THE faces in the passing crowd are always somewhat of an
enigma. There are so many that we do not know, each with his own wide
story, which, however, does not touch our story. One is tempted to go
up and place the hand in the slightly unwilling and doubtful hand of
the stranger and say, “I know you, do I not?” And it is always somewhat
of a miracle if in the midst of the sea of faces there suddenly turns
up the familiar face. There happened to me when I returned to Moscow
after my stay at Mme. E.’s a miracle of this kind. I met one of my
pilgrims again, one of those I accompanied to Jerusalem five years ago,
whom I did not expect to see again--the aged hermit Yevgeny.
I passed and repassed him twice, and he for his part stopped and seemed
to be vaguely wondering what he should do next. ’Twas outside the
Yaroslavsky station, and I was hurrying to catch a suburban train to
visit some friends. There was a great swirl of traffic, and many trams
were circling and groaning, emptying and receiving passengers.
“Father Yevgeny,” said I. “Do you not recognise me?”
He seemed taken aback, and shrank rather as if the devil had taken a
new form to tempt him. I recalled that he was considerably troubled by
the devil.
“We met at Jerusalem, did we not?” said I. “Don’t you remember, we used
to read the Bible together in the mornings?”
Then he recognised me, and a bright and happy smile transfigured his
pallid, wrinkled cheeks and sunken eyes.
He lifted up his bent shoulders and kissed me, first on one cheek, then
on the other, and proclaimed in a loud voice, “God has done this. It is
a miracle. He meant that we should meet again. But how changed you are!
You have grown taller. Yes, it is you. But it is a miracle. God has
done it.”
We were a strange contrast. I in a light summer suit and wearing a
straw hat; he, in any case a remarkable figure, tall though drooping,
with yellowish-white ancient locks and toothless gums. Several people
stopped to look at us, and some approached more closely to hear what we
were talking about. The representatives of two contrary worlds seemed
to have met, for I clearly belonged to that gay, worldly, commercial
Moscow which is so out of touch with Holy Russia, and the monk was
one of those forbidding figures one would not expect to smile and be
demonstrative in the public street.
I wrote him my address, and he promised to come to me on the morrow.
I then sped on to catch the train, my heart full of delight at this
surprising meeting, this true miracle to which the bright Sunday had
given birth.
Next day Yevgeny came to the hotel at which I was staying and asked
for me. He had put on for the occasion an old straw hat and over it a
surprisingly old and dirty Egyptian sun-helmet. In his hand he bore a
tall cypress staff with a cross on the top, a true palmer’s staff, but
a rare enough sight in Moscow.
The porter of the hotel is artificially made fat like a swell coachman,
and he wears in his hat a circle of tips of peacock-feathers which
make him look very grand. It is his business to know every one who
goes in and out of the great hotel. Probably for the first time in his
experience a monk made to enter the establishment. Father Yevgeny and
he--again two worlds confronting one another.
“No. 214 on the second floor,” said the respectful man in charge of
keys and correspondence.
“This way!” said a small boy, pointing to the lift.
But old Yevgeny had never been on a lift in his life.
“My sinful old legs will carry me up,” said he--he mounted the many
stretches of broad carpeted stairway to the second floor, which is
really the third. There was a timid knock at my door, and my visitor
had arrived.
“Father Yevgeny!” I cried.
I showed him his portrait in my book, and translated aloud the
chapter written there about him. He seemed to be extremely pleased.
We considered the portraits of the other pilgrims in turn. Abraham,
who had been twenty times to Jerusalem, was of a Cossack family. The
man carrying the lantern designed for the holy fire was now dead. The
priest standing beside the dead pilgrim in the picture was now at
Troitskaya Lavra. I made Father Yevgeny a present of the volume, and he
bade me write in it in Russian, “To the hermit Yevgeny of Mount Athos.”
“How is it you come to be in Moscow and not at Mount Athos?” I asked.
“The war prevented me. I had come back to Russia to visit my native
village before I died, and whilst I was here the war broke out. I was
hastening back, but our Moscow Metropolite put his hand on my head one
Sunday after morning service and said, ‘Thou art thinking of going to
Afon--wait, do not go.’ Then war with Turkey commenced, and the way was
stopped. Good Father Philaret of the Bogoyavlensky Monastery gave me
shelter, and that is where I am living now.”
