forced me back. A tall thick-set deacon walked before me with a long red
candle; the grey-headed archimandrite in his golden mitre hurried after
him with the censer. When they had vanished from sight the crowd
squeezed me back to my former position. But ten minutes had not passed
before a new wave burst on me, and again the deacon appeared. This time
he was followed by the Father Sub-Prior, the man who, as Ieronim had
told me, was writing the history of the monastery.
As I mingled with the crowd and caught the infection of the universal
joyful excitement, I felt unbearably sore on Ieronim's account. Why did
they not send someone to relieve him? Why could not someone of less
feeling and less susceptibility go on the ferry? 'Lift up thine eyes, O
Sion, and look around,' they sang in the choir, 'for thy children have
come to thee as to a beacon of divine light from north and south, and
from east and from the sea. . . .'
I looked at the faces; they all had a lively expression of triumph, but
not one was listening to what was being sung and taking it in, and not
one was 'holding his breath.' Why was not Ieronim released? I could
fancy Ieronim standing meekly somewhere by the wall, bending forward and
hungrily drinking in the beauty of the holy phrase. All this that glided
by the ears of the people standing by me he would have eagerly drunk in
with his delicately sensitive soul, and would have been spell-bound to
ecstasy, to holding his breath, and there would not have been a man
happier than he in all the church. Now he was plying to and fro over the
dark river and grieving for his dead friend and brother.
The wave surged back. A stout smiling monk, playing with his rosary and
looking round behind him, squeezed sideways by me, making way for a lady
in a hat and velvet cloak. A monastery servant hurried after the lady,
holding a chair over our heads.
I came out of the church. I wanted to have a look at the dead Nikolay,
the unknown canticle writer. I walked about the monastery wall, where
there was a row of cells, peeped into several windows, and, seeing
nothing, came back again. I do not regret now that I did not see
Nikolay; God knows, perhaps if I had seen him I should have lost the
picture my imagination paints for me now. I imagine the lovable poetical
figure solitary and not understood, who went out at nights to call to
Ieronim over the water, and filled his hymns with flowers, stars and
sunbeams, as a pale timid man with soft mild melancholy features. His
eyes must have shone, not only with intelligence, but with kindly
tenderness and that hardly restrained childlike enthusiasm which I could
hear in Ieronim's voice when he quoted to me passages from the hymns.
When we came out of church after mass it was no longer night. The
morning was beginning. The stars had gone out and the sky was a morose
greyish blue. The iron slabs, the tombstones and the buds on the trees
were covered with dew There was a sharp freshness in the air. Outside
the precincts I did not find the same animated scene as I had beheld in
the night. Horses and men looked exhausted, drowsy, scarcely moved,
while nothing was left of the tar barrels but heaps of black ash. When
anyone is exhausted and sleepy he fancies that nature, too, is in the
same condition. It seemed to me that the trees and the young grass were
asleep. It seemed as though even the bells were not pealing so loudly
and gaily as at night. The restlessness was over, and of the excitement
nothing was left but a pleasant weariness, a longing for sleep and
warmth.
Now I could see both banks of the river; a faint mist hovered over it in
shifting masses. There was a harsh cold breath from the water. When I
jumped on to the ferry, a chaise and some two dozen men and women were
standing on it already. The rope, wet and as I fancied drowsy, stretched
far away across the broad river and in places disappeared in the white
mist.
"Christ is risen! Is there no one else?" asked a soft voice.
I recognized the voice of Ieronim. There was no darkness now to hinder
me from seeing the monk. He was a tall narrow-shouldered man of five-
and-thirty, with large rounded features, with half-closed listless-
looking eyes and an unkempt wedge-shaped beard. He had an
extraordinarily sad and exhausted look.
"They have not relieved you yet?" I asked in surprise.
"Me?" he answered, turning to me his chilled and dewy face with a smile.
"There is no one to take my place now till morning. They'll all be going
to the Father Archimandrite's to break the fast directly."
With the help of a little peasant in a hat of reddish fur that looked
like the little wooden tubs in which honey is sold, he threw his weight
on the rope; they gasped simultaneously, and the ferry started.
We floated across, disturbing on the way the lazily rising mist.
