Through Russia Page 11

  And, thoughtfully contracting the bushy eyebrows which looked as though they had been taken from the face of another man, Vologonov thrust his hands up his sleeves, and stood eyeing Nilushka shrewdly with his intangible gaze.

  Never did Felitzata say for certain who the boy's father had been, but at least it was known to me that in vague terms she had designated two men as such—the one a young "survey student," and the other a merchant by name Viporotkov, a man notorious to the whole town as a most turbulent rake and bully. But once when she and Antipa and I were seated gossiping at the entrance-gates, and I inquired of her whether Nilushka's father were still surviving, she replied in a careless way:

  "He is so, damn him!"

  "Then who is he?"

  Felitzata, as usual, licked her faded, but still comely, lips with the tip of her tongue before she replied:

  "A monk."

  "Ah!" Vologonov exclaimed with unexpected animation. "That, then, explains things. At all events, we have in it an intelligible THEORY of things."

  Whereafter, he expounded to us at length, and with no sparing of details, the reason why a monk should have been Nilushka's father rather than either the merchant or the young "survey student." And as Vologonov proceeded he grew unwontedly enthusiastic, and went so far as to clench his fists until presently he heaved a sigh, as though mentally hurt, and said frowningly and reproachfully to the woman:

  "Why did you never tell us this before? It was exceedingly negligent of you."

  Felitzata looked at the old man with sarcasm and sauciness gleaming in her brown eyes. Suddenly, however, she contracted her brows, counterfeited a sigh, and whined:

  "Ah, I was good-looking then, and desired of all. In those days I had both a good heart and a happy nature."

  "But the monk may prove to have been an important factor in the question," was Antipa's thoughtful remark.

  "Yes, and many another man than he has run after me for his pleasure," continued Felitzata in a tone of reminiscence. This led Vologonov to cough, rise to his feet, lay his hand upon the woman's claret-coloured sleeve of satin, and say sternly:

  "Do you come into my room, for I have business to transact with you."

  As she complied she smiled and winked at me. And so the pair departed—he shuffling carefully with his bandy legs, and she watching her steps as though at any moment she might collapse on to her left side.

  Thenceforth, Felitzata visited Vologonov almost daily; and once during the time of two hours or so that the pair were occupied in drinking tea I heard, through the partition-wall, the old man say in vigorous, level, didactical tones:

  "These tales and rumours ought not to be dismissed save with caution. At least ought they to be given the benefit of the doubt. For, though all that he says may SEEM to us unintelligible, there may yet be enshrined therein a meaning, such as—"

  "You say a meaning?"

  "Yes, a meaning which, eventually, will be vouchsafed to you in a vision. For example, you may one day see issue from a dense forest a man of God, and hear him cry aloud: Felitzata, Oh servant of God, Oh sinner most dark of soul—"

  "What a croaking, to be sure!"

  "Be silent! No nonsense! Do you blame yourself rather than sing your own praises. And in that vision you may hear the man of God cry: 'Felitzata, go you forth and do that which one who shall meet you may request you to perform!' And, having gone forth, you may find the man of God to be the monk whom we have spoken of."

  "A-a-ah!" the woman drawled with an air of being about to say something more.

  "Come, fool!"

  "You see—"

  "Have I, this time, abused you?"

  "No, but—"

  "I have an idea that the man of God will be holding a crook."

  "Of course," assented Felitzata.

  Similarly, on another occasion, did I hear Antipa mutter confidentially to his companion:

  "The fact that all his sayings are so simple is not a favourable sign. 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 God.] 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 f
orests 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 God, and all the multitude 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 passed us with shaggy 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 passed into the other world. That day, after returning home from late Mass, 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.

  That day Felitzata had dinner, and then departed on business of her own; and when she returned in the evening, she was astonished to find that her son was still asleep. Next, on looking closer at him, she perceived that he was dead.

  "I looked," she related plaintively to some of the suburban residents who came running to her cot, "and perceived his little feet to be blue; and since it was only just before Mass that I had washed his hands with soap, I remarked the more readily that his feet were become less white than his hands. And when I felt one of those hands, I found that it had stiffened."

