Chapter One

I

A child was born, in the dead of night, to a wealthy family in the South-West Territory. The young mother lay sunk in heavy languor; but when the infant's first cry sounded, low and plaintive, she began to toss feverishly on her bed. Her eyes were shut, but her lips moved, whispering, and her pale face, still soft of outline almost as a child's, twisted as though in suffering and impatient protest—the expression a much-petted child might wear on its first contact with sorrow.
The midwife bent close over the whispering lips.
"Why? Why does he..." the mother asked, almost inaudibly.
The midwife did not understand. Again the child's cry sounded. An expression of bitter suffering passed over the mother's face, and a heavy tear welled from her eyes.
"Why? Why?" she whispered, faintly as before.
This time the midwife understood her question, and answered tranquilly:
"Why the child cries? It's always so. Don't you worry yourself about it."
But the mother was not to be soothed. She started at each new cry, demanding over and over again, with wrathful impatience:
"Why so ... so dreadful?"
The midwife heard nothing out of the ordinary in the child's cries; and the mother, she could see, was hardly conscious—did not, perhaps, even know what she was saying. Turning away from the bed, she busied herself with the infant.
The mother fell silent. Only, now and again, some grievous suffering, finding no outlet in words or movement, pressed great tears from her shut eyes. Through the heavy lashes they seeped, and rolled softly down the marble pallor of her cheeks.
Can the mother's heart have sensed the grim, the unalleviable tragedy that had come into the world with the new-born life—that hung over the infant's cradle, to follow him through all his life, to the very grave?
Or was it, perhaps, no more than delirium? Be that as it may, the child was born blind.


II


No one noticed it, at first. The baby boy turned on the world the same dull, vague look as, to a certain age, all new-born infants do. Day passed after day, until the new life began to be reckoned in weeks. The child's eyes cleared. The dullness lifted, and the pupils seemed to focus. But he did not turn his head to follow the bright beam of light that came into the room in company with the cheery twitter of the birds in the luxuriant country garden, with the murmur of the green beeches swaying close by the open windows. The mother, now herself again, was the first to look, in new alarm, into the baby's face—the first to notice its strange expression, its unchildlike gravity, immobility.
"Why does he stare like that? Tell me—oh, tell me why," she kept asking—seeking comfort, like a frightened dove, in the faces around her.
"What do you mean?" people would answer, unresponsive to her anxiety. "The child is like any child of the same age."
"But see how strangely his hands seem to grope."
"The child is too young to co-ordinate movements with visual impressions," the doctor explained.
"But why do his eyes look always straight ahead? Why does he never turn them? Is he—is he blind?"
And, once the fearful guess had burst from the mother's lips, no words could be found to console her.
The doctor lifted the child, turned it quickly to the light, and looked into its eyes. He seemed a little disturbed, and hurried away with no more than a few non-committal words and the promise to look in again in a day or two.
The mother trembled like a wounded bird. Sobbing, she pressed the child to her breast. But the child's eyes looked out as before, grave and unmoving.
In a day or two, as he had promised, the doctor came again—provided, this time, with an ophthalmoscope. He lit a candle and brought it up to the child's eyes; moved it away, and brought it close again. Many times over, he repeated his tests, his eyes fixed steadily on the child's pupils. And finally, deeply disturbed, he said:
"You were not mistaken, madam, to my great regret. The boy is blind. And beyond all hope of cure."
The mother received his verdict with quiet melancholy.
"I have known it a long time," she answered softly.


III


The family to which the blind child had been born was not a large one. There were the mother and father; and there was "Uncle Maxim", as he was called by everyone in the house and many outside it. The father was a country landowner, very much like a thousand other country landowners in the South-West Territory. He was good-natured—one might call him even kind; treated his labourers well; and was tremendously fond of mills, one or another of which he was perpetually constructing or reconstructing. This occupation took up so much of his time that his voice was seldom heard in the house except at those hours of the day that were set aside for breakfast, dinner, and the like domestic occasions. Coming in, he would invariably ask, "And how are you today, my love?"—after which he would sit down to his meal and hardly speak till it was Читать далее...

