THE evening service
was being celebrated on the eve of Palm Sunday in the Old Petrovsky
Convent. When they began distributing the palm it was close upon ten
o’clock, the candles were burning dimly, the wicks wanted snuffing; it was
all in a sort of mist. In the twilight of the church the crowd seemed
heaving like the sea, and to Bishop Pyotr, who had been unwell for the
last three days, it seemed that all the faces—old and young, men’s
and women’s—were alike, that everyone who came up for the palm had
the same expression in his eyes. In the mist he could not see the doors;
the crowd kept moving and looked as though there were no end to it. The
female choir was singing, a nun was reading the prayers for the day.
How stifling, how hot it was! How long the service went on! Bishop Pyotr
was tired. His breathing was laboured and rapid, his throat was parched,
his shoulders ached with weariness, his legs were trembling. And it
disturbed him unpleasantly when a religious maniac uttered occasional
shrieks in the gallery. And then all of a sudden, as though in a dream or
delirium, it seemed to the bishop as though his own mother Marya
Timofyevna, whom he had not seen for nine years, or some old woman just
like his mother, came up to him out of the crowd, and, after taking a palm
branch from him, walked away looking at him all the while good-humouredly
with a kind, joyful smile until she was lost in the crowd. And for some
reason tears flowed down his face. There was peace in his heart,
everything was well, yet he kept gazing fixedly towards the left choir,
where the prayers were being read, where in the dusk of evening you could
not recognize anyone, and—wept. Tears glistened on his face and on
his beard. Here someone close at hand was weeping, then someone else
farther away, then others and still others, and little by little the
church was filled with soft weeping. And a little later, within five
minutes, the nuns’ choir was singing; no one was weeping and everything
was as before.
Soon the service was over. When the bishop got into his carriage to drive
home, the gay, melodious chime of the heavy, costly bells was filling the
whole garden in the moonlight. The white walls, the white crosses on the
tombs, the white birch-trees and black shadows, and the far-away moon in
the sky exactly over the convent, seemed now living their own life, apart
and incomprehensible, yet very near to man. It was the beginning of April,
and after the warm spring day it turned cool; there was a faint touch of
frost, and the breath of spring could be felt in the soft, chilly air. The
road from the convent to the town was sandy, the horses had to go at a
walking pace, and on both sides of the carriage in the brilliant, peaceful
moonlight there were people trudging along home from church through the
sand. And all was silent, sunk in thought; everything around seemed
kindly, youthful, akin, everything—trees and sky and even the moon,
and one longed to think that so it would be always.
At last the carriage drove into the town and rumbled along the principal
street. The shops were already shut, but at Erakin’s, the millionaire
shopkeeper’s, they were trying the new electric lights, which flickered
brightly, and a crowd of people were gathered round. Then came wide, dark,
deserted streets, one after another; then the highroad, the open country,
the fragrance of pines. And suddenly there rose up before the bishop’s
eyes a white turreted wall, and behind it a tall belfry in the full
moonlight, and beside it five shining, golden cupolas: this was the
Pankratievsky Monastery, in which Bishop Pyotr lived. And here, too, high
above the monastery, was the silent, dreamy moon. The carriage drove in at
the gate, crunching over the sand; here and there in the moonlight there
were glimpses of dark monastic figures, and there was the sound of
footsteps on the flag-stones. . . .
“You know, your holiness, your mamma arrived while you were away,” the lay
brother informed the bishop as he went into his cell.
“My mother? When did she come?”
“Before the evening service. She asked first where you were and then she
went to the convent.”
“Then it was her I saw in the church, just now! Oh, Lord!”
And the bishop laughed with joy.
“She bade me tell your holiness,” the lay brother went on, “that she would
come to-morrow. She had a little girl with her—her grandchild, I
suppose. They are staying at Ovsyannikov’s inn.”
“What time is it now?”
“A little after eleven.”
“Oh, how vexing!”
The bishop sat for a little while in the parlour, hesitating, and as it
were refusing to believe it was so late. His arms and legs were stiff, his
head ached. He was hot and uncomfortable. After resting a little he went
into his bedroom, and there, too, he sat a little, still thinking of his
mother; he could hear the lay brother going away, and Father Sisoy
coughing the other side of the wall. The monastery clock struck a quarter.
The bishop changed his clothes and began reading the prayers before sleep.
