V


Winter came. A heavy snow fell, blanketing roads and fields and villages. At the manor, all was white. The trees in the garden were laden with fluff, as though they had pat out new foliage to replace the withered green. In the drawing-room, a bright blaze crackled in the fire-place; and everyone coming in from out of doors brought with him a whiff of freshness, an odour of new-fallen snow.
In other years Pyotr, too, had felt the poetry of this first winter day. There was that very special stir of energy that always came with his awakening, on such a morning. And there were all the familiar signs of winter—the stamping of feet in the kitchen, when people came in from the cold; and the creak-of the doors; and the tiny currents of nipping air that scampered all about the house; and the crunching footsteps out in the yard, and the new, wintry sensation that came with every outdoor sound. And then, when he drove out with Iochim into the open fields—what a delight it was to hear the sleigh runners gliding over fresh snow, and the sudden cracklings that sounded in the woods beyond the river, and echoed back from fields and road.
But now the first white day brought with it only a deeper melancholy.
Pyotr pulled on high boots, that morning, and wandered off to the old mill. His feet sank deep at every step in the untrodden snow.
The garden was very still. The frozen soil, so softly carpeted, made no sound underfoot. But the air today was sensitive to sound as at no other time of the year, carrying over great distances, clear and true, the cawing of a crow, or the blow of an axe, or even the light snapping of a twig. Now and again it brought to Pyotr's ears a strange, ringing sound, as though of glass, rising quickly to a thin, high note, then dying away at what seemed a tremendous distance. This was off at the village pond. The peasant boys were throwing stones to test the thin layer of ice that had formed on the water overnight.
The manor pond had also frozen over. But the river where the old mill stood still flowed between its snow-piled banks and murmured in the sluices, though its current was slower now, and its waters darker.
Pyotr went up to the dam and stood there, listening. The sound of the water had changed. It was heavier, and all its melody was gone. It seemed to reflect the cold that lay, like the hand of death, over all the countryside.
And Pyotr's heart, too, was filled with a chilly gloom. The dark feeling that had stirred somewhere in the utmost depths of his being, on that blissful summer evening—a vague sense of apprehension, dissatisfaction, questioning—that feeling had now grown until it usurped all the room in his soul that had once belonged to joy and happiness.
Evelina was away. She had been gone since the late autumn. Her parents had planned a visit to their "benefactress", old Countess Potocka, and the Countess had written them to be sure and bring their daughter. Evelina had not wished to go, but had yielded in the end to her father's insistence, which Maxim, too, had supported with considerable energy.
Standing now by the old mill, Pyotr tried to gain again the fullness, the harmony of the emotions he had once experienced here. Did he miss her?—he asked himself. Yes, he did. Yet, though he felt her absence, her presence too—he realised—no longer brought him happiness. It brought, instead, a new and poignant suffering, which he felt somewhat less keenly when she was away.
Only so short a while ago, every detail of that evening had been vivid in his memory—her words, the silky feel of her hair, the beating of her heart against his breast. And out of these details he had created for himself a concept of her that filled him with happiness. But now a something shapeless, amorphous—as were all the phantoms that haunted his sightless imagination—had breathed its noxious breath upon this concept, and shattered it. And he could no longer integrate his recollections into that completeness and harmony which, at the beginning, had filled him to overflowing. There had been a particle, a tiny sand-grain, of something alien lurking from the very outset somewhere deep behind his feeling; and now this particle had so expanded that it seemed to obliterate all else—as a grim storm-cloud obliterates the horizon.
The sound of her voice no longer rang in his ears. The vivid memory of that blissful evening was gone, leaving behind it a gaping emptiness. And something within him, something confined in the deepest depths of his soul, was struggling desperately to fill this emptiness.
He wanted to see her.
A dull aching—that there had always been, of course; but it had long remained no more than a vague, half-realised discomfort, much like a toothache that is not yet acute.
Since his encounter with the blind bell-ringer, consciousness, realisation, had made of this dull ache a piercing pain.
He loved her. And he wanted to see her.
Such was his mood, as day passed after day at the hushed, snow-blanketed manor.
There were times when the moments of happiness rose vividly again in memory, and Pyotr's face would clear, and his melancholy seem to lift. But this never lasted long; and in the end even these moments of comparative brightness were marred by a haunting uneasiness—as though he feared that they, too, would disappear, never to come again. His mood, in consequence, was very uneven, flashes of passionate tenderness and nervous animation alternating with long days of heavy, unrelieved dejection. The piano wept in the dark drawing-room, of an evening, in deep, almost morbid melancholy; and Anna Mikhailovna, listening, shrank with the pain each sobbing note brought to her heart.
In time, one of the worst of her fears materialised. The dreams that had agitated Pyotr's childhood began to visit him again.
Coming into his room when he was still asleep, one morning, Anna Mikhailovna noticed that he seemed strangely uneasy. His eyes were half-open, gleaming dully from under the drooping lids; his face was pale, and his expression troubled.
She paused in the doorway, looking anxiously into his face, trying to guess what might cause his uneasiness. But she saw only that his agitation was swiftly growing, his features tensing more and more in an expression of straining effort.
