I


Pyotr woke early, next morning. Quiet filled his room. The house, too, was still. The stir that comes with day had not yet begun. From the garden, through the open window, the fresh breath of morning came pouring into him. Blind though he was, Pyotr had an excellent feeling for the state of Nature around him. He knew, now, that it was very early. He knew, too, that his window was open—knew it by the rustling of the trees, so close and clear, with nothing to bar it from the room. Today, this feeling was more vivid than ever. He knew, though it did not reach him, that the sun was peeping into the room; knew that, should he stretch a hand out through the window, the dew would come sprinkling from the bushes just outside. And there was another feeling too, today—a feeling unfamiliar, never before experienced, but filling his whole being to overflowing.
He lay still awhile, listening to the twitter of some tiny bird out in the garden, and wondering at this strange new feeling in his heart.
What was it? What had happened?
And suddenly, as he questioned himself, came the memory of her words last night, in the dusk, by the old mill.
"Hadn't you really ever thought of it?" she had said, and—"You silly boy!"
No, he had never thought of it. Her presence had always been a joy to him; but, until that evening, it had been a joy not consciously recognised—as we are not conscious of the air we breathe. Those simple words had stirred his spirit like a stone cast into still waters: one touch, and the smooth, shining surface, reflecting the sunlight and the sky's distant blue, is gone—the water stirred to its very bottom.
Waking now, with his spirit thus renewed, he saw his old playmate in an altogether new light. All that had taken place the evening before came back, in its slightest detail; and, as her voice sounded in his memory, he was amazed at its new tembre. "If a girl falls in love..." and—"You silly boy!"
He sprang out of bed, dressed hurriedly, and ran off down the dew-wet garden paths to the old mill. The water rippled in the sluices, and the bird cherries whispered around him, just as the night before; only then it had been dark, and now it was morning, bright and sunny. Never before had he "felt" the light so strongly—as though the damp fragrance, the freshness of the morning, carried with them to his tingling nerve centres some inkling of the joyous cheer of daylight.


II


Life at the manor became brighter, somehow, and happier. Anna Mikhailovna seemed young again; and Maxim could be heard to joke and laugh, though a moody rumbling still issued at times—like the echo of some distant storm—from his shelter of tobacco-smoke. Some people, he grumbled, seemed to think of life as something in the order of those stupid novels that end with wedding bells; but there were plenty of things in this world of ours that it wouldn't harm such people to give a little thought to. And Pan Popelsky, rotund and handsome in healthy middle-age, his cheeks still ruddy, his hair gradually and evenly silvering—Pan Popelsky, evidently thinking that Maxim's grumbling was addressed to him, would invariably express his agreement and hurry off to attend to his affairs, which were always, it must be said, in perfect order. But the young people would only smile, absorbed in the plans that they were laying. Pyotr was to study music seriously, now.
When the crops were in, and autumn, decked in golden threads of gossamer, hung in languorous contentment over the fields, the whole family, with Evelina, set out on a visit to Stavrukovo, as the Stavruchenkos' estate was called. It was a journey of only some seventy versts; but this short distance brought a great change in the surrounding countryside. The last of the Carpathian foot-hills, still visible in Volhynia and along the Bug, were lost to view, and the landscape settled into rolling Ukrainian steppeland. The villages here were green with orchards and gardens. Scattered gullies cut across the steppe; and here and there along the horizon stood tall grave mounds, long since ploughed around to the very base and now surrounded by yellow fields of stubble.
It was seldom that the family went so far from home. Away from the familiar fields and village, where he knew every inch of ground, Pyotr lost his confident ease of movement; he felt his blindness more strongly, and grew nervous and irritable. Yet he had readily accepted the Stavruchenkos' invitation. Since that memorable evening when he had first realised both his love and the power of his awakening talent, he seemed to shrink less from the outer world—from the dark, unknown vistas that he sensed beyond the bounds of his accustomed life. It had begun to attract him, this world, growing more upon him.
The days at Stavrukovo passed very pleasantly. Pyotr was far less constrained, now, in the youthful company. He would listen with eager interest to young Stavruchenko's masterful playing, and his stories of the Conservatory and of concerts hoard at the capital; and he would flush with pleasure at the musician's enthusiastic praises when the conversation turned to Pyotr's own talent, so vividly expressed, if as yet unpolished. He no longer tried to efface himself, but joined in the general talk as freely as the others, though perhaps not so loquaciously. Evelina, too, had thrown aside the cold restraint—the vigilance, almost—that had hung over her so recently, and delighted them all by her carefree gaiety, her sudden fits of irrepressible merriment.
