Father Vassily obediently moved to the table, and the warm glow of the

lamp fell upon his face, but failed to evoke a responsive warmth. Yet

his face was calm and was free from fear, and this sufficed her.

Bringing her lips close to his ear, she whispered:

“Priest, do you hear me, priest? Do you remember Vassya—that other

Vassya?”

“No.”

“Ah!” joyously exclaimed the Popadya. “You don’t? I don’t either. Are

you scared, priest? Are you? Scared?”

“No.”

“Then why do you groan when you sleep? Why do you groan?”

“Just so. I suppose I am sick.”

The Popadya laughed angrily.

“You? Sick? You—sick?” with her finger she prodded his bony, but broad

and solid chest. “Why do you lie?”

Father Vassily was silent. The Popadya looked wrathfully into his cold

face, with a beard that had long known no contact with the trimming

shear and protruded from his sunken cheeks in transparent clumps, and

she shrugged her shoulders with loathing.

“Ugh! What a fright you have become! Hateful, mean, clammy like a frog.

Ugh! Am I to blame that he was born like that? Tell me. What are you

thinking about? Why are you forever thinking, thinking, thinking?”

Father Vassily maintained silence, and with an attentive, irritating

gaze studied the bloodless and distorted features of his wife. And when

the last sounds of her incoherent speech died away, gruesome, unbroken

stillness gripped her head and breast as though with iron clamps and

seemed to squeeze from her occasional hurried and unexpected gasps:

“And I know ... I know ... I know, priest....”

“What do you know?”

“I know what are you thinking about.” The Popadya paused and shrunk

from her husband in terror. “You—don’t believe ... in God. That’s

what!”

And having uttered this she realized how dreadful was what she had

said, and a pitiful pleading smile parted her lips that were swollen

and scarred with biting, burnt with liquor and red as blood. And she

looked up gladly, when the priest, with blanching cheeks, sharply and

didactically replied:

“That is not true. I believe in God. Think before you speak.”

And silence once more, stillness once more, but now there was in this

silence something soothing, something that seemed to envelop her like a

wave of warm water. And lowering her eyes, she shyly pleaded:

“May I have a little drink, Vassya? It will help me to go to sleep,

it’s getting late,” and she poured out a quarter of a glassful of

liquor, adding irresolutely more and more to it, and draining the glass

to the bottom with little, continuous gulps, with which women drink

liquor. And the glow of warmth returned to her breast, she now longed

for gaiety, noise, lights and for the sound of loud, human voices.

“Do you know what we’ll do, Vassya? Let’s play cards, let’s play

‘Fools’[7]. Call Nastya. That will be nice. I love to play ‘Fools’.

Call her, Vassya, dear. I’ll give you a kiss for it.”

“It is late. She is sleeping.”

The Popadya stamped the floor with her foot. “Wake her. Go!”

Nastya came in, slender and tall like her father, with large clumsy

hands, that had grown coarse with toil. Shivering with the cold, she

had wrapped a short shawl about her shoulders and was counting the

greasy deck of cards without emitting a sound.

Then silently they sat down to a boisterously funny card game—amid the

chaos of overturned furniture, in the dead of night, when all the world

had long sought the oblivion of sleep—men, and beasts and fields. The

Popadya joked and laughed and pilfered trumps out of the deck, and it

seemed to her that the whole world was laughing and jesting, but the

moment the last sound of her words died in the air, the same

threatening and unbroken stillness closed over her, stifling her. And

it was terrible to look upon the two pairs of mute and scrawny arms

that moved slowly and silently over the table, as though these arms

alone were alive and the people who owned them did not exist. Then

shivering, as though with a crazedly drunken expectation of something

supernatural, she looked up above the table—two cold—pallid—sullen

faces loomed desolately in the darkness and swayed back and forth in a

queer and wordless whirl—two cold, two sullen faces. Mumbling

something, the Popadya gulped down another glassful of liquor, and once

more the scrawny hands moved noiselessly, and the stillness began to

hum, and someone else, a fourth one made his appearance behind the

table. Someone’s rapaciously curved fingers were shuffling the cards,

then they shifted to her body, running over her knees like spiders,

crawling up towards her throat.

“Who’s here?” she cried out leaping to her feet and surprised to find

the others standing up and watching her with terrified glances. Yes

there were only two of them: her husband and Nastya.

“Calm yourself, Nastya. We’re here. There’s no one else here.”

“And he?”

“He is sleeping.”

The Popadya sat down and for a moment everything stopped rocking and

slipped back into place. And Father Vassily’s face looked kind.

“Vassya! And what will happen to us when he starts to walk?”

It was little Nastya who replied:

“I was giving him his supper to-night and he was moving his legs.”

“It’s not so,” said the priest, but his words sounded dead and distant,

and all at once everything started to circle in a frenzied whirl,

lights and gloom began to dance, and eyeless spectres nodded to her

from every side. They rocked to and fro, blindly they crept upon her,

tapping her with curved fingers, tearing her garments, strangling her

by the throat, plucking her hair and dragging her somewhere away. But

she clutched the floor with broken finger nails and screamed out loud.

The Popadya was beating her head against the floor, striving

impetuously to flee somewhere and tearing her clothes. And so powerful

was she in the raging frenzy which seized her that Father Vassily and

Nastya could not handle her unaided, and they were forced to summon the

cook and a laborer. It required the combined efforts of all four to

overpower her; then they tied her arms and legs with towels and laid

her on the bed, and Father Vassily remained with her alone. He stood

motionless by the bedside and watched the convulsive writhings and

twitchings of her body and the tears that were flowing from beneath the

tightly shut eyelids. In a voice that was hoarse with screaming she

pleaded:

“Help! Help!”

Wildly piteous and terrible was this desolate cry for help, and there

was no response. Darkness, dull and dispassionate, enveloped it like a

shroud, and in this garment of the dead the cry was dead. The

overturned stools were kicking up their legs absurdly, and their

bottoms blushed with shame. The ancient chest of drawers stood awry and

distracted, and the night was silent. And ever fainter, ever more

pitiful sounded this lonely cry for help:

“Help! I suffer! Help! Vassya, my darling Vassya....”

Father Vassily never stirred from the spot, but with a cool and oddly

calm gesture, he raised up his hands and clasped his head even as his

wife had done a half hour before, and as calmly and deliberately he

brought them down again, and between his fingers trembled threads of

black and greying hair.

V.

Among people, mid their affairs and conversations, Father Vassily was

so evidently a man apart, so unfathomably alien to all, that he did not

seem human at all, but a moving cerement. He did whatever others did,

he talked, he worked, he ate and drank, but it seemed at times as

though he merely imitated others, while he personally lived in a

different world that was inaccessible to any. And all who saw him asked

themselves: what is this man thinking about? so manifest on his every

movement was the impress of deep thought. It was seen in his ponderous

gait, in the deliberateness of his halting speech, when between two

spoken words yawned black chasms of hidden and distant thought; it hung

like a heavy film over his eyes, and nebulous was his distant gaze that

faintly glowed beneath his shaggy overhanging eyebrows. Sometimes it

was necessary to speak to him twice before he heard and responded. And

sometimes he neglected to greet others, and because of this some

accounted him haughty. Thus once he failed to greet Ivan Porfyritch.

The churchwarden was astounded for a moment, then hurried back and

overtook the priest who was walking slowly.

“You’ve grown proud, Father! Won’t even greet a man!” he said

mockingly. Father Vassily looked up at him in surprise, blushed a

little and apologized:

“Pardon me, Ivan Porfyritch, I did not notice you.” The churchwarden

attempted to look down upon him, measuring him with a look of censure,

but for the first time he realized that the priest was the taller of

the two, although the churchwarden was reputed to be the tallest man in

the parish. And the churchwarden found something agreeable in this

discovery, for unexpectedly to himself he invited the priest to call on

him:

“Come and see me some day, Father.”

And several times he glanced back, in order to size up the receding

figure of the priest. Even Father Vassily was pleased, but only for a

moment. He had hardly taken two steps, when the burden of persistent

thought, heavy and hard like a millstone, succeeded in stifling the

memory of the churchwarden’s kindly words and crushed the quiet and

bashful smile that was on its way to his lips. And he lapsed again into

thought—thinking of God and of people and of the mysterious fate of

human life.

And it happened during confession; fettered by his immovable thoughts

Father Vassily was coldly putting the customary queries to some old

woman, when he was suddenly struck by an odd thing which he had never

noticed before: there he stood calmly prying into the innermost secret

thoughts and feelings of another, and that other looked up to him with

awe and told him the truth—that truth which it is not given to anyone

else to know. And the wrinkled countenance of the old woman assumed a

peculiar expression, it became brightly radiant, as though the darkness

of night reigned all around, but the light of day was falling on that

face alone. And suddenly he interrupted her and asked:

“Art thou telling the truth, woman?”

But what the old woman answered he heard not. The mist had departed

from before his face, with flushing eyes—as though a bandage had fallen

from them—he was gazing in amazement upon the face of the woman, and it

seemed to him to bear a peculiar expression: clearly outlined upon it

was some mysterious truth of God and of life. On the old woman’s head,

beneath an openwork kerchief, Father Vassily noticed a parting line, a

narrow grey strip of skin running through hair that was carefully

combed on either side of it. And this parting line, this absurd care

for an ugly, aged head that nobody else had any use for, was likewise a

truth: the sorrowful truth of the ever lonely, ever sorrowful human

existence. And it was then, for the first time in his life of forty

years, that Father Vassily became aware with his eyes and with his

hearing and with every one of his senses that beside him there were

other creatures on earth—creatures that were like him, having their own

lives, their own sorrows, their own fates.

“And hast thou children?” hurriedly he inquired, interrupting the old

woman again.

“They’re all dead, Father!”

“All dead?” inquired the priest in surprise.

“All dead,” she repeated and her eyes became bloodshot.

“And how dost thou live?” inquired Father Vassily in amazement.

“How should I live?” cried the woman. “I live by alms.”

Stretching out his neck, Father Vassily from the height of his immense

stature riveted his gaze upon the old woman but did not utter a sound.

And his long, scraggy face, fringed by his disheveled hair, seemed so

strange and terrible to the woman that she was chilled to the tips of

the fingers which she was holding clasped before her breast.