Then, suddenly, something seemed to move—or had she imagined it?—over the bed. It was the light, a narrow beam of brilliant winter sunlight, slanting in from the window to strike the wall just over Pyotr's head. Again, as she watched, the sunbeam seemed to quiver—and the bright spot on the wall slipped lower down. And again it slipped, and again. Slowly, barely perceptibly, the light was approaching Pyotr's half-opened eyes. And as it approached, his tension grew more and more marked.
Anna Mikhailovna stood motionless in the doorway, unable to tear her eyes from that blazing spot of light. As in a nightmare, she seemed to see its movements—step by quivering step—closer and closer to her son's defenceless eyes. Pyotr grew paler and paler, his drawn face set in that expression of painful effort. Now the yellow light touched his hair. Now its warm glow reached his forehead. The mother strained forward, in an instinctive effort to protect her child. But—as in a nightmare—her feet were rooted to the floor, and she could not move. Pyotr's eyes opened wide, now; and when the light touched his sightless pupils, his head rose from the pillow as though to meet it. A spasm passed over his lips—a smile, perhaps; or perhaps a moan. And again his face set in its look of straining effort.
But now, at last, Anna Mikhailovna managed to break free of the paralysis that had gripped her limbs. She hurried across the room and laid her hand on Pyotr's forehead. He started, and woke.
"Is that you, Mother?" he asked.
"Yes."
He sat up. For a moment, he seemed only partially conscious. But then the fog seemed to lift, and he said,
"I've had a dream again. I have them often, now. Only— I can never remember them, afterwards."


VI


Pyotr's mood was changing, his deep, but quiet melancholy giving way to fits of nervous irritability. At the same time, his remarkable delicacy of sense perception was noticeably increasing. His keen hearing became keener still; and his whole being responded to the stimulus of light—responded even in the evening hours. He always knew whether the night was dark or moonlit; and often, after all the family had gone to bed, he would walk about the manor grounds for hours, sunk in wordless melancholy, yielding himself to the mysterious influence of the moon's dreamy, fantastic light. Always, at such times, his pale face would turn to follow the fiery globe in its passage across the sky; and its cold beams would be reflected in his eyes.
But when the moon began to set, growing steadily larger as it approached the earth; when in the end, heavily veiled in crimson mist, it slowly sank beyond the snowy horizon, a softer, more peaceful look would come into his face, and he would turn back to the house and go indoors.
What occupied his thoughts those long nights, it would be hard to say. To all who have tasted of the joys and the torment of knowledge and of understanding, there comes at a certain age—to some in greater, to some in lesser degree—a period of spiritual crisis. Pausing at the threshold of life's activities, people look about them, attempting each to understand his place in Nature, his own significance, his relations with the outer world. This is a difficult time, and he is fortunate whose vitality is of such sweeping power as to carry him through it without violent upheaval. For Pyotr, too, there was this added difficulty, that to the universal query—"What do we live for?" he must add his own: "What, being blind, do I live for?" And again, thrusting in upon the very process of such sombre reflection, there was another factor: the all but physical pressure of a need that could not be satisfied. And all this had its effect upon his character.
The Yaskulskys got back shortly before Christmas. Evelina ran at once to the manor, and burst into the drawing-room, bubbling over with excited joy, to throw her arms around Anna Mikhailovna, and Pyotr, and Maxim. Snow sparkled in her hair, and a gust of frosty freshness came with her into the room. Pyotr's face lit up, at first, with the sudden happiness of her coming; but it soon darkened again, in almost deliberate melancholy.
"I suppose you think I love you," he said gruffly, that same day, when he and Evelina were alone together.
"I'm sure of it," she returned.
"Well, but I'm not sure of it at all," he declared morosely. "No, not at all. I used to think I loved you more than anything on earth. Only now I'm not sure I do at all. You'd do best to drop me, before it's too late, and follow the voices that call you away, out into life."
"Why must you torment me so?"
The gentle reproach broke out against her will.
"Torment you?" Again that look of deliberate, selfish melancholy came to his face. "Yes, so I do. Torment you. And I'll go on tormenting you, all the rest of my life. I can't possibly not torment you. I didn't know, before. But now I know. And it's no fault of mine. The hand that took away my sight, even before I was born—that same hand put this ill nature into me. We're all of us like that—all of us, born blind. You'd do best to drop me—yes, all of you, turn away from me, because I can only return you suffering for your love. I want to see. Can't you understand? I want to see, and 1 can't rid myself of that want. If I could only see Mother, and Father, and you, and Maxim—if I could see you once, I'd be satisfied. I'd remember. I'd have that memory to carry with me through the darkness, all the years to come."
Again and again, with remarkable persistency, he returned to this idea. When he was alone, he would pick up now one object, now another, and examine it with infinite care—then, laying it aside, sit pondering over the qualities that he had found in it. He pondered, too, over those distinctions which he was able faintly to perceive, through the medium of touch, between bright surfaces of different colours. But it was only as differences, as comparatives, void of all concrete sense significance, that all these things could reach his receptive centres. Even a sunlit day, now, differed to him from dark night only in this—that the brilliant daylight, penetrating by mysterious, untraceable channels to his brain, intensified his painful seekings.


