He said goodbye and left, and she did not try to keep him.
XI
In the middle of July the headman of his sister’s village, fifteen miles from Pokrovskoe, came to Levin with a report on the course of affairs and the mowing. The main income from his sister’s estate came from the water meadows. In former years the hay had been taken by the muzhiks at eight roubles per acre. When Levin took over the management, he examined the meadows, discovered that they were worth more, and set a price of ten roubles per acre. The muzhiks would not pay that price and, as Levin suspected, drove away other buyers. Then Levin went there in person and arranged for the meadows to be reaped partly by hired help, partly on shares. His muzhiks resisted this innovation in every possible way, but the thing went ahead, and in the first year the income from the meadows nearly doubled. Two years ago and last year the muzhiks had kept up the same resistance, and the reaping had been done in the same way. This year the muzhiks had cut all the hay for a share of one-third, and now the headman had come to announce that the mowing was done and that, fearing rain, he had sent for the clerk and in his presence had already divided the hay, piling up eleven stacks as the master’s share. From his vague answers to the question of how much hay there had been in the main meadow, from the headman’s haste in dividing the hay without asking permission, from the muzhik’s whole tone, Levin realized that there was something shady in this distribution of the hay and decided to go himself to verify the matter.
Arriving at the village at dinner-time and leaving his horse with an old friend, the husband of his brother’s wet nurse, Levin went to see the old man in the apiary, wishing to learn the details of the hay harvest. A garrulous, fine-looking old man, Parmenych received Levin joyfully, showed him what he was doing, told him all the details about his bees and about that year’s hiving; but to Levin’s questions about the mowing he spoke uncertainly and unwillingly. That further confirmed Levin in his surmises. He went to the field and examined the stacks. The stacks could not have contained fifty cartloads each, and, to catch the muzhiks, Levin at once gave orders to send for the carts used in transporting hay, to load one stack and transport it to the barn. There turned out to be only thirty-two cartloads in the stack. Despite the headman’s assurances about the fluffiness of the hay and its settling in the stacks, and his swearing that everything had been done in an honest-to-God way, Levin insisted on his point that the hay had been divided without his order, and that he therefore did not accept this hay as fifty cartloads to a stack. After lengthy arguments, the decision was that the muzhiks would take those eleven stacks, counting them as fifty cartloads each, towards their share, and apportion the master’s share again. These negotiations and the distribution of the stacks went on till the afternoon break. When the last of the hay had been distributed, Levin, entrusting the clerk with supervising the rest, seated himself on a haystack marked with a willow branch and admired the meadow teeming with peasants.
In front of him, where the river bent around a little bog, a motley line of women moved with a merry chatter of ringing voices, and the scattered hay quickly stretched out in grey, meandering ridges over the pale green new growth. Behind the women came muzhiks with forks, and the ridges grew into broad, tall, fluffy haystacks. To the left, carts rattled over the already reaped meadow, and the haystacks, lifted in huge forkfuls, vanished one after another, replaced by heavy cartloads of fragrant hay overhanging the horses’ croups.
‘Fine weather for it! What hay we’ll have!’ said the old man, sitting down beside Levin. ‘It’s tea, not hay! They pick it up like ducklings after grain!’ he added, pointing to the stacks being forked. ‘A good half’s been carted off since dinner.’
‘The last one, is it?’ he shouted to a young fellow who was driving by, standing in front of the cart-box and waving the ends of the hempen reins.
‘The last one, pa!’ the young fellow shouted, holding the horse back, and, smiling, he turned round to the gay, red-cheeked woman, also smiling, who was sitting in the cart-box, and drove on.
‘Who’s that? Your son?’ asked Levin.
‘My youngest,’ said the old man with a tender smile.
‘A fine young fellow!’
‘Not bad.’
‘Already married?’
‘Yes, two years ago St Philip’s.’11
‘And what about children?’
‘Children, hah! For a whole year he understood nothing, and was bashful besides,’ the old man replied. ‘Ah, what hay! Just like tea!’ he repeated, wishing to change the subject.
