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“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.