GRÜBELEI—MOSCOW AFTER EXILE—POKROVSKOE—THE DEATH OF MATVEY—FATHER IOANN
Our life in Novgorod had not been a happy one. I had gone there not in
a spirit of self-sacrifice and determination, but with my heart full of
annoyance and exasperation. This second exile, with the vulgarity of its
attendant circumstances, irritated more than it distressed me; it was
not enough of a calamity to rouse the spirit, but was merely a worry,
without the interest of novelty or the stimulus of danger. The mere sight
of the provincial government office with its Elpidifor Antihovitch Zurov,
its councillor Hlopin, and its vice-governor Pimen Arapov, was enough to
poison my existence.
I was ill-humoured; Natalie sank into melancholy. Her sensitive nature,
accustomed from childhood to tears and sadness, gave way again to
brooding depression. She dwelt on painful ideas and readily let slip
everything bright and joyful. Life was becoming more complex; there were
more chords in it and with them more anxiety. After Sasha’s illness had
come the shock of the secret police, her premature confinement, and the
loss of the baby. The death of a baby is scarcely felt by the father,
anxiety over the mother makes him almost forget the little creature
that has flitted away almost before it had time to cry and take the
breast. But to the mother the new-born child is something close and
familiar already; for months she has been _feeling_ him; there has been a
physical, chemical, nervous connection between them; moreover, the baby
makes up to the mother for the burden of pregnancy, for the sufferings of
childbirth; without him her agonies are motiveless and resented, without
him the unwanted milk affects the brain.
After Natalie’s death I found among her papers a note which I had quite
forgotten. It consisted of a few lines I had written an hour or two
before Sasha’s birth. It was a prayer, a blessing, a dedication of the
unborn creature to ‘the service of humanity,’ his ‘consecration to the
path of hardship.’
On the other side was written in Natalie’s hand: ‘_January 1,
1841_.—Yesterday Alexandr gave me this; he could not have made me a
better present, those lines at once called up the whole picture of our
three years of unbroken, boundless happiness, resting on love alone. So
we have passed into a new year; whatever awaits us in it, I bow my head
and say for both of us, Thy Will be done! We welcomed the New Year at
home, in solitude, only A. L. Vitberg was with us. Little Alexandr was
missing from our party, he was so sound asleep, neither past nor future
exists for him yet. Sleep, my angel, free from care, I pray for you—and
for you too, my child unborn, whom I love with all a mother’s love. Your
movements, your tremors mean so much to my heart, and may your coming
into the world be glad and blessed!’
But the mother’s hope was not fulfilled: the babe was sentenced by
Nicholas. The deadly hand of the Russian autocrat intervened here
also—and here also destroyed a life!
The baby’s death left its mark upon her soul.
With sadness and rankling resentment we went to Novgorod.
The _truth_ of that period, as it was seen at the time, without the
artificial perspective given by distance, without the cooling effect of
years, and the different light thrown on it by a series of other events
is preserved in a diary of the period. I had meant to keep a diary, had
begun it many times, but had never kept it up. On my birthday in Novgorod
Natalie gave me a white book in which I sometimes wrote down what was in
my heart, or my head.
This book has been preserved. On the first page Natalie wrote: ‘May all
the pages of this book, and of all your life be bright and joyous!’
Three years later she added on the last page: ‘In 1842 I hoped that all
the pages of your diary might be bright and untroubled; three years have
passed since then, and looking back I do not regret that my hope has not
been fulfilled; both joy and suffering are essential for a full life, and
you will find peace in my love, in the love with which my whole being, my
whole life is filled. Peace to the past and a blessing for the future!
March 25th, 1845, Moscow.’
This was what was written on the 4th of April 1842:
‘Oh Lord, what unbearable misery! Is it weakness or have I a right to
feel it? Must I reckon my life finished? Is all my readiness for work,
all my craving for self-expression to be crushed, till my yearnings are
stifled and I am ready for a life of emptiness? It might be possible
to exist with no object but one’s own inner development, but the same
awful depression comes over me in the midst of study. I must express
myself—perhaps from the same necessity as the grasshopper churrs ... and
for years to come I have to drag this weight.’
And as though frightened at my own words, I followed this with Goethe’s
lines:—
‘Gut verloren—etwas verloren,
Ehre verloren—viel verloren,
Musst Ruhm gewinnen,
Da werden die Leute sich anders besinnen.
