It was on the eve of Palm Sunday; vespers were being sung in the
Staro-Petrovski Convent. The hour was nearly ten when the palm leaves
were distributed, and the little shrine lamps were growing dim; their
wicks had burnt low, and a soft haze hung in the chapel. As the
worshippers surged forward in the twilight like the waves of the sea, it
seemed to his Reverence Peter, who had been feeling ill for three days,
that the people who came to him for palm leaves all looked alike, and,
men or women, old or young, all had the same expression in their eyes.
He could not see the doors through the haze; the endless procession
rolled toward him, and seemed as if it must go on rolling for ever. A
choir of women’s voices was singing and a nun was reading the canon.
How hot and close the air was, and how long the prayers! His Reverence
was tired. His dry, parching breath was coming quickly and painfully,
his shoulders were aching, and his legs were trembling. The occasional
cries of an idiot in the gallery annoyed him. And now, as a climax, his
Reverence saw, as in a delirium, his own mother whom he had not seen for
nine years coming toward him in the crowd. She, or an old woman exactly
like her, took a palm leaf from his hands, and moved away looking at him
all the while with a glad, sweet smile, until she was lost in the crowd.
And for some reason the tears began to course down his cheeks. His heart
was happy and peaceful, but his eyes were fixed on a distant part of the
chapel where the prayers were being read, and where no human being could
be distinguished among the shadows. The tears glistened on his cheeks
and beard. Then some one who was standing near him began to weep, too,
and then another, and then another, until little by little the chapel
was filled with a low sound of weeping. Then the convent choir began to
sing, the weeping stopped, and everything went on as before.
Soon afterward the service ended. The fine, jubilant notes of the heavy
chapel-bells were throbbing through the moonlit garden as the bishop
stepped into his coach and drove away. The white walls, the crosses on
the graves, the silvery birches, and the far-away moon hanging directly
over the monastery, all seemed to be living a life of their own,
incomprehensible, but very near to mankind. It was early in April, and a
chilly night had succeeded a warm spring day. A light frost was falling,
but the breath of spring could be felt in the soft, cool air. The road
from the monastery was sandy, the horses were obliged to proceed at a
walk, and, bathed in the bright, tranquil moonlight, a stream of
pilgrims was crawling along on either side of the coach. All were
thoughtful, no one spoke. Everything around them, the trees, the sky,
and even the moon, looked so young and intimate and friendly that they
were reluctant to break the spell which they hoped might last for ever.
Finally the coach entered the city, and rolled down the main street. All
the stores were closed but that of Erakin, the millionaire merchant. He
was trying his electric lights for the first time, and they were
flashing so violently that a crowd had collected in front of the store.
Then came wide, dark streets in endless succession, and then the
highway, and fields, and the smell of pines. Suddenly a white crenelated
wall loomed before him, and beyond it rose a tall belfry flanked by five
flashing golden cupolas, all bathed in moonlight. This was the
Pankratievski Monastery where his Reverence Peter lived. Here, too, the
calm, brooding moon was floating directly above the monastery. The coach
drove through the gate, its wheels crunching on the sand. Here and there
the dark forms of monks started out into the moonlight and footsteps
rang along the flagstone paths.
“Your mother has been here while you were away, your Reverence,” a lay
brother told the bishop as he entered his room.
“My mother? When did she come?”
“Before vespers. She first found out where you were, and then drove to
the convent.”
“Then it was she whom I saw just now in the chapel! Oh, Father in
heaven!”
And his Reverence laughed for joy.
“She told me to tell you, your Reverence,” the lay brother continued,
“that she would come back to-morrow. She had a little girl with her, a
grandchild, I think. She is stopping at Ovsianikoff’s inn.”
“What time is it now?”
“It is after eleven.”
“What a nuisance!”
His Reverence sat down irresolutely in his sitting-room, unwilling to
believe that it was already so late. His arms and legs were racked with
pain, the back of his neck was aching, and he felt uncomfortable and
hot. When he had rested a few moments he went into his bedroom and
there, too, he sat down, and dreamed of his mother. He heard the lay
brother walking away and Father Sisoi the priest coughing in the next
room. The monastery clock struck the quarter.
