X.
The long evenings of winter time Father Vassily passed in solitude with the idiot, imprisoned together with him in the white cage of pine log walls and ceiling, as though locked in a shell.
From the past he had retained a love for bright lights—and on the table, warming the room, blazed a large oil lamp with a big-bellied globe. The window panes frozen outside and frosted within reflected the light of the lamp and sparkled, but were impenetrably opaque like the walls and cut off the people from the greying night outside. Like a boundless sphere the night enveloped the house, crushing it from above, seeking some crevice through which to plunge its greyish claws, but finding none. It raged about the doors, tapped the walls with its lifeless hands, exhaling a murderous cold, wrathfully raised a myriad of dry and spiteful snowflakes, flinging them frenziedly against the windowpanes, and frantically ran back into the fields, cavorting, singing and leaping headlong into snowbanks, clutching the stiffened earth in its crosslike embrace. Then it rose and squatted on its haunches and silently gazed into the illuminated windows gnashing its teeth. And once more shrilly shrieking it flung itself against the house, bellowing into the chimney with a greedy howl of insatiable hatred and longing, and it lied: it had no children, it had devoured them all and buried them out in the field——in the field—in the field.
“A snowstorm,” said Father Vassily stopping to listen for a moment and turning his eyes back to his reading.
But it found them. The flame of the big lamp melted a circle in the frosty armor, and the damp window pane glistened and it glued its grey wan eye to the exposed spot. “Two of them—two—two—just two.” Rough, bare walls with the shining drops of amber sap, the radiant emptiness of air and the humans—two of them.
With the narrow little skull bending over his work the idiot sat at the table pasting little boxes out of cardboard: he was spreading on the paste, holding the tip of the brush in his long narrow hand, or else he was cutting up the cardboard and the click of the scissors resounded noisily through the barren house. The boxes came out all askew and dirty, with overlapping bands that refused to stick, but the idiot was unconscious of these defects and continued to work. Now and then he raised his head and with a motionless glance from beneath his narrow brutish eyelids he gazed into the radiant emptiness of the room, wherein a riot of sounds was fighting, whirling and circling. Rustling, rattling, crackling, booming, explosive sounds they were, mingling with someone’s laughter and long drawn out, protracted sighing. They were hovering over him, running over his face like invisible cobwebs, and penetrating into his head—those rustling, crackling, sighing sounds. And the man on the other side of the table was motionless and silent.
“Bang!” crackled the drying wood, and Father Vassily shivered and tore his eyes from the white page before him. And then he saw the bare rough walls, and the desolate windows and the grey eye of the night, and the idiot frozen in a listening attitude with a pair of shears in his hands. All this flitted past him like a vision, and once more before his lowered eyes spread the unfathomable world of the marvelous, the world of love, the world of gentle compassion and of beautiful sacrifices.
“Pa-pa,” the idiot mumbled the word which he had recently learned, and looked at his father askance, angrily, worriedly. But the man heard not and was silent, and his luminous face seemed inspired. He was dreaming the wondrous dreams of a madness that was brilliant as the sun. He believed with the faith of those martyrs who enter upon the stake as upon a couch of joy and die with a doxology on their lips. And he loved with the mighty and unrestrained love of the master who rules life and death and knows not the torture of the tragic impotence of human love. “Glory—glory—glory!”
“Pa-pa, Pa-pa!” once more mumbled the idiot, and receiving no reply took up his shears again. But he soon dropped them again, staring with motionless eyes and pricking up his outstanding ears to catch the sounds as they flitted past him. Hissing and rustling, laughter and whistling. And laughter. The night was in a playful mood. It squatted on the beams of the unfinished framework, rocking on the rafters and tumbling into the snow; it quietly stole into nooks and crannies, and there dug graves for those strangers, those strangers. And joyously it whirled up aloft, spreading its grey, wide wings, peering; then it tumbled again like a rock, or circling whizzed through the darkened window openings of the frosty framework, hissing and screaming. It was chasing the snowflakes—pallid with fear they silently sped onward in headlong flight.
“Pa-pa,” the idiot shouted loudly. “Pa-pa!”
The man heard and raised his head with the long, black, greying locks that encircled his face like the night and the snow. For a moment before him rose again the bare, rough walls and the spiteful and frightened face of the idiot and the screaming of the rioting snowstorm, filling his heart with agonized elation. It is done—it is done.
“What is it, Vassily? Paste your boxes.”
“Papa!”
“Be calm. The snowstorm? Yes, yes, the snowstorm!”
Father Vassily clung to the window—eye to eye with the greying night. He peered. And he whispered in terrified wonderment:
“Why doesn’t he ring the bell?[9] What if some one is lost in the fields?”
