At last the service was over, and they all quietly dispersed, and it was dark and empty again, and there followed that hush which is only known in stations that stand solitary in the open country or in the forest when the wind howls and nothing else is heard and when all the emptiness around, all the dreariness of life slowly ebbing away is felt.
Matvey lived not far from the station at his cousin’s tavern. But he did not want to go home. He sat down at the refreshment bar and began talking to the waiter in a low voice.
“We had our own choir in the tile factory. And I must tell you that though we were only workmen, our singing was first-rate, splendid. We were often invited to the town, and when the Deputy Bishop, Father Ivan, took the service at Trinity Church, the bishop’s singers sang in the right choir and we in the left. Only they complained in the town that we kept the singing on too long: ‘the factory choir drag it out,’ they used to say. It is true we began St. Andrey’s prayers and the Praises between six and seven, and it was past eleven when we finished, so that it was sometimes after midnight when we got home to the factory. It was good,” sighed Matvey. “Very good it was, indeed, Sergey Nikanoritch! But here in my father’s house it is anything but joyful. The nearest church is four miles away; with my weak health I can’t get so far; there are no singers there. And there is no peace or quiet in our family; day in day out, there is an uproar, scolding, uncleanliness; we all eat out of one bowl like peasants; and there are beetles in the cabbage soup. . . . God has not given me health, else I would have gone away long ago, Sergey Nikanoritch.”
Matvey Terehov was a middle-aged man about forty-five, but he had a look of ill-health; his face was wrinkled and his lank, scanty beard was quite grey, and that made him seem many years older. He spoke in a weak voice, circumspectly, and held his chest when he coughed, while his eyes assumed the uneasy and anxious look one sees in very apprehensive people. He never said definitely what was wrong with him, but he was fond of describing at length how once at the factory he had lifted a heavy box and had ruptured himself, and how this had led to “the gripes,” and had forced him to give up his work in the tile factory and come back to his native place; but he could not explain what he meant by “the gripes.”
“I must own I am not fond of my cousin,” he went on, pouring himself out some tea. “He is my elder; it is a sin to censure him, and I fear the Lord, but I cannot bear it in patience. He is a haughty, surly, abusive man; he is the torment of his relations and workmen, and constantly out of humour. Last Sunday I asked him in an amiable way, ‘Brother, let us go to Pahomovo for the Mass!’ but he said ‘I am not going; the priest there is a gambler;’ and he would not come here to-day because, he said, the priest from Vedenyapino smokes and drinks vodka. He doesn’t like the clergy! He reads Mass himself and the Hours and the Vespers, while his sister acts as sacristan; he says, ‘Let us pray unto the Lord’! and she, in a thin little voice like a turkey-hen, ‘Lord, have mercy upon us! . . .’ It’s a sin, that’s what it is. Every day I say to him, ‘Think what you are doing, brother! Repent, brother!’ and he takes no notice.”
Sergey Nikanoritch, the waiter, poured out five glasses of tea and carried them on a tray to the waiting-room. He had scarcely gone in when there was a shout:
“Is that the way to serve it, pig’s face? You don’t know how to wait!”
It was the voice of the station-master. There was a timid mutter, then again a harsh and angry shout:
“Get along!”
The waiter came back greatly crestfallen.