He recounted how, when the war broke out, he had a vision. He looked
up into the sky, and it was filled with little white clouds hurrying
southward. He was mistaken in thinking them clouds; he saw later that
they were in fact the hosts of the angels ranging themselves on the
side of Serbia to save her from the Austrians.
Yevgeny and I spent the whole day together. In the evening I had to
leave Moscow, and he saw me off at the station. He talked a great deal
about his visions. For instance, he had seen the Kingdom of Heaven. One
sunny afternoon in the monastery yard he fell into a trance, and in
the trance he saw what he had wanted to see all his life--a vision of
the Kingdom. “There are really four heavens,” said he. “The first is
so splendid, so full of light, that it is almost impossible to look at
it; and in the midst of the light sit the Holy Trinity. Round and round
them all the while and for ever the cherubs keep moving and they sing
oi-oi-oi-ei-ei-ei-ai-ai-ai ... and never cease for a moment. In the
second heaven I saw the apostles and the prophets. In the third heaven
were the holy _ugodniki_, and in the fourth were a great crowd of all
sorts and conditions of men and women all in white. There were many,
many of our Russians there--I was so glad, so full of joy that I went.
And then suddenly it all vanished, and I found myself in the monastery
yard and on my knees, and my hands were on the white head of an old,
old pilgrim woman. I asked her if she had seen anything, but she had
seen nothing.”
I asked Father Yevgeny about the Mount Athos heresy, and the
Name-of-Godites, as the heretics were irreverently called. I had a
faint suspicion that Yevgeny might be one of them. But he was very
robustly against them. “It all sprang from one man who was himself
illiterate,” said he. “He held that as the Three were One, therefore
Jesus and God were one and the same, and that in the beginning Jesus
made the heavens and the earth. And he got a great following among the
Russian monks. But he was altogether in the wrong, and if he had read
he would have understood that Jesus the Son of God was born in the
fulness of time, and the Name of God must therefore have priority. Ah!
now they have all confessed they were wrong, and have been pardoned.”
We walked out into the Moscow streets, and all the while the old monk
talked most energetically, and made astonishing gestures. One moment
he saw a large triangle on a poster and spat to one side as he passed.
“The symbol of the masons,” said he. “To-day the Cross is fighting
the triangle, that is one meaning of the war. Do you know, many of
the stewards of the old vodka shops were secretly masons, and it was
found that they cut out on the floor underneath the shop counters, a
cross--so that the drunkards might trample it under foot.” Yevgeny’s
large intellectual face with wizened white eyebrows, and fine eyes at
the bottom of caverns of wrinkled flesh, was full of animation, his
gap-toothed mouth blurted the long torrent of words which it could
hardly control, his long black gown from neck to ankles flapped in the
wind.
I was sorry to have to part with him again so soon. But I promised to
re-find him when I returned to Moscow. He came with me to the Kursky
station. “God meant that we should meet again,” said he. “It was a
miracle. All my life is full of miracles.” He told me the miracles of
his birth. His mother was one of the serfs. She married, but was eight
years childless. This caused her great grief, and she did not cease to
pray to God that she might bear a child. “If it be a boy, he shall be
either a soldier or a monk,” she promised God. Interesting that she
should feel that to be a soldier was also to be consecrated to God.
Yevgeny was born, and when he grew up he volunteered to be a soldier,
and went to fight the Turks. He was wounded, and as he lay on the
battlefield in great pain, and facing death, he promised his life to
God. He then rapidly recovered, and, fulfilling his promise, entered a
monastery. Since then all his life he has allowed himself to be guided
by visions and inspirations rather than by reason.
In the vague light in the train, all the passengers were quarrelling
over places, and the porters were struggling with baskets and bundles.
The old monk stood on the grey platform and embraced me very warmly,
and then I stepped up, and the third bell tinkled and the whistle
blew, and the train slowly ran out--leaving Yevgeny at the far end
of the platform and the space of unoccupied rails behind the train,
momentarily increasing.