He was pleased to know that the merchant’s daughter was twenty-two, and he wondered whether she was good-looking. When he inquired whether she was weak, he really wanted to know if she had feminine charm.
‘Can I have fallen so low?’ he thought. ‘Lord, help me! Restore me, my Lord and God!’ And he clasped his hands and began to pray.
The nightingales burst into song, a cockchafer knocked against him and crept up the back of his neck. He brushed it off. ‘But does He exist? What if I am knocking at a door fastened from outside? The bar is on the door for all to see. Nature–the nightingales and the cockchafers–is that bar. Perhaps the young man was right.’ And he began to pray aloud. He prayed for a long time till these thoughts vanished and he again felt calm and confident. He rang the bell and told the attendant to say that the merchant might bring his daughter to him now.
The merchant came, leading his daughter by the arm. He led her into the cell and immediately left her.
She was a very fair girl, plump and very short, with a pale, frightened, childish face and a much developed feminine figure. Father Sergius remained seated on the bench at the entrance and when she was passing and stopped beside him for his blessing he was aghast at himself for the way he looked at her figure. As she passed by him he was acutely conscious of her femininity, though he saw by her face that she was sensual and feeble-minded. He rose and went into the cell. She was sitting on a stool waiting for him, and when he entered she rose.
‘I want to go back to Papa,’ she said.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he replied. ‘What are you suffering from?’
‘I am in pain all over,’ she said, and suddenly her face lit up with a smile.
‘You will be well,’ said he. ‘Pray!’
‘What is the use of praying? I have prayed and it does no good’–and she continued to smile. ‘I want you to pray for me and lay your hands on me. I saw you in a dream.’
‘How did you see me?’
‘I saw you put your hands on my breast like that.’ She took his hand and pressed it to her breast. ‘Just here.’
He yielded his right hand to her.
‘What is your name?’ he asked, trembling all over and feeling that he was overcome and that his desire had already passed beyond control.
‘Marie. Why?’
She took his hand and kissed it, and then put her arm round his waist and pressed him to herself.
‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Marie, you are a devil!’
‘Oh, perhaps. What does it matter?’
And embracing him she sat down with him on the bed.
At dawn he went out into the porch.
‘Can this all have happened? Her father will come and she will tell him everything. She is a devil! What am I to do? Here is the axe with which I chopped off my finger.’ He snatched up the axe and moved back towards the cell.
The attendant came up.
‘Do you want some wood chopped? Let me have the axe.’
Sergius yielded up the axe and entered the cell. She was lying there asleep. He looked at her with horror, and passed on beyond the partition, where he took down the peasant clothes and put them on. Then he seized a pair of scissors, cut off his long hair, and went out along the path down the hill to the river, where he had not been for more than three years.
A road ran beside the river and he went along it and walked till noon. Then he went into a field of rye and lay down there. Towards evening he approached a village, but without entering it went towards the cliff that overhung the river. There he again lay down to rest.
It was early morning, half an hour before sunrise. All was damp and gloomy and a cold early wind was blowing from the west. ‘Yes, I must end it all. There is no God. But how am I to end it? Throw myself into the river? I can swim and should not drown. Hang myself? Yes, just throw this sash over a branch.’ This seemed so feasible and so easy that he felt horrified. As usual at moments of despair he felt the need of prayer. But there was no one to pray to. There was no God. He lay down resting on his arm, and suddenly such a longing for sleep overcame him that he could no longer support his head on his hand, but stretched out his arm, laid his head upon it, and fell asleep. But that sleep lasted only for a moment. He woke up immediately and began not to dream but to remember.
He saw himself as a child in his mother’s home in the country. A carriage drives up, and out of it steps Uncle Nicholas Sergeevich, with his long, spade-shaped, black beard, and with him Pashenka, a thin little girl with large mild eyes and a timid pathetic face. And into their company of boys Pashenka is brought and they have to play with her, but it is dull. She is silly, and it ends by their making fun of her and forcing her to show how she can swim. She lies down on the floor and shows them, and they all laugh and make a fool of her. She sees this and blushes red in patches and becomes more pitiable than before, so pitiable that he feels ashamed and can never forget that crooked, kindly, submissive smile. And Sergius remembered having seen her since then.
Long after, just before he became a monk, she had married a landowner who squandered all her fortune and was in the habit of beating her. She had had two children, a son and a daughter, but the son had died while still young. And Sergius remembered having seen her very wretched. Then again he had seen her in the monastery when she was a widow. She had been still the same, not exactly stupid, but insipid, insignificant, and pitiable. She had come with her daughter and her daughter’s fiance. They were already poor at that time and later on he had heard that she was living in a small provincial town and was very poor.
‘Why am I thinking about her?’ he asked himself, but he could not cease doing so. ‘Where is she? How is she getting on? Is she still as unhappy as she was then when she had to show us how to swim on the floor? But why should I think about her? What am I doing? I must put an end to myself.’
And again he felt afraid, and again, to escape from that thought, he went on thinking about Pashenka.
So he lay for a long time, thinking now of his unavoidable end and now of Pashenka. She presented herself to him as a means of salvation. At last he fell asleep, and in his sleep he saw an angel who came to him and said: ‘Go to Pashenka and learn from her what you have to do, what your sin is, and wherein lies your salvation.’
He awoke, and having decided that this was a vision sent by God, he felt glad, and resolved to do what had been told him in the vision. He knew the town where she lived. It was some three hundred versts (two hundred miles) away, and he set out to walk there.
VI
Pashenka had already long ceased to be Pashenka and had become old, withered, wrinkled Praskovya Mikhaylovna, mother-in-law of that failure, the drunken official Mavrikyev. She was living in the country town where he had had his last appointment, and there she was supporting the family: her daughter, her ailing neurasthenic son-in-law, and her five grandchildren. She did this by giving music lessons to tradesmen’s daughters, giving four and sometimes five lessons a day of an hour each, and earning in this way some sixty rubles (6 pounds) a month. So they lived for the present, in expectation of another appointment. She had sent letters to all her relations and acquaintances asking them to obtain a post for her son-in-law, and among the rest she had written to Sergius, but that letter had not reached him.
It was a Saturday, and Praskovya Mikhaylovna was herself mixing dough for currant bread such as the serf-cook on her father’s estate used to make so well. She wished to give her grandchildren a treat on the Sunday.
Masha, her daughter, was nursing her youngest child, the eldest boy and girl were at school, and her son-in-law was asleep, not having slept during the night. Praskovya Mikhaylovna had remained awake too for a great part of the night, trying to soften her daughter’s anger against her husband.
She saw that it was impossible for her son-in-law, a weak creature, to be other than he was, and realized that his wife’s reproaches could do no good–so she
