Nekhludoff asked, addressing a middle-aged, barefooted peasant, with a tattered coat, and a bright look on his face, who was holding his worn cap with his left hand, in a peculiarly straight position, in the same way soldiers hold theirs when commanded to take them off.
"Just so," said this peasant, who had evidently not yet rid himself of the military hypnotism he had been subjected to while serving his time.
"It means that you have sufficient land," said Nekhludoff.
"No, sir, we have not," said the ex-soldier, with an artificially pleased look, carefully holding his tattered cap in front of him, as if offering it to any one who liked to make use of it.
"Well, anyhow, you'd better think over what I have said."
Nekhludoff spoke with surprise, and again repeated his offer.
"We have no need to think about it; as we have said, so it will be," angrily muttered the morose, toothless old man.
"I shall remain here another day, and if you change your minds, send to let me know."
The peasants gave no answer.
So Nekhludoff did not succeed in arriving at any result from this interview.
"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 he asked to come here?" said Nekhludoff. "I would carefully explain it to them."
"That can he 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."
"That's certain," answered the old man. And then they were silent, and the tramping of the horses' feet along the highroad was the only sound to be heard.
