Osip Varlamitch, to ask forgiveness
--it was the Day of Forgiveness--and he fastened the door with
the hook, and we were left alone face to face. And he began to
reprove me, and I must tell you Osip Varlamitch was a man of brains,
though without education, and everyone respected and feared him,
for he was a man of stern, God-fearing life and worked hard. He had
been the mayor of the town, and a warden of the church for twenty
years maybe, and had done a great deal of good; he had covered all
the New Moscow Road with gravel, had painted the church, and had
decorated the columns to look like malachite. Well, he fastened the
door, and--'I have been wanting to get at you for a long time,
you rascal, . . .' he said. 'You think you are a saint,' he said.
'No you are not a saint, but a backslider from God, a heretic and
an evildoer! . . .' And he went on and on. . . . I can't tell you
how he said it, so eloquently and cleverly, as though it were all
written down, and so touchingly. He talked for two hours. His words
penetrated my soul; my eyes were opened. I listened, listened and
--burst into sobs! 'Be an ordinary man,' he said, 'eat and drink,
dress and pray like everyone else. All that is above the ordinary
is of the devil. Your chains,' he said, 'are of the devil; your
fasting is of the devil; your prayer-room is of the devil. It is
all pride,' he said. Next day, on Monday in Holy Week, it pleased
God I should fall ill. I ruptured myself and was taken to the
hospital. I was terribly worried, and wept bitterly and trembled.
I thought there was a straight road before me from the hospital to
hell, and I almost died. I was in misery on a bed of sickness for
six months, and when I was discharged the first thing I did I
confessed, and took the sacrament in the regular way and became a
man again. Osip Varlamitch saw me off home and exhorted me: 'Remember,
Matvey, that anything above the ordinary is of the devil.' And now
I eat and drink like everyone else and pray like everyone else
. . . . If it happens now that the priest smells of tobacco or vodka I
don't venture to blame him, because the priest, too, of course, is
an ordinary man. But as soon as I am told that in the town or in
the village a saint has set up who does not eat for weeks, and makes
rules of his own, I know whose work it is. So that is how I carried
on in the past, gentlemen. Now, like Osip Varlamitch, I am continually
exhorting my cousins and reproaching them,