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He started, left the railing, and hesitatingly walked towards the altar, tramping with his heavy goloshes. "Andrey Andreyitch, was it you asked for prayers for the rest of Mariya's soul?" asked the priest, his eyes angrily transfixing the shopkeeper's fat, perspiring face. "Yes, Father." "Then it was you wrote this? You?" And Father Grigory angrily thrust before his eyes the little note.
It's not your business to listen here!" All that he had just seen and heard aroused a multitude of questions in his mind. "The cook's going to be married," he thought. "Strange I don't understand what people get married for. Mamma was married to papa, Cousin Verotchka to Pavel Andreyitch.
The lay brother was alarmed, and ran first to the archimandrite, then for the monastery doctor, Ivan Andreyitch, who lived in the town. The doctor, a stout old man with a long grey beard, made a prolonged examination of the bishop, and kept shaking his head and frowning, then said: "Do you know, your holiness, you have got typhoid?"
And on this little note, handed in by Andrey Andreyitch before mass, was written in big, as it were staggering, letters: "For the rest of the soul of the servant of God, the harlot Mariya." "Yes, certainly I wrote it,..." answered the shopkeeper. "How dared you write it?" whispered the priest, and in his husky whisper there was a note of wrath and alarm.
"But you know, she,... excuse my mentioning it, was an actress!" articulated Andrey Andreyitch, overwhelmed. "An actress! But whatever she was, you ought to forget it all now she is dead, instead of writing it on the note." "Just so,..." the shopkeeper assented.
"Wha... what?" asked Andrey Andreyitch in bewilderment. "You don't understand?" whispered Father Grigory, stepping back in astonishment and clasping his hands. "What have you got on your shoulders, a head or some other object? You send a note up to the altar, and write a word in it which it would be unseemly even to utter in the street! Why are you rolling your eyes?
The people had begun moving and were trooping out of church. The only one who did not move was Andrey Andreyitch, a shopkeeper and old inhabitant of Verhny Zaprudy. He stood waiting, with his elbows on the railing of the right choir.
At last he was exhausted and in a perspiration and he began talking jerkily, in a low voice as though to himself, and finished his speech not quite coherently: "And so I propose the health of Bruni, that is Adolf Andreyitch, who is here, among us . . . generally speaking . . . you understand . . ."
She was a graceful young woman with the manners of a young lady, and dressed like one. She talked cleverly, as though from a book, smoked, and slept till midday. When Andrey Andreyitch asked her what she was doing, she had announced, looking him boldly straight in the face: "I am an actress." Such frankness struck the former flunkey as the acme of cynicism.
And allow me to ask you, Father Deacon!" "Well, that's good," said Father Grigory, taking off his vestments. "That I commend. I can approve of that! Well, go your way. We will come out immediately." Andrey Andreyitch walked with dignity from the altar, and with a solemn, requiem-like expression on his red face took his stand in the middle of the church.
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