VII


Coming into the drawing-room, one day, Maxim found Pyotr and Evelina there. Evelina seemed upset, and Pyotr's face was gloomy. He seemed to feel an organic need, nowadays, to search out new and ever new sources of suffering with which to torment both himself and others.
"He keeps asking," Evelina told Maxim, "what people mean when they talk of the bells 'ringing red'.* And I can't seem to explain it properly." [ Red ringing—a term used in Russian in speaking of the pealing of church bells on a holiday.]
"What's the trouble, then?" Maxim asked Pyotr curtly.
Pyotr shrugged.
"Nothing in particular. Only—if sounds have colour, and I can't see it, why, that means I can't perceive even sound in all its fullness."
"You're talking childish nonsense," Maxim returned, sharply now. "You know perfectly well that's not true. Your perception of sound is fuller than ours by far."
"Well, but what do people mean, then, when they say that? There must be some meaning to it."
Maxim thought a moment.
"It's just a comparison," he answered finally. "Sound is motion, if you get down to it, and so is light. And that being so, of course, they're bound to have certain traits in common."
"What traits, then?" Pyotr persisted. "This 'red' ringing—what's it like?"
Again Maxim stopped to think before answering.
He might go into the science of vibration. But that, he realised, could not satisfy the question in Pyotr's mind. And, too, whoever it was that had first described sounds by adjectives of light and colour had probably had no knowledge of the physical nature of either; yet, clearly, he had felt a resemblance. What resemblance?
A new idea began to take shape in Maxim's mind.
"I don't know whether I can make it altogether clear to you," he said. "But anyway—this 'red' ringing, to start with. You've heard it time and again, in the city, on church holidays, and you know it just as well as I do. It's simply that the expression isn't used in our parts."
"Wait! Wait a minute!"
Hastily, Pyotr threw open the piano and began to play. Against a background of a few low tones, his skilful fingers set the higher notes, more vivid and mobile, leaping and skipping in endless permutations; and the room echoed to just that joyous, high-pitched clamour of bells that fills the air on a church holiday.
"There!" Maxim said. "That's very like. And none of us could master it better than you have, though we do have eyes to see. Well, and anything red that I may look at, if it has a large enough surface, affects me in much the same way as this 'red' ringing. There's the same feeling of restlessness, of a sort of resilient agitation. The very redness seems to be always changing. The depth, the intensity of the colour slip into the background; and on the surface, now here, now there, you seem to catch fleeting glimpses of lighter tones, swiftly rising and as swiftly disappearing. And all this affects the eyes very powerfully—my eyes, at any rate."
"How true, how true!" Evelina broke in excitedly. "I get exactly the same feeling. I can never look long at our red table-cloth."
"Nor can some people endure the holiday bells. Yes, I believe I'm right in drawing such a parallel. And while we're at it, the comparison can be carried further. There's another sort of chiming, that people often call 'crimson'. And there's a colour, too, a shade of red, that's called by that same name—'crimson'. Both the sound and the colour are very close to red, only—deeper, milder, more even. Sleigh bells, carriage bells—while they're still new, their tinkling is liable to be sharp, uneven, unpleasant to the ear; but when they've been long in use they 'ring into their own', as lovers of their music put it, and attain this 'crimson' chime. With church chimes, too, you can get the same effect by skilful combination of several of the smaller bells."
Pyotr began to play again—the merry jingle of bells as the post speeds by.
"No," Maxim said. "I should call that too red."
"Oh! I know now."
And the music became more even. Sinking from the high pitch at which it had begun, so vivid and lively, it grew gradually softer, lower, deeper. Now it was the chiming of a set of bells hung under the bow of a Russian troika, speeding away down a dusty road into the distant evening haze—quiet, even, marred by no sudden janglings; fainter and fainter, until the last notes died away in the calm stillness of the countryside.
"That's it!" Maxim said. "You've grasped the difference perfectly. Yes—your mother tried, once, to explain colour to you by means of sound. You were only a youngster then."
"I remember that. Why did you make us give it up? Perhaps I might have learned to understand."
"No," Maxim returned slowly. "Nothing could have come of that. Though it does seem to me that, if you get down deep enough inside us, the effects produced by sound impressions and by colour impressions are really very much alike. We may say of a person, for instance, that he sees the world through rose-coloured spectacles. By that we mean that he is buoyantly, optimistically inclined. Much the same mood can be induced by the right choice of sound impressions. Both sound and colour, I should say, serve as symbols for the same inner impulses."
Maxim paused to light his pipe, watching Pyotr closely as he puffed. Pyotr sat very still, clearly waiting eagerly. For a moment, Maxim hesitated. Ought he to go on? But the thought passed, and he began again, slowly, abstractedly, as though carried on independently of his will by the strange current his thoughts had taken.
"And, you know—the queerest thoughts come to my mind. Is it mere chance, say, that our blood is red? Because, you see, whenever an idea takes shape in your brain; or when you have those dreams of yours, that set you shivering after you wake, and force the tears to your eyes; or when a man seems all ablaze with passion—at all such times, the blood comes pulsing faster from the heart, racing up in glowing streams to the brain. Well, and—it's red, our blood."