Mut verloren—alles verloren,
Da wäre es besser nicht geboren’;
and later:—
‘My shoulders are breaking but still they will bear!’
‘Will those who come after us understand, will they appreciate all
the horror, all the tragic side of our existence? And meanwhile our
sufferings are the soil from which their happiness will develop; will
they understand what makes us slothful, makes us seek all sorts of
pleasure, drink and so on? Why do we not lift our hands to great tasks,
why at the moment of rapture do we not forget our despondency? Let them
stop with musing and sadness before the stones under which we slumber: we
have deserved their mournful thoughts!
‘I cannot go on for long in my position, I shall be stifled—and I don’t
care how I get out of it, if only I get out of it. I have written to
Dubbelt (I asked him to try and get leave for me to return to Moscow).
Writing that letter made me ill, _on se sent flétri_. I expect it is what
prostitutes feel when first they begin selling themselves.’[55]
And it was just this vexation, this impatient cry of revolt, this
fretting for free activity, this feeling of fetters on the limbs that
Natalie misunderstood.
Often I found her with tear-stained eyes by Sasha’s cot; she assured me
that it was nothing but nerves, that I had better not notice it, not
question her.... I believed her.
One evening I returned home late; she was in bed when I went in, I was
feeling sick at heart. F—— had asked me to go and see him in order to
tell me that he suspected that one of our common acquaintances was in
relations with the police. That sort of thing usually sends a pang to the
heart, not so much from the possible danger as from the feeling of moral
repulsion.
I walked up and down the room in silence, turning over what I had just
heard, when all at once I fancied that Natalie was weeping; I took her
handkerchief, it was soaked with tears.
‘What is it?’ I asked, alarmed and distressed.
She took my hand and in a voice full of tears said:
‘My dear, I will tell you the truth; perhaps it is self-love, egoism,
madness, but I feel, I see, that I cannot distract your mind, you are
bored,—I understand it, I don’t blame you, but it hurts me, it hurts
me, and I cry. I know that you love me, that you are sorry for me, but
you don’t know what makes you depressed, what gives you that feeling of
emptiness, you feel the poverty of your life—and, indeed, what can I do
for you?’
I was like a man suddenly roused in the middle of the night and told
something terrible before he is quite awake: he is frightened and
trembling, though he doesn’t yet understand what is wrong. I was so
completely at peace, so sure of our deep, perfect love, that I never
spoke about it; it was the great assumption upon which all our life
rested; a serene consciousness, a boundless conviction of it excluding
doubt, even distrust of myself, was the fundamental basis of my
happiness. Peace, tranquillity, the aesthetic side of life, all that—as
before our meeting in the graveyard on the 9th of May 1838, as at the
beginning of our life in Vladimir—rested on her, on her, on her!
My deep distress and my astonishment at first dissipated these clouds,
but in a month or two they began to return. I soothed and comforted
her; she smiled herself at the dark phantoms, and again the sunshine
brightened our corner; but as soon as I had forgotten them they raised
their heads again for no reason whatever, and when they had passed I
began to be afraid of their return.
Such was the state of mind in which in July 1842 we moved to Moscow.
Moscow life, at first too full of distractions, could have no beneficial
nor soothing effect. Far from helping her at that time I gave only too
much cause for her _Grübelei_ to grow deeper and more intense.[56]
* * * * *
Natalie became absorbed in melancholy, more and more her faith in me
wavered, her idol was shattered. It was a crisis, the painful transition
from youth to maturity. She could not get over the thoughts that fretted
her heart, she was ill, and grew thin—while terrified and reproaching
myself I stood beside her and saw that I had no longer the boundless
power with which I had once been able to exorcise the spirits of gloom.
It wounded me to see it, and I was immensely sorry for her.
They say that children grow in illness; in this spiritual illness which
brought her to the verge of consumption she made colossal strides in
growth. From the slanting rays and glow of dawn she passed by this
sorrowful path into the clear bright light of midday. Her health was
equal to the strain and that was all that mattered. Without losing one
iota of her womanliness she developed intellectually with extraordinary
boldness and depth. Gently and with a smile of self-sacrifice she left
behind what was lost beyond recall, without sentimental repining, without
a sense of personal grievance, and on the other hand without conceited
satisfaction.