I


The child's world broadened. His sensitive hearing told him more and more of Nature. But darkness, deep, impenetrable, hung as always over and around him—a black cloud, weighing heavily upon his brain. It had hung over him from the day of his birth, and he might surely have grown accustomed, resigned to his misfortune. But he was not resigned. There was some instinct in his childish being that strove ceaselessly for freedom from the blackness. And this subconscious, but unintermittent quest for the light that he had never seen left its imprint more and more deeply on his face, in an expression of undefined and tortured effort.
Still, he too had his moments of unclouded pleasure, his bright childish raptures. These came when some powerful impression, accessible to his senses, brought him new knowledge of the unseen world. For Nature, in her might and grandeur, did not remain entirely a closed book to the blind child.
There was the day when they took him to a high rock overhanging the river, and he stood listening, with an altogether new expression, to the faint splashings of the water far below; and then the sound of the pebbles rolling from underfoot, dropping down the side of the rock, made him clutch at his mother's skirts with sinking heart. Always, afterwards, the concept of depth was associated in his mind with the murmur of water at the foot of the rock and the frightened scamper of falling pebbles.
Distance, to him, was the slow fading away of a song into nothingness. And when spring thunder rolled across the sky, filling all space with its rumbling, and then retiring, with a final wrathful roar, behind the clouds—at such moments the blind child would stand listening in reverent awe. His heart would swell, and in his mind would rise a poignant sense of the majesty and sweep of the heavenly vault above him.
Sound was thus the chief medium by which the outer world could reach his understanding. The impressions received through other senses served only to supplement his sound impressions, in which all his ideas of the world were shaped.
Sometimes, when the day was at its hottest, and all sounds were stilled; when human activity came to a standstill, and Nature lay in that peculiar hush in which one can sense no movement but the unceasing, soundless flow of vital energy—at such hours, sometimes, a new expression would transform the blind boy's face. It was as though he were listening, with strained attention, to sounds that none but he could hear—sounds rising from within, from the very depths of his being, called to the surface by the great stillness without. Watching his face, at such times, one had the impression that some dim thought was sounding in his heart in melody—vague as yet, and unformed.


II


He was in his fifth year, thin and weakly. Indoors, he moved, even ran, about the rooms with perfect freedom. A strange, seeing how confidently he walked—never hesitating at a turn, never at a loss to find things that he wanted—might not have realised that he was blind; might have taken him simply for an unusually contemplative child, with dreamy eyes that seemed to look far out into vague distances. Out of doors, however, things were not so easy. He walked with a stick, feeling the ground with it before every step he took. When he had no stick, he would get down on hands and knees and crawl, swiftly investigating with his fingers every object encountered in his path.


III


It was a quiet summer evening. Uncle Maxim was out in the garden. The child's father, as usual, was still away in some distant field. Everything was still. The village was sinking into sleep, and the talk in the servants' hall had died away. The child had been put to bed half an hour past.
He lay in his room, only half-asleep. For some days, now, the very thought of this quiet evening hour had called strange memories to his mind. He could not see the darkening sky, of course; could not see the swaying tree-tops outlined in black against its starry velvet, or the shadows that gathered under the shaggy eaves of barns and stable, or the blue blackness creeping over the earth, or the glinting gold of moonbeams and starlight. Yet, day after day, he would drop off to sleep under some beautiful spell that, in the morning, he could not explain.
It would come at the hour when sleep began to dull his senses, when he no longer consciously heard the murmur of the beeches at his window, or the distant barking of the village dogs, or the trilling of the nightingale beyond the river, or the mournful tinkle of tiny bells where a colt was grazing in the meadow; when all individual sounds seemed to fade and vanish. Merged in new, soft harmony, they would now seem to come again, all these sounds, and hover in his room, filling his heart with vague, but very pleasant fancies. When morning came, he would wake in a softened, tender mood, and question his mother eagerly:
"What was it, last night? What was it?"
The mother Читать далее...

I


Under Maxim's plan the blind boy was left, in everything possible, to fend for himself. The results were excellent. Indoors, he made no impression of helplessness at all. He moved about confidently, and kept his room neat, and his clothes and toys in order. So far as was feasible, too, Maxim introduced physical exertion. The boy had a regular system of exercises; and when he was five Maxim gave him a little horse, a mild and harmless creature. The mother could not imagine, at first, how her blind child could possibly ride. It was pure madness, she told her brother. But Maxim threw all his powers of persuasion into play, and in two or three months the boy was riding freely, needing Iochim's guidance only where the paths turned sharply.
Thus, his blindness was not allowed to hinder his physical development; and, to the best of human ability, its effect on his character, too, was minimised. He was a tall child for his age, and finely built; rather pale, with delicate and expressive features. His black hair accentuated his pallor, and his big, dark eyes, almost unmoving, gave his face a peculiar expression that people would notice at first glance, and wonder at. A tiny crease that cut across his forehead; a habit of keeping his head inclined a little forward; a look of sadness that sometimes clouded his handsome features—such were the only outward effects of his blindness. His movements, in familiar places, were free and confident. Yet it was easy to see that his natural liveliness was under constraint; and there were times when it burst through in nervous fits of some intensity.