"It's red, our blood," Pyotr repeated musingly. "Red, and hot."
"Yes. Red, and hot. And so, you see—the colour red, and the sounds we may also call 'red', bring us brightness, animation. They bring, too, the conception of passion, which people also call 'hot', and 'fiery', and 'seething'. And another interesting thing: artists often speak of reddish tones as tones of warmth."
Maxim puffed awhile at his pipe, surrounding himself with blue clouds of smoke.
"If you swing your arm up over your head and down again," he continued, "you'll describe a more or less limited semicircle. Well, then, try to imagine your arm much longer—infinitely long. Then, if you could swing it so, you'd be describing a semicircle infinitely far away. That's where we see the vault of the skies above us. Infinitely far away. A vast hemisphere, even and endless and blue. When it has that aspect, our spirit is calm, unclouded. But when the sky is overcast with clouds—shifting, uneasy, of undefined and changing outline—then our spiritual calm, too, is broken by a feeling of indefinable unrest. You feel that, don't you, when a storm-cloud is approaching?"
"Yes. Something seems to disturb my very soul."
"Exactly. And so we wait for the deep blue to show again, from behind the clouds. The storm passes, but the blue sky remains. We know that well, and so we can endure the storm. There, then: the sky is blue. And the sea, when it's calm. Your mother's eyes are blue, and so are Evelina's."
"Like the sky!" Pyotr said, with sudden tenderness. "Like the sky. Blue eyes are considered a sign of spiritual clarity. And now, take green. The soil, of itself, is black. And the tree-trunks, in early spring, are black too, or sometimes grey. But then the spring sun sends down its light and heat, and warms these dark surfaces. And the green comes creeping out to cover the blackness. Green grass, green leaves. They must have light and warmth, these green growths; but not too much light, or too much warmth. That's what makes green things so pleasant to the eye. Greenness—it's warmth intermingled with a dewy coolness. It arouses a feeling of tranquil satisfaction, of health—but not by any means of passion; not of the state that people call joyous rapture. Have I made it at all clear to you?"
"N-no, not very. But go on, anyway. Please."
"Well, there's no helping it, I suppose. Let's go on, then. As the summer heat increases, the green growths seem overburdened, as it were, with the very fullness of their vital powers. The leaves begin to droop. And if the heat isn't tempered by the cool damp of rain, the green colour may fade entirely. But then, as autumn draws on, the fruit takes shape, gleaming daily redder among the weary foliage. The fruit is reddest on the side where it receives most light. It seems to concentrate within itself all the vital force, all the summer passion of growing things. So that here too, as you see, red is the colour of passion. And it's used as the symbol of passion. Red is the colour of rapture, of sin, of fury, of wrath and vengeance. The great masses of the people, when they rise in revolt, seek to express the feeling that moves them in the red of their banner, carried like wind-tossed flame over their march. But—again, I haven't made it clear."
"That doesn't matter. Go on."
"Late autumn. The fruit has matured. It falls from the tree, lies helpless on the ground. It dies, yes, but the seed within it lives; and within this seed, potentially, the new plant already lives, with its luxuriant new leafage, and its new fruit to come. The seed has fallen to the ground. And over it, the sun hangs low and cold. And cold winds blow, driving cold clouds before them. Not only passion—all of life is gently, imperceptibly stilled. More and more, the black earth shows bare through its green coverings. The very blue of the sky turns cold. And then, one day, the snow-flakes in their millions come floating down over this subdued and quiet, this widowed earth. And soon the earth lies smooth, and white, and even. White—that's the colour of the frosty snow; the colour of the loftiest of the clouds, floating up there in the chill, unattainable heights; the colour of the highest mountain peaks, majestic, but barren. White is the emblem of passionless purity, of cold, high sanctity, the emblem of a future life of the spirit, incorporeal. As to black..."
"That I know," Pyotr broke in. "No sound, no movement. Night."
"Yes, and for that reason black is the emblem of grief and death."
Pyotr shuddered.
"Death!" he repeated dully. "You said it yourself. Death. And for me, all the world is black. Always, everywhere."
"That's not true," Maxim returned heatedly. "You know sound, and warmth, and movement. You live among loving friends. There are many who would give up their gift of sight for the blessings you so unreasonably despise. But you're too full of your own selfish grief..."
"And if I am?" Pyotr's voice was tense with passion. "Of course I'm full of it. How else? I can't get away from it. It's always with me."
"If you could get it into your head that there are troubles in the world a hundred times worse than yours; if you could realise that this life you lead, the security, the love you've always enjoyed—that in comparison with such troubles your life is very heaven, why..."
"No, no!" Pyotr broke in wrathfully, on the same high, passionate note as before. "That isn't true! I'd change around with the most miserable beggar, because he's happier than me. All this solicitude for the blind—there's no sense in it at all. It's a great mistake. The blind—they should be put out on the roads and left there, to beg their living. Yes, I'd be happier if I were a beggar. When I woke in the morning, I'd have my dinner to think of. I'd keep counting the coppers that were given me, and I'd have the worry, always—would there be enough? And then, if there was enough, I'd have that to be happy about. And then there would be the night's lodging to worry over. And if I didn't get enough coppers, I'd suffer with hunger and cold. And with all that I'd never have an empty moment, and ... well, and no hardship could ever make me suffer as I suffer now."
