XXIV. Papik's Testament and Death

Dear Tornik, my time is come. The glad morning of my life is passed; the noonday is passed; the last of it, the evening, is near. I must sleep, and take such a rest that I rise no more. You see I am fallen from strength: my steps totter, and even the staff avails nothing; my hands have ceased from labor; oh, and my eyes, like the patriarch Isaac's, are grown dim. In all my body I am become unprofitable; no use is left in me, neither to you nor to the world. The man who has ceased from labor — his living on is more than superfluous. Both to our family and to the villagers I am a burden. To eat bread that my own hand has not plowed, not sown, not reaped — how bitter that is, and how contrary to that commandment of God which says: with the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread.¹ My body is turned to dry bone; no sweat springs from my brow any more — for sweat comes of labor.

True, children and grandchildren lie under a great obligation to tend and keep their aged fathers and grandfathers, with great care and without murmuring, until the day of death. The presence of the old is a blessing to house and family. Therefore holy Scripture says: "Let not an elder be lacking out of thy house."²

But I have seen and heard, Tornik, how many a time in families, when the aged fathers, the grandfathers and the old grandmothers suffer long upon their sickbeds, then those same beloved households of theirs begin to heave up complaint: Oh, that he would die, that we might be free — what is this we endure! They forget, they do not remember, their parents' and their grandsires' love and tender care, the father's and the mother's kindness, by whose nursing they themselves grew up and became men.

Let us leave this, Tornik; you do not yet know what things there are in men's family life. Sometimes the father of a family is very rich, and his chests are full of gold pieces; but when he is by nature grasping and close-fisted, he husbands the expenses of his house with the harshest stinginess, and lives like a destitute pauper. And have you heard what that miser's family pray? God take his soul, that we may be delivered from his hard-hearted housekeeping.

Sometimes God hears that prayer, and takes the miserly householder's soul. For a moment the family weep, until the great funeral solemnity is performed; and when they have shut the miser's body in the grave, thereafter they open the gold-filled chests, and lavishing, squandering and pomp come in and lord it over the miser's house. It does not last long: the season of squandering is short; soon the chests of gold are emptied; squandering departs, and everlasting poverty comes in and reigns.

I am glad, Tornik, that you are a good son: you do not wait for your Papik's death — and your Papik is no miser; a peasant cannot be a miser so long as his door stands open. You were a little orphan boy, and I kept you like a rose. I have no chests of gold, that you should say: how good it were if my Papik died, and I were master of the gold pieces, and lived my life as I pleased!

The inheritance I leave you is not gold — it is far more precious and more gainful than gold. What is gold? It stays in no one place, but like quicksilver scatters, runs off and vanishes; and many a time, besides, cunning thieves break through and steal the hoarded treasures of the miser.³

I leave you our inheritance from our fathers, the fields and the lands, which stand always in their place, unchanged and steadfast. I leave you the gutan with its two relays of beasts; I leave you milch cows and sheep by the hundred. These, look you, are Papik's red gold pieces — only labor to keep the reckoning and to till, and to tend the beasts even as I taught you your lessons, long and long, in plain and homely fashion expounding to you the art of the husbandry of the soil.

Let me speak to you again, Tornik. I feel it of myself: my death is drawn near. Death's angel is come, and knocks at Papik's door. Though I throw a thousand bolts and bars behind the door, it avails nothing — he will come in by the window; for the angels have a piercing power, and pass through bodies hard as steel. And if you say, let me go hide in the deep abyss of the Ocean seas — death's angel will reach even there, hard after a man.

Tomorrow is Sunday, Tornik. Take my arm and lead me to church. I too, like Musho, must speak, confess, pray, see my last Liturgy and receive the holy Communion: that is my last provision for the road; I believe that with that provision of the Bread of Life which Christ bequeathed, I shall be made worthy of the holy kingdom. When we come back from worship, Tornik, have my felt bed spread, that I may lie down and rest. My head is grown very heavy; my heart has begun to flutter; my feet are cold already. I know that cold will come creeping little by little toward my heart, which is the body's center; in that hour all my body will freeze, and suddenly you will see that Papik is dead, and the lamp of his life gone out. I beseech God to give me life a few days more, until I finish my testament.

My first family testament is this, Tornik. Your widowed mother who bore you, who today is our house's mistress and steward — you must honor her with all reverence as the mother who gave you birth, even as holy Scripture commands: "Honor thy father and thy mother, that it may be well with thee."⁴ Your father is dead; you have only a mayrik, and you are her one and only child of consolation; you see how she yearns over you both. In the time of her old age you must take every care of her; beware that you never grieve her in any manner of way. She is the laboring mistress and steward: all the inner government of our house is in her hand; she alone shall command.

