the house,--at first together with her husband, who had been taken into
the household; and later, when he began going away for a whole year
at a time, all by herself. Under her eyes the girl grew, steadily and
rapidly; never did she cry, never did she complain of aught; only she
had constant fits of pensiveness. If Katherine called to her, asking
what the matter with her was, she would answer simply, saying that her
neck was creaking, and that she was listening to it. “There,” she would
say, turning her neck, and her fair little face, “do you hear it?” “And
what are you thinking of?” “Oh, just so. I don’t know.” During her
childhood she never had anything to do with girls of her own age, and
never did she go anywheres,--only once had she gone with her sister
to that old settlement beyond Sviyat-Oziero, where in the churchyard,
under pine trees, crosses of pine wood stick up out of the ground, and
where stands a little church of logs, roofed with blackened tiles of
wood that look like scales. That was the first time that she had been
dressed up in bast slippers and a _sarafan_ of bright coloured linen,
and that a necklace and a yellow kerchief had been bought for her.
Katherine grieved about her husband and wept; wept, too, about her
childlessness. But, having shed all her tears, she gave a vow to have
no more knowledge of her husband. When her husband would come, she
would meet him joyously, speaking with him cheerily, painstakingly
looked over his shirts, mending all that stood in need of mending;
she bustled about the oven, and was pleased when he liked anything;
but they slept apart, like strangers. And when he would go away, she
would again become wearied and quiet. More and more frequently did she
leave the house, staying at a near-by nunnery, visiting the holy old
man Rodion, who was striving for his soul in a hut within a forest
that was beyond that nunnery. She was perseveringly learning to read,
bringing saintly books from the nunnery, and would read them aloud;
not in her usual voice, but pitching it in high sing-song. She would
be sitting at a table, her eyes cast-down, holding the book with both
hands, while the girl stood near by, listening and picking a splinter
from the table, looking all about the hut, which was always in the best
of order. Drinking in the sounds of her own voice, Katherine read on of
saints, of martyrs, who had contemned the dark things of our earth for
things heavenly, desirous of crucifying their flesh with its lusts and
its passions. Anna listened attentively to the reading, as to a chant
in an unknown tongue. But as soon as Katherine would shut the book, she
would never ask her to read some more: the book was always beyond her
understanding.
In adolescence she grew not by days, but by hours. When she was about
thirteen, she became exquisitely slender, tall, and strong. She was
gentle, fair of face, blue-eyed, but the work she liked was of the
commonest, of the roughest. When summer came on, when Katherine’s
husband returned, when the entire village went to the mowing, Anna,
too, went with her people and worked like a grown-up. Only, there
is not a great deal of summer work in that region. And once more the
sisters would be soon left alone, once more they would return to their
placid existence; and, once more, having done for the day with the live
stock, with the oven, Anna would be sitting at her sewing, or the loom,
the while Katherine read aloud: of seas, of deserts, of the city of
Rome, of Byzantium, of the miracles and deeds of the first Christians.
In the black hut in the forest sounded then words that enchanted the
ear: “In the land of Cappadocia, in the reign of the devout Byzantian
emperor, Leo the Great ... In the days of the patriarchship of the
most holy Joachhim of Alexandria, in Æthiopia, which is most distant
from us....” Thus did Anna come to know of the virgins and youths,
torn to pieces by wild beasts at pagan circuses; of the heavenly
beauty of Barbara, beheaded by her cruel, ferocious, unnatural parent;
of the relics of saints, guarded by angels on the Mount of Sinai; of
the warrior Eustacius, converted to the true God by the call of the
Crucified Himself, who burst out like a refulgent sun between the horns
of a deer that he, Eustacius, had been pursuing in the chase; of the
labours of Sabbas the Sainted, that dwelt in the Vale of Fires; and of
many, many others, who had spent their bitter days nigh desert springs,
in crypts, and in mountain cenobies.... During her adolescence she
had beheld herself in a dream, clad in a long linen shift and with a
crown of iron on her head. And Katherine had told her: “That stands for
dying, sister,--for an early death.”