Everyone was silent. Ieronim worked mechanically with one hand. He
slowly passed his mild lustreless eyes over us; then his glance rested
on the rosy face of a young merchant's wife with black eyebrows, who was
standing on the ferry beside me silently shrinking from the mist that
wrapped her about. He did not take his eyes off her face all the way.
There was little that was masculine in that prolonged gaze. It seemed to
me that Ieronim was looking in the woman's face for the soft and tender
features of his dead friend.
A NIGHTMARE
Kunin, a young man of thirty, who was a permanent member of the Rural
Board, on returning from Petersburg to his district, Borisovo,
immediately sent a mounted messenger to Sinkino, for the priest there,
Father Yakov Smirnov.
Five hours later Father Yakov appeared.
"Very glad to make your acquaintance," said Kunin, meeting him in the
entry. "I've been living and serving here for a year; it seems as though
we ought to have been acquainted before. You are very welcome! But . . .
how young you are!" Kunin added in surprise. "What is your age?"
"Twenty-eight, . . ." said Father Yakov, faintly pressing Kunin's
outstretched hand, and for some reason turning crimson.
Kunin led his visitor into his study and began looking at him more
attentively.
"What an uncouth womanish face!" he thought.
There certainly was a good deal that was womanish in Father Yakov's
face: the turned-up nose, the bright red cheeks, and the large grey-blue
eyes with scanty, scarcely perceptible eyebrows. His long reddish hair,
smooth and dry, hung down in straight tails on to his shoulders. The
hair on his upper lip was only just beginning to form into a real
masculine moustache, while his little beard belonged to that class of
good-for-nothing beards which among divinity students are for some
reason called "ticklers." It was scanty and extremely transparent; it
could not have been stroked or combed, it could only have been pinched.
. . . All these scanty decorations were put on unevenly in tufts, as
though Father Yakov, thinking to dress up as a priest and beginning to
gum on the beard, had been interrupted halfway through. He had on a
cassock, the colour of weak coffee with chicory in it, with big patches
on both elbows.
"A queer type," thought Kunin, looking at his muddy skirts. "Comes to
the house for the first time and can't dress decently.
"Sit down, Father," he began more carelessly than cordially, as he moved
an easy-chair to the table. "Sit down, I beg you."
Father Yakov coughed into his fist, sank awkwardly on to the edge of the
chair, and laid his open hands on his knees. With his short figure, his
narrow chest, his red and perspiring face, he made from the first moment
a most unpleasant impression on Kunin. The latter could never have
imagined that there were such undignified and pitiful-looking priests in
Russia; and in Father Yakov's attitude, in the way he held his hands on
his knees and sat on the very edge of his chair, he saw a lack of
dignity and even a shade of servility.
"I have invited you on business, Father. . . ." Kunin began, sinking
back in his low chair. "It has fallen to my lot to perform the agreeable
duty of helping you in one of your useful undertakings. . . . On coming
back from Petersburg, I found on my table a letter from the Marshal of
Nobility. Yegor Dmitrevitch suggests that I should take under my
supervision the church parish school which is being opened in Sinkino. I
shall be very glad to, Father, with all my heart. . . . More than that,
I accept the proposition with enthusiasm."
Kunin got up and walked about the study.
"Of course, both Yegor Dmitrevitch and probably you, too, are aware that
I have not great funds at my disposal. My estate is mortgaged, and I
live exclusively on my salary as the permanent member. So that you
cannot reckon on very much assistance, but I will do all that is in my
power. . . . And when are you thinking of opening the school Father?"
"When we have the money, . . ." answered Father Yakov.
"You have some funds at your disposal already?"
"Scarcely any. . . . The peasants settled at their meeting that they
would pay, every man of them, thirty kopecks a year; but that's only a
promise, you know! And for the first beginning we should need at least
two hundred roubles. . . ."
"M'yes. . . . Unhappily, I have not that sum now," said Kunin with a
sigh. "I spent all I had on my tour and got into debt, too. Let us try
and think of some plan together."
Kunin began planning aloud. He explained his views and watched Father
Yakov's face, seeking signs of agreement or approval in it. But the face
was apathetic and immobile, and expressed nothing but constrained
shyness and uneasiness. Looking at it, one might have supposed that
Kunin was talking of matters so abstruse that Father Yakov did not
understand and only listened from good manners, and was at the same time
afraid of being detected in his failure to understand.
"The fellow is not one of the brightest, that's evident . . ." thought
Kunin. "He's rather shy and much too stupid."
