On Annunciation Day, after the mail train had been sent off, Matvey was
sitting in the refreshment bar, talking and drinking tea with lemon in it.
The waiter and Zhukov the policeman were listening to him.
“I was, I must tell you,” Matvey was saying, “inclined to religion from my
earliest childhood. I was only twelve years old when I used to read the
epistle in church, and my parents were greatly delighted, and every summer
I used to go on a pilgrimage with my dear mother. Sometimes other lads
would be singing songs and catching crayfish, while I would be all the
time with my mother. My elders commended me, and, indeed, I was pleased
myself that I was of such good behaviour. And when my mother sent me with
her blessing to the factory, I used between working hours to sing tenor
there in our choir, and nothing gave me greater pleasure. I needn’t say, I
drank no vodka, I smoked no tobacco, and lived in chastity; but we all
know such a mode of life is displeasing to the enemy of mankind, and he,
the unclean spirit, once tried to ruin me and began to darken my mind,
just as now with my cousin. First of all, I took a vow to fast every
Monday and not to eat meat any day, and as time went on all sorts of
fancies came over me. For the first week of Lent down to Saturday the holy
fathers have ordained a diet of dry food, but it is no sin for the weak or
those who work hard even to drink tea, yet not a crumb passed into my
mouth till the Sunday, and afterwards all through Lent I did not allow
myself a drop of oil, and on Wednesdays and Fridays I did not touch a
morsel at all. It was the same in the lesser fasts. Sometimes in St.
Peter’s fast our factory lads would have fish soup, while I would sit a
little apart from them and suck a dry crust. Different people have
different powers, of course, but I can say of myself I did not find fast
days hard, and, indeed, the greater the zeal the easier it seems. You are
only hungry on the first days of the fast, and then you get used to it; it
goes on getting easier, and by the end of a week you don’t mind it at all,
and there is a numb feeling in your legs as though you were not on earth,
but in the clouds. And, besides that, I laid all sorts of penances on
myself; I used to get up in the night and pray, bowing down to the ground,
used to drag heavy stones from place to place, used to go out barefoot in
the snow, and I even wore chains, too. Only, as time went on, you know, I
was confessing one day to the priest and suddenly this reflection occurred
to me: why, this priest, I thought, is married, he eats meat and smokes
tobacco—how can he confess me, and what power has he to absolve my
sins if he is more sinful that I? I even scruple to eat Lenten oil, while
he eats sturgeon, I dare say. I went to another priest, and he, as ill
luck would have it, was a fat fleshy man, in a silk cassock; he rustled
like a lady, and he smelt of tobacco too. I went to fast and confess in
the monastery, and my heart was not at ease even there; I kept fancying
the monks were not living according to their rules. And after that I could
not find a service to my mind: in one place they read the service too
fast, in another they sang the wrong prayer, in a third the sacristan
stammered. Sometimes, the Lord forgive me a sinner, I would stand in
church and my heart would throb with anger. How could one pray, feeling
like that? And I fancied that the people in the church did not cross
themselves properly, did not listen properly; wherever I looked it seemed
to me that they were all drunkards, that they broke the fast, smoked,
lived loose lives and played cards. I was the only one who lived according
to the commandments. The wily spirit did not slumber; it got worse as it
went on. I gave up singing in the choir and I did not go to church at all;
since my notion was that I was a righteous man and that the church did not
suit me owing to its imperfections—that is, indeed, like a fallen
angel, I was puffed up in my pride beyond all belief. After this I began
attempting to make a church for myself. I hired from a deaf woman a tiny
little room, a long way out of town near the cemetery, and made a
prayer-room like my cousin’s, only I had big church candlesticks, too, and
a real censer. In this prayer-room of mine I kept the rules of holy Mount
Athos—that is, every day my matins began at midnight without fail,
and on the eve of the chief of the twelve great holy days my midnight
service lasted ten hours and sometimes even twelve. Monks are allowed by
rule to sit during the singing of the Psalter and the reading of the
Bible, but I wanted to be better than the monks, and so I used to stand
all through. I used to read and sing slowly, with tears and sighing,
lifting up my hands, and I used to go straight from prayer to work without
sleeping; and, indeed, I was always praying at my work, too. Well, it got
all over the town ‘Matvey is a saint; Matvey heals the sick and
senseless.’ I never had healed anyone, of course, but we all know wherever
any heresy or false doctrine springs up there’s no keeping the female sex
away. They are just like flies on the honey. Old maids and females of all
sorts came trailing to me, bowing down to my feet, kissing my hands and
crying out I was a saint and all the rest of it, and one even saw a halo
round my head. It was too crowded in the prayer-room. I took a bigger
room, and then we had a regular tower of Babel. The devil got hold of me
completely and screened the light from my eyes with his unclean hoofs. We
all behaved as though we were frantic. I read, while the old maids and
other females sang, and then after standing on their legs for twenty-four
hours or longer without eating or drinking, suddenly a trembling would
come over them as though they were in a fever; after that, one would begin
screaming and then another—it was horrible! I, too, would shiver all
over like a Jew in a frying-pan, I don’t know myself why, and our legs
began to prance about. It’s a strange thing, indeed: you don’t want to,
but you prance about and waggle your arms; and after that, screaming and
shrieking, we all danced and ran after one another —ran till we
dropped; and in that way, in wild frenzy, I fell into fornication.”
