“Yes…” he began with a sigh. “We were walking along just now, and Mr. Kutcherov met us.…Yes.…He saw the girls at daybreak.… ‘Why don’t they bring mushrooms,’ he said… ‘to my wife and children?’ he said.…And then he looked at me and he said: ‘I and my wife will look after you,’ he said. I wanted to fall down at his feet, but I hadn’t the courage.…God give him health.…God bless him!…”

Stephania crossed herself and sighed.

“They are kind, simple-hearted people,” Rodion went on, “ ‘We shall look after you.’…He promised me that before everyone. In our old age…it wouldn’t be a bad thing.…I should always pray for the them.…Holy Mother, bless them.…”

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the fourteenth of September, was the festival of the village church. The Lytchkovs, father and son, went across the river early in the morning and returned to dinner drunk; they spent a long time going about the village, alternately singing and swearing; then they had a fight and went to the New Villa to complain. First Lytchkov the father went into the yard with a long ashen stick in his hands. He stopped irresolutely and took off his hat. Just at that moment the engineer and his family were sitting on the verandah, drinking tea.

“What do you want?” shouted the engineer.

“Your honour…” Lytchkov began, and burst into tears. “Show the Divine mercy, protect me…my son makes my life a misery… your honour.…”

Lytchkov the son walked up, too; he, too, was bareheaded and had a stick in his hand; he stopped and fixed his drunken senseless eyes on the verandah.

“It is not my business to settle your affairs,” said the engineer. “Go to the rural captain or the police officer.”

“I have been everywhere.…I have lodged a petition…” said Lytchkov the father, and he sobbed. “Where can I go now? He can kill me now, it seems. He can do anything. Is that the way to treat a father? A father?”

He raised his stick and hit his son on the head; the son raised his stick and struck his father just on his bald patch such a blow that the stick bounced back. The father did not even flinch, but hit his son again and again on the head. And so they stood and kept hitting one another on the head, and it looked not so much like a fight as some sort of a game. And peasants, men and women, stood in a crowd at the gate and looked into the garden, and the faces of all were grave. They were the peasants who had come to greet them for the holiday, but seeing the Lytchkovs, they were ashamed and did not go in.

The next morning Elena Ivanovna went with the children to Moscow. And there was a rumour that the engineer was selling his house.…

V

The peasants had long ago grown used to the sight of the bridge, and it was difficult to imagine the river at that place without a bridge. The heap of rubble left from the building of it had long been overgrown with grass, the navvies were forgotten, and instead of the strains of the “Dubinushka” that they used to sing, the peasants heard almost every hour the sounds of a passing train.

The New Villa has long ago been sold; now it belongs to a government clerk who comes here from the town for the holidays with his family, drinks tea on the terrace, and then goes back to the town again. He wears a cockade on his cap; he talks and clears his throat as though he were a very important official, though he is only of the rank of the collegiate secretary, and when the peasants bow he makes no response.