by Leo Tolstoy
Titus had taken the first swath very quickly, as Levin had noticed, probably wanting to test his master, and the swath happened to be a long one. The following swaths were easier, but even so Levin had to strain all his strength not to lag behind the muzhiks.
He thought of nothing, desired nothing, except not to lag behind and to do the best job he could. He heard only the clang of scythes and ahead of him saw Titus's erect figure moving on, the curved semicircle of the mowed space, grass and flower-heads bending down slowly and wavily about the blade of his scythe, and ahead of him the end of the swath, where rest would come.
Not understanding what it was or where it came from, in the midst of his work he suddenly felt a pleasant sensation of coolness on his hot, sweaty shoulders. He glanced at the sky while his blade was being whetted. A low, heavy cloud had come over it, and big drops of rain were falling. Some muzhiks went for their caftans and put them on; others, just like Levin, merely shrugged their shoulders joyfully under the pleasant freshness.
They finished another swath and another. They went through long swaths, short swaths, with bad grass, with good grass. Levin lost all awareness of time and had no idea whether it was late or early. A change now began to take place in his work which gave him enormous pleasure. In the midst of his work moments came to him when he forgot what he was doing and began to feel light, and in those moments his swath came out as even and good as Titus's. But as soon as he remembered what he was doing and started trying to do better, he at once felt how hard the work was and the swath came out badly.
Having finished one more swath, he wanted to walk back again, but Titus stopped, went over to the old man and quietly said something to him. They both looked at the sun. 'What are they talking about? Why doesn't he go back down the swath?' thought Levin, to whom it did not occur that the muzhiks had been mowing without a break for no less than four hours and it was time for them to have breakfast.
'Breakfast, master,' the old man said.
'Already? Well, let's have breakfast then.'
Levin handed the scythe back to Titus and, together with the muzhiks, who were going to their caftans to fetch bread, walked to his horse over the swaths of the long mowed space lightly sprinkled with rain. Only now did he realize that his guess about the weather had been wrong and that the rain was wetting his hay.
'The hay will be spoiled,' he said.
'Never mind, master, mow when it rains, rake when it shines!' said the old man.
Levin untethered the horse and went home to have coffee.
Sergei Ivanovich had just risen. After having coffee, Levin went back to the mowing, before Sergei Ivanovich had time to get dressed and come out to the dining room.
V
After breakfast Levin landed not in his former place in the line, but between an old joker who invited him to be his neighbour and a young muzhik married only since autumn, for whom it was his first summer of mowing.
The old man, holding himself erect, went ahead, moving his turned-out feet steadily and widely, and in a precise and steady movement that apparently cost him no more effort than swinging his arms while walking, as if in play, laid down a tall, uniform swath. Just as though it were not him but the sharp scythe alone that swished through the succulent grass.
Behind Levin came young Mishka. His fair young face, with a wisp of fresh grass bound round his hair, worked all over with the effort; but as soon as anyone looked at him, he smiled. He clearly would sooner have died than admit it was hard for him.
Levin went between them. In this hottest time the mowing did not seem so hard to him. The sweat that drenched him cooled him off, and the sun, burning on his back, head and arm with its sleeve rolled to the elbow, gave him firmness and perseverance in his work; more and more often those moments of unconsciousness came, when it was possible for him not to think of what he was doing. The scythe cut by itself. These were happy moments. More joyful still were the moments when, coming to the river, where the swaths ended, the old man would wipe his scythe with thick, wet grass, rinse its steel in the cool water, dip his whetstone box and offer it to Levin.
'Have a sip of my kvass![6] Good, eh?' he said with a wink.
And, indeed, Levin had never before drunk such a drink as this warm water with green floating in it and tasting of the rusty tin box. And right after that came a blissfully slow walk with scythe in hand, during which he could wipe off the streaming sweat, fill his lungs with air, look at the whole stretched-out line of mowers and at what was going on around him in the woods and fields.
The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.
It was hard only when he had to stop this by now unconscious movement and think, when he had to mow around a tussock or an unweeded clump of sorrel. The old man did it easily. The tussock would come, he would change movement and, using the heel or tip of the scythe, cut around it on both sides with short strokes. And as he did so, he studied and observed what opened up before him; now he picked off a corn-flag, ate it or offered it to Levin, now flung aside a branch with the tip of his scythe, or examined a quail's nest from which the female had flown up right under the scythe, or caught a snake that had got in his way and, picking it up with the scythe as with a fork, showed it to Levin and tossed it aside.
For Levin and the young lad behind him these changes of movement were difficult. Both of them, having got into one strenuous rhythm, were caught up in the passion of work and were unable to change it and at the same time observe what was in front of them.
Levin did not notice how the time passed. If he had been asked how long he had been mowing, he would have said half an hour - yet it was nearly dinner-time. Walking back down the swath, the old man drew Levin's attention to the girls and boys, barely visible, coming towards the mowers from different directions, through the tall grass and along the road, their little arms weighed down with bundles of bread and jugs of kvass stoppered with rags.
