Before dawn Alyosha is roused. Father Zossima is very weak and wants to sit in a chair, but his mind is clear. He confesses to Father Païssy, takes communion, and extreme unction follows. The cell fills, first with the hermitage, then with people from the monastery. He kisses each of them and takes his leave as the earlier visitors make room. His voice is weak but steady, and he jests that years of teaching have made silence harder than talk. A monk, he says, has no reason to feel above the people who come. The aim of their seclusion is reached only when a man sees that he is worse than others, and responsible to all men for all human sins.
A letter sets the monastery moving. Madame Hohlakov writes that the elder once told a widow her son Vassya was alive and would come or send word. She had been praying for him as if he were dead, which he called a kind of sorcery, and then forgave. Scarcely home, she was given a letter from Siberia, written on the road from Ekaterinenburg. Vassya is returning and hopes to embrace her in three weeks. She calls it a miracle of prediction. The brothers already know. Rakitin has sent Father Païssy word of a matter too grave to defer. Païssy frowns as he reads, then his eyes gleam, and he says they shall see greater things. The monks around him repeat it.
That evening the monk from Obdorsk is sent past the apiary to Father Ferapont, who sits on a low bench under a huge elm. He is tall, erect, and still vigorous, his thick hair not even quite grey. He will not bow. He says that a year ago he pinched a devil's tail in a door, crossed it three times, and it died like a crushed spider. They do not smell it in the corner. The Holy Spirit, he says, flies down as a bird, sometimes a swallow, a goldfinch, or a blue-tit, and speaks in human language. Today the bird told him a fool would come and ask unseemly questions. At night the elm is not an elm. The two branches are Christ holding out his arms, and Ferapont trembles, because Christ may snatch him up and carry him away.
Zossima asks whether Alyosha did not promise yesterday to see his father, his brothers, and others. He must go. The elder will not die without him there to hear a last word, a last gift, because Alyosha loves him. On the way out Father Païssy speaks without preface. The learning of this world has analysed the parts of what was sacred and overlooked the whole, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. He blesses him and calls him an orphan. Alyosha sees a new friend in the stern monk, as though the elder had bequeathed him.
Coming Up in Chapter 26
Alyosha goes first to his father, who had insisted he come while Ivan was out. Fyodor is up early, trying to look bold, but he is tired. His forehead is bandaged with a red handkerchief, the bruises purple, his nose swollen. He turns a hostile glance on Alyosha and says the coffee is cold.