"Couldn't it, then?"
Maxim's voice was cold. Evelina, pale and subdued, saw his eyes turn to her in a look of sympathy and deep concern.
"No, never. I'm convinced of that," Pyotr returned stubbornly, with a new harshness in his tone. "I often envy Yegor now, up in his belfry. Waking up, in the early morning, I think of him—especially if it's a windy, snowy day. I think of him, climbing the belfry stairs..."
"In the cold," Maxim put in.
"Yes, in the cold. He shivers, and coughs. And over and over he curses Father Pamfili, because he won't get him a warm coat for the winter. And then he takes hold of the bell ropes, though his hands are so freezing cold, and rings the bells for morning service. And he forgets he's blind. Because anyone would feel the cold, up there, blind or not. But me—I can't forget I'm blind, and..."
"And you've no one to curse for anything."
"Yes, I've no one to curse. There's nothing to fill my life, nothing but this blindness. There's no one I can blame for it, of course, but—any beggar's happier than me."
"Perhaps he is," Maxim said coldly. "I won't argue about that. In any case, if life had been harder on you, perhaps you'd be easier to live with."
And, with another pitying glance at Evelina, he took up his crutches and stumped heavily out of the room.
Pyotr's spiritual unrest intensified after this talk, and he was absorbed more and more in his agonising mental labour.
There were moments of success, when his groping spirit stumbled upon the sensations Maxim had described to him, and they merged with his own space impressions. The earth stretched, dark .and melancholy, away and away into the distance. He tried to survey it all, but it had no end. And over it hung another infinitude. Memory brought back the roll of thunder, and with it a feeling of breadth, of vastness. The thunder would pass, but something would remain, up there—something that filled the soul with a sensation of majesty and serenity. At times this feeling would achieve almost concrete definition—at the sound of Evelina's voice, or his mother's; for were not their eyes "like the sky"? But then abruptly—destroyed by too great definition—the concept that had been rising, seeking shape, from the far depths of his imagination would disappear.
They tormented him, all these dim imaginings; and they brought no shade of satisfaction. He pursued them with such straining effort—yet they remained always so obscure, bringing him nothing but disappointment. They could not assuage the dull ache that accompanied the painful seekings of his afflicted spirit, its vain strivings to regain the fullness of perception life had denied it.


VIII


Spring had come.
In a little town some sixty versts from the manor, in the opposite direction from Stavrukovo, there was a wonderworking Catholic icon, the miraculous powers of which had been assessed with some precision by people versed in matters of this kind. Anyone who came on foot to honour this icon on its fete day was entitled to twenty days' "remission"—in other words, to complete absolution in the other world from any sin or crime committed here on earth in the course of twenty days. And so every year, on a certain day of early spring, the little town would come to life. The old church, decked out for its fete in the first green branches, the first flowers of spring, would send the joyous clamour of its bell echoing over all the town. There would be a constant rumble of carriage wheels, and the streets and squares, even the fields far round about, would be thronged with pilgrims come on foot. Nor were all of these pilgrims Catholics. The fame of the icon had travelled very far, _and it attracted anguished and distressed of the Orthodox faith as well—city folk, in their majority.
The flood of people on the church road, when the great day came, was vast and colourful this year as always. To an observer looking down on the scene from one of the near-by hilltops, the pressing crowds might well have seemed one living whole: some gigantic serpent stretched out along the road, inert and still—only its lustreless, varicoloured scales stirring and shifting with its heavy breathing. And to either side of the teeming roadway stood the beggars, two endless lines of beggars, stretching out their hands for alms.
Leaning heavily on his crutches, Maxim moved slowly down one of the streets leading away to the outskirts of the town. Pyotr walked beside him, with Iochim.
They had left behind them the clamour of the crowd, the cries of the Jewish peddlers, the rumble of wheels—all the hubbub and uproar that rolled from end to end of the church road. At this distance, it merged into one vast, dull wave of sound—now rising, now falling, never ceasing. Here too, however, though the throng was less, there was a constant tramp of feet, and murmur of voices, and rustling of wheels on the dusty road. Once, a whole train of ox-carts came squeaking past and turned into a near-by side-street.
The day was cold, and Pyotr, following passively wherever Maxim turned, kept drawing his coat closer about him. Absently, he listened to the hubbub in the streets; but his mind was busy, even here, with those painful seekings that now occupied him constantly.
And then, through this selfish preoccupation, a new sound caught his ear—caught it so forcefully that he threw up his head, and stopped abruptly.
They had reached the edge of the town, where the last rows of houses gave way to long lines of fencing and plots of wasteland, and, finally, the street widened into a broad highway, stretching away between open fields. At this widening of street into road, pious hands had in some past day set up a stone pillar bearing an icon and a lantern. The lantern, true, was never lit; but it swung, creaking, on its hook in every wind. And at the foot of this pillar huddled a group of blind beggars, crowded out of all the better stands by less handicapped competitors. They held each a wooden alms-bowl in his hands; and from time to time one or another of them would raise his voice in a plaintive chant:
"A-alms for the bli-ind! Alms, in Christ's name!"
