by Leo Tolstoy
‘Then what use would five props be to you, when one shed has fallen in and the others will soon do so? You don’t need props, but new rafters, cross-pieces, and uprights,’ said the master, evidently parading his knowledge of the subject.
Chúris was silent.
‘So what you need is timber and not props. You should have said so.’
‘Of course I want timber, but there’s nowhere to get it. It won’t do to keep going to the master’s house! If the likes of us were allowed to get into the habit of coming to your honour’s house for everything we need, what sort of serfs should we be? But if you will be merciful concerning the oak posts that are lying unused on your threshing-floor,’ he added, bowing and shifting from foot to foot, ‘I might be able to change some of the pieces, cut away others, and fix things up somehow with the old stuff.’
‘With the old stuff? Don’t you yourself say that it’s all old and rotten? To-day this corner falls in, to-morrow that, the day after a third: so if you are to do anything you must rebuild it altogether that the work may not be wasted. Tell me, do you think your place could stand through this winter or not?’
‘Who can tell?’
‘But what do you think? Will it fall in or not?’
Chúris considered.
‘It will all fall in,’ he said suddenly.
‘There, you see you should have said at the meeting that you need to rebuild the whole homestead, and not only put in a few props. You know I should be glad to help you …’
‘We’re very grateful for your favour,’ Chúris replied suspiciously, and without looking at the master. ‘If you would only favour me with four beams and some props I could perhaps fix things up myself; and the rotten wood I’d take out and use for supports in the hut.’
‘Then is your hut in a bad state too?’
‘My old woman and I are expecting from day to day that it will crush someone,’ Chúris remarked indifferently. ‘The other day she did get crushed by a strut from the ceiling.’
‘Crushed? What do you mean?’
‘Why, your honour, it hit her on the back so that she lay more dead than alive till night-time.’
‘Well, and has she recovered?’
‘Yes, she’s recovered, but she’s always ailing. It’s true that she’s been sickly since her birth.’
‘What, are you ill?’ Nekhlyúdov asked the woman who was still standing in the doorway and had begun groaning as soon as her husband mentioned her.
‘Just here it never leaves me,’ she said, pointing to her dirty emaciated chest.
‘Again!’ said Nekhlyúdov, shrugging his shoulders with vexation. ‘Why don’t you go to the dispensary when you’re ill? That’s what the dispensary is for. Haven’t you been told of it?’
‘We have, master, but I’ve no time. There’s the obligatory work on the estate, our own work, and the children, and I’m all alone. We are lone people.’
Chapter III
NEKHLYÚDOV went into the hut. The uneven smoke-begrimed walls of one end of the room had all sorts of rags and clothing hanging up on them, and the best corner was literally covered with reddish cockroaches that had collected round the icon and the benches. In the middle of the black, smelly, fourteen-foot-square hovel, there was a large crack in the ceiling, which though propped up in two places was bulging so that it threatened to collapse at any moment.
‘Yes, the hut is very bad,’ said Nekhlyúdov, looking straight at Chúris, who did not seem inclined to begin speaking about this state of things.
‘It will crush us and will crush the children,’ muttered the woman in a tearful voice, leaning against the brick oven under the bunks.
‘Don’t you talk,’ Chúris said sternly, and with a subtle smile showing slightly under his moustache he turned to the master. ‘I can’t think what could be done to it, your honour – to the hut. I have put up props and boards, but nothing can be done.’
‘How are we to live through the winter here? Oh, oh, oh!’ said the woman.
‘If we put up some more props and new struts,’ her husband interrupted her with a quiet business-like expression, ‘and changed one of the rafters, we might somehow get through the winter. We might get along – only the props will crowd the hut, that’s all. But if we touch it, there won’t be a sound bit left. It’s only as long as it’s not touched that it holds together,’ he concluded, evidently well pleased to have realized that fact.
Nekhlyúdov was vexed and grieved that Chúris had let himself come to such a pass and had not applied to him sooner, for ever since his arrival he had never refused help to a peasant, and only tried to get them to come straight to him with their troubles. He even felt a sort of animosity against Chúris, and angrily shrugged his shoulders and frowned; but the sight of the wretchedness around him and Chúris’s quiet, self-satisfied appearance in the midst of it, changed his vexation into a melancholy feeling of hopelessness.
‘Now why didn’t you tell me sooner, Iván?’ he said reproachfully, sitting down on the dirty crooked bench.
‘I daren’t, your honour,’ Chúris replied with the same barely perceptible smile, shifting from one dirty bare foot to the other on the uneven earth floor, but he said this so boldly and calmly that it was hard to believe that he had not dared to apply to his master.
‘We are only peasants: how can we dare …’ began the woman with a sob.
‘Hold your jabber,’ Chúris addressed her again.
‘It’s impossible for you to live in this hut. It’s nonsense!’ said Nekhlyúdov after a pause. ‘Now this is what we’ll do, friend …’
‘Yes, sir,’ Chúris replied.
‘You’ve seen those brick cottages with hollow walls that I have been building in the new village?’
‘Of course I have,’ answered Chúris, showing his still sound and white teeth in a smile. ‘We were quite surprised at the way they were laid. Tricky cottages! The children were laughing and asked if they were going to be store-houses, and the walls filled in to keep the rats out.… Grand cottages!’ he finished, shaking his head with a look of ironical perplexity. ‘Just like jails!’
‘Yes, they are fine cottages, warm and dry, and not so likely to catch on fire,’ said the master with a frown on his young face, evidently annoyed by the peasant’s irony.
‘No gainsaying, your honour – grand cottages!’