'See the midges come crawling!' he said, pointing to them, and he looked at the sun from under his hand.
They finished two more swaths and the old man stopped.
'Well, master, it's dinner-time!' he said resolutely. And, having reached the river, the mowers set out across the swaths towards their caftans, near which the children who had brought their dinners sat waiting for them. The muzhiks gathered together - those from far away under their carts, those from nearby under a willow bush on which they heaped some grass.
Levin sat down with them; he did not want to leave.
Any constraint before the master had long since vanished. The muzhiks were preparing to have dinner. Some were washing, the young fellows were bathing in the river, others were preparing a place to rest, untying sacks of bread and unstopping jugs of kvass. The old man crumbled some bread into a bowl, kneaded it with a spoon handle, poured in some water from his whetstone box, cut more bread, sprinkled it with salt, and turned eastward to pray.
'Here, master, try a bit of my mash,' he said, squatting down in front of the bowl.
The mash tasted so good that Levin changed his mind about going home for dinner. He ate with the old man and got to talking with him about his domestic affairs, taking a lively interest in them, and told him about all his own affairs and all circumstances that might interest the old man. He felt closer to him than to his brother, and involuntarily smiled from the tenderness that he felt for this man. When the old man stood up again, prayed, and lay down right there under the bush, putting some grass under his head, Levin did the same and, despite the flies and bugs, clinging, persistent in the sunlight, tickling his sweaty face and body, he fell asleep at once and awoke only when the sun had passed over to the other side of the bush and begun to reach him. The old man had long be
en awake and sat whetting the young fellows' scythes.
Levin looked around him and did not recognize the place, everything was so changed. An enormous expanse of the meadow had been mowed, and its already fragrant swaths shone with a special new shine in the slanting rays of the evening sun. The mowed-around bushes by the river, the river itself, invisible before but now shining like steel in its curves, the peasants stirring and getting up, the steep wall of grass at the unmowed side of the meadow, and the hawks wheeling above the bared meadow - all this was completely new. Coming to his senses, Levin began to calculate how much had been mowed and how much more could be done that day.
They had done an extraordinary amount of work for forty-two men. The whole of the big meadow, which in the time of the corvee[7] used to be mowed in two days by thirty scythes, was already mowed. Only some corners with short swaths remained unmowed. But Levin wanted to get as much mowed as possible that day and was vexed with the sun for going down so quickly. He felt no fatigue at all; he only wanted to work more and more quickly and get as much done as possible.
'What do you think, can we still mow Mashka's Knoll?' he said to the old man.
'As God wills, the sun's not high. Or might there be some vodka for the lads?'
At break time, when they sat down again and the smokers lit up, the old man announced to the lads that if they 'mow Mashka's Knoll -there'll be vodka in it'.
'See if we can't! Go to it, Titus! We'll clear it in a wink! You can eat tonight. Go to it!' came the cries, and, finishing their bread, the mowers went to it.
'Well, lads, keep the pace!' said Titus, and he went ahead almost at a trot.
'Get a move on!' said the old man, hustling after him and catching up easily. 'I'll cut you down! Watch out!'
And it was as if young and old vied with each other in the mowing. But no matter how they hurried, they did not ruin the grass, and the swaths were laid as cleanly and neatly. A little patch left in a corner was cleared in five minutes. The last mowers were coming to the end of their rows when the ones in front threw their caftans over their shoulders and went across the road to Mashka's Knoll.
The sun was already low over the trees when, with whetstone boxes clanking, they entered the wooded gully of Mashka's Knoll. The grass was waist-high in the middle of the hollow, tender and soft, broad-bladed, speckled with cow-wheat here and there under the trees.
After a brief discussion - to move lengthwise or crosswise - Prokhor Yermilin, also a famous mower, a huge, swarthy man, went to the front. He finished the first swath, went back and moved over, and everybody started falling into line after him, going downhill through the hollow and up to the very edge of the wood. The sun sank behind the wood. The dew was already falling, and only those mowing on the hill were in the sun, while below, where mist was rising, and on the other side, they walked in the fresh, dewy shade. The work was in full swing.
Sliced down with a succulent sound and smelling of spice, the grass lay in high swaths. Crowding on all sides in the short swaths, their whetstone boxes clanking, to the noise of scythes clashing, of a whetstone swishing along a sharpening blade, and of merry shouts, the mowers urged each other on.
Levin went as before between the young lad and the old man. The old man, who had put on his sheepskin jacket, was just as gay, jocular and free in his movements as ever. In the wood they were constantly happening upon boletus mushrooms, sodden in the succulent grass, which their scythes cut down. But the old man, each time he met a mushroom, bent down, picked it up, and put it into his jacket. 'Another treat for my old woman,' he would mutter.
Easy as it was to mow the wet and tender grass, it was hard going up and down the steep slopes of the gully. But the old man was not hindered by that. Swinging his scythe in the same way, with the small, firm steps of his feet shod in big bast shoes, he slowly climbed up the steep slope, and, despite the trembling of his whole body and of his trousers hanging lower than his shirt, he did not miss a single blade of grass or a single mushroom on his way and joked with the muzhiks and Levin just as before. Levin came after him and often thought that he would surely fall, going up such a steep slope with a scythe, where it was hard to climb even without a scythe; but he climbed it and did what was needed. He felt that some external force moved him.