And when she was going on fifteen, she became altogether maidenly,
and folks marvelled at her loveliness; the aureately-white colour of
her face was just the least bit tinged with a delicate blush; her
eyebrows were bushy, of a light flaxen colour, her eyes blue; she was
light, well-made,--unless it were that she was disproportionately
tall, slender, and long of arm; quietly and beautifully did she raise
her lashes. The winter that year was a rigorous one. The forests,
the lakes, were snowed under; the openings in the ice were thickly
frozen over; the frosty wind burned; and of dawns, two mirror-like,
rainbow-tinged suns were flashing at the same time. Before the
Christmas holidays Katherine ate bread-and-_kvass_ pudding, and dried
oatmeal; but Anna would nourish herself only with bread: “I want to
fast till I get another prophetic dream,” she had told her sister.
And toward the New Year again did she have a dream: she saw an early,
frosty morning; the blinding, icy sun seemed to have just rolled out
from beyond the snow-drifts, and a cutting wind was making her catch
her breath; she was flying upon skiis against the wind, toward the sun,
over the white plains, in pursuit of some wondrous ermine,--but she
suddenly tumbled off into some abyss, and was blinded, stiffed in the
cloud of snow dust swirling up at the edge of the precipice from under
the skiis.
She could understand nothing of this dream; but Anna, during all New
Year’s day, did not once look into her sister’s face. The priests were
going through the village; when they came to see the Skuratovs in
their turn, she hid behind the curtains of the sleeping place above
the big oven. During that winter, not having yet become settled in her
intentions, she was frequently dreamy, and Katherine would say to her:
“I have long been calling you, to go to Father Rodion,--he would ease
you of all your worries!”
She read to her that winter of Alexis, the Man of God; and of John, who
dwelt in a hut of branches,--both had died in poverty at the gates of
their well-born parents; she read of Simeon Stylites, who had rotted
alive while standing upon a pillar of stone. Anna asked her: “But why
doesn’t Father Rodion stand on a pillar?” And she answered, that the
tasks of holy people are varied, that our Russian martyrs had sought
salvation, for the most part, in the caverns of Kiev,--and, later on,
within impassable forests; or else had attained the Kingdom of Heaven
as naked, useless innocents. During that winter did Anna find out
about the Russian saints as well,--her spiritual forefathers: about
Matthew the Clear-Seeing, upon whom was bestowed the gift of seeing
only the dark and base things of this world, of penetrating into the
innermost hidden recesses of filth in the hearts of men, of beholding
clairvoyantly the visages of underground devils and of hearing their
impious counsellings. She heard of Mark the Grave Digger, who had
dedicated himself to the burial of the dead, and who through his
incessant proximity to Death had gained such sway over it that it
trembled at the sound of his voice; she heard of Isaac the Anchorite,
who had clad his body in the undressed hide of a goat which had grown
to his skin forever, and who gave himself up to mad dances with evil
spirits, that enticed him of nights into skipping and reeling to their
noisy calls, reeds, tympani and dulcimers.... “From him, from Isaac,
started all these innocents,” Katherine had told her. “And how many
there were of them afterward, none can reckon up! Father Rodion said
thus: ‘There have been none of them in any other land save ours; only
to us did the Lord send them as a visitation for our great sins,
and through His great grace.’” And she added what she had heard in
the nunnery,--the grievous tale of how Russia had retreated out of
Kiev into impassable forests and morasses, into its little towns of
bast, under the cruel rule of the princes of Muscovy; what Russia had
endured from seditions, from internicine wars, from ferocious Tartar
hordes and from other chastisements of God: from plague and famine,
from fire and heavenly portents. There was then, said she, such a vast
multitude of the folks of God, suffering and acting the innocent for
the sake of Christ, that the holy songs were not to be heard for their
squealing and clamouring in the churches. And a considerable number
among them, said she, were canonized among the heavenly throng. There
was Simon, from the forests of the Volga regions, who wandered over
desert waste lands, hiding himself from the sight of man, clad only
in a torn shift, and afterward, dwelling in a city, he was castigated
every day by its citizens for his uselessness, and expired from the
wounds inflicted during such castigations. There was Procopius, who
took upon himself ceaseless tortures in the town of Viatka, for that he
would, in the night-time, clamber up into belfries and ring the bells
in quick alarum, as though there were a fiery conflagration. There is
a Procopius that was born in the region of Ziryan, amongst savages,
amongst hunters after beasts; all his life did he go about with three
coal-rakes in his hands; he did adore the desert places, the mournful
wooded banks of the Sukhona, where, perched upon a little bowlder, he
did with tears pray for those that sailed upon it. There was Jacob the
Beatified, who sailed in an oaken log, hollowed out into a coffin, upon
an ice block, down the river Msta to the benighted dwellers of that
poor region; there is John the Hairy, from near Rostov-the-Greater,
whose hair was so unruly that it threw into a panic all whosoever might
behold it; there was John of Vologda, called Big Cap, small of stature,
wrinkled of face, all hung over with crosses,--until his very death he
never took off his head covering, that was like to a pot of cast-iron;
there was Basil, that went about naked, who wore for apparel, in winter
cold and summer heat, only iron chains and a little handkerchief that
he bore in his hand.... “Now, sister,” Katherine had said, “they are
standing before the face of the Lord, rejoicing among the throng of His
Saints; as for their imperishable relics, they repose within shrines
of cypress and of silver, in the holiest of cathedrals, by the side of
kings and prelates!”