It was cold, and the beggars had been there since morning. There was nothing to shelter them from the fresh wind that blew in from the fields. They could not even move about, like others, with the crowd, to warm their limbs. And their voices, raised by turn in their dreary chant, were burdened with unreasoning, inarticulate complaint—with the misery of bodily suffering and of utter helplessness. After the first few notes their cramped chests would fail them, and the chant would fade into a dismal mumbling, that died away in a long, shivering sigh. But even these last, faintest notes, all but drowned in the clamour of the streets, brought to any human ear that caught them a shocked, almost incredulous realisation of the immensity of suffering behind them.
Pyotr stopped abruptly, his face twisted with pain—as though the beggars' wretched wailing were some grim auricular spectre, rising in his path.
"What are you frightened at?" Maxim asked him. "What you hear are those same fortunate souls you were so envious of, not long ago. Blind beggars, asking alms. They're feeling the cold a bit, of course. But, according to you, that should only make them happier."
"Come away from here!" Pyotr cried, seizing Maxim's arm.
"Ah, you want to come away, then! And is that your only response to other people's suffering? No, stop awhile. I've been wanting to have a serious talk with you, and this is a very good place for what I have to say. Well, then—you keep grumbling because times have changed, and blind youths aren't cut down any more in battle by night, like that young bandurist—Yurko. You chafe because you've no one to curse like Yegor in his belfry. And in your heart you do curse, too—curse your own people, because they've deprived you of the bliss life brings these beggars. And—on my honour!—you may be right. Yes, on the honour of an old soldier, any man has the right to choose his own way in life. And you're a man already. So that—listen, now, to what I have to say. If you make up your mind to remedy our mistake; if you decide to flout your fate, to throw up all the privileges life has given you from the cradle, and try the lot of these unfortunates—I, Maxim Yatsenko, promise you my respect, and help, and support. Do you hear me, Pyotr? I wasn't much older than you are now, when I threw myself into fire and battle. My mother wept for me, just as yours will for you. But, the devil take it all, I feel I had the right to do as I did, just as you have that right now. Once in a lifetime, fate gives any man the chance to choose. And so, you need only say the word...."
Maxim broke off and, turning towards the beggars, shouted,
"Fyodor Kandiba! Are you there?"
"Here I am," one of the cracked voices replied. "Is that you, Maxim Mikhailovich?"
"Yes. Come where I told you, a week from today."
"I'll be there," the beggar answered, and once more took up the endless chant.
Maxim's eyes were flashing.
"There you'll meet a man," he said, "who really has the right to grumble against fate, and against his fellow-men. Perhaps you'll learn from him to shoulder your burden, instead of—"
"Come, come away from here," Iochim broke in. He tugged at Pyotr's arm, with an angry look at Maxim.
"Oh, no!" Maxim cried wrathfully. "There's no one yet passed blind beggars by without throwing them a copper, if he can't give more. Do you mean to run off without doing even that? Blaspheme—that's all you know how to do! It's easy to envy other people's hunger, when your own belly's full!"
Pyotr threw back his head as though a whip had struck him. Pulling out his purse, he moved quickly towards the huddled group of beggars. When his groping stick touched the feet of the nearest of them, he bent over him, feeling for the wooden alms-bowl, and carefully laid his money on the pile of coppers in it. Several passers-by stopped to stare at this handsome youth, so clearly of the gentry, fumblingly giving alms to a blind beggar who as fumblingly received them.
But Maxim turned sharply away, and stumped off up the street. His face was flushed, his eyes blazing. He had been seized, evidently, by one of those violent fits of anger that had been so well known to all his acquaintances in his youth. And he was no longer a pedagogue, weighing and choosing every word. He was a man impassioned, giving full rein to his hot wrath. Only later, after a sidelong glance at Pyotr, did his anger seem to subside. Pyotr was white as chalk. His brows were drawn sharply together, and his face betrayed his deep agitation.
The cold wind set the dust whirling about them as they walked on though the streets of the little town. Behind them, they could hear the blind beggars squabbling over the money Pyotr had given.


IX


Perhaps it was simply the result of a chill; perhaps, the culmination of a lengthy period of spiritual crisis. Perhaps it was a combination of the two. Whatever the cause, the following day found Pyotr ill in his room, in a burning fever. He lay tossing on his bed, his face distorted. At times, he seemed to listen for something; at times, tried to spring up, as though to hurry off somewhere. The old doctor called in from the town felt his pulse, and talked of the cold spring winds, Maxim, frowning sombrely, avoided his sister's eyes.
The fever was persistent. When the crisis came, Pyotr lay for several days almost without sign of life. But youth is resilient; and he overcame his illness.
One morning Anna Mikhailovna noticed a ray of bright spring sunlight slanting across the sick-bed.
"Pull the curtain to," she whispered to Evelina. "This sunlight—I don't trust it!"
But when Evelina got up to go to the window, Pyotr spoke suddenly—the first words he had uttered in all these weary days:
"No, don't. Please. Leave it as it is."
