Through Russia

Sometimes hopping along on one leg, and smiling, and waving his arms, and causing the ample folds and sleeves of his smock to flutter until he seemed to be moving in the midst of a nimbus, Nilushka would sing in a halting whisper the childish ditty:

Oh Lo-ord, pardon me!
Wo-olves run,
And do-ogs run,
And the hunters wait
To kill the wolves.
Oh Lo-ord, pardon me!

Meanwhile, he would diffuse a cheering atmosphere of happiness with which no one in the locality had anything in common. For he was ever a lighthearted, winning, essentially pure innocent of the type which never fails to evoke good-natured smiles and kindly emotions. Indeed, as he roamed the streets, the suburb seemed to live its life with less clamour, to appear more decent of outward guise, since the local folk looked upon the imbecile with far more indulgence than they did upon their own children; and he was intimate with, and beloved by, even the worst. Probably the reason for this was that the semblance of flight amid an atmosphere of golden dust which was his combined with his straight, slender little figure to put all who beheld him in mind of churches, angels, God, and Paradise. At all events, all viewed him in a manner contemplative, interested, and more than a little deferential.

A curious fact was the circumstance that whenever Nilushka sighted a stray gleam from a piece of glass, or the glitter of a morsel of copper in sunlight, he would halt dead where he was, turn grey with the ashiness of death, lose his smile, and remain dilating to an unnatural extent his clouded and troubled eyes. And so, with his whole form distorted with horror, and his thin hand crossing himself, and his knees trembling, and his smock fluttering around his frail wisp of a body, and his features growing stonelike, he would, for an hour or more, continue to stand, until at length someone laid a hand in his, and led him home.

The tale had it that, in the first instance, born "soft-headed," he finally lost his reason, five years before the period of which I am writing, when a great fire occurred, and that thenceforth anything, save sunlight, that in any way resembled fire plunged him into this torpor of dumb dread. Naturally the people of the suburb devoted to him a great deal of attention.

"There goes God's fool," would be their remark. "It will not be long before he dies and becomes a Saint, and we fall down and worship him."

Yet there were persons who would go so far as to crack rude jests at his expense. For instance, as he would be skipping along, with his childish voice raised in his little ditty, some idler or another would shout from a window, or through the cranny of a fence:

"Hi, Nilushka! Fire! Fire!"

Whereupon the angel-faced imbecile would sink to earth as though his legs had been cut away at the knee from under him, and he would huddle, frantically clutching his golden head in his permanently soiled hands, and exposing his youthful form to the dust, under the nearest house or fence.

Only then would the person who had given him the fright repent, and say with a laugh:

"God in heaven, what a stupid lad this is!"

And, should that person have been asked why he had thus terrified the boy, he would probably have replied:

"Because it is such sport to do so. As a lad who cannot feel things as other human beings do, he inclines folk to make fun of him."

As for the omniscient Antipa Vologonov, the following was his frequent comment on Nilushka:

"Christ also had to walk in terror. Christ also was persecuted. Why so? Because ever He endured in rectitude and strength. Men need to learn what is real and what is unreal. Many are the sins of earth come of the fact that the seeming is mistaken for the actual, and that men keep pressing forward when they ought to be waiting, to be proving themselves."

Hence Vologonov, like the rest, bestowed much attention upon Nilushka, and frequently held conversations with him.

"Do you now pray to God," he said once as he pointed to heaven with one of his crooked fingers, and with the disengaged hand clasped his dishevelled, variously coloured beard.

Whereupon Nilushka glanced fearfully at the mysteriously pointing finger, and, plucking sharply at his forehead, shoulders, and stomach with two fingers and a thumb, intoned in thin, plaintive accents:

"Our Father in Heaven – "

"WHICH ART in Heaven."

"Yes, in the Heaven of Heavens."

"Ah, well! God will understand. He is the friend of all blessed ones." [Idiots; since persons mentally deficient are popularly deemed to stand in a peculiarly close relation to the Almighty.]

Again, great was Nilushka's interest in anything spherical. Also, he had a love for handling the heads of children; when, softly approaching a group from behind, he would, with his bright, quiet smile, lay slender, bony fingers upon a close-cropped little poll; with the result that the children, not relishing such fingering, would take alarm at the same, and, bolting to a discreet distance, thence abuse the idiot, put out their tongues at him, and drawl in a nasal chorus:

"Nilka, the bottle-neck, the neck without a nape to it" [Probably the attractiveness of this formula lay rather in the rhyming of the Russian words: "Nilka, butilka, bashka bez zatilka!" than in their actual meaning].

Yet their fear of him was in no way reciprocated, nor, for that matter, did they ever assault him, despite the fact that occasionally they would throw an old boot or a chip of wood in his direction-throw it aimlessly, and without really desiring to hit the mark aimed at.

Also, anything circular – for example, a plate or the wheel of a toy, engaged Nilushka's attention and led him to caress it as eagerly as he did globes and balls. Evidently the rotundity of the object was the point that excited his interest. And as he turned the object over and over, and felt the flat part of it, he would mutter:

"But what about the other one?"

What "the other one" meant I could never divine. Nor could Antipa. Once, drawing the idiot to him, he said:

"Why do you always say 'What about the other one'?"

Troubled and nervous, Nilushka merely muttered some unintelligible reply as his fingers turned and turned about the circular object which he was holding.

"Nothing," at length he replied.

"Nothing of what?

"Nothing here."

"Ah, he is too foolish to understand," said Vologonov with a sigh as his eyes darkened in meditative fashion.

"Yes, though it may seem foolish to say so," he added, "some people would envy him."

"Why should they?"

"For more than one reason. To begin with, he lives a life free from care – he is kept comfortably, and even held in respect. Since no one can properly understand him, and everyone fears him, through a belief that folk without wit, the 'blessed ones of God,' are more especially the Almighty's favourites than persons possessed of understanding. Only a very wise man could deal with such a matter, and the less so in that it must be remembered that more than one 'blessed one' has become a Saint, while some of those possessed of understanding have gone – well, have gone whither? Yes, indeed!"

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

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

"He is so, damn him!"

"Then who is he?"

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

"A monk."

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

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

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

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