CHAPTER III

Death of Alexander I—The Fourteenth of December—Moral Awakening—Bouchot—My Cousin—N. Ogaryóv.

ONE winter evening my uncle came to our house at an unusual hour. He looked anxious and walked with a quick step to my father’s study, after signing to me to stay in the drawing-room.

Fortunately, I was not obliged to puzzle my head long over the mystery. The door of the servants’ hall opened a little way, and a red face, half hidden by the wolf-fur of a livery coat, invited me to approach; it was my uncle’s footman, and I hastened to the door.

“Have you not heard?” he asked.

“Heard what?”

“The Tsar is dead. He died at Taganrog.”

I was impressed by the news: I had never before thought of the possibility of his death. I had been brought up in great reverence for Alexander, and I thought with sorrow how I had seen him not long before in Moscow. We were out walking when we met him outside the Tver Gate; he was riding slowly, accompanied by two or three high officers, on his way back from manœuvres. His facewas attractive, the features gentle and rounded, and his expression was weary and sad. When he caught us up, I took off my hat; he smiled and bowed to me.

Confused ideas were still simmering in my head; the shops were selling pictures of the new Tsar, Constantine; notices about the oath of allegiance were circulating; and good citizens were making haste to take the oath—when suddenly a report spread that the Crown Prince had abdicated. Immediately afterwards, the same footman, a great lover of political news, with abundant opportunities for collecting it from the servants of senators and lawyers—less lucky than the horses which rested for half the day, he accompanied his master in his rounds from morning till night—informed me that there was a revolution in Petersburg and that cannon were firing in the capital.

On the evening of the next day, Count Komarovsky, a high officer of the police, was at our house, and told us of the band of revolutionaries in the Cathedral Square, the cavalry charge, and the death of Milorádovitch.[26]

26.When Nicholas became Emperor in place of his brother Constantine, the revolt of the Decembrists took place in Petersburg on December 14, 1825. Five of the conspirators were afterwards hanged, and over a hundred banished to Siberia.

Then followed the arrests—“They have taken so-and-so”; “They have caught so-and-so”; “They have arrested so-and-so in the country.” Parents trembled in fear for their sons; the sky was covered over with black clouds.

During the reign of Alexander, political persecution was rare: it is true that he exiled Púshkin for his verses, and Labzin, the secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts, for proposing that the imperial coachman should be elected a member;[27]but there was no systematic persecution.The secret police had not swollen to its later proportions: it was merely an office, presided over by De Sanglin, a freethinking old gentleman and a sayer of good things, in the manner of the French writer, Etienne de Jouy. Under Nicholas, De Sanglin himself came under police supervision and passed for a liberal, though he remained precisely what he had always been; but this fact alone serves to mark the difference between the two reigns.

27.The president had proposed to elect Arakchéyev, on the ground of his nearness to the Tsar. Labzin then proposed the election of Ilyá Baikov, the Tsar’s coachman. “He is not only near the Tsar but sits in front of him,” he said.

The tone of society changed visibly; and the rapid demoralisation proved too clearly how little the feeling of personal dignity is developed among the Russian aristocracy. Except the women, no one dared to show sympathy or to plead earnestly in favour of relations and friends, whose hands they had grasped yesterday but who had been arrested before morning dawned. On the contrary, men became zealots for tyranny, some to gain their own ends, while others were even worse, because they had nothing to gain by subservience.

Women alone were not guilty of this shameful denial of their dear ones. By the Cross none but women were standing; and by the blood-stained guillotine there were women too—a Lucile Desmoulins, that Ophelia of the French Revolution, wandering near the fatal axe and waiting her turn, or a George Sand holding out, even on the scaffold, the hand of sympathy and friendship to the young fanatic, Alibaud.[28]

28.Camille Desmoulins was guillotined, with Danton, April 5, 1794; his wife, Lucile, soon followed him. Alibaud was executed July 11, 1836, for an attempt on the life of Louis Philippe.