“Go now,” sounded a stern voice above her.

Strange days commenced now for Father Vassily, and something unwonted

was going on in his mind; hitherto only this had been; there had

existed a tiny earth whereon lived only the enormous figure of Father

Vassily. Other people did not seem to exist. But now the earth had

grown, had become unfathomably big, peopled all over with creatures

like Father Vassily. There was a multitude of them, each living an

individual existence, suffering individual sufferings, hoping and

doubting individually, and among them Father Vassily felt like a lonely

tree in a field about which suddenly an immense and trackless forest

had grown. Gone was the solitude; and with it the sun and the bright

desert distances, and the gloom of the night had grown in intensity.

All the people gave him truth. When he did not hear their truthful

utterances, he saw their homes and their faces: and upon homes and

faces was engraved the inexorable truth of life. He sensed this truth,

but he was unable to grasp and name it and he eagerly sought new faces

and new words. Few came to confession during the fast days of Advent,

but he kept them in the confessional for hours at a time, examining

each one searchingly, insistently, stealing himself into the most

intimate nooks of the soul where man himself looks in but rarely and

with awe. He did not know what he was searching for and he mercilessly

plowed up everything—that the soul rests on and lives by. In his

questions he was pitiless and shameless, and each thought which he

conceived was a stranger to fear. But it did not take him long to

realize that all these people who were telling him the whole truth, as

though he were God, were themselves ignorant of the truth of life. Back

of their myriads of trifling, severed, hostile truths he dimly saw the

shadowy outlines of the one great and all-solving truth. Everyone was

conscious of it, everyone longed for it, yet none could define it with

a human word—that overwhelming truth of God and of people, and of the

mysterious fates of human life.

And Father Vassily himself began to sense it, and he sensed it now a

despair and frenzied fear, now as pity, wrath and hope. And as

heretofore, he was stern and cold to look upon, while his, mind and his

heart were already melting in the fire of unknown truth and a new life

was entering his old body.

On the Tuesday of the week preceding Christmas, Father Vassily had

returned from the church rather late. In the dark cold vestibule

someone’s hand arrested him and a hoarse voice whispered:

“Vassily, don’t go inside.”

By the note of terror in her voice he recognized his wife and stopped.

“I’ve been waiting an hour for you, I’m all frozen,” and her teeth

chattered with the cold.

“What has happened? Come.”

“No. No. Listen, Nastya! I came in and found her standing before the

mirror, making faces just like him, waving her hands like him.”

“Come.”

By main force he dragged the resisting Popadya into the living room,

and there, looking around in fear, she told him more. While on her way

into the living room to water the plants she had found Nastya, standing

still before the mirror, and in the mirror she had seen the reflection

of her face, not as it always looked, but oddly idiotic, with a

savagely contorted mouth and squinting eyes. Then, still in silence,

Nastya raised up her hands, and curving her fingers convulsively like

the idiot, she stretched them out towards her own reflection in the

mirror—and everything was so still, and all this was so terrible and

unreal that the Popadya screamed and dropped her water pot. And Nastya

ran away. And row she did not know whether it had really happened or

her own imagination had been playing a trick on her.

“Call Nastya and step out!” ordered the priest.

Nastya came and stopped on the threshold. Her face was long and scraggy

like her father’s, and when she was talking she copied his posture: her

neck extended, inclined a little to one side, looking sullenly askance

from beneath her eyebrows. And she held her hands behind her back just

as he was in the habit of doing.

“Nastya, why do you do these things?” firmly, but calmly inquired

Father Vassily.

“What things?”

“Mother saw you near the mirror. Why did you do that? He is sick.”

“No, he is not sick, he pulls my hair.”

“Why do you imitate him? Do you like a face like his?”

Nastya stood sullenly with downcast eyes.

“I don’t know,” she answered. And then with a queer look of candor she

looked into her father’s eyes and resolutely added: “Yes, I like it.”

Father Vassily looked at her searchingly but did not say a word.

“Don’t you like it?” semi-affirmatively inquired Nastya.

“No.”

“Then why do you keep thinking about him? I would kill him if I were

you.”

And it seemed to Father Vassily that even then she was making a face

like the idiot: something dull and brutish flitted over her cheeks and

drew her eyes together.

“Go!” he sternly commanded. But Nastya did not move and with the same

queerly candid expression she kept on gazing straight into her father’s

eyes. And her face no longer resembled the repulsive mask of the idiot.

“But you never think of me,” she observed simply, as though expressing

an abstract truth.

And then, in the gathering gloom of the wintry dusk, there occurred

between these two—who were so like, yet so unlike one another—a brief

and curious dialog:

“You are my daughter. Why did I know nothing about it? Do you know?”

“No.”

“Come and kiss me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Don’t you love me?”

“No, I love nobody.”

“Even as I,” and the priest’s nostrils extended with repressed

laughter.

“Don’t you love anybody either? And how about mama? She drinks so much.

I’d kill her too.”

“And me?”

“No, not you. You talk to me at least. I feel sorry for you sometimes.

It must be very hard, don’t you know, when your son is a silly. He is

terribly mean.”

“You don’t begin to know how mean he is. He eats cockroaches alive. I

gave him a dozen and he ate them all up.”

Without moving away from the door she sat down on the corner of a

chair, cautiously, like a scullery maid, folded her hands on her knees

and waited.

“It’s a weary life, Nastya,” pensively said the priest.

Unhurriedly and importantly she agreed with him:

“It certainly is.”

“And do you pray to God?”

“Of course I do. Only at night, in the morning there is too much work,

I have no time. I must sweep, make up beds, put things in order, wash

the dishes, get tea for Vasska[8], serve it to him, you know yourself

how much work that is.”

“Just like a servant maid,” said Father Vassily indefinitely.

“What did you say?” said Nastya uncomprehendingly.

Father Vassily bowed low his head and maintained silence. Immense and

black he loomed against the dull white background of the window, and

his words seemed to Nastya round and shiny like glass beads. She waited

long, but her father was silent and she called out timidly:

“Papa!”

Without raising his head Father Vassily commandingly waived his hand,

once, then the second time. Nastya sighed and rose, but hardly had she

turned in the doorway when something rustled behind her and two

powerful, sinewy arms raised her up in the air and a mocking voice

whispered in her very ear:

“Put your arms around my neck. I’ll carry you.”

“Why? I am big.”

“No matter. Hold fast.”

It was hard work breathing in the embrace of two arms that were holding

her like hoops of iron, and she had to duck her head in the doorway in

order not to knock against the transom; she did not know whether she

was pleased or merely surprised. And she did not know whether she

merely imagined it or her father had really whispered into her ear:

“You must be sorry for mama.”

But after she had said her prayers and was getting ready for bed,

Nastya sat for a long while on her bed, lost in musing. Her slim little

back with the pointed shoulder blades and the distinctly marked

vertebrae was almost humped; the soiled nightshirt had slipped from the

angular shoulder; folding her hands about her knees and rocking back

and forth, she resembled a ruffled bird that was overtaken in the field

by the frost. She was staring straight ahead with unblinking eyes that

were plain and enigmatic like the eyes of a beast. And with pensive

obstinacy she whispered:

“And still I’d kill her.”

Late at night, when everyone was asleep, Father Vassily silently stole

into the room, and his face was cold and austere. Without casting a

glance at Nastya, he set the lamp down on the table and bent over the

calmly sleeping idiot. He was lying on his back, his misshapen chest

stretched out, his arms spread out; his little shriveled head had

fallen back, and its receding chin gleamed white. As he lay sleeping,

under the pale reflected light which was falling upon him from the

ceiling, his face, with the closed eyelids hiding his witless eyes, did

not seem as horrible as in the daytime. It seemed wearied, like the

face of an actor exhausted after playing a difficult part, and around

his tightly shut enormous mouth lay the shadow of stern grief. It was

as though there were in him two souls, and while one was sleeping, the

other was wakeful—all-knowing and sorrowful.

Father Vassily straightened up slowly, and maintaining an austere and

stolid expression, walked out and proceeded to his room without casting

a glance at Nastya. He was walking slowly and calmly, with the

ponderous and lifeless stride of profound meditation, and the darkness

scattered before him, hiding behind him in deep shadows and cunningly

pursuing him at his heels. His face was shining brightly in the light

of the lamp and his eyes were gazing fixedly into the distance, far

ahead, into the very depths of fathomless space, while his feet slowly

and clumsily pursued their automatic march.

It was late at night and the second cocks had crowed.

VI.

Lent had arrived. The muffled church-bell commenced its monotonous

tinkle, but its wan, melancholy, modest sounds of summons could not

dispel the wintry stillness which was lying over snow-covered fields.

Timidly they leaped from the belfry into the misty air below, and sank

and died, and for a long time nobody came to the little church in

response to its appeal—faint at first, but persistent and growing more

imperious every day.

Towards the end of the first week of Lent two old women came to

church—hoary they were, hazy and deaf like the very air of the dying

winter, and for a long time they mumbled with toothless mouths,

repeating, forever over and over repeating their dull, uncouth plaints

which had no beginning and knew no end. Their very words and tears

seemed to have grown aged in service and ready for rest. They had

received absolution, but they failed to realize it, and were still

praying for something, deaf and hazy like fragments of a vapid dream.

But in their wake came a throng of people, and many youthful, fervid

tears, many youthful words, pointed and gleaming, cut their way into

Father Vassily’s heart.

When Semen Mossyagin, a peasant, had thrice bowed to the ground, and

cautiously advanced towards the priest, the latter gazed upon him

sharply and fixedly, but the pose which he maintained did not seem to

befit the occasion.

With his neck extended, his hands folded across his chest, he was

tugging at the end of his beard with the fingers of one hand. Mossyagin

walked up to the priest and was astounded: the priest was watching him

and smiling softly with nostrils distended like a horse.

“I have been waiting for thee for a long time,” said the priest with a

snicker. “Why hast thou come, Mossyagin?”

“For confession,” quickly and eagerly replied Mossyagin and with a

friendly grin exposed his white teeth—they were white and even like a

string of pearls.

“Wilt thou feel better after confession?” continued the priest,

smiling, as it seemed to the peasant, in a merry and friendly fashion.

