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Along the high road to Sukhum which lay behind us there were proceeding some invisible travellers whose scraping of feet as they walked proclaimed the fact that they were not over-used to journeying on foot. Just as the party drew level with us, a musical voice hummed out softly the line “Alone will I set forth upon the road,” with the word “alone” plaintively stressed. Next, a resonant bass voice said with a sort of indolent incisiveness:

“Aphon or aphonia means loss of speech to the extent of, to the extent of–oh, to WHAT extent, most learned Vera Vasilievna?”

“To the extent of total loss of power of articulation,” replied a voice feminine and youthful of timbre.

Just at that moment we saw two dark, blurred figures, with a paler figure between them, come gliding into view.

“Strange indeed is it that, that–“

“That what?”

“That so many names proper to these parts should also be so suggestive. Take, for instance, Mount Nakopioba. Certainly folk hereabouts seem to have ” amassed ” things, and to have known how to do so.” [The verb nakopit means to amass, to heap up.]

“For my part, I always fail to remember the name of Simon the Canaanite. Constantly I find myself calling him ‘the Cainite.'”

“Look here,” interrupted the musical voice in a tone of chastened enthusiasm. “As I contemplate all this beauty, and inhale this restfulness, I find myself reflecting: ‘How would it be if I were to let everything go to the devil, and take up my abode here for ever?'”

At this point all further speech became drowned by the sound of the monastery’s bell as it struck the hour. The only utterance that came borne to my ears was the mournful fragment:

Oh, if into a single word
I could pour my inmost thoughts!

To the foregoing dialogue my companion had listened with his head tilted to one side, much as though the dialogue had deflected it in that direction: and now, as the voices died away into the distance, he sighed, straightened himself, and said:

“Clearly those people were educated folk. And see too how, as they talked of one thing and another, there cropped up the old and ever-persistent point.”

“To what point are you referring?”

My companion paused a moment before he replied. Then he said:

“Can it be that you did not hear it? Did you not hear one of those people remark: ‘I have a mind to surrender everything ‘?”

Whereafter, bending forward, and peering at me as a blind man would do, Kalinin added in a half-whisper:

“More and more are folk coming to think to themselves: ‘Now must I forsake everything.’ In the end I myself came to think it. For many a year did I increasingly reflect: ‘Why should I be a servant? What will it ever profit me? Even if I should earn twelve, or twenty, or fifty roubles a month, to what will such earnings lead, and where will the man in me come in? Surely it would be better to do nothing at all, but just to gaze into space (as I am doing now), and let my eyes stare straight before me?'”

“By the way, what were you talking to those people about?”

“Which people do you mean?”

“The bearded man and the rest, the company in the guest-chamber?”

“Ah, THAT man I did not like–I have no fancy at all for fellows who strew their grief about the world, and leave it to be trampled upon by every chance-comer. For how can the tears of my neighbour benefit me? True, every man has his troubles; but also has every man such a predilection for his particular woe that he ends by deeming it the most bitter and remarkable grief in the universe–you may take my word for that.”

Suddenly the speaker rose to his feet, a tall, lean figure.

“Now I must seek my bed,” he remarked. “You see, I shall have to leave here very early tomorrow.”