And you, Shushan: the great duty of your bridehood is obedience. You must be a bride all love, meek, obedient and willing before your mother-in-law. She is a very good woman; like a mother she loves us with tender yearning. You may have heard that there are mothers-in-law who despise and torment their brides — though who knows? perhaps their brides too have many failings. But you, who have been a bride these several years — did you one day hear or see your mother-in-law speak one bitter word, or deal basely with you? Remember, Shushan, that you too will one day be a mother-in-law: what you do, that you shall find. Do not forget these counsels of Papik's.

I commit to you the reverence and the modesty of our patriarchal house: you must keep that virtue of our line unspoiled. Read always in holy Scripture the story of the patriarchs, where the history of their lives and their innocence is written.

The Lord God by the holy crown gave you, Tornik, a Shushan-flower; and to Shushan a Tornik: there is no other for either of you until the day of death. I bless you — live long, and live in love; may the tree of your holy marriage bear fruit ever anew with new children, and your sons be manifold, like the house of the patriarch Jacob.

But know this, Tornik: children born many are no such boast to their parents, if they remain unschooled and turn prodigal. Do you know how great a reproach such children are to their parents? Labor to give your children good schooling in their childhood years, while they are still green twigs, and soft as wax. If you let them thicken and harden, the schooling will come hard thereafter; for everything has its own season — look to it that you let not the season's fit moment pass.

Keep your life and your ways straight, Tornik; walk straight, that your children may follow you. Let it not be as with the crab, who, walking sidelong himself, counsels his young: walk straight!⁵ Know that they will answer you: "Father, we see how you walk."

With a vow I charge you, Tornik: in all the works of your life keep uprightness. You must know that uprightness will increase you the people's credit and trust, whereby you will win fair fame and honor before the people.

It is the greatest moral wealth for you, Tornik, if you can draw the people's love and good will toward yourself: all the gold of the world does not weigh even with that. You live in a single village apart; do not say, the circuit of my virtue is too narrow. It is enough and to spare for you, Tornik, if first you be beloved and honored of one village's people: fair fame has wings — it flies from village to village, reaches even to Van, and spreads through all the land of Vaspurakan. Remember shepherd Hako, and the fame of our village's great householders, how it was cried abroad through all the villages.

Ask now, Tornik, what are the moral means and the good works whereby a man's worth and name rise before the people. These are the means: to love; to do good; to be tender-hearted; not only to give the hungry man bread, but with your own hand to crumble bread into his tanapur; to take fallen and luckless families by the hand; to shield wronged souls; and the rest. Reading the Gospel, Tornik, you will remember that Jesus on the day of judgment, leaving aside the doers of good in all their other manifold virtues, remembers chiefly the tender mercy of the merciful: that they gathered in the homeless, shiftless strangers left in the street; that they went to see the poor, helpless sick; that they visited the prisoners; that they gave the hungry bread, and the thirsty water.⁶ And these good deeds of the merciful — who has received them at the merciful men's hands? Plainly, it is the people's oppressed and tormented order that has received them — which cannot pay its benefactors back. Therefore Christ pays the poor man's debt; and what does He pay, do you know? The kingdom of heaven — for a morsel of bread and a cup of water.

But you must know, Tornik, that the people does not love a man for nothing, and gives no thanks where it has received nothing. Does the beggar at the door give his blessing before he has received the loaf? or a man benefited open his mouth to give thanks without receiving the benefit? Upon this earth everything is exchange for exchange.

There are, yes, mouths that are always thankless, and many a time prove ungrateful against benefaction; perhaps, being evil and graceless, they even pay back evil, and bind the benefactor's hand, so that he rues his good deed and does good no more.

But leave those reckonings, Tornik; give heed to the Gospel, which commands to do good to them that hate you.⁷ Though they be unworthy — have you not seen that our heavenly Father gives His rain to our fields equally, making no distinction between the evil and the good, and likewise makes His light-giving sun rise alike over all the world? The fruit and working of benefaction is a mighty medicine: it softens the spirit of the wicked and changes the heart's bitterness, when a man sees that for his evil he receives good; and that good burns like fire upon his inward conscience. Therefore Paul says: "In so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head."⁸ This is the best means — ever to overcome the evil man with goodness: goodness is water, that quenches the kindled fire.

Benefaction is a free-will debt of fellowship and Christian love of man, whereby a man deals out a portion of his substance to the people's needy. But it is not by this alone that the people loves a man and knows him for a benefactor: it is the personal worth, the virtuous life, that increase a good man's glory before the people. See, Tornik, I set before you what those virtues of the soul are.

The faith of our fathers' church; a God-fearing and unfeigned devotion; a meek and kindly nature; love, that loves its fellow as its own self; justice, that deals its own and its fellow's portion out equal; a good conscience, that never does its fellow harm or wrong, and will rather bear wrong than deal it; the spirit of love for the people, that ever studies the people's good and profit; a cheerful open-handedness, which is most dear to the people; great undertakings that are for the common good — that is, church, school, hospital, poor-house, orphan-house, gifts of every kind, bequest and the rest, whatever is needful for the people's life and progress.

