THE young landlord evidently wished to ask the couple something more; he did not rise from the bench but looked hesitatingly now at Chúris and now at the empty unheated brick oven.
‘Have you had dinner?’ he asked at last.
A mocking smile showed under Chúris’s moustache, as if it amused him that the master should ask such a silly question, and he did not answer.
‘What dinner, benefactor?’ said the woman with a deep sigh. ‘We’ve eaten bread – that’s our dinner. We had no time to get sorrel to-day, so I had nothing to make soup of, and what kvas there was I gave the children.’
‘To-day we have a strict fast, your honour,’ said Chúris, explaining his wife’s words. ‘Bread and onions – that’s our peasant food. Thank the Lord we have grain, by your honour’s kindness – for many of our peasants haven’t even that. The onions failed everywhere this year. Michael the gardener asked two kopéks1 a bunch when we sent to him the other day, so there’s nowhere the likes of us can buy any. Since Easter we haven’t been to church. We can’t even afford a candle to put in front of St Nicholas’s icon.’
Nekhlyúdov had long known, not by hearsay or by trusting to other people’s words, but by personal observation, the extreme poverty in which his serfs lived; but that reality was in such contrast with his whole upbringing, his bent of mind, and the course of his life, that he involuntarily kept forgetting it, and whenever he was forcibly reminded of it, as now, he felt intolerably depressed and sad, as though he were tormented by a reminder of some crime committed and unatoned for.
‘Why are you so poor?’ he asked, involuntarily uttering his thought.
‘What else could we be but poor, master, your honour? What is our land like? As you know, it’s clay and mounds, and we must have angered God, for since the cholera year the crops won’t grow. And we have less meadow and less arable land now; some have been taken into the owner’s farm and some added to his fields. I am a lonely man and old.… I’d be glad to bestir myself but I haven’t the strength. My wife is ailing, and hardly a year passes without another girl baby, and they all have to be fed. Here am I working alone, and there are seven of us at home. I often sin before God, thinking that if He took some of them soon, things would be easier, and it would be better for them than suffering here.…’
‘O-oh!’ the woman sighed aloud, as if confirming her husband’s words.
‘Here’s all the help I have,’ Chúris continued, pointing to an unkempt flaxen-haired boy of seven with an enormous belly, who had just then come in timidly, making the door creak, and who now, holding onto his father’s shirt with both his little hands, stood gazing with astonished eyes from under his brow at the master. ‘All the help I have is this,’ Chúris continued in his deep voice, stroking the child’s flaxen hair with his rough hand. ‘How long shall I have to wait for him? The work is getting beyond me. It’s not so much my age as the rupture that is getting the best of me. In bad weather I’m ready to scream, and by rights I ought to be released from serf-labour on account of my age.2 There’s Dútlov, Dëmkin, Zyábrev – all younger than me – who have long since stopped working on the land. But I have no one to work for me – that’s the trouble. We have to eat, so I am struggling on, your honour.’
‘I should really be glad to help you. But what can I do?’ said the young master, looking compassionately at the serf.
‘How can it be helped? Of course if a man holds land he must work for his master – we know that well enough. I’ll have somehow to wait for my lad to grow up. Only, if you’ll be so good, excuse him from school! The other day the clerk came round and said that your honour ordered him to go to school. Do let him off, your honour. What sense has he got? He’s too young to understand anything.’
‘Oh, no, friend. Say what you will, your boy can understand,’ replied Nekhlyúdov, ‘and it’s time for him to be learning. I’m saying it for your own good. Just think: when he grows up and is head of the house he’ll be able to read and write, and to read in church too – with God’s help everything will go right in the home,’ he added, trying to express himself so as to be understood, but yet blushing and hesitating without knowing why.
‘There’s no denying it, your honour, you don’t wish us any harm, but there’s no one to stay at home when my wife and I go to work on the owner’s land; of course he’s small, but still he’s useful to drive in the cattle and water the horses. Such as he is, still he’s a peasant,’ and Chúris smiled and took hold of the child’s nose with his thick fingers and blew it for him.
‘All the same, send him when you are at home and he has time. Do you hear? Be sure to send him.’
Chúris sighed deeply and gave no reply.
Chapter V
‘YES, and I wanted to ask why your manure has not been carted,’ continued Nekhlyúdov.
‘What manure have I got, sir, your honour? There’s nothing to cart. What live-stock have I got? I have a little mare and a foal. The heifer I sold to the inn-keeper as a calf last autumn. That’s all the live-stock I have.’
‘How is that? You haven’t enough cattle, yet you sold a heifer as a calf?’ the master asked with surprise.
‘But what could I feed it on?’
‘Haven’t you enough straw to feed a cow? Others have enough.’
‘Others have manured land, but mine is nothing but clay. I can’t do anything with it.’
‘Well then dress it, so that it should not be all clay, then it will yield grain and there’ll be something to feed the cattle on.’
‘But I have no cattle, so how can there be any manure?’
‘This is a strange vicious circle,’ thought Nekhlyúdov, but could not imagine how to advise the peasant.
‘And then again, your honour,’ Chúris went on, ‘it is not manure that makes the corn grow, but only God. Last year I got six ricks from an unmanured plot, but from the manured land we got almost nothing. It’s only God!’ he added with a sigh. ‘And then cattle do not thrive in our yard. This is the sixth year they have died. Last year one calf died, the other I sold, as we had nothing to live on, and the year before last a fine cow perished: she was driven home from the pasture all right, then suddenly she staggered and staggered and died. Just my bad luck!’
‘Well friend, so that you should not say you have no cattle because you have no fodder, and no fodder because you have no cattle, here’s something to buy a cow with,’ said Nekhlyúdov, blushing as he took some crumpled paper money out of his trouser pocket and began sorting it. ‘Buy yourself a cow, and I wish you luck; and you can have fodder from the threshing ground; I’ll give orders. Mind you have a cow by next Sunday. I’ll look in.’
Chúris stood so long smiling and shifting from foot to foot without stretching out his hand for the money, that Nekhlyúdov at last put it on the table, blushing still more.
‘We are greatly satisfied with your kindness,’ Chúris said with his usual rather sarcastic smile.
His wife stood under the bunks sighing heavily, and seemed to be saying a prayer.
The young master felt embarrassed; he hurriedly rose from his seat, went out into the passage, and called Chúris to follow. The sight of the man he was befriending was so pleasant that he did not wish to part from him at once.
‘I am glad to help you,’ he said, stopping by the well. ‘I can help you because I know you are not lazy. If you take pains I’ll help you, and with God’s aid you’ll get straight.’
‘It’s not a case of getting straight, your honour,’ said Chúris, his face suddenly assuming a serious and even stern expression as if quite dissatisfied that the master should suppose he could get straight. ‘In my father’s time I lived with my brothers and we did not know any want, but when he died and we broke up, everything went from bad to worse. It’s all from being alone!’