Short Stories by Chekhov
one have guessed that this was his mother. He shut his eyes and seemed
to sleep, but twice heard the clock strike and Father Sisoy coughing the
other side of the wall. And once more his mother came in and looked
timidly at him for a minute. Someone drove up to the steps, as he could
hear, in a coach or in a chaise. Suddenly a knock, the door slammed, the
lay brother came into the bedroom.
"Your holiness," he called.
"Well?"
"The horses are here; it's time for the evening service."
"What o'clock is it?"
"A quarter past seven."
He dressed and drove to the cathedral. During all the "Twelve Gospels"
he had to stand in the middle of the church without moving, and the
first gospel, the longest and the most beautiful, he read himself. A
mood of confidence and courage came over him. That first gospel, "Now is
the Son of Man glorified," he knew by heart; and as he read he raised
his eyes from time to time, and saw on both sides a perfect sea of
lights and heard the splutter of candles, but, as in past years, he
could not see the people, and it seemed as though these were all the
same people as had been round him in those days, in his childhood and
his youth; that they would always be the same every year and till such
time as God only knew.
His father had been a deacon, his grandfather a priest, his great-
grandfather a deacon, and his whole family, perhaps from the days when
Christianity had been accepted in Russia, had belonged to the
priesthood; and his love for the Church services, for the priesthood,
for the peal of the bells, was deep in him, ineradicable, innate. In
church, particularly when he took part in the service, he felt vigorous,
of good cheer, happy. So it was now. Only when the eighth gospel had
been read, he felt that his voice had grown weak, even his cough was
inaudible. His head had begun to ache intensely, and he was troubled by
a fear that he might fall down. And his legs were indeed quite numb, so
that by degrees he ceased to feel them and could not understand how or
on what he was standing, and why he did not fall. . . .
It was a quarter to twelve when the service was over. When he reached
home, the bishop undressed and went to bed at once without even saying
his prayers. He could not speak and felt that he could not have stood
up. When he had covered his head with the quilt he felt a sudden longing
to be abroad, an insufferable longing! He felt that he would give his
life not to see those pitiful cheap shutters, those low ceilings, not to
smell that heavy monastery smell. If only there were one person to whom
he could have talked, have opened his heart!
For a long while he heard footsteps in the next room and could not tell
whose they were. At last the door opened, and Sisoy came in with a
candle and a tea-cup in his hand.
"You are in bed already, your holiness?" he asked. "Here I have come to
rub you with spirit and vinegar. A thorough rubbing does a great deal of
good. Lord Jesus Christ! . . . That's the way . . . that's the way. . .
. I've just been in our monastery. . . . I don't like it. I'm going away
from here to-morrow, your holiness; I don't want to stay longer. Lord
Jesus Christ. . . . That's the way. . . ."
Sisoy could never stay long in the same place, and he felt as though he
had been a whole year in the Pankratievsky Monastery. Above all,
listening to him it was difficult to understand where his home was,
whether he cared for anyone or anything, whether he believed in God. . .
. He did not know himself why he was a monk, and, indeed, he did not
think about it, and the time when he had become a monk had long passed
out of his memory; it seemed as though he had been born a monk.
"I'm going away to-morrow; God be with them all."
"I should like to talk to you. . . . I can't find the time," said the
bishop softly with an effort. "I don't know anything or anybody here. .
. ."
"I'll stay till Sunday if you like; so be it, but I don't want to stay
longer. I am sick of them!"
"I ought not to be a bishop," said the bishop softly. "I ought to have
been a village priest, a deacon . . . or simply a monk. . . . All this
oppresses me . . . oppresses me."
"What? Lord Jesus Christ. . . . That's the way. Come, sleep well, your
holiness! . . . What's the good of talking? It's no use. Good-night!"
The bishop did not sleep all night. And at eight o'clock in the morning
he began to have hemorrhage from the bowels. The lay brother was
alarmed, and ran first to the archimandrite, then for the monastery
doctor, Ivan Andreyitch, who lived in the town. The doctor, a stout old
man with a long grey beard, made a prolonged examination of the bishop,
and kept shaking his head and frowning, then said:
"Do you know, your holiness, you have got typhoid?"
After an hour or so of hemorrhage the bishop looked much thinner, paler,
and wasted; his face looked wrinkled, his eyes looked bigger, and he
seemed older, shorter, and it seemed to him that he was thinner, weaker,
more insignificant than any one, that everything that had been had
retreated far, far away and would never go on again or be repeated.
"How good," he thought, "how good!"
His old mother came. Seeing his wrinkled face and his big eyes, she was
frightened, she fell on her knees by the bed and began kissing his face,
his shoulders, his hands. And to her, too, it seemed that he was
thinner, weaker, and more insignificant than anyone, and now she forgot
that he was a bishop, and kissed him as though he were a child very near
and very dear to her.
