The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reading an ebook TXT) 📗

class="calibre1">“We shall see greater things, greater things yet!” the monks

around repeated.

 

But Father Paissy, frowning again, begged all of them, at least

for a time, not to speak of the matter “till it be more fully

confirmed, seeing there is so much credulity among those of this

world, and indeed this might well have chanced naturally,” he added,

prudently, as it were to satisfy his conscience, though scarcely

believing his own disavowal, a fact his listeners very clearly

perceived.

 

Within the hour the “miracle” was of course known to the whole

monastery, and many visitors who had come for the mass. No one

seemed more impressed by it than the monk who had come the day

before from St. Sylvester, from the little monastery of Obdorsk in the

far North. It was he who had been standing near Madame Hohlakov the

previous day and had asked Father Zossima earnestly, referring to

the “healing” of the lady’s daughter, “How can you presume to do

such things?”

 

He was now somewhat puzzled and did not know whom to believe.

The evening before he had visited Father Ferapont in his cell apart,

behind the apiary, and had been greatly impressed and overawed by

the visit. This Father Ferapont was that aged monk so devout in

fasting and observing silence who has been mentioned already, as

antagonistic to Father Zossima and the whole institution of

“elders,” which he regarded as a pernicious and frivolous

innovation. He was a very formidable opponent, although from his

practice of silence he scarcely spoke a word to anyone. What made

him formidable was that a number of monks fully shared his feeling,

and many of the visitors looked upon him as a great saint and ascetic,

although they had no doubt that he was crazy. But it was just his

craziness attracted them.

 

Father Ferapont never went to see the elder. Though he lived in

the hermitage they did not worry him to keep its regulations, and this

too because he behaved as though he were crazy. He was seventy-five or

more, and he lived in a corner beyond the apiary in an old decaying

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 neighbourhood.

 

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 grey, and still had very thick hair and a full beard,

both of which had once been black. His eyes were grey, 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 whole meal 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 dishonour 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 marvellous-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

grey 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 favour 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