Part 13

Nikolai Yevgrafovitch Almazof hardly waited for his wife to open the door to him; he went straight to his study without taking off his hat or coat. His wife knew in a moment by his frowning face and nervously-bitten underlip that a great misfortune had occurred.

She followed him in silence. Almazof stood still for a moment when he reached the study, and stared gloomily into one corner, then he dashed his portfolio out of his hand on to the floor, where it lay wide open, and threw himself into an armchair, irritably snapping his fingers together.

He was a young and poor army officer attending a course of lectures at the staff office academy, and had just returned from a class. To-day he had taken in to the professor his last and most difficult practical work, a survey of the neighbourhood.

So far all his examinations had gone well, and it was only known to God and to his wife what fearful labour they had cost him.... To begin with, his very entrance into the academy had seemed impossible at first. Two years in succession he had failed ignominiously, and only in the third had he by determined effort overcome all hindrances. If it hadn't been for his wife he would not have had sufficient energy to continue the struggle; he would have given it up entirely. But Verotchka never allowed him to lose heart, she was always encouraging him ... she met every drawback with a bright, almost gay, front. She denied herself everything so that her husband might have all the little things so necessary for a man engaged in mental labour; she was his secretary, draughtsman, reader, lesson-hearer, and note-book all in one.

For five minutes there was a dead silence, broken only by the sorry sound of their old alarm clock, familiar and tiresome ... one, two, three-three--two clear ticks, and the third with a hoarse stammer. Almazof still sat in his hat and coat, turning to one side in his chair.... Vera stood two paces from him, silent also, her beautiful mobile face full of suffering. At length she broke the stillness with the cautiousness a woman might use when speaking at the bedside of a very sick friend:

"Well, Kolya, what about the work? Was it bad?"

He shrugged his shoulders without speaking.

"Kolya, was it rejected? Tell me; we must talk it over together."

Almazof turned to his wife and began to speak irritably and passionately, as one generally does speak when telling of an insult long endured.

"Yes, yes. They've rejected it, if you want to know. Can't you see they have? It's all gone to the devil! All that rubbish"--he kicked the portfolio with his foot--"all that rubbish had better be thrown into the fire. That's your academy. I shall be back in the regiment with a bang next month, disgraced. And all for a filthy spot ... damn it!"

"What spot, Kolya?" asked she. "I don't understand anything about it."

She sat down on the side of his chair and put her arm round his neck. He made no resistance, but still continued to stare into the corner with an injured expression.

"What spot was it, Kolya?" asked his wife once more.

"Oh, an ordinary spot--of green paint. You know I sat up until three o'clock last night to finish my drawing. The plan was beautifully done. Everyone said so. Well, I sat there last night and I got so tired that my hand shook, and I made a blot--such a big one.... I tried to erase it, but I only made it worse.... I thought and thought what I had better do, and I made up my mind to put a clump of trees in that place.... It was very successful, and no one could guess there had been a blot. Well, to-day I took it in to the professor. 'Yes, yes,' said he, 'that's very well. But what have you got here, lieutenant; where have these bushes sprung from?' Of course, I ought to have told him what had happened. Perhaps he would only have laughed ... but no, he wouldn't, he's such an accurate German, such a pedant. So I said, 'There are some trees growing there.' 'Oh, no, no,' said he. 'I know this neighbourhood as well as I know the five fingers of my own hand; there can't be any trees there.' So, my word against his, we had a great argument about it; many of our officers were there too, listening. 'Well,' he said at last, 'if you're so sure that there are trees in this hollow, be so good as to ride over with me to-morrow and see. I'll prove to you that you've either done your work carelessly, or that you've copied it from a three versts to the inch map....'"

"But why was he so certain that no bushes were there?"

"Oh, Lord, why? What childish questions you do ask! Because he's known this district for twenty years; he knows it better than his own bedroom. He's the most fearful pedant in the world, and a German besides.... Well, of course, he'll know in the end that I was lying and so discussed the point with him...."

