Page 53 - the-brothers-karamazov

one of them had recently made a donation of a thousand
roubles, while another was a very wealthy and highly cul-
tured landowner, upon whom all in the monastery were in
a sense dependent, as a decision of the lawsuit might at any
moment put their fishing rights in his hands. Yet no official
personage met them.
Miusov looked absent-mindedly at the tombstones
round the church, and was on the point of saying that the
dead buried here must have paid a pretty penny for the right
of lying in this ‘holy place,’ but refrained. His liberal irony
was rapidly changing almost into anger.
‘Who the devil is there to ask in this imbecile place? We
must find out, for time is passing,’ he observed suddenly, as
though speaking to himself.
All at once there came up a bald-headed, elderly man
with ingratiating little eyes, wearing a full, summer over-
coat. Lifting his hat, he introduced himself with a honeyed
lisp as Maximov, a landowner of Tula. He at once entered
into our visitors’ difficulty.
‘Father Zossima lives in the hermitage, apart, four hun-
dred paces from the monastery, the other side of the copse.’
‘I know it’s the other side of the copse,’ observed Fyodor
Pavlovitch, ‘but we don’t remember the way. It is a long time
since we’ve been here.’
‘This way, by this gate, and straight across the copse... the
copse. Come with me, won’t you? I’ll show you. I have to
go.... I am going myself. This way, this way.’
They came out of the gate and turned towards the copse.
Maximov, a man of sixty, ran rather than walked, turning

The Brothers Karamazov