‘Where would they go?’
‘Well, that all depends,’ interposed Ilyá who had tied the horses under the penthouse and came up to his father. ‘The Kadmínski lads went to Rómen with eight tróykas and earned their keep and brought back about thirty rubles for each tróyka; or there’s Odessa where they say fodder is cheap.’
‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,’ said the master, turning to the old man and trying tactfully to introduce the question of farming. ‘Tell me, is it more profitable to go carting than to farm at home?’
‘Much more profitable, your Excellence,’ Ilyá again broke in, vigorously shaking back his hair. ‘At home we’ve no fodder for the horses.’
‘And how much will you earn in a summer?’
‘Well, after the spring – though fodder was dear – we carted goods to Kiev and loaded up grits for Moscow in Kursk, and kept ourselves, fed the horses well, and brought fifteen rubles home.’
‘There’s no harm in working at an honest job be it what it may,’ said the master, again addressing the old man, ‘but it seems to me that other work might be found. This carting work makes a young fellow go anywhere and see all sorts of people and he may get spoilt,’ he added, repeating Karp’s words.
‘What are we peasants to take up, if not carting?’ rejoined the old man, with a mild smile. ‘On a good carting job a man has enough to eat himself, and the horses have enough. As to getting spoilt, it’s not the first time the lads have been carting, and I used to go myself and got nothing bad from anyone – nothing but good.’
‘There’s plenty of work you could do at home: land, meadows …’
‘How could we, your Excellency?’ Ilyá interrupted with animation. ‘We are born to this, we know all about it, it’s suitable work for us: the pleasantest work for us, your Excellence, is carting.’
‘May we ask your Excellence to do us the honour to come to the hut? You have not been there since our house-warming,’ said the old man, bowing low and making a sign to his son. Ilyá raced into the hut and the old man followed with Nekhlyúdov.
Chapter XVII
ON entering the hut the old man bowed again, dusted the front bench with the skirt of his smock, and asked with a smile:
‘What may I offer your Excellency?’
The hut was clean and roomy, with sleeping places near the ceiling, and bunks. It also had a chimney. The fresh aspen logs, between which the moss-caulking could be seen, had not yet turned dark; the new benches and sleeping places had not yet worn smooth, and the earthen floor was not yet trodden hard. Ilyá’s wife, a thin young peasant woman with a dreamy oval face, sat on a bunk and rocked a cradle that hung by a long pole from the ceiling. In the cradle, breathing softly, lay an infant with eyes closed and outstretched limbs. Karp’s wife, a plump, red-cheeked woman, stood by the oven shredding onions over a wooden bowl, her sleeves turned up above her elbows, showing her hands and arms tanned to above her wrists. A pock-marked pregnant woman stood beside the oven hiding her face with her sleeve. It was hot in the hut, for besides the heat of the sun there was the heat of the oven, and there was a strong smell of freshly-baked bread. From the sleeping places aloft two fair-haired little boys and a girl, who had climbed up there while awaiting dinner, looked down with curiosity on the master.
The sight of this prosperity pleased Nekhlyúdov and yet he felt embarrassed in the presence of these women and children, who were all looking at him. He sat down on the bench, blushing.
‘Give me a bit of hot bread, I like it,’ he said, and flushed still more.
Karp’s wife cut off a big bit, and handed it to the master on a plate. Nekhlyúdov said nothing, not knowing what to say; the women were also silent, and the old man kept mildly smiling.
‘Really now, what am I ashamed of – just as if I had done something wrong?’ thought Nekhlyúdov. ‘Why shouldn’t I suggest their starting a farm? What stupidity …!’ Yet he still kept silent.
‘Well, sir, how about the lads? What are your orders?’ said the old man.
‘Well I should advise you not to let them go but to find them work here,’ Nekhlyúdov said, suddenly gaining courage. ‘Do you know what I have thought of for you? Join me in buying a grove in the State forest, and some land too.’
‘How could I, your Excellence? Where is the money to come from?’ the old man interrupted him.
‘Only a small grove, you know, for about two hundred rubles,’ Nekhlyúdov remarked.
The old man smiled grimly.
‘If I had the money, why not buy it?’ he said.
‘Have you no longer that amount?’ said the master reproachfully.
‘Oh sir, your Excellence!’ said the old man in a sorrowful voice, looking towards the door. ‘I have enough to do to keep the family. It’s not for us to buy groves.’
‘But you have the money, why should it lie idle?’ insisted Nekhlyúdov.
The old man suddenly became greatly agitated; his eyes glittered and his shoulders began to twitch.
‘Maybe evil persons have said it of me,’ he began in a trembling voice, ‘but believe me, I say before God,’ he went on, becoming more and more excited and turning towards the icon, ‘may my eyes burst, may I fall through the ground here, if I have anything but the fifteen rubles Ilyá brought home and even then I have the poll-tax to pay. You know yourself we have built the cottage …’
‘Well, all right, all right!’ said the master, rising. ‘Good-bye, friends.’
Chapter XVIII
‘MY God, my God!’ thought Nekhlyúdov as he walked home with big strides through the shady avenues of his neglected garden, absent-mindedly plucking twigs and leaves on his way. ‘Can it be that all my dreams of the aims and duties of my life are mere nonsense? When I planned this path of life I fancied that I should always experience the complete moral satisfaction I felt when the idea first occurred to me – so why do I now feel so depressed and sad and dissatisfied with myself?’ And he remembered with extraordinary vividness and distinctness that happy moment a year before.
He had got up very early that May morning, before anyone else in the house, feeling painfully agitated by the secret, unformulated impulses of youth, and had gone first into the garden and then into the forest, where he wandered about alone amid the vigorous, luscious, yet peaceful works of nature, suffering from an exuberance of vague feeling and finding no expression for it. With all the charm of the unknown his youthful imagination pictured to him the voluptuous form of a woman, and it seemed to him that here it was – the fulfilment of that unexpressed desire. But some other, deeper feeling told him: ‘Not that,’ and impelled him to seek something else. Then his inexperienced, ardent mind, rising higher and higher into realms of abstraction, discovered, as it seemed to him, the laws of being, and he dwelt on those thoughts with proud delight. But again a higher feeling told him: ‘Not that,’ and once more agitated him and forced him to continue his search. Empty of thought and feeling – a condition which always follows intensive activity – he lay on his back under a tree and began to gaze at the translucent morning clouds drifting across the limitless blue sky above him. Suddenly without any reason tears filled his eyes and, Heaven knows why, a definite thought to which he clung with delight entered his mind, filling his whole soul – the thought that love and goodness are truth and happiness – the only truth and the only happiness possible in the world. And this time his deeper feeling did not say: ‘Not that,’ and he rose and began to verify this new thought. ‘This is it! This! So it is!’ he said to himself in ecstasy, looking at all the phenomena of life in the light of this newly-discovered and as it seemed to him perfectly novel truth, which displaced his former convictions. ‘What rubbish is all I knew and loved and believed in,’ he said to himself. ‘Love, self-denial – that is the only true happiness – a happiness independent of chance!’ and he smiled and flourished his arms. Applying this thought to all sides of life and finding it confirmed by life as well as by the inner voice which told him, ‘This is it,’ he experienced a new sensation of joyful agitation and delight. ‘And so, to be happy I must do good,’ he thought, and his whole future presented itself to him no longer in the abstract, but in vivid pictures of a landed proprietor’s life.