Marya and Fyokla crossed themselves, fasted, and took the sacrament every year, but understood nothing.  The children were not taught their prayers, nothing was told them about God, and no moral principles were instilled into them; they were only forbidden to eat meat or milk in Lent.  In the other families it was much the same:  there were few who believed, few who understood.  At the same time everyone loved the Holy Scripture, loved it with a tender, reverent love; but they had no Bible, there was no one to read it and explain it, and because Olga sometimes read them the gospel, they respected her, and they all addressed her and Sasha as though they were superior to themselves.

For church holidays and services Olga often went to neighbouring villages, and to the district town, in which there were two monasteries and twenty-seven churches.  She was dreamy, and when she was on these pilgrimages she quite forgot her family, and only when she got home again suddenly made the joyful discovery that she had a husband and daughter, and then would say, smiling and radiant: 

“God has sent me blessings!”

What went on in the village worried her and seemed to her revolting.  On Elijah’s Day they drank, at the Assumption they drank, at the Ascension they drank.  The Feast of the Intercession was the parish holiday for Zhukovo, and the peasants used to drink then for three days; they squandered on drink fifty roubles of money belonging to the Mir, and then collected more for vodka from all the households.  On the first day of the feast the Tchikildyeevs killed a sheep and ate of it in the morning, at dinner-time, and in the evening; they ate it ravenously, and the children got up at night to eat more.  Kiryak was fearfully drunk for three whole days; he drank up everything, even his boots and cap, and beat Marya so terribly that they had to pour water over her.  And then they were all ashamed and sick.

However, even in Zhukovo, in this “Slaveytown,” there was once an outburst of genuine religious enthusiasm.  It was in August, when throughout the district they carried from village to village the Holy Mother, the giver of life.  It was still and overcast on the day when they expected Her at Zhukovo.  The girls set off in the morning to meet the ikon, in their bright holiday dresses, and brought Her towards the evening, in procession with the cross and with singing, while the bells pealed in the church across the river.  An immense crowd of villagers and strangers flooded the street; there was noise, dust, a great crush....  And the old father and Granny and Kiryak—­all stretched out their hands to the ikon, looked eagerly at it and said, weeping: 

“Defender!  Mother!  Defender!”

All seemed suddenly to realize that there was not an empty void between earth and heaven, that the rich and the powerful had not taken possession of everything, that there was still a refuge from injury, from slavish bondage, from crushing, unendurable poverty, from the terrible vodka.