A Prayer
“Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him.”
Matthew 6:8
“No, no, no! It can’t be. … Doctor! Surely something can be done? Why do neither of you speak?” said a young mother, as with long, firm steps she came out of the nursery, where her three-year-old child, her first and only son, lay dying of water on the brain.
Her husband and the doctor, who had been talking together in subdued tones, became silent. With a deep sigh the husband timidly approached her, and tenderly stroked her dishevelled hair. The doctor stood with bowed head, and his silence and immobility showed the hopelessness of the case.
“What’s to be done?” said the husband. “What’s to be done, dear? …”
“Ah! Don’t … don’t!” cried she; and there was a note of anger or reproach in her voice as she suddenly turned back to the nursery.
Her husband tried to stop her.
“Kitty, don’t go there …”
She glanced at him with large, weary eyes, and, without answering, entered the nursery.
The boy lay in his nurse’s arms, a white pillow under his head. His eyes were open, but he did not see with them; and from his closed lips came bubbles of foam. The nurse sat with stern and solemn mien, looking across him, and did not move when the mother entered. Only when the latter came close to her and put her hand under the pillow to take the child, the nurse said gently:
“He is passing away!” and turned aside. But his mother, nevertheless, with a deft and practised movement, took the boy into her own arms. His long wavy hair had got tangled. She smoothed it, and looked into his face.
“No, I can’t …” she muttered, and quickly but carefully handed him back to the nurse, and left the room.
It was the second week of the boy’s illness, and all that time his mother had wavered between despair and hope. During all that time she had not slept two hours a day. Several times each day she had gone to her bedroom, and, standing before the large icon of the Saviour, in its gold-embossed covering, had prayed God to save her boy. The dark-faced Saviour held in his small dark hand a gilt book, on which was written in black enamel: “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
She prayed with all the strength of her soul before that icon. And though in the depth of her heart, even while she prayed, she felt that the mountain would not be removed, and God would not do as she willed, but as He willed, she still prayed, repeating the familiar prayers, and some that she composed herself and repeated aloud with special fervour.
Now that she knew he was dead, she felt as if something had snapped in her head and was whirling round; and when she reached her bedroom she looked at all the things there with astonishment, as though not recognizing the place. Then she lay down on the bed, her head falling not on the pillow but on her husband’s folded dressing-gown, and she lost consciousness in sleep.
In her sleep she saw her Kóstya, with his curly hair and thin white neck, healthy and merry, sitting in his little armchair, swinging his plump little legs, pouting his lips, and carefully seating his boy-doll on the papier-mâché horse which had lost one leg and had a hole in its back.
“What a good thing he is alive!” she thought, “and how cruel it was that he died! Why was it? Why should God—to whom I prayed so earnestly—let him die? Why should God wish it? … He did no harm to anyone. … Doesn’t God know that my whole life is wrapped up in him, and that I cannot live without him? To take such an unfortunate, dear, innocent being, and torture him … and in answer to all my prayers, to shatter my life, and let his eyes set, and his body stretch out and grow stiff and cold! …”
Again she saw him coming. Such a little fellow, passing in at such big doors, swinging his little arms as grown-up people do. And he looked and smiled. … “The darling! … and God wants to torture and destroy him! Why pray to Him, if He does such horrible things?”
Suddenly Molly, the under-nurse, began to say something very strange. The mother knew it was the girl Molly, yet it was both Molly and an angel at the same time.
“But if she is an angel, why has she no wings on her back?” thought the mother.
She remembered, however, that someone—she did not know who, but some trustworthy person—had told her that there were angels without wings now.
And Molly, the angel, said:
“You do wrong, ma’am, to be offended with God. It is impossible for Him to grant all prayers. People often ask such things, that to please one would mean offending another. … Why, even now, all over Russia, people are praying—and what people! The very highest bishops and monks, in the cathedrals and churches, over the relics of the saints … praying for victory over the Japanese. But is that right? It is wrong to pray for that, and He cannot grant such prayers. … The Japanese also pray for victory, and there is but one Father of all. … Then what is He to do? What can He do, ma’am?” repeated Molly.
“Yes, that’s true! The old story. … Voltaire already said it. … We all know it, and all say it; but my case is different. … Why can’t He grant my prayer when I do not ask anything bad, but only that He should not kill my darling boy, without whom I cannot live?”
So said the mother, and she felt his plump little arms round her neck, and his warm little body nestling against hers.
“How good that it did not really happen! …” thought she.
“But that is not all, ma’am …” Molly insisted, in her usual blundering way. “That is not all. Sometimes only one person asks, and yet He can’t possibly do it. … We know that, quite well! … I know it, you see, because I take His messages,” said Molly, the angel, in just the same voice in which yesterday, after taking a message from her mistress to her master, she told the nurse: “I know master is at home, for I have taken him a message.”
“How often have I had to report to Him,” said Molly, “that someone—a young one generally—asks to be helped not to do bad deeds, not get drunk or live loosely—asks, in fact, that vice should be extracted from him as if it were a splinter!”
“How well Molly speaks!” thought her mistress.
“… But He cannot possibly do it, for each one must try for himself. … Only by trying does one get better. You yourself, ma’am, gave me a fairytale to read about a black hen which gave a magic hemp-seed to a boy who saved her life. As long as the seed was in his trouser-pocket, he knew all his lessons without learning them, and so this seed made him stop learning and quite lose his memory. … He, our Father, cannot take evil out of people; and they should not ask Him to do it, but they should pull it out—wash it out—tear it out of themselves!”