“But why doesn’t Father Rodion be an innocent?” again asked Anna.
And Katherine answered that he had followed in the steps of those
who imitated not Isaac, but Sergius of Radonezh; he had followed in
the steps of the men who had founded monasteries in forests. Father
Rodion, said she, had at first sought salvation in an ancient and famed
desert place, located in the same regions where, in the midst of a
dreary forest, in the hollow trunk of an oak, three centuries old, a
great saint had once dwelt. There had Father Rodion served a strict
novitiate and taken the habit; had merited through the tears of his
repentance, and through his mercilessness toward the flesh, a sight
of the countenance of the Queen of Heaven Herself; he had fulfilled
his vow of seven years’ seclusion and seven years’ silence, but he was
not satisfied with that,--he left the monastery, and had come,--it was
now many, many years ago,--into these forests. He had put on shoes of
bast, a white robe of sack-cloth, a black stole with an eight-pointed
cross upon it, with a depiction of the skull and bones of Adam; he
subsists only upon water and uncooked swamp-grass; he has barred the
little window of his cabin with a holy icon; he sleeps in a coffin,
under an ever-lit holy lamp, and at the hour of every midnight he is
incessantly beset by howling beasts, by throngs of ravening dead men,
and by devils....
On her fifteenth birthday, at that very age when a maid ought to become
a bride, Anna forsook the world forever.
Spring that year came early and was a warm one. The berries ripened
in the woods beyond number; the grasses were waist-high, and at the
beginning of the Fast of St. Peter[4] the entire village went out to
mow them. Anna worked with a will; became sunburned among the grasses
and the flowers; the blush flamed darker upon her face; the kerchief,
pushed lower over the forehead, hid her warm glance. But once, in the
meadow, a great glistening snake with an emerald head wound itself
around her bare foot. Seizing the snake with her slim and long hand,
tearing away its icy and slippery plait, Anna cast it far from her
without even lifting her face. But she was very much scared,--she had
become whiter than linen. And Katherine said to her: “This, sister, is
the third sign for thee: dread the Arch-Tempter, a dangerous time is
coming for thee!” And it may have been the fright, or it might have
been these words,--but for a week after that the deathly pallor did not
depart from Anna’s face. And just before St. Peter’s Day, suddenly and
unexpectedly, she begged to go to the nunnery to hear the all-night
mass,--and did go, and did spend the night there, and in the morning
was found worthy of staying in the crowd of humble folk near the
threshold of the recluse. And a great grace did he show to her: out
of all the crowd did he remark her and did beckon her to him. And she
came out of his cabin with her head bent low, covering half her face
with her kerchief, having pushed it down over the fire of her flaming
cheeks, and in the confusion of her emotions did not see the ground
beneath her. And a chosen vessel, a sacrifice to God, had he called
her; had lit two little wax tapers, and, taking one himself and giving
the other to her, had stood a long while in prayer before an image. And
afterwards he had ordered her to kiss that image,--and had given her
his blessing to enter the nunnery for a novitiate within a short while.