“Of course I will.”

“And is it true that thou hast sold thy horse and the last sheep and

mortgaged thy wagon?”

Mossyagin looked at the priest seriously and with a show of annoyance:

the priest’s face was stolid, his eyes were downcast. Neither broke the

silence. Father Vassily turned slowly towards the lectern and

commanded:

“Tell thy sins.”

Mossyagin coughed, assumed a devotional expression, and cautiously

inclining his head and his chest towards the priest began to speak in a

loud whisper. And while he spoke, the priest’s face became more and

more forbidding and solemn, as though it had turned to stone under the

hail of the peasant’s painful and constraining words. His breath came

fast and heavy as though choking in that senseless, dull and savage

something which was called the life of Semen Mossyagin and which seemed

to grip him as though in the black coils of some mysterious serpent. It

was as though the stern law of causality had no dominion over this

humble but phantastic existence: so unexpectedly, with such clownish

absurdity there were linked in it trivial transgressions and unmeasured

suffering, a mighty, an elemental will to a mighty elemental

creativeness and a monstrously vegetating existence somewhere in

No-man’s land between life and death. Endowed with a fine mind that

slightly inclined to sarcasm, strong in body like a ferocious beast,

enduring as though fully three hearts beat in his breast, so that when

one of the three died, the ethers gave life to a new one,—he seemed

capable of overturning the very earth upon which firmly, though

clumsily were planted his feet. But in reality what happened? He was

forever on the verge of starvation, as were his wife, his children, his

cattle; and his bedimmed mind reeled drunkenly as though unable to find

the door of its own abode. Desperately straining every effort in an

endeavor to build up something, to create something, he merely fell

sprawling into the dust, and his work collapsed and disintegrated,

rewarding him with a mock and a sneer. He was a man of compassion, and

had adopted an orphan, and everybody scolded him; and the orphan lived

awhile and died of constant malnutrition and illness, and then he began

to scold himself and ceased to understand whether it was the right

thing to be compassionate or not. It seemed as though the tears should

never dry in the eyes of so unfortunate a man, or that the outcries of

wrath and resentment should never die upon his lips, but strange to say

he was always goodnatured and cheerful, and even his beard seemed

somehow absurdly gay; blazing red it was, with each hair seemingly

awhirl and agog in an interminable whimsical dance. And he even took

part in the village choral dances with the young lads and lassies,

singing the melancholy folksongs with a high tremolo voice that brought

tears to the eyes of the hearers, while on his own lips played a smile

of gentle sarcasm.

And his sins were so trivial and formal: a surveyor whom he had driven

to the nearest village—Petrovki—had offered him a meatpie on a fast

day, and he had eaten of it; and in confessing he dwelt as long upon

this transgression as though he had committed a murder; and the year

before, just before communion, he had smoked a cigarette and this too

he described at great length and with agonized anguish.

“That’s all!” finally said Mossyagin, in a cheery voice, and wiped the

perspiration from his brow.

Father Vassily slowly turned his haggard face to him:

“And who helpeth thee?”

“Who helps me?” repeated Mossyagin. “Nobody. It’s a scant fare for us

villagers, you know that yourself. Still Ivan Porfyritch helped me out

once,” the peasant winked slyly at the priest: “he gave me three poods

of flour, and promised four more towards fall.”

“And God?”

Semen sighed and his face grew sad.

“God? I daresay I’m undeserving.”

The priest’s superfluous questions were beginning to annoy Mossyagin.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the empty church, carefully

counted the hairs in the priest’s sparse beard, surveyed his

half-rotted teeth and it occurred to him that the priest might have

spoilt them by eating too much sugar. And he heaved a sigh.

“What art thou waiting for?”

“What I am waiting for? What should I be waiting for?”

And silence again. It was dark and cold in the church, and the chilly

air was stealing under the peasant’s blouse.

“And must it go on like this always?” asked the priest, and his words

sounded listless and distant like the thud of the earth thrown into the

grave upon the lowered coffin.

“And must it go on like this always?” repeated Mossyagin listening to

the sound of his own words. And all that had passed in his life rose

before him again: the hungry faces of the children, the reproaches, the

killing toil, the dull heartache that makes one long to drink and

fight; and so it must go on, for a long time, all through life—until

death steps in. Blinking his white eyelashes, Mossyagin cast a

teardimmed misty glance upon the priest and met his sharp and blazing

gaze—and in this exchange of glances they recognized an intimate

sorrowful kinship. An instinctive movement drew them together, and

Father Vassily laid his hand on the peasant’s shoulder: lightly and

gently it rested upon it like a cobweb in autumn time. Mossyagin’s

shoulder quivered affectionately, he lifted up his eyes trustingly, and

pitifully smiling with a corner of his mouth he said:

“But like as not it may ease up!”

The priest removed his hand imperceptibly and was silent. The peasant’s

white eyelashes blinked faster and faster, the little hairs in the

blazing red beard danced ever more merrily, while his tongue babbled

something unintelligible and incoherent:

“No. I dare say it won’t ease up. You’re right.”

But the priest did not suffer him to finish. He stamped his foot with

repressed emotion, scared the peasant with a wrathful, hostile glance,

and hissed at him like an angry adder:

“Don’t weep! Don’t dare to weep. Oh, why do they blubber like senseless

calves? What can I do?” he prodded his chest with his finger. “What can

I do? Am I God, am I? Ask HIM! Ask HIM! Ask HIM! I tell thee.”

He pushed the peasant’s shoulder.

“Down on thy knees.”

Mossyagin knelt.

“Pray.”

Behind him loomed the walls of the deserted and gloomy church, above

him rang the angered voice of the priest: “Pray! Pray!”, and without

rendering account to himself of his actions, Mossyagin commenced to

cross himself swiftly, touching the ground with his forehead. And the

swift and monotonous movements of his head, the extraordinary nature of

the penance, the consciousness of being at that very instant subject to

some powerful and mysterious will—filled the mind of the peasant with

awe and at the same time with a peculiar sense of relief.

For in this very awe before something mighty and austere was born the

hope of intercession and mercy. And ever more frantically he was

pressing his brow to the cold floor, when the priest abruptly

commanded:

“Arise!”

Mossyagin arose, made his obeisance to the nearest images, and the

fiery-red hairs of his beard whirled and danced willingly and

cheerfully when he again approached the priest. Now he was sure that he

would find relief and he calmly awaited further commands.

But Father Vassily merely measured him with a sternly curious glance

and pronounced the absolution. On his way out of the church Mossyagin

looked back: still in the same spot stood the nebulous figure of the

priest, the faint glimmer of a wax taper could not fully outline it,

and it loomed black and immense as though it had no definite contours

and limits but was merely a particle of the gloom which was filling the

church.

Communicants were now flocking daily in increasing numbers to the

confessional and numberless faces, both wrinkled and youthful,

alternated before Father Vassily in wearisome procession. He quizzed

them all insistently and severely, and timid, incoherent speeches were

poured into his ears by the hour, and the purport of each speech was

suffering, terror and a great expectation. All united in condemning

life, but none seemed anxious to die, and everybody appeared to be

waiting for something, and this expectation seemed to have been handed

down as an inheritance from the father of the race. It had passed

through minds and hearts long since vanished from the world, and for

this reason it was so imperious and potent. And it had become bitter,

for on its way it had absorbed all the grief of hope unrealized, all

the bitterness of faith deceived, all the consuming anguish of infinite

desolation. The blood of all hearts, living and dead, had nourished its

roots, and it had branched out over the whole of life like a great and

mighty tree. And losing himself among these souls like a wanderer in

the forest primeval, he was also forgetting his own pent-up sufferings

which had crowned his head with a stern sorrow, and he too began to

wait for something with a stern impatience.

He did not wish now for human tears, but they were flowing

irrepressibly, overruling his will, and every tear was a demand, and

they all penetrated his heart like poisoned arrows. And with the dim

sense of approaching horror he began to comprehend that he was not the

master of men, not even their neighbor, but their servant, their slave,

that the eyes of a great expectation were seeking him, were commanding

him, were summoning him. And ever oftener he admonished, them with

repressed wrath:

“Ask HIM! Ask HIM!”

And he turned his back upon them.

But at night the living people took on the guise of diaphanous shadows

and walked by his side in a silent throng, invading his very thoughts,

and they made a transparency of the walls of his house and a mock of

the locks and the bars on its doors. And agonized, weirdly phantastic

were the dreams that unrolled like a flaming band beneath his skull.

It was in the fifth week of Lent, when the breath of spring wafted its

fragrance over the fields and the dusk was blue and diaphanous, that

the Popadya had started on another drunken debauch. She had been

drinking heavily for four days at a stretch, screaming with terror and

struggling, and on the fifth day—it was Saturday—towards evening, she

put out the little oil lamp before the saint’s image in her room,

twisted a towel into a noose and tried to strangle herself. But the

moment the noose had begun to stifle her she became frightened and

cried out, and Father Vassily came running with little Nastya and

released her. It all ended in mere fright. Nor, indeed, had there been

any danger, for the noose was clumsily tied and it was impossible to be

strangled in it. But more frightened than all was the Popadya herself.

She wept and pleaded to be forgiven; her arms and legs were trembling,

her head shook as with palsy; the whole evening she kept her husband by

her side and clung closely to him. The extinguished oil lamp in her

room was lighted again at her own request, and other oil lamps before

each holy image, and it looked like the eve of some great church

festival. After the first moment of excitement Father Vassily had

regained his composure and was now coldly amiable, even jocular. He

related a very amusing incident of his seminary days, and then his

memory strolled back into the dim past of his early boyhood and he told

about his escapades in stealing apples in company with other

youngsters. And it was so difficult to imagine a watchman leading him

away by the ear, that Nastya refused to believe or laugh, although

Father Vassily himself was laughing with a gentle, childlike laughter

and his face looked truthful and good.

Little by little the Popadya also regained her composure and ceased to

look askance into obscure nooks, and when Nastya had been sent to bed,

she smiled gently at her husband and inquired:

“Were you scared?”

Father Vassily’s face lost its truthful and kindly expression, and only

his lips were smiling as he replied:

“Of course. What had come into your head anyway?”

