by Leo Tolstoy
“Father Sergius! Father Sergius! Or how does one call you?”
“What do you want?” replied a quiet voice.
“Please forgive me for disturbing your solitude, but really I could not help it. I should simply have fallen ill. And I don’t know that I shan’t now. I am all wet and my feet are like ice.”
“Pardon me,” replied the quiet voice. “I cannot be of any assistance to you.”
“I would not have disturbed you if I could have helped it. I am only here till daybreak.”
He did not reply and she heard him muttering something, probably his prayers.
“You will not be coming in here?” she asked, smiling. “For I must undress to dry myself.”
He did not reply, but continued to read his prayers.
“Yes, that is a man!” thought she, getting her dripping boot off with difficulty. She tugged at it, but could not get it off. The absurdity of it struck her and she began to laugh almost inaudibly. But knowing that he would hear her laughter and would be moved by it just as she wished him to be, she laughed louder, and her laughter—gay, natural, and kindly—really acted on him just in the way she wished.
“Yes, I could love a man like that—such eyes and such a simple noble face, and passionate too despite all the prayers he mutters!” thought she. “You can’t deceive a woman in these things. As soon as he put his face to the window and saw me, he understood and knew. The glimmer of it was in his eyes and remained there. He began to love me and desired me. Yes—desired!” said she, getting her overshoe and her boot off at last and starting to take off her stockings. To remove those long stockings fastened with elastic it was necessary to raise her skirts. She felt embarrassed and said:
“Don’t come in!”
But there was no reply from the other side of the wall. The steady muttering continued and also a sound of moving.
“He is prostrating himself to the ground, no doubt,” thought she. “But he won’t bow himself out of it. He is thinking of me just as I am thinking of him. He is thinking of these feet of mine with the same feeling that I have!” And she pulled off her wet stockings and put her feet up on the bench, pressing them under her. She sat a while like that with her arms round her knees and looking pensively before her. “But it is a desert, here in this silence. No one would ever know. . . .”
She rose, took her stockings over to the stove, and hung them on the damper. It was a queer damper, and she turned it about, and then, stepping lightly on her bare feet, returned to the bench and sat down there again with her feet up.
There was complete silence on the other side of the partition. She looked at the tiny watch that hung round her neck. It was two o’clock. “Our party should return about three!” She had not more than an hour before her. “Well, am I to sit like this all alone? What nonsense! I don’t want to. I will call him at once.”
“Father Sergius, Father Sergius! Sergey Dmitrich! Prince Kasatsky!”
Beyond the partition all was silent.
“Listen! This is cruel. I would not call you if it were not necessary. I am ill. I don’t know what is the matter with me!” she exclaimed in a tone of suffering. “Oh! Oh!” she groaned, falling back on the bench. And strange to say she really felt that her strength was failing, that she was becoming faint, that everything in her ached, and that she was shivering with fever.
“Listen! Help me! I don’t know what is the matter with me. Oh! Oh!” She unfastened her dress, exposing her breast, and lifted her arms, bare to the elbow. “Oh! Oh!”
All this time he stood on the other side of the partition and prayed. Having finished all the evening prayers, he now stood motionless, his eyes looking at the end of his nose, and mentally repeated with all his soul: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me!”
But he had heard everything. He had heard how the silk rustled when she took off her dress, how she stepped with bare feet on the floor, and had heard how she rubbed her feet with her hand. He felt his own weakness, and that he might be lost at any moment. That was why he prayed unceasingly. He felt rather as the hero in the fairy tale must have felt when he had to go on and on without looking round. So Sergius heard and felt that danger and destruction were there, hovering above and around him, and that he could only save himself by not looking in that direction for an instant. But suddenly the desire to look seized him. At the same instant she said:
“This is inhuman. I may die. . . .”
“Yes, I will go to her, but like the saint who laid one hand on the adulteress and thrust his other into the brazier. But there is no brazier here.” He looked round. The lamp! He put his finger over the flame and frowned, preparing himself to suffer. And for a rather long time, as it seemed to him, there was no sensation, but suddenly—he had not yet decided whether it was painful enough—he writhed all over, jerked his hand away, and waved it in the air. “No, I can’t stand that!”
“For God’s sake come to me! I am dying! Oh!”
“Well,” he thought, “shall I perish? No, not so!”
“I will come to you directly,” he said, and having opened his door, he went without looking at her through the cell into the porch where he used to chop wood. There he felt for the block and for an axe which leant against the wall.
“Immediately!” he said, and taking up the axe with his right hand he laid the forefinger of his left hand on the block, swung the axe, and struck with it below the second joint. The finger flew off more lightly than a stick of similar thickness, and bounding up, turned over on the edge of the block and then fell to the floor.
