War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [744]
During the sowing and harvesting of hay and grain, he looked after his own and the muzhiks’ fields in exactly the same way. And rare was the landowner who had his fields sown and harvested so early and so well and had such good returns as Nikolai.
He did not like having anything to do with house serfs, called them “freeloaders,” and, as everyone said, spoiled and indulged them; when some sort of orders had to be given about a house serf, especially when one had to be punished, he would lapse into indecisiveness and consult everyone in the house; but when it was possible to send a house serf as a soldier in place of a muzhik, he did it without the slightest hesitation. In all his orders concerning muzhiks, he never experienced the slightest doubt. Any order from him—this he knew—would be approved by all against one or a few.
He never allowed himself either to burden or punish a man only because he wanted it that way, or to relieve and reward a man because it was his personal desire to do so. He would have been unable to say what constituted this yardstick of what should and should not be done, but this yardstick in his soul was firm and unwavering.
He often said with vexation of some failure or disorder: “That’s our Russian folk”—and fancied that he could not bear muzhiks.
But with all the forces of his soul he loved these “Russian folk” and their life, and only because of that understood and adopted for himself the one way and method of farming that produced good results.
Countess Marya was jealous of this love of her husband’s and was sorry that she could not share in it, but she could not understand the joys and griefs afforded him by that separate world so foreign to her. She could not understand why he was so especially animated and happy when, having gotten up at dawn and spent the whole morning in the fields or at the threshing floor, he came back to have tea with her from the sowing, mowing, or harvesting. She did not understand why he told her admiringly and with rapture about the rich, thrifty muzhik Matvei Ermishin, who spent whole nights with his family transporting sheaves, and before anyone else had anything harvested, already had his stacks built. She did not understand why, pacing from the window to the balcony, he smiled so joyfully under his mustache and winked to himself when a warm, fine rain fell on the withering oat sprouts, or why, when a menacing cloud was blown away during the mowing or harvesting, he would come from the threshing floor, red, sunburnt, and sweaty, with the smell of wormwood and bitterwort in his hair, joyfully rubbing his hands, and say, “Well, one more little day, and mine and the peasants’ will all be threshed.”
Still less could she understand why he, with his kind heart, with his usual readiness to anticipate her wishes, would almost be driven to despair when she conveyed to him the requests of some peasant women or muzhiks who had turned to her asking to be released from work, why he, her kind Nicolas, stubbornly refused her, angrily asking her not to interfere in what was not her business. She felt that he had his special world, which he passionately loved, with some sort of laws that she did not understand.
When, trying to understand him, she occasionally spoke to him of his merits, which consisted in being good to his subjects, he would get angry and say: “Not in the least; it never even enters my head; and I wouldn’t do this much for their good. It’s all poetry and old wives’ tales—all this good of one’s neighbor. I want our children not to go begging; I have to set up our fortune while I live; that’s all. What’s needed for that is order, strictness…That’s what!” he said, clenching