Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [191]
Half-way there he stopped for feeding at a wealthy muzhik’s. A fresh, bald old man with a broad red beard, grey at the cheeks, opened the gates, pressing himself to the post to let the troika pass. Directing the coachman to a place under a shed in the big, clean and tidy new yard with fire-hardened wooden ploughs in it, the old man invited Levin in. A cleanly dressed young woman, galoshes on her bare feet, was bending over, wiping the floor in the new front hall. Frightened of the dog that came running in with Levin, she cried out, but immediately laughed at her fright, learning that the dog would not touch her. Pointing Levin to the inner door with her bared arm, she bent again, hiding her handsome face, and went on washing.
‘The samovar, maybe?’ she asked.
‘Yes, please.’
The room was big, with a Dutch stove and a partition. Under the icons stood a table with painted decorations, a bench and two chairs. By the entrance was a small cupboard. The shutters were closed, the flies were few, and it was so clean that Levin took care that Laska, who had been running in the road and bathing in puddles, should not dirty the floor, pointing her to a place in the corner by the door. After looking round the room, Levin went out to the back yard. The comely young woman in galoshes, empty buckets swinging on the yoke, ran ahead of him to fetch water from the well.
‘Look lively!’ the old man shouted merrily after her and came up to Levin. ‘Well, sir, are you on your way to see Nikolai Ivanovich Sviyazhsky ? He stops here, too,’ he began garrulously, leaning on the porch rail.
In the middle of the old man’s story of his acquaintance with Sviyazhsky, the gates creaked again and the field workers drove into the yard with ploughs and harrows. The horses hitched to the ploughs and harrows were well fed and large. Two of the workers were apparently family members, young men in cotton shirts and peaked caps; the other two were hired men in hempen shirts - one an old man and the other a young lad. Leaving the porch, the old man went to the horses and began to unhitch them.
‘What have you been ploughing?’ asked Levin.
‘Earthing up the potatoes. We’ve also got a bit of land. You, Fedot, don’t turn the gelding loose, put him to the trough, we’ll hitch up another one.’
‘Say, father, what about those ploughshares I asked you to get, have you brought them?’ asked a tall, strapping fellow, apparently the old man’s son.
‘There ... in the sledge,’ replied the old man, coiling the unhitched reins and throwing them on the ground. ‘Set them up while we’re having dinner.’
The comely young woman, with full buckets weighing down her shoulders, went into the front hall. Other women appeared from somewhere - young, beautiful, middle-aged, and old ugly ones, with and without children.
The samovar chimney hummed; the workers and family members, finished with the horses, went to have dinner. Levin got his own provisions from the carriage and invited the old man to have tea with him.
‘Why, we’ve already had tea today,’ said the old man, accepting the invitation with obvious pleasure. ‘Or just for company.’
Over tea Levin learned the whole story of the old man’s farming. Ten years ago the old man had rented three hundred and twenty acres from a lady landowner, and last year he had bought them and rented eight hundred more from a local landowner. A small portion of the land, the worst, he rented out, and he himself ploughed some hundred acres with his family and two hired men. The old man complained that things were going poorly. But Levin understood that he was complaining only for propriety’s sake, and that his farm was flourishing. If it had been going poorly, he would not have bought land at forty roubles an acre, would not have got three sons and a nephew married, would not have rebuilt twice after fires, each time better than before. Despite the old man’s complaints, it was clear that he was justifiably proud of his prosperity, proud of his sons, nephew, daughters-in-law, horses,