“My joy,--thou simple sacrifice!” he had said to her. “Be thou a bride
not of this earth but of heaven! I know, full well, thy sister hath
prepared thee. I shall concern myself with this also, sinner that I am.”
[4] In midsummer. _Trans._
In the nunnery, in the monastic atmosphere, abandoning the world and
her own will for the sake of her spiritual godfather, Anna, who has
been named Aglaia upon taking the veil, passed three and thirty months.
And when the thirty-third month was almost run, she did depart this
life.
How she had lived there, how she had sought her salvation, is known to
none, for the remoteness of time. But still some things have remained
in the memory of the people. Once upon a time, some peasant pilgrim
women, from various and distant places, were bound for that wooded
region where Anna had been born. Near a small river which they had
to cross, they met the usual wanderer over holy places, in appearance
ill-favoured, tattered,--even, to put it plainly, queer, for the reason
that his eyes, underneath a derby that had once been high in the world,
were bandaged with a kerchief. The women began questioning him about
the ways, the roads to the nunnery; about Father Rodion himself, and
about Anna. He, in answering them, spoke a bit about himself at first:
“I, now, little sisters, don’t know such a terrible lot, myself;
however, I can chat a bit with you, for I am returning from those very
parts. You,” he said, “must feel uncanny in my company, and I don’t
wonder at it: I’m not a sweet sight to many; whoever I meet, whether he
be afoot or on horseback, seeing a little old pilgrim going through a
forest, hobbling along all by his lonesome with a white kerchief over
his eyes, and, to boot, chanting psalms to God,--of course, he’s taken
aback. But then, for my sins, far too greedy and quick are my eyes; my
sight is so rare and penetrating, that I can see even at night, like
a cat; and being in general sharp-sighted beyond measure, because I
don’t travel with other folk but keep to myself,--well, for that reason
have I resolved to curb a little my corporeal sight....” Then he began
telling them how great a distance, by his reckoning, the pilgrim women
had left to go; toward what regions they should direct their way; where
they might have lodgings and rest; and what sort of a place the nunnery
was.
“First,” said he, “will come the settlement near Sviyat-Oziero; then
that very village where Anna was born; and then you’ll see another
lake, belonging to the convent, which lake, though shallow, is of a
decent size, and you’ll have to sail over this lake in a boat. And, as
soon as you get out of the boat, right there is the convent itself, so
near you might almost reach it with your hand. Of course, there’s no
end of woods on the other shore as well, and through the trees you can
see, as always, the walls of the convents, the domes of chapels, the
cells, the hostels....”
Then, for a long while, he related to them the life of Rodion, the
childhood and adolescence of Anna, and, in the end, he told them of her
stay in the nunnery:
“Oh, her stay was not a long one,” said he. “It is a pity you say,
with such beauty and youth? Of course, to such fools as we, it would
be a piteous thing. But it’s plain to be seen Father Rodion knew well
what he was about. For he was that way with everybody,--kindly, and
meek, and gladsome, yet set on having his way, unto mercilessness;
but he was especially so with Aglaia. I, my little ones, have been at
the spot where she is resting.... A long little grave, beautiful, all
grown over with grass, all green.... And I won’t hide anything,--I
won’t hide that it was there, at her grave, that I thought of tying
up my eyes; it was Aglaia’s example that gave me the idea; for she, I
must tell you, during all her stay in the nunnery, did not for a single
hour raise her eyes; even as she had pushed the veil down over them,
so did it remain, and she was so sparing of her speech, so evasive,
that even Father Rodion himself wondered at her. And yet, come to think
of it, it was no easy matter for her to bear her task--to bid eternal
farewell to the world, to the face of mankind! And her work in the
nunnery was the very hardest that she could find, while her nights she
spent standing in prayer. But then, how Father Rodion had come to love
her! He marked her out from all the rest, let her come every day into
his little cabin; held long converse with her about the future fame of
the nunnery; even revealed his visions to her,--with a strict order of
silence. Well, and so she burned out, like a candle, in the briefest
time.... Again do you sigh, being sorry? I do agree with you, it is a
