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Chapter 11.
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 everyone 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
thrashing floor 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 today or tomorrow 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 skillful, 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?”