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Updated: June 10, 2025
He, too, probably, if he had been living, would not have been able to utter a word in the bishop's presence. . . . Something fell down on the floor in the adjoining room and was broken; Katya must have dropped a cup or a saucer, for Father Sisoy suddenly spat and said angrily: "What a regular nuisance the child is! Lord forgive my transgressions! One can't provide enough for her."
"And what then?" asked Sisoy in the next room. "Then we drank tea . . ." answered Marya Timofyevna. "Good gracious, you've got a green beard," said Katya suddenly in surprise, and she laughed. The bishop remembered that the grey-headed Father Sisoy's beard really had a shade of green in it, and he laughed.
"Father Sisoy," the bishop called. Sisoy went back to his room and a little later made his appearance in his boots, with a candle; he had on his cassock over his underclothes and on his head was an old faded skull-cap. "I can't sleep," said the bishop, sitting up. "I must be unwell. And what it is I don't know. Fever!" "You must have caught cold, your holiness. You must be rubbed with tallow."
The whole time he had been here, not one person had spoken to him genuinely, simply, as to a human being; even his old mother seemed now not the same! And why, he wondered, did she chatter away to Sisoy and laugh so much; while with him, her son, she was grave and usually silent and constrained, which did not suit her at all.
"Don't disturb his holiness," Sisoy said angrily, walking about the room. "Let him sleep . . . what's the use . . . it's no good. . . ." Three doctors arrived, consulted together, and went away again.
Through the wall Father Sisoy was snoring in the next room, and his aged snore had a sound that suggested loneliness, forlornness, even vagrancy. Sisoy had once been housekeeper to the bishop of the diocese, and was called now "the former Father Housekeeper"; he was seventy years old, he lived in a monastery twelve miles from the town and stayed sometimes in the town, too.
As on the day before, sounds reached him from the adjoining rooms through the walls, voices, the jingle of glasses and teaspoons. . . . Marya Timofyevna was gaily telling Father Sisoy some story with quaint turns of speech, while the latter answered in a grumpy, ill-humoured voice: "Bother them! Not likely! What next!"
After resting a little he went into his bedroom, and there, too, he sat a little, still thinking of his mother; he could hear the lay brother going away, and Father Sisoy coughing the other side of the wall. The monastery clock struck a quarter. The bishop changed his clothes and began reading the prayers before sleep.
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