Short Fiction, Vladimir Korolenko [finding audrey TXT] 📗

slightly bending forward from her seat, she watched the boy’s face with a painful scrutiny. When his hand, gliding along the brilliant white plumage, reached the tips of the wings, where the white plumes were suddenly replaced by black ones, Anna Michàilovna instantly moved her hand to the other key, and the low bass note, with its deep reverberations, echoed through the room.

Both mother and son were so much engrossed in their occupation that they had not observed Maxim’s entrance, until, recovering from his astonishment, he interrupted this performance: “Annùsya, what does this mean?”

Meeting Maxim’s searching glance, the young woman was as much confused as if a severe tutor had detected her in the commission of some fault. “You see,” she said in confusion, “he tells me that he can distinguish a certain difference between the colors of the stork, but he cannot understand wherein this difference consists. Truly he was the first one to mention it, and I believe he is right.”

“Well, what of it?”

“Well, I was trying, after a fashion, to explain this difference to him by sounds. Don’t be vexed, Max, but I really think that there is a correspondence.”

This unexpected idea took Maxim so entirely by surprise that at first he was at a loss for an answer. He asked her to repeat her experiments, and as he watched the rigid concentration of the boy’s expression he shook his head. “Believe me, Anna,” he said when he was alone with her, “it is better not to arouse thoughts in the boy’s mind, to which you can give no satisfactory solution. He must resign himself to his blindness⁠—there is no help for it; and it is our duty to keep him from trying to comprehend the light. For my part, I make every effort to avert each question, and if it were but possible to keep him removed from all objects likely to suggest them, he would no more realize that a sense is missing than we who possess five deplore the want of a sixth.”

The sister yielded as usual to her brother’s persuasive arguments; but this time both were mistaken. While overrating the influence of outside impressions, Maxim forgot the powerful stimulus which Nature communicates to a child’s soul.

IV

They had before them a blind child, a future man, the possible father of a family. “Malevolent fate,” or perhaps “accident” hidden within the mysterious realm of phenomena, had closed forever those eyes⁠—the windows through which the soul receives impressions from the glowing, many-colored, changing world. Doomed never to behold the light of the sun, although not himself the offspring of the blind, he was still a link in the illimitable chain of bygone lives, and contained within himself the possibilities of future lives. All those living links now lost in the remote past, corresponding in proportion to their capacity to the impressions of light, had transmitted to him the inner faculty, and through him, blind though he was, to an endless succession of future generations who would possess the power of vision.49

Thus it was that in the depths of this child’s soul these hereditary forces lay dormant⁠—vague “possibilities,” hitherto unaffected by outside influences. The whole fabric of his mind, fashioned after the ancestral model, had reserved within itself a substratum of the impressions of light, the product of the countless experiences of his ancestors. Thus in his inner organization the blind man is like another possessing eyesight, but with eyes forever closed, Hence a dim yet ever present consciousness of desire that craves contentment; an undefined yearning to exercise the dormant powers of his soul which have never been called into action. Hence also certain vague forebodings and endeavors⁠—like the longing for flight, which children feel, and the joys of which they taste in witching dreams.

Now, at last, the instinctive inclination of little Peter’s childish fancies was reflected on his features in that look of troubled perplexity. Those hereditary, and yet as far as he himself was concerned undeveloped and therefore unshaped, “possibilities” of the ideas of light rose like obscure phantoms in the child’s mind, exciting him to aimless and distressing efforts. All his nature, in an unconscious protest against the individual “accident,” rose to claim the restoration of the universal law.

V

Consequently, however much Maxim might try to exclude all outward impressions from his nephew, he had no control over the urgent cravings that came from within. With all his precautions he could but avert a premature awakening of these unsatisfied yearnings, and thereby diminish the boy’s chances of suffering. In every other respect the child’s unhappy fate, with all its cruel consequences, must take its course.

And like a dark shadow this fate advanced to meet him. From year to year the boy’s natural vivacity subsided, like a receding wave, while the melancholy that was echoing within his soul grew persistently, and left its impress on his temperament. His laughter, which in childhood resounded at every new and especially vivid impression, was now rarely heard. He was naturally less accessible to all that was bright and cheerful, and more or less humorous, than to that vague obscurity and gloom peculiar to the Southern nature, which finds reflection in the folk-songs. These made a deep impression on the boy’s imagination. The tears stood in his eyes whenever he heard how “the grave whispers to the wind in the field,” and he loved to wander through the fields himself, listening to this murmur. He longed more and more for solitude; and when in his hours of recreation he started off on his lonely walk, the family would avoid that direction, lest they might disturb his solitude.

Seated upon some mound out on the steppe, or on the hillock above the river, or on the familiar cliff, Petrùsya would listen to the rustling leaves, the whispering grass, the vague soughing of the wind across the steppe. All this harmonized perfectly with the deep seriousness of his mood. There, so