‘Well then, one of them is quite ready. It is twenty-three feet square, with a passage and a larder, and is quite ready. I might let you have it at cost price and you could pay me when you can,’ said the master with a self-satisfied smile which he could not control at the thought of his benevolence. ‘You can pull down this old one and use it to build a granary, and we will move the yard buildings too. There is good water there. I will allot you fresh land for your vegetable plots and you will have arable land quite close. You’ll soon live well. Now, don’t you like it?’ he added, noticing that as soon as he spoke of settling somewhere else, Chúris stood quite motionless and looked at the ground no longer smiling.
‘It’s as your honour pleases,’ he said without looking up.
The old woman came forward as if touched to the quick, and prepared to say something, but her husband forestalled her.
‘It’s as your honour pleases,’ he replied, firmly and yet submissively, looking up at his master and tossing back his hair, ‘but it won’t do for us to live in the new village.’
‘Why not?’
‘No, your honour. If you move us there – we’re in a bad way as it is, but there we should never be proper peasants. What sort of peasants should we be there? Why, a man couldn’t possibly live there … but just as you please.’
‘Why not?’
‘We should be quite ruined, your honour.’
‘But why couldn’t a man live there?’
‘What kind of life would it be? Just think. The place has never been lived in, the water not tested, and there’s no pasture. Our hemp plots here have been manured from olden times, but what is
there there? There’s nothing! All bare! No wattles, no corn-kilns, no sheds – nothing at all. We shall be ruined, your honour, if you drive us there, we shall be ruined completely. The place is new, unknown …’ he repeated thoughtfully but shaking his head decisively.
Nekhlyúdov began to argue that the change would on the contrary be very advantageous for him, that wattles and sheds would be erected, that the water was good there, and so on; but Chúris’s dull silence confused him and he felt he was not saying the right things. Chúris did not reply, but when his master stopped, remarked with a slight smile that it would be better to house the old domestic serfs and Alëshka, the fool, in the new village, to watch over the grain there.
‘That would be fine,’ he remarked, and laughed calmly. ‘No, it’s a hopeless business, your honour!’
‘Well, what if the place is uninhabited?’ Nekhlyúdov insisted patiently. ‘This place was uninhabited once, but now people live here; and you will be the first to settle in the new village and will bring luck.… You must certainly settle there …’
‘Oh sir, your honour, how can they be compared?’ said Chúris with animation, as if afraid the master might take a definite decision. ‘Here we are in the Commune – it’s lively, and we’re accustomed to it. We have the road, and the pond here for the wife to wash the clothes and water the cattle, and our whole peasant establishment here from days of old: the threshing-floor and little vegetable plot, and these willows that my parents planted. My grandfather and father breathed their last here and if only I can end my days here, your honour, I don’t ask anything more. If you will have the goodness to let my hut be mended, we shall be very grateful for your kindness. If not, we’ll manage to live somehow in the old one to the end of our days. Let us pray for you all our lives,’ he continued, bowing low. ‘Don’t turn us from our nest, master.…’
While Chúris was speaking, louder and louder sobs came from the place under the bunks where his wife stood, and when her husband said ‘master’ she unexpectedly sprang forward and threw herself on her knees at Nekhlyúdov’s feet, weeping bitterly.
‘Don’t ruin us, benefactor! You are like father and mother to us! How could we move? We are old, lonely people. As God, so you …’ and she began her lamentations again.
Nekhlyúdov jumped up from the bench to raise the old woman, but she beat her head on the earthen floor in a kind of passionate despair and pushed away his hand.
‘What are you doing? Please get up. If you don’t wish to go, you needn’t. I won’t force you,’ he said, waving his arms and stepping towards the door.
When Nekhlyúdov had again sat down on the bench and the silence in the hut was only interrupted by the wailing of the woman who had retired under the bunk and stood there wiping her tears with the sleeve of her smock, he realized for the first time what the tumble-down hovel, the broken-down well with the muddy puddle, the rotting sheds and outhouse, and the broken willows which he saw through the crooked window, meant to Chúris and his wife, and he felt depressed, sad, and without knowing why, ashamed.
‘Why didn’t you tell the Commune last Sunday that you needed a cottage, Iván? I don’t know now how to help you. I told you all at the first meeting that I have settled on the estate to devote my life to you; and I was ready to deprive myself of everything to make you contented and happy, and I swear before God that I will keep my word,’ said the young proprietor, ignorant of the fact that outpourings of that kind are ill adapted to arouse faith in anyone, and least of all in a Russian, who likes not words but deeds, and dislikes the expression of feelings however fine.
But the simple-hearted young man was so pleased with the feeling he experienced that he could not help pouring it out.
Chúris bent his head to one side, and blinking slowly listened to his master with forced attention, as to one who had to be listened to though he was saying things that were not very nice, and did not at all concern ‘us’.
‘But I can’t give everybody all I am asked for. If I did not refuse some who ask me for timber, I should soon not have any left myself and should be unable to give to those who really need it. That is why I gave the “Crown wood” for the betterment of the peasants’ buildings, and handed it over completely to the Commune. That wood is now not mine, but belongs to you peasants. I can no longer dispose of it, but the Commune does what it sees fit with it. Come to the meeting to-night. I will tell them of your request, and if they resolve to give you wood for a new hut it will be all right, but I have no timber now. I wish to help you with all my heart, but if you don’t want to move, the matter is not in my hands but rests with the Commune. Do you understand me?’
‘We are very grateful for your kindness, your honour,’ answered Chúris, abashed. ‘If you will oblige us with the timber for the building, we will get straight that way.… Anyhow, what’s the Commune? Everybody knows.…’
‘No, you must come.’
‘Yes, I’ll come. Why not? But all the same I won’t beg of the Commune.’
Chapter IV
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 ri
ghts 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.’
