He had to decide, to choose one or the other course: either to return to the world and live there like all men, serve a man who had destroyed his father and was likely to destroy the whole of Russia; or once for all turn his back upon the world, become a beggar, a wanderer, one of those “hidden, runaway folk,” who have here no continuing city, but seek one to come; to the West with Pastor Glück, or to the East, the legendary city, with Cornelius the monk. Which should he choose? whither should he go? he had not yet made up his mind; he wavered, tarried with the final decision. He seemed to wait for something. But this night, after the conversation on the raft about Peter, the Antichrist, he felt that it was impossible to delay any longer. The ship was sailing for Stockholm in the morning, and on the morrow Cornelius, threatened with arrest, was obliged to flee from Petersburg. He urged Tichon to come with him.
“I am just upon the sword-edge,” he again thought, “and whichever side I happen to fall on, in that will I abide. There is but one life, one death; a second blunder won’t mend the first.”
Yet at the same time Tichon felt powerless to decide, and that two destinies, like the two ends of a deadly noose, joined and tightening, seemed to press and strangle him. He got up, took from the shelf a manuscript—“The Meditations of St. Hippolitus concerning the second coming,” and in order to escape from thought, began looking at the title pictures by light of the oil-lamp burning before the image. One of them represented Antichrist, sitting on a throne, wearing the green uniform of the Preobrazhensky regiment with red facings and brass buttons; on his head, a three-cornered hat and a sword by his side: his face resembled that of Tsar Peter, and he was pointing forward with his hand. In front of him, to the right, columns of the Preobrazhensky and Simeon Guards were marching towards a monastery among dark woods. Far above, on a hill with three caves, some monks were praying. The soldiers, guided by quaint blue demons, were climbing up the mountain slope. Below ran the legend: “Then will he send into the hills and caves and holes of the earth his armies of evil spirits to seek out those who hide from his sight and bring them to worship him.” On another picture soldiers were shooting at monks who were bound: “These are falling by Satan’s hand.”
Behind the wooden partition Elena continued to sigh and weep, praying to the heavenly King for the Tsar Peter. Tichon laid down the book and fell on his knees before the icon. Yet he could not pray. Anguish seized him, such as he had never felt before. The flame of the burnt-out lamp flared up a last time and then went out; gloom surrounded him, and something seemed to creep up and clutch his throat with a dark, soft, warm hairy paw. He grew short of breath. His body was bathed in a cold sweat. And again it seemed to him he was flying headlong, sinking down into some black gloom, into an abyss—the jaws of the Beast itself. “It does not really matter,” thought Tichon, the thought flashed on his mind with unbearable clearness, it did not really matter which of the two paths he chose, go east or go west, here or there, at either extremity of the earth there ruled the one foreboding—“The end is approaching.” For as the lightning comes from the east and shineth even unto the west, so should also the coming of the Son of man be. And it seemed to him that he—Tichon—had already beheld this encircling lightning. “Even so, come Lord Jesus!” he exclaimed. At that very instant the cell window was lit up with a terrible white light. A deafening crash followed. It seemed as though the sky was rent and falling. It was the same lightning which had so startled the Tsar Peter that he let the icon drop at the foot of Venus. Elena heard, through the howling, hiss and rumbling of the storm, a terrible unearthly scream. Tichon for the third time in his life was seized with an epileptic swoon.
He recovered consciousness on the deck of the barge, where he had been brought from the close cell to revive. It was early morning, blue sky above, white mist below. A star was glistening in the east through the mist, it was the star of Venus. On the isle of Keivoussary, crowning the dome of the house of Boutourlin, the Metropolitan of the Thrice-Drunken Conclave, stood the gilt statue of Bacchus. Lit up by the first ray of the rising sun, it glowed like a red star through the mist. The earthly star exchanged mysterious glances with the heavenly one. The mist became roseate, as if blood were entering the pale bodies of phantoms. The marble body of the goddess, in the middle pavilion overlooking the Neva, glowed as if alive. She smiled her eternal smile at the sun, rejoicing that he rose even here amid the hyperborean night. The body of the goddess shone ethereal and roseate in the shroud of mist, the mist glowing like the body of the goddess. The mist was her body. In her all existed, and she in all.
Tichon remembered the thoughts that had thronged his mind during the night, and he felt in his soul a calm determination not to return to Pastor Glück, but to escape with Cornelius.
The storm had shifted the barge and its bow was now touching the raft where the conversation about Antichrist had taken place last night. Ivan had found time to get his sleep and he was again sitting in the same place as last night singing the same song. And music, (or was it only phantom music?) the sounds of the minuet subdued by the mist:—
’Tis time to cast thy bow away,