§14
But the real martyrs of our dinner-table were certain old and feeble ladies, who held a humble and uncertain position in the household of Princess Khovanski, my father’s sister. For the sake of change, or to get information about our domestic affairs—whether the heads of the family had quarrelled, whether the cook had beaten his wife and been detected by his master, whether a maid had slipped from the path of virtue—these old people sometimes came on a saint’s day to spend the day. I ought to mention that these old widows had known my father forty or fifty years earlier in the house of the Princess Meshcherski, where they were brought up for charity. During this interval between their precarious youth and unsettled old age, they had quarrelled for twenty years with husbands, tried to keep them sober, nursed them when paralysed, and buried them. One had fought the battle of life in Bessarabia with a husband on half-pay and a swarm of children; another, together with her husband, had been a defendant for years in the criminal courts; and all these experiences had left on them the traces of life in provincial towns—a dread of those who have power in this world, a spirit of humility and also of blind fanaticism.
Their presence often gave rise to astonishing scenes.
“Are you not well, that you are eating nothing, Anna Yakimovna?” my father would ask.
Then Anna Yakimovna, the widow of some obscure official, an old woman with a worn faded face and a perpetual smell of camphor, apologised with eyes and fingers as she answered: “Excuse me, bátyushka—I am really quite ashamed; but, you know, by old custom to-day is a Fast-day.”
“What a nuisance! You are too scrupulous, mátushka: ‘not that which entereth into a man defileth a man but that which cometh out’: whatever you eat, the end is the same. But we ought to watch ‘what cometh out of the mouth,’ and that means scandal against our neighbours. I think you should dine at home on such days. Suppose a Turk were to turn up, he might want pilaus; but my house is not a hotel where each can order what he wants.” This terrified the old woman who had intended to ask for some milk pudding; but she now attacked the kvass and the salad, and made a pretence of eating enormously.
But if she, or any of them, began to eat meat on a Fast-day, then my father (who never fasted himself) would shake his head sorrowfully and say: “Do you really think it worth while, Anna Yakimovna, to give up the ancient custom, when you have so few years still to live? I, poor sinner, don’t fast myself, because I have many diseases; but you may thank God for your health, considering your age, and you have kept the fasts all your life; and now all of a sudden—think what an example to them—” pointing to the servants. And the poor old woman once more fell upon the kvass and the salad.
These scenes filled me with disgust, and I sometimes ventured to defend the victim by pointing out the desire of conformity which he expressed at other times. Then it was my father’s custom to get up and take off his velvet skull-cap by the tassel: holding it over his head, he would thank me for my lecture and beg me to excuse his forgetfulness. Then he would say to the old lady: “These are terrible times! Little wonder that you neglect the Fast, when children teach their parents! What are we coming to? It is an awful prospect; but fortunately you and I will not live to see it.”