Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [150]
For Levin and the young lad behind him these changes of movement were difficult. Both of them, having got into one strenuous rhythm, were caught up in the passion of work and were unable to change it and at the same time observe what was in front of them.
Levin did not notice how the time passed. If he had been asked how long he had been mowing, he would have said half an hour - yet it was nearly dinner-time. Walking back down the swath, the old man drew Levin’s attention to the girls and boys, barely visible, coming towards the mowers from different directions, through the tall grass and along the road, their little arms weighed down with bundles of bread and jugs of kvass stoppered with rags.
‘See the midges come crawling!’ he said, pointing to them, and he looked at the sun from under his hand.
They finished two more swaths and the old man stopped.
‘Well, master, it’s dinner-time!’ he said resolutely. And, having reached the river, the mowers set out across the swaths towards their caftans, near which the children who had brought their dinners sat waiting for them. The muzhiks gathered together - those from far away under their carts, those from near by under a willow bush on which they heaped some grass.
Levin sat down with them; he did not want to leave.
Any constraint before the master had long since vanished. The muzhiks were preparing to have dinner. Some were washing, the young fellows were bathing in the river, others were preparing a place to rest, untying sacks of bread and unstopping jugs of kvass. The old man crumbled some bread into a bowl, kneaded it with a spoon handle, poured in some water from his whetstone box, cut more bread, sprinkled it with salt, and turned eastward to pray.
‘Here, master, try a bit of my mash,’ he said, squatting down in front of the bowl.
The mash tasted so good that Levin changed his mind about going home for dinner. He ate with the old man and got to talking with him about his domestic affairs, taking a lively interest in them, and told him about all his own affairs and all circumstances that might interest the old man. He felt closer to him than to his brother, and involuntarily smiled from the tenderness that he felt for this man. When the old man stood up again, prayed, and lay down right there under the bush, putting some grass under his head, Levin did the same and, despite the flies and bugs, clinging, persistent in the sunlight, tickling his sweaty face and body, he fell asleep at once and awoke only when the sun had passed over to the other side of the bush and begun to reach him. The old man had long been awake and sat whetting the young fellows’ scythes.
Levin looked around him and did not recognize the place, everything was so changed. An enormous expanse of the meadow had been mowed, and its already fragrant swaths shone with a special new shine in the slanting rays of the evening sun. The mowed-around bushes by the river, the river itself, invisible before but now shining like steel in its curves, the peasants stirring and getting up, the steep wall of grass at the unmowed side of the meadow, and the hawks wheeling above the bared meadow - all this was completely new. Coming to his senses, Levin began to calculate how much had been mowed and how much more could be done that day.
They had done an extraordinary amount of work for forty-two men. The whole of the big meadow, which in the time of the corvée7 used to be mowed in two days by thirty scythes, was already mowed. Only some corners with short swaths remained unmowed. But Levin wanted to get as much mowed as possible that day and was vexed with the sun for going down so quickly. He felt no fatigue at all; he only wanted to work more and more quickly and get as much done as possible.
‘What do you think, can we still