All the time he spoke he kept picking up burnt matches from the ash-tray on the table in front of him, and breaking them to little bits. When he ceased speaking, he threw the pieces on the floor. It was quite evident that, strong man though he was, he was very near weeping.

For a long while husband and wife sat there silent. Then suddenly Verotchka jumped up from her seat.

"Listen, Kolya," said she. "We must go this very minute. Make haste and get ready."

Nikolai Yevgrafovitch wrinkled up his face as if he were suffering some intolerable pain.

"Oh, don't talk nonsense, Vera," he said. "You don't think I can go and put matters right by apologising, do you? That would be asking for punishment. Don't be foolish, please!"

"No, it's not foolishness," said Vera, stamping her toot. "Nobody wants you to go and apologise. But, don't you see, if there aren't any silly old trees there we'd better go and put some."

"Put some--trees!" exclaimed Nikolai Yevgrafovitch, his eyes staring.

"Yes, put some there. If you didn't speak the truth, then you must make it true. Come along, get ready. Give me my hat ... and coat. No, not there; in the cupboard.... Umbrella!"

And while Almazof, finding his objections entirely ignored, began to look for the hat and coat, Vera opened drawers and brought out various little boxes and cases.

"Earrings.... No, they're no good. We shan't get anything on them. Ah, here's this ring with the valuable stone. We'll have to buy that back some time. It would be a pity to lose it. Bracelet ... they won't give much for that either, it's old and bent.... Where's your silver cigar-case, Kolya?"

In five minutes all their valuables were in her hand-bag, and Vera, dressed and ready, looked round for the last time to assure herself she hadn't overlooked anything.

"Let us go," she said at last, resolutely.

"But where?" Almazof tried again to protest. "It's beginning to get dark already, and the place is ten versts away."

"Stupid! Come along."

First of all they went to the pawnshop. The pawnbroker had evidently got accustomed long ago to the sight of people in distress, and could not be touched by it. He was so methodical about his work, and took so long to value the things, that Vera felt she should go crazy. What specially vexed her was that the man should test her ring with acid, and then, after weighing it, he valued it at three roubles only.

"But it's a real brilliant," said poor Vera. "It cost thirty-seven roubles, and then it was a bargain."

The pawnbroker closed his eyes with the air of a man who is frankly bored.

"It's all the same to us, madam," said he, putting the next article into the scales. "We don't take the stones into consideration, only the metals."

To Vera's astonishment, her old and bent bracelet was more valuable. Altogether they got about twenty-three roubles, and that was more than was really necessary.

When they got to the gardener's house, the white Petersburg night had already spread over the heavens, and a pearly light was in the air. The gardener, a Tchekh, a little old man with gold eyeglasses, had only just sat down to supper with his family. He was much surprised at their request, and not altogether willing to take such a late order. He was doubtless suspicious of a practical joke, and answered dryly to Vera's insistent demands:

"I'm very sorry. But I can't send my workmen so far at night. If it will do to-morrow morning, I'm quite at your service."

There was no way out of the difficulty but to tell the man the whole story of the unfortunate blot, and this Verotchka did. He listened doubtfully at first, and was almost unfriendly, but when Vera began to tell him of her plan to plant some bushes on the place, he became more attentive and smiled sympathetically several times.

"Oh, well, it's not much to do," he agreed, when Vera had finished her story. "What sort of bushes do you want?"

However, when they came to look at his plants, there was nothing very suitable. The only thing possible to put on the spot was a clump of lilacs.

It was in vain for Almazof to try and persuade his wife to go home. She went all the way with him, and stayed all the time the bushes were planted, feverishly fussing about and hindering the workmen. She only consented to go home when she was assured that the turf under the bushes could not be distinguished from the rest of the grass round about.

Next day Vera felt it impossible to remain in the house. She went out to meet her husband. Quite a long way off she knew, by a slight spring in his walk, that everything had gone well.... True, Almazof was covered in dust, and he could hardly move from weariness and hunger, but his face shone with the triumph of victory.