There was an old monastery, some ten versts from Stavrukovo, that was widely known hereabout for the part it had played, in its time, in local history. Again and again, Tatar hordes, like swarming locusts, had besieged its walls, sending their arrows in myriads against its defenders; or Polish troops had stormed it desperately; or, when it was held by the Poles, the Cossacks had rushed into battle to regain their fortress.
Now the ancient towers lay in ruin. The crumbling walls, patched here and there with stretches of peaceful paling, protected the monastery's vegetable gardens from no more dangerous foe than the enterprising cattle of the local peasantry; and the broad moats were overgrown with millet.
One clear, mild autumn day the Stavruchenkos and their guests set out to visit this monastery. Maxim, with his sister and Evelina, went in the carriage—a broad, old-fashioned vehicle, swaying on its high springs like a wind-tossed boat. The young men rode.
Pyotr rode confidently along beside the others, guided always by the hoofbeats of his companions' mounts and by the sound of the carriage wheels on the road ahead. A stranger, seeing his easy, fearless manner, could hardly have guessed that this young horseman did not see the road—that he had simply learned by long practice to trust his horse's instinct. Anna Mikhailovna, at first, kept looking anxiously back at her son, uneasy because both horse and road were unfamiliar to him. Maxim, too, watched him furtively, with a mentor's pride in his pupil and a purely male superiority to women's silly fears.
"You know," the student exclaimed suddenly, riding up to the carriage, "I've just had an idea. There's a grave here that you really ought to see. We came on the story not long ago, going through some old papers at the monastery, and it's tremendously interesting. We can go right now, if you like. It's not much out of our way—just at the end of the village."
"What makes you think of graves?" Evelina demanded, laughing. "Are we such sad company as all that?"
"I'll answer that question later," he returned, and called to the coachman to turn off towards Kolodnya and stop by the stile to Ostap's garden.
Then, turning his horse, he cantered back to join the other riders.
The carriage turned down a narrow little road, where its wheels sank deep into a thick layer of dust. The young men shot past, and dismounted by a wattle fence at the side of the road. When they had tied their horses here, the young Stavruchenkos walked back to help the ladies down from the carriage, when it should come up; and Pyotr stood waiting, leaning against the pommel of his saddle, his head inclined—listening intently, trying to orientate himself in this unfamiliar place.
To him, this bright autumn day was darkest night, enlivened only by the day-time sounds around him. He could hear the approaching carriage, and the talk and laughter of the two young men. The horses at his side, reaching over the fence to the tall growth of weeds that bordered the vegetable garden inside, pulled at their bridles and made them tinkle. A song floated, wistful, lazy, on the light breeze. It came from somewhere quite near—among the garden beds, perhaps. There was a murmur of leaves, in some near-by orchard. A stork clattered its bill; there was a loud beating of wings, and a cock crowed, as though suddenly recalling some urgent matter; a well-sweep creaked. The sounds of workaday village life. And, indeed, the village was very near. They had stopped by a garden at its very edge.
Of more distant sounds, the clearest was the measured calling of a monastery bell, very thin and high. By the way the bell sounded, or perhaps by the feel of the breeze, or, it might be, by some other sign that he himself could not have named, Pyotr felt that there must be a sudden break or fall in the land somewhere beyond the monastery—the bluff bank of a stream, perhaps; and beyond it a long stretch of flatland, humming with the sounds of peaceful life. Faintly, fragmentarily, these sounds too reached his ears, giving him an aural sensation of distance, veiled and quivering—as to us, who can see, distant outlines seem to quiver in the dim light of evening.
The breeze played with his hair, under the brim of his hat, and brushed past his ear with a soft murmuring much like the singing of an Aeolian harp. Vague memories stirred in his mind. Happenings of his distant childhood, caught up out of forgetfulness, came to life again in the form of wind, and touch, and sound. This breeze that played around him, mingling with the distant bell and with the wistful song here in the garden, seemed to be telling him some old, sad tale of the past history of these places, or, perhaps, of his own past, or of his future—so dark, so undefined.
But now the carriage had come up, and the whole company trooped over the stile into the garden. In a corner of the garden, among a rank growth of weeds and grasses, lay a broad stone slab, almost level with the earth around it. Green leaves of thistle, around flame-pink flower heads, broad-leafed burdock, and tall, thin-stalked cockle swayed above the shorter grasses, rustling gently in the breeze, and Pyotr could hear them whispering over the neglected grave.
"It was only recently we discovered this," young Stavruchenko said. "Yet, do you know who lies under this stone? He was famous, in his day—old Ignat Kary."
"So this is where you lie, old fighter," Maxim said slowly. "How did he come to be here at Kolodnya?"
