7

THE crowd assembled in the yard of the village elder’s house were talking noisily but as soon as Nekhlyudov came up they fell silent, and just as at Kuzminskoye one after another they all took off their caps. They looked far more wretched than the Kuzminskoye people; just as the women and girls wore fluff-rings in their ears, so nearly all the men were wearing bast shoes and homespun coats. A few of them were barefoot and in their shirt-sleeves, having come straight from the fields.

Nekhlyudov, after a struggle with himself, began his speech by telling the peasants of his intention to make the land entirely over to them. The men were silent and the expression on their faces underwent no change.

‘Because I consider,’ said Nekhlyudov, flushing, ‘that land shouldn’t belong to someone who does not work on it, and that everybody has a right to enjoy the benefits of the land.’

‘That’s true. That’s a fact,’ said several voices in the crowd.

Nekhlyudov went on to tell them that the revenue from the land must be distributed equally, and that he therefore proposed that they should take the land and pay a rent – which they would agree upon among themselves – into a common fund which would be for their own use. There were more murmurs of approval and assent, but the grave faces of the peasants became graver and graver, and the eyes which had been fixed on the master were now cast down, as if to spare him the shame of knowing that they all saw through his stratagems and he was deceiving no one.

Nekhlyudov spoke plainly enough, and his listeners were intelligent men, but they did not and could not understand him, for the same reason that the bailiff had taken so long in understanding him. They were firmly convinced that it is natural for every man to look out for his own interest. Had not generations of experience proved to them that the landowner always watched his own interest at the expense of the peasants? Therefore, if a landlord calls them together and makes this unheard-of offer it could only be in order to swindle them more cunningly still.

‘Well, then, what rent will you fix for the land?’ asked Nekhlyudov.

‘ ’Ow can us fix rents? We can’t do it. The land’s yours, and you’re the master,’ voices from the crowd answered him.

‘But no, you will be using the money for communal purposes.’

‘We can’t do it. The commune’s one thing, and this is another.’

‘Don’t you understand,’ said the bailiff with a smile, in an attempt to throw more light on the matter (he had followed Nekhlyudov to the meeting), ‘the prince is letting the land to you for money, and that money goes back to you as your own capital, for your common good.’

‘Oh, we understand all right,’ said an irritable, toothless old man, without raising his eyes. ‘It’s same as puttin’ money in a bank, on’y we should ’ave to pay in at special times. We don’t want it: things are ’ard enough for us as it is, and that’d fair put the stopper on us.’

‘It’s no good. We’re better off the old way,’ cried several voices, some sulky, others downright hostile.

The opposition grew more and more determined when Nekhlyudov mentioned that he would draw up a contract which he would sign and would expect them to sign also.

‘What’s the use of signing anything? We’ve worked all along, and we’ll go on working. What’s the good of all this? We’re ignorant people. We can’t agree to it, it’s not what we’re used to. Leave things as they are. But it would be a good thing to make another arrangement about the seed,’ voices cried variously from the crowd.

Under the old system the peasants had to provide the seed for the crops from which they paid their dues to the landowner, so this was a request that he should provide it.

‘Then you mean that you refuse to take the land?’ Nekhlyudov asked, addressing a middle-aged, bare-footed peasant with a beaming countenance, in a torn tunic, who was holding his tattered cap stiffly in his bent left hand, the way soldiers do when ordered to uncover.

‘Yes, sir,’ replied the man, who had evidently not yet shaken off the hypnotic influence of a soldier’s training.

‘Then you have all the land you want?’ said Nekhlyudov.

‘Oh no, sir,’ answered the ex-soldier, with an artificially cheerful air, carefully holding his tattered cap in front of him, as if offering it to anyone who might like to make use of it.

‘Well, anyhow, you had better think over what I have said.’ Nekhlyudov spoke with surprise and again repeated his offer.

‘Nothin’ to think over. We ’old by what we’ve said,’ muttered the morose, toothless old man angrily.

‘I shall be here all day tomorrow – if you change your minds, come and let me know.’

The peasants did not reply.

So Nekhlyudov could make no headway at all, and he went back to the office.

‘If you will permit me to say so, prince,’ remarked the bailiff when they got home, ‘it’s a waste of time trying to explain anything to them, they’re a pig-headed lot. The minute you get them all together they turn as stubborn as mules and there’s no moving them after that. It’s because they’re suspicious of everything. And yet there are some intelligent men among them – that grey-haired fellow, for example, or the swarthy one who kept raising objections. If they come to the office and I sit them down to a tumbler of tea,’ continued the smiling bailiff, ‘we get talking and you’d be surprised – wise as Solomon, they are: they can thrash the matter out and get the right answer every time. But let the same man come to a meeting and he’s a different person altogether, and just goes on repeating the same thing over and over again…’

‘Then couldn’t we send for a few of the more intelligent ones to come here?’ said Nekhlyudov. ‘I could go through the plan with them in detail.’

‘Yes, that can be done,’ answered the smiling bailiff.

‘Then please have them come tomorrow.’

‘Very well,’ said the bailiff, and smiled more cheerfully still, ‘I’ll call them for tomorrow.’

*

‘There’s an artful dodger for you!’ a black-haired peasant with an unkempt beard, who sat swaying on his well-fed mare, said to a lean old man in a torn tunic riding by his side, his horse’s iron hobbles clanking.

The pair were on their way to pasture their horses for the night by the roadside, or, if they got a chance, in the forest belonging to the estate.

‘ “I’ll let you have the land for nothing if you’ll just sign!” Haven’t they fooled the likes of us often enough? No, my friend, you won’t catch us, nowadays we know a thing or two ourselves,’ he added, and began calling a colt that had fallen behind. He stopped and looked back, but the colt had not remained behind – it had gone into the meadow by the roadside.

‘Curse the little devil! Taken a liking to the master’s fields,’ said the black-haired peasant with the unkempt beard, hearing the snapping of sorrel stalks as the whinnying colt galloped across the sweet-smelling, swampy meadow.

‘Just listen to that – the meadow’s all overgrown. We shall have to send the women out one Sunday to do a bit of weeding,’ said the thin peasant in the torn tunic. ‘Else we’ll be ruining our scythes.’

‘ “Just sign,” he says,’ the peasant with the shaggy beard continued on the subject of his master’s address. ‘Sign, indeed, and let ‘im swaller yer alive!’

‘That’s sure,’ replied the old man.

And they said no more. The only sound was the clopping of the horses’ hooves on the hard road.