It was not in a book, nor through a book, that she found her freedom,
but through living and clearness of vision. Unimportant incidents,
bitter experiences, which for many would have passed without a trace,
left a deep imprint on her soul and were enough to arouse her mind to
immense activity. A slight hint was sufficient for her to pass from one
deduction to another, till she reached that fearless grasp of the truth
which is a heavy burden even for a man to bear. Mournfully she parted
from her shrine in which had stood so many holy things, bathed in tears
of grief and joy; she left them without blushing as big girls blush at
the sight of their doll of yesterday. She did not turn away from them,
she let them go with anguish, knowing that she would be the poorer, the
more defenceless for the loss, that the soft light of the glimmering ikon
lamp would be followed by the grey dawn, that she must make friends with
harsh, callous forces, deaf to the murmur of prayer, deaf to the hopes of
immortality. She gently put them from her bosom like a dead child, and
gently laid them in the grave, respecting in them her past life, their
poetry and the comfort they had given at some moments. Even later she
disliked touching them coldly, just as we avoid wantonly stepping on a
grave.
With this intense mental activity, with this shattering and rebuilding of
all her convictions, she naturally needed rest and solitude.
We went away to my father’s estate near Moscow.
And as soon as we found ourselves alone surrounded by trees and fields,
we breathed freely and looked clearly at life again. We stayed in the
country until late autumn. From time to time we had visitors from Moscow.
Ketscher stayed a month with us, all our friends arrived for the 26th of
August, Natalie’s nameday; then again peace and stillness and the woods
and the fields—and no one but ourselves.
Pokrovskoe, standing solitary, surrounded by immense forest estates, was
of quite a different and much more serious character than Vassilyevskoe,
lying so sunnily with its villages on the bank of the Moskva. This
difference was even noticeable in the peasants. The Pokrovskoe peasants,
hemmed in by woods, were less like people living within reach of Moscow
than those of Vassilyevskoe, although as a fact they were fifteen miles
nearer the city. They were quieter, more unsophisticated, and hung
together very closely. My father moved a wealthy family of peasants from
Vassilyevskoe to Pokrovskoe, but the peasants of the latter place never
considered the family as belonging to their village, but always called
them ‘the settlers.’
With Pokrovskoe, too, I had been closely connected throughout my
childhood; I used to stay there when I was too young to remember, and
from the year 1821 we used to spend a few days there almost every summer
on our way to and from Vassilyevskoe. There lived old Kashentsov,
paralysed and in disgrace since 1813, who dreamed of seeing his master,
the Senator, in all his finery and regalia; there lived—and later in the
cholera of 1831 died—the venerable grey-headed corpulent village elder,
Vassily Yakovlyev, whom I remembered at all his stages with his beard
first dark brown and afterwards quite grey; there lived my foster-brother
Nikifor, who prided himself on the fact that he had for my benefit been
robbed of the milk of his mother, who died later on in a madhouse....
The little village of some twenty or twenty-five homesteads stood at some
distance from our rather large house. On one side lay a semicircular
meadow that had been cleared and fenced in, on the other there was a view
of the river, dammed up for the sake of a mill which they had intended to
build fifteen years before, and of an ancient wooden church all on the
slant, which my uncle the Senator and my father, who owned the estate in
common, had also been intending to repair for the last fifteen years.
The house which had been built by the Senator was a very good one; there
were lofty rooms, big windows, and on both sides porches that were like
verandahs. It was built of choice thick logs, not covered with anything
either outside or in, but with the crevices stuffed up with tow and moss.
The walls smelt of resin, which oozed out here and there like drops of
amber. Before the house there was a small field and beyond that began
a dark forest of large trees, through which ran a track to Zvenigorod;
in the other direction a side-path ran like a thin, dusty ribbon by the
village and was lost in the rye, coming out through the Maikovsky factory
and going on to the Mozhaisk road. There was the forest stillness and
the forest sound, the incessant buzzing of flies, bees, and insects,
... and the fragrance ... that fragrance of grass and forest, made up
of the scents of plants, of leaves, but not of flowers ... which I have
so eagerly sought in Italy and in England, both in spring and in hot
summer, but scarcely ever found. Sometimes one gets a whiff of it in the
hay-field, or when the sirocco is blowing, or before a storm ... and it
brings back the little place before the house, on which, to the great
distress of the village elder and the house-serfs, I would not have the
grass clipped close; on the grass a boy of three, rolling in the clover
and the dandelions among the grasshoppers and ladybirds, and we ourselves
and youth and friendship!
