“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