And then those self-devoted laborers, be they of the clergy or of the lay order — when they give themselves for the people, sparing nothing, sacrificing all things, yes and their very life if need compel: then the people is not content only to love; it would worship its self-devoted laborers. Though they die, they are not forgotten: the people keeps their name as a feast and glorifies it, and raises an everlasting monument to their memory.

There, Tornik — this is the fruit of loving the people. Labor to win that fruit and that glory, that after your death you may remain deathless: the people will remember you, and bless your memory.

Dear Tornik, I have still to speak with you; but I wish that today you call our village's priests, the householders and the hambans. Papik is bound to give his last farewell to the village people, with whom I have lived all this time, and enjoyed so much of their respect and honor. As for you, so for the villagers, I have the commands of my testament.

Welcome, my dear villagers, light of my eyes! You see Papik is laid low, and there is no more hope of his rising. I have called you to say my last farewells, and to go my road, which leads straight to heaven — so trusts Papik His servant, that he shall be found worthy of the sight of his Lord.

Do you remember Tornik's wedding day, when you ate the marriage-meal, drank the wine of Shahpaz, and fell to singing your merry songs: we have eaten Tornik's meal — in good time may we eat Papik's! Now the day is come and arrived, when you shall eat my soul-meal.

Eat it with a good appetite, dear villagers; but you must eat Papik's last counsels too, like the meal. You will have known, surely, how for years now I have given my Tornik many lessons and counsels, both for the happy village life and for the progress of the soil and the tiller's art; and at the last I laid it upon Tornik as a testament, that he in his turn hand on those same lessons to your children.

And now with living mouth I leave you my testament — Papik, laid in his death-bed, would speak with you still. Hear what I say, well-meaning villagers.

The Lord God has dealt the village people the best part of this world's delight. Do you see? — to you He has given the broad fields of tillage, the mountains, the valleys, the rivers, the springs, adorned with plants and flowers of myriad kind, tilled by God Himself. You dwell in the very paradise of nature, and enjoy the abundant, unfailing good things that same nature gives — while the townsfolk live outside this paradise. Their delight is their own hand-built great buildings; all their pomps are fleeting and changeable, today they are and tomorrow not. But your pomp, which Providence made ready long ago, is and remains: the fields, the mountains, the plants, the rivers, the springs, ever unchanged, ever the same. Only, of those richest goods that nature has prepared, man must know how to take his enjoyment.

What the Lord God said to Adam, the same He speaks to Adam's children to this day: to work the earth and to keep it. You know by trial that the field, without wheat sown, grows no wheat; without planting and watering, no tree thrives; without the labor of husbandry no man can draw forth the earth's yield and gather it into his barn. The husbandman's life bears fruit only by labor; the husbandman lives by the soil, and lives happy; and when he has lived himself, he gives the city people too their bread.

So then you, with your lands, your fields, your mountains, your milch cows and sheep and the other serviceable beasts, are richer by far and far than the townsfolk. As a villager and a man of trial, Papik gives you counsel: let it not be — never let it be! — that you leave village, leave soil, and go dwell in the city. Know that you will be wretched: when you lose the soil, your life too is lost with the soil. Want and misery will overtake you, and then you will be hemmed in with despair; no other hope will stand before you but exile-for-bread alone: to cast off family, leave your children masterless, go into foreign parts, suffer in cruel labor — forsaking the sweet and free labor of husbandry — oh! to go and be a porter? Forsaking the village's green fields, the plow-handle and the yoke-beasts, tree and flower, the breeze-cooled mountains, the waters of the springs of immortality, the sweet-breathed health-giving air, the milk and madzun, the cream and butter, and all the many natural and patriarchal good enjoyments which the mother land bestows on her children! Papik has made long trial of the bitter life of exile, and many of you have made the same trial. Labor, labor! — that you taste not the bitternesses of that life of strangers' lands. And I too pray for you, my fellow-countrymen villagers, that you never see the face of exile, but find your bread in the mother land.

But you know, devout villagers, that men do not live by bread alone. You go to worship, you give ear to the Gospel: hear what Jesus says — "man shall not live by bread alone, but by the word of God must he live."⁹ For if our body lives by bread, the soul too must live; and the soul's life and bread are God's commandments, and the head of the commandments is love. Therefore men live by love, and live by one another.

Let me give you a plain example. With one yoke there is no gutan; with one man the mill-stone, or the oil-press beam, cannot be carried and set in its place. All the hard things of this world men have learned to do with fellowship's united strength. You know by trial: when some heavy matter falls upon our village, we all join together and so we work it. Do you remember, some years ago, the Kurds struck and drove off our village's sheep? Then all the braves of the village gathered — this one mounted, that one afoot; they took scythes for swords, went, and turned the plunder home. Now say yourselves: could one man have turned back the village's whole plunder?

