| UNTIL PRINCE ANDREY’S STAY at Bogutcharovo, the estate had never had an owner in residence, and the Bogutcharovo peasants were of quite a different character from the peasants of Bleak Hills. They differed from them in speech, in dress, and in manners. They said they came from the steppes. The old prince praised them for their industry when they came to Bleak Hills for harvesting, or digging ponds and ditches; but he did not like them because of their savage manners. Prince Andrey’s residence at Bogutcharovo, and his innovations—his hospitals and schools and the lowering of their rent—had not softened their manners, but, on the contrary, had intensified their traits of character, which the old prince called their savagery. Obscure rumours were always current among them: at one time a belief that they were all to be carried off to be made Cossacks, then that they were to be converted to some new religion, then rumours of some supposed proclamations of the Tsar, or of the oath to the Tsar Pavel Petrovitch in 1797 (which was said to have granted freedom to the peasants, and to have been withdrawn by the gentry later); then of the expected return of the Tsar Peter Fedorovitch, who was to rise again from the dead in seven years, and to bring perfect freedom, and to make an end of the existing order of things. Rumours of the war, and Bonaparte and his invasion, were connected in their minds with vague conceptions of Antichrist, of the end of the world, and perfect freedom. In the vicinity of Bogutcharovo were large villages inhabited by Crown serfs, or peasants who paid rent to absentee owners. There were very few resident landowners in the neighbourhood, and consequently very few house-serfs or peasants able to read and write. And among the peasants of that part of the country there could be seen more distinctly and strongly marked than among others those mysterious undercurrents in the life of the Russian peasantry, which are so baffling to contemporaries. Twenty years before, there had been a movement among the peasants of the district to emigrate to certain supposedly warm rivers. Hundreds of peasants, among them those of Bogutcharovo, had suddenly begun selling their cattle and moving away with their families towards the south-west. Like birds flying to unknown realms over the ocean, these men with their wives and children turned towards the south-west, where no one of them had been. They set off in caravans, redeemed their freedom one by one, ran and drove and walked to the unknown region of the warm springs. Many were punished; some sent to Siberia; many died of cold and hunger on the road; many came back of their own accord; and the movement died down as it had begun without obvious cause. But the undercurrents still flowed among the people, and were gathering force for some new manifestation, destined to appear as strangely, unexpectedly, and at the same time simply, naturally, and forcibly. In 1812 any one living in close relations with the peasants might have observed that there was a violent ferment working below the surface, and an outbreak of some kind was at hand. Alpatitch, who came to Bogutcharovo a little while before the old prince’s death, noticed that there was some excitement among the peasants; and noticed that, unlike Bleak Hills district, where within a radius of sixty versts all the peasants had moved away, abandoning their villages to be wasted by the Cossacks, in the Bogutcharovo steppe country the peasants had entered, it was said, into communication with the French, and were remaining in their homes, and there were some mysterious documents circulating among them. He learned through serfs who were attached to him that the peasant Karp, a man of great influence in the village, had a few days previously accompanied a government transport, and had returned with the news that the Cossacks were destroying the deserted villages, while the French would not touch them. He knew that another peasant had on the previous day even brought from the hamlet of Vislouhovo, where the French were encamped, a proclamation from the French general that no harm would be done to the inhabitants, and that everything taken from them would be paid for, if they would remain. In token of good faith, the peasant brought from Vislouhovo a hundred-rouble note (he did not know it was false), paid him in advance for hay. And last, and most important of all, Alpatitch learned that on the day on which he had given the village elder orders to collect carts to move the princess’s luggage from Bogutcharovo, there had been a meeting in the village at which it was resolved to wait and not to move. Meanwhile, time was pressing. On the day of the prince’s death, the 15th of August, the marshal urged Princess Marya to move the same day, as it was becoming dangerous. He said that he could not answer for what might happen after the 16th. He drove away that evening, promising to return next morning for the funeral. But next day he could not come, as he received information of an expected advance of the French, and was only just in time to get his family and valuables moved away from his own estate. For nearly thirty years Bogutcharovo had been under the direction of the village elder, Dron, called by the old prince, Dronushka. Dron was one of those physically and morally vigorous peasants, who grow a thick beard as soon as they are grown up, and go on almost unchanged till sixty or seventy, without a grey hair or the loss of a tooth, as upright and vigorous at sixty as at thirty. Shortly after the attempted migration to the warm rivers, in which he had taken part with the rest, Dron was made village elder and overseer