sky, as if celebrating and rejoicing that the day, thank God, was over and they could rest. Her mother was in the crowd, the day laborer Praskovya, walking with a bundle in her arms and breathing heavily as always.
“Good evening, Makarych!” said Lipa, seeing Crutch. “Good evening, dear heart!”
“Good evening, Lipynka!” said Crutch, delighted. “Dear women, dear girls, love the rich carpenter! Ho, ho! Little ones, my little ones,” Crutch sobbed. “My gentle little hatchets.”
Crutch and Yakov walked on, and could still be heard talking. After them the crowd met with old Tsybukin, and it suddenly became very quiet. Lipa and Praskovya had dropped behind a little, and when the old man came abreast of them, Lipa bowed low and said:
“Good evening, Grigory Petrovich!”
And her mother also bowed. The old man stopped and looked at the two women without saying anything; his lips trembled and his eyes were filled with tears. Lipa took a piece of kasha pie from her mother’s bundle and gave it to him. He took it and began to eat.
The sun had set completely; its glow had gone out even on the road above. It was growing dark and cool. Lipa and Praskovya walked on and kept crossing themselves for a long time.
JANUARY 1900
THE BISHOP
I
On the eve of Palm Sunday the vigil was going on in the Old Petrovsky Convent. It was almost ten o’clock when they began to hand out the pussywillows,1 the lights were dim, the wicks were sooty, everything was as if in a mist. In the twilight of the church, the crowd heaved like the sea, and to Bishop Pyotr, who had been unwell for three days, it seemed that all the faces—old and young, men’s and women’s—were alike, that everyone who came up to get a branch had the same expression in their eyes. The doors could not be seen in the mist, the crowd kept moving, and it looked as if there was and would be no end to it. A women’s choir was singing, a nun was reading the canon.
How hot it was, how stifling! How long the vigil was! Bishop Pyotr was tired. His breathing was labored, short, dry, his shoulders ached with fatigue, his legs trembled. And it was unpleasantly disturbing that some holy fool cried out now and then from the gallery. Besides, the bishop suddenly imagined, as if in sleep or delirium, that his own mother, Marya Timofeevna, whom he had not seen for nine years, or else an old woman resembling his mother, came up to him in the crowd, and, receiving a branch from him, stepped away, all the while gazing happily at him, with a kind, joyful smile, until she mingled with the crowd again. And for some reason tears poured down his face. His soul was at peace, all was well, yet he gazed fixedly at the choir on the left, where they were reading, where not a single person could be made out in the evening darkness—and wept. Tears glistened on his face, his beard. Then someone else began to weep near him, then someone else further away, then another and another, and the church was gradually filled with quiet weeping. But in a short while, some five minutes, the convent choir began to sing, there was no more weeping, everything was as before.
The service was soon over. As the bishop was getting into his carriage to go home, the whole moonlit garden was filled with the merry, beautiful ringing of the expensive, heavy bells. The white walls, the white crosses on the graves, the white birches and black shadows, and the distant moon in the sky, which stood directly over the convent, now seemed to live their own special life, incomprehensible, yet close to mankind. April was just beginning, and after the warm spring day it turned cooler, slightly frosty, and a breath of spring could be felt in the soft, cold air. The road from the convent to town was sandy, they had to go at a walking pace; and on both sides of the carriage, in the bright, still moonlight, pilgrims trudged over the sand. And everyone was silent, deep in thought, everything around was welcoming, young, so near—the trees, the sky, even the moon—and one wanted to think it would always be so.
At last the carriage drove into town and rolled down the main street. The shops were closed, except that of the merchant Yerakin, the millionaire, where they were trying out electric lighting, which was flickering badly, and people crowded around. Then came wide, dark streets, one after another, deserted, then the high road outside town, the fields, the smell of pines. And suddenly there rose up before his eyes a white, crenellated wall, and behind it a tall bell tower, all flooded with light, and beside it five big, shining, golden domes—this was St. Pankraty’s Monastery, where Bishop Pyotr lived. And here, too, high above the monastery hung the quiet, pensive moon. The carriage drove through the gate, creaking over the sand, here and there the black figures of monks flashed in the moonlight, footsteps were heard on the flagstones …
“Your mother came while you were away, Your Grace,” the cell attendant reported, when the bishop came to his quarters.
“Mama? When did she come?”
“Before the vigil. She first asked where you were, and then went to the convent.”
“That means it was her I saw in church! Oh, Lord!”
And the bishop laughed with joy.
“She asked me to tell Your Grace,” the attendant went on, “that she will come tomorrow. There’s a girl with her, probably a granddaughter. They’re staying at Ovsyannikov’s inn.”
“What time is it now?”
“Just after eleven.”
“Ah, how vexing!”
The bishop sat for a while in the drawing room, pondering and as if not believing it was so late. His arms and legs ached, there was a pain in the back of his head. He felt hot and uncomfortable. Having rested, he went to his bedroom and there, too, sat for a while, still thinking about his mother. He heard the attendant leave and Father Sisoy, a hieromonk, cough on the other side of the wall. The monastery clock struck the quarter hour.
The bishop changed his clothes and began to read the prayers before going to sleep. He read these old, long- familiar prayers attentively, and at the same time thought about his mother. She had nine children and around forty grandchildren. Once she had lived with her husband, a deacon, in a poor village, lived there for a long time, from the age of seventeen to the age of sixty. The bishop remembered her from early childhood, almost from when he was three—and how he loved her! Sweet, dear, unforgettable childhood! Why does this forever gone, irretrievable time, why does it seem brighter, more festive and rich, than it was in reality? When he had been sick as a child or a youth, how tender and sensitive his mother had been! And now his prayers were mixed with memories that burned
