The work is intense and ceaseless. All work with their utmost strength and during this work eats up not only all their scanty supplies of food but also any reserves they may have had: never too stout, they grow leaner by the end of the harvest work.
Here is a small group engaged on mowing: three peasants-one an old man, another his nephew (a young married lad), and a boot-maker, a sinewy fellow who has been a domestic serf-this hay-harvest decides their fate for the coming winter for them all: whether they can keep a cow and pay the taxes. They have already worked unceasingly and continuously for two weeks. Rain has hindered the work. After the rain, when the wind has dried the grass, they decide to finish the work, and to get on more quickly they decide each to bring two women to it. With the old man comes his wife, a woman of fifty worn out by hard work and eleven childbirths, and deaf but still a good worker, and his
1 The fast of St. Peter and St. Paul, from the ninth week after Easter till the 29th June, old style.-A. M.
thirteen-year-old daughter, a small girl but strong and quick. With the nephew comes his wife, a woman as strong and tall as a man, and his sister-in-law the pregnant wife of a soldier. With the boot maker comes his wife, a good worker, and her mother, an old woman finishing her eighth decade and who usually goes out begging. They all line up, and work from morning till evening in the sweltering blaze of the June sun. It is steaming and the rain threatens. Every hour of work is precious. They grudge the time to fetch water or kvas.
A tiny boy, the old woman’s grandson, fetches some water for them. The old woman, evidently only anxious not to be driven away from the work, does not let the rake out of her hands, though she can hardly, with effort, move along. The lad, all bent up and taking short steps with his bare little feet, brings along the jug of water which is heavier than himself, changing it from hand to hand.
The girl shoulders a load of hay which is also heavier than she; she takes a few steps, stops, and throws it down unable to carry it farther. The old woman of fifty rakes unceasingly and, with her kerchief brushed to one side, drags the hay along, breathing heavily and tottering in her walk; the woman of eighty does nothing but rake, but even that is beyond her strength: she slowly drags her feet in their bark shoes, and with wrinkled brows looks sombrely before her like one who is seriously ill or is dying. The old man purposely sends her farther away from the others to rake near the hay-cocks so that she should not have to keep up with them, but without pause and with the same death-like sombre face she works on as long as the others do.
The sun is already setting behind the woods and the hay-cocks are not yet all cleared away and much remains to be done.
All feel it is time to knock off. but no one speaks waiting for the others to do so. At last the boot maker, feeling that he has no strength left, proposes to the old man to leave the cocks till tomorrow and the old man agrees, and the women at once run for their clothes, for the jugs, for the hay-forks, and the old woman sits down immediately where she stands, and then lies down still looking straight before her with the same deathlike face. But the women are going, and she gets up groaning and drags herself away after them.
But here is the proprietor’s house. That same evening when from the village is heard the clang of the whetstones of the exhausted hay-makers returning from the fields, the sounds of the hammers straightening out the dents in the scythe blades, the shouts of women and girls who, having just had time to put down their rakes are already running to drive in the cattle-from the proprietor’s house other sounds are heard; drin, drin, drin! goes the piano, and an Hungarian song rings out, and amid those songs occasionally comes the sound of the knock of croquet-mallets on the balls. Near the stable stands a carriage to which four well-fed horses are harnessed. It is a smart hired carriage.
Guests have arrived who have paid ten rubles to be driven ten miles. The horses harnessed to the carriage are making their bells tinkle. There is hay in their trough and they trample it underfoot-the very hay that there in the hay field is collected with such effort. At the proprietor s house there is movement-a healthy well-fed lad in a pink shirt (given him for his services as yard porter is calling the coachmen to harness and saddle some horses. Two peasants who live here as coachmen come out of the coachmen’s room and go leisurely to saddle the horses for the gentlefolk. .
Still nearer to the proprietor’s house one hears the sounds of another piano. This is a young lady student of the Conservatoire, who lives here to teach the children and is practicing Schumann. The sounds of the one piano break in on those of the other. Close to the house two nurses are passing: one of them is young, the other old. They are taking and carrying children-of the same age as those who had run from the village with the jugs-to put them to bed. One of the nurses is English and cannot speak Russian. She was imported from England not for any known qualities, but only because she could not talk Russian. Farther off a peasant and two peasant women are watering flowers near the house, while another is cleaning a gun for the young master.
And here are two women carrying a basket with clean clothes; they have washed the linen for the gentry and for the English and French teachers. In that house two women hardly manage to wash up all the crockery for the gentlefolk who have just had a meal, and two peasants in dress coats are running up and down stairs serving coffee, tea, wine, and seltzer water. Upstairs a table is spread: they have just finished eating and will soon eat again till midnight, till three o’clock, often till cock-crow.
Some of them sit smoking and playing cards, others sit and smoke talking liberalism; others move about from place to place, eat, smoke, and not knowing what to do decide to go out for a drive. There are some fifteen healthy men and women there and some thirty able-bodied men and women servants working for them.
And this is happening where every hour and every boy is precious. And it will continue in July when the peasants, going short of sleep, will mow the oats by night not to let them shack, and the women will rise while it is still dark to thrash straw for sheaf-bands, and when that old woman by then quite worn out with the harvest work, and the woman with child, and the young lads, overstrain themselves and get ill from drinking too much water; and when there is a shortage of bands and horses and carts to carry to the stacks the corn which feeds everyone, and of which millions of puds1 are needed every day in Russia that people may not die; and all this time the gentlefolk will continue the same way of life there will be theatricals, picnics, hunts, drinking, eating, piano-playing, singing, dancing, in an unceasing orgy.
Here it is no longer possible to make the excuse that such is the order of things; none of it was prearranged. We ourselves carefully arrange this way of life, taking grain and labour away from the overburdened peasant folk. We live as though we had no connexion with the dying washerwoman, the fifteen-year-old prostitute, the woman fagged out by cigarette-making, and the strained, excessive labour of the old women and children around us who lack a sufficiency of food; we live-enjoying ourselves in luxury-as if there were no connexion between those things and our life; we do not wish to see that were it not for our idle, luxurious and depraved way of life, there would also not be this excessive toil, and that without this excessive toil such lives as ours would be impossible.
We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another, and that we, living as we do, are as innocent and pure as doves.
We read descriptions of the lives of the Romans and marvel at the inhumanity of the soulless Luculli glutting themselves on delicacies and costly drinks while people died of
1 The pud is about 36 lbs. avoirdupois.-A. M.
hunger; we shake our heads and marvel at the savagery of our grandfathers, the serf-owners who organized domestic orchestras and theatres and allotted whole villages for the upkeep of their gardens, and from the height of our humanitarianism we wonder at them.
We read the words of
