I


There are souls which seem born for the quiet heroism of that love which goes hand in hand with care and grief; souls to which ministration to others in misfortune seems an organic necessity, the very breath of life. Nature has endowed them, these souls, with the tranquillity, lacking which such everyday, prosaic heroism would be inconceivable; has providently softened their passions, their ambitions, aspirations, subordinating all purely selfish hopes and desires to this one dominant trait of character. Such people often seem to those around them cold, unemotional, sober beyond all need. Deaf to the impassioned appeal of earthly life, they follow the sad path of duty tranquilly as they might the road of the most glorious personal happiness. Cold as snow-topped mountain peaks, they seem; and majestic, too, as those lofty peaks. All that is worldly and base lies like dirt at their feet. Even slander and gossip slip from their snow-white robes, as splattered mud from the wings of a swan.
This is a type only rarely created by life or training. Like talent, like genius, it is Nature's endowment to a chosen few. Its traits are early manifested, and they were already evident in Petro's little friend. The mother soon realised what a happy thing this childish friendship might become for her blind boy. And Maxim, seeing this as well as she, felt that now, when the child had everything he had been lacking, the course of his spiritual development should be smooth and even—unhindered, undisturbed.
But that was an error, and a bitter one.


II


For some years, while Petro was still quite small, Maxim thought himself entirely in control of the boy's spiritual growth. Not every aspect of this growth, perhaps, arose from the tutor's direct influence; but he was sure, in any case, that no new development, no new spiritual acquirement, could escape his notice and his guiding hand. But when Petro grew older, and entered upon the period transitional between childhood and adolescence, these lofty pedagogical dreams turned out to be quite unfounded. Hardly a week passed that did not bring something new, and often startling; and Maxim was altogether at a loss to find the source of these new ideas and concepts that arose in the blind boy's mind. There was some unknown force at work in the very depths of the child's being, thrusting up to the surface the most unexpected manifestations of independent spiritual development. And Maxim could only bow his head in reverent awe before these mysterious processes that had begun to interfere in his methods of pedagogy. Nature seemed to know some stimulus, some way of revelation, to give the child new concepts that he could not possibly, in his blindness, have developed from direct experience. Contemplating all this, Maxim had a sense of the endless, unbroken continuity of life's vital processes—passing ever on, in all their thousands of details, through the successive train of individual lives.
It frightened him, at first, this realisation that he was not entirely master of the child's mentality; that there was something else, independent of his will and unaffected by his influence, that worked upon his pupil. It made him fear for the child's future, fear the possibility of desires and seekings that might bring the blind boy nothing more than unappeasable longings and suffering. And he began to grope for the sources of these new springs of knowledge—hoping to stop them up, for the boy's own good.
The mother, too, noticed these sudden strange flashes. There was a morning when Petro came running up to her, excited as she had seldom seen him.
"Mother, Mother," he cried. "I saw a dream!"
"What did you see, then, child?" the mother asked, with a sad doubt that she could not suppress.
"I saw ... you, in my dream, and Uncle Maxim. And ... and—everything, I saw. It was so fine, Mother! Oh, it was so fine!"
"Well, and what else did you see, Petro?"
"I can't remember."
"Do you remember me?"
"No," the child answered hesitantly. "No, I can't remember. Not anything."
There was a moment's silence.
"But I did see, just the same, I did see, truly," he cried.
His face clouded over, and a tear gleamed in his sightless eyes.
This happened several times. And with each repetition the boy grew sadder, more unquiet.


