“If I might make a remark, Prince,” said the foreman, when they got home, “you will never come to any agreement with them; they are so obstinate. At a meeting these people just stick in one place, and there is no moving them. It is because they are frightened of everything. Why, these very peasants—say that white-haired one, or the dark one, who were refusing, are intelligent peasants. When one of them comes to the office and one makes him sit down to cup of tea it’s like in the Palace of Wisdom—he is quite diplomatist,” said the foreman, smiling; “he will consider everything rightly. At a meeting it’s a different man—he keeps repeating one and the same . . .”
“Well, could not some of the more intelligent men be asked to come here?” said Nekhludoff. “I would carefully explain it to them.”
“That can be done,” said the smiling foreman.
“Well, then, would you mind calling them here to-morrow?”
“Oh, certainly I will,” said the foreman, and smiled still more joyfully. “I shall call them to-morrow.”
“Just hear him; he’s not artful, not he,” said a blackhaired peasant, with an unkempt beard, as he sat jolting from side to side on a well-fed mare, addressing an old man in a torn coat who rode by his side. The two men were driving a herd of the peasants’ horses to graze in the night, alongside the highroad and secretly, in the landlord’s forest.
“Give you the land for nothing—you need only sign—have they not done the likes of us often enough? No, my friend, none of your humbug. Nowadays we have a little sense,” he added, and began shouting at a colt that had strayed.
He stopped his horse and looked round, but the colt had not remained behind; it had gone into the meadow by the roadside. “Bother that son of a Turk; he’s taken to getting into the landowner’s meadows,” said the dark peasant with the unkempt beard, hearing the cracking of the sorrel stalks that the neighing colt was galloping over as he came running back from the scented meadow.
“Do you hear the cracking? We’ll have to send the women folk to weed the meadow when there’s a holiday,” said the thin peasant with the torn coat, “or else we’ll blunt our scythes.”
“Sign,” he says. The unkempt man continued giving his opinion of the landlord’s speech. “‘Sign,’ indeed, and let him swallow you up.”