became rector of a seminary and was consecrated archimandrite. In those days his life flowed so peacefully and pleasantly, and seemed to stretch far into the future with no end in sight. Then his health began to fail, he became very thin and nearly blind, and his doctors advised him to give up everything and live abroad.
“And what did you do then?” Father Sisoi was saying in the next room.
“Then we had a cup of tea,” Maria Timofeyevna answered.
“Oh, Father, look, your beard is green!” Katya exclaimed suddenly in surprise, and she burst out laughing.
The Bishop remembered that old gray-haired Father Sisoi’s beard really did have a touch of green, and he, too, laughed.
“God have mercy on us, what a nuisance the girl is!” Father Sisoi shouted in an angry voice. “You’re a spoiled brat! Sit still, will you?”
New recollections came to the Bishop—he remembered the white church, all perfectly new, in which he held services when he went abroad, and the roaring of the warm sea. His apartment there contained five lofty rooms, well lit, with a brand-new writing table in his study and a whole library of books. He read a great deal and wrote a lot. He remembered how homesick he had been for his native land, and he remembered a blind beggar woman playing on a guitar underneath his window and singing about love, and whenever he listened to her, he always found himself for some reason meditating on the past. Eight years slipped away before he was recalled to Russia, and now he was a suffragan bishop, and the past was already fading into the far-off mists, as though it were a dream.
Father Sisoi came into the bedroom with a candle in his hand.
“Well, well,” he said, surprised. “So you went to sleep early, Your Eminence.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s still very early, only ten o’clock! I bought a candle this evening. I want to rub you with tallow!”
“I have a fever,” the Bishop said, sitting up. “I really should do something about it. My head feels queer. …”
Father Sisoi removed the Bishop’s shirt and began rubbing his chest and back with tallow.
“There … there,” he said. “Oh, Lord Jesus Christ! There! I went to the town today and met—what’s his name?—yes, Archpresbyter Sidonsky. I had a cup of tea with him. I don’t like him. Oh, Lord Jesus Christ! There! I don’t like him one little bit!”
III
The archbishop was an old man, very fat, and for more than a month he had kept to his bed, suffering from rheumatism or gout. Bishop Peter went to see him almost every day, and he also saw all those who had been going to the archbishop as suppliants. Now that he was unwell, he was troubled by the triviality and emptiness of everything they asked for, everything that made them weep, and he was distressed by their ignorance and cowardice. And all these useless, trivial requests oppressed him by their sheer weight, and now at last he felt he understood the man who wrote in his early days a treatise on the freedom of the will, and now seemed to be absorbed in trivialities, to have forgotten everything, and to have put thoughts of God aside. It occurred to the Bishop that he must have grown out of touch with Russian life while abroad; it was no longer easy for him; the people seemed coarse, the women who came for guidance seemed dull and stupid, the seminarians and their teachers uncultured and sometimes savage. And the documents which came in and went out could be counted in the tens of thousands! What documents they were! The ecclesiastical superintendents were giving marks to all the priests in the diocese; the young and old priests, and their wives and children, all were given marks according to their behavior—five, four, sometimes three—and he was obliged to talk and read and write serious reports on the subject. There was not a moment he could call his own, his soul was troubled all day, and he was at peace with himself only in church.
He could not grow accustomed to the terror he inspired unwittingly among people in spite of his quiet and modest ways. Everyone in the province seemed to shrivel and show demonstrable signs of guilt and fear the moment he glanced at them. Everyone, even the old archpresbyters, trembled in his presence; they all threw themselves at his feet, and not long ago an old lady, the wife of a village priest, came to him and was so overcome with awe that she was unable to utter a word, and went away without asking for anything. And he, who was incapable of uttering a harsh word against people in his sermons, and who never blamed people because he pitied them so, was moved to fury by these suppliants; he lost his temper and hurled their petitions to the floor. In all the time he had been there not one single person had spoken to him genuinely, simply, humanly. Even his old mother had changed—had in fact changed more than most! Why did she chatter incessantly with Father Sisoi, and laugh so much with him, while maintaining a strange seriousness and reserve and constraint in the presence of her son? It was not like her. The only person who behaved naturally and said whatever came into his head was old Father Sisoi, who had lived with bishops all his life and had outlasted eleven of them. And so Bishop Peter was at ease with him, although, of course, he was a horrible and empty-headed little man.
After the service on Tuesday, Bishop Peter went to the archbishop’s house and received petitions; he grew excited, lost his temper, and drove home. He felt as unwell as before, and longed for his bed, but he was hardly in the house when he was informed that the young merchant Yerakin, a benefactor of the church, had come to see him on important business. The Bishop was obliged to receive him. Yerakin stayed about an hour, talking in a loud voice, almost screaming, and it was difficult to understand what he said.
“May God grant it!” the merchant said as he went away. “It’s absolutely necessary, too! According to the circumstances, Your Eminence! Oh, I do hope it comes to pass!”
After him came the mother superior of a distant convent. And when she had gone, the bells were ringing for vespers and he had to go to the church.
That evening the monks sang in harmony and as though inspired, while a young black-bearded priest officiated; and the Bishop, listening as they sang of the Bridegroom who entered at midnight into the chamber adorned for Him, felt no sorrow over his sins, nor any grief, only a great sense of peace and tranquillity, and in his imagination he was being swept back into the distant past, to the days of his childhood and youth, when they also sang of the Bridegroom entering the chamber, and now the past rose up before him, vivid, beautiful, and joyful, as in all likelihood it had never been. And perhaps in the other world, in the life to come, we shall remember the distant past, our life on earth, with the same feeling. Who knows? The Bishop sat near the altar, where the shadows were deepest, while tears trickled down his cheeks, and he thought of how he had attained everything a man of his position could attain; he had faith, but not everything was clear to him. Something was lacking, and he did not want to die. He felt he had failed to discover the most important thing of all, something which he had glimpsed obscurely in dreams in the past, and he was still troubled by the same hopes for the future he had felt as a child, and at the seminary, and when he was abroad.
“How beautifully they are singing today,” he thought, listening to the hymns. “Oh, how beautifully!”
IV