He read attentively those old, long familiar prayers, and at the same time
thought about his mother. She had nine children and about forty
grandchildren. At one time, she had lived with her husband, the deacon, in
a poor village; she had lived there a very long time from the age of
seventeen to sixty. The bishop remembered her from early childhood, almost
from the age of three, and—how he had loved her! Sweet, precious
childhood, always fondly remembered! Why did it, that long-past time that
could never return, why did it seem brighter, fuller, and more festive
than it had really been? When in his childhood or youth he had been ill,
how tender and sympathetic his mother had been! And now his prayers
mingled with the memories, which gleamed more and more brightly like a
flame, and the prayers did not hinder his thinking of his mother.
When he had finished his prayers he undressed and lay down, and at once,
as soon as it was dark, there rose before his mind his dead father, his
mother, his native village Lesopolye . . . the creak of wheels, the bleat
of sheep, the church bells on bright summer mornings, the gypsies under
the window—oh, how sweet to think of it! He remembered the priest of
Lesopolye, Father Simeon—mild, gentle, kindly; he was a lean little
man, while his son, a divinity student, was a huge fellow and talked in a
roaring bass voice. The priest’s son had flown into a rage with the cook
and abused her: “Ah, you Jehud’s ass!” and Father Simeon overhearing it,
said not a word, and was only ashamed because he could not remember where
such an ass was mentioned in the Bible. After him the priest at Lesopolye
had been Father Demyan, who used to drink heavily, and at times drank till
he saw green snakes, and was even nicknamed Demyan Snakeseer. The
schoolmaster at Lesopolye was Matvey Nikolaitch, who had been a divinity
student, a kind and intelligent man, but he, too, was a drunkard; he never
beat the schoolchildren, but for some reason he always had hanging on his
wall a bunch of birch-twigs, and below it an utterly meaningless
inscription in Latin: “Betula kinderbalsamica secuta.” He had a shaggy
black dog whom he called Syntax.
And his holiness laughed. Six miles from Lesopolye was the village Obnino
with a wonder-working ikon. In the summer they used to carry the ikon in
procession about the neighbouring villages and ring the bells the whole
day long; first in one village and then in another, and it used to seem to
the bishop then that joy was quivering in the air, and he (in those days
his name was Pavlusha) used to follow the ikon, bareheaded and barefoot,
with naïve faith, with a naïve smile, infinitely happy. In Obnino, he
remembered now, there were always a lot of people, and the priest there,
Father Alexey, to save time during mass, used to make his deaf nephew
Ilarion read the names of those for whose health or whose souls’ peace
prayers were asked. Ilarion used to read them, now and then getting a five
or ten kopeck piece for the service, and only when he was grey and bald,
when life was nearly over, he suddenly saw written on one of the pieces of
paper: “What a fool you are, Ilarion.” Up to fifteen at least Pavlusha was
undeveloped and idle at his lessons, so much so that they thought of
taking him away from the clerical school and putting him into a shop; one
day, going to the post at Obnino for letters, he had stared a long time at
the post-office clerks and asked: “Allow me to ask, how do you get your
salary, every month or every day?”
His holiness crossed himself and turned over on the other side, trying to
stop thinking and go to sleep.
“My mother has come,” he remembered and laughed.
The moon peeped in at the window, the floor was lighted up, and there were
shadows on it. A cricket was chirping. Through the wall Father Sisoy was
snoring in the next room, and his aged snore had a sound that suggested
loneliness, forlornness, even vagrancy. Sisoy had once been housekeeper to
the bishop of the diocese, and was called now “the former Father
Housekeeper”; he was seventy years old, he lived in a monastery twelve
miles from the town and stayed sometimes in the town, too. He had come to
the Pankratievsky Monastery three days before, and the bishop had kept him
that he might talk to him at his leisure about matters of business, about
the arrangements here. . . .
At half-past one they began ringing for matins. Father Sisoy could be
heard coughing, muttering something in a discontented voice, then he got
up and walked barefoot about the rooms.
“Father Sisoy,” the bishop called.
Sisoy went back to his room and a little later made his appearance in his
boots, with a candle; he had on his cassock over his underclothes and on
his head was an old faded skull-cap.
“I can’t sleep,” said the bishop, sitting up. “I must be unwell. And what
it is I don’t know. Fever!”
“You must have caught cold, your holiness. You must be rubbed with
tallow.” Sisoy stood a little and yawned. “O Lord, forgive me, a sinner.”
“They had the electric lights on at Erakin’s today,” he said; “I don’t
like it!”
Father Sisoy was old, lean, bent, always dissatisfied with something, and
his eyes were angry-looking and prominent as a crab’s.
“I don’t like it,” he said, going away. “I don’t like it. Bother it!”
