"What? For a sin committed by one three years of age (for, indeed, my little son was no more)? The accident happened of his pulling down a lamp upon himself, and of my wife seizing him, and herself being burnt to death. She was weak, too, for but eleven days had passed since her confinement."
"No. What I mean is that in that accident you see a punishment for sins committed by the child's father and mother."
This reply from the corner came with perfect confidence. The black-bearded man, however, pretended not to hear it, but spread out his hands as though parting the air before him, and proceeded hurriedly, breathlessly to detail the manner in which his wife and little one had met their deaths. And all the time that he was doing so one had an inkling that often before had he recounted his narrative of horror, and that often again would he repeat it.
His shaggy black eyebrows, as he delivered his speech, met in a single strip, while the whites of his eyes grew bloodshot, and their dull, black pupils never ceased their nervous twitching.
Presently the gloomy recital was once more roughly, unceremoniously broken in upon by the cheerful voice of the Christ-loving pilgrim.
"It is not right, brother," the voice said, "to blame God for untoward accidents, or for mistakes and follies committed by ourselves."
"But if God be God, He is responsible for all things."
"Not so. Concede to yourself the faculty of reason."
"Pah! What avails reason if it cannot make me understand?"
"Cannot make you understand WHAT?"
"The main point, the point why MY wife had to be burnt rather than my neighbour's?"
Somewhere an old woman commented in spitefully distinct tones:
"Oh ho, ho! This man comes to a monastery, and starts railing as soon as he gets there!"
Flashing his eyes angrily, the black-bearded man lowered his head like a bull. Then, thinking better of his position, and contenting himself with a gesture, he strode swiftly, heavily towards the door. Upon this the Christ-loving pilgrim rose with a swaying motion, bowed to everyone present, and set about following his late interlocutor.
"It has all come of a broken heart," he said with a smile as he passed me. Yet somehow the smile seemed to lack sympathy.
With a disapproving air someone else remarked:
"That fellow's one thought is to enlarge and to enlarge upon his tale."
"Yes, and to no purpose does he do so," added the Christ-loving pilgrim as he halted in the doorway. "All that he accomplishes by it is to weary himself and others alike. Such experiences are far better put behind one."
Presently I followed the pair into the forecourt, and near the entrance-gates heard a voice say quietly:
"Do not disturb yourself, good father."
"Nevertheless" (the second voice was that of the porter of the monastery, Father Seraphim, a strapping Vetlugan) "a spectre walks here nightly."
"Never mind if it does. As regards myself, no spectre would touch me."
Here I moved in the direction of the gates.
"Who comes there?" Seraphim inquired as he thrust a hairy and uncouth, but infinitely kindly, face close to mine. "Oh, it is the young fellow from Nizhni Novgorod! You are wasting your time, my good sir, for the women have all gone to bed."
With which he laughed and chuckled like a bear.
Beyond the wall of the forecourt the stillness of the autumn night was the languid inertia of a world exhausted by summer, and the withered grass and other objects of the season were exhaling a sweet and bracing odour, and the trees looking like fragments of cloud where motionless they hung in the moist, sultry air.
Also, in the darkness the half-slumbering sea could be heard soughing as it crept towards the shore while over the sky lay a canopy of mist, save at the point where the moon's opal-like blur could be descried over the spot where that blur's counterfeit image glittered and rocked on the surface of the dark waters.
Under the trees there was set a bench whereon I could discern there to be resting a human figure. Approaching the figure, I seated myself beside it.
"Whence, comrade?" was my inquiry.
"From Voronezh. And you?"
A Russian is never adverse to talking about himself. It would seem as though he is never sure of his personality, as though he is ever yearning to have that personality confirmed from some source other than, extraneous to, his own ego. The reason for this must be that we Russians live diffused over a land of such vastness that, the more we grasp the immensity of the same, the smaller do we come to appear in our own eyes; wherefore, traversing, as we do, roads of a length of a thousand versts, and constantly losing our way, we come to let slip no opportunity of restating ourselves, and setting forth all that we have seen and thought and done.
Hence, too, must it be that in conversations one seems to hear less of the note of "I am I" than of the note of "Am I really and truly myself?"
"What may be your name?" next I inquired of the figure on the bench.
"A name of absolute simplicity--the name of Alexei Kalinin."
"You are a namesake of mine, then."
"Indeed? Is that so?"
With which, tapping me on the knee, the figure added:
"Come, then, namesake. 'I have mortar, and you have water, so together let us paint the town.'"
Murmuring amid the silence could be heard small, light waves that were no more than ripples. Behind us the busy clamour of the monastery had died down, and even Kalinin's cheery voice seemed subdued by the influence of the night--it seemed to have in it less of the note of self-confidence.
