He tried reproof, but merely received some such answer as the following: “How is it possible, master, that we should not rejoice in our lord’s profit? You yourself graciously observed how hard we worked when we were ploughing and sowing. You ordered a measure of vodka apiece for us because we did so.” What reply could be made to that?
“But why has it all turned out badly now?” the master asked.
“Who knows? Evidently some worms devoured the seed from below. And just remember what a summer we have had: there’s been no rain at all.”
But the master saw that no worms had devoured the peasants’ crops from below, and that the rain had fallen in a peculiar way: it had favoured the peasants, but not one drop of it had watered the owner’s fields.
It was still more difficult for him to manage the women. They were continually begging off from their work, and complaining of the master’s impositions. It was strange! He had utterly abolished all tributes of linen, berries, mushrooms, and nuts; he had released them from fully half of their other labours, thinking that the women would devote this time to domestic affairs; that they would mend and make their husbands’ clothes, and cultivate their vegetable gardens. However, nothing of the sort took place.
Idleness, quarrelling, gossiping, and all sorts of dissension arose among the fair sex, so that the husbands were continually coming to him with such words as these: “Master, take away that devil of a woman, my wife! she’s a perfect fiend: there’s no living with her!”
He hardened his heart, and tried to resort to sternness. But how could he be stern? A woman would come to him in the regular feminine fashion, weak and ill and whining, with the most horrible and disgusting rags heaped upon her—where she had got them, God only knows! “Go away, go home! take yourself out of my sight! God be with you!” said poor Tentyotnikoff; and then he saw the sick woman, as soon as she had emerged from his doors, fight with a neighbour over a beet-root and belabour the neighbour’s sides in a way of which a healthy man would have been incapable.
It occurred to him to try the experiment of establishing a school among them, but this resulted in such folly that he hung his head in shame: it would have been better if he had not thought of it. Finally, in his discouragement his zeal faded away.
He superintended the work in an inattentive manner. If he stood near-by while the scythes were rustling softly through the grass, or the men were piling the hay in stacks, or loading it on waggons, his eyes gazed into the distance; if the work was proceeding afar, they sought objects near at hand, or glanced aside at some bend of the river, along the banks of which walked a red-billed, red-legged marten. He gazed at it with curiosity, as it held a fish, which it had caught crosswise in its bill, as though meditating whether it should swallow it or not; and then gazing intently across the river at another marten, gleaming white in the distance, he saw that it had not caught a fish, but was staring fixedly at the marten who had. Or else deserting both the martens and the bend of the river, screwing his eyes tight together, and throwing up his head towards the airy expanse, he inhaled the perfume of the fields, and listened to the voices of the melodious tenants of the air as they united in one harmonious chorus. He heard the woodcock piping in the rye, the landrail croaking in the grass, the linnets grumbling and twittering as they flitted past, the marsh-snipe shrieking as he rose in the air, the trills of the lark rolling down an invisible ladder of air, and the notes of the stork ringing out like the blasts of a trumpet as it outlined a triangle in the sky. The whole neighbourhood, full of sound, gave back a delightful echo. But even all this began to bore him. He soon ceased to visit the fields altogether and sat in his own room, refusing even to receive the reports of the steward.
At first some people from the neighbourhood came to visit him—a retired lieutenant of hussars, redolent of tobacco; a student who had not completed his course but who held very decided opinions, and had gathered his wisdom from current pamphlets and newspapers. However, these visitors also began to