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And so, to return to our story. When before dawn they laid Father Zossima’s body in the coffin and brought it into the front room, the question of opening the windows was raised among those who were around the coffin. But this suggestion made casually by some one was unanswered and almost unnoticed. For they expected something quite different.
I shall look him up. I shall make a point of it. What does he mean?” He went round the monastery, and crossed the pine-wood to the hermitage. The door was opened to him, though no one was admitted at that hour. There was a tremor in his heart as he went into Father Zossima’s cell. “Why, why, had he gone forth? Why had he sent him into the world? Here was peace. Here was holiness.
That action had made a terrible impression on Alyosha; he believed blindly in its mysterious significance. Mysterious, and perhaps awful. As he hastened out of the hermitage precincts to reach the monastery in time to serve at the Father Superior’s dinner, he felt a sudden pang at his heart, and stopped short. He seemed to hear again Father Zossima’s words, foretelling his approaching end.
Biographical details, for instance, cover only Father Zossima’s earliest youth. Of his teaching and opinions we find brought together sayings evidently uttered on very different occasions. His utterances during the last few hours have not been kept separate from the rest, but their general character can be gathered from what we have in Alexey Fyodorovitch’s manuscript.
Only lately I declared them in Father Zossima’s cell.... And the very same day, in the evening I beat my father. I nearly killed him, and I swore I’d come again and kill him, before witnesses.... Oh, a thousand witnesses!
But the majority were on Father Zossima’s side and very many of them loved him with all their hearts, warmly and sincerely. Some were almost fanatically devoted to him, and declared, though not quite aloud, that he was a saint, that there could be no doubt of it, and, seeing that his end was near, they anticipated miracles and great glory to the monastery in the immediate future from his relics.
In it she informed Alyosha of a strange and very opportune incident. It appeared that among the women who had come on the previous day to receive Father Zossima’s blessing, there had been an old woman from the town, a sergeant’s widow, called Prohorovna.
Fyodor Pavlovitch seems to have been the first to suggest, apparently in joke, that they should all meet in Father Zossima’s cell, and that, without appealing to his direct intervention, they might more decently come to an understanding under the conciliating influence of the elder’s presence.
He went into Father Zossima’s bedroom, knelt down, and bowed to the ground before the elder, who slept quietly without stirring, with regular, hardly audible breathing and a peaceful face. Alyosha returned to the other room, where Father Zossima had received his guests in the morning.
He felt obliged to decline the honor of your hospitality, and not without reason. In the reverend Father Zossima’s cell he was carried away by the unhappy dissension with his son, and let fall words which were quite out of keeping ... in fact, quite unseemly ... as”—he glanced at the monks—“your reverence is, no doubt, already aware.
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