“Where has she got all this from?” thought her mistress, and said:
“All the same, Molly, you have not answered my question.”
“Give me time, and I will answer it,” said Molly. “It sometimes happens that I take a message to say that a family have been ruined by no fault of their own. They are all weeping. … Instead of living in good rooms, they live anyhow. They even go without tea, and pray for any sort of help. … But, again, He cannot do what they want, for He knows what is good for them. They do not see it, but He, our Father, knows that if they lived in plenty they would be spoilt and go all to smithereens.”
“That’s true,” thought her mistress. “But why does she speak in such an offhand way when talking about God? ‘All to smithereens’ is not at all a proper expression! I shall certainly have to tell her of it, another time.”
“But that is not my question,” repeated the mother. “I ask, why … for what reason … did this God of yours want to take my boy?”
And the mother saw her Kóstya alive, and heard his childish laugh, clear as a bell. “Why should he be taken from me? If God can do that, He is a bad, wicked God, and I do not want Him, and do not wish to know Him.”
And, strange to say, Molly was no longer at all like Molly, but was some quite other, new strange indefinite creature, and she spoke, not aloud with her lips, but in some peculiar way that went straight into the mother’s heart.
“Pitiful, blind, self-confident creature!” said this being. “You see your Kóstya as he was a week ago, with firm elastic limbs and long curly hair, and his naive affectionate and sensible talk. But was he always like that? There was a time when you were glad when he could say ‘Dada’ and ‘Mamma,’ and knew one from the other. Before that, you were delighted when he stood up on his soft feet and toddled to a chair. Before that, you were all delighted when he crawled about the room like an animal; and earlier yet, you were glad that he began to take notice and could hold up his hairless head, the pulsating crown of which was still soft. Still earlier, you were glad when he began to suck, pressing the nipple with his toothless gums. Before that, you were glad when he, all red and not yet separated from you, cried pitifully, filling his lungs with air. Earlier yet, a year before, where was he—when he did not exist? You all think you are standing still, and that you and those you love ought always to remain what you now are. But you do not really remain the same for a single minute … you all flow like a river; and as a stone drops downwards, you are all hastening towards death, which sooner or later awaits every one of you. How is it you do not understand that if, from nothing, he became what he was, he would not have stopped, and would not for a minute have remained as he was when he died? But, just as from nothing he became a suckling, and from a suckling a child, so from a child he would have become a schoolboy, a youth, a young man, middle-aged, elderly, and then old. You do not know what he would have been had he remained alive … but I know!”
And suddenly the mother saw—in the private cabinet of a restaurant, brilliantly lit by electricity (her husband had once taken her to such a place), near a table on which were the remains of a supper—a bloated, wrinkled, unpleasant, would-be-young old man with turned-up moustaches. He was sitting on a soft sofa, in which he sank deep, his drunken eyes gazing with desire at a depraved, painted woman with a white bare neck, and with drunken tongue he shouted something, repeating an indecent joke several times, evidently pleased at the approving laughter of another similar pair.
“It is not true, it is not he … that is not my Kóstya!” exclaimed the mother in terror, looking at the horrible old man—horrible just because there was something in his glance and about his lips that reminded her of Kóstya’s own peculiarities. “It is well that this is only a dream,” thought she. “There is the real Kóstya …” and she saw her white, naked Kóstya, with his plump chest, as he sat in his bath, laughing and kicking; and she not only saw, but felt, how he suddenly seized her arm, bared to the elbow, and kissed it and kissed it, and at last bit it—not knowing what else to do with that arm so dear to him.
“Yes, this—and not that horrid old man—is Kóstya,” she said to herself. And thereupon she awoke, and came back with terror to the reality from which there was no awaking.
She went to the nursery. The nurse had already washed and laid out Kóstya’s body. He lay on something raised; his little nose was waxen and sharp, and sunk at the nostrils, and his hair was smoothed back from his brow. Around him candles were burning, and on a small table at his head stood hyacinths—white lilac and pink.
The nurse rose from her chair and, lifting her brows and pouting her lips, looked at the upturned, stonily rigid face. Molly entered at the door opposite, with her simple good-natured face and tear-stained eyes.
“Why, she told me one should not grieve, but she has herself been crying,” thought the mother. Then she turned her gaze to the dead. For a moment she was startled and repelled by the dreadful likeness the dead face bore to that of the old man she had seen in her dream; but she drove away that thought, and, crossing herself, touched with her warm lips the small cold waxen forehead. Then she kissed the crossed rigid little hands; and suddenly the scent of the hyacinths told her, as it were afresh, that he was gone and would return no more; and she was stifled by sobs, and again kissed him on the forehead, and wept for the first time. She wept, but not with despair; her tears were resigned and tender. She suffered, but no longer rebelled or complained; and she knew that what had happened had to be, and was therefore good.
“It is a sin to weep, dear lady,” said the nurse; and, going up to the little corpse, with a folded handkerchief she wiped away the tears the mother had left on Kóstya’s waxen forehead.
“Tears will sadden his little soul! It is well with him now. … He is a sinless angel. Had he lived, who knows what might have become of him?”
“Yes, yes! … But, still, it hurts, it hurts!” said the mother.