The Popadya trembled as though chilled by a sudden draught, and picking

with shaking fingers at the fringe of her warm shawl she said

irresolutely:

“I don’t know, Vassya. My heart is so heavy. And I’m so afraid of

everything. Afraid of everything. Things go on and I can’t make out how

and why. There we have spring, and summer will follow. Then again the

fall and the winter. And we shall still sit as we are sitting now, you

in your corner and I in mine. Don’t be angry with me, Vassya. I realize

that it can’t be different. And yet....”

She sighed and continued without taking her eyes off the shawl.

“There was a time when I did not fear death, I thought when things went

very badly with me, I should die. And now I even fear death. What’s to

become of me, Vassya, dear? Must it be—drink again.”

Perplexed she raised her sorrowful eyes to his face, and in them he

read the pangs of mortal anguish and of boundless despair, and a dull

and humble plea for mercy. In the town where Feeveysky spent his

student days, he had seen on one occasion a greasy Tartar leading a

horse to the flaying yeard: it had broken its hoof which was hanging by

a shred and the horse was stepping up on the pavement with the

mutilated stump of the crippled foot; it was a cold day and a cloud of

white steam enveloped the horse, but it walked on staring ahead with an

immobile gaze, and its eyes were horrible in their meekness. Even such

were the eyes of the Popadya. And he thought that if someone were to

dig a grave, and fling this woman into its depths burying her alive, he

would be committing a kindly deed.

The Popadya with trembling lips tried to puff into life the cigarette

which had long since gone out and continued:

“And then again he. You know whom I mean. Of course he’s a child, and I

feel sorry for him. But soon he’ll commence to walk and he will be the

death for me. And not a soul to help. Now I’ve complained to you, but

what good is it? I don’t know what to do?”

She heaved a sigh and threw up her hands in despair. And in unison with

her the low squat room itself seemed to sigh, and the shades of night

whose silent throng surrounded Father Vassily whirled about him in

agony. They were sobbing in frenzied anguish, they were extending their

nerveless hands, they were pleading for mercy, for pardon, for truth.

“Ah!” responded a hoarse groan from the depths of the priest’s bony

chest. He jumped to his feet, upsetting the chair with an abrupt

movement, and began to pace the floor with a swift stride, shaking his

folded hands, mumbling something, stumbling like a blind or an insane

man against chairs and against walls. And when colliding with a wall,

he hastily touched it with his scrawny fingers and turned back in his

flight, and so he circled in the narrow cage of the room’s mute walls

like a phantastic shade that had assumed a gruesome and weird

materialization. But in an odd contrast to the frantic mobility of his

body, immobile like the eyes of a blind man were his eyes, and in them

glistened tears, the first tears which he had shed since Vassya’s

death.

Forgetting her own self, the Popadya’s awestricken eyes followed the

priest and she cried:

“Vassya, what’s the matter with you? What is the matter?”

Father Vassily turned around abruptly, hastily gained his wife’s side,

as though rushing over to trample upon her, and he laid his heavy and

shaking hand on her head. And for a long, long time he silently held

his hand above her head, as though in benediction, as though warding

off the powers of evil. And he spoke and each resonant sound that

composed his words was a ringing metallic tear:

“Poor little woman; poor little woman.”

And once more he resumed his pacing, towering and awe-inspiring in his

despair, like a tigress who had been robbed of her young one. His face

was frantically convulsed, and his shaking lips jerked out half-formed,

fragmentary, infinitely sorrowing words:

“Poor woman. Poor woman.... Poor people all. All weeping.... No help

... Oh-oh-oh!”

He stopped and raising aloft his immobile eyes, with his gaze

transfixing the ceiling and the misty gloom of the vernal night beyond

it, he cried out in a piercing, frenzied voice:

“And THOU sufferest it! THOU sufferest it! Then take....” and he

clenched his fist and shook it aloft, but at his feet, with her hands

wrapt about her knees, the Popadya lay writhing in hysterics, and

mumbled, choking mid tears and laughter:

“Don’t! Don’t! Darling, precious! I’ll never do it again!”

The idiot woke up and was howling; Nastya came running into the room in

wild affright and the jaws of the priest set with a metallic snap.

Silently, and with seeming indifference, he tended his wife, laying her

down on her bed, and when she had fallen asleep he was still holding

her hand between his two palms, and thus he sat until morning by her

bedside.. And all through the night, until morning, oil lamps were

burning before each image, as though on the eve of a great and glorious

festival.

The next day Father Vassily was the same as usual—cool and calm, nor

did he by a word recall the incidents of the day before. But in his

voice, whenever he exchanged words with his wife, in the glance with

which he regarded her was a gentle tenderness which only her own

tormented heart could appreciate. And so mighty was this manly, silent

tenderness that the tormented heart smiled a timid smile in return and

retained the memory of this smile in its depths like a cherished

treasure. They conversed but little, and their sparing speech was

simple and commonplace; they were rarely together—torn asunder by

life’s vicissitudes—but with hearts full of suffering they were

constantly seeking one another; nor could any human being, nor cruel

fate itself divine with what hopeless anguish and tenderness they loved

one another. Long ago, since the birth of the idiot, they had ceased

living as man and wife, and they resembled a pair of devoted unhappy

lovers deprived even of a hope of happiness, dreaming dreams that dared

not assume a definite shape. And shame, once abandoned, returned again

into the heart of the wife, and with it a desire to appear attractive;

she blushed when her husband saw her bare arms and she did something to

her face and her hair that made both look fresh and youthful and

strangely beautiful in spite of the sadness of her expression. But when

the periodic spells of drunkenness came on again, the Popadya

disappeared in the seclusion of her darkened room, even as dogs are

wont to hide when they feel the approach of madness, and in silence and

solitude she fought out her battle with madness and with the monstrous

visions born of it.

But every night, when all were asleep, the Popadya stole to the bedside

of her husband and made a sign of the cross over his head as though to

dispel from his brow all grief and evil thoughts. And she longed to

kiss his hand, but dared not, and silently retired to her room,

vanishing in the darkness like a dim white vision similar to the

nebulous and melancholy apparitions which hover at night over swamps

and over the graves of deceased and forgotten people.

VII.

The Lenten bell continued to send abroad its monotonous and somber

summons, and it seemed as though with each muffled knell it gathered

fresh power over the consciences of the village folk. In ever

increasing numbers silent figures, somber as the sound of the tolling

church bell, wended their way to the little church from every

direction. Night still reigned over the denuded fields and a thin crust

of ice still spanned the murmuring brook, when from every road and side

path human figures appeared marching one by one, but united by some

common bond into one solemnly chastened procession moving to the same

invisible goal.

And every day, from early morn until late in the evening, Father

Vassily was confronted with a succession of human faces, some with

every wrinkle brightly outlined by the yellow glow of wax tapers,

others dimly emerging out of obscure nooks as though the very

atmosphere of the church had taken on the shape of a human being

thirsting for mercy and truth. The people crowded and pushed, clumsily

elbowing one another; they shuffled their feet heavily as they dropped

to their knees with discordant and asymmetric movements; and heaving

deep sighs, with relentless insistence they laid their sins and their

sorrows before the priest.

Each one had enough suffering and grief for a dozen human existences,

and it seemed to the overwhelmed and distracted priest, as though the

entire living world had brought its tears and its pangs before him

seeking his aid, meekly pleading for it, imperiously clamoring for it.

Once he had been searching for truth, but now he was drowning in it, in

this merciless truth of suffering; in the agonized consciousness of

impotence he longed to die,—merely in order to escape seeing, hearing

and knowing. He had summoned the woe of humanity and lo! it came to

him. His soul was afire like the sacrificial altar, and he longed to

put his arms about every one of them with a fraternal embrace, saying:

“poor friend, let us struggle on side by side, let us together weep and

seek. For there is no help for man from anywhere.”

But this was not what the people, worn out with the struggle of life,

were expecting from him, and with anguish, with wrath, with despair he

kept repeating:

“Ask of HIM! Ask of HIM!”

Sorrowing they believed him and departed, and in their place came

others in fresh and serried ranks, and again he frantically repeated

the terrible and relentless words:

“Ask of HIM! Ask of HIM!”

And the hours in the course of which he listened to truth seemed to him

as years, and that which had passed in the morning before the

confession, appeared dim and faint like all images of a distant past.

When finally he came out of the church, being the last to leave,

darkness had already set in, the stars sparkled sweetly, and the silent

air of the vernal night seemed like a tender caress. But he had no

faith in the peace of the stars; he fancied that even from these

distant worlds, groans and cries and broken pleas for mercy descended

upon him. And he felt crushed with a sense of personal shame as though

he himself had perpetrated all the wickedness that reigned in the

world, as though he himself had caused all these tears to flow, had

mangled and torn into shreds all these human hearts. He was overwhelmed

with shame because of these downtrodden homes which he passed on his

way, he was ashamed to enter his own house where by virtue of sin and

of madness the dreadful image of the semi-idiot, semi-beast, held its

autocratic insolent sway.

And in the mornings he walked to the church as men walk to the scaffold

to meet a shameful and agonizing death, with the whole world as

executioners: the dispassionate sky, the hurrying, thoughtlessly

laughing mob and his own relentless inner thoughts. Every suffering

person was his executioner, a helpless tool of an all-powerful God, and

there were as many hangmen as there were people, and as many lashes as

there were trusting and expectant hearts. They were all inexorably

insistent. No man thought of ridiculing the priest, but at any moment

he tremblingly expected the outburst of some horrible satanic laughter

and he feared to turn his back upon the people. All that is brutal and

evil is born behind a man’s back, but while he is looking, no one dare

attack him face to face. And that is why he looked at them, worrying

them with his glance, and frequently turned his eyes to the place

behind the lectern occupied by Ivan Porfyritch Koprov, the

churchwarden.

The latter alone talked loudly in the church as he calmly sold his

tapers; and twice during the service he sent up the verger and some

boys to take up collections. Then noisily rattling his copper coins, he

piled them up in little heaps, and frequently clicked the lock of his

cash box; when others knelt, he merely inclined his head and crossed

himself. And it was obvious that he regarded himself as a man needful

to God, knowing that without him God would be at no small difficulty to

arrange things as well as they were going and to keep them in proper

order.

