Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [147]
The Bishop laughed. Some five miles from Lyesopolye lay the village of Obnino with its wonder-working icon. In summer they would take the icon in procession, leaving Obnino to make the rounds of the neighboring villages, so that the church bells rang all day, now in one place, now in another, and to the Bishop it seemed as though the air itself had trembled with joy as he followed behind the icon, barefoot and hatless, with a simple smile on his lips and a simple faith in his heart. He had been immeasurably happy in those days, when he was known as Little Paul. Now he remembered that there were always crowds of people in Obnino, and in those days the priest, Father Alexey, in order to allow time for the offertory, made his deaf nephew read out the names of those for whom special prayers were asked “for the peace of their souls” or “for the health of their bodies.” Ilarion would read out the list of names, receiving an occasional five- or ten-kopeck coin for his services, and it was only when he had grown gray and bald, and was close to death, that he suddenly noticed on one of the slips of paper the words: “What a fool you are, Ilarion!” Until the age of fifteen Little Paul showed few signs of promise, and his schoolwork was so bad that his parents thought of removing him from the ecclesiastical school and putting him to work in a store. One day, calling at the Obnino post office for letters, he stared for a long time at the clerks and said: “Excuse me, how are you paid, every month or every day?”
The Bishop crossed himself and turned over on the other side, hoping to put his thoughts to rest, hoping to sleep.
“My mother has come,” he remembered, and laughed.
The moon glittered through the window, the floor shone white with moonlight, and the shadows lay over him. A cricket chirped. Through the wall came the sound of Father Sisoi snoring in the next room, and the old man’s snores somehow suggested loneliness, forlornness, a strange wandering. Once Father Sisoi had been the housekeeper of the diocesan bishop, and so they called him “the former Father Housekeeper.” He was seventy years old, and sometimes he lived in the monastery twelve miles out of town, and sometimes he remained in the town. Just three days before he had turned up at the Pankratievsky Monastery, and the Bishop was keeping him there to discuss some affairs and business with him at his leisure.
The bell for matins rang at half past one. Father Sisoi coughed, muttered something in a disgruntled voice, and then got up and went wandering barefoot through the rooms.
“Father Sisoi,” the Bishop called.
Father Sisoi returned to his room and a little later reappeared, wearing boots and carrying a candle, with a cassock over his underclothes and an old, small, faded skullcap on his head.
“I can’t sleep,” the Bishop said, sitting up. “I must be ill. I don’t know what it is. Fever!”
“You may have caught cold, Your Eminence. You should get yourself rubbed with tallow.”
Father Sisoi stood there for a while and yawned: “O Lord, forgive me, a poor sinner …”
“I saw the electric lamps in Yerakin’s store,” the Bishop went on. “I don’t like them at all.”
Father Sisoi was old, lean, bent, always dissatisfied with something or other, and his eyes were angry and prominent like a crab’s.
“I don’t like it either,” he said, going away. “I don’t like it at all. O Lord, what a mess!”
II
On the following day, Palm Sunday, the Bishop took the service in the cathedral in the town. Afterward he paid a visit to the archbishop, called upon the widow of a general who was very ill, and then drove home. Around two o’clock he entertained two beloved guests for lunch—his aged mother and his niece Katya, who was eight years old. All through lunch the spring sunshine streamed through the windows from the courtyard, shining sweetly on