“No one even cares to come and see us,” she said, sober and downcast, when the last of their few guests had departed, noisy and drunken, after a senseless gorging, having paid no regard to the rare vintage of wines or to the quality of the food.
But it was the head of the vestry, Ivan Porfyritch Koprov, who treated the priest worse than the rest of the parishioners. He openly exhibited his contempt for the luckless man, and when the Popadya’s periodical lapses into appalling inebriety had become a public scandal, he refused to kiss the priest’s hand. And the good-natured deacon tried vainly to reason with him.
“Shame on thee. It is not the man, but his holy office that must be respected.”
But Ivan Porfyritch stubbornly refused to dissociate the office from the man, and replied:
“He is a worthless man. He can neither keep himself in order, nor his wife. Is it right for a spiritual adviser’s wife to persist in drunkenness, without shame or conscience? Let my wife try and go on a spree, I’d stop her quickly.”
The deacon shook his head reproachfully and mentioned the long-suffering of Job, how God had loved him, but turned him over to Satan to be tried, but later rewarded him an hundredfold for all his sufferings. But Ivan Porfyritch smiled scornfully into his beard and without the slightest compunction cut short the disagreeable admonition.
“Don’t tell me, I know. Job, so to speak, was a righteous man, a holy man, but what is this one? Where is his righteousness? Rather remember, deacon, the old proverb: God marks a rogue. There is sound sense in that proverb.”
“Wait, the priest will get even with thee, for refusing to kiss his hand. He’ll drive thee out of the church.”
And they bet a gallon of cherry brandy whether the priest would expel him or not. The vestry man won; next Sunday he turned his back on the priest with an insolent air, and the hand which the priest had extended to be kissed, burnt brown it was from the sun—remained desolately suspended in midair, and Father Vassily flushed a deep purple, but did not say a word.
And after this incident which was much talked about in the village, Ivan Porfyritch became still more firmly convinced that the priest was a bad and an unworthy man and began to incite the villagers to complain to the bishop and to ask for another parish priest.