"You poured that water on the keys intentionally, to prevent your playing," the teacher angrily declares to her pupil.
"I do not deny it," Vladimir rejoins, loftily.
The spectators suppress a smile, and are all, as is, alas! so frequently the case, on the side of the culprit, a tall, overgrown lad of about fourteen, with a handsome dark face, large black eyes, a short, impertinent nose, and full, well-formed lips. With hands thrust deep into the pockets of his blue jacket, he gravely surveys the circle, and tosses his head defiantly.
"You hear him! you hear him!" Fräulein Laut screams, turning to the by-standers. Then, approaching Vladimir, she asks, angrily, "And how can you justify such conduct?"
Vladimir scans her with majestic disdain. "How can you justify your having ruined all my pleasure in music?" he asks, in a tragic tone, and with a bombastic flourish of his hand. "That piano has been my dear friend from childhood!"--he points feelingly to the instrument, which is yellow with age, has thin, square legs, and six pedals, the use of which no one has ever yet fathomed,--"yes, my friend! And today I hate it so that I have well-nigh destroyed it! Fräulein Laut, justify that."
"Must I be subjected to this insolence?" groans the teacher.
"Vladimir, go to your room!" Harry orders, with hardly maintained gravity.
Vladimir departs with lofty self-possession. The teacher turns contemptuously from those present, especially from Harry, who tries to appease her with a few courteous phrases. With a skilful hand she takes the piano apart, dismembers the key-board, and spreads the hammers upon sheets of tin brought for her from the kitchen by Blasius, the old servant, that the wet, swollen wood may be dried before the fire.
"Take care lest there be an auto-da-fé," Harry calls after her. Without deigning to reply, she vanishes with the bowels of the piano.
Blasius, meanwhile, with imperturbable composure, has spread the table for the evening meal at one end of the spacious room, in which there is now diffused an agreeable odour of fresh biscuits. A mountain of reddish-yellow almond cakes is flanked on one side by a plate of appetizing rye bread, on the other by butter garnished with ice and cresses. There is a fruit-basket at either end of the table, filled with peaches, early grapes, and all kinds of ripe green and purple plums, while a bowl of cut glass holds whipped cream cooled in ice. Finally, old Blasius brings in a tray fairly bending beneath the burden of various pitchers and flagons, the bewildering number of which is due to the fact that at Komaritz the whims of all are consulted, and consequently each one orders something different, be it only a different kind of cream.