The sun has set, it is still very warm, we don’t want to go home, we
still sit on the grass. Ketscher sorts out the mushrooms and scolds me
for no reason. Can that be the tinkle of a bell? Is it something for
us? Perhaps—it is Saturday. ‘It must be the police-captain going off
somewhere,’ says Ketscher, suspecting that it is not. The troika rattles
through the village, rumbles over the bridge, disappears behind a knoll,
and the only road is towards us. While we run to meet it, it drives up
to the house; Shtchepkin has already rolled off it like an avalanche,
smiling, kissing his hand, and roaring with laughter, while Byelinsky,
cursing the distance from Pokrovskoe and the way that Russian carts and
Russian roads are made, is still alighting and stretching himself, and
already Ketscher is scolding them: ‘What devil has brought you at eight
o’clock in the evening, couldn’t you have come sooner, it is all that
perverse Byelinsky, he can’t get up early, what were you thinking about?’
‘Why, he is more of a savage than ever,’ says Byelinsky, ‘and what a head
of hair he has grown! You would do for the moving forest in _Macbeth_,
Ketscher. Wait a bit, don’t exhaust all your abuse, there are villains
coming later still.’
Another troika is already turning into the yard, Granovsky and Yevgeny
Korsh.
‘Have you come to stay long?’
‘Two days.’
‘Splendid!’ and Ketscher himself is so pleased that he greets them almost
as Tarass Bulba greeted his sons.
Yes, that was one of the happy periods of our life. Of past storms
nothing remained but a trace of vanishing cloud; at home among our
friends there was perfect harmony.
But a senseless fatality very nearly spoilt it all.
One evening Matvey, showing Sasha something on the dam where we too were
standing, slipped and fell into the water on the shallow side. Sasha
was terrified, he rushed up to him as he got out, held him tight in his
little arms and repeated tearfully: ‘Don’t go there, you’ll be drowned!’
No one imagined that the child’s embrace was the last Matvey would
receive and that Sasha’s words were indeed a terrible prophecy.
Drenched and covered with mud, Matvey went to bed and we never saw him
again.
At seven o’clock next morning I was standing on the verandah when I
heard voices growing louder and louder, confused screams, and then
peasants came into sight running at full speed. ‘What has happened?’ ‘Oh,
something dreadful,’ they answered, ‘your man is drowning ... they pulled
one out in time but they can’t get the other.’ I rushed to the river, the
village elder was there with his boots off and his breeches tucked up;
two peasants were throwing a net from a canoe. Five minutes later they
shouted: ‘We have got him, we have got him!’ and dragged Matvey’s dead
body to the bank. The young man, so blooming, handsome, and rosy-cheeked,
lay with wide-open eyes in which there was no trace of life, and already
the lower part of his face was beginning to swell. The village elder laid
the body on the bank, sternly bade the peasants not to touch it, threw a
coat over it, set a man to watch it, and sent for the rural police....
When I returned home I met Natalie; she knew already what had happened
and ran to me sobbing.
We were sorry, very sorry to lose Matvey. He had played so intimate a
part in our little family, he was so closely bound up with all the chief
events of its last five years, and he loved us so truly that we could not
easily get over his loss.
‘Perhaps,’ I wrote at the time, ‘death may have been a blessing for him,
life had terrible blows in store for him and he had no way of avoiding
them. But it is dreadful to witness such a way of escape from the future.
He had developed under my influence, but in too great a hurry; his
development was a worry to him through its one-sidedness.’
The melancholy side of Matvey’s life lay precisely in the gulf which the
haphazard character of his education had brought with it, and in his
incapacity for filling it up, his lack of strength of will for overcoming
it. In him generous feelings and a tender heart were stronger than
intellect or character. Rapidly, like a woman, he assimilated a great
deal, especially of our outlook on life; but he was incapable of going
humbly back to the first elements, to the ABC, and filling in the blanks
and empty places by study. He did not like his calling and, indeed, he
could not like it. Social inequality is nowhere apparent in so degrading
and humiliating a form as in the relations between master and servant.
Rothschild in the street is far more on an equality with the beggar who
stands with a broom and sweeps away the mud before him than with his
valet in silk stockings and white gloves.
