CHAPTER III
“Do you remember, my Lord, how in your room at Preobrazhensky I asked you before the Holy Gospels, whether you would regard me as your confessor, your guardian-angel, God’s apostle—the judge of your actions; and whether you believed that I, unworthy though I might be, possessed that holy power of the priest to bind, or to loose, which Christ granted to his apostles; and you answered ‘Yes’?”
So spake to the Tsarevitch the arch-priest Father James Ignatief, who had come from Moscow to Petersburg, about three weeks after Alexis’ interview with Theodosius.
Ten years before Father James had stood in the same relationship to Alexis as the Patriarch Nicon had stood to his grandfather, the gentle Tsar Alexis Michailovitch. The grandson had followed his grandfather’s precept: “Let the clergy be first; submit to them without question, the priesthood is higher than the Tsarhood.” Amid the universal desecration and thraldom of the Church, the Tsarevitch felt it a sweet privilege to bow before the humble priest James. In the pastor’s face he saw the face of the Lord himself, and he believed that the Lord was Lord of lords, and King of kings. The more absolute and severe Father James was, the more humble was the Tsarevitch, and the more he rejoiced in his humility. He bestowed upon his spiritual father all that love he could not give to his father after the flesh. It was a jealous, tender, passionate friendship, almost like that between lovers. “I take God for witness that in the whole Russian Empire I have no other such friend as your holiness,” he wrote to Father James from abroad. “I did not mean to say it, but, never mind, I will now; may God grant you long life, and should you be called to a better world I should have no desire to return to Russia.”
Suddenly it all changed. Father James had a son-in-law, the clerk Peter Anfimoff. Yielding to the entreaties of his confessor, Alexis had taken this Anfimoff into his service and entrusted to him the administration of his estates at Poretzkoye, in the Government of Nishni-Novgorod. The arbitrary rule of the clerk ruined the peasants, and almost drove them to revolt. Many times did they write to Alexis complaining about Peter the thief, but the latter always came out unscathed, thanks to the protection of Father James. At last it dawned upon the peasants to send a messenger to Petersburg, to their old friend and countryman, Ivan Afanássieff, valet to the Tsarevitch. Ivan went himself to Poretzkoye to investigate matters, and on his return, reported in such a way that no doubt whatever remained of Peter’s dishonesty and villainy, and what was more important, that Father James knew all about it. It was a severe blow to Alexis. He was indignant, not because of the harm done to him or his peasants, but because the Church of God seemed to him desecrated in the person of her unworthy pastor. For a long time he would not see Father James, he concealed his resentment and said nothing; but at last it burst out.
Under the nickname of Father Hell, together with Jibanda, Sleeper, the Lasher and other boon companions of the Tsarevitch, the arch-priest was wont to take part in the drinking bouts of the Most Drunken Conclave, an imitation of Peter’s more famous association. At one of their orgies Alexis began denouncing the Russian clergy, calling them Judas, the Betrayers of Christ.
“When will the new prophet Elijah arise to break your backs, ye priests of Baal?” exclaimed Alexis, looking straight at Father James.
“You speak wildly, Tsarevitch,” the latter interposed with severity, “it ill becomes you to cast reproaches at us, your unworthy intercessors with God——”
“Oh! we know your prayers,” interrupted Alexis, “You seek pardon and in the same breath pray for God’s blessing on your knavery. My father, the Tsar Peter, may God grant him long life! did well to clip your wings! You deserve to be treated much worse than this, you Pharisees, hypocrites, serpent brood.”
Father James got up from the table, came up to the Tsarevitch and asked in a solemn voice:—
“Of whom do you speak, my Lord. Is it myself?”
At this minute Father James resembled the holy Father, the patriarch Nikon, but Peter’s son no longer resembled the gentle Tsar Alexis Michailovitch.
“You too are included,” answered the Tsarevitch, standing up and continuing to look at Father James. “You too, Father, cannot be exempt from the general rule; you too have sold your soul to the devil; and have become a priest from motives of self interest. Why do you assume such pride? You want the Patriarchate, no doubt? If so, you are a long way off it. Wait, the Lord will soon cast you down from the pride of place which your Church assumes, and you will fall into the mud, mud, mud!”
He added a ribald expression; all laughed. Father James lost control over himself, he too was drunk, though not so much with wine as with anger. “Hold your tongue, Alexis,” he cried. “Be quiet, you puppy.”
“If I am a puppy, you, Father, are a dog!”
