AT first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and
in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound
like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed
at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But
when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew
inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles
of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and
lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.
Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical
academy, returning home from shooting, walked all the time by the path
in the water-side meadow. His fingers were numb and his face was burning
with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on
had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt
ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more
rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy.
The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river;
the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all
round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that,
as he went out from the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the
floor in the entry, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the
stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and
the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he
thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the
time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been
just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with
holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same
darkness, the same feeling of oppression--all these had existed, did
exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make
life no better. And he did not want to go home.
The gardens were called the widows’ because they were kept by two
widows, mother and daughter. A camp fire was burning brightly with a
crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the ploughed earth.
The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man’s coat, was standing
by and looking thoughtfully into the fire; her daughter Lukerya, a
little pock-marked woman with a stupid-looking face, was sitting on
the ground, washing a caldron and spoons. Apparently they had just had
supper. There was a sound of men’s voices; it was the labourers watering
their horses at the river.
“Here you have winter back again,” said the student, going up to the
camp fire. “Good evening.”
Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled cordially.
“I did not know you; God bless you,” she said.
“You’ll be rich.”
They talked. Vasilisa, a woman of experience, who had been in service
with the gentry, first as a wet-nurse, afterwards as a children’s nurse,
expressed herself with refinement, and a soft, sedate smile never left
her face; her daughter Lukerya, a village peasant woman, who had been
beaten by her husband, simply screwed up her eyes at the student and
said nothing, and she had a strange expression like that of a deaf mute.
“At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself,” said the
student, stretching out his hands to the fire, “so it must have been
cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An
utterly dismal long night!”
He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked:
“No doubt you have been at the reading of the Twelve Gospels?”
“Yes, I have,” answered Vasilisa.
“If you remember at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, ‘I am ready to
go with Thee into darkness and unto death.’ And our Lord answered him
thus: ‘I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth thou wilt have
denied Me thrice.’ After the supper Jesus went through the agony of
death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and
faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep.
He fell asleep. Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and
betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest
and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm,
hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going
to happen on earth, followed behind.... He loved Jesus passionately,
intensely, and now he saw from far off how He was beaten...”
Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.
“They came to the high priest’s,” he went on; “they began to question
Jesus, and meantime the labourers made a fire in the yard as it was
cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood with them near the fire
and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: ‘He was
with Jesus, too’--that is as much as to say that he, too, should be
taken to be questioned. And all the labourers that were standing near
the fire must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he
was confused and said: ‘I don’t know Him.’ A little while after again
someone recognized him as one of Jesus’ disciples and said: ‘Thou, too,
art one of them,’ but again he denied it. And for the third time someone
turned to him: ‘Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden to-day?’
For the third time he denied it. And immediately after that time the
cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus, remembered the
words He had said to him in the evening.... He remembered, he came to
himself, went out of the yard and wept bitterly--bitterly. In the Gospel
it is written: ‘He went out and wept bitterly.’ I imagine it: the
still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible,
smothered sobbing...”
T he student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling, Vasilisa
suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she
screened her face from the fire with her sleeve as though ashamed of her
tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably at the student, flushed crimson,
and her expression became strained and heavy like that of someone
enduring intense pain.
The labourers came back from the river, and one of them riding a horse
was quite near, and the light from the fire quivered upon him. The
student said good-night to the widows and went on. And again the
darkness was about him and his fingers began to be numb. A cruel wind
was blowing, winter really had come back and it did not feel as though
Easter would be the day after to-morrow.
Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears
all that had happened to Peter the night before the Crucifixion must
have some relation to her....
He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness
and no figures could be seen near it now. The student thought again that
if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it
was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had
happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present--to both
women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman
had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because
Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what
was passing in Peter’s soul.
And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute
to take breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by
an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.” And it seemed
to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he
touched one end the other quivered.
When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and afterwards, mounting the
hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson
sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty
which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the
high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had
evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly
life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour--he was only
twenty-two--and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of
unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little,
and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty
meaning.