The Tales of Chekhov, vol 7 | Page 3

"What a fool
you are, Ilarion." Up to fifteen at least Pavlusha was undeveloped and
idle at his lessons, so much so that they thought of taking him away
from the clerical school and putting him into a shop; one day, going to
the post at Obnino for letters, he had stared a long time at the
post-office clerks and asked: "Allow me to ask, how do you get your
salary, every month or every day?"
His holiness crossed himself and turned over on the other side, trying to
stop thinking and go to sleep.
"My mother has come," he remembered and laughed.
The moon peeped in at the window, the floor was lighted up, and there
were shadows on it. A cricket was chirping. Through the wall Father
Sisoy was snoring in the next room, and his aged snore had a sound
that suggested loneliness, forlornness, even vagrancy. Sisoy had once
been housekeeper to the bishop of the diocese, and was called now "the
former Father Housekeeper"; he was seventy years old, he lived in a
monastery twelve miles from the town and stayed sometimes in the
town, too. He had come to the Pankratievsky Monastery three days
before, and the bishop had kept him that he might talk to him at his
leisure about matters of business, about the arrangements here. . . .

At half-past one they began ringing for matins. Father Sisoy could be
heard coughing, muttering something in a discontented voice, then he
got up and walked barefoot about the rooms.
"Father Sisoy," the bishop called.
Sisoy went back to his room and a little later made his appearance in
his boots, with a candle; he had on his cassock over his underclothes
and on his head was an old faded skull-cap.
"I can't sleep," said the bishop, sitting up. "I must be unwell. And what
it is I don't know. Fever!"
"You must have caught cold, your holiness. You must be rubbed with
tallow." Sisoy stood a little and yawned. "O Lord, forgive me, a
sinner."
"They had the electric lights on at Erakin's today," he said; "I don't like
it!"
Father Sisoy was old, lean, bent, always dissatisfied with something,
and his eyes were angry-looking and prominent as a crab's.
"I don't like it," he said, going away. "I don't like it. Bother it!"
II
Next day, Palm Sunday, the bishop took the service in the cathedral in
the town, then he visited the bishop of the diocese, then visited a very
sick old lady, the widow of a general, and at last drove home. Between
one and two o'clock he had welcome visitors dining with him--his
mother and his niece Katya, a child of eight years old. All dinner-time
the spring sunshine was streaming in at the windows, throwing bright
light on the white tablecloth and on Katya's red hair. Through the
double windows they could hear the noise of the rooks and the notes of
the starlings in the garden.
"It is nine years since we have met," said the old lady. "And when I
looked at you in the monastery yesterday, good Lord! you've not
changed a bit, except maybe you are thinner and your beard is a little
longer. Holy Mother, Queen of Heaven! Yesterday at the evening
service no one could help crying. I, too, as I looked at you, suddenly
began crying, though I couldn't say why. His Holy Will!"
And in spite of the affectionate tone in which she said this, he could see
she was constrained as though she were uncertain whether to address
him formally or familiarly, to laugh or not, and that she felt herself
more a deacon's widow than his mother. And Katya gazed without

blinking at her uncle, his holiness, as though trying to discover what
sort of a person he was. Her hair sprang up from under the comb and
the velvet ribbon and stood out like a halo; she had a turned-up nose
and sly eyes. The child had broken a glass before sitting down to dinner,
and now her grandmother, as she talked, moved away from Katya first
a wineglass and then a tumbler. The bishop listened to his mother and
remembered how many, many years ago she used to take him and his
brothers and sisters to relations whom she considered rich; in those
days she was taken up with the care of her children, now with her
grandchildren, and she had brought Katya. . . .
"Your sister, Varenka, has four children," she told him; "Katya, here, is
the eldest. And your brother-in-law Father Ivan fell sick, God knows of
what, and died three days before the Assumption; and my poor Varenka
is left a beggar."
"And how is Nikanor getting on?" the bishop asked about his eldest