You have understood now, that men live by helping one another. Ask then: why do they live by one another? Give heed; I will speak plainly. Because upon this earth, everywhere, in village and city, men's life is unequal: one is rich, one is poor; one is a prince, one common folk; one is master, one servant; one is householder, and one laborer. And this very inequality it is that binds men to one another and forms a fellowship: it binds the people with the prince, the servant with the master, the poor man with the rich, as our village's poor laborers are bound with the rich householders.

What say you — if those laborers were not poor, would they take upon themselves to enter under service's heavy yoke? "Poverty humbleth a man," says holy Scripture;¹⁰ else, if a man feel his own worth, he never stoops to do service. But would it be well, think you, if every man alike were free, were rich, were an agha? No — then the order of this world would be thrown down. The Armenians have a proverb: "I an agha, you an agha — who will grind our grist?"¹¹ Yes: the servant and the miller must make ready the flour, that the agha may eat bread without going to the mill.

The greatest part of the world's people are workmen, laborers, tillers and servants, and it is the fruit of their poured-out sweat that feeds the world. By Providence's everlasting law the life of human fellowship is so ordered, that men live by one another. You see with your own eyes, and know by trial, that our village life too is unequal: one part are landlords and householders, and another part are hired laborers, who exchange the toil of their bitter sweat for a very scant wage. Let it never be that you cut your laborers' wage, or put it off — not today, tomorrow. The Lord God commands that the hired laborer's wage stay not until evening — that is, let not the day pass over it;¹² for the protest of the reaping laborers rises even to heaven, and God by the mouth of Isaiah the prophet rebuked the landholding masters of Israel. Deal not cruelly and harshly with the laborers. I have seen some who tormented them beyond measure, reviled them and struck them with the fist, dealing them wrong besides. Know that you are not the laborers' lord: God is; and He will be avenger, and judge the cause of the wronged. The more sweetly and justly you deal with the tilling laborers, the better and the more gainful for you: then they will be the more truly and faithfully yours, and will work with heart and mind, whereby the yield of the husbandry will be far more profitable to the master.

Householder brothers, let it never be that you count the free workingmen — the laborers — as base slaves, and use them with contempt. You go to church, you give ear to the Gospel: do you not know, have you not understood, that Jesus, forming all His faithful — great and small, rich and poor, prince and people, master and servant — all equally into one brotherhood of love, said this word: "Ye are all brethren"?¹³

By this word Jesus does not annul the honor and respect of each rank or degree of human fellowship. No: Paul the Apostle, expounding this word of Christ, teaches us to render to every man according to his degree our honor and our respect, morally also.¹⁴ The Gospel's debt of love makes no distinction: every man, in whatever station and degree he stand, is bound to pay it to his fellow. And for the outward debts too Jesus spoke with decree, and performed it: "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."¹⁵

The turn is come, villager brothers, that I speak to you: be knowers of your debts, and stand always faithful to pay what you owe, to whomever it be. But the first necessary, great and weightiest debt for a subject people is the dues of the state, which the land's people, townsman and villager, is bound to pay with exactness and faithful fear. That man is guilty, not only before the land's laws but before God's revealed commandments, who cheats and defrauds in these dues.

Labor always to pay the state's taxes exactly, and to pay them in season. Do not let them pile up and grow heavy upon you, so that afterward you are driven to sell what you have and pay the tax. And what have you? Soil and plow-beasts: if you sell them, you sell your life, and die alive in misery.

Our village's poor I commend to you, kind-hearted householders. Deal the state's taxes out straight and just; lay the burden light upon the destitute houses; you who are able, take the poor men's burden upon yourselves. Know that he who carries his fellow's burden fulfills the great law of the commandment of love.

After the state's dues — I know it — our villagers have many debts to the townsfolk too. Most luckless are they who have sold their lands to pay their debts; and some, pawning their fields, heap debt upon debt at heavy, heavy interest, whose end is most cross-fortuned and bitter: for at the last they cannot pay, and then the creditor will have the right to seize your fields.

Therefore Papik gives you counsel: labor first to make no debt. But when hardship and strait bear down on you, and you are without shift and must borrow, labor to pay the small debt quickly, before it has grown. In the business of debts be always faithful: whether in taking or in giving practice no deceit at all; deal uprightly and make your reckonings straight. Know that the village people's credit and honor stand upon its faithfulness. Whoever cheats and forswears, thereafter his credit and honor are dead before the townsman: to whomever he turn and plead, he cannot borrow. You will say: Papik, do you not know your villager, who knows neither letters nor reckoning? How should he know and keep his accounts? He has only an unwritten, paperless head-reckoning; therefore many a time he forgets, and takes refuge in denial.