The wives of the exiles were deprived of all civil rights;abandoning their wealth and position in society, they faced a whole lifetime of slavery in Eastern Siberia, where the terrible climate was less formidable than the Siberian police. Sisters, who were not permitted to accompany their condemned brothers, absented themselves from Court, and many of them left Russia; almost all of them retained in their hearts a lively feeling of affection for the sufferers. But this was not so among the men: fear devoured this feeling in their hearts, and none of them dared to open their lips about “the unfortunate.”

As I have touched on this subject, I cannot refrain from giving some account of one of these heroic women, whose history is known to very few.

In the ancient family of the Ivashevs a French girl was living as a governess. The only son of the house wished to marry her. All his relations were driven wild by the idea; there was a great commotion, tears, and entreaties. They succeeded in inducing the girl to leave Petersburg and the young man to delay his intention for a season. Young Ivashev was one of the most active conspirators, and was condemned to penal servitude for life. For this was a form ofmésalliancefrom which his relations did not protect him. As soon as the terrible news reached the young girl in Paris, she started for Petersburg, and asked permission to travel to the Government of Irkutsk, in order to join her future husband. Benkendorf tried to deter her from this criminal purpose; when he failed, he reported the case to Nicholas. The Tsar ordered that the position of women who had remained faithful to their exiled husbands should be explained to her. “I don’t keepher back,” he added; “but she ought to realise that if wives, who have accompanied their husbands out of loyalty, deserve some indulgence, she has no claim whatever to such treatment, when she intends to marry one whom she knows to be a criminal.”

In Siberia nothing was known of this permission. When she had found her way there, the poor girl was forced to wait while a correspondence went on with Petersburg. She lived in a miserable settlement peopled with released criminals of all kinds, unable to get any news of her lover or to inform him of her whereabouts.

By degrees she made acquaintances among her strange companions. One of these was a highwayman who was now employed in the prison, and she told him all her story. Next day he brought her a note from Ivashev; and soon he offered to carry messages between them. All day he worked in the prison; at nightfall he got a scrap of writing from Ivashev and started off, undeterred by weariness or stormy weather, and returned to his daily work before dawn.

At last permission came for their marriage. A few years later, penal servitude was commuted to penal settlement, and their condition was improved to some extent. But their strength was exhausted, and the wife was the first to sink under the burden of all she had undergone. She faded away, as a flower from southern climes was bound to fade in the snows of Siberia. Ivashev could not survive her long: just a year later he too died. But he had ceased to live before his death: his letters (which impressed even the inquisitors who read them) were evidence not only of intense sorrow, but of a distracted brain; they were full of a gloomy poetry and a crazy piety; afterher death he never really lived, and the process of his death was slow and solemn.

This history does not end with their deaths. Ivashev’s father, after his son’s exile, transferred his property to an illegitimate son, begging him not to forget his unfortunate brother but to do what he could. The young pair were survived by two children, two nameless infants, with a future prospect of the roughest labour in Siberia—without friends, without rights, without parents. Ivashev’s brother got permission to adopt the children. A few years later he ventured on another request: he used influence, that their father’s name might be restored to them, and this also was granted.

I was strongly impressed by stories of the rebels and I their fate, and by the horror which reigned in Moscow. These events revealed to me a new world, which became more and more the centre of my whole inner life; I don’t know how it came to pass; but, though I understood very dimly what it was all about, I felt that the side that possessed the cannons and held the upper hand was not my side. The execution of Pestel[29]and his companions finally awakened me from the dreams of childhood.

29.One of the Decembrists.

Though political ideas occupied my mind day and night, my notions on the subject were not very enlightened: indeed they were so wide of the mark that I believed one of the objects of the Petersburg insurrection to consist in placing Constantine on the throne as a constitutional monarch.

It will easily be understood that solitude was a greaterburden to me than ever: I needed someone, in order to impart to him my thoughts and ideals, to verify them, and to hear them confirmed. Proud of my own “disaffection,” I was unwilling either to conceal it or to speak of it to people in general.

My choice fell first on Iván Protopópov, my Russian tutor.

