Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

by Leo Tolstoy

  ‘It’s true, sir, Dmítri Nikoláevich,’ said the old man, looking with fatherly condescension at his master, ‘people do write in books. But it may be that it is written wrongly. Perhaps they say “He’ll do as we advise, and then we’ll laugh at him.” That does happen! How can one teach the bees where to build their comb? They do it themselves according to the hive, sometimes across it and sometimes lengthways. There, please look in,’ he added, opening one of the nearest hives and looking into the opening where buzzing bees were crawling about on the crooked combs. ‘These are young ones: they have their mind on the queen bee, but they make the comb straight or to one side as best fits the hive,’ continued the old man, evidently carried away by his favourite subject and not noticing his master’s condition. ‘See, they’re coming in laden today. It’s a warm day and everything can be seen,’ he added, closing the opening and pressing a crawling bee with a rag and then with his hand brushing several from his wrinkled neck. The bees did not sting him, but Nekhlyúdov could hardly refrain from running away from the apiary: they had stung him in three places and were buzzing all round his head and neck.

  ‘How many hives have you?’ he asked, stepping back towards the door.

  ‘As many as God has given,’ replied Dútlov laughingly. ‘One mustn’t count them, sir. The bees don’t like it. There now, your Excellence, I wanted to ask your honour something,’ he continued, pointing to some narrow hives standing near the fence. ‘It’s about Osip, your nurse’s husband – if you would only speak to him. It’s wrong to act so to a neighbour in one’s own village.’

  ‘What is bad?… Oh, but they do sting!’ said the master, with his hand already on the door-handle.

  ‘Well, you see, every year he lets his bees out among my young ones. They ought to have a chance to improve, but the strange bees enter the combs and take the wax from them,’ said the old man, not noticing his master’s grimaces.

  ‘All right … afterwards … in a moment …’ muttered Nekhlyúdov, and unable to bear the pain any longer he ran quickly through the door waving both hands.

  ‘Rub it with earth and it will be all right,’ said the old man, following the master into the yard. The master rubbed the places that had been stung with earth, flushed as he gave a quick glance at Karp and Ignát, who were not looking at him, and frowned angrily.

  Chapter XVI

  ‘WHAT I wanted to ask your Excellency,’ … said the old man, pretending not to notice or really not noticing his master’s angry look.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you see, we are well off for horses, thank God, and have a labourer, so that the owner’s work will not be neglected by us.’

  ‘Well, what about it?’

  ‘If you would be so kind as to accept quit-rent and excuse my lads from service, Ilyá and Ignát could go carting all summer with three teams of horses, and might earn something.’

  ‘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 sa
y 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.

  He saw before him an immense field of action for his whole life, which he would devote to well-doing and in which consequently he would be happy. There was no need to search for a sphere of activity: it lay ready before him; he had a direct duty – he owned serfs.… And what a joyful and grateful task lay before him! ‘To influence this simple, receptive, unperverted class of people; to save them from poverty, give them a sufficiency, transmit to them an education which fortunately I possess, to reform their vices arising from ignorance and superstition, to develop their morality, to make them love the right.… What a brilliant, happy future! And I, who do it all for my own happiness, shall in return enjoy their gratitude, and see myself advancing day by day further and further towards the appointed aim. A marvellous future! How could I have failed to see it before?

  ‘And besides all that,’ he thought at the same time, ‘what prevents my being happy in the love of a woman, in the joys of family life?’ And his youthful imagination painted a still more enchanting future. ‘I and my wife, whom I love as no one ever before loved anyone in the world, will always live amid this peaceful poetic nature, with our children and perhaps with my old aunt. We have our mutual love, our love for our children, and we both know that our aim is to do good. We help each other to move towards that goal. I shall make general arrangements, give general and just assistance, carry on the farm, a savings-bank and workshops, while she, with her pretty little head, wearing a simple white dress which she lifts above her dainty foot, walks through the mud to the peasant school, to the infirmary, to some unfortunate peasant who strictly speaking does not deserve aid, and everywhere brings consolation and help. The children, the old men, and the old women, adore her and look on her as an angel – as Providence. Then she returns, and conceals from me the fact that she has been to see the unfortunate peasant and given him some money; but I know it all and embrace her tightly, and firmly and tenderly kiss her lovely eyes, her shyly blushing cheeks, and her smiling rosy lips.’