The complaints made of servants, which we hear every day, are quite
as just as the servants’ complaints against their masters, and that
not because either class has grown worse than it was, but because they
are growing more and more conscious of their mutual relation. It is
oppressive to the servant and corrupting to the master.
We are so accustomed to our aristocratic attitude to servants that we do
not notice it at all. How many good-natured and sensitive young ladies
there are in the world, ready to weep over a frozen puppy and to give
their last farthing to a beggar, who will yet drive through severe frost
to a fancy dress ball for the benefit of the destitute in Syria, or a
concert given for burnt-out villagers in Abyssinia, and will ask their
mother to stay for one more quadrille without a thought of the little
postillion boy on horseback with the blood freezing in his veins in the
night frost.
The attitude of masters to their servants is loathsome. The workman at
any rate knows what his job is; he does something; he can do it more
quickly and then be free, besides he can dream of becoming his own
master. The servant can never finish his work, he is like a squirrel in
a wheel; life makes dirt, it makes dirt incessantly, and the servant is
incessantly cleaning up after it. He is obliged to take upon himself all
the petty discomforts of life, all its dirty and tedious aspects. He is
put into a livery to show he is not his own man but some one else’s. He
waits upon a man who is twice as strong and healthy as himself, he must
step into the mud that the other may go dry-shod, he must be cold that
the other may be warm.
Rothschild does not make the starving Irishman look on at his feasts of
Lucullus, he does not send him to pour out Clos-de-Vougeot for twenty
persons, with the unspoken understanding that if he pours out a glass for
himself he will be turned away as a thief. The Irish peasant is luckier
too than the indoor slave because he does not know what soft beds and
fragrant wines are like.
Matvey was fifteen when he came to me from Sonnenberg, with him I lived
in exile and with him in Vladimir; he was our servant at the time when
we were without money. He looked after Sasha like a nurse, and had a
boundless faith in me and a blind devotion to me, which came from his
understanding that I was not really a master. His relation to me was more
like that which existed in old days between the pupils of the Italian
artists and their _maestri_. I was often vexed with him, but not in the
least as a servant.... I felt worried about his future; oppressed by
his position and unhappy about it, he did nothing to escape from it. At
his age if he had cared to work he might have begun a new life; but to
do so needed persevering hard work, often tiresome and often childish.
His reading was confined to novels and poetry. His understanding and
appreciation of them was sometimes very correct, but serious reading
wearied him. He was slow and inaccurate in reckoning, and his writing was
bad and illegible. How often have I insisted on his working at arithmetic
and handwriting, but never could get him to do it: instead of Russian
grammar, he would at one time take up the French alphabet, at another
German dialogues; of course, that was waste of time and only discouraged
him. I used to scold him vigorously for it; he would be mortified,
sometimes shed tears and say that he was an unlucky man and that it was
too late to study; sometimes he would come to such depths of despair as
to wish for death, would fling up all his pursuits and would spend weeks,
even months in idleness and boredom.
With modest abilities and not too wide an aim, all might yet have been
well. But unhappily in those spiritually sensitive but soft characters
the energy is mostly wasted on rushing ahead in spurts, and there is
no energy left for going forward steadily. From the distance they have
a vision of education and culture on their poetical side, they would
like to grasp them, forgetting their lack of technical equipment, of the
fingering without which no instrument is mastered.
I often asked myself whether his half-education was not a poisoned gift;
what awaited him in the future?
Fate cut the Gordian knot.
Poor Matvey! Even his funeral was surrounded with all the gloomy
oppressiveness and horrible accompaniments which were yet typically
Russian. At midday the police-sergeant arrived together with his clerk
and our village priest, a very old man and a great drunkard. They saw
the body, asked questions and sat down to write the answers. The priest,
who was neither writing nor reading, put on a big pair of silver-rimmed
spectacles and sat in silence sighing, yawning, and making the sign of
the cross over his mouth, then suddenly turned to the village elder and
making a movement as though he had an insufferable pain in his back,
asked him: ‘I say, Savely Gavrilovitch, will there be a little bit of
lunch?’
The village elder, a dignified peasant, promoted to his position by the
Senator and my father, because he was a good carpenter, did not belong to
the village (consequently he knew nothing of what went on in it). He was
very handsome in spite of being sixty. He stroked his beard, which was
combed out like a fan, and as though he had nothing whatever to do with
the matter, answered in a deep bass, looking at me from under his brow:
‘About that we can give no information!’