This man was full of that respectable indefinite liberalism, which, though it often disappears with the first grey hair, marriage, and professional success, does nevertheless raise a man’s character. He was touched by what I said, and embraced me on leaving the house. “Heaven grant,” he said, “that those feelings of your youth may ripen and grow strong!” His sympathy was a great comfort to me. After this time he began to bring me manuscript copies, in very small writing and very much frayed, of Púshkin’s poems—Ode to Freedom,The Dagger, and of Ryléev’sThoughts. These I used to copy out in secret; and now I print them as openly as I please!

As a matter of course, my reading also changed. Politics for me in future, and, above all, the history of the French Revolution, which I knew only as described by Mme. Provo. Among the books in our cellar I unearthed a history of the period, written by a royalist; it was so unfair that, even at fourteen, I could not believe it. I had chanced to hear old Bouchot say that he was in Paris during the Revolution; and I was very anxious to question him. But Bouchot was a surly, taciturn man, with spectacles over a large nose; he never indulged in any needless conversation with me: he conjugated French verbs, dictated examples, scolded me, and then took his departure, leaning on his thick knotted stick.

The old man did not like me: he thought me a mere idler, because I prepared my lessons badly; and he often said, “You will come to no good.” But when he discovered my sympathy with his political views, he softened down entirely, pardoned my mistakes, and told me stories of the year ’93, and of his departure from France when “profligates and cheats” got the upper hand. He never smiled; he ended our lesson with the same dignity as before, but now he said indulgently, “I really thought you would come to no good, but your feelings do you credit, and they will save you.”

To this encouragement and approval from my teachers there was soon added a still warmer sympathy which had a profound influence upon me.

In a little town of the Government of Tver lived a granddaughter of my father’s eldest brother. Her name was Tatyana Kuchin. I had known her from childhood, but we seldom met: once a year, at Christmas or Shrovetide, she came to pay a visit to her aunt at Moscow. But we had become close friends. Though five years my senior, she was short for her age and looked no older than myself. My chief reason for getting to like her was that she was the first person to talk to me in a reasonable way: I mean, she did not constantly express surprise at my growth; she did not ask what lessons I did and whether I did them well; whether I intended to enter the Army, and, if so, what regiment; but she talked to me as most sensible people talk to one another, though she kept the little airs of superiority which all girls like to show to boys a little younger than themselves.

We corresponded, especially after the events of 1824;but letters mean paper and pen and recall the school-room table with its ink-stains and decorations carved with a penknife. I wanted to see her and to discuss our new ideas; and it may be imagined with what delight I heard that my cousin was to come in February (of 1826) and to spend several months with us. I scratched a calendar on my desk and struck off the days as they passed, sometimes abstaining for a day or two, just to have the satisfaction of striking out more at one time. In spite of this, the time seemed very long; and when it came to an end, her visit was postponed more than once; such is the way of things.

One evening I was sitting in the school-room with Protopópov. Over each item of instruction he took, as usual, a sip of sour broth; he was explaining the hexameter metre, ruthlessly hashing, with voice and hand, each verse of Gnyéditch’s translation of the Iliad into its separate feet. Suddenly, a sound unlike that of town sledges came from the snow outside; I heard the faint tinkle of harness-bells and the sound of voices out-of-doors. I flushed up, lost all interest in the hashing process and the wrath of Achilles, and rushed headlong to the front hall. There was my cousin from Tver, wrapped up in furs, shawls, and comforters, and wearing a hood and white fur boots. Blushing red with frost and, perhaps, also with joy, she ran into my arms.

Most people speak of their early youth, its joys and sorrows, with a slightly condescending smile, as if they wished to say, like the affected lady in Griboyédov’s play, “How childish!” Children, when a few years are past, areashamed of their toys, and this is right enough: they want to be men and women, they grow so fast and change so much, as they see by their jackets and the pages of their lesson-books. But adults might surely realise that childhood and the two or three years of youth are the fullest part of life, the fairest, and the most truly our own; and indeed they are possibly the most important part, because they fix all that follows, though we are not aware of it.

So long as a man moves modestly forwards, never stopping and never reflecting, and until he comes to the edge of a precipice or breaks his neck, he continues to believe that his life lies ahead of him; and therefore he looks down upon his past and is unable to appreciate the present. But when experience has laid low the flowers of spring and chilled the glow of summer—when he discovers that life is practically over, and all that remains a mere continuance of the past, then he feels differently towards the brightness and warmth and beauty of early recollections.

