Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,217

rubbed with tallow.”

Sisoy stood for a while and yawned: “O Lord, forgive me, a sinner.”

“At Yerakin’s today they burned electricity,” he said. “I doan like it!”

Father Sisoy was old, lean, bent, always displeased with something, and his eyes were angry, protruding, like a crayfish’s.

“Doan like it!” he said, going out. “Doan like it, God help ‘em all!”

II

The next day, Palm Sunday, the bishop served the liturgy in the town cathedral, then visited the diocesan bishop, visited a certain very sick old general’s widow, and finally went home. Between one and two o’clock he had dinner with two dear guests: his old mother and his niece Katya, a girl of about eight. All through dinner the spring sun looked through the window from outside, shining merrily on the white tablecloth and in Katya’s red hair. Through the double windows one could hear the noise of rooks in the garden and the singing of starlings.

“It’s nine years since we saw each other,” the old woman said, “but yesterday in the convent, when I looked at you—Lord! You haven’t changed a bit, only you’ve lost weight, and your beard has grown longer. Ah, Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother! And yesterday during the vigil, nobody could help themselves, everybody wept. Looking at you, I suddenly wept, too—though why, I don’t know. It’s God’s holy will!”

And, in spite of the tenderness with which she said it, she was clearly embarrassed, as if she did not know whether to address him formally or informally, to laugh or not, and seemed to feel more like a deacon’s widow than his mother. But Katya gazed without blinking at her uncle, the bishop, as if trying to figure out what sort of man he was. Her hair rose from under the comb and velvet ribbon and stood out like a halo, her nose was turned up, her eyes were sly. Before sitting down to dinner she had broken a tea glass, and now her grandmother, as she talked, kept moving glasses and cups away from her. The bishop listened to his mother and remembered how, many years ago, she used to take him and his brothers and sisters to visit relatives whom she considered wealthy; she was solicitous for her children then, and for her grandchildren now, and so she had brought Katya …

“Your sister Varenka has four children,” she told him. “Katya here is the oldest, and, God knows what was the cause of it, but my son-in-law, Father Ivan, took sick and died three days before the Dormition.5 And my Varenka is now fit to go begging through the world.”

“And how is Nikanor?” the bishop asked about his oldest brother.

“All right, thank God. He’s all right, and able to get by, Lord be blessed. Only there’s one thing: his son Nikolasha, my grandson, didn’t want to follow the clerical line, but went to the university to become a doctor. He thinks it’s better, but who knows! It’s God’s holy will.”

“Nikolasha cuts up dead people,” said Katya, and she spilled water in her lap.

“Sit still, child,” the grandmother remarked calmly and took the glass from her. “Pray when you eat.”

“We haven’t seen each other for so long!” the bishop said and tenderly stroked his mother’s shoulder and arm. “I missed you when I was abroad, mama, I missed you terribly.”

“I thank you.”

“I used to sit by the open window in the evening, alone as could be, they’d start playing music, and homesickness would suddenly come over me, and I thought I’d give anything to go home, to see you…”

His mother smiled, brightened up, but at once made a serious face and said:

“I thank you.”

His mood changed somehow suddenly He looked at his mother and could not understand where she got that timid, deferential expression in her face and voice, or why it was there, and he did not recognize her. He felt sad, vexed. Besides, his head ached just as yesterday, he had bad pain in his legs, the fish seemed insipid, tasteless, and he was thirsty all the time …

After dinner two rich ladies, landowners, came and spent an hour and a half sitting silently with long faces; the archimandrite,6taciturn and slightly deaf, came on business. Then the bells rang for vespers, the sun set behind the woods, and the day was gone. Returning from church, the bishop hastily said his prayers, went to bed, and covered himself warmly.

The memory of the fish he had eaten at dinner was unpleasant. The moonlight disturbed him, and then he

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