During the service he would first listen to the prayers, trying
to attach some meaning to them not discordant with his own views;
then feeling that he could not understand and must condemn them,
he tried not to listen to them, but to attend to the thoughts,
observations, and memories which floated through his brain with
extreme vividness during this idle time of standing in church.
He had stood through the litany, the evening service and the
midnight service, and the next day he got up earlier than usual,
and without having tea went at eight o'clock in the morning to
the church for the morning service and the confession.
There was no one in the church but a beggar soldier, two old
women, and the church officials. A young deacon, whose long back
showed in two distinct halves through his thin undercassock, met
him, and at once going to a little table at the wall read the
exhortation. During the reading, especially at the frequent and
rapid repetition of the same words, "Lord, have mercy on us!"
which resounded with an echo, Levin felt that thought was shut
and sealed up, and that it must not be touched or stirred now or
confusion would be the result; and so standing behind the deacon
he went on thinking of his own affairs, neither listening nor
examining what was said. "It's wonderful what expression there
is in her hand," he thought, remembering how they had been
sitting the day before at a corner table. They had nothing to
talk about, as was almost always the case at this time, and
laying her hand on the table she kept opening and shutting it,
and laughed herself as she watched her action. He remembered how
he had kissed it and then had examined the lines on the pink
palm. "Have mercy on us again!" thought Levin, crossing himself,
bowing, and looking at the supple spring of the deacon's back
bowing before him. "She took my hand then and examined the lines
'You've got a splendid hand,' she said." And he looked at his own
hand and the short hand of the deacon. "Yes, now it will soon be
over," he thought. "No, it seems to be beginning again," he
thought, listening to the prayers. "No, it's just ending: there
he is bowing down to the ground. That's always at the end."
The deacon's hand in a plush cuff accepted a three-rouble note
unobtrusively, and the deacon said he would put it down in the
register, and his new boots creaking jauntily over the flagstones
of the empty church, he went to the altar. A moment later he
peeped out thence and beckoned to Levin. Thought, till then
locked up, began to stir in Levin's head, but he made haste to
drive it away. "It will come right somehow," he thought, and
went towards the altar-rails. He went up the steps, and turning
to the right saw the priest. The priest, a little old man with a
scanty grizzled beard and weary, good-natured eyes, was standing
at the altar-rails, turning over the pages of a missal. With a
slight bow to Levin he began immediately reading prayers in the
official voice. When he had finished them he bowed down to the
ground and turned, facing Levin.