In the meantime Elena Kirillovna kneels down with a sigh before the
ikon in her bedroom. She prays a long time. Conscientiously she repeats
all the prayers she knows. Her dry, raspberry-coloured lips stir
slightly. Her face has a severe, concentrated expression. All her
wrinkles seem also austere, weary, callous.
There are many words in her prayers—holy, lofty, touching words. But
because of their frequent repetition their meaning has become, as it
were, hardened, stereotyped and ordinary; the tears which appear in her
eyes are habitual tears wrung out by her antique emotion, and have no
relation to the secret trepidation of impossible hopes which have
stolen into the old woman’s heart of late.
Diligently her lips murmur prayers each day for the forgiveness of
sins, voluntary and involuntary, committed in deed, in word, or in
thought; prayers for the purification of our souls of all defilement;
and again words concerning our impieties, our evil actions, our
disregard of commandments, our general unworthiness, our worldly
frailty, and the temptations of Satan; and again concerning the
accursed soul and the accursed body and the sensual life; and her words
embrace only universal evil and all-pervading depravity. Surely these
prayers were composed for Titans, created to reconstruct the universe,
but who, out of shamefaced indolence, are attending to this business
with their arms hanging at their sides.
And not a word does she utter of her own, her personal affliction, of
what is in her soul.
The old, dried-up lips mumble of mercy, of generosity, of brotherly
love, of the holy life—of all those lofty regions pouring out their
bounty upon all creation. And not a word of the miracle, awaited
eagerly and with trepidation.
But here are words for those who are in prison and in exile; it is a
prayer for their liberation, for their redemption.
Here is something at last about Borya.
Freedom and redemption....
But the prayer runs on and on, and it is again for strangers, for
distant people, for the universal; only for an instant, and then
lightly, does she pause to put in something for herself, for her
desire, for what is in her heart.
Then for the dead—for those others, the long since departed, the almost
forgotten, the resurrected only in word in the hour of these strangers,
prayed for in this easy, gliding way all the world over where piety
reigns.
The prayers are ended. Elena Kirillovna lingers for a moment. She has
an air of having forgotten to say something indispensable.
What else? Or has she said all?
“All”—some one seems to say simply, softly and inexorably.
Elena Kirillovna rises from her knees. She goes to the window. Her soul
is calm and self-contained. The prayer has not left her in a mood of
piety, but has relieved her weary soul for a brief time of its
material, matter-of-fact existence.