Russian Literature – Children Books – Russian Poetry – Leo Tolstoy – The Two Old Men – Contents
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XI.
Efím walked by himself the same way he had come out. As he was getting close to his village, he began to worry again about how things were going at his house without him. In a year, he thought, much water runs by. It takes a lifetime to get together a home, but it does not take long to ruin it. He wondered how his son had done without him, how the spring had opened, how the cattle had wintered, and whether the hut was well built. Efím reached the spot where the year before he had parted from Eliséy. It was not possible to recognize the people. Where the year before they had suffered want, now there was plenty. Everything grew well in the field. The people picked up again and forgot their former misery. In the evening Efím reached the very village where the year before Eliséy had fallen behind. He had just entered the village, when a little girl in a white shirt came running out of a hut.
“Grandfather, grandfather! Come to our house!”
Efím wanted to go on, but the girl would not let him. She took hold of his coat and laughed and pulled him to the hut. A woman with a boy came out on the porch, and she, too, beckoned to him:
“Come in, grandfather, and eat supper with us and stay overnight!”
Efím stepped in.
“I can, at least, ask about Eliséy,” he thought. “This is the very hut into which he went to get a drink.”
Efím went inside. The woman took off his wallet, gave him water to wash himself, and seated him at the table. She fetched milk, cheese, cakes, and porridge, and placed it all on the table. Tarásych thanked her and praised the people for being hospitable to pilgrims. The woman shook her head.
“We cannot help receiving pilgrims,” she said. “We received life from a pilgrim. We lived forgetting God, and God punished us in such a way that all of us were waiting for death. Last summer we came to such a point that we were all lying down sick and starved. We should certainly have died, but God sent us an old man like you. He stepped in during the daytime to get a drink; when he saw us, he took pity on us and remained at our house. He gave us to eat and to drink, and put us on our feet again. He cleared our land from debt, and bought a horse and cart and left it with us.”
The old woman entered the room, and interrupted her speech:
“We do not know,” she said, “whether he was a man or an angel of the Lord. He was good to us all, and pitied us, and then went away without giving his name, so that we do not know for whom to pray to God. I see it as though it happened just now: I was lying down and waiting for death to come; I looked up and saw a man come in,—just a simple, bald-headed man,—and ask for a drink. I, sinful woman, thought that he was a tramp, but see what he did! When he saw us he put down his wallet, right in this spot, and opened it.”
The girl broke in.
“No, granny,” she said, “first he put his wallet in the middle of the room, and only later did he put it on the bench.”
And they began to dispute and to recall his words and deeds: where he had sat down, and where he had slept, and what he had done, and what he had said to each.
Toward evening the master of the house came home on a horse, and he, too, began to tell about Eliséy, and how he had stayed at their house.
“If he had not come to us,” he said, “we should all of us have died in sin. We were dying in despair, and we murmured against God and men. But he put us on our feet, and through him we found out God, and began to believe in good people. May Christ save him! Before that we lived like beasts, and he has made men of us.”
They gave Efím to eat and to drink, and gave him a place to sleep, and themselves went to bed.
As Efím lay down, he could not sleep, and Eliséy did not leave his mind, but he thought of how he had seen him three times in Jerusalem in the foremost place.
“So this is the way he got ahead of me,” he thought. “My work may be accepted or not, but his the Lord has accepted.”
In the morning Efím bade the people good-bye: they filled his wallet with cakes and went to work, while Efím started out on the road.
Russian Literature – Children Books – Russian Poetry – Leo Tolstoy – The Two Old Men – Contents
Copyright holders – Public Domain Book
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