Chapter 68 Part Two - Six

Nekhludoff touched the lintel of the cottage and the lintel of the porch twice more in succession before he came out into the street.Several children in white shirts, gray shirts, and pink shirts were waiting for him outside the door.Several other children joined him.Several other women with babies were waiting for him, including the thin one who was effortlessly cradling the pale doll in the rag cap.The doll had the face of a little old man, but it kept smiling queerly and wagging its twitching thumb.Nekhludoff knew it was a painful smile.He asked who this woman was. "She is the Anisha I told you about," said the older boy.

Nekhludoff turned to Anisha. "How's your day going?" he asked. "What do you do for a living?" "How do you live? Beg for food," said Anisha, crying. The doll, who looked like a little old man, had a smile on his whole face, and at the same time twisted his two slender legs like earthworms. Nekhludoff took out his wallet and gave the woman ten rubles.He hadn't taken two steps when another woman with a baby overtook him, then an old woman, then another woman.They all said they were poor and asked for alms.Nekhludoff distributed the sixty ruble change from his wallet and walked home very sadly, that is, to the butler's lodge.The steward greeted him with a smile and told him that the peasants would gather in the evening.Nekhludoff thanked him, and instead of going to his room, went into the garden and wandered along the weedy path strewn with white apple petals, thinking about what he had just seen.

There was silence around the wing at first, but after a while Nekhludoff heard the angry quarreling of two women in the butler's room, occasionally mingled with the calm, smiling voice of the butler.Nekhludoff listened attentively. "I'm exhausted, why are you tearing off the cross from my neck?" said a woman's angry voice. -------- ①Christians often wear a cross and take it off until they die.The meaning here is: "Why are you forcing me to die?" "You know, it just broke in," said another woman's voice. "I said, give it back to me. Why do you torture the animals and make my children have no milk!"

"You have to lose money, or work to pay for it," the butler replied nonchalantly. Nekhludoff went out of the garden and came up to the steps of the house.There stood two women with disheveled hair, one of whom was pregnant and appeared to be about to give birth.The butler stood on the doorstep in a canvas overcoat with his hands in his pockets.As soon as the two women saw the host, they fell silent and began to straighten the kerchiefs on their heads; the butler withdrew his hand from his pocket, and a smile appeared on his face. Here's the thing: According to the steward, farmers often put calves and even cows on the owner's pasture on purpose.Now, the two cows of the two peasant women were caught in the pasture and came here.The steward fined each cow thirty kopecks, or two days' work.The two peasant women repeatedly said that first, their cows broke in by accident, second, they had no money, and third, even if they agreed to work as compensation, they demanded that the two cows should be released immediately, because they had disappeared early in the morning. Baking in the sun, without any feed, mooing pitifully there.

"How many times have I told you," said the steward, smiling, looking back at Nekhludoff as if to invite him to be a witness, "that you must take care of the animals when you come home for lunch. " "As soon as I ran off to see my doll, the beasts left." "Since you are herding cattle, you can't just walk away." "Then who should I ask to feed the baby? I can't ask you to nurse it." "If the animal had really trampled the pasture, we'd have nothing to say, but it just ran in," another woman said. "The whole meadow is trampled," said the steward to Nekhludoff. "If they are not punished, there will be no hay harvest in the future."

"Hey, don't do anything wrong," cried the pregnant woman. "My animals have never been caught." "Here, now that you've caught it, you'll either have to pay a fine or work to compensate you." "Come on, let's work, let the cow go, don't starve it to death!" she shouted viciously. "They work day and night. My mother-in-law is sick. My husband only knows how to drink. I am busy all by myself, and my strength is exhausted. You still have to force others to work, and you are not afraid of crimes!" Nekhludoff told the steward to let the cows go, and went into the garden to continue his thoughts, but there was nothing else to think about now.He felt that the matter was clear, so he couldn't understand why others couldn't see such a clear problem, and why he didn't see it for so long.

