On Thursday he celebrated mass in the cathedral; it was the Washing of
Feet. When the service was over and the people were going home, it was
sunny, warm; the water gurgled in the gutters, and the unceasing trilling
of the larks, tender, telling of peace, rose from the fields outside the
town. The trees were already awakening and smiling a welcome, while above
them the infinite, fathomless blue sky stretched into the distance, God
knows whither.
On reaching home his holiness drank some tea, then changed his clothes,
lay down on his bed, and told the lay brother to close the shutters on the
windows. The bedroom was darkened. But what weariness, what pain in his
legs and his back, a chill heavy pain, what a noise in his ears! He had
not slept for a long time—for a very long time, as it seemed to him
now, and some trifling detail which haunted his brain as soon as his eyes
were closed prevented him from sleeping. As on the day before, sounds
reached him from the adjoining rooms through the walls, voices, the jingle
of glasses and teaspoons. . . . Marya Timofyevna was gaily telling Father
Sisoy some story with quaint turns of speech, while the latter answered in
a grumpy, ill-humoured voice: “Bother them! Not likely! What next!” And
the bishop again felt vexed and then hurt that with other people his old
mother behaved in a simple, ordinary way, while with him, her son, she was
shy, spoke little, and did not say what she meant, and even, as he
fancied, had during all those three days kept trying in his presence to
find an excuse for standing up, because she was embarrassed at sitting
before him. And his father? He, too, probably, if he had been living,
would not have been able to utter a word in the bishop’s presence. . . .
Something fell down on the floor in the adjoining room and was broken;
Katya must have dropped a cup or a saucer, for Father Sisoy suddenly spat
and said angrily:
“What a regular nuisance the child is! Lord forgive my transgressions! One
can’t provide enough for her.”
Then all was quiet, the only sounds came from outside. And when the bishop
opened his eyes he saw Katya in his room, standing motionless, staring at
him. Her red hair, as usual, stood up from under the comb like a halo.
“Is that you, Katya?” he asked. “Who is it downstairs who keeps opening
and shutting a door?”
“I don’t hear it,” answered Katya; and she listened.
“There, someone has just passed by.”
“But that was a noise in your stomach, uncle.”
He laughed and stroked her on the head.
“So you say Cousin Nikolasha cuts up dead people?” he asked after a pause.
“Yes, he is studying.”
“And is he kind?”
“Oh, yes, he’s kind. But he drinks vodka awfully.”
“And what was it your father died of?”
“Papa was weak and very, very thin, and all at once his throat was bad. I
was ill then, too, and brother Fedya; we all had bad throats. Papa died,
uncle, and we got well.”
Her chin began quivering, and tears gleamed in her eyes and trickled down
her cheeks.
“Your holiness,” she said in a shrill voice, by now weeping bitterly,
“uncle, mother and all of us are left very wretched. . . . Give us a
little money . . . do be kind . . . uncle darling. . . .”
He, too, was moved to tears, and for a long time was too much touched to
speak. Then he stroked her on the head, patted her on the shoulder and
said:
“Very good, very good, my child. When the holy Easter comes, we will talk
it over. . . . I will help you. . . . I will help you. . . .”
His mother came in quietly, timidly, and prayed before the ikon. Noticing
that he was not sleeping, she said:
“Won’t you have a drop of soup?”
“No, thank you,” he answered, “I am not hungry.”
“You seem to be unwell, now I look at you. I should think so; you may well
be ill! The whole day on your legs, the whole day. . . . And, my goodness,
it makes one’s heart ache even to look at you! Well, Easter is not far
off; you will rest then, please God. Then we will have a talk, too, but
now I’m not going to disturb you with my chatter. Come along, Katya; let
his holiness sleep a little.”
And he remembered how once very long ago, when he was a boy, she had
spoken exactly like that, in the same jestingly respectful tone, with a
Church dignitary. . . . Only from her extraordinarily kind eyes and the
timid, anxious glance she stole at him as she went out of the room could
one have guessed that this was his mother. He shut his eyes and seemed to
sleep, but twice heard the clock strike and Father Sisoy coughing the
other side of the wall. And once more his mother came in and looked
timidly at him for a minute. Someone drove up to the steps, as he could
hear, in a coach or in a chaise. Suddenly a knock, the door slammed, the
lay brother came into the bedroom.
“Your holiness,” he called.
“Well?”
“The horses are here; it’s time for the evening service.”
“What o’clock is it?”
“A quarter past seven.”
He dressed and drove to the cathedral. During all the “Twelve Gospels” he
had to stand in the middle of the church without moving, and the first
gospel, the longest and the most beautiful, he read himself. A mood of
confidence and courage came over him. That first gospel, “Now is the Son
of Man glorified,” he knew by heart; and as he read he raised his eyes
from time to time, and saw on both sides a perfect sea of lights and heard
the splutter of candles, but, as in past years, he could not see the
people, and it seemed as though these were all the same people as had been
round him in those days, in his childhood and his youth; that they would
always be the same every year and till such time as God only knew.
His father had been a deacon, his grandfather a priest, his
great-grandfather a deacon, and his whole family, perhaps from the days
when Christianity had been accepted in Russia, had belonged to the
priesthood; and his love for the Church services, for the priesthood, for
the peal of the bells, was deep in him, ineradicable, innate. In church,
particularly when he took part in the service, he felt vigorous, of good
cheer, happy. So it was now. Only when the eighth gospel had been read, he
felt that his voice had grown weak, even his cough was inaudible. His head
had begun to ache intensely, and he was troubled by a fear that he might
fall down. And his legs were indeed quite numb, so that by degrees he
ceased to feel them and could not understand how or on what he was
standing, and why he did not fall. . . .
