over twenty times already, and yet, even at the cost of some loss of
sincerity, believed it necessary to teach her children French in that way.
“But why are you going? Do stay a little.”
Levin stayed to tea; but his good-humor had vanished, and he felt ill at
ease.
After tea he went out into the hall to order his horses to be put in, and,
when he came back, he found Darya Alexandrovna greatly disturbed, with a
troubled face, and tears in her eyes. While Levin had been outside, an
incident had occurred which had utterly shattered all the happiness she had
been feeling that day, and her pride in her children. Grisha and Tanya had
been fighting over a ball. Darya Alexandrovna, hearing a scream in the
nursery, ran in and saw a terrible sight. Tanya was pulling Grisha’s hair,
while he, with a face hideous with rage, was beating her with his fists
wherever he could get at her. Something snapped in Darya Alexandrovna’s
heart when she saw this. It was as if darkness had swooped down upon her
life; she felt that these children of hers, that she was so proud of, were not
merely most ordinary, but positively bad, ill-bred children, with coarse,
brutal propensities—wicked children.
She could not talk or think of anything else, and she could not speak to
Levin of her misery.
Levin saw she was unhappy and tried to comfort her, saying that it
showed nothing bad, that all children fight; but, even as he said it, he was
thinking in his heart: “No, I won’t be artificial and talk French with my
children; but my children won’t be like that. All one has to do is not spoil
children, not to distort their nature, and they’ll be delightful. No, my
children won’t be like that.”
He said good-bye and drove away, and she did not try to keep him.
Chapter 11
In the middle of July the elder of the village on Levin’s sister’s estate,
about fifteen miles from Pokrovskoe, came to Levin to report on how things
were going there and on the hay. The chief source of income on his sister’s
estate was from the riverside meadows. In former years 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
