Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 13
While they were saddling his horse, Levin again called up the bailiff, who was
hanging about in sight, to make it up with him, and began talking to him about the
spring operations before them, and his plans for the farm.
The wagons were to begin carting manure earlier, so as to get all done before the
early mowing. And the ploughing of the further land to go on without a break so
as to let it ripen lying fallow. And the mowing to be all done by hired labor, not on
half-profits. The bailiff listened attentively, and obviously made an effort to approve
of his employer’s projects. But still he had that look Levin knew so well that always
irritated him, a look of hopelessness and despondency. That look said: “That’s all
very well, but as God wills.”
Nothing mortified Levin so much as that tone. But it was the tone common to all
the bailiffs he had ever had. They had all taken up that attitude to his plans, and so
now he was not angered by it, but mortified, and felt all the more roused to struggle
against this, as it seemed, elemental force continually ranged against him, for which
he could find no other expression than “as God wills.”
“If we can manage it, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said the bailiff.
“Why ever shouldn’t you manage it?”
“We positively must have another fifteen laborers. And they don’t turn up. There
were some here today asking seventy roubles for the summer.”
Levin was silent. Again he was brought face to face with that opposing force.
He knew that however much they tried, they could not hire more than forty–thirtyseven
perhaps or thirty-eight– laborers for a reasonable sum. Some forty had been
taken on, and there were no more. But still he could not help struggling against it.
“Send to Sury, to Tchefirovka; if they don’t come we must look for them.”
“Oh, I’ll send, to be sure,” said Vassily Fedorovitch despondently. “But there are
the horses, too, they’re not good for much.”
“We’ll get some more. I know, of course,” Levin added laughing, “you always
want to do with as little and as poor quality as possible; but this year I’m not going
to let you have things your own way. I’ll see to everything myself.”
“Why, I don’t think you take much rest as it is. It cheers us up to work under the
master’s eye...”
“So they’re sowing clover behind the Birch Dale? I’ll go and have a look at them,”
he said, getting on to the little bay cob, Kolpik, who was led up by the coachman.
“You can’t get across the streams, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” the coachman
shouted.
“All right, I’ll go by the forest.”
And Levin rode through the slush of the farmyard to the gate and out into the open
country, his good little horse, after his long inactivity, stepping out gallantly, snorting
over the pools, and asking, as it were, for guidance. If Levin had felt happy before
in the cattle pens and farmyard, he felt happier yet in the open country. Swaying
rhythmically with the ambling paces of his good little cob, drinking in the warm yet
fresh scent of the snow and the air, as he rode through his forest over the crumbling,
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