Crazy Pashka
I
WITH the directness and cruelty of youth we called him Crazy Pashka, at first among ourselves and later to his face. He did not seem to mind it. In his gentle way he followed us around as a man under a spell might follow his tormentors. Some of our thrusts he did not understand; others he bore for the sake of being near Helen.
‘ Crazy ’ was probably the wrong scientific term to describe his mental condition, and an exaggerated one, but it was the only one we could think of at the time. Constantine, the soul and brain of our gang, had once lucidly described him thus: —
‘It’s not as if Pashka was crazy — really crazy, I mean. It’s only sort of as if he was just — well, just crazy.’
We laughed at his failure to find a more appropriate word, but none of us could do any better, and Crazy Pashka remained so to us until the awful solemnity of the outcome of our last practical joke at his expense raised him to the dignity of his real name.
Pashka was mortally afraid of ghosts. Ghosts were, as a matter of fact, the original reason of his mental derangement. A silly nurse, having for years fed him with scary ghost stories, profited by the occasion of his grandmother’s death to threaten the child. She warned him that if he did not obey her his grandmother’s ghost would get him. Two nights later the boy disobeyed her in some trifling matter, and the woman actually went to the trouble of going into the chilly, severe drawingroom where his grandmother’s body had lain, putting a sheet over her head, and pouncing upon Pashka as he ran along the corridor from his mother’s room to the nursery. The child gave one terrible shriek and collapsed in the arms of the ghost, who was still struggling with her shroud when the terrified parents arrived on the scene. The nurse was discharged, but it did not mend matters — the boy did not recover.
He was very gentle, extremely, excessively obedient, as though obedience were the one commandment he dared not break; but something vital, something absolutely essential to the workings of a sane human mind, was lacking. There was nothing repulsive or beastlike about him, as is so often the case with the mentally ill. His mind was not deformed; it simply was n’t ‘all there.’ Now, at twenty-two, with a body well built and beautifully proportioned, with a face which would have been good-looking if it had not been for the paleness and a perpetually half-scared, half-vacant look, and which even then had a certain appealing attractiveness, he was at the mercy of a gang of thoughtless, callous children.
Individually we were not so bad. Collectively we constituted that most unmanageable and lawless combination — the gang! The old estate, its spaciousness still a part of old Russia, its generous body ungrudgingly bearing the burden of new summer houses thrust upon it by the impoverished owner, afforded almost unlimited possibilities for varied and — to our age thrilling activities. The river wound its dark green, rippling body between the obligingly sloping banks, coming almost to the porch of our house, whispering a promise of coolness, and then running perversely away on to the green lawn beneath the Nelidovs’ verandah. The woods across the river were full of berries and mushrooms, and possessed the added attraction of the ever-present danger of running into the owner’s dogs. The dusty five-mile road to the town of Koltino was to us the ancient highway over which, perchance, mysterious strangers traveled by night pursued by bold robbers. Our leisure was unlimited, our imagination was allowed to have full play.
Our respective families, having found the haven of rest and peace under the old, benevolent trees, left us pretty much alone, but not one of us was left so coldly, so carelessly alone as poor Crazy Pashka. He was staying with some distant relatives, and the distance was so great that the call of blood was barely audible. His mother had died about three years after the tragedy of his childhood, followed soon after by her husband, who had stayed on this earth just long enough to spend the remainder of his fortune and to leave, in dying, a desolate and penniless boy. Pashka’s very defenselessness should have stopped us from teasing him. But it did n’t.
II
Now, when I think of all that happened during that summer and of the results of our mercilessness, I cannot be altogether sorry, but neither can I find any excuse for our conduct. It was the more shameless because Pashka was such easy prey. In the case of Tania, our other victim, the fight was much more even. It is true that we almost drowned her in our effort to get her soaking wet, but at least we got thoroughly drenched ourselves in the process, and on the memorable occasion when we walked her into town with fond hopes of working her to a point of complete exhaustion, she outlasted us easily and came home under full steam, away ahead of our lagging rear guard. Now, in the light of later events, I am inclined to think that she voluntarily underwent some of the trials we inflicted upon her for the sole purpose of distracting our attention from Pashka. At that time we did not go into reasons of things and cheerfully took whatever life offered us in the way of diversion.