Father James’ face became purple, he trembled all over, raised both his hands over the head of the Tsarevitch, and with the voice in which he was wont to pronounce the anathema against all heretics and apostates, he now called out:
“I will curse you with the power given to us by the Lord Himself, through the Apostle Peter——”
“Spare your breath,” retorted Alexis with a malignant smile. “Don’t invoke Peter the Apostle, but Peter Anfimoff the clerk, the thief, your beloved son-in-law, it’s he, Peter the vile, Peter the evil one, who possesses you and cries within you!”
Father James dropped one hand and struck Alexis on the cheek: “Closing the mouth of the evil one.”
The Tsarevitch fell upon him, with one hand he seized him, the other was searching for a knife on the table. Distorted by anger, pale, with flashing eyes, the face of Alexis bore a momentary, mysterious likeness to his father Peter. It was one of those fits of fury which from time to time the Tsarevitch was subject to, and while it lasted he was capable of any crime.
The others started up and rushed to separate them; they seized the combatants by hands and feet, and, after considerable effort, succeeded in parting them.
This quarrel, like all similar quarrels, had no result: a drunkard is not responsible for his deeds; it is a usual thing to drink, fight, sleep it off and be friends again. They too made it up; but the old love did not return. The priest had lost his authority over the grandson as he had done over the grandfather.
Father James was the intermediary between the Tsarevitch and a whole secret confederacy, almost a conspiracy, against Peter and his new town. This society had for its centre the disgraced Tsaritsa Eudoxia, the first wife of Peter, who had been banished to Sousdal. When the news spread of the Tsar’s supposed fatal illness, Father James hurried to Petersburg, bearing a message from Sousdal, where great things were expected when Alexis should become Tsar. But things had taken a new turn by the time the priest had arrived. The Tsar grew better so rapidly that his recovery seemed almost miraculous, or else his illness had been feigned. Kikin’s prophecy had been fulfilled: the cat which was supposed to be dead had leapt up, and there was an end to the mice’s merry-making; all dispersed and hid themselves. Peter had gained his end, and had learnt what his son’s strength would be, should he, the Tsar, really die.
Rumours had reached Alexis that his father was very wroth with him. One of the spies, was it Theodosius himself? had whispered, it was said, to Peter, that the Tsarevitch was cheerful at the time of his father’s illness and that his face was bright and joyous.
Again all forsook the Tsarevitch, avoided him as a leper. After having dreamt of the throne he saw himself nigh to the scaffold, and he knew that he should find no mercy. Daily he dreaded an interview with his father. Yet hatred and revolt stifled fear. This deception, this dissimulation, this feline slyness, this sacrilegious trifling with death seemed vile to him. He could not help remembering another dissimulation of his father’s. The letter threatening disinheritance, “a declaration to my son,” which the Tsarevitch received on the day of his wife’s funeral, October 22, 1715, had been dated October 11, the eve of his son’s, young Peter Alexeyevitch’s, birth. At the time he had not noticed the antedating; but now he saw the reason for this subterfuge. When a son was born to him, Alexis, the Tsar could not very well have ignored the same in his “declaration”; nor could he threaten absolute disinheritance when a new heir had appeared. The substitution of dates leant an appearance of legitimacy to what was in reality unlawful.
The Tsarevitch smiled bitterly, when he remembered how his father always liked to pose as artless and straightforward.
He could forgive his father everything, all the great wrongs and ill-doings, but he could not get over this petty cunning.
Father James found the Tsarevitch immersed in these thoughts. Alexis was pleased to see him; he was lonely and welcomed any visitor. But Nikon’s spirit was strong in Father James. Feeling that Alexis now more than ever needed his help, he resolved to remind him of his wrongs.
“Tsarevitch,” continued Father James, “you have broken the vow made unto me in Preobrazhensky before the Holy Gospels, treating it lightly and with contempt. You no longer consider me your guardian angel, the apostle of Christ, the judge of all your actions; on the contrary you have taken upon yourself to judge and outrage us with reviling words. And much misery did you bring into our household through this affair, between our son-in-law and the peasants of Poretzkoye. And you have plucked me, your spiritual father, by the beard, a thing your highness had no right to do, if only for fear of the living God.... Though I be a vile sinner, yet I am, nevertheless, a minister of the pure body and blood of Christ. The Lord of lords will judge between us on the day of the great reckoning, when there will be no dissimulation. Then the power of the world will fade away, and the Tsar will stand before God simply as a man.”