"It's all right! Splendid!" cried he when within ten paces of his wife, in answer to the anxious expression on her face. "Just think, we went together to those bushes, and he looked and looked at them--he even plucked a leaf and chewed it. 'What sort of a tree is this?' says he."

"'I don't know, your Excellency,' said I.

"'It's a little birch, I suppose,' says he.

"'Yes, probably, your Excellency.'"

Then he turned to me and held out his hand.

"'I beg your pardon, lieutenant,' he says. 'I must be getting old, that I didn't remember those bushes.' He's a fine man, that professor, and he knows a lot. I felt quite sorry to deceive him. He's one of the best professors we have. His learning is simply wonderful. And how quick and accurate he is in marking the plans--marvellous!"

But this meant little to Vera. She wanted to hear over and over again exactly what the professor had said about the bushes. She was interested in the smallest details--the expression on the professor's face, the tone of his voice when he said he must be growing old, exactly how Kolya felt....

They went home together as if there had been no one in the street except themselves, holding each other by the hand and laughing at nothing. The passers-by stopped to look at them; they seemed such a strange couple.

Never before had Nikolai Yevgrafovitch enjoyed his dinner so much as on that day. After dinner, when Vera brought a glass of tea to him in the study, husband and wife suddenly looked at one another, and both laughed.

"What are you laughing at?" asked Vera.

"Well, why did _you_ laugh?" said her husband.

"Oh, only foolishness. I was thinking all about those lilacs. And you?"

"Oh, mine was foolishness too--and the lilacs. I was just going to say that now the lilac will always be my favourite flower...."

XIII

ANATHEMA

"Father Deacon, you're wasting the candles," said the deacon's wife. "It's time to get up."

This small, thin, yellow-faced woman treated her husband very harshly. In the school at which she had been educated there had been an opinion that--men were scoundrels, deceivers, and tyrants. But her husband, the deacon, was certainly not a tyrant. He was absolutely in awe of his half-hysterical, half-epileptic, childless wife. The deacon weighed about nine and a half poods[1] of solid flesh; he had a broad chest like the body of a motor-car, an awful voice, and with it all that gentle condescension of manner which often marks the behaviour of extraordinarily strong people in their relations towards the weak.

[1] A pood is 40 Russian lbs., about 36 lbs. English.

It always took the deacon a long time to get his voice in order. This occupation--an unpleasant, long-drawn-out torture--is, of course, well known to all those who have to sing in public: the rubbing with cocaine, the burning with caustic, the gargling with boracic acid. And, still lying upon his bed, Father Olympus began to try his voice.

"Via ... kmm! Via-a-a! Alleluia, alleluia. ... Oba-che ... kmm.... Ma-ma...."

"There's no sound in my voice," he said to himself. "Vla-di-ko bla-go-slo-ve-e-e.... Km...."

Like all famous singers, he was given to be anxious about his voice. It is well known that actors grow pale and cross themselves before they go on to the stage. And Father Olympus suffered from this vice of fear. Yet he was the only man in the town, and possibly in all Russia, who could make his voice resound in the old dark cathedral church, gleaming with ancient gold and mosaic.

He alone could fill all the corners of the old building with his powerful voice, and when he intoned the funeral service every crystal lustre in the candelabras trembled and jingled with the sound.

His prim wife brought him in a glass of weak tea with lemon in it, and, as usual on Sunday mornings, a glass of vodka. Olympus tried his voice once more: "Mi ... mi ... fa.... Mi-ro-no-citsi.... Here, mother," called he to his wife, "give me _re_ on the harmonium."

His wife sounded a long melancholy note. "Km ... km.... Pharaoh and his chariots.... No, no, I can't do it, my voice has gone. The devil must have got into me from that writer, what's his name?..."

Father Olympus was very fond of reading; he read much and indiscriminately, but paid very little attention to the names of the authors. His seminary education, based chiefly on learning by heart, on reading "rubrics," on learning indispensable quotations from the fathers of the Church, had developed his memory to an unusual degree. In order to get by heart a whole page of complicated casuistical reasoning, such as that of St. Augustine, Tertullian, Origen, Basil the Great or St. John Chrysostom, it was quite sufficient for him to run his eye over the lines, and he would remember them. It was a student from the Bethany Academy who brought him books to read, and only the evening before he had given him a delightful romance, a picture of life in the Caucasus, of soldiers, Cossacks, Tchetchenians, and how they lived there and fought one another, drank wine, married, hunted.

