I. Приехали в монастырь

It was the end of August.

The meeting with the elder had been arranged for directly after the late Mass, around half past eleven.

Our visitors, however, had not appeared for the Mass at all, but arrived just as it was all breaking up.

They came in two carriages; in the first, a dapper barouche drawn by a pair of costly horses, arrived Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov together with a distant relative of his, a very young man of about twenty, Pyotr Fomich Kalganov.

This young man was preparing to enter the university; Miusov, with whom for some reason he was meanwhile living, kept tempting him to go abroad with him, to Zurich or Jena, to enroll there and finish his studies.

The young man had not yet made up his mind.

He was pensive and as though absent-minded.

His face was pleasant, his build sturdy, his height fairly tall.

There was a strange fixity in his gaze: like all very absent-minded people, he would sometimes stare straight at you and for a long while, yet meanwhile not see you at all.

He was taciturn and a little awkward, but it would happen — never, though, except one-on-one with someone — that all at once he would grow terribly talkative, impulsive, prone to laughter, sometimes laughing God knows at what.

But his animation died down just as quickly and suddenly as it had flared up.

He was always well, even fastidiously, dressed: he already had a certain independent fortune and expected a far greater one to come.

He was a friend of Alyosha's.

In an exceedingly rickety, rattling, but roomy hired carriage, drawn by a pair of old roan-pink horses that lagged far behind Miusov's barouche, Fyodor Pavlovich also drove up, with his little son Ivan Fyodorovich.

Dmitri Fyodorovich had been told the hour and the appointed time the day before, but he was late.

The visitors left their carriages by the wall, at the hostelry, and went in through the monastery gates on foot.

Apart from Fyodor Pavlovich, the other three had apparently never seen any monastery at all, and Miusov for some thirty years, perhaps, had not so much as set foot in a church.

He looked about him with a certain curiosity, not without a certain casualness deliberately put on.

But to his observant mind nothing presented itself within the monastery beyond the church and household buildings, which were, moreover, quite ordinary.

The last of the people were filing out of the church, taking off their caps and crossing themselves.

Among the common folk there were also visitors of a higher class — two or three ladies, one very old general — all of them lodging at the hostelry.

The beggars surrounded our visitors at once, but no one gave them anything.

Only little Petrusha Kalganov took a ten-copeck piece from his purse and, hurrying and growing flustered God knows why, hastily thrust it at one of the women, saying quickly: "Divide it equally"

None of his companions made any remark about it, so there was nothing for him to be embarrassed by; but, noticing this, he grew all the more embarrassed.

It was strange, however; by rights they ought to have been awaited, and perhaps even with some ceremony: one of them had not long ago donated a thousand roubles, while another was a most wealthy landowner and, so to speak, a most cultivated man, on whom they all here partly depended in the matter of fishing rights in the river, depending on the turn the lawsuit might take.

And yet, for all that, none of the official persons came out to meet them.

Miusov gazed absent-mindedly at the gravestones around the church and was about to remark that these little graves must have cost a pretty penny to those who buried their dead for the right to do so in such a "holy" spot, but he held his tongue: his simple liberal irony was turning in him into something almost like anger.

"The devil — whom does one ask here, anyway, in this muddle… This really needs settling, because time is getting on," he muttered suddenly, as though speaking to himself.

Suddenly an elderly, balding gentleman in a loose summer overcoat, with sugary little eyes, came up to them.

Lifting his hat and lisping sweetly, he introduced himself to all of them in general as Maximov, a landowner from Tula.

He entered at once into our travelers' difficulty.

"The elder Zossima lives in the hermitage, shut away in the hermitage, some four hundred paces from the monastery, through the little wood, through the little wood…"

"That much I know myself, sir, that it's through the little wood," Fyodor Pavlovich answered him, "but we don't quite remember the way — it's been a long time since we were here."

"In through these gates here, and straight on through the little wood… the little wood.

Come along.

Would you allow me… myself… I myself… This way, this way…"

They went out through the gates and set off through the wood.