Since the beginning of Lent he had been very angry with Father Vassily

because of the interminable time he took up in the confessional. He

could not understand what great and interesting sins these people could

have that could make it worth while to devote so much time to them. It

was all due, he claimed, to the fact that Father Vassily knew neither

how to live himself nor how to handle people.

“Dost thou think they appreciate it?” he said to the good-natured

deacon who like the rest of the church officials was worn out with the

heavy burden of Lenten duties. “Not a bit of it. They will only laugh

at him.”

Father Vassily’s stern demeanor, on the contrary, pleased him, just as

he had been pleasantly impressed when he had first observed his

towering height. A genuine priest and a servant of God seemed to him

akin to an honest and efficient steward who requires an exact and

accurate accounting from those with whom he deals. Ivan Porfyritch

himself went to confession the last week in Lent, and he made long

preparations for it, trying to remember and to classify all his small

transgressions. And he was inordinately proud to know that he kept his

sins in the same good order as his business affairs.

On Wednesday of Holy week, when Father Vassily was fast losing his

physical strength, an unusually numerous throng had gathered to

confess. The last man in the confessional was a worthless scamp named

Trifon, a cripple, who hobbled on crutches from village to village in

the vicinity. Instead of legs which he had lost in some factory

accident and which had been trimmed down to his loins, he had a pair of

short little stumps around which a bag of skin had formed. His

shoulders, raised up through the constant use of crutches supported a

filthy head that seemed to be covered with a growth of coarse hemp, and

he had an equally filthy and neglected beard; his eyes were the

insolent eyes of a mendicant, drunkard and thief. He was repulsive and

dirty, groveling in filth and dust like a reptile, and his soul was as

dark and mysterious as the soul of a savage beast. It was difficult to

understand how he managed to live and yet he lived and even had women,

as phantastic and unreal and as unlike a human being as himself.

Father Vassily was forced to bend down low in order to hear the

cripple’s confession. The impudently serene stench of his body, the

parasites crawling about his head and neck—even as he himself crawled

over the face of the earth—revealed to the priest in a flash the utter

destitution of his crippled soul—horrible, shameful, unfathomable to

conscience. And with a terrible clearness he realized how dreadfully,

how irrevocably this man had been deprived of all the human

characteristics, of all the things to which he was as fully entitled as

the kings in their palaces, as the saints in their cloistered cells,

and he shuddered.

“Go. God absolveth thee of thy sins,” he said.

“Wait. I have more to confess,” hoarsely croaked the beggar, raising up

his purpling face. And he related how ten years back he had in a forest

violated a little girl, giving her three copper coins when she cried,

and how later begrudging her this money, he strangled her to death and

buried her in the woods. And there no one ever found her. A dozen

times, to a dozen different priests he had related the same story, and

because of this repetition it appeared to him simple and ordinary and

unrelated to himself, as though it were a mere fairy tale which he had

learned by heart. Sometimes he varied this story: instead of summer

time he pictured the event as having occurred late in the fall; now the

little girl was a blonde, now darkhaired; but the three copper coins

never varied. Some priests refused to believe him and laughed at him,

pointing out that for ten years past not one little girl had been

killed or missed in the entire region; he was caught in numberless and

crude contradictions, and it was demonstrated to him that the whole

story was an obvious fabrication, born of his diseased brain while he

drunkenly roamed through the woods. And this aroused him to frenzy: he

shouted, he swore by the name of God, calling as frequently upon the

devil as upon God to bear him witness, and began to recite such

repulsive and obscene details that the oldest priests were made to

blush with indignation. Now he was waiting to see if this priest of the

Snamenskoye village would believe him or not, and he was content to

note that the priest believed him: for the priest had shrunk back, with

bloodless cheeks and raised his hand as though to strike him:

“Is this true?” hoarsely asked Father Vassily.

The beggar began to cross himself energetically.

“I swear by God it is true. Let me sink into the ground if it

ain’t....”

“But that means HELL!” cried the priest. “Dost thou grasp it: HELL?”

“God is merciful,” mumbled the beggar, with a sullen and injured tone.

But from his wicked and frightened eyes it was plainly seen that he

expected to go to hell and had become accustomed to that thought even

as to his queer tale of the strangled little girl.

“Hell on earth, hell beyond. Where is thy paradise? Wert thou a worm, I

would crush thee with my foot, but thou art a man. A man? Or art thou

truly a worm? What art thou, speak?” cried the priest and his hair

shook as though fanned by a breeze. “And where is thy God? Why has He

left thee?”

“I made him believe it,” gleefully thought the beggar, feeling the

words of the priest strike his head like a hail of molten metal.

Father Vassily sat down on his haunches and drawing from the

degradingly unusual pose a strange and an agonizing store of pride, he

passionately whispered:

“Listen. Don’t be afraid. There will be no hell. I am telling thee

truly. I too have killed a human being. A little girl. Her name is

Nastya. And there will be no hell. Thou wilt be in paradise.

Understand? With the saints, with the righteous! Higher than all....

Higher than all, I tell thee.”

That evening Father Vassily returned home very late, after his family

had finished supper. He was very tired and haggard, wet to his knees

and covered with dirt, as though he had tramped for a long time over

pathless and rainsodden fields. In the household preparations were

being made for the Easter festival. Though very busy, the Popadya from

time to time ran in for a moment out of the kitchen, anxiously scanning

her husband’s features. And she tried to appear gay and to conceal her

anxiety.

But at night, when according to her custom she came into his bedroom on

tiptoe and having made a threefold sign of the cross over his head, was

about to depart, she was stopped by a gentle and timid voice—so unlike

the voice of the austere Father Vassily:

“Nastya, I cannot go to church.”

There was terror in that voice, and also something pleading and

childlike. As though unhappiness was so immense that it was no longer

any use to put on the mask of pride and of slippery, lying words behind

which people are wont to conceal their feelings. The Popadya fell to

her knees by the bedside of her husband and peered into his face: in

the faint bluish light of the oil lamp it seemed as pale as the face of

a corpse and as immobile, and only his black eyes were open and

squinted in her direction. He lay still and flat on his back like a man

stricken with a painful disease, or like a child frightened by an evil

dream and afraid to move.

“Pray, Vassya!” whispered the Popadya, stroking his clammy hands which

were crossed upon his breast like the hands of a corpse.

“I cannot. I am afraid. Light the lamp, Nastya.”

While she was lighting the lamp, Father Vassily began to dress, slowly

and awkwardly, like an invalid who had been long chained to his bed. He

could not unaided fasten the hooks of his cassock, and he asked his

wife:

“Hook the cassock.”

“Where are you going?” inquired the Popadya in surprise.

“Nowhere. Just so.”

And he began to pace the floor slowly and diffidently with faint and

shaking limbs. His head was trembling with a measured and hardly

perceptible palpitation, and his lower jaw had dropped impotently. With

an effort he attempted to draw it up into its proper place, licking his

dry and flabby lips, but in the next moment it dropped back again;

exposing the dark gap of his mouth. Something vast, something

inexpressibly horrible seemed to be impending—like boundless waste and

boundless silence. And there was neither earth nor people nor any world

beyond the walls of the house, there was only the yawning bottomless

abyss and eternal silence.

“Vassya, is it really true?” asked the Popadya, her heart sinking with

the fear within her.

Father Vassily looked at her with dim, lack-lustre eyes, and with a

momentary access of energy waved his hand:

“Don’t. Don’t. Be silent.”

And once more he fell to pacing the floor, and once more dropped the

strengthless jaw. And thus he paced the room, with the slow

deliberateness of Time itself, while the pale-cheeked woman sat

terror-stricken on the bed, only with the slow deliberateness of Time

itself her eyes moved and followed him in his walk. And something vast

was impending. There it came and stood still and gripped them with a

vacant and all-embracing stare—vast as the boundless waste, terrible as

the eternal silence.

Father Vassily stopped in front of his wife, regarding her with

unseeing eyes and said:

“It is dark. Light another light.”

“He is dying,” thought the Popadya and with shaking hands, scattering

matches on the floor, she lighted a candle. And once more he begged:

“Light still another.”

And she kept lighting and lighting them. Many candles and lamps were

now ablaze. Like a tiny faintly bluish star the little oil lamp before

the holy image lost itself in the vivid and daring glare of the many

lights, and it seemed as though the great and glorious festival had

already set in. Meanwhile, with the deliberateness of Time itself he

softly paced through the brilliant waste. Now, when the waste was

ablaze with lights, the Popadya saw, and for one brief, terrible

instant realized how lone he was, for he neither belonged to her nor to

anyone else; she realized that she could never alter the fact. If all

the good and strong people had gathered from the ends of the world,

putting their arms about him, with words of caress and comfort, still

he would stand in solitude.

And once more, with sinking heart, she thought: “He is dying.”

Thus passed the night. And as it neared its end, the stride of Father

Vassily grew firm, he straightened himself, looked at the Popadya

several times and said:

“Why so many lights? Put them out.”

The Popadya put out the candles and the lamps and diffidently

commenced:

“Vassya!”

“We’ll talk to-morrow. Go to your room. Time for you to go to sleep.”

But the Popadya did not go, and her eyes seemed to be pleading for

something. And once again strong and stalwart he walked over to her and

patted her head as though she were a child.

“So, Popadya!” he said with a smile. His face was pallid with the

diaphanous pallor of death, and black circles had gathered about his

eyes: as though night itself had lodged there and refused to depart.

In the morning Father Vassily announced to his wife that he would

resign from the priesthood, that he meant to get together some money in

the fall and then to go away with her, somewhere afar off, he knew not

yet where. But the idiot they would leave behind, they would give him

to someone to bring up. And the Popadya wept and laughed and for the

first time after the birth of the idiot she kissed her husband full

upon his lips, blushing in confusion.

And at that time Vassily Feeveysky was forty years old, and his wife

was thirty four.

VIII.