II


Sound impressions had now definitely become dominant in the blind boy's life, the chief form in which his thoughts were shaped, the focus of his mental processes. He would remember songs because their melodies won his heart; and their content, to him, would be coloured with the melancholy, or the merriment, or the dreaminess of their music. More attentively even than before, he listened for the voices of Nature around him. And, fusing his own sense impressions with the loved melodies that had surrounded him from childhood, he was able, at times, to express himself musically, in free improvisations in which it would have been difficult to pick out what was his own, and what taken from the folk songs he knew so well. Not even he himself could distinguish these two elements in his music—so wholly were they merged within him. His mother was teaching him to play the piano, and he was quick to master all her lessons; but he did not lose his love of Iochim's pipe. The piano was richer, fuller, stronger. But the piano was bound to the house, whereas the pipe could be carried along everywhere, and its music blended so completely with the steppe's soft breathing that Petro could not always have said what it was that brought the vague, new thoughts that filled his mind—the wind from far places, or the music he himself was playing.
This passion for music became the core of the boy's mental development, bringing interest and variety into his life. Maxim took advantage of it to give the boy a knowledge of his country's history, woven of sound. His interest seized by a song, the child would learn about its heroes and their stories, and through these—the story of his motherland. This, in its turn, aroused an interest in literature. And when the boy was eight Maxim undertook his first regular instruction. He had made a special study of methods for teaching the blind, and the boy derived much pleasure from his lessons. They brought a new element into life, a positiveness and clarity that served as a balance to the more vague sensations of music.
Thus, the days were well occupied, and there was no lack of new impressions. The boy's life might have been thought as full as any child's can be. He seemed not even to realise his blindness.
And still, there was a strange, unchildlike melancholy in his nature, coming often to the surface. Maxim attributed it to the lack of playmates, and did what he could to supply this need.
Little boys from the village were invited to come and play at the manor. But they were bashful and constrained. The unaccustomed surroundings—and, too, Petro's blindness—made them uncomfortable. They would huddle together, whispering timidly to one another when they could muster up the courage, and casting awed glances at the blind boy. Out of doors, in the garden or off in the fields, they would feel more at ease, and begin to play; but, somehow, Petro was always left out of these games. He could only listen, with wistful longing, to the merry tumult.
Sometimes Iochim would gather the children around him and tell them stories. He knew all sorts of jolly folk tales. The village youngsters, familiar from birth with the addle-pated imps and the artful witches of Ukrainian folklore, would break in with stories of their own, and the time would pass in lively talk and laughter. Petro always listened attentively, with Читать далее...

I


There are souls which seem born for the quiet heroism of that love which goes hand in hand with care and grief; souls to which ministration to others in misfortune seems an organic necessity, the very breath of life. Nature has endowed them, these souls, with the tranquillity, lacking which such everyday, prosaic heroism would be inconceivable; has providently softened their passions, their ambitions, aspirations, subordinating all purely selfish hopes and desires to this one dominant trait of character. Such people often seem to those around them cold, unemotional, sober beyond all need. Deaf to the impassioned appeal of earthly life, they follow the sad path of duty tranquilly as they might the road of the most glorious personal happiness. Cold as snow-topped mountain peaks, they seem; and majestic, too, as those lofty peaks. All that is worldly and base lies like dirt at their feet. Even slander and gossip slip from their snow-white robes, as splattered mud from the wings of a swan.
This is a type only rarely created by life or training. Like talent, like genius, it is Nature's endowment to a chosen few. Its traits are early manifested, and they were already evident in Petro's little friend. The mother soon realised what a happy thing this childish friendship might become for her blind boy. And Maxim, seeing this as well as she, felt that now, when the child had everything he had been lacking, the course of his spiritual development should be smooth and even—unhindered, undisturbed.
But that was an error, and a bitter one.