Very true is that word — you confess it with your own mouth; and I bear witness with you, that the one great house-wrecking cause of the villagers is this, that they know neither writing nor reckoning. The husbandry of our life must be by writing and account; for man's mind is forgetful — today's business it forgets tomorrow. Writing and reckoning were invented to keep our mind's business past forgetting. Whoever has neither writing nor account, his husbandry is disordered, and in all his buying and selling he always takes the loss. Many a time have I spoken it to you, and today for the last time I hand you my counsels as a testament.

Take care of our village's school, that your boys be schooled and learn writing and reckoning. Your own season you have let pass: without account you have lived, without account you will die; at the least let your boys, being schooled, become men of knowledge, and know the businesses of their life's husbandry. When the townsman does everything by writing and account, why should not the villager too know his account like the townsman? What a shame it is for the villager when he is cheated, and falls to grumbling and saying, the townsman cheated me, and the rest! Is the villager not a man? has he no reason? Yes, we too are men; only our reason's eye is shut fast with ignorance. We have eyes, and we walk the world as blind men; therefore the townsman counts us dull and witless — oh, and sometimes, reviling us further, calls us fool outright. That unbearable reproach will never be lifted off us so long as we have no schooling and no learning; and so long as our mind's eye is not opened, we shall walk astray in this world; and you know that the strayed man's road of life is full of misery's thorns, and its end leads down to perdition.

Therefore, dear villagers, to be saved out of that road of perdition we need the unswerving straight road. And what is it that opens the straight path before our eyes? It is not the sun of the day, nor the lantern and lamp of the night: no, those lights of the world are not enough for our life, if we have not the mind's light, which is learning and education, which a man receives from his childhood years. So school your tender little ones, that they may grow up and become men, and their mind's eye be opened, that they walk not the world as blind. School your daughters also, that they may be wise stewards and good mothers; for you must know that the building of the house, the well-ordered husbandry of it, is by the hands of the women alone. Are women not human? have they no soul and mind? The Lord God gave woman to man as a wife not only to bear children: He gave her for companion and helper, to be his fellow-worker in labor — the man labors in the field, the woman in the house. Have you ever seen one ox work the haror? Man and wife are a pair of yoke-fellows; and if we mark it well, the greater share of labor is laid heavy on the women. The poor wives — after suckling the children they have borne, how heavy and hard it is to see to so many businesses of the household husbandry! Give heed, while I range before you, one by one, the works of the village wives' labor. Every day to knead the dough, to bake bread before the scorching tonir, to make ready the food, to carry bread to the laborers in the field; evening and morning to milk the buffalo-dams and the cows; to go to the milking-ground and milk the ewes; to see to all the dairy-work; to beat the churn or the churning-skin; to make butter and cheese; to care for the guests; many a time to clean out the stables; to bake the thin ptir-bread; to build up the fuel-store, making ready firing for winter; to card wool and spin; to knit stockings and footlets, and work other things of homespun; to wash, to sew and to patch; to go out over field and mountain gathering dye-flowers and roots; to weave figured carpets — which one more shall I name? There are still many other works that have fallen to the village wives' portion; and the poor wives bear all these labors in unmurmuring obedience. And you know, and you see, that some of these laboring wives eat cruel blows from their harsh and conscienceless husbands, and hear revilings.

I know what answer you will give: Eh, Papik, what talk is this? If we do not beat and pluck our graceless sharp-tongued wives, can we keep them in hand? You counsel us that the girls too should learn to read like the boys. And do you know what will come then? Their minds will be opened; they will grow tongue-ready and graceless; they will answer back boldly to everything; they will tear the veil of their natural shamefastness, break the yoke of obedience; and see then the husband-and-wife war! The peace of the house will be troubled; our old patriarchal rule and order will be overthrown. We have learned it so from our fathers, that women keep silent and dumb. That is why our brides have learned to stay tongue-bound seven years in the house,¹⁶ and speak with no one, but only with their husbands — and that not before people, but apart. If our girls learn to read, and after marry and become brides, will their tongue be held then? — the more if they become knowing, and reading books, learn the things of the world. And leave that: have the peasant's daughters time, forsooth, to go to school and learn reading and writing? Who is to see to the work of our house and field?

We have been to Bolis and back, and we have seen and we know: those women of Bolis, when they learned reading and writing, turned every one cunning advocates; their poor husbands are become captives in their hands; they dare even to lodge complaint with the Patriarchate of the Armenians and hale their husbands to judgment. Seeing these things, we fear; better our wives stay ignorant and obey us.