Joyfully, they bent over him.
"Do you hear, then? Do you know me?" the mother asked.
"Yes," he replied, and paused. He seemed trying to remember something. Then, faintly, he exclaimed, "Ah, that's it!"—and tried to sit up. "That Fyodor—has he come?"
Evelina and Anna Mikhailovna exchanged anxious glances. Anna Mikhailovna laid her fingers across Pyotr's lips.
"Hush, hush," she whispered. "It's bad for you to talk."
He seized her hand, and kissed it tenderly. Tears rose to his eyes. He let them flow, and they seemed to relieve him.
For some days he was very thoughtful and quiet; but a nervous tremor passed over his face whenever Maxim's footsteps sounded in the hall. Noticing this, the women asked Maxim to keep away from the sick-room. But one day Pyotr himself asked to see him, and alone.
Coming up to the bed, Maxim took Pyotr's hand in his and pressed it gently.
"Well, then, dear boy," he began, "it seems I owe you an apology."
Pyotr's hand returned his uncle's pressure.
"I understand now," he said, very quietly. "You've taught me a lesson, and I'm grateful for it."
"Lesson be damned!" Maxim returned, with an impatient gesture. "It's an awful thing, being a teacher too long. Turns a man's brains into sawdust. No, I wasn't thinking of lessons, that day. I was simply angry, terribly angry, with myself as well as you."
"Then you really wanted me to?..."
"What matter what I wanted? And who can tell what a man wants, when he loses his temper? I wanted you to get some idea of other people's troubles, and think a little less about your own."
Neither spoke for a moment.
"That chant of theirs," Pyotr said finally. "I never once forgot it, all that time I was out of my head. And that Fyodor you spoke to—who was he?" '
"Fyodor Kandiba. An old acquaintance of mine."
"Was he ... born blind, too?"
"Worse. His eyes were burnt out in the wars."
"And now he goes about chanting that song?"
"Yes, and supports a whole brood of orphaned nephews by it. And has always a cheery word, or a joke, for everyone he meets."
"Really?" Pyotr asked, and went on musingly, "Well, but, say what you will, there's something mysterious about it all. And I'd like..."
"What would you like, dear boy?"
A few minutes later footsteps sounded in the hall, and Anna Mikhailovna opened the door. Looking anxiously into their faces, she could see only that both seemed moved by their conversation, which broke off abruptly with her appearance.
The fever once conquered, Pyotr's young body recovered swiftly. In another two weeks he was up and about.
He was greatly changed. Even his features seemed altered, no longer strained by those spasms of bitter inner suffering that had formerly been so frequent. The shock he had experienced was now followed by a state of quiet musing, tinged with a gentle melancholy.
Maxim feared that this might be only a temporary change, a slackening of nervous tension resulting from physical weakness.
Then, one day, as evening was gathering, Pyotr sat down to the piano, for the first time since his illness, and began to improvise, as he so liked to do. His music breathed a quiet, gentle sadness, very much in tune with his own mood. And then, all at once, through this quiet melancholy burst the first notes of the blind beggars' chant. The melody disintegrated, and Pyotr stood up abruptly, his face distorted, his eyes bright with tears. He was not yet strong enough, it seemed, to cope with so forceful an impression of life's dissonance as had come to him in the shape of this cracked, heart-rending plaint.
Again, that evening, Maxim and Pyotr talked long together, alone. And afterwards—the days drew into weeks, and the quiet weeks went by, and there was no change in Pyotr's peaceful mood. The too bitter, too selfish consciousness of his own misfortune which had made his spirit sluggish all those last months, and fettered his native energy, seemed now to have lost its foothold, to have yielded place to other feelings. He set himself aims again, laid plans for the future. Life was reviving within him, and his wounded spirit was putting forth fresh shoots, much as a tree that has been ailing bursts into new life at the first bracing breath of spring.
That very summer, it was decided, Pyotr was to go to Kiev for serious study. A famed pianist was to be his teacher. And only his uncle was to accompany him. On this both Pyotr and Maxim insisted.


X


A britzka turned off the road into the steppe, one warm evening in July, to stop for the night at the edge of a near-by wood. As dawn was breaking, two blind beggars came up the road. One of them was turning the handle of a primitive instrument: a hollow cylinder in which, as the handle was turned, a wooden shaft rubbed against taut strings, producing a monotonous and melancholy droning. In a voice somewhat nasal and cracked with age, but still pleasant to the ear, the other beggar was chanting a morning prayer.
A little further down the road, a train of carts was rumbling along, loaded with sun-dried fish. The carters heard someone hail the two blind beggars up ahead, and saw them turn off the road and approach some gentlefolk who where lounging on a rug beside a britzka drawn up at the edge of the wood. Some time later, as the carters were watering their horses at a wayside well, the beggars caught up with them again. But there were three of them now. The leader, tapping the road before him with his long staff at every step, was an old man with long, flowing grey hair and a drooping, snow-white moustache. His forehead was covered with old sores, evidently the mark of severe burns, and his eye sockets were empty. A thick cord, slung over his shoulder, stretched back to the second beggar's belt. This second was a tall, sturdy fellow, badly pock-marked, with a sullen, ill-natured look. Like the old man, he strode along with an accustomed swing, his sightless face uplifted as though seeking guidance in the sky. The third of the beggars was a youth, dressed in stiff new clothing of the sort that peasants wear. His face was pale, and there was a hint of fright in his expression. His step was hesitant. How and again he would stop, and seem to listen for some sound behind him—bringing up his companions with a jerk by the long cord that bound them all together.