"It was back in 17—. The monastery was held by Polish troops, and the Cossacks had laid siege to it, together with some Tatar band. And—well, you know, the Tatars were always a dangerous sort of ally. The garrison must have found some way of buying over their mirza. And one night, when the Poles organised a sally, the Tatars joined them against the Cossacks. There was a fearful battle in the dark. The Tatars were beaten, I believe, and the monastery taken; but the Cossacks lost their leader in the fighting."
The young man paused a moment.
"There was another name in the story, too," he continued slowly, "though we haven't been able to find a second grave. The records at the monastery speak of a blind young bandurist buried at Kary's side. He had been with Kary through many campaigns."
"Blind?" Anna Mikhailovna cried tremulously. "And campaigning with Kary?"
She had a vision of her own blind boy, in that fearful battle in the darkness.
"Yes, he was blind. And, evidently, famed for his singing throughout the Zaporozhye country. At any rate, that's how the record speaks of him, in that peculiar mixture of Polish and Ukrainian and Church Slavonic in which the story is set down. I can quote it for you, if you like. I remember this part of it almost word for word: 'And with him Yurko, gloried Cossack singer, who had never left his side, and was by him much loved. And Yurko too, when Kary lay dead, the heathen horde perfidiously cut down. For in their heathen faith know they no veneration for the crippled, nor for the glorious talent of song making and of the plucking of the strings, by which even the wolves of the steppe might be softened, yet not these heathen, who spared it not in their attack by night. And they are laid side by side, the singer and the warrior, and may their noble end be gloried in eternity, Amen.'"
'The stone is wide," one of the company remarked. "Perhaps they lie together under it."
'That may be so. But the inscriptions are all worn away. The mace and horsetail still show, here at the top, but all the rest is gone. Nothing but lichen."
"Ah, but wait one minute," cried Pyotr, who had been listening to this tale with breathless interest.
He knelt beside the stone and pressed his slender fingers down on the green growth of lichen that covered it. Through the lichen, he could feel the firm texture of the stone, and the faint outlines of letters cut in its surface.
He sat thus a moment, his face uplifted, his eyebrows drawn. Then he read aloud.
'"Ignaty, known as Kary ... by the will of our Lord ... shot down from a Tatar bow....'"
"Yes, that much we made out," the student said.
Pyotr's fingers, tensely arched, crept further and further down the stone slab.
"'When Kary lay dead...'"
"'The heathen horde...'" the student put in eagerly. "That's how Yurko's death is described in the record. So that it's true—he lies here too, under this same stone."
"Yes—'the heathen horde'," Pyotr confirmed. "And that's all I can make out. No, wait a bit! Here's some more: 'Cut down by Tatar sabres....' And something else—but no, it's indecipherable. That's all."
All further memory of the young bandurist had been wiped out by erosion, in the century and a half that the stone had been lying over the grave.
For a moment, a deep silence hung over the garden. Only the foliage rustled in the breeze. Then the hush was broken by a long-drawn, reverential sigh. That was Ostap, the owner of the garden, and thereby master of the one-time ataman's last earthly abode. Coming up to welcome the gentlefolk, he had stopped in speechless amazement at the sight of the young man with upturned, sightless eyes, bending over the grave to read by touch words that years, and rain, and storm had combined to hide away from human sight.
"It's the grace of God," he said, his eyes fixed on Pyotr in a look of the deepest awe. "It's the grace of God, that gives the blind to know what we, with eyes, can never see."
"Do you understand now, Panna Evelina, why I suddenly remembered Yurko?" the student asked, when the carriage had set off again along the dusty road on its slow progress towards the monastery. "We kept wondering, my brother and I, how a blind singer could have ridden with Kary and his flying bands. Of course, Kary may not have been the chief ataman at that time. He may have been simply a troop leader. But we know that he was always in command of mounted Cossacks, not of foot troops. And the bandurists—they were usually old men, wandering from village to village and singing for alms. It was only when I saw your Pyotr riding, today, that I suddenly pictured that blind lad in the saddle, with his bandura, slung on his back instead of a gun."
The young man paused a moment, then continued, almost enviously,
"And he fought in battles, too, it may well be. And in any case, he shared in all the marches and the dangers. Yes, what times there were, once, in this Ukraine of ours!"
"What dreadful times!" Anna Mikhailovna put in, sighing. "What wonderful times!" the young man returned. "Nothing like that ever happens now," Pyotr put in gruffly. He had just ridden up to join young Stavruchenko beside the carriage. For a moment he listened, his eyebrows raised, to catch the gait of the other horses. His face, rather paler than usual, betrayed a state of deep emotion.