Father Yakov revived somewhat and even smiled only when the footman came
into the study bringing in two glasses of tea on a tray and a cake-
basket full of biscuits. He took his glass and began drinking at once.
"Shouldn't we write at once to the bishop?" Kunin went on, meditating
aloud. "To be precise, you know, it is not we, not the Zemstvo, but the
higher ecclesiastical authorities, who have raised the question of the
church parish schools. They ought really to apportion the funds. I
remember I read that a sum of money had been set aside for the purpose.
Do you know nothing about it?"
Father Yakov was so absorbed in drinking tea that he did not answer this
question at once. He lifted his grey-blue eyes to Kunin, thought a
moment, and as though recalling his question, he shook his head in the
negative. An expression of pleasure and of the most ordinary prosaic
appetite overspread his face from ear to ear. He drank and smacked his
lips over every gulp. When he had drunk it to the very last drop, he put
his glass on the table, then took his glass back again, looked at the
bottom of it, then put it back again. The expression of pleasure faded
from his face. . . . Then Kunin saw his visitor take a biscuit from the
cake-basket, nibble a little bit off it, then turn it over in his hand
and hurriedly stick it in his pocket.
"Well, that's not at all clerical!" thought Kunin, shrugging his
shoulders contemptuously. "What is it, priestly greed or childishness?"
After giving his visitor another glass of tea and seeing him to the
entry, Kunin lay down on the sofa and abandoned himself to the
unpleasant feeling induced in him by the visit of Father Yakov.
"What a strange wild creature!" he thought. "Dirty, untidy, coarse,
stupid, and probably he drinks. . . . My God, and that's a priest, a
spiritual father! That's a teacher of the people! I can fancy the irony
there must be in the deacon's face when before every mass he booms out:
'Thy blessing, Reverend Father!' A fine reverend Father! A reverend
Father without a grain of dignity or breeding, hiding biscuits in his
pocket like a schoolboy. . . . Fie! Good Lord, where were the bishop's
eyes when he ordained a man like that? What can he think of the people
if he gives them a teacher like that? One wants people here who . . ."
And Kunin thought what Russian priests ought to be like.
"If I were a priest, for instance. . . . An educated priest fond of his
work might do a great deal. . . . I should have had the school opened
long ago. And the sermons? If the priest is sincere and is inspired by
love for his work, what wonderful rousing sermons he might give!"
Kunin shut his eyes and began mentally composing a sermon. A little
later he sat down to the table and rapidly began writing.
"I'll give it to that red-haired fellow, let him read it in church, . .
." he thought.
The following Sunday Kunin drove over to Sinkino in the morning to
settle the question of the school, and while he was there to make
acquaintance with the church of which he was a parishioner. In spite of
the awful state of the roads, it was a glorious morning. The sun was
shining brightly and cleaving with its rays the layers of white snow
still lingering here and there. The snow as it took leave of the earth
glittered with such diamonds that it hurt the eyes to look, while the
young winter corn was hastily thrusting up its green beside it. The
rooks floated with dignity over the fields. A rook would fly, drop to
earth, and give several hops before standing firmly on its feet. . . .
The wooden church up to which Kunin drove was old and grey; the columns
of the porch had once been painted white, but the colour had now
completely peeled off, and they looked like two ungainly shafts. The
ikon over the door looked like a dark smudged blur. But its poverty
touched and softened Kunin. Modestly dropping his eyes, he went into the
church and stood by the door. The service had only just begun. An old
sacristan, bent into a bow, was reading the "Hours" in a hollow
indistinct tenor. Father Yakov, who conducted the service without a
deacon, was walking about the church, burning incense. Had it not been
for the softened mood in which Kunin found himself on entering the
poverty-stricken church, he certainly would have smiled at the sight of
Father Yakov. The short priest was wearing a crumpled and extremely long
robe of some shabby yellow material; the hem of the robe trailed on the
ground.
The church was not full. Looking at the parishioners, Kunin was struck
at the first glance by one strange circumstance: he saw nothing but old
people and children. . . . Where were the men of working age? Where was
the youth and manhood? But after he had stood there a little and looked
more attentively at the aged-looking faces, Kunin saw that he had
mistaken young people for old. He did not, however, attach any
significance to this little optical illusion.