Tania was the only human being who stood, or attempted to stand, between Pashka and the world. Her family lived in the house next to Pashka’s, her window facing his, so that she was able to keep an eye on his comings and goings to a certain extent. After the affair of the walk, she had gained our reluctant respect by the simple expedient of beating us at our own game, and hers was the only word which kept us from making life entirely unbearable for Pashka. I believe, and such is the irony of things, that if she had not had to go to the city for a week we should never have gone to the extremes we did in the disreputable performance of the raffle.
The ostensible reason for the raffle was, of course, to help Pashka. He had gone to town and bought himself out of his extremely meagre funds a muchneeded pair of trousers. Upon his return it developed that the trousers were too small for him. He had no money to buy himself another pair, nor had any one of us enough to lend or give him the necessary sum, even had we felt the inclination. The outright sale of the trousers would not do, because we had to collect the full price for them if Pashka was to get himself another pair, and no one that we knew of contemplated buying a new pair at the time. I don’t remember which one of us hit upon the idea of the lottery. By making tickets very cheap we could talk both the summer people and the chaps from the village into buying them, as those who did not win at least would have purchased the right to come to the lottery and enjoy themselves. The cause was ostensibly a righteous one, and I shall allow our parents the benefit of the doubt by assuming that it was the righteousness, rather than the fun, which made them upon that occasion join forces with us.
The next step was to persuade Pashka to part with the trousers. Frankly, we doubted the outcome of our conversation with him so little that we had sold most of the tickets and made all arrangements before we even broached the subject to him on the very day of the raffle. Unexpectedly, he resisted us. Some latent sense of dignity in him rebelled against the ridiculous part we expected him to play. We wanted him to sit on a specially constructed dais, on a chair vividly and expertly decorated by our best ‘artists,’ wrapped up in a sheet as an irrefutable sign that he actually lacked the more conventional garment. People, we insisted, were entitled to the proof. They wanted to feel that they were really supplying a crying need, and, moreover, they wanted the show. The dreaded threat of the ghost getting him on the third night seemed to shake his resistance for a moment, but failed to achieve its usual result of complete submission. Perhaps it was not even a possible understanding of the humiliation as much as acute bashfulness that shrank from a public posing, in whatever guise it might be, that made him so adamant. We could, of course, have overpowered him by sheer force, but that would mean that several boys would have to be holding him on his improvised throne, and where then would be the dramatic appeal for sympathy that we wanted to stage? Constantine craftily shifted from threats to promises.
‘Pashka,’ he said, ‘if you do it, Helen will kiss you. You will, won’t you, Helen?’
Helen giggled and said: ‘All right. I will.’
Helen, fortunately, was a fool. I say fortunately, because if in addition to her overwhelming beauty and complete heartlessness she had had a brain, she would have been a menace. As matters stood, she simply was a nuisance. Her name was almost symbolic. Helen of Troy must have possessed that fatal combination of superlative beauty which fires men’s hearts with indifference that lets them be broken. In an older group, or under different circumstances, she would have created veritable havoc, but in the blessed freedom of the summer fun the wholesomely derisive gang let her tag along mostly because we could use her as bait in our sport with Pashka. Pashka was unable to gauge either her mentality or her emotional standards. To him her divinely perfect face was, as it probably became in her after life for saner and more mature men, the epitome of life’s beauty.
He looked at her for a moment, the intensity of his emotion almost obliterating the frightened vacancy of his gaze. His face, deprived of the ordinary control that hides a man’s soul from strangers, showed the agony of his temptation. He repeated Constantine’s question slowly: —
‘You will, won’t you, Helen?’
‘Why, of course I will, Pashka. I said I would, and I will.’
‘You will kiss me, Helen? You will let me kiss you?’
Helen was becoming annoyed. All this was very silly, and Pashka’s slow heavy speech and his solemnity were beginning to irritate her. However, the feeling of gratification at her own importance made her answer once more: —
‘Yes, I will, Pashka. I promise I will.’
Pashka covered his face with his hands. He always stood when he talked to us, as if the physical sensation of his height were his only weapon in dealing with us. He was standing now, swaying slightly from left to right, his hands twitching, his breath coming audibly and brokenly. For a moment we were awed into an unwonted silence. If at that moment some sensible, sensitive person had said a few adequate words, I think we would have retreated. But no such person arrived, and, though silent, we stood our ground. At last Pashka uncovered his face. If possible, it was paler than usual. He nodded his consent and walked away.