He heard it fall before he felt any pain, but before he had time to be surprised he felt a burning pain and the warmth of flowing blood. He hastily wrapped the stump in the skirt of his cassock, and pressing it to his hip went back into the room, and standing in front of the woman, lowered his eyes and asked in a low voice: “What do you want?”
She looked at his pale face and his quivering left cheek, and suddenly felt ashamed. She jumped up, seized her fur cloak, and throwing it round her shoulders, wrapped herself up in it.
“I was in pain . . . I have caught cold . . . I . . . Father Sergius . . . I . . .”
He let his eyes, shining with a quiet light of joy, rest upon her, and said:
“Dear sister, why did you wish to ruin your immortal soul? Temptations must come into the world, but woe to him by whom temptation comes. Pray that God may forgive us!”
She listened and looked at him. Suddenly she heard the sound of something dripping. She looked down and saw that blood was flowing from his hand and down his cassock.
“What have you done to your hand?” She remembered the sound she had heard, and seizing the little lamp ran out into the porch. There on the floor she saw the bloody finger. She returned with her face paler than his and was about to speak to him, but he silently passed into the back cell and fastened the door.
“Forgive me!” she said. “How can I atone for my sin?”
“Go away.”
“Let me tie up your hand.”
“Go away from here.”
She dressed hurriedly and silently, and when ready sat waiting in her furs. The sledge bells were heard outside.
“Father Sergius, forgive me!”
“Go away. God will forgive.”
“Father Sergius! I will change my life. Do not forsake me!”
“Go away.”
“Forgive me—and give me your blessing!”
“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost !”—she heard his voice from behind the partition. “Go!”
She burst into sobs and left the cell. The lawyer came forward to meet her.
“Well, I see I have lost the bet. It can’t be helped. Where will you sit?”
“It is all the same to me.”
She took a seat in the sledge, and did not utter a word all the way home.
A year later she entered a convent as a novice, and lived a strict life under the direction of the hermit A
rseny, who wrote letters to her at long intervals.
IV
Father Sergius lived as a recluse for another seven years.
At first he accepted much of what people brought him—tea, sugar, white bread, milk, clothing, and firewood. But as time went on he led a more and more austere life, refusing everything superfluous, and finally he accepted nothing but rye bread once a week. Everything else that was brought to him he gave to the poor who came to him. He spent his entire time in his cell, in prayer or in conversation with callers, who became more and more numerous as time went on. Only three times a year did he go out to church, and when necessary he went out to fetch water and wood.
The episode with Makovkina had occurred after five years of his hermit life. That occurrence soon became generally known—her nocturnal visit, the change she underwent, and her entry into a convent. From that time Father Sergius’s fame increased. More and more visitors came to see him, other monks settled down near his cell, and a church was erected there and also a hostelry. His fame, as usual exaggerating his feats, spread ever more and more widely. People began to come to him from a distance, and began bringing invalids to him whom they declared he cured.
His first cure occurred in the eighth year of his life as a hermit. It was the healing of a fourteen-year-old boy, whose mother brought him to Father Sergius insisting that he should lay his hand on the child’s head. It had never occurred to Father Sergius that he could cure the sick. He would have regarded such a thought as a great sin of pride; but the mother who brought the boy implored him insistently, falling at his feet and saying: “Why do you, who heal others, refuse to help my son?” She besought him in Christ’s name. When Father Sergius assured her that only God could heal the sick, she replied that she only wanted him to lay his hands on the boy and pray for him. Father Sergius refused and returned to his cell. But next day (it was in autumn and the nights were already cold) on going out for water he saw the same mother with her son, a pale boy of fourteen, and was met by the same petition.
He remembered the parable of the unjust judge, and though he had previously felt sure that he ought to refuse, he now began to hesitate and, having hesitated, took to prayer and prayed until a decision formed itself in his soul. This decision was, that he ought to accede to the woman’s request and that her faith might save her son. As for himself, he would in this case be but an insignificant instrument chosen by God.
And going out to the mother he did what she asked—laid his hand on the boy’s head and prayed.
The mother left with her son, and a month later the boy recovered, and the fame of the holy healing power of the starets Sergius (as they now called him) spread throughout the whole district. After that, not a week passed without sick people coming, riding or on foot, to Father Sergius; and having acceded to one petition he could not refuse others, and he laid his hands on many and prayed. Many recovered, and his fame spread more and more.
So seven years passed in the monastery and thirteen in his hermit’s cell. He now had the appearance of an old man: his beard was long and grey, but his hair, though thin, was still black and curly.
V
For some weeks Father Sergius had been living with one persistent thought: whether he was right in accepting the position in which he had not so much placed himself as been placed by the archimandrite and the abbot. That position had begun after the recovery of the fourteen-year-old boy. From that time, with each month, week, and day that passed, Sergius felt his own inner life wasting away and being replaced by external life. It was as if he had been turned inside out.