The reading of this tale had disturbed the elementary soul of the deacon. He had read it three times over, and often during the reading had laughed and wept emotionally, clenching his fists and turning his huge body from one side to the other in his chair. He continually asked himself, "Would it not have been better to have been a hunter, a trapper, a fisherman, a horseman, anything rather than a clergyman?"

* * * * *

He was always a little later in coming into the cathedral than he ought to have been. Just like a famous baritone at a theatre. As he came through the south door into the sanctuary, on this Sunday morning, he tried his voice for the last time. "Km ... km.... I can sing _re,_" he thought. "But that scoundrel will certainly give me the tone on _doh._ Never mind, I must change it to my note, and the choir will be obliged to follow."

There awoke in him that pride which always slumbers in the breast of a public favourite, for he was spoilt by the whole town; even the street-boys used to collect together to stare at him with a similar veneration to that with which they gazed into the immense mouth of the brass helicon in the military band on the boulevard.

The bishop entered and was solemnly installed in his seat. He wore his mitre a little on one side. Two sub-deacons stood beside him with censers, swinging them harmoniously. The clergy, in bright festival robes, stood around. Two priests brought forward from the altar the ikons of the Saviour and the Virgin-Mother, and placed them on a stand before the people.

The cathedral was an ancient building, and had a pulpit of carved oak like that of a Catholic church. It stood close up to the wall, and was reached by a winding staircase. This was the deacon's place.

Slowly, trying each step as he went, and carefully resting his hands on the balustrade--he was always afraid of breaking something accidentally--the deacon went up into the pulpit. Then, clearing his throat and nose and expectorating, he struck the tuning-fork, passed deliberately from _doh_ to _re,_ and began:

"Bless us, most reverend Father."

"Now, you scoundrel," he thought to himself, apostrophising the leader of the choir; "you won't dare to change the tone in the presence of the bishop." At that moment he felt, with pleasure, that his voice sounded much better than usual; it was quite easy to pass from one note to another, and its soft depth of tone caused all the air in the cathedral to vibrate.

It was the Orthodox service for the first week in Lent, and, at first, Father Olympus had not much work. The reader trumpeted out the psalms indistinctly; he was a deacon from the academy, a future professor of homiletics, and he snuffled.

Father Olympus roared out from time to time, "Let us pray." He stood there on his raised platform, immense, in his stiff vestment of gilt brocade, his mane of grey-black hair hanging on his shoulders, and every now and then he tried his voice quietly. The church was full to the doors with sentimental old peasant women and sturdy grey-bearded peasants.

"Strange," thought Olympus to himself suddenly, "but every one of these women's heads, if I look at it from the side, reminds me inevitably either of the head of a fish or of a hen's head. Even the deaconess, my wife...."

His attention, however, was not diverted from the service. He followed it all along in his seventeenth-century missal. The prayers came to an end: "Almighty God, Master and Creator of all living." And at last, "Amen."

Then began the affirmation of Orthodoxy. "Who is as great as the Lord, as our God? Thou art the God who alone doest wonders." The chant had many turns in it, and was not particularly clear. Generally during the first week in Lent there follows, at this point, the ritual of anathema, which can be altered or omitted as may be thought fit by the bishop. There is a list of persons to be anathematised for special reasons, Mazeppa is cursed, Stenka Razin, Arius the iconoclast, the old-believer Avvakum, etc., etc.

But the deacon was not quite himself to-day. Certainly he must have been a little upset by the vodka his wife had given him that morning. For some reason or other he could not get the story which he had read the previous night out of his mind. He kept seeing clear and vivid pictures of a beautiful, simple, and boundlessly attractive life. Almost mechanically he went through the Creed, chanted the Amen, and proclaimed according to an ancient custom to an old and solemn tone: "This is the faith of the apostles, this is the faith of our fathers, this is the Orthodox faith, this is the universal faith, this faith is ours."