I understand your words well, dear villagers; give heed, that I may answer. Some forty years ago — I confess it straight — Papik too thought and spoke like you. But when I learned to read, and took the savor of books, and going about in exile saw with my own eyes the world's affairs and its changes, thereafter I began to change my thoughts. You must know that time changes everything with itself. And you — what do you think? would you stay unchanged in your oldness? If you remain in this present state of yours, motionless as standing water, and do not go forward like the living rivers' streams, you will dry up and wither in ignorance and misery. Man must walk with the time: he who stays behind will hunger for bread. Know that upon this earth it is chiefly the ignorant who have the wretched and miserable life.

There was a time when townsman and villager alike were ignorant, and lived alike in ignorance. Now the townsman goes forward with his schools; boy and girl are schooled equally. If we villagers are not schooled — if not to the townsman's measure, then at least in some small part — then before the townsfolk we shall be bondmen; for it is ignorance that makes a man bondman and captive. This is why the townsman goes forward and grows rich, and the villager stays behind and sinks to want.

You suppose and judge that when girls learn writing and reading they turn tongue-ready and graceless, and lose besides their natural reverence and modesty. That judgment of yours is very wrong. The example stands before our eyes: our own village is above two hundred houses; the wives of our village are all equally ignorant, they know neither writing nor reading — now say, are those graceless and tongue-ready wives of your telling wanting among them? You do not know yet, that the spring of all evil ways is ignorance; and the ignorance of the women is more hurtful to a family house than the men's. Give ear to what Solomon the wise says: "Wise women build their houses; but the graceless pull them down with their own hands."¹⁷ You suppose that to build a house, to make it thrive and keep it, is of the men alone, and that women signify nothing to its building. But you must know that the house's building and its fullness are in the women's hands. You bring the field's earnings and pour them into the house; but if the wife be ignorant and foolish, not knowing how to govern a house, not knowing how the house's needs must be supplied, and how to husband with measure and thrift — then you will see the year's provision spent in half the year: no flour left in the barrel, nor butter in the larder, nor other victuals; for to husband there is needed wit and wisdom, and when the mistress is witless, the house's building begins to be pulled down from within.

Leave the house's material building and the husbandry of bread. For a house or family line to be firm and standing, there is needed still more the moral building; if that building does not uphold the house, the material building soon falls in. And what is it that raises the house's moral building from the foundation? Listen, I will tell you: it is the mother's schooling and care. And how can a mother school her tender-born little ones, when she herself is unschooled and ignorant? This is why our children turn out ill-mannered — when the mothers are witless, so far that they cannot even rightly nurse the children they have borne. It is by that cause that our children die young, so young. It is a wonder — many suppose the village people is more fruitful in children, and multiplies. That opinion is very wrong: we see that not even half of those born remain. The poor children go as victims of their mothers' unschooling. And we have no right to blame those mothers. Do you think the bearing and rearing of children so easy a thing? Children are not the self-sown grasses of our fields, that grow and strengthen of themselves without tending. It is only the schooled mother's care that knows how to tend and rear her children well.

Do not suppose, and say, that milk and bread are enough for children's rearing. We see that the birds and the beasts care for their young so far only: when the fledglings' wings are grown, they fly off, and thenceforth care for themselves; likewise the calves, when they are weaned of the milk, begin to go to the field, graze, and find their own forage.

Eh, dear villagers — do you not know, then, that you are men endowed with reason, and your life bears no likeness to the life of birds and beasts? The Lord God, laying His curse on Adam, said: with the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread — that is, with grinding labor procure it; but of the birds and beasts He said no such thing, for the heavenly Father feeds them, as Jesus bears witness.¹⁸ If we live by bread alone, then we turn beasts. Therefore Jesus said: man lives not by bread alone, but by the word of God.

And what say you — is God's word, is the kingdom of heaven, for the men only? Have the women no part in it? Are they shut out? Did God give the book of Scripture, the law, the commandment, the Gospel, to the men alone? No, it is not so. The Lord God gave His commandment to Adam and to Eve equally; and likewise to their seed He has handed down His divine commandments equally, by the hands of Moses and of Jesus.

Therefore woman, the root of the house, must also know and understand those divine commandments which are contained in the Old and the New Testament. And how can she read and understand God's word, if from her little years she learn it not in the school — that afterward, growing up, she may be a schooled mother, and able to school the tender children she bears? Do you not know that those little ones are given over to their mother's schooling and care alone? The fathers take no thought of it — least of all the village fathers, who are wholly busied in their tilling labor. Who is it that first teaches the child to sign his face with the cross? The Christian mother. Who is it that answers the curious child's every question, sweetly, with a mother's tenderness, unwearied? The mother. Who is it, when the child turns his eyes toward heaven and sees the bright things in the blue heaven's face, and asks what they are — it is the mother who answers: they are the sun, the moon, the stars; God created them for us, to give light by day and night. And when the child sees the things near round about him and asks, who is it again that gives answer to them all? Again the mother. Yes: the child learns his tongue from his mother; God, and the things of God, he learns from his mother too. Men suppose that children must learn those things only from the schoolmaster or the vardapet. It is not so; give heed, and I will explain. Our new-born babes are carried to church; the priest baptizes them in the font; the godfather stands interpreter for the speechless babe, and asking faith, hope and love, gives the confession of Christianity in its stead. But who is it that baptizes the babe in the font of the mother-house? That baptizer, that natural priest, is the very mother who bore it: when the babe's tongue and mind begin to open, she begins to teach it Christianity's brief, plain and natural lessons; she sows in its tender heart the seed-grains of the holy faith, which bud on and on as it grows.

