
arrangement, and the hay had been cut on the same system. This year the
peasants were doing all the mowing for a third of the hay crop, and the
village elder had come now to announce that the hay had been cut, and
that, fearing rain, they had invited the counting-house clerk over, had
divided the crop in his presence, and had raked together eleven stacks
as the owner’s share. From the vague answers to his question how much
hay had been cut on the principal meadow, from the hurry of the village
elder who had made the division, not asking leave, from the whole tone
of the peasant, Levin perceived that there was something wrong in the
division of the hay, and made up his mind to drive over himself to look
into the matter.
Arriving for dinner at the village, and leaving his horse at the
cottage of an old friend of his, the husband of his brother’s
wet-nurse, Levin went to see the old man in his bee-house, wanting to
find out from him the truth about the hay. Parmenitch, a talkative,
comely old man, gave Levin a very warm welcome, showed him all he was
doing, told him everything about his bees and the swarms of that year;
but gave vague and unwilling answers to Levin’s inquiries about the
mowing. This confirmed Levin still more in his suspicions. He went to
the hay fields and examined the stacks. The haystacks could not
possibly contain fifty wagon-loads each, and to convict the peasants
Levin ordered the wagons that had carried the hay to be brought up
directly, to lift one stack, and carry it into the barn. There turned
out to be only thirty-two loads in the stack. In spite of the village
elder’s assertions about the compressibility of hay, and its having
settled down in the stacks, and his swearing that everything had been
done in the fear of God, Levin stuck to his point that the hay had been
divided without his orders, and that, therefore, he would not accept
that hay as fifty loads to a stack. After a prolonged dispute the
matter was decided by the peasants taking these eleven stacks,
reckoning them as fifty loads each. The arguments and the division of
the haycocks lasted the whole afternoon. When the last of the hay had
been divided, Levin, intrusting the superintendence of the rest to the
counting-house clerk, sat down on a haycock marked off by a stake of
willow, and looked admiringly at the meadow swarming with peasants.
In front of him, in the bend of the river beyond the marsh, moved a
bright-colored line of peasant women, and the scattered hay was being
rapidly formed into gray winding rows over the pale green stubble.
After the women came the men with pitchforks, and from the gray rows
there were growing up broad, high, soft haycocks. To the left, carts
were rumbling over the meadow that had been already cleared, and one
after another the haycocks vanished, flung up in huge forkfuls, and in
their place there were rising heavy cartloads of fragrant hay hanging
over the horses’ hind-quarters.
“What weather for haying! What hay it’ll be!” said an old man,
squatting down beside Levin. “It’s tea, not hay! It’s like scattering
grain to the ducks, the way they pick it up!” he added, pointing to the
growing haycocks. “Since dinner time they’ve carried a good half of
it.”
“The last load, eh?” he shouted to a young peasant, who drove by,
standing in the front of an empty cart, shaking the cord reins.
“The last, dad!” the lad shouted back, pulling in the horse, and,
smiling, he looked round at a bright, rosy-cheeked peasant girl who sat
in the cart smiling too, and drove on.
“Who’s that? Your son?” asked Levin.
“My baby,” said the old man with a tender smile.
“What a fine fellow!”
“The lad’s all right.”
“Married already?”
“Yes, it’s two years last St. Philip’s day.”
“Any children?”
“Children indeed! Why, for over a year he was innocent as a babe
himself, and bashful too,” answered the old man. “Well, the hay! It’s
as fragrant as tea!” he repeated, wishing to change the subject.
Levin looked more attentively at Ivan Parmenov and his wife. They were
loading a haycock onto the cart not far from him. Ivan Parmenov was
standing on the cart, taking, laying in place, and stamping down the
huge bundles of hay, which his pretty young wife deftly handed up to
him, at first in armfuls, and then on the pitchfork. The young wife
worked easily, merrily, and dexterously. The close-packed hay did not
once break away off her fork. First she gathered it together, stuck the
fork into it, then with a rapid, supple movement leaned the whole
weight of her body on it, and at once with a bend of her back under the
red belt she drew herself up, and arching her full bosom under the
white smock, with a smart turn swung the fork in her arms, and flung
the bundle of hay high onto the cart. Ivan, obviously doing his best to
save her every minute of unnecessary labor, made haste, opening his
arms to clutch the bundle and lay it in the cart. As she raked together
what was left of the hay, the young wife shook off the bits of hay that
had fallen on her neck, and straightening the red kerchief that had
dropped forward over her white brow, not browned like her face by the
sun, she crept under the cart to tie up the load. Ivan directed her how
to fasten the cord to the cross-piece, and at something she said he
laughed aloud. In the expressions of both faces was to be seen
vigorous, young, freshly awakened love.