The archbishop was a great formalist, a pedant, and a somewhat eccentric man. He never allowed a word to be dropped out of the text of the canon of our thrice-blessed Father Andrew of Crete, or from the funeral service or from any other rite. And Father Olympus, imperturbably causing the cathedral to vibrate with his lion's roar, and making the lustres of the candelabra jingle and sound as they moved, cursed, anathematised and excommunicated from the Church the iconoclasts, all the ancient heretics from Arius onward, all those accepting the teaching of Ital, of the monk Nil, of Constantine Bulgaris and Irinik, of Varlaam and Akindin, of Gerontius and Isaac Agrir; cursed those who insulted the Church, all Mahometans, Dissenters and Judaizers; cursed the reproachers of the festival of the Annunciation, smugglers, offenders of widows and orphans, the Old-Believers, the rebels and traitors, Grishka, Otrepief, Timoshka Akundinof, Stenka Razin, Ivashka Mazeppa, Emelka Pugachof, as well as all those who uphold any teaching contrary to that of the Orthodox faith.

Then the extent of the curse was proclaimed: denial of the blessings of redemption, exclusion from the Holy Sacraments, and expulsion from the assembly of the holy fathers and their inheritance.

Curses were pronounced on those who do not think that the Orthodox Tsar was raised to the throne by the special will of God, when at his anointing, at the commencement of his high calling, the holy oil was poured out upon him; also on those daring to stir up sedition against him; on those who abuse and blaspheme the holy ikons. And to each of these proclamations the choir responded in a mournful wail, tender angelic voices giving the response, "_Anathema._"

The women had long been weeping hysterically.

The deacon was about to end by singing the "Eternal Memory" for all those departed this life in the true faith, when the psalm-singer brought him a little note from the priest, telling him that his Eminence the archbishop had ordered that Count Leo Tolstoy was to be anathematised.

The deacon's throat was sore from much reading. But he cleared his throat by a cough, and began once more: "Bless us, most reverend Father." He guessed, rather than heard, the feeble mutterings of the aged prelate:

"The proto-deacon will now, by the grace of God, pronounce a curse upon a blasphemer and apostate from the faith of Christ, and expel from the Holy Sacraments of the Church Count Leo Tolstoy. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

"Amen," sang the choir.

Father Olympus felt his hair stand on end. It seemed to stick out on all sides, and become stiff and painful as if turning into steel wire. And at that moment his memory recalled with extraordinary clearness the tender words of the story[1] he had read the previous night:

"Rousing himself, Yeroshka raised his head and watched the moths fluttering around the flickering flame of his candle and falling therein.

"'Fool! fool!' said he to one. 'Whither are you flying? Fool! fool!' He got up and drove the moths away with his clumsy fingers.

"'You'll burn yourself, little fool; come, fly away, there's plenty of room here,' said he, coaxing one of them with gentle voice, and striving to catch hold of it by the wings and send it away. 'You'll destroy yourself, and then I shall be sorry for you.'"

[1] Evidently, "The Cossacks," by Tolstoy.--(ED.)]

"Good Lord! Who is it I am to curse?" said the deacon to himself in terror. "Is it possibly _he_--he who made me feel so much, and weep all last night for joy and rapture?"

But, obedient to a thousand-year-old custom, he repeated the terribly moving words of cursing and excommunication, and they resounded among the crowd like blows upon a large church bell.

So the curse went on: "The ex-priest Nikita, the monks Sergei, Sabatius--yes, Sabatius--Dorofei, Gabriel--blasphemers, impenitent and stubborn in their heresy--and all who act contrary to the will of God, be they accursed!..."

He waited a moment to take breath. His face was red and perspiring. The arteries on both sides of his throat were swollen, each a finger's thickness. And all the while he proclaimed the curse, Tolstoy's thoughts were in his mind. He remembered another passage: