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 a collegiate secretary, and when the peasants bow he makes no response.
In Obrutchanovo 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 Obrutchanovo 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 Lytchkovs, 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.
They trudged along, tired out, and mused as they went. . . . In their village, they mused, the people were good, quiet, sensible, fearing God, and Elena Ivanovna, too, was quiet, kind, and gentle; it made one sad to look at her, but why had they not got on together? Why had they parted like enemies? How was it that some mist had shrouded from their eyes what mattered most, and had let them see nothing but damage done by cattle, bridles, pincers, and all those trivial things which now, as they remembered them, seemed so nonsensical? How was it that with the new owner they lived in peace, and yet had been on bad terms with the engineer?
And not knowing what answer to make to these questions they were all silent except Volodka, who muttered something.
'What is it?' Rodion asked.
'We lived without a bridge . . .' said Volodka gloomily. 'We lived without a bridge, and did not ask for one . . . and we don't want it. . . .'
No one answered him and they walked on in silence with drooping heads.
NOTES
villa: the Russian for a summer residence is
carting manure: taking manure from the cattle yard to fertilize the fields
Aalhaus: Allgauer, Bavarian breed of cattle
quarrel: first line of a fable 'The Two Neighbors' by Ivan I. Khemnitser (1745-1784)
On Official Duty
by Anton Chekhov
THE deputy examining magistrate and the district doctor were going to an inquest in the village of Syrnya. On the road they were overtaken by a snowstorm; they spent a long time going round and round, and arrived, not at midday, as they had intended, but in the evening when it was dark. They put up for the night at the Zemstvo hut. It so happened that it was in this hut that the dead body was lying -- the corpse of the Zemstvo insurance agent, Lesnitsky, who had arrived in Syrnya three days before and, ordering the samovar in the hut, had shot himself, to the great surprise of everyone; and the fact that he had ended his life so strangely, after unpacking his eatables and laying them out on the table, and with the samovar before him, led many people to suspect that it was a case of murder; an inquest was necessary.
In the outer room the doctor and the examining magistrate shook the snow off themselves and knocked it off their boots. And meanwhile the old village constable, Ilya Loshadin, stood by, holding a little tin lamp. There was a strong smell of paraffin.
'Who are you?' asked the doctor.
'Conshtable, . . .' answered the constable.
He used to spell it 'conshtable' when he signed the receipts at the post office.
'And where are the witnesses?'
