Through Russia Part 20

For, you see, they do not harmonise with the affair in its entirety--in such a connection words should be mysterious, and so, able to be interpreted in more than one way, seeing that the more meanings words possess, the more are those words respected and heeded by mankind."

"Why so?" queried Felitzata.

"Why so?" re-echoed Vologonov irritably. "Are we not, then, to respect ANYONE or ANYTHING? Only he is worthy of respect who does not harm his fellows; and of those who do not harm their fellows there are but few.

To this point you must pay attention--you must teach him words of variable import, words more abstract, as well as more sonorous."

"But I know no such words."

"I will repeat to you a few, and every night, when he goes to bed, you shall repeat them to HIM. For example: 'Adom ispolneni, pokaites'[Do ye people who are filled with venom repent]. And mark that the exact words of the Church be adhered to. For instance, 'Dushenbitzi, pozhaleite Boga, okayannie,' [Murderers of the soul, accursed ones, repent ye before G.o.d.] must be said rather than 'Dushenbitzi, pozhaleite Boga, okayanni,' since the latter, though the shorter form, is also not the correct one. But perhaps I had better instruct the lad myself."

"Certainly that would be the better plan."

So from that time onwards Vologonov fell to stopping Nilushka in the street, and repeating to him something or another in his kindly fashion. Once he even took him by the hand, and, leading him to his room, and giving him something to cat, said persuasively:

"Say this after me. 'Do not hasten, Oh ye people.' Try if you can say that."

"'A lantern,'" began Nilushka civilly.

"'A lantern?' Yes. Well, go on, and say, 'I am a lantern unto thee--"

"I want to sing, it."

"There is no need for that, though presently you shall sing it. For the moment your task is to learn the correct speaking of things. So say after me--"

"O Lo-ord, have mercy!" came in a quiet, thoughtful chant from the idiot. Whereafter he added in the coaxing tone of a child:

"We shall all of us have to die."

"Yes, but come, come!" expostulated Vologonov. "What are you blurting out NOW? That much I know without your telling me--always have I known, little friend, that each of us is hastening towards his death. Yet your want of understanding exceeds what should be."

"Dogs run-"

"Dogs? Now, enough, little fellow."

"Dogs run like chickens. They run here, in the ravine," continued Nilushka in the murmuring accents of a child of three.

"Nevertheless," mused Vologonov, "even that seeming nothing of his may mean something. Yes, there may lie in it a great deal. Now, say: 'Perdition will arise before him who shall hasten.'"

"No, I want to SING something."

With a splutter Vologonov said:

"Truly you are a difficult subject to deal with!"

And with that he fell to pacing the floor with long, thoughtful strides as the idiot's voice cried in quavering accents:

"O Lo-ord, have me-ercy upon us!"

Thus the winsome Nilushka proved indispensable to the foul, mean, unhealthy life of the suburb. Of that life he coloured and rounded off the senselessness, the ugliness, the superfluity. He resembled an apple hanging forgotten on a gnarled old worm-eaten tree, whence all the fruit and the leaves have fallen until only the branches wave in the autumn wind. Rather, he resembled a sole-surviving picture in the pages of a ragged, soiled old book which has neither a beginning nor an ending, and therefore can no longer be read, is no longer worth the reading, since now its pages contain nothing intelligible.

And as smiling his gracious smile, the lad's pathetic, legendary figure flitted past the mouldy buts and cracked fences and riotous beds of nettles, there would readily recur to the memory, and succeed one another, visions of some of the finer and more reputable personages of Russian lore--there would file before one's mental vision, in endless sequence, men whose biographies inform us how, in fear for their souls, they left the life of the world, and, hieing them to the forests and the caves, abandoned mankind for the wild things of nature. And at the same time would there recur to one's memory poems concerning the blind and the poor-in particular, the poem concerning Alexei the Man of G.o.d, and all the mult.i.tude of other fair, but unsubstantial, forms wherein Russia has embodied her sad and terrified soul, her humble and protesting grief. Yet it was a process to depress one almost to the point of distraction.

