第66章

That they were only sowing the clover on six dessiatinas, not in all the twenty, was still more annoying to him. Clover, as he knew, both from books and from his own experience, never did well except when it was sown as early as possible, almost in the snow. And yet Levin could never get this done.

`There's no one to send. What would you do with such people? Three haven't turned up. And there's Semion...'

`Well, you should have taken some men from the chaffcutter.'

`And so I have, as it is.'

`Where are the peasants, then?'

`Five are making compote' (which meant compost), `and four are shifting the oats for fear of being touched, Konstantin Dmitrich.'

Levin knew very well that `touching' meant that his English seed oats were already spoiled. Again they had not done as he had ordered.

`Why, but I told you during Lent to put in pipes,' he cried.

`Don't be put out; we shall get it all done in time.'

Levin made an angry gesture, and went into the granary to glance at the oats, and then to the stable. The oats were not yet spoiled. But the laborers were carrying the oats in spades when they might simply let them slide down into the lower granary; and arranging for this to be done, and taking two laborers from there for sowing clover, Levin got over the vexation his bailiff had caused him. Indeed, it was such a lovely day that one could not be angry.

`Ignat!' he called to the coachman, who, with his sleeves tucked up, was washing the carriage wheels, `saddle...'

`Which, sir?'

`Well, let it be Kolpik.'

`Yes, sir.'

While they were saddling his horse, Levin again called the bailiff, who was hanging about in sight, to make it up with him, and began talking to him about the spring operations before them, and his plans for the farming.

The wagons were to begin carting manure earlier, so as to get all done before the early mowing. And the plowing of the outlying land was to go on without a break, so as to let it lie black fallow and furrowed.

And the moving to be all done by hired labor, not on half-profits.

The bailiff listened attentively, and obviously made an effort to approve of his employer's projects. But still he had that look Levin knew so well that always irritated him, a look of hopelessness and despondency.

That look said: `That's all very well, but as God wills.'

Nothing mortified Levin so much as that tone. But it was the tone common to all the bailiffs he had ever had. They had all taken that attitude to his plans, and so now he was not angered by it, but mortified, and felt all the more roused to struggle against this apparently elemental force continually ranged against him, for which he could find no other name than `as God wills.'

`If we can manage it, Konstantin Dmitrich,' said the bailiff.

`Why shouldn't you manage it?'

`We positively must have fifteen laborers more. And they don't turn up. There were some here today asking seventy roubles for the summer.'

Levin was silent. Again he was brought face to face with that opposing force. He knew that however much they tried, they could not hire more than forty - thirty-seven perhaps or thirty-eight - laborers for a reasonable sum; some forty had been taken on, and there were no more. But still he could not help struggling against it.

`Send to Sury, to Chefirovka, if they don't come. We must look for them.'

`I'll send, to be sure,' said Vassilii Fiodorovich despondently.

`But then there are the horses - they're not good for much.'

`We'll get some more. I know, of course,' Levin added laughing, `you always want to do with as little and as poor a quality as possible;but this year I'm not going to let you have things your own way. I'll see to everything myself.'

`Why, I don't think you take much rest as it is. It cheers us up to work under the master's eye....'

`So they're sowing clover behind the Birch Dale? I'll go and have a look at them,' he said, mounting the little bay cob, Kolpik, who was led up by the coachman.

`You can't get across the stream, Konstantin Dmitrich,' the coachman shouted.

`All right, I'll go by the forest.'

And Levin rode through the slush of the farmyard to the gate and out into the open country, his good little horse, after his long inactivity, ambling easily, snorting over the pools, and asking, as it were, for guidance.

If Levin had felt happy before in the cattle pens and farmyard, he felt happier yet in the open country. Swaying rhythmically with the ambling paces of his good little cob, drinking in the warm yet fresh scent of the snow and the air, as he rode through his forest over the crumbling, wasted snow, still left in parts, and covered with dissolving tracks, he rejoiced over every tree, with the moss reviving on its bark and the buds swelling on its shoots. When he came out of the forest, in the immense plain before him, his winter fields stretched in an unbroken carpet of green, without one bare place or swamp, only spotted here and there in the hollows with patches of melting snow. He was not put out of temper even by the sight of the peasants' horse and colt trampling down his young grass (he told a peasant he met to drive them out), nor by the sarcastic and stupid reply of the peasant Ipat, whom he met on the way, and asked, `Well, Ipat, shall we soon be sowing?' `We must get the plowing done first, Konstantin Dmitrich,' answered Ipat. The farther he rode, the happier he became, and plans for the land rose to his mind each better than the last:

to plant all his fields with hedges along the southern borders, so that the snow should not lie under them; to divide them up into six fields of tillage and three for pasture and hay; to build a cattle yard at the further end of the estate, and to dig a pond and to construct movable pens for the cattle as a means of manuring the land. And then three hundred dessiatinas of wheat, one hundred of potatoes, and one hundred and fifty of clover, and not a dessiatina exhausted.