III


Passing through the yard, one day, Maxim heard strange sounds floating from the drawing-room, where Petro should have been having a music lesson. A strange sort of exercise, this! It consisted of only two notes. First, the very highest, brightest note of the upper register, quivering as it was struck—repeatedly, rapidly, over and over again; then, suddenly—and also over and over—a low, rolling bass note. What could such extraordinary music mean? Maxim turned quickly towards the house, and a moment later, opening the drawing-room door, stopped short in amazement at the scene confronting him.
Petro, in his tenth year now, sat on a low stool at his mother's feet. Beside him, its neck outstretched and its long beak turning restlessly from side to side, stood a young stork Iochim had tamed and given to the boy. Petro always fed his pet from his own hand, and the bird followed him everywhere. Now he was holding it still with one hand, and with the other gently stroking its feathers—the neck, the back, the wings. His face was set in strained attention. And his mother, at the piano—her face aflame with excitement, her eyes dark with grief—was striking one of the keys, rapidly, repeatedly, evoking that continuous, quivering highest note of all. As she played, she looked with painful intentness into the child's face at her knee. And then, when the boy's hand, stroking the stork, reached the point at the end of the wing where the intense white of the feathers ended abruptly in as intense a black, the mother's hand swept down across the keyboard and a low, bass note came rumbling through the room.
They were so absorbed in what they were doing that neither of them noticed Maxim until, recovering from his amazement, he interrupted them with a loud, "Anna! What does all this mean?"
Meeting her brother's searching glance, Anna Mikhailovna hung her head like a little girl whom her teacher has caught at some childish mischief.
"Well, you see," she explained awkwardly, "Petro says he feels some difference in the colouring of the feathers. Only he can't understand just what the difference is. He spoke of it himself, truly he did, and I think he really feels it."
"And if he does, what then?"
"Why, nothing, only ... you see ... I thought perhaps I could help him a little to understand the difference, by using this difference of sounds. Don't be cross with me, Max. I really think it's very similar."
Maxim was so amazed by this new thought that, at first, he could find nothing to say. He made her repeat her experiment, and watched the boy's strained face in silence, shaking his head. -
"Do try to understand me, Anna," he told his sister, when the boy had left the room. "It's not a good thing to raise questions in the child's mind that you can never, never answer to his full satisfaction."
"But he brought it up himself, truly he did," she cried. "That makes no difference. The boy has no choice but to settle down to his blindness. And we must try to make him forget any such thing as light. I do my best to prevent any outer stimulus that might lead him to fruitless questioning. And if we could rid him of all such stimuli, he'd never feel the lack in his sensations—just as we, with all five senses, never long for some unknown sixth."
"Ah, but we do," she answered softly.
"Anna!"
"We do," she persisted. "We often long for what's impossible."
Still, she yielded to her brother's counsel.
But this time Maxim was wrong. In his eagerness to block all outer stimuli, he had failed to take into account those impulses which Nature had implanted in the child's own being.


IV


The eyes, someone has said, are the mirror of the soul.
It would be more true, perhaps, to liken them to windows, through which the soul receives its impressions of the outer world in all its vivid, sparkling colour. Who can say what portion of our spiritual make-up depends upon our sight impressions?
A man is only one link in an unending chain of lives that stretches, through him, from the bottomless past to the infinitely distant future. In one such link, a blind little boy, some cruel chance had shut these windows. All his life must pass in darkness. But did that mean that the chords by which the soul responds to sight impressions had snapped within him, never to be mended? No! Through this dark life, too, the soul's receptiveness to light must continue, to be passed on to succeeding generations. The blind boy's soul was a normal human soul, with all the normal human capacities. And since every capacity carries with it the desire for accomplishment, this dark soul held within it an unconquerable longing for light.
Somewhere in the unfathomed depths lay inherited powers, unessayed, still dormant in the misty state of "potentiality", but ready at the first ray of light to rise in swift response. But the windows remained shut. The child's fate was sealed. He would never see that ray! All his life must pass in darkness.
And the darkness was alive with phantoms.
Had the child lived in poverty, had he been surrounded with misery, his thoughts might, perhaps, have been absorbed by these outer sources of suffering. But his family had taken care to isolate him from all that might cause him distress. They had given him unbroken peace and quiet. And now, in this quiet that reigned in his soul, the inner want made itself the more strongly felt. Through the still darkness around him, he began to feel a vague, but unremitting sense of a need that sought fulfilment—a striving to give shape to powers that lay dormant, unapplied, deep in his being.
All this gave rise to strange, undefined expectations and impulses—something in the nature of the will to fly that all of us have experienced in childhood, with the wonderful dreams it is bound up with at that age.
And this, in its turn, gave rise to instinctive mental strivings that found expression in a look of painful inquiry on the blind boy's face. The "potentialities" of sight impression, inherited but not applied, raised strange phantoms in the childish brain—dark, shapeless, undefined, compelling, tormenting effort to attain he knew not what.
It was Nature, rising in blind protest against this individual "exception"—seeking to reassert the universal rule that here was violated.


