The hero of the novel is the spiritual pastor of one of the mountain parishes of Switzerland, called one day to a wretched hut in a spot untrodden by men, to pray before the bed of a dying woman. In the room there were only a kindhearted neighbor and a little servant girl. After performing his religious duty he took up his civil duty concerning the burial, the family, and the effects...
The whole legacy was a blind girl, who had grown up in the house of her aunt; and the aunt, being deaf, had never troubled to speak with her. The two lived in an unbroken silence, and that upbringing amounted to setting food before the blind girl at its appointed hours, leading her from her filthy bed to the stove in the season of snow and bitter cold, or pushing her toward the door of the hut, when the snows melted, to warm herself in the heat of the sun—
And without a thought for the practical consequences — his wife's anger, the expenses of his house and his five children, the smallness of his salary — he wrapped the girl in a blanket, set her in his one-horse carriage, and turned back home. Beside him she was a mass of flesh without a soul, and he kept saying to himself: Is she asleep? What difference is there, for her, between sleeping and waking? My Lord! Surely within this mute body there is a soul waiting for a ray of Thy mercy to touch it! My Lord! Wilt Thou grant my love to drive from her the darkness of this night?
When he reached the house his wife cried out:
What have you taken upon yourself now? Are the cares and the costs of five children not enough for us?
He lifts the blind girl down from the carriage and leads her into the house; and no sooner does he let go of her hand for a minute than he hears her screaming. There was no human note in her voice; she made mutterings like the whining of newborn dogs. He tries to seat her on a chair and she drops to the floor, all in a heap; he walks her over beside the stove, and only when she huddles down next to it, as she used to do in the hut, does her calm come back.
“Nothing holds true but the true” is an old proverb that will stay forever new and in force in politics, economics, morals, art, and literature. People do not call a man a “world author” unless he has fed everyone who hungers for literature and quenched everyone who thirsts for truth, under every sun and at every moment.
Among these is André Gide. On the morrow of his death people set about revisiting his masterpieces, and I set about choosing, for my readers, men and women, of “The Woman's Voice,” a masterpiece in which he reached the very edge of the miraculous when, with the simplicity of children, he portrayed the most violent tragedy that can be cast upon some of those who have been denied the blessing of sight.
I could go far in describing the masterpiece LA SYMPHONIE PASTORALE, but I will not draw out the introduction.
His wife obeys the call of goodness, the call of the heart, and hastens to help him; then she obeys the call of reason and says:
“And what are you going to do” with this? The contempt of it wounds him; he lays his hand on the blind girl's forehead and says to his wife and children, who had formed a circle around him:
“I have brought home the lost sheep.”
The storm breaks. He orders the children out; the wife returns to laying out her troubles, and he replies, acknowledging the weight of the burdens on her shoulders and quickening the sense of goodness in her heart, until she relents and sets about washing the girl and cutting her hair, which was alive with vermin; then she takes her to the bath, cleans her body, and dresses her in clothes of her eldest daughter's.
In the days that followed, the good pastor fell into deep despair. He had dreamed of bringing a