II


For some years, while Petro was still quite small, Maxim thought himself entirely in control of the boy's spiritual growth. Not every aspect of this growth, perhaps, arose from the tutor's direct influence; but he was sure, in any case, that no new development, no new spiritual acquirement, could escape his notice and his guiding hand. But when Petro grew older, and entered upon the period transitional between childhood and adolescence, these lofty pedagogical dreams turned out to be quite unfounded. Hardly a week passed that did not bring something new, and often startling; and Maxim was altogether at a loss to find the source of these new ideas and concepts that arose in the blind boy's mind. There was some unknown force at work in the very depths of the child's being, thrusting up to the surface the most unexpected manifestations of independent spiritual development. And Maxim could only bow his head in reverent awe before these mysterious processes that had begun to interfere in his methods of pedagogy. Nature seemed to know some stimulus, some way of revelation, to give the child new concepts that he could not possibly, in his blindness, have developed from direct experience. Contemplating all this, Maxim had a sense of the endless, unbroken continuity of life's vital processes—passing ever on, in all their thousands of details, through the successive train of individual lives.
It frightened him, at first, this realisation that he was not entirely master of the child's mentality; that there was something else, independent of his will and unaffected by his influence, that worked upon his pupil. It made him fear for the child's future, fear the possibility of desires and seekings that might bring the blind boy nothing more than unappeasable longings and suffering. And he began to grope for the sources of these new springs of knowledge—hoping to stop them up, for the boy's own good.
The mother, too, noticed these sudden strange flashes. There was a morning when Petro came running up to her, excited as she had seldom seen him.
"Mother, Mother," he cried. "I saw a dream!"
"What did you see, then, child?" the mother asked, with a sad doubt that she could not suppress.
"I saw ... you, in my dream, and Uncle Maxim. And ... and—everything, I saw. It was so fine, Mother! Oh, it was so fine!"
"Well, and what else did you see, Petro?"
"I can't remember."
"Do you remember me?"
"No," the child answered hesitantly. "No, I can't remember. Not anything."
There was a moment's silence.
"But I did see, just the same, I did see, truly," he cried.
His face clouded over, and a tear gleamed in his sightless eyes.
This happened several times. And with each repetition the boy grew sadder, more unquiet.


III


Passing through the yard, one day, Maxim heard strange sounds floating from the drawing-room, where Petro should have been having a music lesson. A strange sort of exercise, this! It consisted of only two notes. First, the very highest, brightest note of the upper register, quivering as it was struck—repeatedly, rapidly, over and over again; then, suddenly—and also over and over—a low, rolling bass note. What could such extraordinary music mean? Maxim turned quickly towards the house, and a moment later, opening the drawing-room door, stopped short in amazement at the scene confronting him.
Petro, in his tenth year now, sat on a low stool at his mother's Читать далее...

I


A few more years passed by.
Nothing had changed at the quiet manor. The beeches still rustled in the garden; only their foliage seemed rather thicker now, and darker. The white house wore the same pleasant, welcoming look as always; only its walls had settled a little, and seemed the least bit out of line. The thatched eaves of the stable frowned down as they always had, and Iochim, still confirmed in his bachelor life, tended the horses as before. The pipe, too, still sounded from the stable doors in the evening hours; only now Iochim preferred to listen, while the blind boy played—be it pipe or piano.
There was more grey than before in Maxim's hair.
No more children had been born to the Popelskys, and the blind firstling remained, as ever, the hub around which all the life of the manor centred. For him, the manor had shut itself up in its own narrow circle, content to live a quiet, secluded life, linked only with the no less quiet life of the possessor's little home. Thus, the boy—now a youth—had grown up much like a hot-house plant, sheltered against any harsh influence that might emanate from distant outer spheres.
He lived, as always, at the centre of a vast world of darkness: darkness above him, darkness around him—everywhere darkness, without end or limit; and, through the darkness, his sensitive nature strained to meet each new impression—like a taut string strains, ready to respond to sound in eager sound. And this taut expectancy noticeably affected his mood. Another moment—just another moment, it kept seeming, and the darkness would reach out its unseen hands and touch some chord within him, a chord still sunk in long and wearisome sleep and waiting, longing to be awakened.
But the familiar darkness of the manor, so kindly and so uneventful, brought to his waiting senses only the caressing murmur of the trees in the old garden, soothing, lulling his mind. Of the distant world, he knew only through songs, and books, and history. It was only by hearsay, here amidst the pensive murmuring of the garden and the quiet peace of the manor, that he learned anything of the storms and passions of that far-off life—picturing what he heard through a mist of enchantment, as he might a song, an epic, a tale of wonder.
All went so well, it might have seemed. The mother, watching, saw that her son's spirit, sheltered as by a high wall, lay plunged in an enchanted semi-slumber—artificial, it might be, but at any rate tranquil. And she did not want this tranquillity to be shattered. She was afraid of anything that might shatter it.
Evelina, too, had grown up, by imperceptible degrees. Her clear eyes, looking out over this enchanted hush, at times held something of perplexity, of inquiry about what life might hold in store; but never did they reveal the slightest hint of impatience.
Pan Popelsky, in these years, had made his estate into a model property; but the question of his blind son's future was not, of course, any affair of this kindly soul's. All that got taken care of, somehow, with no effort on his part.
Only Maxim, constituted as he was, found this hush a difficult thing to bear, even as the temporary state he knew it to be—a compelled phase in his plans for his pupil. The youthful spirit, he reasoned, must be given time to settle itself, to accumulate strength, that it might be able to withstand the harsh contact of life.
But without the magic circle, all this time, life was boiling, surging, seething. And the time came when the blind boy's old preceptor felt that he might, at last, break open this circle, throw wide the hot-house door, and let in a stream of the fresh outer air.


