War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [272]
Prince Andrei had been living in the country for two years without a break. All those undertakings which Pierre had initiated on his estates and had not brought to any result, constantly changing from one thing to another—all these undertakings, without talking about them to anyone and without any noticeable effort, had been carried out by Prince Andrei.
He possessed in the highest degree that practical tenacity, lacking in Pierre, which kept things in motion without any big gestures and efforts on his part.
On one of his estates of three hundred souls, the peasants were registered as free plowmen (this was one of the first examples in Russia), on some others the corvée was replaced by quitrent.2 A trained midwife was invited to Bogucharovo at his expense to help women in childbirth, and a priest was paid to teach the children of the peasants and servants to read and write.
Prince Andrei spent half his time at Bald Hills with his father and his son, who was still in the care of nannies; the other half in his Bogucharovo cloister, as his father called his estate. Despite the indifference he had displayed to Pierre towards all external events in the world, he followed them assiduously, received many books, and, to his own astonishment, noticed, when people from Petersburg came to visit him or his father, fresh from the very whirlwind of life, that these people, in their knowledge of all that was happening in external and internal politics, were far behind him, who sat all the time in the country.
Besides being taken up with his estates, besides being generally taken up with reading the most varied books, Prince Andrei was taken up at that time with a critical analysis of our last two unfortunate campaigns and with drawing up a project for change in our military regulations and statutes.
In the spring of 1809, Prince Andrei went to his son’s Ryazan estates, of which he was the trustee.
Warmed by the spring sun, he sat in his open carriage, looking at the first grass, the first birch leaves, and the first billows of white spring clouds racing across the bright blue sky. He was not thinking about anything, but looked around cheerfully and meaninglessly.
They crossed the ferry on which he had talked with Pierre a year before. They drove past a dirty village, threshing floors, sprouting fields, down a slope with residual snow by a bridge, up a slope of muddy clay, past strips of stubble and bushes greening here and there, and entered a birch woods on both sides of the road. It was almost hot in the woods, the wind was not felt. The birches, all strewn with sticky green leaves, did not stir, and the first green grass and purple flowers were poking through and lifting up last year’s leaves. Small fir trees, scattered here and there among the birches, were an unpleasant reminder of winter with their crude evergreen needles. The horses began to snort as they drove into the woods and sweated more visibly.
The footman Pyotr said something to the coachman; the coachman answered affirmatively. But evidently the coachman’s sympathy was not enough for Pyotr: he turned on the box towards his master.
“Your Excellency, how light it feels!” he said, smiling respectfully.
“What?”
“It feels light, Your Excellency.”
“What’s he talking about?” thought Prince Andrei. “Ah, the spring, probably,” he thought, looking about. “So it is, everything’s green already…so quickly! Birches, and bird cherry, and alders already beginning…But no sign of oaks. Ah, there’s one.”
At the side of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times older than the birches of the woods, it was ten times as thick and twice as tall as any birch. It was an enormous oak, twice the span of a man’s arms in girth, with some limbs broken off long ago, and broken bark covered with old scars. With its huge, gnarled, ungainly, unsymmetrically