Nature deceives us all with her endless tricks and devices: she makes us a gift of youth, and then, when we are grown up, asserts her mastery and snares us in a web of relations, domestic and public, most of which we are powerless to control; and, though we impart our personal character to our actions, we do not possess our souls in the same degree; the lyric element of personality is weaker, and, with it, our feelings and capacity for enjoyment—all, indeed, is weaker, except intelligence and will.

My cousin’s life was no bed of roses. She lost her mother in childhood; her father was a passionate gambler, who,like all men who have gambling in their blood, was constantly rich and poor by turns and ended by ruining himself. What was left of his fortune he devoted to his stud, which now became the object of all his thoughts and desires. His only son, a good-natured cavalry officer, was taking the shortest road to ruin: at the age of nineteen, he was a more desperate gambler than his father.

When the father was fifty, he married, for no obvious reason, an old maid who was a teacher in the Smolny Convent. She was the most typical specimen of a Petersburg governess whom I had ever happened to meet: thin, blonde, and very shortsighted, she looked the teacher and the moralist all over. By no means stupid, she was full of an icy enthusiasm in her talk, she abounded in commonplaces about virtue and devotion, she knew history and geography by heart, spoke French with repulsive correctness, and concealed a high opinion of herself under an artificial and Jesuitical humility. These traits are common to all pedants in petticoats; but she had others peculiar to the capital or the convent. Thus she raised tearful eyes to heaven, when speaking of the visit of “the mother of us all” (the Empress, Márya Fyódorovna[30]); she was in love with Tsar Alexander, and carried a locket or ring containing a fragment of a letter from the Empress Elizabeth[31]—“il a repris son sourire de bienveillance!”

30.The wife of Paul and mother of Alexander I and Nicholas.

31.Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, reigned from 1741 to 1762. Probablyilrefers to her father.

It is easy to imagine the harmonious trio that made up this household: a card-playing father, passionately devoted to horses and racing and noisy carouses in disreputable company; a daughter brought up in complete independenceand accustomed to do as she pleased in the house; and a middle-aged blue-stocking suddenly converted into a bride. As a matter of course, no love was lost between the stepmother and stepdaughter. In general, real friendship between a woman of thirty-five and a girl of seventeen is impossible, unless the former is sufficiently unselfish to renounce all claim to sex.

The common hostility between stepmothers and step-daughters does not surprise me in the least: it is natural and even moral. A new member of the household, who usurps their mother’s place, provokes repulsion on the part of the children. To them the second marriage is a second funeral. The child’s love is revealed in this feeling, and whispers to the orphan, “Your father’s wife is not your mother.” At one time the Church understood that a second marriage is inconsistent with the Christian conception of marriage and the Christian dogma of immortality; but she made constant concessions to the world, and went too far, till she came up against the logic of facts—the simple heart of the child who revolts against the absurdity and refuses the name of mother to his father’s second choice.

The woman too is in an awkward situation when she comes away from the altar to find a family of children ready-made: she has nothing to do with them, and has to force feelings which she cannot possess; she is bound to convince herself and the world, that other people’s children are just as attractive to her as her own.

Consequently, I don’t blame either the convent-lady or my cousin for their mutual dislike; but I understand how a young girl unaccustomed to control was eager to go wherever she could be free. Her father was now gettingold and more submissive to his learned wife; her brother, the officer, was behaving worse and worse; in fact, the atmosphere at home was oppressive, and she finally induced her stepmother to let her go on a visit to us, for some months or possibly for a year.

The day after her arrival, my cousin turned my usual routine, with the exception of my lessons, upside down. With a high hand she fixed hours for us to read together, advised me to stop reading novels, and recommended Ségur’sGeneral HistoryandThe Travels of Anacharsis.[32]From the ascetic point of view she opposed my strong inclination to smoke on the sly—cigarettes were then unknown, and I rolled the tobacco in paper myself: in general, she liked to preach to me, and I listened meekly to her sermons, if I did not profit by them. Fortunately, she was not consistent: quite forgetting her own arrangements, she read with me for amusement rather than instruction, and often sent out a secret messenger in the shape of a pantry-boy to buy buckwheat cakes in winter or gooseberries in summer.

