“Thank you very much!”
The bishop’s mood changed. He looked at his mother, and could not understand where she had acquired that deferential, humble expression of face and voice, and what the meaning of it might be. He hardly recognised her, and felt sorrowful and vexed. Besides, his head was still aching, and his legs were racked with pain. The fish he was eating tasted insipid and he was very thirsty.
After dinner two wealthy lady landowners visited him, and sat for an hour and a half with faces a mile long, never uttering a word. Then an archimandrite, a gloomy, taciturn man, came on business. Then the bells rang for vespers, the sun set behind the woods, and the day was done. As soon as he got back from church the bishop said his prayers, and went to bed, drawing the covers up closely about his ears. The moonlight troubled him, and soon the sound of voices came to his ears. Father Sisoi was talking politics with his mother in the next room.
“There is a war in Japan now,” he was saying. “The Japanese belong to the same race as the Montenegrins. They fell under the Turkish yoke at the same time.”
And then the bishop heard his mother’s voice say:
“And so, you see, when we had said our prayers, and had our tea, we went to Father Yegor——”
She kept saying over and over again that they “had tea,” as if all she knew of life was tea-drinking.
The memory of his seminary and college life slowly and mistily took shape in the bishop’s mind. He had been a teacher of Greek for three years, until he could no longer read without glasses, and then he had taken the vows, and had been made an inspector. When he was thirty-two he had been made the rector of a seminary, and then an archimandrite. At that time his life had been so easy and pleasant, and had seemed to stretch so far, far into the future that he could see absolutely no end to it. But his health had failed, and he had nearly lost his eyesight. His doctors had advised him to give up his work and go abroad.
“And what did you do next?” asked Father Sisoi in the adjoining room.
“And then we had tea,” answered his mother.