§11
We never went back to Vasílevskoë after 1832, and my father sold it during my banishment. In 1843 we were staying in the country within twenty versts of the old home and I could not resist paying it a visit. We drove along the familiar road, past the pine-wood and the hill covered with nut bushes, till we came to the ford which had given me such delight twenty years ago—I remembered the splashing water, the crunching sound of the pebbles, the coachmen shouting at the jibbing horses. At last we reached the village and the priest’s house; there was the bench where the priest used to sit, wearing his brown cassock—a simple kindly man who was always chewing something and always in a perspiration; and then the estate-office where Vassíli Epifánov made out his accounts; never quite sober, he sat crouching over the paper, holding his pen very low down and tucking his third finger away behind it. The priest was dead, and Vassíli Epifánov, not sober yet, was making out accounts somewhere else. The village head man was in the fields, but we found his wife at their cottage.
Changes had taken place in the interval. A new manor-house had been built on the hill, and a new garden laid out round it. Returning past the church and churchyard, we met a poor deformed object, creeping, as it seemed, on all-fours. It signed to me, and I went close to it. It was an old woman, bent, paralysed, and half-crazy; she used to live on charity and work in the old priest’s garden; she was now about seventy, and her, of all people, death had spared! She knew me and shed tears, shaking her head and saying: “How old you have grown! I only knew you by your walk. And me—but there’s no use talking about me.”
As we drove home, I saw the head man, the same as in our time, standing in a field some way off. He did not recognise me at first; but when we were past, he made out who I was, took off his hat, and bowed low. A little further on, I turned round, and Grigóri Gorski—that was the head man’s name—was standing on the same spot and watching our carriage. That tall bearded figure, bowing in the harvest field, was a link with the past; but Vasílevskoë had ceased to be ours.