‘Kasatsky.’
‘Over forty, I should think.’
‘And does he receive all visitors?’
‘Yes, everybody, but not always.’
‘Cover up my feet. Not like that—how clumsy you are! No! More, more—like that! But you need not squeeze them!’
So they came to the forest where the cell was.
Makovkina got out of the sledge, and told them to drive on. They tried to dissuade her, but she grew irritable and ordered them to go on.
When the sledges had gone she went up the path in her white dogskin coat. The lawyer got out and stopped to watch her.
It was Father Sergius’s sixth year as a recluse, and he was now forty-nine. His life in solitude was hard—not on account of the fasts and the prayers (they were no hardship to him) but on account of an inner conflict he had not at all anticipated. The sources of that conflict were two: doubts, and the lust of the flesh. And these two enemies always appeared together. It seemed to him that they were two foes, but in reality they were one and the same. As soon as doubt was gone so was the lustful desire. But thinking them to be two different fiends he fought them separately.
‘O my God, my God!’ thought he. ‘Why dost thou not grant me faith? There is lust, of course: even the saints had to fight that—Saint Anthony and others. But they had faith, while I have moments, hours, and days, when it is absent. Why does the whole world, with all its delights, exist if it is sinful and must be renounced? Why hast Thou created this temptation? Temptation? Is it not rather a temptation that I wish to abandon all the joys of earth and prepare something for myself there where perhaps there is nothing?’ And he became horrified and filled with disgust at himself. ‘Vile creature! And it is you who wish to become a saint!’ he upbraided himself, and he began to pray. But as soon as he started to pray he saw himself vividly as he had been at the Monastery, in a majestic post in biretta and mantle, and he shook his head. ‘No, that is not right. It is deception. I may deceive others, but not myself or God. I am not a majestic man, but a pitiable and ridiculous one!’ And he threw back the folds of his cassock and smiled as he looked at his thin legs in their underclothing.