On Friday night Vania saw the priest again and asked to be released. The priest praised him and prayed with him and offered him release, and then Vania would not take it. He asked to swear again. So he was sworn in again and this time for ten days.
Vania went home and prayed, and successfully resisted temptation for ten days, and very proud he was at the end of that time when he returned to the holy man and the latter praised him and hung a sign of God by a little chain round his neck.
The priest prayed with him again and sent him away for a fortnight on the same conditions.
Vania was sober in this way for a whole month, and all his family with him, and he prospered with his cab and bought their furniture out of pawn. God was evidently very pleased with Vania.
But at the end of that time a catastrophe happened. Vania went to the shrine to be re-confirmed in his new life, and behold the priest was not there any more. He had been removed by the Bishop, and no one knew where he had gone to. There was unutterable sadness and despair in the crowds of drunkards that Vania found there, weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The Government, hearing of the success of the priest, and noting the diminution in the sale of vodka, had suppressed the holy man in order that there might be no shortage in the treasury. There was the interest on foreign loans to pay!
CHAPTER IX
A MUSHROOM FAIR IN LENT
I HAD been out one morning looking at St Saviour’s and tasting the March sunshine, and I returned to the Kislovka unexpectedly. Nicholas, taken by surprise, was grinding at mathematics very gloomily. I had never seen him so despondent, so melancholy. He looked at me very sadly when I sat down beside him and began to chat.
“Why are you going to leave me?” he asked. I had told him that I should not remain in Moscow beyond Easter, and we were then in Lent. “Why will you not wait till June and then we can go to Lisitchansk together; and we will walk to the Caucasus, or we will walk across Europe to Calais and get back to England?”