Without a word the Tsarevitch raised his eyes to him; they expressed neither grief nor despair, but such blank indifference that Father James did not continue; he understood that this was not the right moment to settle old accounts. He was warm-hearted and deeply attached to Alexis.
“Well, God will forgive you,” he said in conclusion, “and you, my friend, forgive me also——”
Then he added, looking into his face with tender anxiety:
“Why are you so downcast, Alexis?”
The Tsarevitch hung his head and did not reply.
“I have brought you something,” Father James smiled with a cheerful, mysterious air, “a letter from your mother. I have recently been to see them. Their joy has invigorated me. Again they have had visions, voices, saying: The time will soon come.” He searched in his pocket for the letter.
“Don’t,” the Tsarevitch stopped him, “don’t, Father James. It would be better not to let me see it. What good can it do? Life is particularly difficult for me at this moment. This might be reported, my father could get wind of it. We are surrounded by spies. Don’t go to see the religious again, and bring me no more letters in future. We must not——”
Father James again looked at him long and anxiously.
“This is what they have brought him to ... the son denies his mother!”
“Can’t you get on with your father?” he asked in a whisper.
Alexis only waved his hand and his head sank lower still. Father James understood it all. Tears filled the old man’s eyes, he bent over the Tsarevitch, laid one hand on the young man’s, while with the other he began gently to stroke his hair, as he would that of a sick child, saying:
“What is it, my little son? What is it, my son? the Lord be with thee! If you have something on your mind, don’t keep it back; it will do you good for us to talk it over together. I am your father, remember; though I am but a sinner yet the Lord may give me wisdom.”
The Tsarevitch continued to be silent and avoided his gaze. But suddenly his face fell, his lips quivered with a hollow tearless sob, he sank at his confessor’s feet.
“It’s hard, Father, it’s hard! I know not what to do. I can bear it no longer—— I wish my father——”
He was unable to proceed, he seemed frightened by what he was going to say.
“Come into the chapel, come quickly, I’ll tell you all there, I want to confess. Judge, Father, in the sight of God between my father and me——”
In the chapel, a small room next to the bedchamber, the walls were covered with ancient icons, in gold and silver trimmings set with precious stones; they were a heritage of Tsar Alexis. No ray of sunshine ever penetrated here. Lamps lit the perpetual gloom.
The Tsarevitch knelt before the desk which held the Gospels. Father James, robed, solemn, as it were transfigured, his face quite simple and peasant like, slightly heavy, and bloated with age, yet from a distance still handsome, reminding one of the Saviour’s face on old images—held the cross, saying:—
“My son, Christ is invisibly present to receive thy confession; be not ashamed, neither afraid; conceal nothing from me, but recount to me all thy sins so that thou mayest receive the absolution of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
And as the sins were named one after the other in the order of the confession, the priest putting the questions, the penitent answering them, Alexis’ heart grew lighter and lighter, as though some powerful being were removing load after load from his soul, and, touching with light finger the wounds of his conscience, healed them. He felt happy and awed; his heart burned within him and it seemed to him, that not Father James, but Christ Himself was standing before him.
“Tell me, son, hast thou willingly or unwillingly slain a man?”
This was a question the Tsarevitch was anticipating with dread.
“I have sinned here,” he replied in a scarcely audible voice, “not in deed, nor in words, but in thought. I wished my father——”
And again, as before, he stopped short as if what he was going to say had frightened him. But the All-seeing Eye penetrated the very depths of his soul, and nothing could be hid from It.
With effort, trembling, pale and bathed in cold sweat, he concluded:
“When my father was ill, I longed for his death.”
He stopped and shrank together and bent his head lower still. He closed his eyes so as not to see Him who stood before him; his heart sank in an agony of dread, as though he were waiting for the last word of condemnation, or absolution, which would peal forth like thunder as on the day of Judgment, when suddenly he heard the familiar, ordinary human voice of Father James, saying: “God will forgive thee, child. We all desired it!”
The Tsarevitch lifted his head, opened his eyes, and saw the familiar, ordinary, human face, not in the least alarming, with little wrinkles round the brown eyes; kind and slightly cunning, a mole with three hairs on the round plump cheek, the reddish grizzled beard, the same he had once pulled in a scuffle, when in his cups. An ordinary priest, nothing remarkable about him; yet, if a thunderbolt had fallen, Alexis would have been less dumbfounded than by those simple words—“God will forgive thee, we all desired it.”