Now have you seen, that the first natural and great teacher and schooler of the home's family school is the mother who bears the child? We do not err if we say: in Christian learning and first schooling, the first schoolmaster, vardapet, theologian and tutor is the mother — above all the devout mother, who teaches not with the tongue alone, but schools her children by her own good motherly example. Our church-loving village mothers — do you see them? — clasping their babes in their arms they go to church, light candles before the images of the Holy Mother of God and of the Cross, kneel, and pray; and the babe, seeing these examples of its mother, takes their stamp like a seal upon its clean child's heart. And when it grows little by little, and begins to ask — mayrik, who is the Holy Mother of God? who is Christ? why was Christ crucified? how did He rise again, and ascend into heaven? — ah, there the unlearned and ignorant mother cannot tell the child Christ's birth and His deeds.

Have you understood now, villager brothers, that the mothers are the one first schoolmaster and schooler of their children? And this is enough — I have preached you a sermon and counsel as long as a vardapet's. Keep this my last testament: take care from now on that your children, boy and girl equally, be schooled. As I have said in my Tornik's lessons, our village schools have no great expenses: if every house at threshing-time gives one kot of wheat apiece, all the school's charges are provided. I know you have many griefs and many taxes to meet; but the school-tax is a tax so needful and so gainful, that it will be the cure of those many griefs of yours. You do not understand these words now; but you will understand them on that day when you see the fruit of education — and you will remember me, and give your God-have-mercy for Papik's soul.

Dear villagers, I think this much is enough and to spare. Keep my counsel and my testament, and leave it an inheritance to your children. There was much still to say to you, but my breath is spent; I can go on no longer. Farewell in peace; pray for me, that the good angel take my soul with sweetness. I am not worthy of the shining court of the kingdom of heaven: it is much for me if I be a servant and doorkeeper at its gate.¹⁹ Pray you from the earth; and I, kneeling in spirit before the gate of the kingdom of heaven, will pray the benefactor God to show mercy to all the world, and to our poor Armenian nation. Amen.

Eh, dear Tornik, the time is come for me to give up my soul; the angel waits. Yet I have one last testament for you all, which you must perform with all faithfulness and exactness, and so inherit Papik's blessing.

I am dying, Tornik. Carry me and bury me in our walled field, which is near the burying-ground. Have my grave dug in a corner of the field, where the poplar and willow trees stand. You know that many a time Papik, weary from labor, would go and sit beneath those trees and rest; sometimes too, laying my head against the tree's bole, I slept sweetly. Now I shall sleep in the grave, until Gabriel sounds his trumpet.

When you plow that field of my grave and sow wheat, I give you charge: of that field's clean wheat grind flour, as much as suffices, and deliver it to the village priest, that he make of it the nshkhar — the wafer-bread — and offer the Liturgy for Papik's soul on the days of the dead of the five tabernacle-feasts.²⁰ Likewise when you gather our vineyard, pick out with your own hand the good ripe grapes and press them, and making ready the whole year's chalice-wine, deliver it to the priest; let him keep it in the church.

Make ready my soul-meal with all abundance. At your wedding we slaughtered the black crooked ox; look again — among our gutan-beasts crooked oxen are never wanting, that do not pull even with their yoke-fellow and forever drag the share out of the furrow: if there be such, slaughter them, make them a matagh for Papik's soul, and feed all the village's poor in fullness. And now send a man quickly to the monastery of Varag: let them call Daniel vardapet, that good laborer for the village's progress; let him come bury me, and say the office of the dead. Give a new-grown buffalo calf as soul-portion to the monastery of Varag; for it is by that monastery's grace we have learned to read.

Tornik, plant a khachkar over my grave, and write my memorial thus: "This is the tomb of Papik of Archak, who loved soil and plow-handle, spoke his Tornik the lessons of husbandry, handed down his testament, and died. You who pass by, say God have mercy on Papik's soul."

The hour of my soul's departing draws on, Tornik. Call your mayrik; call Shushan and her children; come all together and kiss Papik's hand; take my last blessing, and go out; leave me alone, that I may rest a little space, and give up my soul.