For the three months that followed their souls were resting; gladness

and hope, long strangers to their hearts, returned to their home once

again. Strong through suffering endured was the Popadya’s faith in the

new life to come,—in an altogether novel and different life elsewhere,

unlike the life that anybody else had lived or could live. She sensed

but vaguely what was going on in her husband’s heart, though she saw

that he bore himself with a peculiar cheeriness, serene even like the

flame of the candle. She saw the strange glow in his eyes such as he

had lacked before, and she had an abiding faith in his power. Father

Vassily attempted to talk to her at times with regard to his plans for

the future, whither they would go and how they would live, but she

refused to listen: words, exact and positive, seemed to frighten away

her vague and formless vision and to drag the future with a strangely

horrible perverseness into the power of a cruel past. Only one thing

she craved: that it might be far away, far beyond the bounds of that

familiar world which was still so terrible to her. As heretofore,

periodically she succumbed to attacks of drunkenness, but these passed

quickly and she no longer feared them: she believed that she would soon

cease to drink altogether. “It will be different there, I shall have no

need of liquor,” she thought all transfigured with the radiance of an

indefinite and glorious vision.

With the coming of summer she once more began to stroll for days at a

time through the fields and the woods; coming back at dusk she waited

at the gate for Father Vassily’s return from haying. Softly and slowly

gathered the shadows of the brief summer night; and it seemed as though

night would never come to blot out the light of day; only when she

glanced upon the dim outlines of her hands which she held folded upon

her lap she felt that there was something between those hands and

herself and that it was night with the diaphanous and mysterious dusk.

And before vague fears had time to fill her heart, Father Vassily was

back—stalwart, vigorous, cheery, bringing with him the acrid and

pleasant fragrance of grassy fields. His face was dark with the dusk of

night, but his eyes were shining brightly, and in his suppressed voice

seemed to lurk the vast expanse of the fields and the fragrance of

grass and the joy of persistent toil.

“It is beautiful out in the fields,” he said with laughter that sounded

subdued, enigmatic and somber, as though he derided some one, perhaps

himself.

“Of course, Vassya, of course. Of course, it’s beautiful,” retorted the

Popadya with conviction and they went in to supper. After the vastness

of the fields Father Vassily felt crowded in the tiny living room; with

embarrassment he became conscious of the length of his arms and of his

legs and moved them about so clumsily and ridiculously that the Popadya

teased him:

“You ought to be made to write a sermon right now, why you could hardly

hold a pen in your hands,” she said.

And they laughed.

But left alone, Father Vassily’s face assumed a serious and solemn

expression. Alone with his thoughts he dared not laugh or jest. And his

eyes gazed forward sternly and with a haughty expectancy—for he felt

that even in these days of hope and peace the same inexorably cruel and

impenetrable fate was hovering over his head.

On the twenty seventh day of July—it was in the evening—Father Vassily

and a laborer were carting sheaves from the field.

From the nearby forest a lengthy shadow had fallen obliquely across the

field; other lengthy and oblique shadows were falling all over the

field from every side. Suddenly from the direction of the village there

came the faint, barely audible sound of a tolling bell, uncanny in its

untimeliness. Father Vassily turned around sharply: there where through

the willows he had been wont to see the dim outlines of his shingled

roof, an immobile column of smoke—black and resinous—had reared itself

up in the air, and beneath it writhed, at though crushed down by a

gigantic weight, darkly lurid flames. By the time they had cleared the

cart of sheaves and had reached the village at a gallop, darkness had

set in and the fire had died down: only the black, charred corner posts

were glowing their last like dying candles, and faintly gleamed the

tiles of the stripped fireplace, while a pall of whitish smoke that

resembled a cloud of steam was hanging low over the ruins, wrapping

itself about the legs of the peasants who were stamping out the fire,

and against the background of the fading glow of sunset it seemed

suspended in the air in the shape of flat, dark shadows.

The whole street was thronged with people; the villagers trampled

through the liquid mud formed by water that had been spilled in

fighting the blaze, they were conversing loudly and in agitation,

peering intently into one another’s faces, as though failing to

recognize immediately their neighbors’ familiar faces and voices. The

village herd had been meanwhile driven in from the fields, and the

animals were straying about forlorn and excited. The cows were lowing,

the sheep stared ahead with immobile, glassy, bulging eyes, and

distractedly rubbed against the legs of people, or startled into an

unreasoning panic madly rushed from place to place pattering with their

hoofs over the ground. The village women tried to chase them home, and

all over the village was heard their monotonous summons “kit-kit-kit.”

And these dark figures, with their dark bronze-like faces, this queer

and monotonous calling of sheep, the sight of these human beings and

helpless animals fused into one mass by a common, primal sense of fear

created the impression of something chaotic and primordial.

It had been a windless day, and the priest’s house was the only one

consumed by the blaze. It was said that the fire had started in a room

where the drunken Popadya had lain down to rest, and that it had been

caused by a burning cigarette or a carelessly thrown match. All the

villagers were in the fields at the time, and the rescuers succeeded in

saving the idiot who was badly frightened but unhurt, while the Popadya

herself was discovered in a horribly burnt condition and was dragged

out unconscious, though still alive. When Father Vassily who had come

galloping with his cart received the report of the disaster, the

villagers were prepared to witness an outburst of grief and tears, but

they were astounded: he had stretched out his neck in the attitude of

listening with concentrated attention, his lips were tightly

compressed, and to judge from his appearance it seemed as though he had

been fully apprized of the happenings and was now merely trying to

check up the report; as though in that brief mad hour, while with his

locks fluttering in the breeze, with his gaze riveted to the column of

smoke and fire, he stood on his cart and urged on his horse to a

frenzied gallop, he had divined everything: that it had been ordained

that a fire should occur and that his wife and all he owned should

perish, while the idiot and the little girl Nastya should be saved and

remain alive.

For a moment he stood still with downcast eyes, then he threw back his

head and resolutely made his way through the crowd, straight to the

deacon’s house where the dying Popadya had found shelter.

“Where is she?” he loudly asked of the silent people within. And

silently they showed him. He came close to her bedside, bent low over

the shapeless feebly groaning mass and seeing one great white blister

which had taken the place of the face once cherished and beloved, he

shrank back in horror and covered his face with his hands.

The Popadya was in a flutter; doubtless she had regained consciousness

and was trying to say something, but instead of words she emitted a

hoarse and inarticulate bark. Father Vassily withdrew his hands from

his face; not the faintest trace of a tear was to be seen thereon; it

was inspired and austere like the countenance of a prophet. And when he

spoke, with the loud articulation of one addressing a deaf person, his

voice rang with an unshakeable and terrible faith. There was in it

nothing human, vacillating or based on self-strength; thus could speak

only he who had felt the unfathomable and awful nearness of God.

“In the name of God—hearest thou me?” he exclaimed. “I am here, Nastya,

I am near thee. And the children are here. Here is Vassily. Here is

Nastya.”

From the immobile and terrible face of the Popadya it could not be

gathered whether she had heard or not. And raising his voice to a

higher pitch Father Vassily once more addressed himself to the

shapeless mass of charred flesh:

“Forgive me, Nastya. For I have destroyed thee, and thou wast not to

blame. Forgive me—my one—and—only love. And bless the children in thy

heart. Here they are: here is Nastya, here is Vassily. Bless them and

depart in peace. Have no fear of death. God hath pardoned thee. God

loveth thee. He will give thee rest. Depart in peace. There wilt thou

see Vassya. Depart thou in peace.”

Everyone had now withdrawn with tearful eyes, and the idiot who had

fallen asleep, was taken away. Father Vassily remained alone with the

dying woman, to spend with her that last fleeting summer night the

coming of which she had so dreaded. He knelt down, pillowed his head

near the dying woman, and with the faint and dreadful odor of burnt

human flesh in his nostrils, he shed profuse soft tears of infinite

compassion. He wept for her in her youth and beauty, trustingly longing

for joy and caresses; he wept for her in the loss of her son; frenzied

and pitiful, a plaything of fears, haunted by visions; he wept for her

in those latter clays, awaiting his coming in the dusk of the summer

eve, humble and radiant. It was her body—that tender body so thirsting

for caresses that the flames had devoured, and now it reeked with the

odor of burning. Had she been crying? struggling? calling for her

husband?

With tear dimmed eyes Father Vassily looked about wildly and rose to

his feet. All was still with a stillness such as reigns only in the

presence of death. He looked at his wife. She was motionless with that

peculiar immobility of a corpse, when every fold of garment and bedding

seems to be carved of lifeless stone, when the glowing tints of life

have faded from raiment, yielding to shades that seem drab and

unnatural. The Popadya was dead.

Through the opened window poured the warm breath of the summer night

and from somewhere in the distance, accentuating the stillness in the

room, came the harmonious chirping of crickets. About the lamp

noiselessly circled the moths of the night which had come flying

through the window; striking the light some fell, others with sickly

spiral movements strove anew towards the light, and either lost

themselves in the darkness or gleamed white about the flame like little

flakes of whirling snow. The Popadya was dead.

“No! No!” shouted the priest in a loud and frightened voice. “No! No! I

believe! Thou art right! I believe.”

He fell to his knees, and pressed his face to the drenched floor, amid

fragments of soiled cotton and dripping bandages, as though thirsting

to be changed into dust and to mingle with dust; and with the rapture

of boundless humility he eliminated from his outcry the very pronoun

“I” and added brokenly: “... believe!”

Once more he prayed, without words, without thoughts, but straining

taut every fibre of his mortal body that in fire and death had realized

the inexplicable nearness of God. He had ceased to sense his own life

as such,—as though the intimate bond between body and spirit has been

cut, and freed from all that is earthy, freed from itself, the spirit

had soared to unfathomed and mysterious heights. The terrors of doubt

and of tempting thoughts, the passionate wrath and the bold outcries of

resentful human pride—all had crumbled into dust with the abasement of

the body; only the spirit alone, having torn the hampering fetters of

its “I” was living the mysterious life of contemplation.

When Father Vassily had risen to his feet it was already light, and a

ray of sunshine, long and ruddy, clung like a bright colored blotch to

the petrified raiment of the deceased. And this surprised him, for the

last thing that he remembered was the darkened window and the moths

that circled about the light. A number of these frail creatures were

scattered in charred clusters about the base of the lamp, which was

still burning with an invisible yellowish flame; one grey and shaggy

moth, with a big misshapen head, was still alive, but had no strength

to fly away and was helplessly crawling about the table. The moth was

doubtless in great pain, and was groping for the shelter of night and

of darkness, but the merciless light of day streamed upon it from

everywhere burning its tiny ugly body that was created for darkness.

