“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.”