32.Voyage du jeune Anacharsis, by the Abbé Barthélemy, published in 1779. Ségur was a French historian (1753-1830).

I believe that her influence on me was very good. She brought into my monastic life an element of warmth, and this may have served to keep alive the enthusiasms that were beginning to stir in my mind, when they might easily have been smothered by my father’s ironical tone. I learned to be attentive, to be nettled by a single word, to care for a friend, and to feel affection; I learned also to talk about feelings. In her I found support for mypolitical ideas; she prophesied a remarkable future and reputation for me, and I, with a child’s vanity, believed her when she said I would one day be a Brutus or Fabricius.

To me alone she confided the secret of her love for a cavalry officer in a black jacket and dolman. It was really a secret; for the officer, as he rode at the head of his squadron, never suspected the pure little flame that burnt for him in the breast of this young lady of eighteen. Whether I envied him, I can’t say; probably I did, a little; but I was proud of being chosen as her confidant, and I imagined (under the influence ofWerther) that this was a tragic passion, fated to end in some great catastrophe involving suicide by poison or the dagger. I even thought at times of calling on the officer and telling him the whole story.

My cousin brought shuttlecocks with her from home. One of them had a pin stuck into it, and she always used it in playing; if anyone else happened to get hold of it, she took it away and said that no other suited her as well. But the demon of mischief, which was always whispering its temptations in my ear, tempted me to take out this pin and stick it into another shuttlecock. The trick was entirely successful: my cousin always chose the shuttlecock with the pin in it. After a fortnight I told her what I had done: she changed colour, burst out crying, and ran to her own room. I was frightened and distressed; after waiting half an hour I went to find her. Her door was locked, and I asked her to open it. She refused, saying that she was not well, and that I was an unkind, heartless boy. Then I wrote a note in which I begged her to forgive me, and after tea we made it up: I kissed herhand, and she embraced me and explained the full importance of the incident. A year before, the officer had dined at their house and played battledore with her afterwards; and the marked shuttlecock had been used by him. I felt very remorseful, as if I had committed a real act of sacrilege.

My cousin stayed with us till October, when her father summoned her home, promising to let her spend the next summer with us in the country. We looked forward with horror to the separation; and soon there came an autumn day when a carriage arrived to fetch her, and her maid carried down baskets and band-boxes, while our servants put in provisions of all kinds, to last a week, and crowded to the steps to say their good-byes. We exchanged a close embrace, and both shed tears; the carriage drove out into the street, turned into a side-street close to the very shop where we used to buy the buckwheat cakes, and disappeared. I took a turn in the court-yard, but it seemed cold and unfriendly; my own room, where I went next, seemed empty and cold too. I began to prepare a lesson for Protopópov, and all the time I was thinking, “Where is the carriage now? has it passed the gates or not?”

I had one comfort: we should spend next June together in the country.

I had a passionate love for the country, and our visits there gave me new life. Forests, fields, and perfect freedom—all this was a complete change to me, who had grown up wrapped in cotton-wool, behind stone walls, never daring to leave the house on any pretext without asking leave, or without the escort of a footman.

From spring onwards, I was always much exercised by one question—shall we go to the country this year or not? Every year my father said that he wished to see the leaves open and would make an early start; but he was never ready before July. One year he put off so long that we never went at all. He sent orders every winter that the country-house was to be prepared and heated, but this was merely a deep device, that the head man and ground-officer, fearing our speedy arrival, might pay more attention to their duties.

It seemed that we were to go. My father said to my uncle, that he should enjoy a rest in the country and must see what was doing on the land; but still weeks went by.

The prospect became brighter by degrees. Food supplies were sent off—tea and sugar, grain of different kinds and wine; then came another delay; but at last the head man was ordered to send a certain number of peasants’ horses on a fixed day. Joy! Joy! we are to go!

