Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [149]
“They’re fighting in Japan now,” he was saying. “The Japanese are just like the Montenegrins, you know, they’re the same race. They were both under the Turkish yoke, don’t you know?”
And then came the voice of Maria Timofeyevna: “We said our prayers and had a cup of tea, and then we went off to see Father Yegor at Novokhatnoye, and then we …”
She kept saying: “We had a cup of tea” or “We drank tea,” until it seemed that her whole life was devoted to tea drinking. Slowly, drowsily, the Bishop found himself surrendering to recollections of the seminary where he had studied. For three years he had taught Greek in the seminary, until he could no longer read without glasses; he became a monk, and later was made school inspector. Then he took the examination for a degree. At thirty-two he 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