III
That evening at the lottery our noisy activity was mostly a reaction against the brief interval of subdued quiet of the afternoon. We jumped, and ran around, and shouted, calling everybody’s attention to the grotesque figure on the dais. There sat Pashka, arrayed in his sheet, with the historic trousers hanging from a tree near by. Some lanterns remaining from a garden party ware donated to us and flickered ineffectively in the long, grayish twilight of a summer evening.
For some reason we were not getting as much fun as we expected from the raffle. None of the summer people laughed, and the guffaws of the village beaus sounded coarse even to our not very sensitive ears. The complete immobility of Pashka on the dais, the tense whiteness of his face above the white sheet, lent a tragic earnestness to the scene which our bustling about could not quite dispel. We were actually glad when the raffle was over and one of the village boys triumphantly carried the loot away, accompanied by his half-envious, halfscornful companions. The grown-ups strolled away, and we were left with a sum of money adequately covering not only another pair of trousers, but even the necessary trip to town, with Pashka still motionless on the dais, and with a feeling that somehow we had missed fire.
Perhaps it was that feeling of dissatisfaction that made Helen behave as she did. I cannot explain otherwise such complete lack of fair sportsmanship, such careless breaking of a promise. Whatever it was, she refused to kiss Pashka. She walked right past him, the perfect oval of her face gleaming in the lantern light. He sat there too stunned to get up and follow her. Finally, goaded into motion by our teasing, he got up, descended from the dais, threw off the sheet, revealing a perfectly conventional though badly worn pair of trousers, walked a fewsteps, and then a great sob broke from him. He fell down on the damp evening grass and wept bitterly, not as children cry, but as men weep in moments of unbearable anguish.
The thin whistle of the evening train had sounded about half an hour before, and we were not so much surprised as startled when Tania’s swift steps crunched on the sandy path. She saw Pashka’s sobbing figure on the ground and ran to him. For a second, before she knelt by his side and lifted his head into her lap, she turned her face toward us, and it was white with rage. She took the picture in at a glance — the dais, the crazily decorated chair, the discarded sheet, and our sullen, shamefaced countenances. But at the moment she had no time to spare for learning the details, her energy bent upon quieting Pashka. She was stroking his head gently, wiping his face with her quickly soaked handkerchief, lifting him into a more comfortable position, until finally he was sitting by her side, his head on her shoulder, his shoulders encircled by her tenderly firm arm.
‘Pashenka, stop crying. Why are you crying so hard, Pasha?’ She was n’t really asking him, nor expecting him to answer her question. She was merely speaking to soothe him, as one might soothe a frightened child with the steady monotone of a familiar voice.
But so recent, so great was his disappointment that he was shocked into coherence:—
‘Helen would not kiss me. She promised me she would if I did, and then she would n’t.’
‘If you did what, Pasha? — One of you boys just come here and tell me what you did to him this time.’
Constantine, nobly carrying the responsibilities as well as the prerogatives of the alleged leader of the gang, stepped closer and explained the matter to Tania. It is true that he dwelt with greater emphasis upon our desire to help Pashka out with the raffle than upon our insistence on the unnecessary humiliation of this evening’s performance. But Tania disregarded our intentions and stuck to facts. Then, after a brief but tremendously expressive ‘You beasts!’ she turned to Helen, whose natural curiosity had prevailed over the pose of nonchalance acquired so recently, and who had come back to the scene, attracted by the commotion.
Tania’s voice came cold and low, like chunks of ice falling: —
‘Come here, you mean little fool. Come here this minute, I tell you!’ There was something so insistent, almost implacable in her voice that Helen obeyed. She came, reluctantly and sullenly, but she came.
‘Now, kiss him.’
Helen bent her face toward Pashka, bringing her smooth, cool cheek near his still trembling lips. Pashka looked at her out of his tear-swollen eyes. A violent shudder shook his body, then he turned away and hid his face in Tania’s shoulder. To her anxious question, —
‘Why, what’s the matter now, Pasha?’
‘I wanted her to kiss me kindly,’ he whispered.
Tania waved us away, and remained sitting there, with her slender, maidenly, motherly arms around Pashka.
