Short Fiction, Vladimir Korolenko [finding audrey TXT] 📗

power grew within the woman’s heart; and choosing the time when her boy was playing in the evening in some remote garden-path, or perhaps out for a walk, she would seat herself at the piano. At first her attempts were unsatisfactory; her hands seemed powerless to evoke a response to her conception, and the tones of the instrument failed to interpret her emotions. But soon she perceived that the ease and freedom with which she could express her feelings through the medium of those tones were gradually increasing. The Hohòl’s lessons had not been without avail; while the mother’s love, and an intuitive perception of the potent charm that swayed the heart of her boy helped her to profit by them. Her difficult and brilliant themes had given place to pensive songs; the sad Ukraine “meditation” echoed in plaintive tones through the dimly lighted rooms, adding a tenderness to the mother’s heart.

At last she gained confidence to enter into an open contest; and one evening a strange combat went on between the manor and the stable. From the shaded barn with its overhanging thatch, gently quivering, came the trills of the pipe, while advancing to the encounter from the open windows of the mansion, glittering in the moonlight through the leaves of the beech-trees, echoed the full ringing chords of the piano. At first neither the boy nor Joachim, prejudiced as they were, deigned to pay any attention to the “learned” music of the mansion. The boy even frowned when Joachim paused, and impatiently urged him on, saying⁠—

“Come, play! Go on playing!”

Three days had not gone by when these pauses grew more and more frequent. Joachim often laid his pipe aside to listen, and the boy, forgetting to urge his friend, listened also. Finally Joachim said in a dreamy sort of way, “That is fine! Listen! that is a fine thing!” And then in his dreamy, absentminded way he took the boy in his arms and carried him through the garden to the open window of the drawing-room.

Joachim supposed that the “gracious Pani” was playing for her own amusement, and would take no notice of them. But Anna Michàilovna had become aware that her rival, the pipe, had been silenced; she realized her victory, and her heart beat with pride and joy. Moreover, her displeasure with Joachim had entirely vanished. She knew that she owed her present happiness to him⁠—he had shown her how to regain the devotion of her child; and if her boy were now to receive from her new and valuable impressions, they would both owe a debt of gratitude to their teacher, the peasant piper.

IX

The ice was broken. On the following day the boy with timid curiosity came into the drawing-room, where he had not been since the new city guest⁠—that angry, loud-voiced creature⁠—had taken possession of the room. But yesterday he heard the guest sing a song that pleased his ear, and gave him cause to change his opinion of the instrument. With the last lingering traces of his former timidity he drew near the spot where the piano stood, and stopping at a short distance from it, he listened. There was no one in the drawing-room. His mother sat on a sofa in the adjoining room, sewing; she held her breath as she watched him, admiring every movement, every change of expression on his sensitive face.

Putting out his hand, the blind boy touched the polished surface of the piano; then overcome by bashfulness, he immediately withdrew it. Having twice repeated this experiment he drew nearer, and began a careful examination of the instrument, stooping to the floor to pass his hand over the legs, and feeling his way as far around its sides as he could go. At last his hand touched the smooth keyboard: the soft reverberation of the string vibrated uncertainly on the air. The boy listened to this vibration long after it had ceased to be audible to his mother; then with a look of intense interest he touched another key. Presently, as he drew his hand along the keyboard, he happened to touch a note of the upper register; then he touched every note, one after the other, and paused to listen as they vibrated in trembling cadence and were lost in the air. The face of the blind boy wore an expression of mingled attention and delight; he evidently enjoyed every separate tone, and by this sensitive observation of each elementary sound as component parts of melodies yet unborn, the future artist might be divined.

But it seemed as if each note possessed for the blind boy an attribute peculiar to itself. When beneath the pressure of his finger a brilliant note of the upper register rang out, a glow would come upon his face, uplifted as if to follow the ringing note in its upward flight; but when he touched a deep bass-note, he stooped to listen⁠—seeming to feel sure that the heavy note must be rolling along the ground, scattering itself all over the floor, to be finally lost in the corners.

X

Uncle Maxim simply tolerated all these musical experiments. Strange though it may seem, the inclinations which had so unmistakably manifested themselves in the boy excited mingled emotions in the breast of the old soldier. On the one hand, this intense passion for music indicated the boy’s inherent musical talent, and foreshadowed a possible career; but in spite of this, a vague sense of disappointment filled Uncle Maxim’s heart.

“It cannot be denied,” thus ran Maxim’s thoughts, “that music is a power by which a man may sway the hearts of the multitude. He, the blind man, will attract dandies and fashionable women by the hundreds, will play a valse or a nocturne,”⁠—here Uncle Maxim’s musical vocabulary came suddenly to an end⁠—“and they will wipe away their tears with their delicate handkerchiefs. Ah, the deuce take it! that is not what I could have wished for him. But what’s