Chapter 12
The load was tied on. Ivan jumped down and took the quiet, sleek horse
by the bridle. The young wife flung the rake up on the load, and with a
bold step, swinging her arms, she went to join the women, who were
forming a ring for the haymakers’ dance. Ivan drove off to the road and
fell into line with the other loaded carts. The peasant women, with
their rakes on their shoulders, gay with bright flowers, and chattering
with ringing, merry voices, walked behind the hay cart. One wild
untrained female voice broke into a song, and sang it alone through a
verse, and then the same verse was taken up and repeated by half a
hundred strong healthy voices, of all sorts, coarse and fine, singing
in unison.
The women, all singing, began to come close to Levin, and he felt as
though a storm were swooping down upon him with a thunder of merriment.
The storm swooped down, enveloped him and the haycock on which he was
lying, and the other haycocks, and the wagon-loads, and the whole
meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing to the
measures of this wild merry song with its shouts and whistles and
clapping. Levin felt envious of this health and mirthfulness; he longed
to take part in the expression of this joy of life. But he could do
nothing, and had to lie and look on and listen. When the peasants, with
their singing, had vanished out of sight and hearing, a weary feeling
of despondency at his own isolation, his physical inactivity, his
alienation from this world, came over Levin.
Some of the very peasants who had been most active in wrangling with
him over the hay, some whom he had treated with contumely, and who had
tried to cheat him, those very peasants had greeted him good-humoredly,
and evidently had not, were incapable of having any feeling of rancor
against him, any regret, any recollection even of having tried to
deceive him. All that was drowned in a sea of merry common labor. God
gave the day, God gave the strength. And the day and the strength were
consecrated to labor, and that labor was its own reward. For whom the
labor? What would be its fruits? These were idle considerations—beside
the point.
Often Levin had admired this life, often he had a sense of envy of the
men who led this life; but today for the first time, especially under
the influence of what he had seen in the attitude of Ivan Parmenov to
his young wife, the idea presented itself definitely to his mind that
it was in his power to exchange the dreary, artificial, idle, and
individualistic life he was leading for this laborious, pure, and
socially delightful life.
The old man who had been sitting beside him had long ago gone home; the
people had all separated. Those who lived near had gone home, while
those who came from far were gathered into a group for supper, and to
spend the night in the meadow. Levin, unobserved by the peasants, still
lay on the haycock, and still looked on and listened and mused. The
peasants who remained for the night in the meadow scarcely slept all
the short summer night. At first there was the sound of merry talk and
laughing all together over the supper, then singing again and laughter.
All the long day of toil had left no trace in them but lightness of
heart. Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard
but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh, and
the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before the
morning. Rousing himself, Levin got up from the haycock, and looking at
the stars, he saw that the night was over.
“Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?” he said to
himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings he
had passed through in that brief night. All the thoughts and feelings
he had passed through fell into three separate trains of thought. One
was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education.
This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was easy and simple.
Another series of thoughts and mental images related to the life he
longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life
he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content,
the peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably
conscious. But a third series of ideas turned upon the question how to
effect this transition from the old life to the new. And there nothing
took clear shape for him. “Have a wife? Have work and the necessity of
work? Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land? Become a member of a peasant
community? Marry a peasant girl? How am I to set about it?” he asked
himself again, and could not find an answer. “I haven’t slept all
night, though, and I can’t think it out clearly,” he said to himself.
“I’ll work it out later. One thing’s certain, this night has decided my
fate. All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing,”
he told himself. “It’s all ever so much simpler and better....”
“How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange, as it were,
mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right over his
head in the middle of the sky. “How exquisite it all is in this
exquisite night! And when was there time for that cloud-shell to form?
Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it—only two
white streaks. Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!”
He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad towards the
village. A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and sullen. The
gloomy moment had come that usually precedes the dawn, the full triumph
of light over darkness.