The church was as cold and grey inside as outside. There was not one
spot on the ikons nor on the dark brown walls which was not begrimed and
defaced by time. There were many windows, but the general effect of
colour was grey, and so it was twilight in the church.
"Anyone pure in soul can pray here very well," thought Kunin. "Just as
in St. Peter's in Rome one is impressed by grandeur, here one is touched
by the lowliness and simplicity."
But his devout mood vanished like smoke as soon as Father Yakov went up
to the altar and began mass. Being still young and having come straight
from the seminary bench to the priesthood, Father Yakov had not yet
formed a set manner of celebrating the service. As he read he seemed to
be vacillating between a high tenor and a thin bass; he bowed clumsily,
walked quickly, and opened and shut the gates abruptly. . . . The old
sacristan, evidently deaf and ailing, did not hear the prayers very
distinctly, and this very often led to slight misunderstandings. Before
Father Yakov had time to finish what he had to say, the sacristan began
chanting his response, or else long after Father Yakov had finished the
old man would be straining his ears, listening in the direction of the
altar and saying nothing till his skirt was pulled. The old man had a
sickly hollow voice and an asthmatic quavering lisp. . . . The complete
lack of dignity and decorum was emphasized by a very small boy who
seconded the sacristan and whose head was hardly visible over the
railing of the choir. The boy sang in a shrill falsetto and seemed to be
trying to avoid singing in tune. Kunin stayed a little while, listened
and went out for a smoke. He was disappointed, and looked at the grey
church almost with dislike.
"They complain of the decline of religious feeling among the people . .
." he sighed. "I should rather think so! They'd better foist a few more
priests like this one on them!"
Kunin went back into the church three times, and each time he felt a
great temptation to get out into the open air again. Waiting till the
end of the mass, he went to Father Yakov's. The priest's house did not
differ outwardly from the peasants' huts, but the thatch lay more
smoothly on the roof and there were little white curtains in the
windows. Father Yakov led Kunin into a light little room with a clay
floor and walls covered with cheap paper; in spite of some painful
efforts towards luxury in the way of photographs in frames and a clock
with a pair of scissors hanging on the weight the furnishing of the room
impressed him by its scantiness. Looking at the furniture, one might
have supposed that Father Yakov had gone from house to house and
collected it in bits; in one place they had given him a round three-
legged table, in another a stool, in a third a chair with a back bent
violently backwards; in a fourth a chair with an upright back, but the
seat smashed in; while in a fifth they had been liberal and given him a
semblance of a sofa with a flat back and a lattice-work seat. This
semblance had been painted dark red and smelt strongly of paint. Kunin
meant at first to sit down on one of the chairs, but on second thoughts
he sat down on the stool.
"This is the first time you have been to our church?" asked Father
Yakov, hanging his hat on a huge misshapen nail.
"Yes it is. I tell you what, Father, before we begin on business, will
you give me some tea? My soul is parched."
Father Yakov blinked, gasped, and went behind the partition wall. There
was a sound of whispering.
"With his wife, I suppose," thought Kunin; "it would be interesting to
see what the red-headed fellow's wife is like."
A little later Father Yakov came back, red and perspiring and with an
effort to smile, sat down on the edge of the sofa.
"They will heat the samovar directly," he said, without looking at his
visitor.
"My goodness, they have not heated the samovar yet!" Kunin thought with
horror. "A nice time we shall have to wait."
"I have brought you," he said, "the rough draft of the letter I have
written to the bishop. I'll read it after tea; perhaps you may find
something to add. . . ."
"Very well."
A silence followed. Father Yakov threw furtive glances at the partition
wall, smoothed his hair, and blew his nose.
"It's wonderful weather, . . ." he said.
"Yes. I read an interesting thing yesterday. . . . the Volsky Zemstvo
have decided to give their schools to the clergy, that's typical."
Kunin got up, and pacing up and down the clay floor, began to give
expression to his reflections.
"That would be all right," he said, "if only the clergy were equal to
their high calling and recognized their tasks. I am so unfortunate as to
know priests whose standard of culture and whose moral qualities make
them hardly fit to be army secretaries, much less priests. You will
agree that a bad teacher does far less harm than a bad priest."
Kunin glanced at Father Yakov; he was sitting bent up, thinking intently
about something and apparently not listening to his visitor.
"Yasha, come here!" a woman's voice called from behind the partition.
