as a wet-nurse, afterwards as a children's nurse expressed herself with refinement, and a
soft, sedate smile never left her face; her daughter Lukerya, a village peasant woman who
had been beaten by her husband, simply screwed up her eyes at the student and said
nothing, and she had a strange expression like that of a deaf-mute.
"At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself," said the student, stretching out his
hands to the fire, "so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have
been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!"
He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked:
"No doubt you have heard the reading of the Twelve Apostles?"
"Yes, I have," answered Vasilisa.
"If you remember, at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, 'I am ready to go with Thee into
darkness and unto death.' And our Lord answered him thus: 'I say unto thee, Peter, before
the cock croweth thou wilt have denied Me thrice.' After the supper Jesus went through the
agony of death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and faint, his
eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep. He fell asleep. Then you heard
how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him
bound to the high priest and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and
alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going to happen on
earth, followed behind. . . . He loved Jesus passionately, intensely, and now he saw from far
off how He was beaten. . . . "
Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.
"They came to the high priest's," he went on; "they began to question Jesus, and meantime
the laborers made a fire in the yard as it was cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood
with them near the fire and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: 'He
was with Jesus, too' -- that is as much as to say that he, too, should be taken to be
questioned. And all the laborers that were standing near the fire must have looked sourly
and suspiciously at him, because he was confused and said: 'I don't know Him.' A little
while after again someone recognized him as one of Jesus' disciples and said: 'Thou, too, art
one of them,' but again he denied it. And for the third time someone turned to him: 'Why,
did I not see thee with Him in the garden today?' For the third time he denied it. And
immediately after that time the cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus,
remembered the words He had said to him in the evening. . . . He remembered, he came to
himself, went out of the yard and wept bitterly -- bitterly. In the Gospel it is written: 'He
went out and wept bitterly.' I imagine it: the still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the
stillness, faintly audible, smothered sobbing.. . . ."
The student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly gave a gulp, big
tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she screened her face from the fire with her sleeve
as though ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably at the student, flushed
crimson, and her expression became strained and heavy like that of someone enduring
intense pain.