The southern spring, the swift and easy running of his Viennese carriage and the solitude of the open road all put Pierre in a good mood. The estates, which he had never visited before, became one by one more and more picturesque; all the peasants seemed to be thriving and they were touchingly grateful for his kindness to them. Everywhere Pierre was given a welcome that embarrassed him, yet deep down he found it all heart-warming. At one place the peasants brought him bread and salt and a icon of St Peter and St Paul, and then asked permission to build a new chapel in their church at their own expense in honour of these patron saints of his and as a gesture of love and gratitude for his kindness to them. At another stop he was welcomed by women carrying tiny babies, grateful for being released from hard physical work. In a third place he was met by a priest with a cross, surrounded by little children who were being taught reading, writing and religion because of the count’s generosity. On all his estates Pierre saw with his own eyes stone buildings under construction or already built, all to the same plan – hospitals, schools and alms-houses, soon to be opened. Everywhere Pierre saw the steward’s records showing a decrease in the amount of work done by the peasants for the benefit of the master, compared with previous years, and he heard the most moving expressions of gratitude from deputations of peasants dressed in their traditional blue kaftans.
What Pierre did not know was that the place where they brought him bread and salt and were building a new chapel to St Peter and St Paul was a trading village which held a fair every St Peter’s day, and the chapel had been started long before by wealthy peasants of that village, where nine-tenths of the peasants lived in abject poverty. He did not know that as a result of his orders to stop sending nursing mothers out to work on the master’s land, those same mothers had to work even harder on their own patches of land. He did not know that the priest who met him with the cross oppressed the peasants with his methods of extortion, and that the pupils gathered round him had been yielded up with much weeping and could be redeemed by their parents only for large sums of money. He did not know that the stone buildings were being put up, all to the same plan, by his own workers, which meant an actual increase in the forced labour of his peasants, but that didn’t show up on paper. He did not know that where the steward’s records showed a one-third reduction in rent, in accordance with his instructions, their compulsory labour had gone up by half. And so it was that Pierre returned from the tour of his estates delighted and fully restored to the mood of philanthropy in which he had left Petersburg, and he wrote most enthusiastically to his ‘brother and mentor’, as he called the Grand Master.
‘How easy it is, what little effort it takes to do so much good,’ thought Pierre, ‘and how little we trouble ourselves to do it!’
He was pleased that so much gratitude had been shown him, but he felt embarrassed by this. Such gratitude only served to remind him how much
The head steward, a very stupid man but with plenty of cunning, had the measure of his clever but simple-minded master, and he toyed with him. Noting the impact on the count of these carefully staged receptions, he redoubled and strengthened his arguments – it was impossible, and, what was more important, it was quite unnecessary to liberate the peasants, who were perfectly happy as things stood.
Deep down, Pierre had to agree with the steward that it would be difficult to imagine the people being any happier, and there was no telling what their future might be in freedom. However, not without reluctance, he continued to stick to what he thought was right. The steward promised to do everything in his power to carry out the count’s wishes, knowing full well that the count would never be in a position to check whether everything possible had been done to speed up the sale of the forests and pay off the bank-loans, and he would probably never even ask about the buildings, let alone find out that when they were finished they just stood empty, and the peasants went on giving in labour and money exactly what other peasants gave to other masters – all that could be got out of them.
CHAPTER 11
Back from his southern tour in buoyant mood, Pierre did what he had been intending to do for some time; he went to visit his friend Bolkonsky, not having seen him for two years. At the last post-station he heard that Andrey was not at Bald Hills but at his new separate estate, so he went straight there.