sad thing! But I will tell you something far greater; for her great
humility, for her disregard of this world, for her silence and for her
toiling beyond her strength, he wrought a thing unheard of: toward the
end of the third year of her striving, he invested her with the habit,
and afterward, after prayer and holy meditation, he did summon her to
him on a certain fearsome hour and commanded her to her end. Yes, that
is just the way he spoke to her: ‘My joy, thy time has come! Remain
thou in my memory just as glorious as thou now art, standing before
me in this hour; depart to God!’ And what think ye? Within four and
twenty hours she did forsake this life. She lay down, burning as with
a fire,--and passed out. True, he did console her,--he confided to her
before her end that by reason of her not having been able, during the
first days of her novitiate, to keep just a few things of his secret
discourses, only her lips would be rotted. He offered up silver coins
for her funeral, and coppers to be given out at her burial; a bundle
of candles for a forty days’ mass for her; a yellow candle worth a
whole rouble for her coffin; and the coffin itself,--rounded out, of
oak, hollowed out of one piece. And he blessed her as she was laid
out, slender and just a trifle too tall, within that coffin, with her
hair all let out, in two shroud-shifts. She was in an under-cassock
of white, with a black selvage all around, and in a black mantle with
white crosses on top of it; upon her little head they put a green
little cap of velvet, broidered with gold; on top of the cap a small
skull cap; and after that they tied a blue shawl with tassels upon her
head, and then they put a leathern rosary into her dear hands.... Oh,
I can’t tell how fine they arrayed her. And yet, little ones, there
is a spiteful rumour which is of the devil, that she did not want to
die,--oh, how she didn’t want to!
“Departing in such youth and in such beauty, she took her farewell of
everybody, so they say, with tears, saying to all, in a loud voice,
‘Forgive me!’ And at the very last she closed her eyes and said
distinctly: ‘And against thee, Mother-Earth, have I sinned in body
and soul,--wilt thou forgive me?’ And those words are fearful words:
touching their foreheads to the earth, men uttered them in the prayer
for repentance throughout ancient Russia, before Whitsuntide, before
the heathen day of the water nixies.”
_1916._
THE GRAMMAR OF LOVE
A certain Ivlev was once travelling, in the beginning of June, to a
distant region of his provence.
The _tarantass_, with its dusty top all awry, had been given him by
his brother-in-law, at whose estate he was passing the summer. The
_troika_[5] of small but well-broken horses, with thick matted manes,
he had hired in the village, from a wealthy _moujik_. They were driven
by a son of that _moujik_, a lad of eighteen,--a plodding fellow, a
good husbandman. He was all the time cogitating about something with
displeasure, seemed to be offended at something, could not take a
joke. And, having become convinced that there was no possibility of
getting into talk with him, Ivlev yielded to that peaceful and aimless
observation, which chimes in so well with the beat of hoofs and the
jangling of little bells.
[5] Three horses, harnessed abreast. _Trans._
The drive was very pleasant at first: the day was warm, grayish: the
road a much travelled one; the meadowlands were full of flowers and
sky-larks; from the grain-fields, from the dove-coloured fields of
rye, spreading onward as far as the eye could see, a pleasant little
breeze was blowing, bearing flower pollen over slanting masses of the
grain and rye, at times making this pollen dust swirl like smoke,--and
the distance even seemed misty from it. The lad, in a new cap and a
clumsy jacket made of lustrine, was sitting upright; the fact that the
horses were completely entrusted to him, and that he was wearing his
best clothes, made him especially serious. As for the horses, they
coughed and ran along without hurrying; the off-horse at times made
the whiffle-tree scrape against the wheel, at others strained in his
harness, and one horse-shoe was constantly flashing under him with its
white steel.
“Will we stop at the count’s?” asked the lad, without turning around,
when a village came into view ahead of them, enclosing the horizon with
its hedges and garden.
“What for?” said Ivlev.
The lad was silent for a time, and having knocked off with a whip a
large gadfly that had stuck to a horse, answered sombrely:
“Why, to drink tea....”
“It isn’t tea you’ve got on your mind,” said Ivlev, “you’re always
trying to save the horses.”
“It isn’t travelling that worries a horse,--it’s food,” answered the
lad with conviction.