II


For a beginning, he brought to the manor an old friend who lived on an estate some seventy versts away. Maxim had visited this friend, old Stavruchenko, from time to time; and now, learning that he had some young people staying with him, wrote to invite them all to the manor. The invitation was accepted gladly—on the old man's part, because of the years of friendship that bound him to Maxim, on the part of the young people, because of the glamour and the traditions that still clung to the name of Maxim Yatsenko. Of these young people, two were Stavruchenko's sons: the younger a Kiev University student, specialising—as the fad was in those days—in philology; the elder a musician, studying at the Conservatory in St. Petersburg. The third was a young cadet, the son of a neighbouring landowner.
Stavruchenko was a hale old man, though his head was entirely grey. He wore his moustache long and drooping, Cossack-fashion, and carried his pipe and tobacco-pouch tied to the sash that supported his vast Cossack pantaloons; spoke no language but Ukrainian; and, when he stood between his two sons, in their long white Ukrainian coats and embroidered Ukrainian shirts, had very much the look of Gogol's Taras Bulba. There was nothing in his character, however, of Bulba's romanticism. Stavruchenko was a landowner, Читать далее...

I


Pyotr woke early, next morning. Quiet filled his room. The house, too, was still. The stir that comes with day had not yet begun. From the garden, through the open window, the fresh breath of morning came pouring into him. Blind though he was, Pyotr had an excellent feeling for the state of Nature around him. He knew, now, that it was very early. He knew, too, that his window was open—knew it by the rustling of the trees, so close and clear, with nothing to bar it from the room. Today, this feeling was more vivid than ever. He knew, though it did not reach him, that the sun was peeping into the room; knew that, should he stretch a hand out through the window, the dew would come sprinkling from the bushes just outside. And there was another feeling too, today—a feeling unfamiliar, never before experienced, but filling his whole being to overflowing.
He lay still awhile, listening to the twitter of some tiny bird out in the garden, and wondering at this strange new feeling in his heart.
What was it? What had happened?
And suddenly, as he questioned himself, came the memory of her words last night, in the dusk, by the old mill.
"Hadn't you really ever thought of it?" she had said, and—"You silly boy!"
No, he had never thought of it. Her presence had always been a joy to him; but, until that evening, it had been a joy not consciously recognised—as we are not conscious of the air we breathe. Those simple words had stirred his spirit like a stone cast into still waters: one touch, and the smooth, shining surface, reflecting the sunlight and the sky's distant blue, is gone—the water stirred to its very bottom.
Waking now, with his spirit thus renewed, he saw his old playmate in an altogether new light. All that had taken place the evening before came back, in its slightest detail; and, as her voice sounded in his memory, he was amazed at its new tembre. "If a girl falls in love..." and—"You silly boy!"
He sprang out of bed, dressed hurriedly, and ran off down the dew-wet garden paths to the old mill. The water rippled in the sluices, and the bird cherries whispered around him, just as the night before; only then it had been dark, and now it was morning, bright and sunny. Never before had he "felt" the light so strongly—as though the damp fragrance, the freshness of the morning, carried with them to his tingling nerve centres some inkling of the joyous cheer of daylight.


