BY

IVAN TURGENEV

From "Torrents of Spring." Translated by Constance Garnett.


In one of the outlying streets of Moscow, in a gray house with white
columns and a balcony, warped all askew, there was once living a lady, a
widow, surrounded by a numerous household of serfs. Her sons were in the
government service at Petersburg; her daughters were married; she went
out very little, and in solitude lived through the last years of her
miserly and dreary old age. Her day, a joyless and gloomy day, had long
been over; but the evening of her life was blacker than night.

Of all her servants, the most remarkable personage was the porter,
Gerasim, a man full twelve inches over the normal height, of heroic
build, and deaf and dumb from his birth. The lady, his owner, had
brought him up from the village where he lived alone in a little hut,
apart from his brothers, and was reckoned about the most punctual of her
peasants in the payment of the seignorial dues. Endowed with
extraordinary strength, he did the work of four men; work flew apace
under his hands, and it was a pleasant sight to see him when he was
ploughing, while, with his huge palms pressing hard upon the plough, he
seemed alone, unaided by his poor horse, to cleave the yielding bosom of
the earth, or when, about St. Peter's Day, he plied his scythe with a
furious energy that might have mown a young birch copse up by the roots,
or swiftly and untiringly wielded a flail over two yards long; while the
hard oblong muscles of his shoulders rose and fell like a lever. His
perpetual silence lent a solemn dignity to his unwearying labor. He was