CHAPTER XVIII

As soon as spring came to the city I started out to tramp to Siberia, for I had heard that country highly praised, but on my way I was stopped by a man who strengthened my soul for the rest of my life and showed me the true path to God.

I met him on the road between Perm and Verk-hotur.

I was lying on the edge of a wood and had built a fire to boil water. It was noon, very hot, and the air was filled with a rosinlike woody smell, oily and sappy. It was difficult to breathe. Even the birds felt hot, and they hid themselves in the depth of the wood and sang there happily while they arranged their lives.

It was quiet on the edge of the wood. It seemed to me that everything would soon melt underneath the sun and that the trees and the rocks and my own stultified body would flow in a many-colored, thick stream upon the earth.

A man was approaching, coming from the Perm side, singing in a loud, trembling voice. I raised my head and listened. I saw a little pilgrim, in a white cassock, with a tea-kettle at his belt and a calf-skin knapsack and a sauce-pan on his back. He walked briskly and nodded and smiled to me from afar.

He was the usual pilgrim. There are many such, and all of them are harmful. Making pilgrimages is a paying business for them. They are boorish and ignorant and are inveterate liars and drunkards, and are not beyond stealing. I disliked them from the bottom of my heart.

He came up to me, took off his cap, shook his head, and his hair danced drolly, while he chattered like a magpie.

"Peace to you, young man. What heat! It is twenty-two degrees hotter than hell."

"Are you long from there?" I asked.

"About six hundred years."

His voice was vibrant and gay, his head small, his forehead high, and his face was covered with fine wrinkles, like a spider-web. His gray beard looked clean and his brown eyes shone with gold, like a young man's.

"He is a merry dog," I thought to myself.

But he continued chattering. "The Urals; there is where you find beauty! The Lord is a great master in decorating the earth. He knows how to arrange the woods and the trees and the mountains well."

He took his tramping gear off, moving quickly and briskly. He saw that my kettle was boiling over and he lifted it off the fire, and asked like an old comrade:

"Shall I pour out my tea, or will we drink yours?" Before I had time to answer, he added: "Well, let's drink mine. I've got good tea. A merchant gave it to me. It's expensive."

I smiled. "You're spry," I said to him.

"That's nothing," he answered. "I am nearly dead from the heat. But wait till I'm rested. Then I will crease out your wrinkles for you."

There was something about him which reminded me of Savelko, and I wanted to joke with him. But in about five minutes I listened to his words open-mouthed. They were strangely familiar; yet unheard-of, and it seemed to me that my own heart, not he, was singing the joy of the sunny days:

"Look! Is this not a holiday? Is it not paradise? The mountains rise toward the sun, rejoicing, and the woods climb to the summits of the hills, and the little blades of grass under your feet strive winged up toward the light of life. All sing psalms of joy, but you, man, you, master of the earth, why do you sit here, morose?"

"What strange bird is that?" I asked myself. But I said to him, trying to draw him out:

"But what if I am filled with unhappy thoughts?" He pointed to the earth. "What is that?"

"The earth."

"No. Look higher."

"You mean the grass?"

"Higher still."

"The shadow?"

"It is the shadow of your body," he said, "and your thoughts are the shadow of our soul. What are you afraid of?"

"I am afraid of nothing."

"You are lying. If you are not afraid, your thoughts would be bold. Unhappiness gives birth to fear, and fear comes from lack of faith. That is the way it is. Drink some tea."

He poured tea into the cups and spoke without interruption:

"It seems to me that I have seen you before. Were you ever in Valaan?"

"I was."

"When? No, it was not there. It seems to me that you were red-headed when I saw you there. You have a striking face. It must have been in Solofki that I saw you."

"I was never in Solofki."

"You were never there? That is too bad. It is an ancient monastery and very beautiful. You ought to go there."

"Then you never saw me before?" I said, and it hurt me to find it so.

"What is the difference?" he cried out. "If I didn't see you before, I see you now; and at that time the other one must have resembled you. Isn't that just the same?"

I laughed. "What do you mean, 'just the same'?"

