V -- THE IDIOT

The man who now entered the room was about fifty years old, with a pale,
attenuated face pitted with smallpox, long grey hair, and a scanty beard
of a reddish hue. Likewise he was so tall that, on coming through the
doorway, he was forced not only to bend his head, but to incline his
whole body forward. He was dressed in a sort of smock that was much
torn, and held in his hand a stout staff. As he entered he smote this
staff upon the floor, and, contracting his brows and opening his mouth
to its fullest extent, laughed in a dreadful, unnatural way. He had lost
the sight of one eye, and its colourless pupil kept rolling about and
imparting to his hideous face an even more repellent expression than it
otherwise bore.

"Hullo, you are caught!" he exclaimed as he ran to Woloda with little
short steps and, seizing him round the head, looked at it searchingly.
Next he left him, went to the table, and, with a perfectly serious
expression on his face, began to blow under the oil-cloth, and to make
the sign of the cross over it, "O-oh, what a pity! O-oh, how it hurts!
They are angry! They fly from me!" he exclaimed in a tearful choking
voice as he glared at Woloda and wiped away the streaming tears with his
sleeve, His voice was harsh and rough, all his movements hysterical and
spasmodic, and his words devoid of sense or connection (for he used no
conjunctions). Yet the tone of that voice was so heartrending, and his
yellow, deformed face at times so sincere and pitiful in its expression,
that, as one listened to him, it was impossible to repress a mingled
sensation of pity, grief, and fear.

This was the idiot Grisha. Whence he had come, or who were his parents,