Despairingly it attempted to shake into activity its pair of short and

singed wings, but it failed to rise up in the air, and once more, with

oblique and angular movements, it fell over on its side and continued

to crawl and grope.

Father Vassily put out the lamp and threw the palpitating moth out of

the window; then vigorously fresh, as though after a long and

refreshing sleep, filled with the sense of strength of restoration and

of a supernatural peace, he made his way into the deacon’s garden.

There for a long time he paced up and down the straight foot path, with

his hands behind his back, his head brushing against the lower branches

of apple and cherry trees; and he walked and he thought. Finding a path

between the branches the sun had commenced to warm his head, and as he

turned back it beat down upon him like a current of fire and blinded

his eyes; here and there a worm eaten apple fell to the ground with a

dull thud, and under a cherry tree, in the loose, dry earth a hen was

fussing around, cackling and tending her brood of a dozen downy yellow

chicks; but he was oblivious to the light of the sun and to the falling

apples and kept on thinking. And wondrous were his thoughts—clear and

pure they were as the air of the early morn, and strangely new; such

thoughts had never before flashed through his head where sad and

painful thoughts were wont to dwell. He was thinking that where he had

seen chaos and the absurdity of malice, there a mighty hand had traced

out a true and straight path. Through the furnace of calamity,

violently snatching him from home and family and from the vain cares of

life, a mighty hand was leading him to a mighty martyrdom, a great

sacrifice. God had transformed his life into a desert, but only so that

he might cease to stray over old and beaten paths, over winding and

deceitful roads where people err, but might seek a new and daring way

in the trackless waste. The column of smoke which he had seen the night

before, was it not that pillar of fire which had marked for the Hebrews

a path through the pathless desert? He thought: “Lord, will my feeble

strength be equal to the task?” but the answer came in the flames that

illumined his soul like a new sun.

He had been chosen.

For an unknown martyrdom, for an unknown sacrifice he had been chosen

by God, he, Vassily Feeveysky, who so blasphemously and madly had cried

out in bitter complaint against his fate. He had been chosen. Let the

earth open at his feet, let hell itself look at him with its red and

cunning eyes, he will disbelieve hell itself. He had been chosen. And

was he not standing on solid ground?

Father Vassily stopped and stamped his foot. The frightened hen emitted

an anxious cackle and calling her brood together stood on guard. One of

the little chicks had strayed afar and hurried to answer his maternal

call, but halfway to his goal two hands, hot, strong and bony seized

him and raised him up in the air. Smiling, Father Vassily breathed upon

the tiny yellowish chick with his hot and moist breath, then gently

folding his hands into the semblance of a nest he tenderly pressed him

to his breast and continued to pace up and down the long and straight

walk.

“What martyrdom? I don’t know. But dare I want to know? Didn’t I once

know my fate? And I called it cruel, and my knowledge was a lie. Did I

not think of bringing a son into the world? And a monster, without form

or mind, entered into my home. And again I thought to multiply my goods

and to leave my house, but it had left me first, consumed by a fire

from heaven. That was what my knowledge amounted to. And she—an

infinitely unfortunate woman, wronged in her very womb, who had

exhausted all tears, who had lived through all horrors. She was waiting

for a new life on earth, and this life would have been sorrowful, but

now she is reclining in death, and her soul is laughing and is branding

the old knowledge a lie. HE knows. He has given me much. He has granted

to me to see life and to experience sufferings and with the sharpness

of my sorrow to penetrate into the sufferings of other people. He has

granted to me to apprehend their great expectation and has given me

love towards them. And are they not expecting? And do I not love? Dear

brethren! God has shown mercy to us, the hour of the mercy of God has

come.”

He kissed the downy head of the chick and continued:

“My path? Docs the arrow think of its path when sent forth by a mighty

hand? It flies and plunges through to its goal subservient to the will

of him who sent it on its way. It is given to me to see, it is given to

me to love, but what will come of this vision, of this love, that will

be His holy will—my martyrdom, my sacrifice.”

Coddled in the hollow of his warm hand the little chick closed his eyes

and fell asleep. And the priest smiled.

“There—I need only close my hand and he will die. Yet he is lying in

the hollow of my hand, upon my bosom, and sleeping trustingly. And am I

not in His hand? And dare I disbelieve the mercy of God when this chick

believes in my human kindness, in my human heart?”

He smiled softly, opening his black, half-rotted teeth and over his

austere, forbidding face the smile scattered into a thousand radiant

wrinkles as though a ray of sunlight suddenly set a-sparkle a pool of

deep and dark waters. And the great, grave thoughts fled away scared

off by human gladness, and for a long time only gladness, only laughter

remained, and the light of the sun and the gently slumbering downy

little chick.

But now the wrinkles smoothed, the face became once more austere and

grave, and the eyes sparkled with inspiration. The greatest, the most

significant arose be< fore him—and its name was Miracle. Thither his

still human, all too human thought had not yet dared to stray. There

was the boundary line of thought. There in the fathomless solar depths

were the dim contours of a new world—and it was no longer the earth. A

world of love, a world of divine justice, a world of radiant and

fearless countenances, undisgraced by lines of suffering, famine and

pain. Like a gigantic, monstrous diamond sparkled this world in the

fathomless solar depths, and the human eye could not dwell upon it

without blinding pain and awe. And humbly bowing his head Father

Vassily exclaimed:

“Thy holy will be done!”

People made their appearance in the garden: the deacon and his wife and

many others. They had seen the priest from afar and with cordial nods

hastened towards him, but as they approached him they paused and

stopped as though transfixed, as people pause before a conflagration,

before a turbulent flood, before the calmly enigmatic gaze of a madman.

“Why do you look at me in this manner?” inquired Father Vassily in

surprise.

But they never stirred from the spot and continued to look. Before them

stood a tall man, entirely unknown to them, an utter stranger, whose

very calm made him all the more distant from them. Dark he was and

terrible to look upon like a shade from another world, but a sparkling

smile played on his face in a myriad radiant wrinkles, as though the

sun was sparkling in a deep black pool of stagnant water. And in his

large gnarled hands he was holding a downy yellow little chick.

“Why are you looking at me in this manner?” he repeated smiling. “Am I

a miracle?”

IX.

It was obvious to all that Father Vassily was hastening to sever the

last ties that still bound him to the past and to the vain cares of

this life. He had written his sister in the city and made hurried

arrangements with her concerning Nastya, leaving the girl in her

charge, nor did he delay a day in despatching her to her aunt, as

though fearing that fatherly love might rise up within him and prevent

this arrangement to the detriment of his ministry. Nastya departed

without exhibiting either pleasure or disappointment: she was content

that her mother had died and merely regretted that the idiot had not

also burnt to death. Seated in the wagon, in an oldfashioned dress

which had been re-made from an old gown of her mother’s, with a child’s

hat sitting awry on her head, she resembled a queerly attired and

homely old maid rather than a girl in her early teens. With her wolfish

eyes she coldly watched the fussy deacon and protested in a dry voice

that was much like the voice of her father:

“Don’t bother, Father Deacon. I am comfortable. Good-bye, papa.”

“Good-bye, Nastya dear. Mind your studies, don’t be lazy.”

The wagon started off, shaking up the girl with its jolting, but in the

next moment she sat up erect like a stick, swaying no longer from side

to side, but merely bobbing up and down. The deacon pulled out a

handkerchief in order to wave the little traveler good-bye, but Nastya

never turned around; and shaking his head reprovingly the deacon heaved

a deep sigh, blew his nose and put the handkerchief back into his

pocket. Thus she departed never to return to the village of

Snamenskoye.

“Why don’t you, Father Vassily, send the little boy away as well? It

will be hard on you to take care of him with only the cook to help you.

She’s a stupid wench and deaf into the bargain,” said the deacon when

the wagon was out of sight and the dust which it had raised had

settled.

Father Vassily eyed him pensively:

“Shirk the consequences of my own sin, and burden others with them? No,

deacon, my sin is with me and must remain with me. We’ll manage

somehow, the old and the young one, what do you think, Father Deacon?”

He smiled a pleasant and cordial smile, as though in stingless raillery

at something known to himself alone, and patted the deacon’s portly

shoulder.

Father Vassily transferred the rights to his land to the vestry,

providing a small sum for his support, which he called his “dowry.”

“And perhaps I might not take even that,” he said enigmatically,

smiling pleasantly, with the same stingless raillery that was a riddle

to all but himself.

And he made it his business to look after another matter: he induced

Ivan Porfyritch to give employment to Mossyagin who had been turning

black in the face from slow starvation. When Mossyagin had first called

on Ivan Porfyritch asking him for work, the churchwarden drove him

away, but after a talk with the priest, he not only gave him

employment, but even sent over a load of shingles for Father Vassily’s

new house. And he said to his wife, a woman who never opened her mouth

and was always in the family way:

“Mark my word, this priest will raise ructions.”

“What ructions?” coldly inquired the wife.

“Just plain ructions. Only as how in a manner of speaking it is none of

my business.... So I keep my mouth shut. Otherwise....” and he looked

vaguely through the window in the direction of the capital city of the

province.

And no one knew whence, whether as the result of the churchwarden’s

mysterious words or from other sources, vague and disquieting rumors

gained currency in the village and in the vicinity with regard to the

priest of Snamenskoye. Like the odor of smoke from a distant forest

fire these rumors moved slowly and scattered widely, no one knowing

whence and how they had originated, and only as the people exchanged

glances and saw the sun grow pallid behind a hazy film they began to

realize that something new, unusual and disquieting had come to dwell

among them.

