Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [453]
‘Why is all this being done?’ he thought. ‘What am I standing here and making them work for? Why are they all bustling about and trying to show me their zeal? Why is this old woman toiling so? (I know her, she’s Matryona, I treated her when a beam fell on her during a fire),’ he thought, looking at a thin woman who, as she moved the grain with a rake, stepped tensely with her black-tanned bare feet over the hard, uneven threshing floor. ‘That time she recovered; but today or tomorrow or in ten years they’ll bury her and nothing will be left of her, nor of that saucy one in the red skirt who is beating the grain from the chaff with such a deft and tender movement. She’ll be buried, too, and so will this piebald gelding - very soon,’ he thought, looking at the heavy-bellied horse, breathing rapidly through flared nostrils, that was treading the slanted wheel as it kept escaping from under him. ‘He’ll be buried, and Fyodor, the feeder, with his curly beard full of chaff and the shirt torn on his white shoulder, will also be buried. And now he’s ripping the sheaves open, and giving orders, and yelling at the women, and straightening the belt on the flywheel with a quick movement. And above all, not only they, but I, too, will be buried and nothing will be left. What for?’
He thought that and at the same time looked at his watch to calculate how much had been threshed in an hour. He had to know that in order to set the day’s quota by it.
‘It will soon be an hour, and they’ve only just started on the third stack,’ Levin thought, went over to the feeder and, shouting above the noise of the machine, told him to feed more slowly.
‘You stuff in too much, Fyodor! See - it gets choked, that’s why it’s slow. Even it out!’
Blackened by the dust sticking to his sweaty face, Fyodor shouted something in reply, but went on doing it not as Levin wanted.
Levin went up to the drum, motioned Fyodor aside, and began feeding himself.
Working till the muzhiks’ dinner-time, which was not far off, he left the threshing barn together with the feeder and got into conversation with him, stopping by a neat yellow rick of harvested rye stacked on the seed-threshing floor.
The feeder came from a distant village, the one where Levin used to lease land on collective principles. Now it was leased to an innkeeper.
Levin got into conversation about that land with Fyodor and asked whether Platon, a wealthy and good muzhik from the same village, might rent it next year.
‘The price is too dear, Platon wouldn’t make enough, Konstantin Dmitrich,’ said the muzhik, picking ears of rye from under his sweaty shirt.
‘Then how does Kirillov make it pay?’
‘Mityukha’ (so the muzhik scornfully called the innkeeper) ‘makes it pay right enough, Konstantin Dmitrich! He pushes till he gets his own. He takes no pity on a peasant. But Uncle Fokanych’ (so he called old Platon), ‘he won’t skin a man. He lends to you, he lets you off. So he comes out short. He’s a man, too.’
‘But why should he let anyone off?’
‘Well, that’s how it is - people are different. One man just lives for his own needs, take Mityukha even, just stuffs his belly, but Fokanych - he’s an upright old man. He lives for the soul. He remembers God.’
‘How’s that? Remembers God? Lives for the soul?’ Levin almost shouted.
‘Everybody knows how - by the truth, by God’s way. People are different. Now, take you even, you wouldn’t offend anybody either ...’
‘Yes, yes, goodbye!’ said Levin, breathless with excitement, and, turning, he took his