  Chapter XIX

  ‘WHERE are those dreams?’ thought the young man now as he neared his house after his visits. ‘For more than a year I have been seeking happiness in that way, and what have I found? It is true I sometimes feel that I have a right to be satisfied with myself, but it is a dry, reasoning sort of satisfaction. No, that is not true, I am simply dissatisfied with myself! I am dissatisfied because I do not find happiness here, and I long for happiness so passionately. I have not only experienced no enjoyment, I have cut myself off from all that gives it. Why? What for? Who is the better for it? My aunt was right when she wrote that it is easier to find happiness for oneself than to give it to others. Have my peasants grown richer? Are they more educated or morally more developed? Not at all! They are no better off, and it grows harder for me every day. If I saw my plans succeeding, or met with any gratitude … but no, I see a false routine, vice, suspicion, helplessness. I am wasting the best years of my life in vain,’ he thought, and remembered that he had heard from his nurse that his neighbours called him a whipper-snapper; that he had no money left in the counting-house, that his newly-introduced threshing machine, to the general amusement of the peasants, had only whistled and had not threshed anything when for the first time it was started at the threshing-floor before a large audience; and that he had to expect officials from the Land Court any day to take an inventory of his estate because, tempted by different new undertakings, he had let the payments on his mortgage lapse. And suddenly, as vividly as the walk in the forest and the dream of a landlord’s life had presented themselves to his mind before, so now did his little room in Moscow, where as a student he had sat late at night, by the light of one candle, with his beloved sixteen-year-old friend and comrade. They had read and repeated some dry notes on civic law for five hours on end, and having finished them had sent for supper and gone shares in the price of a bottle of champagne, and discussed the future awaiting them. How very different the future had appeared to the young student! Then it had been full of enjoyment, of varied activities, of brilliant success, and indubitably led them both to what then seemed the greatest blessing in the world – fame!

  ‘He is already getting on, rapidly getting on, along that road,’ thought Nekhlyúdov of his friend, ‘while I …’

  But by this time he was already approaching the porch of his house, where ten or more peasant- and domestic-serfs stood awaiting him with various requests, and his dreams were replaced by realities.

  There was a tattered, dishevelled, blood-stained peasant woman who complained with tears that her father-in-law wanted to kill her: there were two brothers, who for two years had been quarrelling about the division of a peasant farm between them, and now stood gazing at one another with desperate hatred: and there was an unshaven grey-headed domestic serf, with hands trembling from drunkenness, whom his son, the gardener, had brought to the master with a complai
nt of his depraved conduct: there was a peasant who had turned his wife out of the house because she had not worked all spring: and there was his wife, a sick woman who did not speak, but sat on the grass near the entrance, sobbing and showing an inflamed and swollen leg roughly bandaged with dirty rags.…

  Nekhlyúdov listened to all the petitions and complaints, and having given advice to some, settled the disputes of others, and made promises to yet others, went to his room with a mixed feeling of weariness, shame, helplessness, and remorse.

  Chapter XX

  IN the room occupied by Nekhlyúdov – which was not a large one – there was an old leather couch studded with brass nails, several arm-chairs of a similar kind, an old-fashioned carved and inlaid card-table with a brass rim, which stood open and on which were some papers, and an open, old-fashioned English grand piano with a yellowish case and worn and warped narrow keys. Between the windows hung a large mirror in an old gilt carved frame. On the floor beside the table lay bundles of papers, books, and accounts. In general the whole room had a disorderly and characterless appearance, and this air of untidy occupancy formed a sharp contrast to the stiff, old-fashioned aristocratic arrangement of the other rooms of the large house.

  On entering the room Nekhlyúdov angrily flung his hat on the table and sat down on a chair before the piano, crossing his legs and hanging his head.

  ‘Will you have lunch, your Excellence?’ asked a tall, thin, wrinkled old woman who entered the room in a cap, a print dress, and a large shawl.

  Nekhlyúdov turned to look at her and was silent for a moment as if considering something.

  ‘No, I don’t want any, nurse,’ he said, and again sank into thought.

  The old nurse shook her head at him with vexation, and sighed.