‘Why is the carpenter not with the threshing-machine?’
‘Oh, I meant to tell you yesterday that the harrows need mending. It’s time to plough, you know.’
‘Why wasn’t it done in winter?’
‘But what do you want with the carpenter?’
‘Where are the racks from the calves’ yard?’
‘I have given orders for them to be put into their places. What is one to do with such people!’ said the steward, waving his arm.
‘It’s not a case of such people, but of such a steward!’ said Levin flaring up. ‘Tell me what I keep you for!’ he shouted; but remembering that this would not help matters, he stopped in the middle of what he was saying and only sighed. ‘Well, can we begin sowing?’ he asked after a pause.
‘It will be possible, beyond Turkino, to-morrow or the day after.’
‘And the clover?’
‘I have sent Vasily, he and Mishka are sowing. Only I don’t know if they will get through, it’s very sticky.’
‘How many acres?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘Why not the lot?’ shouted Levin.
That they were only sowing sixteen instead of fifty acres with clover was still more annoying. To grow clover successfully it was necessary according to both theory and his own experience to sow it as early as possible, almost before the snow had finished melting, and Levin could never get this done.
‘There is no one to do it. What are you to do with such people? Three have not come. And now Simon …’
‘Well then, you should have let the straw wait.’
‘So I have.’
‘But where are the men?’
‘Five are making compote’ (he meant compost) ‘and four are turning the oats over. They might begin sprouting, Constantine Dmitrich.’
Levin understood very well that ‘might begin sprouting’ meant that the English seed-oats were already spoiling. Here again his orders had not been obeyed.
‘Oh dear, didn’t I speak about it long ago in Lent… .’
‘Don’t worry, it will all be done in good time.’
Levin waved his hand angrily and went to the barn to look at the oats; then he came back to the stable. The oats were not yet spoilt, but the men were turning them over with shovels whereas they should have let them run down from the loft. Levin ordered them to do this, told off two of the men to help sow the clover, and got over his vexation with the foreman. Indeed, the day was so beautiful one could not long remain angry.
‘Ignat!’ he called to the coachman, who with sleeves rolled up was washing a carriage at the pump, ‘saddle me …’
‘Which, sir?’
‘Oh, Kolpik.’
‘Yes, sir.’
While the horse was being saddled Levin again called the steward, who was hanging about within sight, in order to make it up with him, and began to talk about the spring work that lay before them and his plans for the estate.
‘Carting manure must be started early so that it should be over before the first hay harvest, and the far field will have to be ploughed continually so as to keep the earth clean. We must hire labour for the hay harvest and not pay in kind.’
The foreman listened attentively and evidently tried to approve of his master’s plans: but his face still wore that hopeless and despondent expression so familiar to Levin. This expression seemed to say, ‘That’s all very well, but it will be as God wills.’
Nothing grieved Levin so much as this manner, but it was a manner common to all the numerous stewards he had employed. They all took up the same attitude toward his plans, and therefore he now no longer grew angry with them, but he was grieved, feeling all the more stimulated to resist this, so to say, elemental force for which he could find no other name but ‘as God wills’, which always obstructed him.
‘We’ll see if we can manage it!’ said the steward.
‘Why should you not manage it?’
‘We must have at least fifteen more labourers; but you see they don’t come. Some came to-day, but they wanted seventy roubles each for the summer.’
Levin was silent. That force was opposing him again. He knew that try as they would they had never managed to get more than from thirty-seven to forty labourers at the proper price. Forty could be hired, but never more than forty. Yet all the same he could not but continue the struggle.
‘Send to Sury and to Chefirovka, if they don’t come. We must try and find men.’
‘I’ll send right enough,’ said Vasily Fedorich, the steward, despondently. ‘But the horses too are getting weak.’
‘We will buy some more. But don’t I know,’ he added laughing, ‘that you always want less of everything and worse? However, this year I will not let you have your way. I’ll see to everything myself.’
‘You don’t sleep much as it is, I think. It’s always pleasanter for us when the master’s eye is on us …’
‘Then it’s down in the Birch Valley that they are sowing the clover? I’ll ride over and see,’ said Levin, mounting the little light bay horse, Kolpik, which the coachman had brought.
‘You won’t be able to cross the brook, Constantine Dmitrich,’ the coachman called out.
‘Well then, I’ll go through the forest.’
And Levin rode across the muddy yard and out of the gate into the field at a brisk amble, his fresh little horse snorting at the puddles and pulling at the bridle.
If he had felt light-hearted in the cattle and farm yards, he felt still more so in the fields. Gently swayed by the ambling pace of his good little horse, and drinking in the warm smell with the freshness of snow and air in it, he rode through the forest over the crumbling sinking snow that melted at each footstep, and rejoiced at the sight of each one of his trees with its swelling buds and the moss reviving on its bark. When he had passed the forest, a vast expanse of velvety green unrolled before him without a single bare spot, and only sprinkled here and there in the hollows with patches of unmelted snow. He was not irritated either by the sight of a peasant’s horse and colt treading down the young growth (he told a peasant he met to drive them off), nor by the jeering and stupid answer the peasant, Ipat, whom he happened to meet, gave him in reply to his question:
‘Well, Ipat, will it soon be time to sow?’
‘We must plough first, Constantine Dmitrich,’ said Ipat.
The further he went the happier he felt, and all sorts of plans for his estate, each better than the last, presented themselves to him: to plant rows of willows with a southern aspect on all the fields, so that the snow should not remain long under them; to divide the fields, tilling six and keeping three under grass; to build a new cattle-yard