"All that has disappeared, nowadays," he repeated.
"What was due to disappear, has disappeared," Maxim put in, with a hint of coldness in his tone. "Those people lived the life of their own time. It's for you to find the life that suits your time."
"It's all very well for you," the student said. "You've had something out of life."
"Yes, and life's had something out of me, too," the old Garibaldian returned, with a grim smile, glancing at his crutches.
There was a silence.
"I had my dreams of the old Cossack days too, when I was young," Maxim went on. "The wild poetry of it, and the freedom. I actually went off to Turkey, to join Sadik." [ Sadik-pasha—one Chaikovsky, a Ukrainian dreamer, who thought to make the Cossacks a political force in Turkey.]
"Well, and what came of that?" the young people demanded eagerly.
"I was cured of my dreams fast enough, when I saw those 'free Cossacks' of yours in the service of Turkish despotism. Pure masquerade, historical quackery! I realised then that history has swept all those old trappings into the waste heap; that it's the aim that matters, not the form, however handsome it may seem on the surface. And that was when I went to Italy. There, people were fighting for an aim I was willing to give my life for, even if I didn't know their language."
Maxim was serious now, and spoke with an earnestness that gave his words added weight. He had seldom taken any part in the loud debates between old Stavruchenko and his sons, except to chuckle quietly at their fervour, or to smile good-naturedly when the young people appealed to him as to an ally. But today he had been stirred by the old story that had risen so vividly before them as they bent over the moss-grown stone; and, too, he had the feeling that in some strange way this episode of the distant past had a real significance in the present—for Pyotr, and, through Pyotr, for them all.
This time the young people made no attempt to argue—subdued, perhaps, by the emotion they had experienced in Ostap's garden a few minutes past, beside the gravestone that spoke so eloquently of the death of those past times; or, perhaps, impressed by the old veteran's earnest tone.
"What remains for us, then?" the student asked, breaking the silence that had fallen after Maxim's words.
"Struggle; the same eternal struggle," Maxim answered.
"In what field? In what forms?"
"That's for you to seek."
Now that he had dropped his usual half-mocking tone, Maxim seemed inclined to discuss things seriously. But no time remained, just now, for serious talk. The carriage was approaching the monastery gates. The student reached out a hand to check Pyotr's horse. Like an open book, the blind youth's face showed the deep emotion that still moved him.


III


Visitors to the monastery generally wandered awhile through the ancient church and then climbed to the belfry, which offered a broad view over the adjacent countryside. On clear days, by staring hard, one could make out the distant blobs of white that marked the gubernia centre, and, merging with the horizon, the gleaming curves of the Dnieper.
The sun had already begun to sink when, leaving Maxim to rest on a little porch by one of the monastic cells, the rest of the company made their way to the foot of the bell-tower. In the arched entrance-way they found a young novice waiting to take them up—a slender figure, in a cassock and a high, peaked hat. He stood with his back to the door, his hand on the padlock that secured it, facing a little group of children who hung about, alert as so many frightened sparrows, just out of his reach. Clearly, there had been some clash between the novice and these lively youngsters. Most probably, to judge by his belligerent attitude and the hand he still kept on the lock, he had caught them hanging about the door, in the hope of slipping in when the gentlefolk went up, and had been trying to drive them away. An angry flush darkened his cheeks, contrasting sharply with the pallor of his skin.
There was something strange about the young novice's eyes. They did not seem to move at all. It was Anna Mikhailovna who first noticed this immobility of his gaze, and the peculiar expression of his face. Tremulously, she seized Evelina's hand.
The girl started.
"He's blind!" she whispered faintly.
"Hush," the mother answered. "And—do you notice?"
"Yes."
It was easy enough to notice—the novice's strange facial resemblance to Pyotr. The same nervous pallor, the same clear, but unmoving pupils, the same restless mobility of the eyebrows—starting at every sound, darting up and down as an insect's antennae will when it is frightened. The novice's features were coarser than Pyotr's, and his figure more angular; but that seemed only to emphasise the likeness. And when he broke into a heavy cough, and his hands flew to his sunken chest, Anna Mikhailovna stared at him in wide-eyed panic, as at some ghostly apparition.
When his fit of coughing had passed, the novice unlocked the door, but stood before it, blocking the way.
"No youngsters around?" he demanded hoarsely—and, throwing himself suddenly forward, shouted at the children, "Be off, then, curse you!"
A moment later, as the young people were filing past him into the tower, his voice sounded in their ears with a sort of honeyed pleading:
"Will there be a little something for the bell-ringer? Watch your step—it's dark, inside."
