ed herself and sighed.

"They are kind, simple-hearted people," Rodion went on. "'We shall look
after you.'... He promised me that before everyone. In our old age...
it wouldn't be a bad thing.... I should always pray for them.... Holy
Mother, bless them...."

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the fourteenth of September,
was the festival of the village church. The Lytchkovs, father and son,
went across the river early in the morning and returned to dinner drunk;
they spent a long time going about the village, alternately singing and
swearing; then they had a fight and went to the New Villa to complain.
First Lytchkov the father went into the yard with a long ashen stick in
his hands. He stopped irresolutely and took off his hat. Just at
that moment the engineer and his family were sitting on the verandah,
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