The Brothers Karamazov
wooden cell which had been built long ago for another great ascetic,
Father Iona, who had lived to be a hundred and five, and of whose
saintly doings many curious stories were still extant in the monastery
and the neighborhood.
Father Ferapont had succeeded in getting himself installed in this same
solitary cell seven years previously. It was simply a peasant’s hut,
though it looked like a chapel, for it contained an extraordinary
number of ikons with lamps perpetually burning before them—which men
brought to the monastery as offerings to God. Father Ferapont had been
appointed to look after them and keep the lamps burning. It was said
(and indeed it was true) that he ate only two pounds of bread in three
days. The beekeeper, who lived close by the apiary, used to bring him
the bread every three days, and even to this man who waited upon him,
Father Ferapont rarely uttered a word. The four pounds of bread,
together with the sacrament bread, regularly sent him on Sundays after
the late mass by the Father Superior, made up his weekly rations. The
water in his jug was changed every day. He rarely appeared at mass.
Visitors who came to do him homage saw him sometimes kneeling all day
long at prayer without looking round. If he addressed them, he was
brief, abrupt, strange, and almost always rude. On very rare occasions,
however, he would talk to visitors, but for the most part he would
utter some one strange saying which was a complete riddle, and no
entreaties would induce him to pronounce a word in explanation. He was
not a priest, but a simple monk. There was a strange belief, chiefly
however among the most ignorant, that Father Ferapont had communication
with heavenly spirits and would only converse with them, and so was
silent with men.
The monk from Obdorsk, having been directed to the apiary by the
beekeeper, who was also a very silent and surly monk, went to the
corner where Father Ferapont’s cell stood. “Maybe he will speak as you
are a stranger and maybe you’ll get nothing out of him,” the beekeeper
had warned him. The monk, as he related afterwards, approached in the
utmost apprehension. It was rather late in the evening. Father Ferapont
was sitting at the door of his cell on a low bench. A huge old elm was
lightly rustling overhead. There was an evening freshness in the air.
The monk from Obdorsk bowed down before the saint and asked his
blessing.
“Do you want me to bow down to you, monk?” said Father Ferapont. “Get
up!”
The monk got up.
“Blessing, be blessed! Sit beside me. Where have you come from?”
What most struck the poor monk was the fact that in spite of his strict
fasting and great age, Father Ferapont still looked a vigorous old man.
He was tall, held himself erect, and had a thin, but fresh and healthy
face. There was no doubt he still had considerable strength. He was of
athletic build. In spite of his great age he was not even quite gray,
and still had very thick hair and a full beard, both of which had once
been black. His eyes were gray, large and luminous, but strikingly
prominent. He spoke with a broad accent. He was dressed in a peasant’s
long reddish coat of coarse convict cloth (as it used to be called) and
had a stout rope round his waist. His throat and chest were bare.
Beneath his coat, his shirt of the coarsest linen showed almost black
with dirt, not having been changed for months. They said that he wore
irons weighing thirty pounds under his coat. His stockingless feet were
thrust in old slippers almost dropping to pieces.
“From the little Obdorsk monastery, from St. Sylvester,” the monk
answered humbly, whilst his keen and inquisitive, but rather frightened
little eyes kept watch on the hermit.
“I have been at your Sylvester’s. I used to stay there. Is Sylvester
well?”
The monk hesitated.
“You are a senseless lot! How do you keep the fasts?”
“Our dietary is according to the ancient conventual rules. During Lent
there are no meals provided for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For
Tuesday and Thursday we have white bread, stewed fruit with honey, wild
berries, or salt cabbage and wholemeal stirabout. On Saturday white
cabbage soup, noodles with peas, kasha, all with hemp oil. On weekdays
we have dried fish and kasha with the cabbage soup. From Monday till
Saturday evening, six whole days in Holy Week, nothing is cooked, and
we have only bread and water, and that sparingly; if possible not
taking food every day, just the same as is ordered for first week in
Lent. On Good Friday nothing is eaten. In the same way on the Saturday
we have to fast till three o’clock, and then take a little bread and
water and drink a single cup of wine. On Holy Thursday we drink wine
and have something cooked without oil or not cooked at all, inasmuch as
the Laodicean council lays down for Holy Thursday: ‘It is unseemly by
remitting the fast on the Holy Thursday to dishonor the whole of Lent!’
This is how we keep the fast. But what is that compared with you, holy
Father,” added the monk, growing more confident, “for all the year
round, even at Easter, you take nothing but bread and water, and what
we should eat in two days lasts you full seven. It’s truly
marvelous—your great abstinence.”
“And mushrooms?” asked Father Ferapont, suddenly.
“Mushrooms?” repeated the surprised monk.
“Yes. I can give up their bread, not needing it at all, and go away
into the forest and live there on the mushrooms or the berries, but
they can’t give up their bread here, wherefore they are in bondage to
the devil. Nowadays the unclean deny that there is need of such
fasting. Haughty and unclean is their judgment.”
“Och, true,” sighed the monk.
“And have you seen devils among them?” asked Ferapont.
“Among them? Among whom?” asked the monk, timidly.