All the company gathered at the foot of the stairs. Anna Mikhailovna had been hesitating, only a few minutes before, at the thought of the steep, difficult climb; but now she followed the others in dumb submission.
The blind bell-ringer shut and locked the door. It grew very dark inside the tower, and some time passed before Anna Mikhailovna noticed the dim beam of light overhead, coming in through a diagonal slit in the thick stone wall. Cutting across the tower, the light cast a faint glow on the rough, dust-covered stones of the wall opposite.
The young people were already scrambling up the winding stairs, but Anna Mikhailovna, who had hung back to let them pass, still lingered irresolutely at the bottom.
Shrill, childish voices sounded suddenly outside the tower.
"Let us in," they pleaded. "Please, Uncle Yegor! Be a good fellow!"
But the bell-ringer threw himself furiously against the door, beating with his fists on its iron sheathing.
"Be off with you, curse you!" he shouted hoarsely, choking with rage. "May the thunder strike you!"
"Blind devil!" several voices answered loudly; and there was a swift patter of bare feet, running off.
The bell-ringer stood listening a moment, then drew a quick, sharp breath.
"Perdition take you!" he muttered. "Will there never be an end? May the fever choke you all!"
And then, in an altogether different tone, vibrant with the despair that comes of suffering beyond endurance—
"Oh, Lord! Oh Lord, my God! Why have you forsaken me?"
Moving towards the stairs, he collided with Anna Mikhailovna, still hesitating at the very bottom.
"Who's this? What are you waiting for?" he demanded sharply—then added, more mildly, "That's all right. Don't be afraid. Here—take my arm."
And again, as they climbed the stairs, in the same offensively honeyed tone as in the doorway, he made his plea:
"Will there be a little something for the bell-ringer?"
Anna Mikhailovna fumbled in her purse, in the darkness, and handed him a note. He seized it swiftly. They had come up to the level of the narrow slit in the wall, and in the dim light she saw him press the money to his cheek and feel it carefully with his fingers. His pale face—so like her son's!—twisted suddenly, in the strange, faint light, in an expression of naive and greedy pleasure.
"Oh!" he cried. "Thanks, oh, thanks! Twenty-five rubles! And I thought you were fooling me, just making mock of the blind fellow. Some people do."
The poor woman's bee was wet with streaming tears. She brushed them hastily away and pushed on to overtake the others, whose voices and footsteps, far ahead, came echoing dully down the stairs to her—like the sound of falling water, heard through a stone wall.
The young people paused at one of the turnings, quite high up, where a narrow window admitted a little air and a tiny ray of light, very diffuse, but clearer than what came up from below. The wall here was smooth, and covered with inscriptions—for the most part, the signatures of people who had visited the belfry at one time or another.
Many of these names were familiar to the young Stavruchenkos, and each such discovery was hailed with jokes and laughter.
"Ah, but here's something of another sort," the student exclaimed, and read off slowly, from a tangled scrawl, '"Many start; few reach the goal.'" He laughed, and added, "I suppose that refers to this ascent."
"Twist it that way if you like," the bell-ringer said rudely, turning away; and his mobile eyebrows betrayed his tension. "There's a verse here, too—a little lower down. It wouldn't hurt you to read it."
"A verse? Where? There's no verse here."
"You're so sure, aren't you? But I tell you, there is. There's lots of things hidden from you that have sight."
He moved down a step or two and passed his hand over the wall, just beyond the reach of the faint beam of daylight.
"Here it is," he said. "And a fine verse, too. Only you won't be able to read it without a lantern."
Pyotr moved to his side and passed a hand over the wall. In a moment he had found these grim lines, cut into the wall by someone now dead, perhaps, a hundred years and more:

Forget not the hour of death,
Forget not the judgement day.
Forget not that life must end,
Forget not Hell's flame for aye.

"A merry Maxim!" the student commented—but, somehow the would-be joke fell flat.
"Don't like it, do you?" said the bell-ringer maliciously. "Well, you're still young, of course, only—who can tell? The hour of death steals on us like a thief in the night." In a somewhat different tone, he went on, "It's a fine verse. 'Forget not the hour of death, Forget not the judgement day.'" And, maliciously again, "Yes, and what comes to us then—there's the point of it all."
They went on up the stairs, and soon came out on the lower belfry platform. This was very high; but an opening in the wall disclosed another stairway, steeper and narrower than the first, which brought them to the upper platform, higher still. Here a delightful view spread out before them. The sun was sinking to the west, casting long shadows over the lowland; and the eastern sky was dark with heavy clouds. Off in the distance, the world lay dim and indistinct in the evening haze, except that, here and there, the slanting beams picked out some whitewashed peasant home from the blue shadows, or painted a window-pane in ruby red, or sparkled on the cross of some far belfry.
