“Grandfather, is there such a thing as hell, do you think?”

He raised his head and said sternly and reproachfully:

“Hell? How can that be? How can you? God—and hell? Is that possible? The two don’t go together, friend. It’s a fraud. You people who can read invented this to frighten folk, it’s all priests’ nonsense. Why one should want to frighten people, I cannot see. Besides, no one is really afraid of that hell of yours.…”

“And what about the devil? Where does he live, in that case?”

“Don’t you joke about that.…”

“I’m not joking.…”

“Well—well…”

He waved the skirts of his coat once more over the fire, and said softly:

“Don’t sneer at him. To everyone his own burden. The little Frenchie might have been right about the devil bowing down to the Lord in due time. A priest told me the story of the prodigal son from the Scriptures one day—I can remember it well. It seems to me that it is the story of the devil himself. It’s he, no other but he, that is the prodigal son.…”

He swayed over the fire.

“Hadn’t you better go to sleep?” I suggested.

The old man agreed:

“Yes, it’s time…”

He readily turned on his side, curled himself up, pulled the coat over his head—and was silent. The branches cracked and hissed on the coals, the smoke rose in fanciful streamers into the darkness of the night.

I watched the old man and thought to myself:

“Is he a saint, owning the treasure of limitless love for the world?”

I remembered the lame girl with the sorrowful eyes, in the motley frock, and life itself appeared to me in the image of that girl: she was standing in front of a hideous little god and he, who knew only how to love, put all the enchanting power of that love into one word of consolation:

“Dee-ear.…”

1923.