His Reverence undressed and began his prayers. He spoke the old,
familiar words with scrupulous attention, and at the same time he
thought of his mother. She had nine children, and about forty
grandchildren. She had lived from the age of seventeen to the age of
sixty with her husband the deacon in a little village. His Reverence
remembered her from the days of his earliest childhood, and, ah, how he
had loved her! Oh, that dear, precious, unforgettable childhood of his!
Why did those years that had vanished for ever seem so much brighter and
richer and gayer than they really had been? How tender and kind his
mother had been when he was ill in his childhood and youth! His prayers
mingled with the memories that burned ever brighter and brighter in his
heart like a flame, but they did not hinder his thoughts of his mother.
When he had prayed he lay down, and as soon as he found himself in the
dark there rose before his eyes the vision of his dead father, his
mother, and Lyesopolye, his native village. The creaking of wagon
wheels, the bleating of sheep, the sound of church-bells on a clear
summer morning, ah, how pleasant it was to think of these things! He
remembered Father Simeon, the old priest at Lyesopolye, a kind, gentle,
good-natured old man. He himself had been small, and the priest’s son
had been a huge strapping novice with a terrible bass voice. He
remembered how this young priest had scolded the cook once, and had
shouted: “Ah, you she-ass of Jehovah!” And Father Simeon had said
nothing, and had only been mortified because he could not for the life
of him remember reading of an ass of that name in the Bible!
Father Simeon had been succeeded by Father Demian, a hard drinker who
sometimes even went so far as to see green snakes. He had actually borne
the nickname of “Demian the Snake-Seer” in the village. Matvei
Nikolaitch had been the schoolmaster, a kind, intelligent man, but a
hard drinker, too. He never thrashed his scholars, but for some reason
he kept a little bundle of birch twigs hanging on his wall, under which
was a tablet bearing the absolutely unintelligible inscription: “Betula
Kinderbalsamica Secuta.” He had had a woolly black dog whom he called
“Syntax.”
The bishop laughed. Eight miles from Lyesopolye lay the village of
Obnino possessing a miraculous icon. A procession started from Obnino
every summer bearing the wonder-working icon and making the round of all
the neighbouring villages. The church-bells would ring all day long
first in one village, then in another, and to Little Paul (his Reverence
was called Little Paul then) the air itself seemed tremulous with
rapture. Barefoot, hatless, and infinitely happy, he followed the icon
with a naïve smile on his lips and naïve faith in his heart.
Until the age of fifteen Little Paul had been so slow at his lessons
that his parents had even thought of taking him out of the
ecclesiastical school and putting him to work in the village store.
The bishop turned over so as to break the train of his thoughts, and
tried to go to sleep.
“My mother has come!” he remembered, and laughed.
The moon was shining in through the window, and the floor was lit by its
rays while he lay in shadow. A cricket was chirping. Father Sisoi was
snoring in the next room, and there was a forlorn, friendless, even a
vagrant note in the old man’s cadences.
Sisoi had once been the steward of a diocesan bishop and was known as
“Father Former Steward.” He was seventy years old, and lived sometimes
in a monastery sixteen miles away, sometimes in the city, sometimes
wherever he happened to be. Three days ago he had turned up at the
Pankratievski Monastery, and the bishop had kept him here in order to
discuss with him at his leisure the affairs of the monastery.
The bell for matins rang at half past one. Father Sisoi coughed, growled
something, and got up.
“Father Sisoi!” called the bishop.
Sisoi came in dressed in a white cassock, carrying a candle in his hand.
“I can’t go to sleep,” his Reverence said. “I must be ill. I don’t know
what the matter is; I have fever.”
“You have caught cold, your Lordship. I must rub you with tallow.”
Father Sisoi stood looking at him for a while and yawned: “Ah-h—the Lord
have mercy on us!”
“Erakin has electricity in his store now—I hate it!” he continued.
Father Sisoi was aged, and round-shouldered, and gaunt. He was always
displeased with something or other, and his eyes, which protruded like
those of a crab, always wore an angry expression.
“I don’t like it at all,” he repeated—“I hate it.”