A hush fell over the little company. A breeze blew about them, fresh and pure—free, at this height, from any breath of earth. It played with the bell ropes, and with the bells themselves—making them quiver, now and again, with a faint, long-drawn metallic murmur that suggested to the ear vague, distant music, or perhaps a sighing deep in the bells' copper hearts. Peace and tranquillity breathed from all the quiet countryside.
But there was another reason, too, for the hush that had fallen on the belfry platform. Moved by some common instinct—by the sensation of height, and helplessness, most likely—the two blind youths had moved to the support of the corner pillars, and stood leaning against them, their faces turned to meet the gentle breeze.
And the strange likeness between them now caught every eye. The bell-ringer was a little elder. An ample cassock fell in heavy folds over his wasted frame; and his features were coarser, more roughly cut, than Pyotr's. There were other differences, also, to the searching eye. The bell-ringer was blond. His nose was a little hooked, and his lips were thinner than Pyotr's. His chin was framed in a short, curly beard, and a moustache was beginning to show on his upper lip. But—in the gestures, in the nervous fold of the lips, in the unceasing movement of the eyebrows, lay that amazing, that almost family likeness that makes so many hunchbacks, too, resemble one another.
Pyotr's expression was somewhat the more peaceful. What in him was a look of habitual melancholy was intensified in the bell-ringer to bitterness—at times, to searing malice. At the moment, however, the bell-ringer too had a milder look—as though the softness of the breeze had smoothed the furrows from his forehead, and filled his soul with the tranquil peace chat rose from the scene below, hidden as it was from his unseeing gaze. The twitching of his eyebrows was growing less and less.
Then, suddenly, his eyebrows flew up again, and Pyotr's too—as though both had heard some sound down in the valley, inaudible to all the others.
"Church bells," Pyotr said.
"That's St. Yegori's, fifteen versts from here," the bell-ringer returned. "They always ring for evening service half an hour before us. Do you hear it, then? I hear it, too. Most people don't."
Dreamily, he went on:
"It's fine, up here. On a holiday, specially. D'you ever hear me ringing?"
The question was put with naive vanity.
"Come and hear me, some day. Father Pamfili—you know Father Pamfili, don't you?—he got these two new bells here, specially for me."
He left the support of his pillar to stroke two small bells that time had not yet darkened like the others.
"Fine bells. The way they sing for you, the way they sing! Towards Eastertide, specially."
He reached out for the bell ropes and, with swift finger movements, set the two bells quivering melodiously. The tongues touched so lightly, though distinctly, that the ringing—clearly heard by all the company—could hardly have been audible at even the slightest distance from the belfry platform.
"And you should hear the big one—boo-oom, boo-oom, boom!"
His face was alight with childish pleasure; but even in his pleasure there was something sickly, pitiful.
"Father Pamfili—yes, he got the bells for me," he went on, with a sudden sigh, "but he won't get me a warm coat, not he. Stingy, he is. I'll catch my death, yet, up this belfry. It's so cold! And the autumn's worst of all."
He paused a moment, listening, then said:
"The lame fellow's calling, down below. It's time you were going."
Evelina, who had been watching him all this time as though bewitched, was the first to move.
"Yes, we must go," she said.
And they all turned to the stairs. The bell-ringer, however, did not move. And Pyotr, who had turned with the rest, stopped suddenly.
"Don't wait for me," he said imperiously. "I'll be down in a moment."
Soon the footsteps on the stairs died away. Only Evelina remained, a few steps down. Pressing close to the wall, she had let the others pass, and now stood waiting in breathless suspense.
The blind youths thought themselves alone. For an instant both stood motionless, in an awkward silence, listening.
"Who's that?" the bell-ringer demanded.
"It's me," Pyotr answered.
"You're blind too, aren't you?"
"Yes. And you—have you been blind long?"
"I was born that way. Roman, now—he helps me with the bells—he went blind when he was seven. Look here—can you tell night from day?"
"Yes."
"And so can I. I can feel the light coming on. Roman, he can't. But just the same, it's easier for him."
"Why?" Pyotr asked eagerly.
"Why? Don't you know why? He's seen the daylight. He's seen his mother. Understand? He goes to sleep at night, and
he can see her in his sleep. Only she's old now, and he still sees her young. Do you ever see your mother in your sleep?"
"No," Pyotr responded dully.
"Of course you don't. That only happens when a person goes blind, afterwards. But if you're born blind...."