II


Life at the manor became brighter, somehow, and happier. Anna Mikhailovna seemed young again; and Maxim could be heard to joke and laugh, though a moody rumbling still issued at times—like the echo of some distant storm—from his shelter of tobacco-smoke. Some people, he grumbled, seemed to think of life as something in the order of those stupid novels that end with wedding bells; but there were plenty of things in this world of ours that it wouldn't harm such people to give a little thought to. And Pan Popelsky, rotund and handsome in healthy middle-age, his cheeks still ruddy, his hair gradually and evenly silvering—Pan Popelsky, evidently thinking that Maxim's grumbling was addressed to him, would invariably express his agreement and hurry off to attend to his affairs, which were always, it must be said, in perfect order. But the young people would only smile, absorbed in the plans that they were laying. Pyotr was to study music seriously, now.
When the crops were in, and autumn, decked in golden threads of gossamer, hung in languorous contentment over the fields, the whole family, with Evelina, set out on a visit to Stavrukovo, as the Stavruchenkos' estate was called. It was a journey of only some seventy versts; but this short distance brought a great change in the surrounding countryside. The last of the Carpathian foot-hills, still visible in Volhynia and along the Bug, were lost to view, and the landscape settled into rolling Ukrainian steppeland. The villages here were green with orchards and gardens. Scattered gullies cut across the steppe; and here and there along the horizon stood tall grave mounds, long since ploughed around to the very base and now surrounded by yellow fields of stubble.
It was seldom that the family went so far from home. Away from the familiar fields and village, where he knew every inch of ground, Pyotr lost his confident ease of movement; he felt his blindness more strongly, and grew nervous and irritable. Yet he had readily accepted the Stavruchenkos' invitation. Since that memorable evening when he had first realised both his love and the power of his awakening talent, he seemed to shrink less from the outer world—from the dark, unknown vistas that he sensed beyond the bounds of his accustomed life. It had begun to attract him, this world, growing more upon him.
The days at Stavrukovo passed very pleasantly. Pyotr was far less constrained, now, in the youthful company. He would listen with eager interest to young Stavruchenko's masterful playing, and his stories of the Conservatory Читать далее...

V


Winter came. A heavy snow fell, blanketing roads and fields and villages. At the manor, all was white. The trees in the garden were laden with fluff, as though they had pat out new foliage to replace the withered green. In the drawing-room, a bright blaze crackled in the fire-place; and everyone coming in from out of doors brought with him a whiff of freshness, an odour of new-fallen snow.
In other years Pyotr, too, had felt the poetry of this first winter day. There was that very special stir of energy that always came with his awakening, on such a morning. And there were all the familiar signs of winter—the stamping of feet in the kitchen, when people came in from the cold; and the creak-of the doors; and the tiny currents of nipping air that scampered all about the house; and the crunching footsteps out in the yard, and the new, wintry sensation that came with every outdoor sound. And then, when he drove out with Iochim into the open fields—what a delight it was to hear the sleigh runners gliding over fresh snow, and the sudden cracklings that sounded in the woods beyond the river, and echoed back from fields and road.
But now the first white day brought with it only a deeper melancholy.
Pyotr pulled on high boots, that morning, and wandered off to the old mill. His feet sank deep at every step in the untrodden snow.
The garden was very still. The frozen soil, so softly carpeted, made no sound underfoot. But the air today was sensitive to sound as at no other time of the year, carrying over great distances, clear and true, the cawing of a crow, or the blow of an axe, or even the light snapping of a twig. Now and again it brought to Pyotr's ears a strange, ringing sound, as though of glass, rising quickly to a thin, high note, then dying away at what seemed a tremendous distance. This was off at the village pond. The peasant boys were throwing stones to test the thin layer of ice that had formed on the water overnight.
The manor pond had also frozen over. But the river where the old mill stood still flowed between its snow-piled banks and murmured in the sluices, though its current was slower now, and its waters darker.
Pyotr went up to the dam and stood there, listening. The sound of the water had changed. It was heavier, and all its melody was gone. It seemed to reflect the cold that lay, like the hand of death, over all the countryside.
And Pyotr's heart, too, was filled with a chilly gloom. The dark feeling that had stirred somewhere in the utmost depths of his being, on that blissful summer evening—a vague sense of apprehension, dissatisfaction, questioning—that feeling had now grown until it usurped all the room in his soul that had once belonged to joy and happiness.
Evelina was away. She had been gone since the late autumn. Her parents had planned a visit to their "benefactress", old Countess Potocka, and the Countess had written them to be sure and bring their daughter. Evelina had not wished to go, but had yielded in the end to her father's insistence, which Maxim, too, had supported with considerable energy.
Standing now by the old mill, Pyotr tried to gain again the fullness, the harmony of the emotions he had once experienced here. Did he miss her?—he asked himself. Yes, he did. Yet, though he felt her absence, her presence too—he realised—no longer brought him happiness. It brought, instead, a new and poignant suffering, which he felt somewhat less keenly when she was away.
Only so short a while ago, every detail of that evening had been vivid in his memory—her words, the silky feel of her hair, the beating of her heart against his breast. And out of these details he had created for himself a concept of her that filled him with happiness. But now a something shapeless, amorphous—as were all the phantoms that haunted his sightless imagination—had breathed its noxious breath upon this concept, and shattered it. And he could no longer integrate his recollections into that completeness and harmony which, at the beginning, had filled him to overflowing. There had been a particle, a tiny sand-grain, of something alien lurking from the very outset somewhere deep behind his feeling; and now this particle had so expanded that it seemed to obliterate all else—as a grim storm-cloud obliterates the horizon.
The sound of her voice no longer rang in his ears. The vivid memory of that blissful evening was gone, leaving behind it a gaping emptiness. And something within him, something confined in the deepest depths of his soul, was struggling desperately to fill this emptiness.
He wanted to see her.
A dull aching—that there had always been, of course; but it had long remained no more than a vague, half-realised discomfort, much like a toothache that is not yet acute.
Since his encounter with the blind bell-ringer, consciousness, realisation, had made of this dull ache a piercing pain.
He loved her. And he wanted to see her.
Such was his mood, as day passed after day at the hushed, Читать далее...

