Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com ‘Here’s the hermitage. We’ve arrived,’ cried Fyodor Pav-
lovitch. ‘The gates are shut.’
And he repeatedly made the sign of the cross to the saints
painted above and on the sides of the gates.
‘When you go to Rome you must do as the Romans do.
Here in this hermitage there are twenty-five saints being
saved. They look at one another, and eat cabbages. And not
one woman goes in at this gate. That’s what is remarkable.
And that really is so. But I did hear that the elder receives
ladies,’ he remarked suddenly to the monk.
‘Women of the people are here too now, lying in the por-
tico there waiting. But for ladies of higher rank two rooms
have been built adjoining the portico, but outside the pre-
cincts you can see the windows — and the elder goes out to
them by an inner passage when he is well enough. They are
always outside the precincts. There is a Harkov lady, Ma-
dame Hohlakov, waiting there now with her sick daughter.
Probably he has promised to come out to her, though of late
he has been so weak that he has hardly shown himself even
to the people.’
‘So then there are loopholes, after all, to creep out of the
hermitage to the ladies. Don’t suppose, holy father, that I
mean any harm. But do you know that at Athos not only
the visits of women are not allowed, but no creature of the
female sex — no hens, nor turkey hens, nor cows.’
‘Fyodor Pavlovitch, I warn you I shall go back and leave
you here. They’ll turn you out when I’m gone.’
‘But I’m not interfering with you, Pyotr Alexandrovitch.
Look,’ he cried suddenly, stepping within the precincts,