Towards the middle of October the new house was ready for occupancy,

save that only one wing was all finished and covered with a roof; the

other wing still lacked roof beams and rafters, and gaping with empty

and frameless window openings, clung to the finished portion like a

skeleton strapped to a living person, and at night looked grimly

desolate and forbidding. Father Vassily had not troubled to buy new

furniture: within the four bare walls of crude logs on which the amber

sap had not yet hardened, the sole furniture in the four rooms

consisted of two wooden stools, a table and two beds. The deaf and

stupid cook was a poor hand at building fires and the rooms were always

full of smoke which gave headaches to the inmates and hung like a low

grey cloud over the dirty floor with its imprint of muddy boots. And

the house was cold. During the severe cold spell of early winter the

widow panes had gathered a layer of downy frost on the inside and a

bleak chilling twilight reigned within. The window sills had been

encrusted since the early frost with a thick coating of ice which

constantly dribbling, formed rivulets on the floor. Even the

unpretentious peasants who came to the priest for ministrations looked

askance, in guilty embarrassment, upon the penurious furnishings of the

priestly abode, and the deacon referred to it wrathfully as the

“abomination of desolation.”

When Father Vassily first entered his new house, he paced for a long

time in joyful agitation through rooms that were as cold and barren as

a barn and merrily called to the idiot:

“We’ll live like lords here, Vassily, hey?”

The idiot licked his lips with his long brutish tongue and loudly

barked with jerky, monotonous bellows:

“Huh-huh-huh!”

He was pleased and he laughed. But soon he began to feel the cold and

the loneliness and the gloom of the abandoned abode, and this made him

angry; he screamed, slapped his own cheeks and tried to slide down on

the floor, but he fell from the chair painfully hurting himself.

Sometimes he lapsed into a state of heavy stupor not unlike a grotesque

pensive day dream. Supporting his head with his thin long fingers he

stared into space from beneath his narrow, beastlike eyelids and never

stirred. And it seemed at times that he was not an idiot, but some

strange creature lost in meditation, thinking peculiar thoughts of his

own that were totally unlike the thoughts of other people: as though he

knew something that was peculiar, simple and mysterious, something that

no one else could know of. And to look at his flattened nose with the

widely distended nostrils, at the slanting back of his head which in a

brutish slope merged straight into his back—it seemed that if one were

only to lend him a pair of swift and sturdy legs he would scurry away

into the woods there to live out his mysterious forest life filled with

savage play and obscure forest lore.

And side by side with him, always the two together, always alone, now

deafened by his impudent and malignant screaming, now haunted by his

stony enigmatic stare, Father Vassily lived the equally mysterious life

of the spirit, that had renounced the flesh. He longed to purge himself

for the great martyrdom and the great sacrifice yet unrevealed, and his

days and his nights became one ceaseless prayer, one wordless effusion.

Since the death of the Popadya he had imposed upon himself an ascetic

regime: he drank no tea, he tasted neither meat nor fish, and on days

of abstinence, Wednesday and Friday, his food consisted merely of bread

soaked in water. And with a puzzling cruelty that seemed to be akin to

vindictiveness he had imposed the same strict abstinence upon the

idiot, and the latter suffered like a starving beast. He screamed and

scratched and even shed floods of greedy, doglike tears, but he could

not procure an additional bite of food. The priest saw but few people,

and these only when absolutely compelled to receive them, and he

assiduously shortened all interviews, devoting every hour, with brief

intervals for rest and sleep, to prayer on bended knee. And when he

grew tired he sat down and read the Gospels and the Acts of the

Apostles and the Lives of the Saints. It had been the village custom to

hold services only on Sundays and holidays, but now he celebrated the

early liturgy every morning. The aged deacon had refused to officiate

with him, and he was assisted by the lay-reader, a filthy and lonely

old man who had been once deposed from the diaconate for drunkenness,

and was now acting as verger.

Long before daybreak, shivering with the cold of the early winter

morning, Father Vassily wended his way to the church. He did not have

far to go, but the walk consumed much time. Frequently a snow drift

covered the road at night and his feet sank and stuck fast in the dry

grainy snow and each step required the effort of ten ordinary steps.

The church was not properly heated and it was bitterly cold inside,

with that peculiar penetrating cold which in winter time clings to

public places left vacant for days at a time. Human breath turned into

dense clouds of vapor, the touch of metal felt like a burn. The

lay-reader, who was also the verger, built a small fire in a tiny

stove, back of the altar, just for the priest’s comfort, and by its

opened gate, Father Vassily, squatting on his haunches, warmed his

hands before the modest blaze, for otherwise he could not have clasped

the cross with his numb and unbending fingers. And during the ten

minutes thus spent he joked with the old lay-reader about the cold and

the gipsy sweat, and the lay-reader listened to him with sullen

condescension; constant drink and cold had colored the lay-reader’s

nose a deep purple, and his bristling chin (after his deposition he had

shaved off his beard) moved rhythmically as though chewing a cud.

Then Father Vassily donned his tattered vestments, once embroidered

with gold, of which a few ragged thread ends were the sole remaining

trace. A pinch of incense was dropped into the censer and they began to

officiate in semi-darkness, barely able to distinguish one another’s

outlines, like a couple of blind men moving by instinct in a familiar

spot. Two stumps of wax tapers, one near the lay-reader, the other on

the altar near the image of the Saviour, merely served to intensify the

gloom; and their sharp flames slowly swayed from side to side

responding to the movements of these unhurrying men.

The service was long, and it was slow and solemn. Every word trembled

and deliquesced in its outlines, being caught up by the echo of the

deserted church. And there was nothing within but the echo, the

darkness and the two men serving God; and little by little something

began to glow and blaze in the lay-reader’s heart. Pricking up his

ears, he cautiously strove to catch every word of the priest and moved

his chin in quick succession. And his lonely, filthy decrepit old age

seemed to vanish somewhere into distance, and with it the whole of his

luckless and weary existence, and that which came in the place thereof

was strange and joyous to the verge of tears. Frequently to the

lay-reader’s allocution there came no response; silence, protracted and

solemn, ensued, and the sharp tongues of wax tapers blazed straight up

without stirring. Then from the distance came a voice that was sated

with tears and with gladness. And once more through the semi-darkness

moved sure-footedly the two unhurrying celebrants, and the flames

swayed to one side and to the other in response to their deliberate

measured movements.

The daylight was commencing to break when the service was finished, and

Father Vassily said:

“Look, Nicon, how warm it is getting.”

A spiral of steam was issuing from his mouth. The wrinkles on Nicon’s

cheeks had grown pink, he scanned the priest’s face with a severely

searching expression and diffidently inquired:

“And to-morrow—again? Or perhaps not?”

“Of course, Nicon, again, of course.”

Reverently he conducted the priest to the door and then returned to his

watchman’s booth. There, yelping and barking, a dozen dogs came running

towards him—grown up dogs they were and pups. Surrounded by them as

though by a family of children, he fed them and caressed them, with his

thoughts dwelling constantly on the priest. And as he thought of the

priest he wondered. He thought of the priest—and smiled, without

opening his lips, and averting his face from his dogs so that they

might not see his smile. And he thought, and he thought until

nightfall. But in the morning he waited to see if the priest would not

fool him, if the priest would not back down in the face of the darkness

and the frost. But the priest came despite the cold and the darkness,

shivering, yet cheerful, and once more from the gaping mouth of the

little stove into the very depths of the vacant church stretched a

ribbon of a ruddy glow and along it the black and melting shadow.

At first hearing of the eccentricities of the priest many people came

to the early liturgy just to see him officiate and they marveled. Some

of those who came to watch him pronounced him a madman; others were

edified and wept, but there were others, too, and these were many, in

whose hearts was born a keen and unconquerable disquietude. For in the

steady, in the fearlessly frank and luminous glance of the priest they

had caught a glimmer of mystery, of the most profound and hidden

mystery, full of ineffable threats, full of ominous promises. But soon

the merely curious began to drop off, and for a long time the church

remained vacant in these early morning hours, none disturbing the peace

of the two praying men. But after a lapse of time in response to the

words of the priest there had begun to come from the darkness timid,

subdued sighs, someone’s knees struck the flags of the stone floor with

a dull thud; someone’s lips were whispering, someone’s hands were

holding a tiny fresh taper, and between the two stumps it looked like a

stately young birch in a forest clearing.

And rumor, dull, disquieting, impersonal, grew apace. It crept

everywhere where people assembled, leaving behind some sediment of

fear, hope and expectancy. Little was said, and what was said was

vague; for the most part it was the wagging of heads, followed by

sighs, but in the neighboring province, a hundred miles away, someone,

grey and taciturn, began to whisper of a “new faith” and was lost again

in silence. And rumor kept spreading, like the wind, like the clouds,

like the smoky odor of a distant forest fire.

Last of all the rumors reached the provincial capital, as though they

found it hard and painful to make their way through stone walls,

through the noisy and populous city streets. And like naked, ragged

thieves they finally showed themselves, claiming that someone had

burned himself alive, that a new fanatical sect had sprung up in

Snamenskoye. And people in uniform made their appearance in the

village, but they found nothing, for neither the village houses nor the

stolid faces of the villagers revealed anything to them, and they drove

back to town tinkling with their sleigh bells.

But after this visit the rumors became still more persistent and

malicious, while Father Vassily continued to serve mass every morning

as heretofore.

X.

The long evenings of winter time Father Vassily passed in solitude with

the idiot, imprisoned together with him in the white cage of pine log

walls and ceiling, as though locked in a shell.

From the past he had retained a love for bright lights—and on the

table, warming the room, blazed a large oil lamp with a big-bellied

globe. The window panes frozen outside and frosted within reflected the

light of the lamp and sparkled, but were impenetrably opaque like the

walls and cut off the people from the greying night outside. Like a

boundless sphere the night enveloped the house, crushing it from above,

seeking some crevice through which to plunge its greyish claws, but

finding none. It raged about the doors, tapped the walls with its

lifeless hands, exhaling a murderous cold, wrathfully raised a myriad

of dry and spiteful snowflakes, flinging them frenziedly against the

windowpanes, and frantically ran back into the fields, cavorting,

singing and leaping headlong into snowbanks, clutching the stiffened

earth in its crosslike embrace. Then it rose and squatted on its

haunches and silently gazed into the illuminated windows gnashing its

teeth. And once more shrilly shrieking it flung itself against the

house, bellowing into the chimney with a greedy howl of insatiable

hatred and longing, and it lied: it had no children, it had devoured

them all and buried them out in the field——in the field—in the field.

“A snowstorm,” said Father Vassily stopping to listen for a moment and

turning his eyes back to his reading.