of Bogutcharovo, and had filled those positions irreproachably for twenty-three years. The peasants were more afraid of him than of their master. The old prince and the young one and the steward respected him, and called him in joke the minister. Dron had never once been drunk or ill since he had been appointed elder; he had never after sleepless nights or severe labour shown the slightest signs of fatigue; and though he could not read or write, he never forgot an account of the pounds of flour in the huge waggon-loads he sold, and of the money paid for them, nor missed a sheaf of wheat on an acre of the Bogutcharovo fields. This peasant Dron it was for whom Alpatitch sent on coming from the plundered estate at Bleak Hills. He ordered him to get ready twelve horses for the princess’s carriages, and eighteen conveyances for the move which was to be made from Bogutcharovo. Though the peasants paid rent instead of working as serfs, Alpatitch expected to meet no difficulty on their part in carrying out this order, since there were two hundred and thirty efficient families in Bogutcharovo, and the peasants were well-to-do. But Dron, on receiving the order, dropped his eyes and made no reply. Alpatitch mentioned the names of peasants from whom he told him to take the carts. Dron replied that the horses belonging to those peasants were away on hire. Alpatitch mentioned the names of other peasants. They too, according to Dron, had no horses available: some were employed in government transport, others had gone lame, and others had died through the shortness of forage. In Dron’s opinion, there was no hope of getting horses enough for the princess’s carriages, not to speak of the transport of baggage. Alpatitch looked intently at Dron and scowled. Dron was a model village elder, but Alpatitch had not been twenty years managing the prince’s estates for nothing, and he too was a model steward. He possessed in the highest degree the faculty of divining the needs and instincts of the peasants, with whom he had to deal, and was consequently an excellent steward. Glancing at Dron, he saw at once that his answers were not the expression of his own ideas, but the expression of the general drift of opinion in the Bogutcharovo village, by which the elder had already been carried away. At the same time, he knew that Dron, who had saved money and was detested by the village, must be hesitating between two camps—the master’s and the peasants’. He detected the hesitation in his eyes, and so frowning he came closer to Dron. “Now, Dronushka,” he said, “you listen to me! Don’t you talk nonsense to me. His excellency, Prince Andrey Nikolaevitch, himself gave me orders to move the folk away, and not leave them with the enemy, and the Tsar has issued a decree that it is to be so. Any one that stays is a traitor to the Tsar. Do you hear?” “I hear,” answered Dron, not raising his eyes. Alpatitch was not satisfied with his reply. “Ay, Dron, there’ll be trouble!” said Alpatitch, shaking his head. “It’s for you to command!” said Dron dejectedly. “Ay, Dron, drop it!” repeated Alpatitch, taking his hand out of the bosom of his coat, and pointing with a solemn gesture to the ground under Dron’s feet. “I can see right through you; and more than that, I can see three yards into the earth under you,” he said, looking at the ground under Dron’s feet. Dron was disconcerted; he looked furtively at Alpatitch, and dropped his eyes again. “You drop this nonsense, and tell the folks to pack up to leave their homes and go to Moscow, and to get ready carts to-morrow morning for the princess’s luggage; and don’t you go to the meeting. Do you hear?” All at once Dron threw himself at his feet. “Yakov Alpatitch, discharge me! Take the keys from me; discharge me, for Christ’s sake!” “Stop that!” said Alpatitch sternly. “I can see through you three yards into the earth,” he repeated, knowing that his skill in beekeeping, his knowledge of the right day to sow the oats, and his success in pleasing the old prince for twenty years had long ago gained him the reputation of a wizard, and that the power of seeing for three yards under a man is ascribed to wizards. Dron got up, and would have said something, but Alpatitch interrupted him. “What’s this you’ve all got in your head? Eh? … What are you thinking about? Eh?” “What am I to do with the people?” said Dron. “They’re all in a ferment. I do tell them …” “Oh, I dare say you do,” said Alpatitch. “Are they drinking?” he asked briefly. “They’re all in a ferment, Yakov Alpatitch; they have got hold of another barrel.” “Then you listen to me. I’ll go to the police-captain and you tell them so, and tell them to drop all this and get the carts ready.” “Certainly,” answered Dron. Yakov Alpatitch did not insist further. He had much experience in managing the peasants, and knew that the chief means for securing obedience was not to show the slightest suspicion that they could do anything but obey. Having wrung from Dron a submissive “certainly,” Yakov Alpatitch rested content with it, though he had more than doubts—he had a conviction—that the carts would not be provided without the intervention of the military authorities. And as a fact when evening came, the carts had not been provided. There had been again a village meeting at the tavern, and at the meeting it had been resolved to drive the horses out into the forest and not to provide the conveyances. Without saying a word of all this to the princess, Alpatitch ordered his own baggage to be unloaded from the waggons that had come from Bleak Hills and the horses to be taken from them for the princess’s carriage, while he rode off himself to the police authorities. |
