Sisoy took off the bishop’s shirt and began rubbing his chest and back with tallow.

“That’s the way . . . that’s the way . . .” he said.  “Lord Jesus Christ . . . that’s the way.  I walked to the town to-day; I was at what’s-his-name’s—­the chief priest Sidonsky’s. . . .  I had tea with him.  I don’t like him.  Lord Jesus Christ. . . .  That’s the way.  I don’t like him.”

III

The bishop of the diocese, a very fat old man, was ill with rheumatism or gout, and had been in bed for over a month.  Bishop Pyotr went to see him almost every day, and saw all who came to ask his help.  And now that he was unwell he was struck by the emptiness, the triviality of everything which they asked and for which they wept; he was vexed at their ignorance, their timidity; and all this useless, petty business oppressed him by the mass of it, and it seemed to him that now he understood the diocesan bishop, who had once in his young days written on “The Doctrines of the Freedom of the Will,” and now seemed to be all lost in trivialities, to have forgotten everything, and to have no thoughts of religion.  The bishop must have lost touch with Russian life while he was abroad; he did not find it easy; the peasants seemed to him coarse, the women who sought his help dull and stupid, the seminarists and their teachers uncultivated and at times savage.  And the documents coming in and going out were reckoned by tens of thousands; and what documents they were!  The higher clergy in the whole diocese gave the priests, young and old, and even their wives and children, marks for their behaviour—­a five, a four, and sometimes even a three; and about this he had to talk and to read and write serious reports.  And there was positively not one minute to spare; his soul was troubled all day long, and the bishop was only at peace when he was in church.

He could not get used, either, to the awe which, through no wish of his own, he inspired in people in spite of his quiet, modest disposition.  All the people in the province seemed to him little, scared, and guilty when he looked at them.  Everyone was timid in his presence, even the old chief priests; everyone “flopped” at his feet, and not long previously an old lady, a village priest’s wife who had come to consult him, was so overcome by awe that she could not utter a single word, and went empty away.  And he, who could never in his sermons bring himself to speak ill of people, never reproached anyone because he was so sorry for them, was moved to fury with the people who came to consult him, lost his temper and flung their petitions on the floor.  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.  The only person who behaved freely with him and said what he meant was old Sisoy, who had spent his whole life in the presence of bishops and had outlived eleven of them.  And so the bishop was at ease with him, although, of course, he was a tedious and nonsensical man.