Short Fiction by Leo Tolstoy (book reader for pc TXT) 📕

“Don’t think ill of me, Father. Perhaps you want something to eat?”

He took the bread and the money, and Praskóvya Mikháylovna was surprised that he did not go, but stood looking at her.

“Páshenka, I have come to you! Take me in⁠ ⁠…”

His beautiful black eyes, shining with the tears that started in them, were fixed on her with imploring insistence. And under his greyish moustache his lips quivered piteously.

Praskóvya Mikháylovna pressed her hands to her withered breast, opened her mouth, and stood petrified, staring at the pilgrim with dilated eyes.

“It can’t be! Stëpa! Sergéy! Father Sergius!”

“Yes, it is I,” said Sergius in a low voice. “Only not Sergius, or Father Sergius, but a great sinner, Stepán Kasátsky⁠—a great and lost sinner. Take me in and help me!”

“It’s impossible! How have you so humbled yourself? But come in.”

She reached out her hand, but he did not take it and only followed her in.

But where was she to take him? The lodging was a small one. Formerly she had had a tiny room, almost a closet, for herself, but later she had given it up to her daughter, and Másha was now sitting there rocking the baby.

“Sit here for the present,” she said to Sergius, pointing to a bench in the kitchen.

He sat down at once, and with an evidently accustomed movement slipped the straps of his wallet first off one shoulder and then off the other.

“My God, my God! How you have humbled yourself, Father! Such great fame, and now like this⁠ ⁠…”

Sergius did not reply, but only smiled meekly, placing his wallet under the bench on which he sat.

“Másha, do you know who this is?”⁠—And in a whisper Praskóvya Mikháylovna told her daughter who he was, and together they then carried the bed and the cradle out of the tiny room and cleared it for Sergius.

Praskóvya Mikháylovna led him into it.

“Here you can rest. Don’t take offence⁠ ⁠… but I must go out.”

“Where to?”

“I have to go to a lesson. I am ashamed to tell you, but I teach music!”

“Music? But that is good. Only just one thing, Praskóvya Mikháylovna, I have come to you with a definite object. When can I have a talk with you?”

“I shall be very glad. Will this evening do?”

“Yes. But one thing more. Don’t speak about me, or say who I am. I have revealed myself only to you. No one knows where I have gone to. It must be so.”

“Oh, but I have told my daughter.”

“Well, ask her not to mention it.”

And Sergius took off his boots, lay down, and at once fell asleep after a sleepless night and a walk of nearly thirty miles.

When Praskóvya Mikháylovna returned, Sergius was sitting in the little room waiting for her. He did not come out for dinner, but had some soup and gruel which Lukérya brought him.

“How is it that you have come back earlier than you said?” asked Sergius. “Can I speak to you now?”

“How is it that I have the happiness to receive such a guest? I have missed one of my lessons. That can wait⁠ ⁠… I had always been planning to go to see you. I wrote to you, and now this good fortune has come.”

“Páshenka, please listen to what I am going to tell you as to a confession made to God at my last hour. Páshenka, I am not a holy man, I am not even as good as a simple ordinary man; I am a loathsome, vile, and proud sinner who has gone astray, and who, if not worse than everyone else, is at least worse than most very bad people.”

Páshenka looked at him at first with staring eyes. But she believed what he said, and when she had quite grasped it she touched his hand, smiling pityingly, and said:

“Perhaps you exaggerate, Stíva?”

“No, Páshenka. I am an adulterer, a murderer, a blasphemer, and a deceiver.”

“My God! How is that?” exclaimed Praskóvya Mikháylovna.

“But I must go on living. And I, who thought I knew everything, who taught others how to live⁠—I know nothing and ask you to teach me.”

“What are you saying, Stíva? You are laughing at me. Why do you always make fun of me?”

“Well, if you think I am jesting you must have it as you please. But tell me all the same how you live, and how you have lived your life.”

“I? I have lived a very nasty, horrible life, and now God is punishing me as I deserve. I live so wretchedly, so wretchedly⁠ ⁠…”

“How was it with your marriage? How did you live with your husband?”

“It was all bad. I married because I fell in love in the nastiest way. Papa did not approve. But I would not listen to anything and just got married. Then instead of helping my husband I tormented him by my jealousy, which I could not restrain.”

“I heard that he drank⁠ ⁠…”

“Yes, but I did not give him any peace. I always reproached him, though you know it is a disease! He could not refrain from it. I now remember how I tried to prevent his having it, and the frightful scenes we had!”

And she looked at Kasátsky with beautiful eyes, suffering from the remembrance.

Kasátsky remembered how he had been told that Páshenka’s husband used to beat her, and now, looking at her thin withered neck with prominent veins behind her ears, and her scanty coil of hair, half grey half auburn, he seemed to see just how it had occurred.

“Then I was left with two children and no means at all.”

“But you had an estate!”

“Oh, we sold that while Vásya was still alive, and the money was all spent. We had to live, and like all our young ladies I did not know how to earn anything. I was particularly useless and helpless. So we spent all we had. I taught the children and improved my own education a little. And then Mítya fell ill when he was already in the fourth form, and God took him. Másha fell in love