My good guardian angel, like a watchman you have stood over my head. Do you see? — my whole body swims in death's sweat. That sweat I once poured out in the field; oh, this is the last sweat, which I pour for death. No more need have I of this world's bread — only may I be worthy of the bread of the kingdom of heaven.

Good angel, I am much beholden to you: from the swaddling-band of my birth to my dying state you have kept me. Many a time I grieved you, and many a time too I gladdened you: when I sinned, you turned your face away and sorrowed; when I repented and did penance, you rejoiced. In all my life, I know not how much you wept, how much you laughed. Blessed be God — in this my last hour of the soul's departing you shine most bright; my spirit fills with hope; I believe that in faith I shall give up my soul. Only I beg you to tell me, angel of death: when you have taken my soul, whither will you carry it?

Do you not know, Papik — you, a pupil of the book — that the souls of the faithful must first come up before Christ the Judge? Only the examining Judge appoints for men's souls their lot and their places. Be not troubled for that: the house of Christ's Father is very wide, and has many appointed lodgings.²¹

Then I beseech you, good angel, be intercessor for me before Christ. I want no house, no lodging: I am a man of the field, a tiller, schooled to labor; from the field of heaven's kingdom I ask only one little plot, to plow and sow. I know the kingdom's fields are fat and fruitful beyond this world's fields, which grow thistle, thorn and tares in among the grain.

Poor Papik! You have given your wits to the soil and to labor; you know not what you say. It seems to me you have forgotten the words of Jesus' Gospel; perhaps old age has brought dotage upon you. Do you not know that in the kingdom all labor is ceased for mortal men? Blessed be Christ, who lifted from your father Adam that curse: in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread. You must know, Papik, that in the kingdom there is no labor, no sweat, no pain, no suffering — nothing of all that. The kingdom is only the enjoyment of God's glory: men of flesh become angels like us; no bread is needed, nor water, nor raiment; man and angel are satisfied with the glory of God and bathed in light. But this I tell you, Papik: every man born, whatever he has sown upon this earth, that shall he reap;²² that is, whatever he has wrought, by the measure of his works he shall receive: for good works the portion is Christ's kingdom, and for evildoers hell.

That I know, good angel; and still, in this narrow minute of my death-hour, I would learn of you: if every man, whatever he has sown in this world, shall reap it in the world beyond — then in the kingdom of heaven there is work for me: what I sowed here has sprung up there, and by now it is ripe. Let me take my scythe with me, that I may reap my sowings.

You say that in the kingdom is no eating and drinking: what then is that plenteous table which Christ makes ready for His beloved, and Himself, girding His loins, serves at the table?²³ Ah — Papik longs to labor, and make bread ready for that heavenly table! Can there be a table without bread, or wine without planting a vineyard? I am a laborer of bread; and let Noah the patriarch of Masis plant the vineyard and make ready the wine.²⁴

Very simple-hearted are you, Papik — what things you speak! Jesus came into the world; by the Gospel He told you everything; when He became man like you, He saw men, made trial of them, and bore witness that the children of this world are wiser than the children of light.²⁵ But I marvel at you, Papik, when you would speak in jest with death's angel. Do you not know that angels love no jesting? Zechariah made one jest of unbelief, and was punished on the instant.²⁶ You say, let me take my scythe with me — supposing that we angels have no reaping scythe? Have you not read the book of Revelation, and the scythes that appear in the prophets' visions?²⁷ We in one night mowed down, of Sennacherib's host that beleaguered Jerusalem, a hundred and eighty thousand souls.²⁸ And I marvel the more at this — that you desire they give you a little field in the kingdom, and you would make bread for the kingdom's table.

Eh, Papik, you cannot now conceive the heavenly feast, whose table is immortal, its bread immortal, its wine immortal. Who are you — a mortal, feeble man — to be high-minded to make bread for that table, which Jesus alone made ready, with His Cross and with His blood? Add nothing more, Papik; the hour is late. Give your soul; believe, and be at rest. God knows how He must reward His faithful servants. I know, Papik, your wage is great in heaven: you have fulfilled the debt of fellow-love, you have wronged no man, you have eaten your bread in the sweat of your brow until this day — and now you shall fall asleep with a good death.

Papik had held fast to his soul, and would have spoken still; but when he saw that the angel had no patience, he crossed his hands upon his heart, closed his failing eyes, and murmured his last word. He said: There — take my soul, good angel. So blithely and so easily did Papik give his soul, as one draws out an apple from his bosom: hung eighty and two years upon the tree of life, it was reddened through and full ripe.

The apple dropped from the tree: the angel reached from above, caught it up, and flew away.

Thus died Papik: he gave over his soul, and with his soul he ended also his PAPIK AND TORNIK.

God have mercy on the soul of Papik the patriarch. Amen.

(THE END)