IV
For three days after that we left Pashka alone. Partly it was because the still, small voice, aided by Tania’s whole-hearted contempt, was faintly murmuring within most of us. The other, and perhaps more important, reason was that temporarily our powers of invention had deserted us. It was Helen who for the first time in the history of that eventful summer supplied the brains of the gang. Her suggestion was that we tell Pashka that she was in the vault under the old church, and in danger, and that only Pashka could save her. Then, when he was safely inside, we were to lock him up and leave him there until dark.
At that time it struck us merely as a brilliant idea. Now, when I think it over, I am sure that her main purpose was not to have Pashka locked up in the vault and scared out of his poor remaining wits, but to test her power over him. The vault to him was the most dreadful place on earth, worse even than the cemetery, where at least one had the space and the sky, and from which escape was possible. Whatever it was, she started us on this our last game with Pashka.
We waited until after dinner, conscientiously refraining from adding the physical discomfort of hunger to the mental agony we were preparing to inflict upon poor Pashka. About seven o’clock I ran to him and breathlessly declared that Helen was in the vault and that her salvation depended solely upon Pashka’s courage and promptness.
A trick like that could never have been played upon a sane person, as to the most limited mentality it would have been clear that if we knew of Helen’s whereabouts, and the supposed danger she was in, there was no earthly reason why we could n’t rescue her ourselves, or, if the thing proved to be beyond our power, call upon some of the grown-ups. No such doubts came to Pashka. Helen was in the vault. Helen needed him. Perhaps his very dread of the place made her danger seem more real to him. He ran toward the church.
The old white church and the newer brick one stood on either side of the road, mute reminders of the age of large and costly gestures. Once upon a time the brick church was built spitefully by a neighbor who had quarreled with the builder and donor of the white church. For a while the services were held in both churches by the warring factions. Then peace was reëstablished and the newer church hospitably housed both parties. Gradually the custom was established of opening the stately white building only upon special, more solemn occasions, or when the vault underneath received another of its irrevocably permanent tenants. Even in the daytime the place had the awe-inspiring mysteriousness of abandoned buildings. At night I doubt that any one of us would have ventured inside unfortified by the warm and living presence of his companions. That was the place where we expected Pashka, with his peculiar, sharp terror of the dead, to meet the darkness in solitude.
No knight could have rushed more gallantly to the rescue of his ladylove than this poor afflicted boy ran to Helen’s aid. He did not call upon any of us for help. His long legs were carrying him with unwonted rapidity toward the trap, his voice ringing out earnestly, persistently: —
‘I am coming, Helen! Don’t worry, Helen, I am coming!’
I believe, at least I honestly want to believe, that each one of us, if left to himself, would not have gone through with our noble project. But in a gang the fear of ridicule is one of the strongest emotions, and when Pashka ran through the door obligingly opened for him beforehand, we clanged it to and shot the heavy bolt into its rusty place. For a while Pashka still believed that Helen was somewhere in the vault, and he ran around too deeply anxious on her account to be worried on his own. Gradually the realization of his complete aloneness dawned upon him, and we heard him crying to be let out. The more pitiful, the more terrified his cries became, the more we giggled in our hiding place close to his prison. Really and truly we did not intend to leave him there for a long time. An hour seemed to us a fair period for a joke, but at that time someone called us from the garden for a vastly important discussion of the next day’s picnic.
In the excitement we forgot about Pashka.
V
About eleven o’clock my brother and I were awakened by Tania’s voice calling us through the window: —
‘Pashka hasn’t come home yet. Where did you put him?’
We looked at each other in guilty silence. Three minutes later, sketchily though adequately dressed, we were walking toward the church, with Tania grimly leading the way and Constantine, whom we had ruthlessly roused by a rock thrown in his window, bringing up the rear. Tania was carrying a flashlight in her hand. Constantine and I carried the garden lanterns, and altogether I think we must have made a strange procession. At the church door Tania handed the flashlight to me and herself unfastened the bolt. She ran down the musty steps into the dank air of the vault and almost fell over Pashka.
He lay on his back, his arm twisted queerly over his head, as if in falling he had been trying to shield himself from some threatening menace. He must have struck the stone steps with his forehead, and the blood was trickling slowly down his face. His face had always been pale; now, under this thin stream of red, it was the pallor of death. We could see or hear no breath coming, and the immobility of his body was the final motionless surrender of man.
Tania put her hand on his heart. She must have been sorely tempted to punish us for our cruel stupidity, but the sight of our petrified and thoroughly repentant faces moved her into saying, ‘He is not dead. Just fainted. Get me some water.’