VI
Mashka's Knoll was mowed. They finished the last swaths, put on their caftans and cheerfully went home. Levin got on his horse and, regretfully taking leave of the muzhiks, rode homewards. He looked back from the hill; the men could not be seen in the mist rising from below; he could only hear merry, coarse voices, loud laughter, and the sound of clashing scythes.
Sergei Ivanovich had long ago finished dinner and was drinking water with lemon and ice in his room, looking through some newspapers and magazines that had just come in the post, when Levin, with his tangled hair sticking to his sweaty brow and his dark, drenched back and chest, burst into his room talking cheerfully.
'And we did the whole meadow! Ah, how good, it's remarkable! And how have you been?' said Levin, completely forgetting yesterday's unpleasant conversation.
'Heavens, what a sight!' said Sergei Ivanovich, glancing round at his brother with displeasure in the first moment. 'The door, shut the door!' he cried out. 'You must have let in a good dozen.'
Sergei Ivanovich could not bear flies. He opened the window in his room only at night and kept the doors carefully shut.
'By God, not a one. And if I did, I'll catch it. You wouldn't believe what a pleasure it was! How did your day go?'
'Very well. But did you really mow for the whole day? I suppose you're hungry as a wolf. Kuzma has everything ready for you.'
'No, I don't even want to eat. I ate there. But I will go and wash.'
'Well, go, go, and I'll join you presently,' said Sergei Ivanovich, shaking his head as he looked at his brother. 'Go, go quickly,' he added with a smile and, gathering up his books, he got ready to go. He suddenly felt cheerful himself and did not want to part from his brother. 'Well, and where were you when it rained?'
'What rain? It barely sprinkled. I'll come presently, then. You had a nice day, then? Well, that's excellent.' And Levin went to get dressed.
Five minutes later the brothers came together in the dining room. Though it seemed to Levin that he did not want to eat, and he sat down to dinner only so as not to offend Kuzma, once he started eating, the dinner seemed remarkably tasty to him. Smiling, Sergei Ivanovich looked at him.
'Ah, yes, there's a letter for you,' he said. 'Kuzma, bring it from downstairs, please. And see that you close the door.'
The letter was from Oblonsky. Levin read it aloud. Oblonsky was writing from Petersburg: 'I received a letter from Dolly, she's in Yergushovo, and nothing's going right for her. Go and see her, please, help her with your advice, you know everything. She'll be so glad to see you. She's quite alone, poor thing. My mother-in-law and the others are all still abroad.'
'That's excellent! I'll certainly go and see them,' said Levin. 'Or else let's go together. She's such a nice woman. Isn't it so?'
'Are they nearby?'
'Some twenty miles. Maybe twenty-five. But the road is excellent. An excellent trip.'
'Delighted,' said Sergei Ivanovich, still smiling.
The sight of his younger brother had immediately disposed him to cheerfulness.
'Well, you've got quite an appetite!' he said, looking at his red-brown sunburnt face and neck bent over the plate.
'Excellent! You wouldn't believe what a good regimen it is against all sorts of foolishness. I want to enrich medical science with a new term: Arbeitskur.'*
'Well, it seems you've no need for that.'
'No, but for various nervous patients.'
'Yes, it ought to be tried. And I did want to come to the mowing to have a look at you, but the heat was so unbearable that I got no further than the wood. I sat a little, then walked through the wood to the village, met your nurse there and sounded her out about the muzhiks' view of
&nbs
p; * Work-cure.
you. As I understand, they don't approve of it. She said: "It's not the master's work." Generally it seems to me that in the peasants' understanding there is a very firmly defined requirement for certain, as they put it, "master's" activities. And they don't allow gentlemen to go outside the limits defined by their understanding.'
'Maybe. But I've never experienced such a pleasure in my life. And there's no harm in it. Isn't that so?' Levin replied. 'What can I do if they don't like it? Nothing, I suppose. Eh?'
'I can see,' Sergei Ivanovich continued, 'that you're generally pleased with your day.'
'Very pleased. We mowed the whole meadow. And what an old man I made friends with there! Such a delightful man, you'd never imagine it!'
'Well, so you're pleased with your day. And so am I. First, I solved two chess problems, one of them a very nice one - it opens with a pawn. I'll show you. And then I was thinking about our conversation yesterday.'
'What? Our conversation yesterday?' said Levin, blissfully narrowing his eyes and puffing after he finished dinner, quite unable to recall what this yesterday's conversation had been.
'I find that you're partly right. Our disagreement consists in this, that you take personal interest as the motive force, while I maintain that every man of a certain degree of education ought to be interested in the common good. You may be right that materially interested activity would be desirable. Generally, your nature is much too primesautiere* as the French say; you want either passionate, energetic activity or nothing.'
