Next day, Palm Sunday, the bishop took the service in the cathedral
in the town, then he visited the bishop of the diocese, then visited
a very sick old lady, the widow of a general, and at last drove
home. Between one and two o'clock he had welcome visitors dining
with him--his mother and his niece Katya, a child of eight years
old. All dinner-time the spring sunshine was streaming in at the
windows, throwing bright light on the white tablecloth and on Katya's
red hair. Through the double windows they could hear the noise of
the rooks and the notes of the starlings in the garden.
"It is nine years since we have met," said the old lady. "And when
I looked at you in the monastery yesterday, good Lord! you've not
changed a bit, except maybe you are thinner and your beard is a
little longer. Holy Mother, Queen of Heaven! Yesterday at the evening
service no one could help crying. I, too, as I looked at you,
suddenly began crying, though I couldn't say why. His Holy Will!"
And in spite of the affectionate tone in which she said this, he
could see she was constrained as though she were uncertain whether
to address him formally or familiarly, to laugh or not, and that
she felt herself more a deacon's widow than his mother. And Katya
gazed without blinking at her uncle, his holiness, as though trying
to discover what sort of a person he was. Her hair sprang up from
under the comb and the velvet ribbon and stood out like a halo; she
had a turned-up nose and sly eyes. The child had broken a glass
before sitting down to dinner, and now her grandmother, as she
talked, moved away from Katya first a wineglass and then a tumbler.
The bishop listened to his mother and remembered how many, many
years ago she used to take him and his brothers and sisters to
relations whom she considered rich; in those days she was taken up
with the care of her children, now with her grandchildren, and she
had brought Katya. . . .
"Your sister, Varenka, has four children," she told him; "Katya,
here, is the eldest. And your brother-in-law Father Ivan fell sick,
God knows of what, and died three days before the Assumption; and
my poor Varenka is left a beggar."
"And how is Nikanor getting on?" the bishop asked about his eldest
brother.
"He is all right, thank God. Though he has nothing much, yet he can
live. Only there is one thing: his son, my grandson Nikolasha, did
not want to go into the Church; he has gone to the university to
be a doctor. He thinks it is better; but who knows! His Holy Will!"
"Nikolasha cuts up dead people," said Katya, spilling water over
her knees.
"Sit still, child," her grandmother observed calmly, and took the
glass out of her hand. "Say a prayer, and go on eating."
"How long it is since we have seen each other!" said the bishop,
and he tenderly stroked his mother's hand and shoulder; "and I
missed you abroad, mother, I missed you dreadfully."
"Thank you."
"I used to sit in the evenings at the open window, lonely and alone;
often there was music playing, and all at once I used to be overcome
with homesickness and felt as though I would give everything only
to be at home and see you."
His mother smiled, beamed, but at once she made a grave face and
said:
"Thank you."
His mood suddenly changed. He looked at his mother and could not
understand how she had come by that respectfulness, that timid
expression of face: what was it for? And he did not recognize her.
He felt sad and vexed. And then his head ached just as it had the
day before; his legs felt fearfully tired, and the fish seemed to
him stale and tasteless; he felt thirsty all the time. . . .
After dinner two rich ladies, landowners, arrived and sat for an
hour and a half in silence with rigid countenances; the archimandrite,
a silent, rather deaf man, came to see him about business. Then
they began ringing for vespers; the sun was setting behind the wood
and the day was over. When he returned from church, he hurriedly
said his prayers, got into bed, and wrapped himself up as warm as
possible.
It was disagreeable to remember the fish he had eaten at dinner.
The moonlight worried him, and then he heard talking. In an adjoining
room, probably in the parlour, Father Sisoy was talking politics:
"There's war among the Japanese now. They are fighting. The Japanese,
my good soul, are the same as the Montenegrins; they are the same
race. They were under the Turkish yoke together."
And then he heard the voice of Marya Timofyevna:
"So, having said our prayers and drunk tea, we went, you know, to
Father Yegor at Novokatnoye, so. . ."
And she kept on saying, "having had tea" or "having drunk tea," and
it seemed as though the only thing she had done in her life was to
drink tea.
The bishop slowly, languidly, recalled the seminary, the academy.
For three years he had been Greek teacher in the seminary: by that
time he could not read without spectacles. Then he had become a
monk; he had been made a school inspector. Then he had defended his
thesis for his degree. When he was thirty-two he had been made
rector of the seminary, and consecrated archimandrite: and then his
life had been so easy, so pleasant; it seemed so long, so long, no
end was in sight. Then he had begun to be ill, had grown very thin
and almost blind, and by the advice of the doctors had to give up
everything and go abroad.
"And what then?" asked Sisoy in the next room.
"Then we drank tea . . ." answered Marya Timofyevna.
"Good gracious, you've got a green beard," said Katya suddenly in
surprise, and she laughed.
The bishop remembered that the grey-headed Father Sisoy's beard
really had a shade of green in it, and he laughed.
"God have mercy upon us, what we have to put up with with this
girl!" said Sisoy, aloud, getting angry. "Spoilt child! Sit quiet!"
The bishop remembered the perfectly new white church in which he
had conducted the services while living abroad, he remembered the
sound of the warm sea. In his flat he had five lofty light rooms;
in his study he had a new writing-table, lots of books. He had read
a great deal and often written. And he remembered how he had pined
for his native land, how a blind beggar woman had played the guitar
under his window every day and sung of love, and how, as he listened,
he had always for some reason thought of the past. But eight years
had passed and he had been called back to Russia, and now he was a
suffragan bishop, and all the past had retreated far away into the
mist as though it were a dream. . . .
Father Sisoy came into the bedroom with a candle.
"I say!" he said, wondering, "are you asleep already, your holiness?"
"What is it?"
"Why, it's still early, ten o'clock or less. I bought a candle
to-day; I wanted to rub you with tallow."
"I am in a fever . . ." said the bishop, and he sat up. "I really
ought to have something. My head is bad. . . ."
Sisoy took off the bishop's shirt and began rubbing his chest and
back with tallow.
"That's the way . . . that's the way . . ." he said. "Lord Jesus
Christ . . . that's the way. I walked to the town to-day; I was at
what's-his-name's--the chief priest Sidonsky's. . . . I had tea
with him. I don't like him. Lord Jesus Christ. . . . That's the
way. I don't like him."