CHAPTER II
On the Neva, near the rafts of the Tsarevitch, stood a large barge, which had come from Archangel, laden with Holmogorian pottery. Her owner, the rich merchant Poóshnikoff, belonging to the heretics of the sea coast, gave shelter in his barge to deserters of the old faith, who were obliged to be in hiding. The space between the decks and the poop was divided up into little cells. In one of these Elena had found shelter.
Elena was a peasant woman, the wife of a foreman in the Moscow Mint, Maxim Yereméyeff, a secret iconoclast. When the leader of the iconoclasts, the barber Thomas, was burnt, Maxim fled to the southern towns, leaving his wife behind. It was difficult to decide whether she herself was a heretic or an Orthodox, for she crossed herself with two fingers after the advice of some old man who used to visit her, saying: “thou canst not move God with three fingers,” while yet frequenting Orthodox Churches and confessing to Orthodox priests. Notwithstanding the terrible rumours about Peter, Elena believed he was the true Russian Tsar and loved him. She prayed that she might be allowed to behold his Majesty, and for this reason she had come to Petersburg. One thought only possessed her: that God might grant the Tsar repentance, bring him back to his father’s faith, make him cease from persecuting the people of the old faith, and thus give them, in their turn, a chance of joining the Orthodox church. Elena had composed a special prayer for the unification of the church, which she meant to have shown to her confessor, but could not find the courage, as it seemed so badly written. She visited monasteries, she engaged an old woman for six weeks to read the acathistus for the Tsar at the Ascension church and at another dedicated to the Virgin of Kazan. She herself would kneel two or three thousand times a day for him. But all this did not seem sufficient for her, and she resolved on a last desperate remedy. She made her nephew Vassia, a lad of fourteen, write out the prayer she had composed for the Tsar and the uniting of the church, sewed a cover for an icon, and putting the prayer in the lining, gave it to a priest in the Church of the Assumption, making no mention of the hidden letter.
After the conversation on the raft, Elena returned to her cell on the barge, and when she recalled all she had heard that night about the Tsar, she for the first time asked herself whether after all it was not true, that God could not be moved for such a Tsar.
For a long time she lay motionless in the oppressive darkness of her cabin cell, her eyes wide open, bathed in cold sweat. At last she got up, lit a remnant of a wax church taper and placed it in the corner of the closet before the icon of the Virgin, hung on the wooden partition. It was the same Virgin whom Peter had been exhibiting at the foot of Venus. She knelt, bowed to the ground three hundred times and began to recite with tears and sighs that same forlorn prayer, now sewn into the cover of the icon, at the church of the Assumption.
“Hear me, thou Holy Church, with all the hosts of Cherubim and Seraphim, with all the companies of prophets, patriarchs, saints and martyrs, the Gospels, and all the sacred words that compose the Gospel, remember ye our Tsar Peter! Hear me, Holy Apostolic Church, together with all local images and little icons, with all apostolic books and holy lamps, the censers and candles, the sacred coverings and goodly palls, the stone walls and iron slabs, all fruitful trees and flowers! I implore thee, beautiful sun, pray thou the Lord for our Tsar Peter, and thou young moon with thy stars! O sky and thy mists! O terrible clouds and stormy winds and breezes! O fowls of the air! blue sea, great rivers, small brooks and lakes! pray ye the heavenly King for our Tsar Peter! Fish of the sea, cattle in the fields, beasts of the wood, meadows, forests, mountains all the earth’s increase, pray ye the heavenly King for our Tsar Peter!”
A thin partition separated Elena’s closet from a more spacious cell occupied by Cornelius and his disciple Tichon. Not a word did Tichon say during the conversation on the raft, yet he had followed it with greater interest than any one else. When the group had dispersed, Cornelius went ashore to confer with some other heretics about the approaching great self-burning, “the Red Death,” of thousands of persecuted people belonging to the old faith; a rite which was to take place in the woods beyond the Volga. Tichon had returned to his floating cell alone, and had gone to bed. Yet like Elena in the adjacent compartment, he could not sleep, but kept thinking over what he had heard that night about the Tsar. He felt that his future hung on these thoughts, that the moment was approaching which, like a sword, would cleave his life in twain. “It seems now as though I were on a knife’s edge,” he said to himself, “on whichever side I fall, in that direction will I go.”
Together with thoughts about the future rose memories of the past.