Father Yakov started and went out. Again a whispering began.
Kunin felt a pang of longing for tea.
"No; it's no use my waiting for tea here," he thought, looking at his
watch. "Besides I fancy I am not altogether a welcome visitor. My host
has not deigned to say one word to me; he simply sits and blinks."
Kunin took up his hat, waited for Father Yakov to return, and said good-
bye to him.
"I have simply wasted the morning," he thought wrathfully on the way
home. "The blockhead! The dummy! He cares no more about the school than
I about last year's snow. . . . No, I shall never get anything done with
him! We are bound to fail! If the Marshal knew what the priest here was
like, he wouldn't be in such a hurry to talk about a school. We ought
first to try and get a decent priest, and then think about the school."
By now Kunin almost hated Father Yakov. The man, his pitiful, grotesque
figure in the long crumpled robe, his womanish face, his manner of
officiating, his way of life and his formal restrained respectfulness,
wounded the tiny relic of religious feeling which was stored away in a
warm corner of Kunin's heart together with his nurse's other fairy
tales. The coldness and lack of attention with which Father Yakov had
met Kunin's warm and sincere interest in what was the priest's own work
was hard for the former's vanity to endure. . . .
On the evening of the same day Kunin spent a long time walking about his
rooms and thinking. Then he sat down to the table resolutely and wrote a
letter to the bishop. After asking for money and a blessing for the
school, he set forth genuinely, like a son, his opinion of the priest at
Sinkino.
"He is young," he wrote, "insufficiently educated, leads, I fancy, an
intemperate life, and altogether fails to satisfy the ideals which the
Russian people have in the course of centuries formed of what a pastor
should be."
After writing this letter Kunin heaved a deep sigh, and went to bed with
the consciousness that he had done a good deed.
On Monday morning, while he was still in bed, he was informed that
Father Yakov had arrived. He did not want to get up, and instructed the
servant to say he was not at home. On Tuesday he went away to a sitting
of the Board, and when he returned on Saturday he was told by the
servants that Father Yakov had called every day in his absence.
"He liked my biscuits, it seems," he thought.
Towards evening on Sunday Father Yakov arrived. This time not only his
skirts, but even his hat, was bespattered with mud. Just as on his first
visit, he was hot and perspiring, and sat down on the edge of his chair
as he had done then. Kunin determined not to talk about the school--not
to cast pearls.
"I have brought you a list of books for the school, Pavel Mihailovitch,
. . ." Father Yakov began.
"Thank you."
But everything showed that Father Yakov had come for something else
besides the list. Has whole figure was expressive of extreme
embarrassment, and at the same time there was a look of determination
upon his face, as on the face of a man suddenly inspired by an idea. He
struggled to say something important, absolutely necessary, and strove
to overcome his timidity.
"Why is he dumb?" Kunin thought wrathfully. "He's settled himself
comfortably! I haven't time to be bothered with him."
To smoothe over the awkwardness of his silence and to conceal the
struggle going on within him, the priest began to smile constrainedly,
and this slow smile, wrung out on his red perspiring face, and out of
keeping with the fixed look in his grey-blue eyes, made Kunin turn away.
He felt moved to repulsion.
"Excuse me, Father, I have to go out," he said.
Father Yakov started like a man asleep who has been struck a blow, and,
still smiling, began in his confusion wrapping round him the skirts of
his cassock. In spite of his repulsion for the man, Kunin felt suddenly
sorry for him, and he wanted to soften his cruelty.
"Please come another time, Father," he said, "and before we part I want
to ask you a favour. I was somehow inspired to write two sermons the
other day. . . . I will give them to you to look at. If they are
suitable, use them."
"Very good," said Father Yakov, laying his open hand on Kunin's sermons
which were lying on the table. "I will take them."
After standing a little, hesitating and still wrapping his cassock round
him, he suddenly gave up the effort to smile and lifted his head
resolutely.
"Pavel Mihailovitch," he said, evidently trying to speak loudly and
distinctly.
"What can I do for you?"
"I have heard that you . . . er . . . have dismissed your secretary, and
. . . and are looking for a new one. . . ."
"Yes, I am. . . . Why, have you someone to recommend?"
"I. . . er . . . you see . . . I . . . Could you not give the post to
me?"
"Why, are you giving up the Church?" said Kunin in amazement.