We flew to do her errands, and in about half an hour we saw the slight twitching of the mouth, the faintest color supplanting the deadly pallor of the cheek. As I think about this midnight adventure I wonder why Tania never asked his relatives for help where Pashka was concerned. Did she feel the vast, perhaps even slightly hostile indifference which they felt toward their unwelcome charge? Anyway, just as she did in every small misunderstanding, in this crisis she was handling the matter herself. She might have lacked experience and technique in dealing with people who have fainted, but her eagerness, her concentration, were immense. She worked silently until Pashka finally opened his eyes and moved his head. Then she stretched herself on the floor and cried.
She was crying in a funny, hurried way, as if she had to get the thing done and over with, and proceed with her work. She was crying openly and audibly, with an ever-increasing intensity.
Pashka looked around. His eyes traveled around the vault, wandered across our bewildered faces, and stayed on Tania’s golden head. Our bewilderment was manifest and inevitable. Out of Pashka’s eyes a stranger looked at us in the tricky light of the lanterns. Eyes sad, but neither scared nor vacant, were gazing steadily, unfamiliarly, upon the strange scene. Tania, with her face in the hollow of her arm on the floor, had missed the miracle. She did not become aware of it until a voice, a man’s voice, low and slightly hesitating, broke the silence.
‘Don’t cry. I am better.’
She raised her head quickly, and her puzzled glance met his. With a cry she threw her arms around his neck and pressed his head to her breast.
‘I knew it! Oh, I always knew it! I always told them so! Only I thought it was care and kindness that would bring you back. Oh, Pavel, my dear, my poor darling!’ Tania had stopped crying and was now bent upon getting us home, above all upon getting Pavel home. In her overwhelming gladness and gratitude she almost forgot that we were not the conscious benefactors, but a crowd of silly boys who, but for the grace of God, would have been the unwitting murderers of the man had she not missed him in time and gone to his rescue.
We were only too willing to forget it with her. We helped Pavel to rise; we even foolishly tried to brush off his clothes with our hands, so hard were we trying to be of service. The cut on his forehead had proved quite superficial, and after Tania had washed the blood off his face it lost its aspect of a deadly wound. He stood unsteadily, one of his arms across Constantine’s shoulders, the other supported by the slender, superbly dependable pillar of Tania’s young body. Our relief was so great that we looked at each other and sniggered. If we had been older we should have fallen on our knees and thanked God for His goodness!
With our eager help Pavel walked up the steps of the vault, saying nothing after his first sentence, acquainting himself silently with his surroundings, as though he now saw everything for the first time. Once upon the open road, in the sweet night air, though he was obviously not yet completely recovered, his steps became more purposeful. By some mutual unspoken agreement we led him toward our house, instead of his own. My parents, unaware that anything unusual had happened, had quietly gone to bed, and we tiptoed excitedly into the room which my brother and I shared in a state of amicable warfare. We put Pavel in my bed and I crawled in with my brother. Constantine had reluctantly departed. He would have preferred to stay with us, but in his new rôle of the rescuer he felt in duty bound to see Tania home across the dark stretch of the garden. Pavel fell asleep almost at once. My brother and I whispered long into the night.
VI
Morning came with the hot intensity of July. We awakened early, and saw that Pavel was already awake. He was sitting up in bed, his eyes wandering around the room, a puzzled expression on his face. There was in him the earnestness of a newborn human being who had the whole universe to discover. And miraculously, wonderfully, he had regained his ability to discover it!
We jumped out of bed, dressed hurriedly, and ran to fetch Tania. She was, we felt, the first human being outside of ourselves entitled to see this new creature in the light of day. Moreover, we did not quite know just what to do with him. She came immediately, and we saw by the faint blue hollows under her eyes that she too had not slept much that night. She went over to Pavel and a smile illumined his face. It seemed as though out of the whole strange world her kindness alone reached him in a familiar soothing manner and linked him with himself. She stroked his head in her old way, when suddenly he took her hand into his and pressed his lips to it. It was a gesture of gratitude, of tribute, of allegiance, and faintly even we in our immaturity felt it to be a sign of something else, something greater, more potent than all of those three together.
