Short Stories by Chekhov
anyone was asleep or praying he would slip by like a fly or a gnat. His
face was tender, compassionate. . . ."
Ieronim heaved a deep sigh and took hold of the rope again. We were by
now approaching the bank. We floated straight out of the darkness and
stillness of the river into an enchanted realm, full of stifling smoke,
crackling lights and uproar. By now one could distinctly see people
moving near the tar barrels. The flickering of the lights gave a
strange, almost fantastic, expression to their figures and red faces.
From time to time one caught among the heads and faces a glimpse of a
horse's head motionless as though cast in copper.
"They'll begin singing the Easter hymn directly, . . ." said Ieronim,
"and Nikolay is gone; there is no one to appreciate it. . . . There was
nothing written dearer to him than that hymn. He used to take in every
word! You'll be there, sir, so notice what is sung; it takes your breath
away!"
"Won't you be in church, then?"
"I can't; . . . I have to work the ferry. . . ."
"But won't they relieve you?"
"I don't know. . . . I ought to have been relieved at eight; but, as you
see, they don't come! . . . And I must own I should have liked to be in
the church. . . ."
"Are you a monk?"
"Yes . . . that is, I am a lay-brother."
The ferry ran into the bank and stopped. I thrust a five-kopeck piece
into Ieronim's hand for taking me across and jumped on land. Immediately
a cart with a boy and a sleeping woman in it drove creaking onto the
ferry. Ieronim, with a faint glow from the lights on his figure, pressed
on the rope, bent down to it, and started the ferry back. . . .
I took a few steps through mud, but a little farther walked on a soft
freshly trodden path. This path led to the dark monastery gates, that
looked like a cavern through a cloud of smoke, through a disorderly
crowd of people, unharnessed horses, carts and chaises. All this crowd
was rattling, snorting, laughing, and the crimson light and wavering
shadows from the smoke flickered over it all . . . . A perfect chaos!
And in this hubbub the people yet found room to load a little cannon and
to sell cakes. There was no less commotion on the other side of the wall
in the monastery precincts, but there was more regard for decorum and
order. Here there was a smell of juniper and incense. They talked
loudly, but there was no sound of laughter or snorting. Near the
tombstones and crosses people pressed close to one another with Easter
cakes and bundles in their arms. Apparently many had come from a long
distance for their cakes to be blessed and now were exhausted. Young lay
brothers, making a metallic sound with their boots, ran busily along the
iron slabs that paved the way from the monastery gates to the church
door. They were busy and shouting on the belfry, too.
"What a restless night!" I thought. "How nice!"
One was tempted to see the same unrest and sleeplessness in all nature,
from the night darkness to the iron slabs, the crosses on the tombs and
the trees under which the people were moving to and fro. But nowhere was
the excitement and restlessness so marked as in the church. An unceasing
struggle was going on in the entrance between the inflowing stream and
the outflowing stream. Some were going in, others going out and soon
coming back again to stand still for a little and begin moving again.
People were scurrying from place to place, lounging about as though they
were looking for something. The stream flowed from the entrance all
round the church, disturbing even the front rows, where persons of
weight and dignity were standing. There could be no thought of
concentrated prayer. There were no prayers at all, but a sort of
continuous, childishly irresponsible joy, seeking a pretext to break out
and vent itself in some movement, even in senseless jostling and
shoving.
The same unaccustomed movement is striking in the Easter service itself.
The altar gates are flung wide open, thick clouds of incense float in
the air near the candelabra; wherever one looks there are lights, the
gleam and splutter of candles. . . . There is no reading; restless and
lighthearted singing goes on to the end without ceasing. After each hymn
the clergy change their vestments and come out to burn the incense,
which is repeated every ten minutes.
I had no sooner taken a place, when a wave rushed from in front and
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."