“I went to the Father Superior on Trinity Sunday last year, I haven’t
been since. I saw a devil sitting on one man’s chest hiding under his
cassock, only his horns poked out; another had one peeping out of his
pocket with such sharp eyes, he was afraid of me; another settled in
the unclean belly of one, another was hanging round a man’s neck, and
so he was carrying him about without seeing him.”
“You—can see spirits?” the monk inquired.
“I tell you I can see, I can see through them. When I was coming out
from the Superior’s I saw one hiding from me behind the door, and a big
one, a yard and a half or more high, with a thick long gray tail, and
the tip of his tail was in the crack of the door and I was quick and
slammed the door, pinching his tail in it. He squealed and began to
struggle, and I made the sign of the cross over him three times. And he
died on the spot like a crushed spider. He must have rotted there in
the corner and be stinking, but they don’t see, they don’t smell it.
It’s a year since I have been there. I reveal it to you, as you are a
stranger.”
“Your words are terrible! But, holy and blessed Father,” said the monk,
growing bolder and bolder, “is it true, as they noise abroad even to
distant lands about you, that you are in continual communication with
the Holy Ghost?”
“He does fly down at times.”
“How does he fly down? In what form?”
“As a bird.”
“The Holy Ghost in the form of a dove?”
“There’s the Holy Ghost and there’s the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit
can appear as other birds—sometimes as a swallow, sometimes a goldfinch
and sometimes as a blue-tit.”
“How do you know him from an ordinary tit?”
“He speaks.”
“How does he speak, in what language?”
“Human language.”
“And what does he tell you?”
“Why, to-day he told me that a fool would visit me and would ask me
unseemly questions. You want to know too much, monk.”
“Terrible are your words, most holy and blessed Father,” the monk shook
his head. But there was a doubtful look in his frightened little eyes.
“Do you see this tree?” asked Father Ferapont, after a pause.
“I do, blessed Father.”
“You think it’s an elm, but for me it has another shape.”
“What sort of shape?” inquired the monk, after a pause of vain
expectation.
“It happens at night. You see those two branches? In the night it is
Christ holding out His arms to me and seeking me with those arms, I see
it clearly and tremble. It’s terrible, terrible!”
“What is there terrible if it’s Christ Himself?”
“Why, He’ll snatch me up and carry me away.”
“Alive?”
“In the spirit and glory of Elijah, haven’t you heard? He will take me
in His arms and bear me away.”
Though the monk returned to the cell he was sharing with one of the
brothers, in considerable perplexity of mind, he still cherished at
heart a greater reverence for Father Ferapont than for Father Zossima.
He was strongly in favor of fasting, and it was not strange that one
who kept so rigid a fast as Father Ferapont should “see marvels.” His
words seemed certainly queer, but God only could tell what was hidden
in those words, and were not worse words and acts commonly seen in
those who have sacrificed their intellects for the glory of God? The
pinching of the devil’s tail he was ready and eager to believe, and not
only in the figurative sense. Besides he had, before visiting the
monastery, a strong prejudice against the institution of “elders,”
which he only knew of by hearsay and believed to be a pernicious
innovation. Before he had been long at the monastery, he had detected
the secret murmurings of some shallow brothers who disliked the
institution. He was, besides, a meddlesome, inquisitive man, who poked
his nose into everything. This was why the news of the fresh “miracle”
performed by Father Zossima reduced him to extreme perplexity. Alyosha
remembered afterwards how their inquisitive guest from Obdorsk had been
continually flitting to and fro from one group to another, listening
and asking questions among the monks that were crowding within and
without the elder’s cell. But he did not pay much attention to him at
the time, and only recollected it afterwards.
He had no thought to spare for it indeed, for when Father Zossima,
feeling tired again, had gone back to bed, he thought of Alyosha as he
was closing his eyes, and sent for him. Alyosha ran at once. There was
no one else in the cell but Father Païssy, Father Iosif, and the novice
Porfiry. The elder, opening his weary eyes and looking intently at
Alyosha, asked him suddenly:
“Are your people expecting you, my son?”
Alyosha hesitated.
“Haven’t they need of you? Didn’t you promise some one yesterday to see
them to-day?”
“I did promise—to my father—my brothers—others too.”
“You see, you must go. Don’t grieve. Be sure I shall not die without
your being by to hear my last word. To you I will say that word, my
son, it will be my last gift to you. To you, dear son, because you love
me. But now go to keep your promise.”
Alyosha immediately obeyed, though it was hard to go. But the promise
that he should hear his last word on earth, that it should be the last
gift to him, Alyosha, sent a thrill of rapture through his soul. He
made haste that he might finish what he had to do in the town and
return quickly. Father Païssy, too, uttered some words of exhortation
which moved and surprised him greatly. He spoke as they left the cell
together.
“Remember, young man, unceasingly,” Father Païssy began, without
preface, “that the science of this world, which has become a great
power, has, especially in the last century, analyzed everything divine
handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the
learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old.
But they have only analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and
indeed their blindness is marvelous. Yet the whole still stands
steadfast before their eyes, and the gates of hell shall not prevail