And meanwhile, the priest continued, as if nothing had happened:—
“Tell me, my son, hast thou abstained from blood, carrion, from the flesh of strangled animal, or those killed by the wolf, and smitten by the bird? Hast thou ever defiled thyself by eating what has been forbidden in the holy laws? Hast thou tasted in Lent, or on Wednesdays and Fridays, butter and cheese?”
“Father,” exclaimed the Tsarevitch, “great is my sin, the Lord knows how great it is!”
“Hast thou broken the Lenten fast?” asked Father James with anxiety.
“I did not mean that, Father; I speak of my father, the Tsar. How is it possible? I am his son, flesh of his flesh. The son prayed for the death of his father! He who longs for another person’s death is a murderer. I am a parricide in thought. I am troubled, Father James, sorely troubled. Verily, Father, I confess to thee as to Christ Himself. Judge me, help me, be gracious unto me, O Lord!”
Father James looked at him, first in astonishment, then in anger.
“You repent for having revolted against your father after the flesh, but you forget your revolt against your father after the spirit! Inasmuch as the spirit is more than the flesh, by so much is the father after the spirit greater than the father after the flesh——”
And again he talked in an empty, laboured, literary manner, insisting again and again upon the honour due to the priesthood above all. “You, my son, have rebelled. Like a frenzied man, like a mad goat you have screamed at me. May God not count this unto you! It is not your own doing, but Satan plays me false through you. He has saddled you like a sorry jade and rides you proudly like a wild boar, according to the vision of the holy Fathers, wherever he chooses, till at last he will drive you into eternal perdition.”
And gradually he led the talk to the affair with the Poretzkoye peasants and his son-in-law Peter Anfimoff. A veil like a cobweb, grey, wan and sticky, spread before the eyes of the Tsarevitch, and the face which stood before him seemed to dilate and double, as in a fog; another face appeared instead, also familiar, with a red pointed nose ever scenting the air, blear-eyed and sly, the face of Peter the clerk; and it seemed as if the dignified face of the Most Reverend Father James, which resembled the face of Christ as painted on ancient icons, merged and mingled in a strange unholy way with the features of Peter the thief, Peter the rogue.
“Our Lord Jesus Christ by the grace and abounding compassion of His love, doth pardon and forgive thee, son Alexis, all thy sins!” recited Father James, covering the young man’s head with the stole, “and I, unworthy minister, unto whom He has given the power to pronounce pardon and absolution, declare thee free of thy sins in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit!”
Alexis felt an emptiness in his heart. The words seemed to him meaningless, powerless, without mystery, without awe. He felt that what was forgiven here on earth would not be forgiven him in heaven; that absolution received here was not absolution there.
The same day towards evening, Father James went for his vapour bath; on his return, he sat down near the hearth opposite to the Tsarevitch, and began to drink the hot “sbeeten,” boiled in a kettle of red copper, which reflected the red face of the priest. He drank in leisurely fashion, glass after glass, and mopped his brow with a large chequered handkerchief. He took his bath and drank his drink as if performing a rite. In the way he drank and munched the cracknels, he maintained the same order and solemnity as when officiating at a Church service. He manifestly was a respecter of ancient traditions, and in him appeared the representative of the old Orthodoxy of Russia: “be immoveable like a pillar of marble; bend neither to the right nor to the left.”
The Tsarevitch listened to detached arguments as to what bunches of twigs were softest for use in a vapour bath, what herbs, mint or tansy, made the best scent for a bath; then to a story of how the priest’s own wife had nearly suffocated herself in a vapour bath last winter on the eve of St. Nicholas’ day. Then to an exhortation drawn from the holy Fathers: “The worm is exceedingly humble and lean, while thou art proud and renowned; but if thou wilt be reasonable, destroy thy pride, remembering that strength and power will be meat for the worms; fear vanity, eschew anger.”
Again the affair with the peasants of Poretzkoye and the inevitable Peter Anfimoff was introduced.
The Tsarevitch was sleepy, and it seemed to him, at times, that it was not a man sitting and talking before him, but a cow, interminably chewing the cud.
The twilight was falling. Outside, the snow was melting, the weather was warm; a yellow dirty fog hung in the air; the pale lineaments of the frost-flowers melted and wept on the window panes. The sky was dull, watery and lowering like the sly, vile eyes of Peter the clerk. Father James sat opposite the Tsarevitch in the place which, three weeks ago, had been occupied by the Archimandrite Theodosius; and Alexis involuntarily compared the two pastors, that of the Old and that of the New Church.
