'Well, you really are a boy, there's no being angry with you
. . . what a sweet tooth you've got! I have got the cream ready for you without your asking. Look at the lightning . . . well, that's right! It brings the corn on.'
And I go home skipping and whistling.
We did not go to Vasilevskoye after 1 832. My father sold i t while I was i n exile. In 1843 w e stayed at another estate in the Moscow province, in the district of Zvenigorod, about fourteen miles from Vasilevskoye. I could not help going over to visit my old home. And here we were again riding along the same byroa d ; the familiar fir-wood and the hill covered with nut trees came into view, and then the ford over the river, the ford that had so delighted me twenty years before, the gurgling of the water, the crunching of the pebbles, the shouting coachman and the struggling horses . . . and here was the village and the priest's house where he used to sit on a bench in a dark-brown cassock, simple-hearted, good-natured, red-haired, always in a sweat, always nibbling something and always afflicted with a hiccup; and here was the counting-house where the clerk Vasily Yepifanov, who was never sober, used to write his accounts, huddled up over the paper, holding the pen by the very end with his third finger bent tightly uncle::- it. The priest is dead and Vasily Yepifanov is keeping accounts and getting drunk in
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another village. We stopped at the village head-man's hut, but found only the wife at horne, for her husband was in the fields.
A strange element had crept in during those ten years ; instead of our house on the hill there was a new one, and a new garden was laid out beside it. As we turned by the church and the graveyard we met a deformed-looking creature, dragging itself along almost on all fours; it was trying to show me something, and I went up; it was a hunchbacked, paralytic old woman, halfcrazy, who used to live on charity and work in the former priest's garden. She had been about seventy then and death had just passed by her. She recognised me, shed tears, shook her head and kept saying:
'Ough! why even you are getting old. I only knew you from your walk, while I-there, there, ough! ough ! don't talk of i t ! '
As w e were driving back, I saw in the fields i n the distance the village head-man, the same as in our time. At first he did not know me, but when we had driven by, as though suddenly corning to himself with a start, he took off his hat and bowed low. When we had driven a little farther I turned round; the head-man, Grigory Gorsky, was still standing in the same place, looking after us; his tall, bearded figure, bowing in the midst of the cornfield, gave us a friendly send-off from the horne which had passed into the hands of strangers.
Nick {tnd tlze
Sp{trrolv Hills
' Write then how in this place [ the Sparrow Hills] the story of our lives, yours and mine, began to unfold.
A LETTER, 1833
THREE YEARS before the time I am speaking of we were walking on the banks of the Moskva at Luzhniki, that is, on the other side of the Sparrow Hills. At the river's edge we met a French tutor of our acquaintance in nothing but his shirt; he was panicstricken and was shouting, 'He is drowning, he is drowning! ' But before our friend had time to take off his shirt or put on his
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trousers a Ural Cossack ran down from the Sparrow Hills, dashed into the water, vanished, and a minute later reappeared with a frail man, whose head and a rms vvere flopping about like clothes hung out in the wind. He laid him on the bank, saying,
'He'll stil l recover if we roll him about.'
The people standing round collected fifty roubles and offered it to the Cossack. The latter, without making faces over it, said very simply: 'It's a sin to take money for such a thing, and it was no trouble; come to think of it, he weighs no more than a cat.
We are poor people, though,' he added. 'Ask, we don't; but there, if people give, why not takeJ We are humbly thankful.' Then tying up the money in a handkerchief he went to graze his horses on the hill. My father asked his name and wrote about the incident next day to Essen. Essen promoted him to be a noncommissioned officer. A few months later the Cossack came to see us and with him a pock-marked, bald German, smelling of scent and wearing a curled, fair wig; he came to thank us on behalf of the Cossack-it was the drovvned man. From that time he took to coming to see us.
Karl lvanovich Sonnenberg, that was his name, was at that time completing the German part of the education of two young rascals; from them he went to a landowner of Simbirsk, and from him to a distant relati\·e of my father's. The boy, the care of whose health and German accent had been entrusted to him, and whom Sonnenberg called Nick, attracted me. There was something kind, gentle and pensive about him ; he was not at all like the other boys it had been my luck to meet. We became close friends. He was silent and pensive: I was high-spirited but afraid to rag him.
About the time when my cousin went back to Korcheva, Nick's grandmother died ; his mother he had lost in early childhood.
There was a great upset in the house and Sonnenberg, who really had nothing to do, fussed about too, and imagined that he was run off his legs; he brought Nick in the morning and asked that he might remain with us for the rest of the day. Nick was sad and frightened; I suppose he had been fond of his grandmother .
. . . After we had been sitting still a little I suggested reading Schiller. I was surprised at the similarity of our tastes; he knew far more by heart than I did and knew precisely the passages I liked best; we closed the book and, so to speak, began sounding each otl1er's sympathies.
From Moros who went with a dagger in his sleeve 'to free the city from the tyrant,' from Wilhelm Tell who waited for Vogt on
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the narrow path at Ki.isznacht, the transition to Nicholas and the Fourteenth of December was easy. These thoughts and these comparisons \vere not new to Nick; he, too, knew Pushkin's and Ryleyev's1 unpublished poems. The contrast between him and the empty-headed boys I had occasionally met was striking.
Not long before, walking near the Presnensky Ponds, full of my Bouchot terrorism, I had explained to a companion of my age the justice of the execution of Louis XVI.
'Quite so,' observed the youthful Prince 0., 'but you know he
,..,·as God's anointed ' '
I looked at him with compassion, ceased to care for him and never asked to go and see him again.
There were no such barriers \Vith Nick: his heart beat as mine did. He, too, had cast off from the grim conservative shore, and we had but to shove off together, and almost from the first day we resolved to \York in the interests of the Tsarevich Constantine!
Before that day we had few long conversations. Karl Ivanovich pestered us like an autumn fly and spoilt every conversation with his presence ; he interfered in everything without understanding, made remarks, straightened !\"ick's shirt collar, was in a hurry to get home: in fact, was detestable. After a month we could not pass two days without seeing each other or writing a letter; with all the impulsiveness of my nature I attached myself more and more to Nick, while he had a quiet, deep love for me.