Short Fiction, Vladimir Korolenko [finding audrey TXT] 📗

far as in him lay, he was in absolute sympathy with Nature; he understood her; she disturbed him by no perplexing and unanswerable questions. There the wind fanned his very soul, and the grass seemed to whisper soft words of pity; and as the spirit of the youth in harmony with the gentle influences that surrounded him melted at the tender caress of Nature, he felt his bosom swell with an emotion that communicated itself to his whole being. In moments like these he would throw himself on the cool, moist grass and weep; but in these tears there was no bitterness. Again, he would seize his pipe, and enraptured by his own emotions would improvise pensive melodies suited to his mood and to the peaceful harmony of the steppe. One could easily understand that any human sound coming unexpectedly to interrupt this mood would affect him like a distressing discord. At such times the only fellowship possible to him was with a soul akin to his own; and in the fair-haired girl from the estate of the Possessor the boy enjoyed just such a companion.

This friendship was the more firmly knitted by mutual sympathy. If Evelyn contributed to their partnership her calmness, her gentle animation, or imparted to the blind boy some new detail of the surrounding life, he in turn gave her his sorrow. The little woman’s knowledge of him seemed to have dealt a serious blow to her tender heart: pluck a dagger from a wound, and the bleeding will increase. On the day when she first learned to know the blind boy on the hillock in the steppe, her sympathy for his affliction had really caused her acute pain, and his presence had grown by degrees quite indispensable to her. Separation seemed to renew and increase the poignant pain of her wound, and she longed to be with her little friend that she might appease her own suffering by ministering constantly to his comfort.

VI

One warm autumn night both families were sitting on the terrace in front of the house, admiring the starry sky, with its blue distances and glimmering lights. The blind boy with his friend sat as usual by his mother’s side. All was still around the mansion, and for the moment they sat silent; only the leaves stirred from time to time, like startled things, with unintelligible murmurings, and then lapsed into silence.

Suddenly a meteor, leaping forth from the darkness, flashed across the sky in one brilliant streak; and as it gradually disappeared, it left behind a trail of phosphorescent light. Petrùsya seated beside his mother had linked his arm in hers, and she became suddenly conscious that he started and began to tremble.

“What⁠—was that?” he asked, with a look of trouble on his face.

“It was a falling star, my child.”

“Ah yes, a star,” he said thoughtfully. “I felt sure that it was a star.”

“How could you know, my boy?” inquired the mother, with a pitiful accent of doubt in her voice.

“He is telling the truth,” exclaimed Evelyn; “he knows many things like that.”

This increasing sensitiveness indicated that the boy was evidently drawing near the critical period that lay between childhood and youth. Meanwhile his development pursued its quiet course. He seemed to have grown accustomed to his lot, and the exceptional and uniform character of his sadness⁠—a sadness cheered as it were by no single ray of light, but at the same time free from all eager cravings, and grown to be the habitual background of his life⁠—was in some measure mitigated.

But this proved to have been simply a period of temporary repose. Nature has appointed these resting-places that the young organism may gain strength to meet other attacks. During these calms, new questions imperceptibly rise to the surface and mature; and it needs but a touch to disturb this outward peace, and stir the soul to its very depths, even as the sea is lashed by a sudden squall.

V Love I

And thus a few more years went by. There were no changes in the peaceful mansion. The beech-trees in the garden rustled as of old, only their foliage seemed to have grown darker and thicker; the white walls, although they had warped and settled more or less, shone precisely as they used; the thatched roofs frowned the same as ever; and even the well-known sound of Joachim’s pipe might be heard at the usual hour from the direction of the stable. But Joachim himself, still a bachelor, and grown gray in the service as groom, chose rather to listen to the Panitch when he played either the piano or the pipe, it mattered not which. Maxim too, had grown still more gray. The Popèlski had no other children, and therefore their firstborn, the blind boy, remained as ever the central object of interest, around which clustered the life of the whole mansion. It was for his sake that the family had thus isolated itself within its own narrow circle, contented with its tranquil existence, whose current had now united with the equally placid life of the Possessor’s “cabin.”

Thus Peter, who had now become a youth, had grown up like a hothouse plant, guarded from the rude winds of the outer world. He was still as of old in the centre of a vast, dark world. Darkness enveloped him in every direction⁠—above, around, on all sides; illimitable, eternal. His delicate and sensitive organism vibrated in response to every impression, like a finely strung instrument. This sensitive expectancy was perceptible in the blind youth’s disposition; he seemed to feel that the darkness was about to stretch forth its invisible arms and arouse by its touch that which now lay dormant in his breast, waiting only for the summons. But the dreary darkness around him, familiar from his childhood, replied only by the caressing murmur that rose from the old garden, inspiring him with vague, tranquillizing, and dreamy thoughts. The turbulent current