The policeman laughed, but, noticing that no one else was laughing, became
serious and said:
“That’s Molokanism. I have heard they are all like that in the Caucasus.”
“But I was not killed by a thunderbolt,” Matvey went on, crossing himself
before the ikon and moving his lips. “My dead mother must have been
praying for me in the other world. When everyone in the town looked upon
me as a saint, and even the ladies and gentlemen of good family used to
come to me in secret for consolation, I happened to go into our landlord,
Osip Varlamitch, to ask forgiveness —it was the Day of Forgiveness—and
he fastened the door with the hook, and we were left alone face to face.
And he began to reprove me, and I must tell you Osip Varlamitch was a man
of brains, though without education, and everyone respected and feared
him, for he was a man of stern, God-fearing life and worked hard. He had
been the mayor of the town, and a warden of the church for twenty years
maybe, and had done a great deal of good; he had covered all the New
Moscow Road with gravel, had painted the church, and had decorated the
columns to look like malachite. Well, he fastened the door, and—‘I
have been wanting to get at you for a long time, you rascal, . . .’ he
said. ‘You think you are a saint,’ he said. ‘No you are not a saint, but a
backslider from God, a heretic and an evildoer! . . .’ And he went on and
on. . . . I can’t tell you how he said it, so eloquently and cleverly, as
though it were all written down, and so touchingly. He talked for two
hours. His words penetrated my soul; my eyes were opened. I listened,
listened and —burst into sobs! ‘Be an ordinary man,’ he said, ‘eat
and drink, dress and pray like everyone else. All that is above the
ordinary is of the devil. Your chains,’ he said, ‘are of the devil; your
fasting is of the devil; your prayer-room is of the devil. It is all
pride,’ he said. Next day, on Monday in Holy Week, it pleased God I should
fall ill. I ruptured myself and was taken to the hospital. I was terribly
worried, and wept bitterly and trembled. I thought there was a straight
road before me from the hospital to hell, and I almost died. I was in
misery on a bed of sickness for six months, and when I was discharged the
first thing I did I confessed, and took the sacrament in the regular way
and became a man again. Osip Varlamitch saw me off home and exhorted me:
‘Remember, Matvey, that anything above the ordinary is of the devil.’ And
now I eat and drink like everyone else and pray like everyone else . . . .
If it happens now that the priest smells of tobacco or vodka I don’t
venture to blame him, because the priest, too, of course, is an ordinary
man. But as soon as I am told that in the town or in the village a saint
has set up who does not eat for weeks, and makes rules of his own, I know
whose work it is. So that is how I carried on in the past, gentlemen. Now,
like Osip Varlamitch, I am continually exhorting my cousins and
reproaching them, but I am a voice crying in the wilderness. God has not
vouchsafed me the gift.”
Matvey’s story evidently made no impression whatever. Sergey Nikanoritch
said nothing, but began clearing the refreshments off the counter, while
the policeman began talking of how rich Matvey’s cousin was.
“He must have thirty thousand at least,” he said.
Zhukov the policeman, a sturdy, well-fed, red-haired man with a full face
(his cheeks quivered when he walked), usually sat lolling and crossing his
legs when not in the presence of his superiors. As he talked he swayed to
and fro and whistled carelessly, while his face had a self-satisfied
replete air, as though he had just had dinner. He was making money, and he
always talked of it with the air of a connoisseur. He undertook jobs as an
agent, and when anyone wanted to sell an estate, a horse or a carriage,
they applied to him.
“Yes, it will be thirty thousand, I dare say,” Sergey Nikanoritch
assented. “Your grandfather had an immense fortune,” he said, addressing
Matvey. “Immense it was; all left to your father and your uncle. Your
father died as a young man and your uncle got hold of it all, and
afterwards, of course, Yakov Ivanitch. While you were going pilgrimages
with your mama and singing tenor in the factory, they didn’t let the grass
grow under their feet.”
“Fifteen thousand comes to your share,” said the policeman swaying from
side to side. “The tavern belongs to you in common, so the capital is in
common. Yes. If I were in your place I should have taken it into court
long ago. I would have taken it into court for one thing, and while the
case was going on I’d have knocked his face to a jelly.”
Yakov Ivanitch was disliked because, when anyone believes differently from
others, it upsets even people who are indifferent to religion. The
policeman disliked him also because he, too, sold horses and carriages.
“You don’t care about going to law with your cousin because you have
plenty of money of your own,” said the waiter to Matvey, looking at him
with envy. “It is all very well for anyone who has means, but here I shall
die in this position, I suppose. . . .”
Matvey began declaring that he hadn’t any money at all, but Sergey
Nikanoritch was not listening. Memories of the past and of the insults
which he endured every day came showering upon him. His bald head began to
perspire; he flushed and blinked.
“A cursed life!” he said with vexation, and he banged the sausage on the
floor.