  On Felitzata's face, as she recounted this, there was manifest a nervous expression. Likewise, her features were a trifle flushed. Yet gleaming also through the tears in her languorous eyes there was a sense of relief—one might almost have said a sense of joy.

  "Next," continued she, "I looked closer still, and then fell on my knees before the body, sobbing: 'Oh my darling, whither art thou fled? Oh God, wherefore hast Thou taken him from me?'"

  Here Felitzata inclined her head upon her left shoulder contracted her brows over her mischievous eyes, clasped her hands to her breast, and fell into the lament:

  Oh, gone is my dove, my radiant moon!

  O star of mine eyes, thou hast set too soon!

  In darksome depths thy light lies drown'd,

  And time must yet complete its round,

  And the trump of the Second Advent sound,

  Ere ever my—

  "Here, you! Hold your tongue!" grunted Vologonov irritably.

  For myself, I had, that day, been walking in the forest, until, as I returned, I was brought up short before the windows of Felitzata's cot by the fact that some of the erstwhile turbulent denizens of the suburb were whispering softly together as, with an absence of all noise, they took turns to raise themselves on tiptoe, and, craning their necks, to peer into one of the black window-spaces. Yes, like bees on the step of a hive did they look, and on the great majority of faces, and in the great majority of eyes, there was quivering an air of tense, nervous expectancy.

  Only Vologonov was nudging Felitzata, and saying to her in a loud, authoritative tone:

  "Very ready are you to weep, but I should like first to hear the exact circumstances of the lad's death."

  Thus invited, the woman wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her bodice, licked her lips, heaved a prolonged sigh, and fell to regarding Antipa's red, hardbitten face with the cheerful, unabashed glance of a person who is under the influence of liquor. From under her white head-band there had fallen over her temples and her right cheek a few wisps of golden hair; and indeed, as she drew herself up, and tossed her head and bosom, and smoothed out and stretched the creases in her bodice, she looked less than her years. Everyone now fell to eyeing her in an attentive silence, though not, it would seem, without a touch of envy.

  Abruptly, sternly, the old man inquired:

  "Did the lad ever complain of ill-health?"

  "No, never," Felitzata replied. "Never once did he speak of it—never once."

  "And he
had not been beaten?"

  "Oh, how can you ask me such a thing, and especially seeing that, that—?"

  "I did not say beaten by YOU."

  "Well, I cannot answer for anyone else, but at least had he no mark on his body, seeing that when I lifted the smock I could find nothing save for scratches on legs and back."

  Her tone now had in it a new ring, a ring of increased assurance, and when she had finished she closed her bright eyes languidly before heaving a soft, as it were, voluptuous, and, withal, very audible sigh.

  Someone here murmured:

  "She DID use to beat him."

  "What?"

  "At all events she used to lose her temper with him."

  This led to the putting of a further dozen or so of leading questions; whereafter Antipa, for a while, preserved a suggestive silence, and the crowd too remained silent, as though it had suddenly been lulled to slumber. Only at long last, and with a clearing of his throat, did Antipa say:

  "Friends, we must suppose that God, of His infinite Mercy, has vouchsafed to us here a special visitation, in that, as all of us have perceived, a lad bereft of wit, the same radiant lad whom all of us have known, has here abided in the closest of communion with the Blessed Dispenser of life on earth."

  Then I moved away, for upon my heart there was pressing a burden of unendurable sorrow, and I was yearning, oh, so terribly, to see Nilushka once more.

  The back portion of Felitzata's cot stood a little sunken into the ground, so that the front portion had its cold window panes and raised sash tilted a trifle towards the remote heavens. I bent my head, and entered by the open door. Near the threshold Nilushka was lying on a narrow chest against the wall. The folds of a dark-red pillow of fustian under the head set off to perfection the pale blue tint of his round, innocent face under its corona of golden curls; and though the eyes were closed, and the lips pressed tightly together, he still seemed to be smiling in his old quiet, but joyous, way. In general, the tall, thin figure on the mattress of dark felt, with its bare legs, and its slender hands and wrists folded across the breast, reminded me less of an angel than of a certain image of the Holy Child with which a blackened old ikon had rendered me familiar from my boyhood upwards.