He did not like being there. The other pupils seemed to him dull, the soil unfavourable. The Brundin case was still fermenting within him. He longed to be home. There are many kinds of homesickness, and one of them is of a kind not suitable for poetry.
Let us now look at our friend Peter during the spring ploughing. The pupils were standing in a bunch out on the clay and each one had to plough a plot with the new American steel plough.
“Press harder on the right guide. Not too shallow and not too deep. Look at the horses. The furrows must be straight as a die.”
Thus said the teacher. Peter was the last. He stood there changing feet and thinking that he would take root in the clay. At last it was his turn. He called to the horses and the furrow was started. It was a still April day with big white clouds in the sky. The horses’ sides and the newly turned clay soil shone in the sun. Down in a hollow hung a blue mist and further away a wood of budding birches shimmered like a purple-brown cloud. But Peter neither saw nor felt anything of all that. Nor did he enjoy seeing how finely the ploughshare cut through and turned up the frozen soil. He had no desire just to add furrow to furrow in the ploughed field. He only thought it was heavy, tiresome, lost labour. And all the same he looked like a peasant with his coarse features and his heavy awkward carriage, which he had probably inherited from his mother’s side. But a poison had entered into the peasant’s body. It was the infection of the town—the town that had begun to creep nearer and nearer Selambshof. It was anxiety to turn everything into money. If only he were back at Selambshof, he thought. But he did not long for the house or the trees. He longed to sneak about, and spy and struggle for possession of the money that he already scented. To go about here ploughing soil that was not even his own made him sick. He had already developed the habit of looking at everything from the point of view of ownership. You cannot take any interest in a thing for itself. No, nothing exists in itself but only as “mine” or “yours,” principally “mine.” To whom did this field belong? To the County? That is the same thing as nobody. That was empty, strange, and simply repellent, thought Peter. He had already begun to fear common interests and common institutions. They constituted a kind of silent affront to his selfishness.
Then Peter came slowly back on the return and moved alongside his first furrow. It did not look very straight. He was reproved by his instructor—he heard the mumbling and suppressed laughter of his fellow students. What stupid country bumpkins they were with their lazy self-confidence. Their rustic self-importance about spray-drains and dung-wells irritated him. What experience of life had they had? It would do them good to get caught in the snares of somebody like Brundin and to be really, thoroughly cheated for once. And then he began to think of that old story again. There was something strangely fascinating in thinking of Brundin’s tricks and wheezes. Of course he disapproved of it all. But he could not help thinking of it, all the same. “So that is what they call business,” thought Peter. “That is the way to get rich.” He felt a strange disquietude, one moment he was hot and the next cold. “I shall never allow anybody to cheat me,” he thought. “But how can you really make sure? The only way is, of course, to go to meet one’s enemy and forestall him. You must practise deception, not much, of course, but sufficient to prevent him from deceiving you.”
Peter had now done his allotted share of the ploughing. He stopped the horses and wiped his brow.
“You are not ploughing deep enough, or straight enough. This is not a surface-plough. You ought to get down to the subsoil all the way. What sort of a growth do you expect to get here?”
“I don’t care a damn,” thought Peter.
Then the Farm gong sounded and they moved homewards along the wet road. Peter jogged beside the horses with half-closed eyes. He was dreaming of Selambshof in figures. He had seen them,—when he pried into the books of the estate. There were rents for land and houses, for fishing rights, and quarries, for cartage and for the produce of the estate. Enormous sums in his eyes. “I shall control all that money,” he thought. “I shall be bailiff, and I shall have my reward, because I saved the estate from Brundin. No, don’t imagine that I can be kept out of all that.”
Peter breathed heavily. He felt a queer sucking sensation in his stomach. Fancy if it should all be his. Fancy if one day he should become rich, rich! No, he no longer had only fear and worries—certain timid, trembling voluptuous desires contracted his throat.