It is queer how the great and the trivial things of life are mixed inextricably in one solid pattern. This was perhaps the most important moment in the lives of those two people — a promise, a pledge, an alliance. It was also eight o’clock on a bright summer morning, and none of us had had any breakfast. So we hustled Tania out of the room and helped Pavel to dress, and soon walked out on the cool, airy verandah. Mother was there, and I am still deeply grateful to her for the selfcontrol she displayed on that occasion. Nothing in her expression or manner showed that there was a certain strangeness in Pavel’s appearance at our breakfast table. I later learned that she had had a brief preparation for this encounter, as Tania, after leaving Pavel to our ministrations, had gone to her and told her the essential facts of the past night’s happenings. She then proceeded to Pavel’s home to inform his relations as to his whereabouts and the change in his condition.
‘Not that I think they will care,’ she rather bitterly remarked, ‘ but still I think they ought to know.’
She also, upon Mother’s advice, sent a wire to a nerve specialist, asking him to come and examine Pavel. The specialist arrived in due time, made his examination, and ordered complete quiet, with a gradual broadening of experience by easy stages. Somehow we felt that just because his eyes first fell on us, upon his awakening in the vault, he in some mysterious way belonged to us. Just as before he had been our victim, so he now became our hero, but anyway he was ours. We tried — and succeeded without a great effort — to have him installed in our room, and constituted ourselves his bodyguard, with the novel and original motto: ‘Faithful unto death.’ We whispered in corners, and conspired against the world. We granted audiences and rejected visitors. One visitor especially we rejected with venom which only our amazing forgetfulness of the part we ourselves had played in the recent events could justify. This visitor, needless to say, was Helen. We felt that she above all had failed Pashka in a meaner, more contemptible way than all our teasing. With the gusto of eyewitnesses we told each other how Pashka refused to kiss her. Constantine especially excelled in the accuracy and vividness of his narrative : —
‘And then Helen came crawling up and stuck her cheek out for him to kiss. And he would n’t! No. He turned his head away and just would n’t look at her. And she sat there and cried, and cried, and begged him to kiss her. And he would n’t! No, sir. He would n’t even look at her!’
Constantine waxed dramatic and showed how Helen groveled and how Pashka turned his head away. But I think that on our part all this was sheer bravado. We were very much afraid to have Pavel see Helen. She seemed to us to menace the new peace of his recently reinstated mind, to jeopardize his recovery, to endanger the beautiful warmth of his feeling for Tania.
Helen, in short, was the serpent in the garden. We could, however, no longer stall off their meeting on the day when Pavel left the confines of our home and went for a walk along the river bank. Helen must have been lying in wait for him, for she ran to him right away. Pavel was walking slowly, with his hand on Tania’s arm, his bodyguard behind him. We held our breath. This was the dramatic meeting of our hero with his erstwhile ladylove, for whose sake he had been ready to endure humiliation, to face danger. He took her outstretched hand and stood there awkwardly, holding on to Tania’s arm with his other hand. Tania stood still, so still that her silence had body and weight, the tense silence of fear. Pavel was looking at Helen. No one at any time could help looking at Helen, but on that morning she had the intensity of beauty which had set out to conquer. He looked at her slender white arms and hands, which even then, at sixteen, had the expressiveness, the grace, of a woman’s hands. He looked at the faultless contour of her face, with its delicate, perfect coloring, and turned away. He shivered slightly, as a man might who had touched something unexpectedly and repulsively cold.
‘If you don’t mind, I shall go now,’ he said. ‘I am not very strong yet.’
‘Why, Pasha, don’t you care to talk to me? Don’t you remember how you wanted to kiss me?’ Helen was surprised and offended.
‘Did I ever want to kiss you? I don’t now. Please, let me go.‘
He moved on and we saw the tenseness go out of Tania’s body. She relaxed suddenly as if a great weight had been lifted off her shoulders, and laughed. It was the unrestrained, breath-taking laughter of pure joy. She turned her face to Pavel, and the light in it made us feel as if inadvertently we had looked upon the forbidden, the sacred places of the human soul. We stole quietly away. Pavel no longer needed a bodyguard. The danger had remained behind; his garden lay safe and green before him.
People seldom grow up gradually. There are jumps and leaps in their development that come after great crises of life, after shocks, disappointments, discoveries, the sight of death. It has been my great privilege, without any merit on my part, — even, if I may say so, quite the contrary, — to grow up a little by watching a man come to life.