The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Andrew R. MacAndrew Page A

important person here for the next ten minutes . . .”
    Chapter 3: Women Of Great Faith
    A  SCORE OF visitors, this time all peasant women, were waiting below by the gallery built outside the hermitage wall. They had been told that the elder would eventually come out and so had gathered there. Mrs. Khokhlakov and her daughter had also come out into the gallery to wait for the elder, but in the part reserved for ladies. Mrs. Khokhlakov, a wealthy woman, always tastefully dressed, was still young and very pretty; she was rather pale, with very lively, almost black eyes. She was no more than thirty-three and had been a widow for five years. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, whose legs were paralyzed, had been unable to walk for six months and had to be pushed around in a wheel-chair. She had a charming face, a little emaciated by sickness, but cheerful. There was a mischievous sparkle in the big dark eyes behind her long lashes. Her mother had planned to take her abroad in the spring, but they had been detained throughout the summer by urgent business on the estate. They had been in our town for a week already, having come on business rather than for devotions. Nevertheless, they had already been to see Zosima three days before. And now, although they knew that the elder could receive hardly any visitors, they had come back, begging for one more chance to see “the great healer.”
    The mother sat in a chair next to her daughter’s wheelchair and near her stood an old monk. He came from a little-known monastery somewhere in the far North and was also a visitor. He also sought the elder’s blessing.
    But when the elder appeared in the gallery, he didn’t stop but went straight down to the peasant women crowded around the three steps by the entrance. The elder stood on the top step, put on his stole, and began blessing the women as they pressed close to him. A crazy village girl was dragged toward him by both hands. As soon as she saw the elder, she let out strange shrieks, was seized by violent hiccoughs, and shook as if in convulsions. Zosima, placing the stole on her head, said a brief prayer, and the girl immediately quieted down.
    I do not know what it is like now, but when I was a boy I often saw and heard such crazy, wailing women, in the villages or at monasteries. When they were brought to mass, they shrieked, or barked like dogs, their cries filling the church. But as soon as the Host was elevated and they were led up to it, their “devilry” stopped and they calmed down for a while. As a child, I was greatly surprised by this. But then the neighboring gentry and especially my teachers, who came from town, told me the women were malingering to avoid work, and that proper firmness would cure them once and for all. They told me a number of stories to prove the point. Later, however, specialists told me that it was not a sham at all, that it was a terrible female disease, particularly widespread in Russia (which shows what a hard life Russian peasant women have), a sickness resulting from exhausting work following too soon upon a difficult, abnormal labor without medical help, and from an intensely unhappy life, full of brutality and ill-treatment, which, although common enough, is beyond the powers of endurance of some women. The strange and immediate healing effect of the Host on these crazy women, which was dismissed as shamming or even as a trick of the “clerics,” can probably be explained quite simply by the fact that the women who lead such a woman forward, and above all the sick woman herself, are absolutely convinced that the evil spirit that has entered her will have to leave her body when she is led to the Host and made to bow down before it. And so the overwrought and mentally sick woman always experiences (and cannot help experiencing) a violent shock throughout her entire body at the moment when she bends over the Host, a shock produced by her complete faith in the forthcoming miraculous cure. And the