In bad company

Chapter Four

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.