The landowner Maximov, a man of about sixty, did not so much walk as — better put — almost run alongside, scrutinizing them all with a twitching, almost impossible curiosity.

There was something goggle-eyed in his eyes.

"You see, we are going to this elder on business of our own," Miusov observed sternly, "we have, so to speak, been granted an audience 'with the said personage,' and so, although we are grateful to you for showing us the way, we will not ask you to go in with us."

"I've been, I've been, I've already been… Un chevalier parfait!" — and the landowner snapped his fingers in the air

"Who is this chevalier?" Miusov asked.

"The elder, the magnificent elder, the elder.

The honor and glory of the monastery — Zossima.

Such an elder he is…"

But his disjointed speech was cut short by a little monk who had caught up with the travelers — in a cowl, of no great height, very pale and gaunt.

Fyodor Pavlovich and Miusov stopped.

With an exceedingly polite, almost waist-deep bow, the monk pronounced:

"The Father Superior most humbly begs you all, gentlemen, after your visit to the hermitage, to dine with him.

At his place at one o'clock, no later.

And you also," he said, turning to Maximov.

"That I shall certainly do!" cried Fyodor Pavlovich, terribly delighted by the invitation, "certainly.

And you know, we have all given our word to behave ourselves properly here… And you, Pyotr Alexandrovich, will you come?"

"Why ever should I not?

What did I come here for, after all, if not to see all their customs of the place.

There is only one thing I find awkward, namely that I am at present in your company, Fyodor Pavlovich…"

"Yes — Dmitri Fyodorovich does not yet exist."

"And it would be just as well if he failed to turn up — do you suppose I find it pleasant, all this mess of yours, and you on top of it into the bargain?

So we'll come to dinner — thank the Father Superior," he said, turning to the little monk.

"No, it is my duty to conduct you to the elder himself," the monk replied.

"And I, if that's how it is, will go to the Father Superior — in the meantime I'll go straight to the Father Superior," twittered the landowner Maximov.

"The Father Superior is occupied at the present hour, but as you please…" the monk pronounced irresolutely.

"A most importunate little old man," Miusov remarked aloud, when the landowner Maximov had run back toward the monastery.

"He looks like von Sohn," Fyodor Pavlovich said suddenly.

"That's all you ever know… How does he look like von Sohn?

Have you yourself even seen von Sohn?"

"I've seen his photograph.

If not in the features of the face, then in something inexpressible.

A purest second copy of von Sohn.

I always recognize the type from the face alone."

"Well, perhaps; you're a connoisseur in such matters.

Only here is the thing, Fyodor Pavlovich — you yourself just now were so good as to mention that we had given our word to behave decently, remember.

I'm telling you, restrain yourself.

If you start playing the buffoon, then I have no intention of being put on the same footing with you here… You see what sort of man this is," he said, turning to the monk, "I'm actually afraid to go in among decent people with him."

On the little monk's pale, bloodless lips there appeared a faint, silent little smile, not without a cunning of its own, but he answered nothing, and it was all too plain that he had held his tongue out of a sense of his own dignity.

Miusov frowned all the more.

"Oh, the devil take the whole lot of them — a mere outer manner worked up over centuries, and at bottom charlatanism and nonsense!" flashed through his head.

"Here's the hermitage, we've arrived!" cried Fyodor Pavlovich, "the wall and gates shut."

And he set about making large signs of the cross before the saints painted above the gates and on either side of them.

"One does not go into another's monastery with one's own rule," he remarked.

"Twenty-five saints are saving their souls here in the hermitage — they look at one another and eat cabbage.

And not a single woman will pass through these gates — that's what is especially remarkable.

And this really is so.

Only how is it I heard that the elder receives ladies?" he said, suddenly turning to the little monk.

"The womenfolk of the common people are here even now — over there, look, lying by the little gallery, waiting.

But for ladies of higher rank, two little rooms have been built right here on the gallery, though outside the wall — those very windows there — and the elder comes out to them by an inner passage when he is well; that is, still beyond the wall.