Two miles from the village of Obrutchanovo a huge bridge was being built. From the
village, which stood up high on the steep river-bank, its trellis-like skeleton could be
seen, and in foggy weather and on still winter days, when its delicate iron girders and all
the scaffolding around was covered with hoar frost, it presented a picturesque and even
fantastic spectacle. Kutcherov, the engineer who was building the bridge, a stout, broad-
shouldered, bearded man in a soft crumpled cap drove through the village in his racing
droshky or his open carriage. Now and then on holidays navvies working on the bridge
would come to the village; they begged for alms, laughed at the women, and sometimes
carried off something. But that was rare; as a rule the days passed quietly and peacefully
as though no bridge-building were going on, and only in the evening, when camp fires
gleamed near the bridge, the wind faintly wafted the songs of the navvies. And by day
there was sometimes the mournful clang of metal, don-don-don.
It happened that the engineer's wife came to see him. She was pleased with the river-
banks and the gorgeous view over the green valley with trees, churches, flocks, and she
began begging her husband to buy a small piece of ground and to build them a cottage on
it. Her husband agreed. They bought sixty acres of land, and on the high bank in a field,
where in earlier days the cows of Obrutchanovo used to wander, they built a pretty house
of two storeys with a terrace and a verandah, with a tower and a flagstaff on which a flag
fluttered on Sundays -- they built it in about three months, and then all the winter they
were planting big trees, and when spring came and everything began to be green there
were already avenues to the new house, a gardener and two labourers in white aprons
were digging near it, there was a little fountain, and a globe of looking-glass flashed so
brilliantly that it was painful to look at. The house had already been named the New
Villa.
On a bright, warm morning at the end of May two horses were brought to Obrutchanovo
to the village blacksmith, Rodion Petrov. They came from the New Villa. The horses
were sleek, graceful beasts, as white as snow, and strikingly alike.
"Perfect swans!" said Rodion, gazing at them with reverent admiration.
His wife Stepanida, his children and grandchildren came out into the street to look at
them. By degrees a crowd collected. The Lytchkovs, father and son, both men with
swollen faces and entirely beardless, came up bareheaded. Kozov, a tall, thin old man
with a long, narrow beard, came up leaning on a stick with a crook handle: he kept
winking with his crafty eyes and smiling ironically as though he knew something.
"It's only that they are white; what is there in them?" he said. "Put mine on oats, and they
will be just as sleek. They ought to be in a plough and with a whip, too. . . ."
