I recall the feeling that said to me, “Come, jump in, and pull out the man, save him, and they will all admire you,” which was just what I was desiring.
“Where? where is he?” I ask of the crowd of house-serfs gathered together on the bank.
“Over yonder, near the deepest pool, towards that bank, almost at the bathhouse,” says a washerwoman, getting in her wet linen on a yoke. “I saw him plunge in; and he comes up so and goes down again, and comes up again and screams, ‘I’m drowning, mercy!’ and again he went down to the bottom, and only bubbles came up. Then I saw the man was drowning. And I yelled, ‘Mercy on us, the peasant’s drowning!’ ”
And the washerwoman hoists the yoke on to her shoulder, and bending on one side, walks along the path away from the pond.
“My word, what a shame!” says Yakov Ivanov, the bailiff, in a voice of despair: “what a to-do we shall have now with the district court—we shall never hear the last of it!”
A peasant with a scythe makes his way through the throng of women, children, and old people crowding about the bank, and hanging his scythe in the branches of a willow, begins deliberately pulling off his boots.
“Where, where did he sink?” I keep on asking, longing to throw myself in, and do something extraordinary.
But they point to the smooth surface of the pond, broken into ripples here and there by the rushing wind. It is inconceivable to me that he is