I


That same autumn Evelina declared to her parents her unalterable decision to be married to the blind youth "from the manor". Her mother began to cry; but her father knelt before the icons and, after prayer, declared that such, to his mind, was God's very will in the matter.
They were married, and Pyotr's life was filled with a new, quiet happiness. And yet—behind this happiness, somewhere, lurked a haunting, undefined anxiety, of which he was never entirely free. Even at his most radiant moments there was a tinge of doubting sadness in his smile—as though he could not feel that his happiness was really justified, or really lasting. The news that he was, perhaps, to be a father brought a look of sudden apprehension to his face.
Still, the life that he now led left him no leisure for his former fruitless searchings. His days were occupied by serious study, and by growing anxiety for his wife and for the child that was to come. There were moments, too, when all else was crowded back by rising memories of the blind beggars' mournful chant. At such times he would go off to the village, where a new home had been built for Fyodor Kandiba and his pock-marked nephew. Kandiba would take up his kobza; or perhaps they would simply talk, of one thing and another; and, gradually, Pyotr's thoughts would grow calmer, and his plans regain their power to inspire.
He had become less sensitive to light, and the striving to apprehend it, which had cost him such inner effort, had subsided. The deep-lying forces that had been driving him now slumbered, and he no longer stirred them by the conscious effort to fuse heterogeneous sensations into some one understandable whole. The place that these fruitless endeavours had once occupied within him was now filled by vivid memories, and lively hopes. And yet—who knows?—perhaps this very peace that had come into his soul had the effect of promoting the subconscious workings of his inner being, of helping the formless, disparate impressions that reached his nerve centres in their quest for synthesis, for fusion. For does not our mind often, when we are asleep, easily mould ideas and concepts such as it could never achieve by conscious effort?


II


The room was very still—the same room in which Pyotr had been born. Only an infant's wailing cry disturbed the hush. The child was now a few days old, and Evelina was recovering rapidly. But Pyotr, all these days, had seemed weighed heavily down by a foreboding of approaching sorrow.
The doctor arrived. He took up the baby, and laid it down close to the window. Jerking aside the curtain, he let a bright ray of sunlight into the room. Then he bent over the child, his instruments in his hands. Pyotr sat with bowed head, depressed and seemingly apathetic, as he had been all these last days. The doctor's proceedings seemed to mean nothing to him at all—as though he knew beforehand what the result would be.
"He's surely blind," he said, again and again. "He should never have been born."
The young doctor made no reply, but went on quietly with his tests. And then, at length, he put down his ophthalmoscope, and his voice sounded calmly, confidently through the room:
"The pupils contract. The child sees, no doubt about it."
Pyotr started, and stood up quickly. Clearly, he had heard the doctor's pronouncement. But—such was the expression on his face—he hardly seemed to have understood it. He stood motionless, one trembling hand on the window-sill for support. His upturned face was very pale, his features set.
Until that moment he had been in the power of an extraordinary agitation—a state in which, though he was hardly conscious of his own being, his every nerve and fibre was alive and quivering with expectation.
He was conscious of the darkness that surrounded him. He distinguished it, sensed its presence around him, its unbounded compass. It pressed in upon him, and his imagination strained to encompass it, to contend with it. He placed himself in its path, as though to shield his child against this vast, undulating sea of impenetrable blackness.
This was the mood that held him while the doctor was making his silent preparations. He had been uneasy all these months, of course, but—until now—some faint remnant of hope had always persisted. Now his taut nerves, strained to the breaking point, were seized by a grim, agonising fear; while hope shrank, and hid itself away deep in the inmost recesses of his heart.
And suddenly those words, "The child sees"—and everything was changed: fear vanquished, hope sprung into certainty. It was as though swift light had broken on the tense expectancy that filled his being. It was a tremendous upheaval, a cataclysm, invading his shadowed soul as the lightning flashes through dark night—dazzling, vivid. They seemed to burn themselves a blazing path into his brain—those few short words the doctor had pronounced. A spark flashed, somewhere deep within, and lit the inmost recesses of his spirit. Читать далее...

