Short Fiction, Leonid Andreyev [good e books to read .TXT] 📗

priest, the latter gazed upon him sharply and fixedly, but the pose which he maintained did not seem to befit the occasion.

With his neck extended, his hands folded across his chest, he was tugging at the end of his beard with the fingers of one hand. Mossyagin walked up to the priest and was astounded: the priest was watching him and smiling softly with nostrils distended like a horse.

“I have been waiting for thee for a long time,” said the priest with a snicker. “Why hast thou come, Mossyagin?”

“For confession,” quickly and eagerly replied Mossyagin and with a friendly grin exposed his white teeth⁠—they were white and even like a string of pearls.

“Wilt thou feel better after confession?” continued the priest, smiling, as it seemed to the peasant, in a merry and friendly fashion.

“Of course I will.”

“And is it true that thou hast sold thy horse and the last sheep and mortgaged thy wagon?”

Mossyagin looked at the priest seriously and with a show of annoyance: the priest’s face was stolid, his eyes were downcast. Neither broke the silence. Father Vassily turned slowly towards the lectern and commanded:

“Tell thy sins.”

Mossyagin coughed, assumed a devotional expression, and cautiously inclining his head and his chest towards the priest began to speak in a loud whisper. And while he spoke, the priest’s face became more and more forbidding and solemn, as though it had turned to stone under the hail of the peasant’s painful and constraining words. His breath came fast and heavy as though choking in that senseless, dull and savage something which was called the life of Semen Mossyagin and which seemed to grip him as though in the black coils of some mysterious serpent. It was as though the stern law of causality had no dominion over this humble but fantastic existence: so unexpectedly, with such clownish absurdity there were linked in it trivial transgressions and unmeasured suffering, a mighty, an elemental will to a mighty elemental creativeness and a monstrously vegetating existence somewhere in No-man’s land between life and death. Endowed with a fine mind that slightly inclined to sarcasm, strong in body like a ferocious beast, enduring as though fully three hearts beat in his breast, so that when one of the three died, the ethers gave life to a new one⁠—he seemed capable of overturning the very earth upon which firmly, though clumsily were planted his feet. But in reality what happened? He was forever on the verge of starvation, as were his wife, his children, his cattle; and his bedimmed mind reeled drunkenly as though unable to find the door of its own abode. Desperately straining every effort in an endeavor to build up something, to create something, he merely fell sprawling into the dust, and his work collapsed and disintegrated, rewarding him with a mock and a sneer. He was a man of compassion, and had adopted an orphan, and everybody scolded him; and the orphan lived awhile and died of constant malnutrition and illness, and then he began to scold himself and ceased to understand whether it was the right thing to be compassionate or not. It seemed as though the tears should never dry in the eyes of so unfortunate a man, or that the outcries of wrath and resentment should never die upon his lips, but strange to say he was always goodnatured and cheerful, and even his beard seemed somehow absurdly gay; blazing red it was, with each hair seemingly awhirl and agog in an interminable whimsical dance. And he even took part in the village choral dances with the young lads and lassies, singing the melancholy folksongs with a high tremolo voice that brought tears to the eyes of the hearers, while on his own lips played a smile of gentle sarcasm.

And his sins were so trivial and formal: a surveyor whom he had driven to the nearest village⁠—Petrovki⁠—had offered him a meatpie on a fast day, and he had eaten of it; and in confessing he dwelt as long upon this transgression as though he had committed a murder; and the year before, just before communion, he had smoked a cigarette and this too he described at great length and with agonized anguish.

“That’s all!” finally said Mossyagin, in a cheery voice, and wiped the perspiration from his brow.

Father Vassily slowly turned his haggard face to him:

“And who helpeth thee?”

“Who helps me?” repeated Mossyagin. “Nobody. It’s a scant fare for us villagers, you know that yourself. Still Ivan Porfyritch helped me out once,” the peasant winked slyly at the priest: “he gave me three poods of flour, and promised four more towards fall.”

“And God?”

Semen sighed and his face grew sad.

“God? I daresay I’m undeserving.”

The priest’s superfluous questions were beginning to annoy Mossyagin. He glanced back over his shoulder at the empty church, carefully counted the hairs in the priest’s sparse beard, surveyed his half-rotted teeth and it occurred to him that the priest might have spoilt them by eating too much sugar. And he heaved a sigh.

“What art thou waiting for?”

“What I am waiting for? What should I be waiting for?”

And silence again. It was dark and cold in the church, and the chilly air was stealing under the peasant’s blouse.

“And must it go on like this always?” asked the priest, and his words sounded listless and distant like the thud of the earth thrown into the grave upon the lowered coffin.

“And must it go on like this always?” repeated Mossyagin listening to the sound of his own words. And all that had passed in his life rose before him again: the hungry faces of the children, the reproaches, the killing toil, the dull heartache that makes one long to drink and fight; and so it must go on, for a long time, all through life⁠—until death steps in. Blinking his white eyelashes, Mossyagin cast a teardimmed misty glance upon the priest and met his sharp and blazing gaze⁠—and in this exchange of glances they recognized an intimate sorrowful kinship. An