Pyotr's face was shadowed sombrely, as though a storm-cloud had settled over him. The bell-ringer's eyebrows swept suddenly up over his unmoving eyes, in that expression of blind torment that Evelina knew so well.
"Try as you may, a person will sin sometimes, and complain. Oh Lord, our creator! Holy Virgin, mother of God! Let me see the light and the joy, just once, if it's only in my sleep!"
His face twisted, and he went on, with his former bitterness:
"But no, they won't do even that. Dreams come, sometimes, only—so faint, you can't remember them when you're awake."
He stopped suddenly, listening. His face turned pale, and a strange, convulsive movement distorted every feature.
"The imps are in," he said angrily.
And, true enough, childish shouts and footsteps were echoing up the narrow stairs, like the roar of an advancing flood. Then, for an instant, all was hushed again. Probably, the children had reached the lower platform, where their shouts flew out into the open. But at once the upper stairway was filled with clamour, and a merry crowd of children came racing up, past Evelina, to the bell platform. At the top step they paused a moment, then—one by one—slipped quickly through the doorway, where the blind bell-ringer had taken his stand, his face distorted with malice, striking out wildly at them with his fists.
A new figure appeared in the darkness of the stairway. This was evidently Roman. He had a broad, pock-marked face, expressive of the utmost good nature. His sunken eyes were veiled behind shut lids, but his lips were curved in a very kindly smile. He passed Evelina, still pressed against the wall, and moved on towards the platform. In the doorway, Yegor's flying fist collided with his neck.
"Yegor!" he exclaimed, in a deep, pleasant voice. "Brother! Raging again?"
They stood chest to chest now, feeling one another.
"Why'd you let the imps in?" Yegor demanded, in Ukrainian, his voice still loud with anger.
"Let them play," Roman returned good-humouredly. "God's little birds. Why do you scare them so? Hi, little imps! Where have you got to?"
The children, huddled at the corners of the platform, kept very still; but their eyes gleamed with mischief—and, a little, with fright.
Evelina, stealing noiselessly down the stairs, had already passed the lower platform when she heard Yegor's confident step coming down, and Pyotr's. The next moment a burst of joyous shouts and laughter sounded on the upper platform, as the children rushed to throw their arms around Roman.
As the carriage drove slowly out at the monastery gates, the bells began to sound overhead. Roman was ringing for the evening service.
The sun had set, and the carriage rolled through darkened fields. The even, melancholy peals of the monastery bells floated after it through the blue evening shadows.
Very little was said on the way home. All that evening Pyotr kept away from the others, sitting alone in a far corner of the garden and making no response even to Evelina's anxious calls. Not until everyone had gone to bed did he go in, and feel his way to his room.


IV


There were times during the remaining days of their visit at Stavrukovo when Pyotr's earlier animation returned, and in his own way he seemed quite cheerful. He was greatly interested by the collection of musical instruments the elder of the two young Stavruchenkos had accumulated. Many of these were new to him, and he had to try them all—each with its own, individual voice, suited to the expression of its own peculiar shades of feeling. But something, clearly, was oppressing him; and these moments of cheerfulness seemed but brief flashes against a background of increasing gloom.
None of the company ever referred to the bell-tower. The whole excursion seemed forgotten, as though by tacit agreement. But it had affected Pyotr very deeply—that was quite evident. When he was alone—or even in company, in moments of silence, when there was no talk to occupy his mind—he would sink into thoughts of his own, that brought a bitter look into his face. True, it was a look he had often worn before; but now it seemed harsher, somehow, and—very reminiscent of the blind bell-ringer's.
At the piano, in his moments of least reserve, the quivering of the bells on the high tower came often into his music, and the long-drawn sighing deep in their copper hearts. And as he played, pictures that none of the company had heart to speak of would rise in their memories only too clearly. The sombre gloom of the winding stairs, and the slender figure of the bell-ringer; the consumptive flush on his cheeks, his malice, his bitter complaints. And then, the two blind youths, up on the bell platform—so alike in posture, in expression, in the darting of their eyebrows at every sound or movement. What all these years had seemed to Pyotr's friends an expression of his own, separate individuality now revealed itself to them as the common seal of darkness, lying in equal measure on all victims of its mysterious power.
"Look here, Anna," Maxim said to his sister a few days later, when they were back at home again, "this change that's come over our boy—it started after the trip we took to the monastery. Did anything out of the ordinary happen there, do you know?"
"Ah, it's all on account of that blind lad we met," Anna Mikhailovna answered, sighing.