At that time I never thought of the trouble caused to the peasants by the loss of four or five days at the busiest time of the year. I was completely happy and made haste to pack up my books and notebooks. The horses came, and I listened with inward satisfaction to the sound of their munching and snorting in the court. I took a lively interest in the bustle of the drivers and the wrangles of the servants, as they disputed where each should sit and accommodate his belongings. Lights burnt all night in the servants’ quarters: all were busy packing, or dragging about boxes and bags, or putting on special clothes for the journey, though it was not more than eightyversts. My father’s valet was the most excited of the party: herealised all the importance of packing, pulled out in fury all that others had put in, tore his hair with vexation, and was quite impossible to approach.

On the day itself my father got up no earlier than usual—indeed, it seemed later—and took just as long over his coffee; it was eleven o’clock before he gave the order to put to the horses. First came a coach to hold four, drawn by six of our own horses; this was followed by three or sometimes four equipages—an open carriage, a britzka, and either a large waggon or two carts; all these were filled by the servants and their baggage, in addition to the carts which had preceded us; and yet there was such a squeeze that no one could sit in comfort.

We stopped half-way, to dine and feed the horses, at a large village, whose name of Perkhushkov may be found in Napoleon’s bulletins. It belonged to a son of the uncle, of whom I spoke in describing the division of the property. The neglected manor-house stood near the high road, which had dull flat fields on each side of it; but to me even this dusty landscape was delightful after the confinement of a town. The floors of the house were uneven, and the steps of the staircase shook; our tread sounded loud, and the walls echoed the noise, as if surprised by visitors. The old furniture, prized as a rarity by its former owner, was now spending its last days in banishment here. I wandered, with eager curiosity, from room to room, upstairs and downstairs, and finally into the kitchen. Our cook was preparing a hasty meal for us, and looked discontented and scornful; the bailiff was generally sitting in the kitchen, a grey-haired man with a lump on hishead. When the cook turned to him and complained of the kitchen-range, the bailiff listened and said from time to time, “Well, perhaps you’re right”; he looked uneasily at all the stir in the house and clearly hoped we should soon go away.

Dinner was served on special plates, made of tin or Britannia metal, and bought for the purpose. Meanwhile the horses were put to; and the hall was filled with those who wished to pay their respects—former footmen, spending their last days in pure air but on short commons, and old women who had been pretty house-maids thirty years ago, all the creeping and hopping population of great houses, who, like the real locusts, devour the peasants’ toil by no fault of their own. They brought with them flaxen-haired children with bare feet and soiled clothes; the children kept pushing forward, and the old women kept pulling them back, and both made plenty of noise. The women caught hold of me when they could and expressed surprise at my growth in the same terms every year. My father spoke a few words to them; some tried to kiss his hand, but he never permitted it; others made their bow; and then we went away.

By the edge of a wood our bailiff was waiting for us, and he rode in front of us the last part of the way. A long lime avenue led up to our house from the vicarage; at the house we were met by the priest and his wife, the sexton, the servants, and some peasants. An idiot, called Pronka, was there too, the only self-respecting person; for he kept on his dirty old hat, stood a little apart and grinned, and started away whenever any of the newcomers tried to approach him.

§10

I have seen few more charming spots than this estate of Vasílevskoë. On one side, where the ground slopes, there is a large village with a church and an old manor-house; on the other side, where there is a hill and a smaller village, was a new house built by my father. From our windows there was a view for many miles: the endless corn-fields spread like lakes, ruffled by the breeze; manor-houses and villages with white churches were visible here and there; forests of varying hues made a semicircular frame for the picture; and the ribbon of the Moscow River shone blue outside it. In the early morning I used to push up my window as high as it would go, and look, and listen, and drink in the air.

Yet I had a tenderness for the old manor-house too, perhaps because it gave me my first taste of the country; I had a passion for the long shady avenue which led up to it, and the neglected garden. The house was falling down, and a slender shapely birch-tree was growing out of a crack in the hall floor. A willow avenue went to the left, followed by reed-beds and white sand, all the way to the river; about my twelfth year, I used to play the whole morning on this sand and among the reeds. An old gardener, bent and decrepit, was generally sitting in front of the house, boiling fruit or straining mint-wine; and he used to give me peas and beans to eat on the sly. There were a number of rooks in the garden; they nested in the tree-tops and flew round and round, cawing; sometimes, especially towards evening, they rose up in hundreds at a time, rousing others by their noise; sometimes a single bird would fly quickly from tree to tree, amid general silence. When night came on, some distant owlwould cry like a child or burst out laughing; and, though I feared those wild plaintive noises, yet I went and listened.