The night is sobbing. In the field—in the field—in the field.
“Wait, Vassily. I’ll walk over to Nicon’s. I’ll return at once.”
“Pa-pa!”
The door rattles, letting in a flood of new sounds. They first timidly edge their way near the door—no one is there. It is bright and empty. One by one they steal towards the idiot, groping along the ceiling, along the floor, along the walls. They peer into his brutish eyes, they whisper, they laugh, they commence to play with growing glee, with growing abandon. They chase one another, leaping and stumbling. They are doing something in the adjoining room, fighting and screaming. No one there. Light and emptiness. No one there.
“Boom!” somewhere overhead falls the first heavy note of the church bell scattering the myriad of frightened sounds into flight. “Boom!” goes the bell once more, with a second, muffled, viscid, scattered sound, as though an onrush of wind had caught the broad maw of the bell, and it choked and groaned. And the tiny sounds flee precipitously.
“And here am I again,” says Father Vassily. He is all white and shivering. The stiff, red fingers cannot turn the page. He blows on them, rubs them together, and once more the pages rustle and all disappears, the bare rough walls, the repulsive mask of the idiot and the measured knell of the church bell. Once more his face is ablaze with joyous madness. “Glory, glory!”
“Boom!”
The night is playing with the bell. Catching its thickly reverberating notes, weaving about them a network of whizzing and whistling sounds, tearing them to pieces, scattering them abroad, rolling them ponderously over the fields, burying them in the snow, and listening with the head askew. And once more it rushes to meet the new clangor, tireless, spiteful and cunning like Satan.
“Pa-pa!” cried the idiot throwing to the ground the shears with a bang.
“What is it? Be quiet!”
“Pa-pa!”
Silence in the room, the whizzing and wrathful hissing of the snowstorm outside, and the dull, viscid sounds of the bell. The idiot is slowly turning his head, and his thin, lifeless legs, with the curving toes and the tender soles that have never known contact with firm ground stir feebly and impotently strive to flee. And he calls again:
“Pa-pa!”
“All right. Stop. Listen, I will read you something.”
Father Vassily turned back the page and began with a grave and severe voice, as though reading in church:
“And as He passed by He saw a man who was blind from birth. He raised his hand and with blanched cheeks looked up at Vassya.
“Understand: BLIND FROM BIRTH. Had never seen the light of the sun, the face of his near ones and dear ones. He had come into the world and darkness had enveloped him. Poor man! Blind man!”
The voice of the priest resounds with the firmness of faith and with the transport of sated compassion. He is silent, he is staring ahead with a softly smiling gaze as though he cannot part with this poor man who was blind from birth and had never seen the face of a friend and had never thought that the grace of God was so nigh. Grace—and mercy—and mercy.
“Boom!”
“But listen, son. ‘His disciples asked Him: Master who did sin, this man or his parents that he was born blind? Jesus answered: neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’”
The voice of the priest gathers strength and fills the barren room with its reverberations. And its sonorous sounds pierce the soft purring and hissing and whistling and the lingering cracked tolling of the choking church bell. The idiot is filled with glee over the flaming voice and the brilliant eyes and the noise and the whistling and the booming. He slaps his outstanding ears, he hums, and two streams of viscid saliva flow in two dirty currents to his receding chin.
“Pa-pa! Pa-pa!”
“Listen, listen: ‘I must work the work of Him that sent me while it is day; the night cometh when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ Forever and ever for ever and ever!” into the teeth of the night and of the snowstorm he flings a passionately ringing challenge. “For ever and ever!” The church-bell is calling to the wanderers, and impotently weeps its aged broken voice. And the night is swinging on its black, blind notes: “Two of them, two of them, two-two-two!”
Dimly Father Vassily hears it and with a stern reproof he turns to the idiot:
“Stop that mumbling!”
But the idiot is silent, and once more eyeing him dubiously Father Vassily continues:
“I am the light of the world. When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. And said unto him, Go wash in the pool of Siloam. He went his way therefore,—and washed, and came seeing.”
“SEEING! Vassya, SEEING!” menacingly cried the priest and leaping from his seat he began to pace the floor swiftly. Then he stopped in the center of the room and loudly cried:
“I believe, O Lord, I believe.”
And all was still. But a loud galloping peal of laughter broke the silence, striking the priest’s back. And he turned about terrified.
“What sayest thou?” he asked in fear, stepping back. The idiot was laughing. The senseless, ominous laughter had torn his immense immobile mask from ear to ear and out of the wide chasm of his mouth rushed unrestrained, galloping peals of oddly vacant laughter.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha!”