Elena Ivanovna looked at the broad, tranquil river, pondering, and tears flowed down her cheeks. And Rodion was troubled by those tears; he almost cried himself!
“Never mind . . .” he muttered. “Have patience for a couple of years. You can have the school, you can have the roads, only not all at once. If you went, let us say, to sow corn on that mound, you would first have to weed it out, to pick out all the stones, and then to plow, and work and work . . . and with the people, you see, it is the same . . . you must work and work until you overcome them.”
The crowd had moved away from Rodion’s hut and was coming along the street towards the mountain ash. They began singing songs and playing the concertina, and they kept coming closer and closer. . . .
“Mamma, let us go away from here,” said the little girl, huddling up to her mother, pale and shaking all over; “let us go away, Mamma!”
“Where?”
“To Moscow. . . . Let us go, Mamma.”
The child began crying.
Rodion was utterly overcome; his face broke into profuse perspiration; he took out of his pocket a little crooked cucumber, like a half-moon, covered with crumbs of rye bread, and began thrusting it into the little girl’s hands.
“Come, come,” he muttered, scowling severely; “take the little cucumber, eat it up. . . . You mustn’t cry. Mamma will whip you. . . . She’ll tell your father of you when you get home. Come, come. . . .”
They walked on, and he still followed behind them, wanting to say something friendly and persuasive to them. And, seeing that they were both absorbed in their own thoughts and their own griefs, and not noticing him, he stopped and, shading his eyes from the sun, looked after them for a long time till they disappeared into their copse.
4.
The engineer seemed to grow irritable and petty, and in every trivial incident saw an act of robbery or outrage. His gate was kept bolted even by day, and at night two watchmen walked up and down the garden beating a board; and they gave up employing anyone from Obruchanovo as a laborer. As ill luck would have it someone (either a peasant or one of the workmen) took the new wheels off the cart and replaced them by old ones, then soon afterwards two bridles and a pair of pincers were carried off, and murmurs arose even in the village. People began to say that a search should be made at the Lychkovs’ and at Volodka’s, and then the bridles and the pincers were found under the hedge in the engineer’s garden; someone had thrown them down there.
It happened that the peasants were coming in a crowd out of the forest, and again they met the engineer on the road. He stopped, and without wishing them good day he began, looking angrily first at one, then at another:
“I have begged you not to gather mushrooms in the park and near the yard, but to leave them for my wife and children, but your girls come before daybreak and there is not a mushroom left. . . . Whether one asks you or not it makes no difference. Entreaties, and friendliness, and persuasion I see are all useless.”
He fixed his indignant eyes on Rodion and went on:
“My wife and I behaved to you as human beings, as to our equals, and you? But what’s the use of talking! It will end by our looking down upon you. There is nothing left!”
And making an effort to restrain his anger, not to say too much, he turned and went on.
On getting home, Rodion said his prayer, took off his boots, and sat down beside his wife.
“Yes . . .” he began with a sigh. “We were walking along just now, and Monsieur Kucherov 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! . . .”
Stepanida crossed herself and sighed.
“They are kind, simplehearted 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 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 Lychkovs, 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 Lychkov 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 veranda, drinking tea.
“What do you want?” shouted the engineer.
“Your honor . . .” Lychkov began, and burst into tears. “Show the Divine mercy, protect me . . . my son makes my life a misery . . . your honor. . . .”
Lychkov 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 veranda.
“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 Lychkov 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 Lychkovs, they were ashamed and did not go in.
The next morning Elena Ivanovna went with the children to Moscow. And there was a rumor that the engineer was selling his house. . . .
5.
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 a collegiate secretary, and when the peasants bow he makes no response.
In Obruchanovo everyone has grown older; Kozov is dead. In Rodion’s hut there are even more children. Volodka has grown a long red beard. They are still as poor as ever.
In the early spring the Obruchanovo peasants were sawing wood near the station. And after work they were going home; they walked without haste one after the other. Broad saws curved over their shoulders; the sun was reflected in them. The nightingales were singing in the bushes on the bank, larks were trilling in the heavens. It was quiet at the New Villa; there was not a soul there, and only golden pigeons—golden because the sunlight was streaming upon them—were flying over the house. All of them—Rodion, the two Lychkovs, and Volodka—thought of the white horses, the little ponies, the fireworks, the boat with the lanterns; they remembered how the engineer’s wife, so beautiful and so grandly dressed, had come into the village and talked to them in such a friendly way. And it seemed as though all that had never been; it was like a dream or a fairy tale.