She had already sent warm sheepskin coats to the monastery, and money, with a letter to Father Pamfili in which she begged him, so far as it was in his power, to ease the lot of the two blind bell-ringers. True, for all her gentle, kindly heart, she had forgotten Roman at first, and Evelina had had to remind her that there were two to be provided for. "Yes, yes, of course," she had answered Evelina; but her thoughts had obviously been centred on the one—Yegor. It was to him her heart went out in aching pity, not unmixed with a strange, superstitious feeling that in sending him this offering she might propitiate some unknown, but menacing force that was already advancing, casting its grim shadow over her son's life.
"What blind lad?" Maxim demanded, very much surprised.
"Why, the one in the belfry."
Maxim's crutch came down with an exasperated thump.
"Confound these legs of mine! You forget, Anna, that I don't go clambering up belfry stairs any longer. If one could only get a little sense out of a woman! Evelina—see if you can't tell me, then, just what it was that happened in the belfry."
"The bell-ringer who took us up was blind," Evelina began. Her voice was very low. She, too, had grown paler in these last few clays. "Well, and...."
She stumbled, and stopped. Anna Mikhailovna buried her face in her hands, trying to hide the tears that wet her flaming cheeks.
"Well, and—he looked very like our Pyotr," Evelina continued.
"And no one said a word of this to me! But was there nothing else? Because after all, Anna"—and Maxim's voice, as he turned to his sister, softened in gentle reproach— "there's really no such great tragedy in that."
"Ah, it's just more than I can bear," Anna Mikhailovna returned, barely audibly.
"What's more than you can bear? That some blind lad should resemble your son?"
At this point Evelina caught Maxim's eye, and, seeing her expression, he fell silent. Anna Mikhailovna soon left the room; but Evelina remained, busy, as always, with her embroidery. For a moment, the room was very still.
"Is there more to the story, then?" Maxim asked finally.
"Yes. Pyotr didn't leave the belfry with the rest. He told Aunt Anna"—that had always been Evelina's name for Anna Mikhailovna —"to go down with the others, but he didn't follow her. He stayed behind on the platform, with the blind bell-ringer. Well, and—I stayed, too."
"To eavesdrop?"
The question came almost mechanically—token of Maxim's long years of pedagogy.
"I—I couldn't go away," Evelina answered slowly. "They talked to one another like...."
"Like comrades in misfortune?"
"Yes. As the blind to the blind. And then Yegor asked Pyotr whether he ever saw his mother in his sleep. And Pyotr said no, he didn't. And Yegor—he doesn't, either. But there's another blind bell-ringer there, Roman, and he does see his mother. She's an old woman now, but he still sees her young."
"So. And what more?"
After a moment's hesitation, Evelina raised her eyes to meet Maxim's. Their blue depths were dark with suffering and struggle.
"That other one, Roman—he's kind-hearted, and he seems at peace with life. His face is sad, but there's no malice in it. He wasn't blind from birth. But Yegor..." she paused, then hurried on evasively, "He suffers dreadfully."
"Say what you mean, child," Maxim interrupted impatiently. "He's embittered, then, this Yegor—is that it?"
"Yes. He cursed some children who came up the stairs, and struck out at them with his fists. Whereas Roman—the children seemed to love him."
"Bitter, and resembling Pyotr," Maxim said thoughtfully. "I see, I see."
Again Evelina hesitated, but finally went on—faintly, as though at the cost of painful inner struggle:
"In feature, they weren't really alike at all. It was more a likeness of expression. Until they met, it seems to me, Pyotr had more the look of Roman. But now it's more and more the look of that Yegor. And then, you see, what I'm afraid of is ... I mean, I begin to think...."
"What is it you're afraid of, my dear child? My clever child? Come here to me."
Maxim spoke with a tenderness so unusual in him that the tears sprang to Evelina's eyes. He lifted a hand to stroke her silky hair.
"What is it you think, then, child? Tell me your thoughts. For you can think—I see that now."
"I think ... I think he feels, now, that anyone born blind is bound to be ill-natured. And he's persuaded himself, I'm afraid, that he must be so too, that there's no escaping it."
"So. I see." Maxim's caressing hand dropped heavily to his knee. "Get me my pipe, will you, my dear? There it is, on the window-sill."
Soon a blue cloud of tobacco-smoke began to form around him, and through the smoke his voice came, grumbling to himself.
So. So. No, that was no good at all.... He had been wrong; his sister had been right. People could really yearn and suffer for lack of things they had never in their lives experienced. And now that instinct had been reinforced by conscious realisation, both would keep working in the same direction. What an unfortunate encounter! Though after all, as the saying goes, the truth will always out—if not one way, then another.
He could hardly be seen, now, for the swirling smoke. New thoughts and new decisions were ripening in his square-hewn head.