It was a quarter to twelve when the service was over. When he reached
home, the bishop undressed and went to bed at once without even saying his
prayers. He could not speak and felt that he could not have stood up. When
he had covered his head with the quilt he felt a sudden longing to be
abroad, an insufferable longing! He felt that he would give his life not
to see those pitiful cheap shutters, those low ceilings, not to smell that
heavy monastery smell. If only there were one person to whom he could have
talked, have opened his heart!
For a long while he heard footsteps in the next room and could not tell
whose they were. At last the door opened, and Sisoy came in with a candle
and a tea-cup in his hand.
“You are in bed already, your holiness?” he asked. “Here I have come to
rub you with spirit and vinegar. A thorough rubbing does a great deal of
good. Lord Jesus Christ! . . . That’s the way . . . that’s the way. . . .
I’ve just been in our monastery. . . . I don’t like it. I’m going away
from here to-morrow, your holiness; I don’t want to stay longer. Lord
Jesus Christ. . . . That’s the way. . . .”
Sisoy could never stay long in the same place, and he felt as though he
had been a whole year in the Pankratievsky Monastery. Above all, listening
to him it was difficult to understand where his home was, whether he cared
for anyone or anything, whether he believed in God. . . . He did not know
himself why he was a monk, and, indeed, he did not think about it, and the
time when he had become a monk had long passed out of his memory; it
seemed as though he had been born a monk.
“I’m going away to-morrow; God be with them all.”
“I should like to talk to you. . . . I can’t find the time,” said the
bishop softly with an effort. “I don’t know anything or anybody here. . .
.”
“I’ll stay till Sunday if you like; so be it, but I don’t want to stay
longer. I am sick of them!”
“I ought not to be a bishop,” said the bishop softly. “I ought to have
been a village priest, a deacon . . . or simply a monk. . . . All this
oppresses me . . . oppresses me.”
“What? Lord Jesus Christ. . . . That’s the way. Come, sleep well, your
holiness! . . . What’s the good of talking? It’s no use. Good-night!”
The bishop did not sleep all night. And at eight o’clock in the morning he
began to have hemorrhage from the bowels. The lay brother was alarmed, and
ran first to the archimandrite, then for the monastery doctor, Ivan
Andreyitch, who lived in the town. The doctor, a stout old man with a long
grey beard, made a prolonged examination of the bishop, and kept shaking
his head and frowning, then said:
“Do you know, your holiness, you have got typhoid?”
After an hour or so of hemorrhage the bishop looked much thinner, paler,
and wasted; his face looked wrinkled, his eyes looked bigger, and he
seemed older, shorter, and it seemed to him that he was thinner, weaker,
more insignificant than any one, that everything that had been had
retreated far, far away and would never go on again or be repeated.
“How good,” he thought, “how good!”
His old mother came. Seeing his wrinkled face and his big eyes, she was
frightened, she fell on her knees by the bed and began kissing his face,
his shoulders, his hands. And to her, too, it seemed that he was thinner,
weaker, and more insignificant than anyone, and now she forgot that he was
a bishop, and kissed him as though he were a child very near and very dear
to her.
“Pavlusha, darling,” she said; “my own, my darling son! . . . Why are you
like this? Pavlusha, answer me!”
Katya, pale and severe, stood beside her, unable to understand what was
the matter with her uncle, why there was such a look of suffering on her
grandmother’s face, why she was saying such sad and touching things. By
now he could not utter a word, he could understand nothing, and he
imagined he was a simple ordinary man, that he was walking quickly,
cheerfully through the fields, tapping with his stick, while above him was
the open sky bathed in sunshine, and that he was free now as a bird and
could go where he liked!
“Pavlusha, my darling son, answer me,” the old woman was saying. “What is
it? My own!”
“Don’t disturb his holiness,” Sisoy said angrily, walking about the room.
“Let him sleep . . . what’s the use . . . it’s no good. . . .”
Three doctors arrived, consulted together, and went away again. The day
was long, incredibly long, then the night came on and passed slowly,
slowly, and towards morning on Saturday the lay brother went in to the old
mother who was lying on the sofa in the parlour, and asked her to go into
the bedroom: the bishop had just breathed his last.
Next day was Easter Sunday. There were forty-two churches and six
monasteries in the town; the sonorous, joyful clang of the bells hung over
the town from morning till night unceasingly, setting the spring air
aquiver; the birds were singing, the sun was shining brightly. The big
market square was noisy, swings were going, barrel organs were playing,
accordions were squeaking, drunken voices were shouting. After midday
people began driving up and down the principal street.
In short, all was merriment, everything was satisfactory, just as it had
been the year before, and as it will be in all likelihood next year.
A month later a new suffragan bishop was appointed, and no one thought
anything more of Bishop Pyotr, and afterwards he was completely forgotten.
And only the dead man’s old mother, who is living to-day with her
son-in-law the deacon in a remote little district town, when she goes out
at night to bring her cow in and meets other women at the pasture, begins
talking of her children and her grandchildren, and says that she had a son
a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid that she may not be believed.
. . .
And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her.