‘There will,’ I answered, and called a servant.
‘Thanks be to Thee, O Lord! and indeed it is high time; I get up early,
Alexandr Ivanovitch, and I am sick with hunger.’
The police-sergeant laid down his pen and, rubbing his hands, said,
preening himself: ‘I fancy Father Ioann is hungry; a good thing too, if
our host doesn’t mind, we might have a snack.’
The servant brought a cold lunch with sweet vodka, home-made liqueurs,
and sherry.
‘Say a blessing, Father, since you are shepherd; set the example and we
sinners will follow you,’ observed the police-sergeant.
With great haste and with an extremely condensed grace, the priest took
a wine-glass of sweet vodka, put a bit of crumb of bread into his mouth,
munched it, and at the same time drank off another glassful, and then
quietly and persistently set to work on the ham.
The police-sergeant, too—and this is vividly impressed on my memory—was
particularly pleased with the sweet vodka, and after taking a second
glass, he turned to me with the air of a connoisseur and observed: ‘I
expect your _Doppelkümmel_ came from widow Rouget’s?’
I had no idea where the vodka had been bought, and told them to bring
the bottle; the vodka really had come from widow Rouget’s. What practice
a man must have had to be able to tell the name of the maker from the
bouquet of a vodka!
When they had finished, the village elder put a bundle of oats and a
sack of potatoes in the police-sergeant’s cart; the clerk, who had had
a good deal to drink in the kitchen, got on the box, and he and the
police-sergeant drove away. With unsteady footsteps the priest set off
homewards, picking his teeth with a shaving. I was giving orders to the
servants about the funeral when suddenly Father Ioann stopped and began
waving his hands: the village elder ran up to him and then back to me.
‘What has happened?’
‘Oh, the Father bade me ask your honour,’ answered the elder, not
concealing a smile, ‘“Who,” says he, “will arrange a memorial feast for
the dead man?”’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I told him not to be anxious; there will be pancakes all right, I said.’
Matvey was buried, pancakes and vodka were given to the priest, and it
all left a long, dark shadow behind it. I still had a terrible task
before me—telling his mother.
I cannot part from this worthy priest of the Church of the Veil of Our
Lady in the village of Pokrovskoe without saying a little more about him.
Father Ioann was not a fashionable priest from the seminary; he did not
know the Greek declensions nor the Latin syntax. He was over seventy,
and he had spent half his life as a deacon in a big village belonging
to Elizaveta Alexeyevna Golohvastov, who induced the Metropolitan to
ordain him priest and appoint him to a vacancy in my father’s village.
Though he had tried all his life to accustom himself to taking an immense
quantity of strong drink, he could never get over its effect, and hence
was invariably drunk after midday. He drank to such an extent that often
after a wedding or a christening in neighbouring villages, which formed
part of his parish, the peasants would carry him out dead-drunk, lay him
like a sheaf of corn on his cart, tie the reins to the bar in front and
send him off under the sole supervision of his horse. The nag, who knew
the road well, brought him home without fail. His wife, too, got drunk
every time the Lord sent her the means. But what is more remarkable is
that his daughter at fourteen could toss off a whole teacupful of vodka
without turning a hair.
The peasants despised him and all his family; on one occasion, they even
complained against him to the Senator and to my father, who asked the
Metropolitan to inquire into the matter. The peasants charged him with
being very extortionate in asking for money, with refusing for over three
days to bury a man without payment beforehand, and declining to perform
weddings altogether until he had been paid. The Metropolitan or the
Consistory found the peasants’ complaint a just one and sent Father Ioann
for two or three months to humbler duties. The priest returned from this
correction not only twice as drunken, but a thief as well.
Our servants used to tell us that on the dedication day of the church an
old peasant, drinking with the priest when both were drunk, said: ‘You
are such a disgrace we had to bring it before his Reverence! You wouldn’t
mend your ways so they clipped your wings for you.’ The offended priest
is said to have replied: ‘Well, I pay you out, you rascals, for whether I
marry you or whether I bury you, it is the very worst prayers I say for
you.’
A year later, that is in 1844, we were again spending the summer in
Pokrovskoe. The grey-headed, thin, old priest was still drinking in the
same way, and still as unable to resist the effect of vodka. He got into
the habit of coming after service on Sundays to see me, drinking too much
vodka and sitting for two hours or more. I got sick of this. I told them
to tell him I was not at home, and actually hid in the wood to escape
from him. But even this did not settle him. ‘The master not at home?’ he
said, ‘but the vodka is at home, surely? I’ll be bound he did not take it
with him?’ My servant brought him out into the vestibule a large glass
of sweet vodka, and the priest, after drinking it and having a snack of
caviare, meekly went his way.