"Why not?"

"Because I am I, and the other one is the other one."

"Are you better than he?"

"I don't know."

"I don't know either."

I looked at him and was overcome with impatience. I wanted him to speak and speak without end. He poured out his tea and continued talking hastily:

"Yes, the other one was a one-eyed fellow, and it made him wretched. All the lame and the crippled, whether in body or in mind, are the essence of egoism. 'I am crippled,' they say, or 'I am lame; but you people, don't you dare notice it.' He was that kind of a fellow. He said to me,' All people are rascals. When they see that I have one eye they say to me, "you are one-eyed." That is why they are scoundrels.' 'My dear boy,' I said to him, 'you are a scoundrel and a rascal yourself, and perhaps a fool also. You can take your choice. Understand this: The important thing is not how people look at you but how you look at people. That is why, my friend, we become one-eyed or blind--because we look at other people, hunting for their dark spots and put out our own light in their darkness. If you would light up the other's darkness with your light, the world would be pleasant for you. Man sees no good in any one else but himself, that is why the whole world is a wretched wilderness for him.'"

He laughed and looked at me, and I listened to him as one who is lost in the wood at night and hears a far-off bell and is afraid that he made a mistake; that perhaps it is only the cry of an owl.

I understood that he had seen much; that he had overcome much in himself. But it seemed to me that he did not think much of me, that he was joking with me, and that his young eyes made fun of me. Since my experience with Anthony I seldom trust a man's smile any longer.

I asked him who he was.

"I am called Jehudiel. I am a cheerful idiot for others and a good friend to myself."

"Are you from the clergy?"

"I was a priest for some time, but was unfro'cked and was put in a monastery at Suzdal for six years. You want to know why? Because I preached sermons in church which the people, in the simplicity of their souls, interpreted too literally. They were whipped for it and I was convicted. And thus the affair ended. What did I preach? I don't remember now. It was a long time ago, eighteen years, and one can forget in that time. I have had various thoughts but none of them ever came to anything."

He laughed and in each wrinkle of his face the laughter played. He looked about him as if the mountains and the woods were created for him.

When it became cooler we went on farther together, and on the way he asked me about myself.

"Who are you?"

Again, like that time before Anthony, I wished to place my former days before my eyes and to look upon their checkered face. I spoke about my childhood, about Larion and Savelko, and the old man laughed and shouted.

"Eh, what good people! The Lord's fools, what! Those were dear, true flowers of the Russian soil, real God-loving ones."

I did not understand this praise and his joy looked strange to me, but he could hardly walk from laughter. He stopped, threw his head back and shouted and called straight up to heaven, as if he had a friend there with whom he wished to share his joy. I said to him kindly:

"You resemble Savelko somewhat."

"Resemble!" he cried. "It is always good," he said, "to resemble some one. Eh, dear boy, if only the orthodox church had not ruined us ages ago, how different it would be for the living ones on the Russian soil now."

His speech was dark to me.

I told him about Titoff. He seemed to see my father-in-law before his eyes and he expressed himself freely about him.

"Such a rascal! I have seen many such. They are rapacious bugs, but foolish and cowardly."

When he heard my story about Anthony, he became thoughtful and then said:

"So, that was a doubting Thomas. Well, not every Thomas is a genius. Some of them are stupidity itself."

He drove a bumble-bee from him and lectured it. "Go away, go away from here. Such impoliteness, to fly straight into the eyes. The devil take you!"

I listened to his words attentively, missing nothing. It seemed to me that they were children of deep thought. I spoke to him as before a confessor, except that I hesitated in mentioning God. I was afraid, and I regretted something. God's image had become tarnished in my soul at this time, and I wanted to polish it from the dust of the days, and I saw that I cleaned up to the hollow places and my heart shuddered with pain.

The old man nodded his head and encouraged me.

"Never mind; don't be afraid. If you keep silent you only lie to yourself, not to me. Speak. Regret nothing. For if you destroy, you will create something new."

He responded to my words like an echo and I became more and more at ease with him.