Short Fiction, Fyodor Sologub [most popular novels of all time .txt] 📗

of the young people was not heard too loudly, the movements of the dancers were slow and melancholy.

Three Estonian peasant-musicians in grey felt hats were seated one behind the other with their backs to the sea on stools placed at the edge of a square even space. Their sunburnt faces expressed the zeal of close attention and nothing else. Their sunburnt hands moved exactly and mechanically. And from afar they looked like dolls placed there, parts of a very complicated musical machine.

In front of the players was a music-stand, and behind it stood a short elderly man waving his conductor’s stick calmly, confidently, and as mechanically as the players moved their hands. He too had a sunburnt neck and hands. When he moved a few steps from the stand he was seen to be very lame. And it seemed as if his lameness had been planned by an ignorant but artistic workman, fashioning this fine toy so as to be more suitable for the music of the dance.

The sounds of the music seemed extraordinarily regular and monotonous. One could have wished for some slight inaccuracy or capricious interruption of the rhythm; but afterwards one remembered that it could not be otherwise, that such was the law of this methodically gay and yet melancholy measure.

The young men and girls sat on benches on the other two sides of the square. The fourth side had a light fence beyond which the ground sloped upward, and here upon the grass lay some onlookers who did not dance but had come to watch others dance and to listen to the music.

All the people present seemed to be under the spell of the devilishly-monotonous and inhumanly precise rhythm of this wonderfully executed music. All the young folks danced together and stepped apart with the earnestness and exactitude demanded of them by the power of the mechanical example given them by the sunburnt hand of the lame conductor beating out the time. And the spectators who looked on respectfully and the little peasant children who stood around never moved; they looked as if they all had been carved out of the same unbending material and coloured with the same colours of amber and red-lead.

III

“Don’t you think the musicians play very well, Agnes?” asked Professor Roggenfeldt of his wife.

Agnes Rudolfovna sighed, as if she had been brought back from some sweet vision of the past:

“Yes, they play very well,” said she, “especially if one remembers that they are only simple peasants.”

“The peasants here have culture and so are very different from the Russian peasants,” said her husband.

“Yes, indeed,” said Agnes Rudolfovna.

“But I can’t think why our friend, Doctor Horn, hasn’t come. I feel quite anxious about him. I’m afraid he must have been taken ill suddenly. If he doesn’t come soon, I think we must send and enquire about him.”

Agnes Rudolfovna did not reply. She looked intently at the dancers. Her thin but still beautiful fingers trembled as she smoothed down the folds of her white dress.

It was strange and somewhat painful to look down upon this slow dance and to listen to the melancholy sounds of the waltz, played so precisely by the stiff brown hands of the musicians.

Yes, it was painful but yet sweet to the old lady to recall that far-off time when Edward and Agnes were still young, when he was a fine young man with sparkling eyes, and she a beautiful girl, beautiful as only a beloved and loving woman can be. In sweetness and in pain there revived in her soul memories of that far-off night in the happy month of May and of that old sweet wrongdoing, now long past with her departed youth.

Many years had passed away and she had kept her secret. But today Agnes Rudolfovna felt that the time had come when she must speak out the dreadful words of a delayed confession.

She had wept much during the past night, and early this morning she had risen and written a letter and sent it off to Doctor Horn.

During the morning her old friend had sent her a bouquet of flowers and an answer to her letter⁠—a few words written in the firm even hand of a strong-souled man, and a scrap of crimson ribbon.

And now the old lady sat by the side of her aged husband on the seat overlooking the steep cliff, looking out on to the bright greenness, on the blue of the heavens and the sea, listening to the beating of her fainting heart and preparing herself to speak. But she couldn’t make up her mind to begin.

IV

A tall thin elderly gentleman in a shabby grey coat and faded grey felt hat came along, crunching the gravel of the path under his feet, and stood near the professor. He looked at the musicians and the dancers, screwing up his grey eyes to see them better. There was an expression of astonishment on his dry, nervous face.

“Pardon me,” he said at last, raising his hat, “but what is this? What band is it?”

Professor Roggenfeldt turned his calm blue eyes on the unexpected visitor and answered with a bow of acknowledgment:

“Oh, that is the local peasant band. The villagers form their own band and they play if one invites them. Once every summer they give a concert in that field and take a collection from the audience, and with the money they buy music and pay their expenses. But the visitors here don’t often hire the band and they don’t get much money at their annual concert. And yet they keep up their band from year to year, and it’s a wonderfully good one for a country place.”

“The villagers are very musical and have some education,” said Madame Roggenfeldt. “They’ve even got their own theatre where the young people produce classical pieces quite passably.”

“Thanks very much,” replied the stranger. “But don’t you think they play very strangely?”

Agnes Rudolfovna blushed slightly, smiled a little, and said quietly:

“No, I don’t