“Not prelates but riffraff! we were eagles, we have become bats,” said Theodosius. “We were eagles and have become beasts of burden,” the priest James might have said. Behind Theodosius stood the eternal politician, the ancient prince of the world; behind Father James there also was a politician, the new prince of this world, Peter the rogue. One was worthy of the other. The Old was worthy of the New. And could it be possible that, screened behind these two persons, the past and the future, there was a third, the unique image of the Church as a whole? He looked now at the dirty sky, now at the red face of the priest. In both there was something flat, trivial, eternally trivial; something which was ever present and commonplace; and yet more awful than the wildest delirium. The heart of the Tsarevitch was empty; he was weary with a weariness bitterer than death itself. Again, as on another night, a bell was heard, first far off in the distance and then louder and louder as it came nearer. The Tsarevitch listened anxiously.
“Somebody is driving up; are they coming here?” said Father James.
The splashing of horses’ hoofs in the melted snow was heard, the squeak of the sleigh runners on the bare stones, voices in the entrance, steps across the hall; the doors opened and in came a giant with a handsome stupid face, a strange mixture of a Roman soldier and a Russian, Ivan the fool. It was the Tsar’s orderly, Alexander Ivanovitch Roumiantzev, Captain of the Preobrazhensky Guards. He handed a letter to the Tsarevitch, who broke the seal and read:—
“Son, we order thee to come to-morrow to the Winter Palace.
“Peter.”
Alexis was neither frightened nor surprised; he seemed to have foreseen this interview and felt indifferent.
That night the Tsarevitch had a dream, which he often dreamt, and always in the same way.
This dream was connected with a story he had been told in his childhood. In the time of the executions of the Streltsy Tsar Peter ordered the body of his enemy, the chief rebel leader, Boyarin Ivan Miloslavski, who was a friend of Sophia, to be disinterred; it had remained for seventeen years in St. Nicholas’ Church; the open coffin was then drawn by swine to Preobrazhensky, and there placed in the torture chamber under the block on which traitors were beheaded so that the blood should flow on the dead man; then the body was ordered to be cut into pieces and buried in that chamber under the block—“so that,” ran the ukase, “the vile parts of the thief Miloslavski should be always watered by the blood of thieves, according to the word of the Psalmist: ‘The Lord will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.’”
In this dream Alexis seemed at first to see nothing, but only hear that terrible song from the fairy-tale about the sister and brother, which his grandmother, Peter’s mother, the old Tsaritsa Natalia Kirilovna Naryishkin, had often told him in his childhood. The brother, changed into a goat, was calling his sister Alionoushka, but in the dream Alexis heard instead of “Alionoushka” his own name Alioshenka (diminutive for Alexis).
Alioshenka, Alioshenka,
Hot fires are burning,
Cauldrons are steaming,
Knives are being sharpened,
All to butcher thee.
Before his eyes rises the vision of a lonely street of thawing snow, a row of bleak log huts, the leaden cupolas of the old church of St. Nicholas. It is an early, gloomy dawn; more like evening. On the horizon a comet; a huge star with a tail red as blood. Fat, black pigs, spotted with pink, are drawing a mock sleigh. On the sleigh stands an open coffin; in the coffin lies something black stained with blood in the red glow of the comet. The thin ice on the spring pools cracks under the weight of the sleighs, and the black mud splashes like blood. Stillness reigns in the air, as at the end of the world before the archangel’s trumpet sounds; only the pigs grunt, and somebody’s voice, very much like the voice of that old man in the green faded pall, St. Demetrius of Rostov, whom Alexis remembered to have seen in his childhood, whispers in his ear: “The Lord abhors a bloody and deceitful man,” and the Tsarevitch knows that the bloody man is Peter himself.
He awoke from this dream as usual, in a tremor. A nearly dark gloomy morn was visible through the window. The air was hushed as at the approach of the Judgment day. Suddenly he heard a knock at the door and the sleepy, grumpy voice of Afanássieff:
“Get up, get up, Tsarevitch, it’s time to go to your father.”
He tried to shout aloud and jump up; but his limbs seemed paralysed. He felt as if his body was not his own; he lay as if dead. The dream was continuing, and he had wakened up in his dream. At the same time he heard a knock at the door, and the voice of Afanássieff saying:—
“It’s time to go to your father!”
And his grandmother’s voice, old and feeble, like the bleating of a goat, was singing to him in a low voice that terrible song:
Alioshenka, Alioshenka,
Hot fires are burning,
Cauldrons are steaming,
Knives are being sharpened,
All to butcher thee.