TALES OF CHEKHOV. THE BISHOP AND OTHER STORIES
BY ANTON TCHEKHOV




THE TALES OF CHEKHOV

VOLUME 7

THE BISHOP AND OTHER STORIES

BY

ANTON TCHEKHOV

Translated by CONSTANCE GARNETT




CONTENTS


THE BISHOP
THE LETTER
EASTER EVE
A NIGHTMARE
THE MURDER
UPROOTED
THE STEPPE




THE BISHOP

I

THE evening service was being celebrated on the eve of Palm Sunday
in the Old Petrovsky Convent. When they began distributing the palm
it was close upon ten o'clock, the candles were burning dimly, the
wicks wanted snuffing; it was all in a sort of mist. In the twilight
of the church the crowd seemed heaving like the sea, and to Bishop
Pyotr, who had been unwell for the last three days, it seemed that
all the faces--old and young, men's and women's--were alike,
that everyone who came up for the palm had the same expression in
his eyes. In the mist he could not see the doors; the crowd kept
moving and looked as though there were no end to it. The female
choir was singing, a nun was reading the prayers for the day.

How stifling, how hot it was! How long the service went on! Bishop
Pyotr was tired. His breathing was laboured and rapid, his throat
was parched, his shoulders ached with weariness, his legs were
trembling. And it disturbed him unpleasantly when a religious maniac
uttered occasional shrieks in the gallery. And then all of a sudden,
as though in a dream or delirium, it seemed to the bishop as though
his own mother Marya Timofyevna, whom he had not seen for nine
years, or some old woman just like his mother, came up to him out
of the crowd, and, after taking a palm branch from him, walked away
looking at him all the while good-humouredly with a kind, joyful
smile until she was lost in the crowd. And for some reason tears
flowed down his face. There was peace in his heart, everything was
well, yet he kept gazing fixedly towards the left choir, where the
prayers were being read, where in the dusk of evening you could not
recognize anyone, and--wept. Tears glistened on his face and on
his beard. Here someone close at hand was weeping, then someone
else farther away, then others and still others, and little by
little the church was filled with soft weeping. And a little later,
within five minutes, the nuns' choir was singing; no one was weeping
and everything was as before.

Soon the service was over. When the bishop got into his carriage
to drive home, the gay, melodious chime of the heavy, costly bells
was filling the whole garden in the moonlight. The white walls, the
white crosses on the tombs, the white birch-trees and black shadows,
and the far-away moon in the sky exactly over the convent, seemed
now living their own life, apart and incomprehensible, yet very
near to man. It was the beginning of April, and after the warm
spring day it turned cool; there was a faint touch of frost, and
the breath of spring could be felt in the soft, chilly air. The
road from the convent