The years when we did not stay at Vasílevskoë were few and far between. On leaving, I always marked my height on the wall near the balcony, and my first business on arriving was to find out how much I had grown. But I could measure more than mere bodily growth by this place: the regular recurrence to the same surroundings enabled me to detect the development of my mind. Different books and different objects engaged my attention. In 1823 I was still quite a child and took childish books with me; and even these I left unread, taking more interest in a hare and a squirrel that lived in a garret near my room. My father allowed me, once every evening, to fire off a small cannon, and this was one of my chief delights. Of course, all the servants bore a hand in this occupation, and grey-haired men of fifty were no less excited than I was. In 1827 my books were Plutarch and Schiller; early in the morning I sought the remotest part of the wood, lay down under a tree, and read aloud, fancying myself in the forests of Bohemia. Yet, all the same, I paid much attention to a dyke which I and another boy were making across a small stream, and I ran there ten times a day to look at it and repair it. In 1829 and the next year, I was writing a “philosophical” review of Schiller’sWallenstein, and the cannon was the only one of my old amusements that still maintained its attraction.

But I had another pleasure as well as firing off the cannon—the evenings in the country haunted me like a passion, and I feel them still to be times of piety and peace and poetry.... One of the last bright hours of mylife also recalls to me an evening in the country. I was in Italy, andshewas with me. The sun was setting, solemn and bright, in an ocean of fire, and melting into it. Suddenly the rich crimson gave place to a sombre blue, and smoke-coloured vapour covered all the sky; for in Italy darkness comes on fast. We mounted our mules; riding from Frascati to Rome, we had to pass through a small village; lights were twinkling already here and there, all was peace, the hoofs of the mules rang out on the stone, a fresh dampish wind blew from the Apennines. At the end of the village there was a small Madonna in a niche, with a lamp burning before her; the village girls, coming home from work with white kerchiefs over their heads, knelt down and sang a hymn, and some beggingpifferariwho were passing by added their voices. I was profoundly impressed and much moved by the scene. We looked at each other, and rode slowly on to the inn where our carriage was waiting. When we got home, I described the evenings I had spent at Vasílevskoë. What was it I described?

The shepherd cracks his long whip and plays on his birch-bark pipe. I hear the lowing and bleating of the returning animals, and the stamping of their feet on the bridge. A barking dog scurries after a straggling sheep, and the sheep breaks into a kind of wooden-legged gallop. Then the voices of the girls, singing on their way from the fields, come nearer and nearer; but the path takes a turn to the right, and the sound dies away again. House-doors open with creaking of the hinges, and the children come out to meet their cows and sheep. Work is over. Children play in the street or by the river, and their voices come penetrating and clear over the water through the eveningglow. The smell of burning passes from the corn-kilns through the air; the soaking dew begins to spread like smoke over the earth, the wind seems to walk audibly over the trees, the sunset glow sends a last faint light over the world—and Vyéra Artamónovna finds me under a lime-tree, and scolds me, though she is not seriously angry.

“What’s the meaning of this? Tea has long been served, and everyone is there. I have looked and looked for you everywhere till I’m tired out. I’m too old for all this running. And whatdoyou mean by lying on the wet grass? You’ll have a cold to-morrow, I feel sure.”

“Never mind, never mind,” I would answer laughing; “I shan’t have a cold, and I want no tea; but you must steal me some cream, and mind you skim off the top of the jug!”

“Really, I can’t find it in my heart to be angry with you! But how dainty you are! I’ve got cream ready for you, without your asking. Look how red the sky is! That’s a sign of a good harvest.”

And then I made off home, jumping and whistling as I went.

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 twentyverstsof 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. Atlast 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.

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