V


And so, try as he might to eliminate all outer stimuli, Maxim would never be able to destroy the pressure from within, the pressure of a need unsatisfied At best, the care he exercised might succeed only in delaying the awakening of this need, in preventing the too early intensification of the blind child's suffering. For the rest, the boy's unhappy fate must take its course, with all the bitter consequences of his blindness.
And it advanced upon him, his fate, a heavy storm cloud. His inborn liveliness subsided more and more, as the years passed by—like a receding tide; and an inner melancholy, vague as yet, but unremitting, sounded more and more strongly in his soul, and began to affect his character. The laughter that had rung out, in his early childhood, at every vivid new impression, now sounded less and less frequently. He was able to perceive but little of life's laughter, merriment, humour; but was wonderfully sensitive to the shadowy, wistful melancholy that sounded in Nature in his southern homeland, and in the songs of its people. His eyes would fill with tears at the song of how "the grave whispered with the wind, out in the open field", and he liked to go out into the fields himself, to listen to this whispering. More and more, he developed the desire to be alone; and when, his lessons over, he wandered away by himself, none of the household, if it could be helped, would break in on his seclusion. He would go off to some ancient burial mound, out in the steppe, or to his hillock by the river-bank, or to that high rock he knew so well, and lie there listening, with not a sound about him but the rustle of leaves and the whispering of the grass, and, perhaps, the faint sighing of the wind over the steppe. These things harmonised in some very special way with the depths of his soul's mood. To the extent that he was capable of apprehending Nature, it was out here that he understood her best—completely, to the very bottom. Here, Nature did not worry him with insoluble problems. Here, there was this wind pouring itself straight into his soul, and the grass, that seemed to whisper soft words of sympathy; and when his young soul, tuned to the gentle harmony around him, relaxed in Nature's caressing warmth, he would feel something rising in his breast, something that flooded his whole being. He would bury his face, at such moments, in the cool, damp grass, and let the soft tears flow; soft tears, not bitter. Or, sometimes, he would take up his pipe, and forget all the world in wistful melodies congenial to his mood and to the quiet harmony of the steppe.
Any human sound that might break suddenly in upon this mood affected him, always, as a jarring dissonance. And that was natural enough. It is only with the closest, the most kindred of hearts that there can be communion at such moments; and the boy had only one such friend of his own age—the fair-haired little girl from the possessor's estate.
Their friendship grew steadily stronger. It was a completely reciprocal relationship. Evelina brought her friend her tranquillity, her quiet joy in life. She helped him, in his blindness, to perceive new shadings in the life around them. And he—he brought her his sorrow. It was as though her first knowledge of his grief had dealt the little woman's tender heart a deep and cruel wound, and—remove the dagger from the wound that it had dealt, and she would bleed to death. After the poignant sympathy that had hurt her so on that day of their first talk together, on the hillock by the riverside, his company grew daily more essential to her. When they were apart, the wound would begin to bleed, and the pain would fill her heart again; and she would hasten to her friend, to ease her own suffering in unceasing care for him.


VI


On a mild autumn evening both families had gathered on the grassy stretch before the house, talking of one thing and another, and looking up often into the deep blue of the sky, with its glittering sprinkling of stars. The blind boy sat by his mother, as always, with Evelina close by his side.
For a moment, the talk died away. The evening was very quiet. Only the leaves, now and again, would flutter suddenly, and whisper something, and fall still.
And in this moment of silence a brilliant star dropped from somewhere in the dark-blue heights and swept in a flashing curve across the sky, leaving behind it a phosphorescent trace that lingered, only gradually fading, long after the star had disappeared. The little company watched it silently. Anna Mikhailovna, whose hand lay on Petro's arm, felt him suddenly start, and shiver.
"What ... was that?" he asked, turning to her excitedly.
"A star falling, son."
"A star? Of course. I knew it must be a star."
"How could you know that, Petro?"
A sad note of doubt sounded in the mother's voice.
"Ah, but it's true, what he says," put in Evelina. "He knows lots of things ... well, somehow."
"This sensitivity to the outer world, increasing with every passing day, indicated a rapid approach to the critical age that lies between adolescence and youth. As yet, however, Petro's development was quiet enough. It might have seemed, even, that he had resigned himself to his fate; and the strangely even melancholy, never lifting, yet never greatly deepening, that had become habitual to him, now seemed somewhat less. But this was only a temporary lull: one of those breathing spaces that Nature gives us, as though of deliberate purpose—that the young life may muster up its strength, and gird itself to meet new storm and stress. During such lulls new problems accumulate, unnoticed, and gradually mature. One touch—and the soul's tranquillity is thrown into confusion, to its very depths, like the sea before the onslaught of a sudden storm.