Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

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