At last our acquaintance was broken off completely.
One morning the sacristan, a tall, lanky fellow with his hair done like
a woman’s, arrived to see me, together with his freckled young wife;
they were both in great excitement, both talked at once, both shed tears
simultaneously and wiped them away at the same moment.
The sacristan in a sort of flat falsetto, his wife with a terrible lisp,
vied with each other in telling me that their watch had been stolen a few
days before and also a box in which there were fifty roubles, that the
sacristan’s wife had found the ‘fief’ and that this ‘fief’ was no other
than our worthy pastor and Father in Christ, Ioann.
The proofs were conclusive; the sacristan’s wife had found a piece of
the lid of the stolen box amongst the rubbish swept out of the priest’s
house. They came to beg me to take their part. Although I explained
to them several times over the distribution of authority between the
spiritual and the secular powers, the sacristan still persisted and his
wife still wept; I did not know what to do. I felt sorry for them; they
valued their loss at ninety roubles. After thinking a little I ordered
the cart to be got ready and sent the village elder with a letter to
the police-captain; I asked him for the advice which the sacristan
hoped to get from me. Towards evening the village elder returned, the
police-captain had told him to give me a verbal message: ‘Drop the thing
or the Consistory will intervene and make a bobbery. Tell your master not
to interfere with the long-haired gentry if he does not want his hands
to stink.’ This answer, and the last observation particularly, Savely
Gavrilovitch delivered with great satisfaction.
‘But that the Father stole the box,’ he added, ‘that is as sure as that I
am standing here.’
I regretfully repeated to the sacristan the answer of the secular
authority. The elder, on the contrary, said to him reassuringly: ‘Come,
why are you so down-hearted already? Wait a bit, we’ll be even with him
yet. Are you an old woman or a sacristan?’
And the elder with the help of others did get even with him.
Whether Savely Gavrilovitch was a dissenter or not I do not know for
certain, but the peasants of the family brought from Vassilyevskoe when
my father sold it were all Old Believers. Sober, shrewd, and hard-working
people, they all hated the priest. One of them whom the peasants called
the corn-chandler had his own shop in Neglinny Street in Moscow. The
story of the stolen watch reached him at once; making inquiries, the
corn-chandler discovered that a deacon out of a place, a son-in-law of
the Pokrovskoe priest, had offered to sell or pawn a watch, and that this
watch was at the money-changer’s; the corn-chandler knew the sacristan’s
watch, he went to the money-changer’s and at once saw that it was the
very watch. Not sparing his horses in his delight, he arrived himself in
Pokrovskoe with the news.
Then with the complete proofs in his hand, the sacristan went to the
head-priest of the district. Three days later I heard that the priest had
paid the sacristan a hundred roubles and they were reconciled.
‘How was that?’ I asked the sacristan.
‘The head-priest, as your honour heard, graciously sent for our Herod. He
kept him a long time and what passed I don’t know. Only afterwards he was
pleased to summon me and said to me sternly: “What is this silly quarrel?
For shame, young man, anything may happen in drink. The old man, as you
see, is old, he might be your father. He will give you a hundred roubles
to make it right. Are you satisfied?” “I am satisfied, your Reverence.”
“Well, if you are satisfied, then keep your jaw shut, there is no need
to set the bells ringing, he is over seventy, anyway; if you don’t, mind
I’ll make you smart too.”’
And this drunken thief, unmasked by the corn-chandler, came back to
perform his sacred duties before the same village elder who had so
confidently told me that he had stolen the box; within the choir the same
sacristan in whose pocket the celebrated watch was now for ever and ever
marking the fleeting hours; and—before the very same peasants!
That happened in 1844, about thirty-five miles from Moscow, and I was an
eye-witness of it all!
It would be no wonder if at the summons of Father Ioann the Holy Ghost,
as in Beranger’s ballad, refused to come down.
‘Non, dit l’esprit saint, je ne descends pas.’
How was it they did not dismiss him?
A minister of the Church, our sages of Orthodoxy will tell us, can like
Caesar’s wife never be suspected.