"I'll take him and put him on your sofa. Go nurse him!" That was a
threat.
But Yudushka was not the man to be moved. While Ulita was threatening,
he was already facing the ikon, with hands stretched upward. Evidently
he was imploring God to forgive all people, those who sinned knowingly,
and those who sinned unknowingly; those who sinned in word and those
who sinned in deed; and he thanked the Lord that he himself was not a
sinner or an adulterer, and that the Lord in His grace had led him in
the righteous path. Even his nose trembled with the solemnity of his
feeling. Ulita observed him for some time, blew out her lips in disgust
and left.
"God took one Volodka and gave another Volodka," flashed up in
Yudushka's mind quite irrelevantly; but he at once became aware of this
sudden play of thought and spat inwardly in annoyance.
Soon the priest came and chanted and burned incense. Yudushka heard
the drawl of the sexton as he was chanting, "Oh, Zealous Protectress!"
and gladly chimed in. Soon Ulita came running to the door again and
shouted, "He was christened Volodimir!"
Yudushka was moved by the strange coincidence of this circumstance and
his recent aberration of mind. He saw the will of God in it, and this
time he did not spit, but said to himself:
"Well, then, thank God! He took one Volodka and gave another. That's
what God can do. You lose something in one place and you think it's
gone, but God, if He wishes, rewards you for it a hundredfold."
At last it was announced that the samovar was on the table and the
priest was waiting in the dining-room. Porfiry Vladimirych became quite
peaceful and solemn. The Golovliovo priest, Father Aleksandr, was a
polite man, and he endeavored to give his intercourse with Yudushka
a worldly tone. In the landlord's manor there were all-night vigils
every week and on the eve of every principal holiday, in addition to
the ceremonial services performed every first of the month. That meant
an income of over a hundred rubles a year. Father Aleksandr was not
unmindful of this, nor of the fact that the landmarks between the
church lands and Yudushka's lands had not yet been settled upon, and
Yudushka, on passing the church meadows, would many times exclaim, "My,
what fine meadows!" So the priest's worldly behavior toward Yudushka
was tempered by fear, which came out every time the priest visited the
manor. He would work himself up into gay spirits, though he really had
no occasion to feel happy. And when Porfiry Vladimirych gave expression
to heresies concerning the ways of Providence, the after-life, and so
forth, the priest, though not quite approving of the heresies, still
did not consider them sacrilegious and blasphemous, but ascribed them
to the temerity of spirit characteristic of the gentry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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