Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

While gazing at what was going on in the hut he sat busily thinking how he should carry off the priest. Should he drive him across the Kossoe, as he had come, or should he go round another way? The road was bad near the village. The river was frozen over, but was not strong enough to bear. He had hardly been able to get across.

A labourer came in and threw down an armful of birch logs near the stove, asking the peasant to break up some of it to light the fire, whereupon the peasant took off his coat and set to work.

The priest awoke, as he always did, full of life and spirits. While still in bed, he crossed himself and said his favourite prayer, “To the King of Heaven,” and repeated “Lord have mercy on us” several times. Getting up, he washed, brushed his long hair, put on his boots and an old cassock, and then, standing before the icons, began his morning prayers. When be reached the middle of the Lord’s Prayer, and had come to the words, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us,” he stopped, remembering the deacon who was drunk the day before, and who on meeting him muttered audibly, “Hypocrite, Pharisee.” These words, Pharisee and hypocrite, pained Father Vasily particularly because, although conscious of having many faults, he did not believe hypocrisy to be one of them. He was angry with the deacon. “Yes, I forgive,” he said to himself; “God be with him,” and he continued his prayers. The words, “Lead us not into temptation,” reminded him how he had felt when hot tea with rum had been handed to him the night before after vespers in the house of a rich landowner.

Having said his prayers he glanced at himself in a little mirror which distorted everything, and passed his hands over his smooth, fair hair, which grew in a circle round a moderately large bald patch, and then he looked with pleasure at bis broad, kind face, with its thin beard, which looked young in spite of his forty-two years. After this he went into the sitting-room, where he found his wife hurriedly and with difficulty bringing in the samovar, which was on the point of boiling over.

“Why do you do that yourself? Where’s Thekla?”

“Why do you do it yourself?” mocked his wife. “Who else is to do it?”

“But why so early?”

“A man from Vozdrevo has come to fetch you. His wife is dying.”

“Has he been here long?”

“Yes, some time.”

“Why was I not called before?”

Father Vasily drank his tea without milk (it was Friday); and then, taking the sacred elements, put on his fur coat and cap and went out into the porch with a resolute air. The peasant was awaiting for him there. “Good morning, Mitri,” said Father Vastly, and turning up his sleeve, made the sign of the cross, after which he stretched out his small strong hand with its short-cut nails for him to kiss, and walked out onto the steps. The sun had risen, but was not yet visible behind the overhanging clouds. The peasant brought the cart out from the yard, and drove up to the front door. Father Vasily stepped quickly on the axle of the back wheel and sat down on the seat, which was bound round with hay. Mitri getting in beside him, whipped up the big-barrelled mare with its drooping ears, and the cart rattled over the frozen mud. A fine snow was falling.

Father Vasily’s family consisted of his wife, her mother⁠—(the widow of the former priest of the parish), and three children⁠—two sons and a daughter. The eldest son had finished his course at the seminary, and was now preparing to enter the university; the second son⁠—the mother’s favourite, a boy of fifteen⁠—was still at the seminary, and his sixteen-year-old daughter, Lena, lived at home, though discontented with her lot, doing little to help her mother. Father Vasily himself had studied at the seminary in his youth, and had done so brilliantly that, when he left in 1840, he was at the top of his class. He then began to prepare for entrance into the ecclesiastical academy, and even dreamt of a professorship, or of a bishopric. But his mother, the widow of a verger, with three daughters and an elder son who drank⁠—lived in the greatest poverty. The step he took at that time gave a suggestion of self-sacrifice and renunciation to his whole life. To please his mother he left the academy, and became a village priest. He did this out of love for his mother though he never confessed it to himself, but ascribed his decision to indolence and dislike for intellectual pursuits. The place to which he was presented was a living in a small village, and was offered to him on condition that he would marry the former priest’s daughter.333 The living was not a rich one, for the old priest had been poor and had left a widow and two daughters in distress. Anna, by whose aid he was to obtain the living, was a plain girl, but bright in every sense of the word. She literally fascinated Vasily and forced him to marry her, which he did. So he became Father Vasily, first wearing his hair short and afterwards long, and he lived happily with his wife, Anna Tikhonovna, for twenty-two years. Notwithstanding her romantic attachment to a student, the son of a former deacon, he was as kind to her as ever, as if he loved her still more tenderly, and wished to atone for the angry feelings which her attachment to the student had awakened in him.

It had afforded him an opportunity for the same self-sacrifice and self-denial; the result of which was that he gave up the academy, and felt a calm, almost unconscious, inner joy.

At first the two