"Pavlusha, darling," she said; "my own, my darling son! . . . Why are
you like this? Pavlusha, answer me!"
Katya, pale and severe, stood beside her, unable to understand what was
the matter with her uncle, why there was such a look of suffering on her
grandmother's face, why she was saying such sad and touching things. By
now he could not utter a word, he could understand nothing, and he
imagined he was a simple ordinary man, that he was walking quickly,
cheerfully through the fields, tapping with his stick, while above him
was the open sky bathed in sunshine, and that he was free now as a bird
and could go where he liked!
"Pavlusha, my darling son, answer me," the old woman was saying. "What
is it? My own!"
"Don't disturb his holiness," Sisoy said angrily, walking about the
room. "Let him sleep . . . what's the use . . . it's no good. . . ."
Three doctors arrived, consulted together, and went away again. The day
was long, incredibly long, then the night came on and passed slowly,
slowly, and towards morning on Saturday the lay brother went in to the
old mother who was lying on the sofa in the parlour, and asked her to go
into the bedroom: the bishop had just breathed his last.
Next day was Easter Sunday. There were forty-two churches and six
monasteries in the town; the sonorous, joyful clang of the bells hung
over the town from morning till night unceasingly, setting the spring
air aquiver; the birds were singing, the sun was shining brightly. The
big market square was noisy, swings were going, barrel organs were
playing, accordions were squeaking, drunken voices were shouting. After
midday people began driving up and down the principal street.
In short, all was merriment, everything was satisfactory, just as it had
been the year before, and as it will be in all likelihood next year.
A month later a new suffragan bishop was appointed, and no one thought
anything more of Bishop Pyotr, and afterwards he was completely
forgotten. And only the dead man's old mother, who is living to-day with
her son-in-law the deacon in a remote little district town, when she
goes out at night to bring her cow in and meets other women at the
pasture, begins talking of her children and her grandchildren, and says
that she had a son a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid that she
may not be believed. . . .
And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her.
THE LETTER
The clerical superintendent of the district, his Reverence Father Fyodor
Orlov, a handsome, well-nourished man of fifty, grave and important as
he always was, with an habitual expression of dignity that never left
his face, was walking to and fro in his little drawing-room, extremely
exhausted, and thinking intensely about the same thing: "When would his
visitor go?" The thought worried him and did not leave him for a minute.
The visitor, Father Anastasy, the priest of one of the villages near the
town, had come to him three hours before on some very unpleasant and
dreary business of his own, had stayed on and on, was now sitting in the
corner at a little round table with his elbow on a thick account book,
and apparently had no thought of going, though it was getting on for
nine o'clock in the evening.
Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not infrequently
happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to
observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in
their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed
with an effort and disguised with a lie. But Father Anastasy perceived
it clearly, and realized that his presence was burdensome and
inappropriate, that his Reverence, who had taken an early morning
service in the night and a long mass at midday, was exhausted and
longing for repose; every minute he was meaning to get up and go, but he
did not get up, he sat on as though he were waiting for something. He
was an old man of sixty-five, prematurely aged, with a bent and bony
figure, with a sunken face and the dark skin of old age, with red
eyelids and a long narrow back like a fish's; he was dressed in a smart
cassock of a light lilac colour, but too big for him (presented to him
by the widow of a young priest lately deceased), a full cloth coat with
a broad leather belt, and clumsy high boots the size and hue of which
showed clearly that Father Anastasy dispensed with goloshes. In spite of
his position and his venerable age, there was something pitiful, crushed
and humiliated in his lustreless red eyes, in the strands of grey hair
with a shade of green in it on the nape of his neck, and in the big
shoulder-blades on his lean back. . . . He sat without speaking or
moving, and coughed with circumspection, as though afraid that the sound
of his coughing might make his presence more noticeable.
The old man had come to see his Reverence on business. Two months before
he had been prohibited from officiating till further notice, and his
case was being inquired into. His shortcomings were numerous. He was
intemperate in his habits, fell out with the other clergy and the
commune, kept the church records and accounts carelessly --these were the
formal charges against him; but besides all that, there had been rumours
for a long time past that he celebrated unlawful marriages for money and
sold certificates of having fasted and taken the sacrament to officials
and officers who came to him from the town. These rumours were
maintained the more persistently that he was poor and had nine children
to keep, who were as incompetent and unsuccessful as himself. The sons
were spoilt and uneducated, and stayed at home doing nothing, while the
daughters were ugly and did not get married.
Not having the moral force to be open, his Reverence walked up and down
the room and said nothing or spoke in hints.
"So you are not going home to-night?" he asked, stopping near the dark
window and poking with his little finger into the cage where a canary
was asleep with its feathers puffed out.
Father Anastasy started, coughed cautiously and said rapidly:
"Home? I don't care to, Fyodor Ilyitch. I cannot officiate, as you know,
so what am I to do there? I came away on purpose that I might not have