Once, forgetting that Nilushka was imbecile, I conceived an irrepressible desire to talk with him, and to read him good poetry, and to tell him both of the world's youthful hopes and of my own personal thoughts.

The occasion happened on a day when, as I was sitting on the edge of the ravine, and dangling my legs over the ravine's depths, the lad came floating towards me as though on air. In his hands, with their fingers as slender as a girl's, he was holding a large leaf; and as he gazed at it the smile of his clear blue eyes was, as it were, pervading him from head to foot.

"Whither, Nilushka?" said I.

With a start he raised his head and eyes heavenward. Then timidly he glanced at the blue shadow of the ravine, and extended to me his leaf, over the veins of which there was crawling a ladybird.

"A bukan," he observed.

"It is so. And whither are you going to take it?"

"We shall all of us die. I was going to take and bury it."

"But it is alive; and one does not bury things before they are dead."

Nilushka closed and opened his eyes once or twice.

"I should like to sing something," he remarked.

"Rather, do you SAY something."

He glanced at the ravine again--his pink nostrils quivering and dilating--then sighed as though he was weary, and in all unconsciousness muttered a foul expression. As he did so I noticed that on the portion of his neck below his right ear there was a large birthmark, and that, covered with golden down like velvet, and resembling in shape a bee, it seemed to be endowed with a similitude of life, through the faint beating of a vein in its vicinity.

Presently the ladybird raised her upper wings as though she were preparing for flight; whereupon Nilushka sought with a finger to detain her, and, in so doing, let fall the leaf, and enabled the insect to detach itself and fly away at a low level. Upon that, bending forward with arms outstretched, the idiot went softly in pursuit, much as though he himself were launching his body into leisurely flight, but, when ten paces away, stopped, raised his face to heaven, and, with arms pendent before him, and the palms of his hands turned outwards as though resting on something which I could not see, remained fixed and motionless.

From the ravine there were tending upwards towards the sunlight some green sprigs of willow, with dull yellow flowers and a clump of grey wormwood, while the damp cracks which seamed the clay of the ravine were lined with round leaves of the "mother-stepmother plant," and round about us little birds were hovering, and from both the bushes and the bed of the ravine there was ascending the moist smell of decay. Yet over our heads the sky was clear, as the sun, now sole occupant of the heavens, declined slowly in the direction of the dark marshes across the river; only above the roofs of Zhitnaia Street could there be seen fluttering about in alarm a flock of snow-white pigeons, while waving below them was the black besom which had, as it were, swept them into the air, and from afar one could hear the sound of an angry murmur, the mournful, mysterious murmur of the town.

Whiningly, like an old man, a child of the suburb was raising its voice in lamentation; and as I listened to the sound, it put me in mind of a clerk reading Vespers amid the desolation of an empty church. Presently a brown dog pa.s.sed us with s.h.a.ggy head despondently pendent, and eyes as beautiful as those of a drunken woman.

And, to complete the picture, there was standing--outlined against the nearest shanty of the suburb, a shanty which lay at the extreme edge of the ravine-there was standing, face to the sun, and back to the town, as though preparing for flight, the straight, slender form of the boy who, while alien to all, caressed all with the eternally incomprehensible smile of his angel-like eyes. Yes, that golden birthmark so like a bee I can see to this day!

Two weeks later, on a Sunday at mid-day, Nilushka pa.s.sed into the other world. That day, after returning home from late Ma.s.s, and handing to his mother a couple of wafers which had been given him as a mark of charity, the lad said:

"Mother, please lay out my bed on the chest, for I think that I am going to lie down for the last time."

Yet the words in no way surprised Felitzata, for he had often before remarked, before retiring to rest:

"Some day we shall all of us have to die."

At the same time, whereas, on previous occasions, Nilushka had never gone to sleep without first of all singing to himself his little song, and then chanting the eternal, universal "Lord, have mercy upon us!"

he, on this occasion, merely folded his hands upon his breast, closed his eyes, and relapsed into slumber.