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.
CHAPTER IV
My Friend Niko and the Sparrow Hills.
§1
SOME time in the year 1824 I was walking one day with my father along the Moscow River, on the far side of the Sparrow Hills; and there we met a French tutor whom we knew. He had nothing on but his shirt, was obviously in great alarm, and was calling out, “Help! Help!” Before our friend had time to pull off his shirt or pull on his trousers, a Cossack ran down from the Sparrow Hills, hurled himself into the water, and disappeared. In another moment he reappeared, grasping a miserable little object, whose head and hands shook like clothes hung out to dry; he placed this burden on the bank and said, “A shaking will soon bring him round.”
The bystanders collected fifty roubles for the rescuer. The Cossack made no pretences but said very honestly, “It’s a sin to take money for a thing like that; for he gave me no trouble, no more than a cat, to pull him out. But,” he added, “though I don’t ask for money, if I’m offered it, I may as well take it. I’m a poor man. So thank you kindly.” Then he tied up the money in his handkerchief and went back to his horses grazing on the hill.
My father asked the man’s name and wrote next day to tell his commanding officer of his gallantry; and the Cossack was promoted to be a corporal. A few months later the Cossack appeared at our house and brought a companion, a German with a fair curling wig, pock-marked, and scented. This was the drowning man, who had come to return thanks on behalf of the Cossack; and he visited us afterwards from time to time.