Читать книгу Peter and Alexis. The Romance of Peter the Great онлайн

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One day, on the Troïtsa Square near the Four Frigates coffee house, he met a tall man wearing the leather jacket of a Dutch skipper. And just as in Moscow, on the Red Square near the Lóbnoye Palace, where his father’s head on the spike had looked with its empty eye-socket straight into that tall man’s very eyes, Tichon again recognised him—the Tsar Peter. The terrible face suddenly explained to him the terrible town—they both bore the same impress.

That same day he met the monk Cornelius; he was delighted to see him and did not leave him again. He slept the night in the old man’s cell and spent his days on the rafts and barges among the “hidden runaway folk.” He listened to their tales about the lives of great hermits, who lived in the north, in the woods along the sea coast, the Onega and Olonetz where Cornelius, on leaving Moscow, had spent many years; about terrible burnings, where many thousands had sought a fiery death. From the barge Cornelius was now going to preach the Red Death in the woods beyond the Volga. Tichon had not studied in vain; much of what these people believed he no longer could believe; he thought differently, but felt the same as they, and what was more important still—common to them all was the presentiment of the end. That about which he never could speak, which none of the learned would have comprehended, these people understood and by it alone they lived. All he remembered Pahómitch telling him in his earliest childhood now suddenly had revived in his soul with new force. Again he felt drawn to the woods, the deserts, the secret settlements and peaceful refuges. Again through the air of the white night he seemed to hear over the Neva the bells of that visionary city, in the chimes of the Dutch clocks, again with languid melancholy and yearning he would repeat the ballad about Prince Joseph:—