"The common people are dying. They don't take death seriously because people die often. Children die young, women do heavy labor beyond their capacity, food is generally insufficient, especially for the elderly. The common people fall step by step into this Miserable situation, they don't see it themselves, don't blame others. We just take it for granted that it has always been the way it is." Now he knows very well that ordinary people know and often point out that the main reason for their poverty is the only thing they have to support their families The living land was seized by the landlords.He knew very well that children and old people were dying because they had no milk, and because they had no milk because they had no land to graze their cattle, and they could not receive grain and hay.He knew very well that the whole of the common people's misery, or the main cause of their suffering, was that the land on which they lived was not in their hands, but in the hands of those who owned the land and therefore lived off the labor of the common people.The common people desperately needed land, and died due to lack of land, but the land was cultivated by them, and the grain harvested from the land was sold abroad, so that the landlord could buy himself hats, walking sticks, carriages, bronze ornaments and other things.Nekhludoff knew this very well, just as if horses were not allowed to graze in a pasture and they were enclosed in a fence, they would lose weight and starve to death after eating up the grass in the fence... This phenomenon is really true. It's horrible, it can't go on like this anymore.You must try to eliminate it, at least you cannot participate in it. "I've got to figure out a way," he thought, wandering the nearest birch-lined path. "Scholarly societies, government offices, and newspapers discuss the causes of the poverty of the common people and the means of improving their lives, ignoring only the sure and sure way of not taking away from them the land they need." He remembered clearly the rationale of Henry George, remembered his belief in it, and wondered how he had forgotten it. "Land cannot become private property or a commodity, just like water, air, and sunlight. Everyone has the right to enjoy the land and enjoy all the benefits that the land provides." Now he suddenly understands why he thought of dealing with Kuzminsko Yeah land way, just feel ashamed.He is deceiving himself.He clearly knows that no one has the right to own land, but he still affirms that he has such a right.He gave a portion of the land proceeds to the peasants, but knew in his soul that he had no right to it.He does not intend to do this again in the future, and wants to change Kuzminskoye's method.He drew up a plan in his mind, handing over the land to the peasants, collecting rent, and stipulating that the land rent is the property of the peasants, to be controlled by them, to pay taxes and be used for public welfare.This is not a flat tax,2 but it is the closest approach to a flat tax under the present system.Mainly, though, he gave up land ownership.

-------- ① Henry George (1839-1897) - American bourgeois economist. ②Henry George advocated a single tax on land, advocating that the bourgeois state should nationalize the land and turn land rent into a tax paid to the state.The original text here is English. He went back to the house, saw the butler smiling very happily, invited him to lunch, and said that he was worried that the dishes prepared by his wife with the help of the maid with the pom-pom in her ear would be too badly cooked and overcooked. A coarse tablecloth was spread on the table, on which lay an embroidered handkerchief in place of a napkin.On the table stands an ancient Saxon porcelain soup basin with broken ears, in which is potato and chicken soup - the rooster with this black leg sticking out now and the other black leg has been cut into pieces, the top There are still some chicken feathers left.After eating the soup, the next dish was the rooster whose hair was burnt.Then came the pancakes with lots of cream and sugar.Although the dishes were not appetizing, Nekhludoff ate them without paying attention to what he was eating.He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he forgot all the troubles he had brought back from the village.

Every time the flustered girl with the pompoms on her ears served the dishes, the housekeeper's wife always looked in through the crack of the door, and the housekeeper was always proud of his wife's cooking skills, and laughed even more happily. After dinner Nekhludoff managed to get the butler to sit down.In order to see if his idea was right, and at the same time want to tell others about the issues he was interested in, he told the housekeeper about the plan to hand over the land to the farmers, and asked for his opinion.The butler smiled and pretended that he had thought of this question long ago and was willing to listen to Nekhludoff's opinion.In fact, it can be said that I don't know anything about this plan.Not because Nekhludoff hadn't made it clear, but because according to this plan Nekhludoff would have to give up his own interests for the interests of others.It was a deep-rooted belief in the butler's mind that everyone was trying to benefit himself at the expense of others.

Now that Nekhludoff was arguing that all proceeds from the land should become the peasants' provident fund, the steward thought that there might be something he hadn't understood. "I understand. It means that the interest of this provident fund belongs to you, doesn't it?" The butler said with a smile all over his face. "Absolutely not. You see, land cannot be private property." "That's right!" "Therefore the benefits of the land should be shared by all." "In this way, wouldn't you have no income?" the butler said with a smile.

"I just don't want to." The butler sighed deeply and smiled again.Now he understood that Nekhludoff was not in the right mind.So he studied Nekhludoff's plan to give up the land, to see if he could find anything beneficial to him from it, and concluded that Nekhludoff's abandonment of the land would definitely benefit him as a housekeeper. However, when he realized that there was no such possibility, he was no longer interested in the proposal, and kept a smile on his face just to please his employer.Seeing that the steward did not understand him, Nekhludoff let him go, and sat down at the knife-scarred and ink-stained table to draw up his plan. The sun had already set behind the green linden trees, and mosquitoes flew into the room, biting Nekhludoff.As soon as he finished writing the draft plan, he heard the sounds of animals in the village, the creaking of doors, and the conversations of farmers who had come to the meeting.Nekhludoff told the steward that there was no need to call the peasants to the counting house, and he decided to go himself to the yard where the peasants were assembled.Nekhludoff hastily finished the cup of tea which the housekeeper had brought him, and set off for the village.