They made steady progress. By ten o'clock the wood had fallen far behind—no more than a faint blue streak on the horizon. Around them stretched the open steppe. Later, a hum of sun-warmed telegraph wires announced a highway ahead, intersecting the dusty road. Coming out on the highway, they turned off along it to the right. Almost at once they heard a pounding of horses' hoofs behind them, and the dry sound of iron wheels on the metalled roadway. They stopped, and drew up at the side of the road. Again the wooden shaft began to turn, grinding out its melancholy drone, and the cracked old voice took up the chant:
"A-alms for the bli-ind...."
And as the chant continued, the youngest of the beggars joined the droning accompaniment with a soft thrumming of strings.
A coin clinked at old Kandiba's feet, and the sound of the wheels on the roadway stopped. The giver, evidently, wanted to be sure that his offering was not lost. Kandiba quickly found the coin. As he fingered it, his face lit with satisfaction.
"God save you," he said, turning again to face the vehicle in the road.
It was a britzka, occupied by a grey-haired gentleman of broad, square-hewn figure. A pair of crutches lay propped against the seat.
He looked intently at the youngest of the beggars—this old gentleman in the britzka. The youth was pale, but calm—though a moment before, at the first notes of Kandiba's chant, his fingers had plucked sharply, nervously at the strings, as though attempting to drown out the dismal plaint.
The britzka rolled off again. But, as long as the beggars were in sight, the old gentleman kept looking back at them.
Soon the sound of its wheels died away in the distance. Returning to the roadway, the beggars continued on their way.
"You bring us luck, Yuri," Kandiba said. "And you play right well, too."
A little later, the pock-marked beggar asked,
"For God, is it, you're going to Pochayev? On a vow?"
"Yes," the youth answered, very low.
"Think you'll get your sight back, eh?" This was said with a bitter smile.
"Some people do," Kandiba put in mildly.
"Never met any such, all the years I've been on the road," the pock-marked beggar returned morosely.
They fell silent, tramping steadily on. The sun rose higher and higher, silhouetting against the straight white line of the highway the dark figures of the beggars and, far ahead, the britzka that had passed them by. Further on, the highway forked. The britzka took the road that led to Kiev; but the beggars turned off the highway again, to wander on by country roads towards Pochayev.
Soon afterwards a letter reached the manor. Maxim wrote, from Kiev, that he and Pyotr were both well and that things were working out just as they had wished.
And the three beggars tramped on. All three, now, strode along with the same accustomed swing. Kandiba, in the lead, tapping the road before him with his staff at every step. He knew all the roads and lanes, and always reached the bigger villages in time for fair days or holidays. People would gather to hear the beggars' play, and the coins would come clinking into old Kandiba's outstretched cap.
The youthful beggar's hesitancy, his look almost of fright, soon disappeared. Each step he took along the roads brought to his ears new sounds—the sounds of the vast, unknown world for which he had exchanged the sleepy, lulling murmur of the quiet manor. His unseeing eyes opened ever wider. His chest expanded. His keen hearing grew keener still. Gradually, he came to know his companions—kindly Kandiba and sullen Kuzma. He tramped, with them, in the wake of long trains of squeaky peasant carts; spent many a night by blazing fires in the open steppe; heard the clamour of markets and fairs; stumbled upon human grief and misfortune—and not only among the blind!—that made his heart contract in bitter pain; and, strange as it might seem, found room now in his soul for all these new impressions. The beggars' chant no longer set him trembling. And, as day followed day in this great, roaring sea of life, his painful inner striving for the unattainable subsided and grew still. His sensitive ear caught every new song and melody, and when he began to play a look of quiet pleasure would soften even Kuzma's gloomy features. As they approached Pochayev, their little band grew steadily in number.


* * *


Late that autumn, when the roads were already heaped high with snow, the manor folks' young son came suddenly home, in the company of two blind beggars. The whole household was taken by surprise. He had been to Pochayev, people said, to pray to the icon of the Virgin there for healing. It was a vow that he had taken.
Be that as it might, his eyes remained clear, yet unseeing, as they had always been. But his soul—that, unquestionably, had found healing in his wanderings. It was as though some fearful nightmare had vanished for ever from the manor.
When Maxim, who had been writing all this time from Kiev, finally got home, Anna Mikhailovna greeted him with the cry,
"I'll never forgive you for this, never!"
But the look in her eyes gave the lie to her stern words.
In the long autumn evenings Pyotr told them the story of his wanderings. And when he sat down to the piano, in the twilight hours, the house would be filled with new melodies, such as he had never been heard to play before.
The trip to Kiev was postponed to the next year. And the thoughts of all the family were absorbed by Pyotr's plans and hopes for the future.