Three years passed.
A large audience gathered, at the Kiev "Contracts", [ The "Contracts", let us remind the reader, was the local term for the Kiev Fair.] to hear a remarkable new musician. Blind, he was; yet rumour carried the most fantastic tales of his musical talent, and of his history. He came of a wealthy family, it was said, but a band of blind beggars had stolen him from his home when he was still a child, and he had wandered with them about the countryside until, one day, a famed professor had chanced upon him and discovered his wonderful talent. Or—as others told the tale—he had left home of his own will, and joined this beggar band for some romantic reason. Be that as it might, the hall was full to capacity, and the takings (appropriated to charitable purposes unknown to the audience) complete.
Deep silence fell as a young man came forward on the platform. His face was pale, his eyes dark and beautiful. It would have been hard to believe that he was blind, had not those dark eyes been so fixed, and had he not been guided by a fair-haired young lady—his wife, as many said.
"No wonder he makes such an impression," some sceptic whispered, in the hall. "His very looks are so dramatic!"
That was so. The musician's pale face, with its look of meditative attention, his unmoving eyes, his entire aspect aroused the expectation of something unusual, something altogether out of the ordinary.
They are all lovers of their native melodies—our southern folk; and even this miscellaneous "Contracts" audience was carried away from the first by the musician's tremendous sincerity. He played no set piece—simply what came into his heart and mind. And through this improvisation breathed his vivid feeling for Nature, his sensitive ties with the direct sources of folk melody. Plastic, melodious, rich in colour, the music came pouring forth into the hall—now swelling into a majestic anthem, now sinking into gentle, pensive melancholy. At times, it would be a thunderstorm, rolling across the heavens, echoing out into space; at times—the soft steppe, swaying the grass on some old burial mound, bringing dim dreams of times long past.
When the last note died away, a storm of frenzied applause broke over the huge hall. And the blind musician sat with bowed head, listening wonderingly to the clamour. But then, once more, he raised his hands and brought them down upon the keys. In an instant, the din was hushed.
It was at this point that Maxim came in. Searchingly, he looked into the faces of the audience. And in all these myriad faces he found the same emotion, the same eager, burning gaze, fixed on the blind musician.
Maxim sat listening—and waiting. He knew so well, more than any other in the hall, the human drama that lay behind this music. At any moment, he feared, this improvisation that poured so freely, with such compelling power, from the musician's very soul, might break off suddenly, as it had so often in the past, on a note of strained and painful questioning, revealing some new wound in the player's heart. But the music continued, rising, strengthening, ever fuller and more powerful, complete master of the welded, tensely listening crowd.
And, as Maxim sat listening, he began to distinguish more and more clearly a something very familiar in the music.
Yes, that was it. The clamour of the street. A great wave rolling, rolling—bright, thunderous, alive—to break, sparkling into a thousand separate sounds; now swelling, rising, now sinking again into a distant, but incessant murmur—calm, unimpassioned, cold, indifferent.
And suddenly Maxim's heart contracted. Again, as in the past, a moan had broken into the music.
A moan broke in, and filled the hall, and died away. And again came the clamour of life, sounding ever clearer, brighter, stronger—mobile, sparkling, joyous, full of light.
No, this was not the old moan of private, selfish grief, of blind suffering and torment. Tears rose to Maxim's eyes. And he saw tears in the eyes of those around him.
"He's learned to see. Yes, that's the truth. He's learned to see," Maxim whispered to himself.
Through lively, vivid melodies, joyous, carefree, unrestrained as the wind in the steppes; through the sweeping, manifold din of life; through folk songs, wistful or solemn, there came again and again, with increasing urgency and power, a new, soul-rending note.
"So, so, dear boy," Maxim silently approved. "Overtake them in the hour of merriment and rejoicing."
Another moment—and the blind beggars' chant hung alone—all-powerful, all-absorbing—over the vast hall, over the spellbound throng.
"Alms for the blind.... Alms, in Christ's name."
But this was no mere plea for alms, no pitiful wail, drowned in the din of the streets. It carried all that it had held for Pyotr in those past days when he had fled from the piano, with distorted features, at its sound—unable to endure its bitter pain. Now, he had conquered this pain in his soul; and he conquered the hearts of Читать далее...