Sergius saw that he was a means of attracting visitors and contributions to the monastery, and that therefore the authorities arranged matters in such a way as to make as much use of him as possible. For instance, they rendered it impossible for him to do any manual work. He was supplied with everything he could want, and they only demanded of him that he should not refuse his blessing to those who came to seek it. For his convenience they appointed days when he would receive. They arranged a reception room for men, and a place was railed in so that he should not be pushed over by the crowds of women visitors, and so that he could conveniently bless those who came.
They told him that people needed him, and that fulfilling Christ’s law of love he could not refuse their demand to see him, and that to avoid them would be cruel. He could not but agree with this, but the more he gave himself up to such a life the more he felt that what was internal became external, and that the fount of living water within him dried up, and that what he did now was done more and more for men and less and less for God.
Whether he admonished people, or simply blessed them, or prayed for the sick, or advised people about their lives, or listened to expressions of gratitude from those he had helped by precepts, or alms, or healing (as they assured him)—he could not help being pleased at it, and could not be indifferent to the results of his activity and to the influence he exerted. He thought himself a shining light, and the more he felt this the more was he conscious of a weakening, a dying down of the divine light of truth that shone within him.
“In how far is what I do for God and in how far is it for men?” That was the question that insistently tormented him and to which he was not so much unable to give himself an answer as unable to face the answer.
In the depth of his soul he felt that the devil had substituted an activity for men in place of his former activity for God. He felt this because, just as it had formerly been hard for him to be torn from his solitude so now that solitude itself was hard for him. He was oppressed and wearied by visitors, but at the bottom of his heart he was glad of their presence and glad of the praise they heaped upon him.
There was a time when he decided to go away and hide. He even planned all that was necessary for that purpose. He prepared for himself a peasant’s shirt, trousers, coat, and cap. He explained that he wanted these to give to those who asked. And he kept these clothes in his cell, planning how he would put them on, cut his hair short, and go away. First he would go some three hundred versts by train, then he would leave the train and walk from village to village. He asked an old man who had been a soldier how he tramped: what people gave him, and what shelter they allowed him. The soldier told him where people were most charitable, and where they would take a wanderer in for the night, and Father Sergius intended to avail himself of this information. He even put on those clothes one night in his desire to go, but he could not decide what was best—to remain or to escape. At first he was in doubt, but afterwards this indecision passed. He submitted to custom and yielded to the devil, and only the peasant garb reminded him of the thought and feeling he had had.
Every day more and more people flocked to him and less and less time was left him for prayer and for renewing his spiritual strength. Sometimes in lucid moments he thought he was like a place where there had once been a spring. “There used to be a feeble spring of living water which flowed quietly from me and through me. That was true life, the time when she tempted me!” (He always thought with ecstasy of that night and of her who was now Mother Agnes.) She had tasted of that pure water, but since then there had not been time for it to collect before thirsty people came crowding in and pushing one another aside. And they had trampled everything down and nothing was left but mud.
So he thought in rare moments of lucidity, but his usual state of mind was one of weariness and a tender pity for himself because of that weariness.
It was in spring, on the eve of the mid-Pentecostal feast. Father Sergius was officiating at the Vigil Service in his hermitage church, where the congregation was as large as the little church could hold—about twenty people. They were all well-to-do proprietors or merchants. Father Sergius admitted anyone, but a selection was made by the monk in attendance and by an assistant who was sent to the hermitage every day from the monastery. A crowd of some eighty people—pilgrims and peasants, and especially peasant women—stood outside waiting for Father Sergius to come out and bless them. Meanwh
ile he conducted the service, but at the point at which he went out to the tomb of his predecessor, he staggered and would have fallen had he not been caught by a merchant standing behind him and by the monk acting as deacon.
“What is the matter, Father Sergius? Dear man! O Lord!” exclaimed the women. “He is as white as a sheet!”
But Father Sergius recovered immediately, and though very pale, he waved the merchant and the deacon aside and continued to chant the service.
Father Seraphim, the deacon, the acolytes, and Sofya Ivanovna, a lady who always lived near the hermitage and tended Father Sergius, begged him to bring the service to an end.
“No, there’s nothing the matter,” said Father Sergius, slightly smiling from beneath his mustache and continuing the service. “Yes, that is the way the saints behaved!” thought he.
“A holy man—an angel of God!” he heard just then the voice of Sofya Ivanovna behind him, and also of the merchant who had supported him. He did not heed their entreaties, but went on with the service. Again crowding together they all made their way by the narrow passages back into the little church, and there, though abbreviating it slightly, Father Sergius completed vespers.