“For me? But that’s impossible. From whom?”
“From a Jan Paderewski. The Post Office has been asking for you all over town. Just by chance I heard about it.”
The letter from home enclosed a hundred rubles. Ignace left Petersburg the next day and was soon safe at home in Sudylkow, thinner but considerably wiser than he had been a year before. One question had haunted him all the way home. “How did you know where to find me?” he asked his father. “And how did you know how desperately I needed that money?”
“Oh, that was easy,” Mr. Paderewski said. “You see, I had a dream. I saw you hungry and cold in St. Petersburg, so I sent the letter to the Post Office there and begged them to look for you. The surprising thing is that they found you.”
The fact that his father’s intense love for him had worked a small miracle on his behalf touched the boy’s heart so deeply that he made an immediate resolution. He would repay his father’s goodness by doing exactly as his father wanted. He would go back to the Conservatory and finish his studies with no more nonsense. Nor would he put his father to any more years of expense than the good man had originally expected. He was now two years behind his own classmates, but he vowed that somehow he would graduate with them. This gave him six months in which to complete the regular work of two years!
During these months of intensive study, young Ignace began to develop the gift that would carry him through so many crises in his life: an enormous power of concentration.
On graduation day Mr. Paderewski was in the hall, sick at heart because he did not really believe that his son could possibly have passed the rigorous final examinations for the music diploma. As the list of the names was read, as one boy after another went up to the platform, the nervous father braced himself. “But of course his name will not be called. How could it be? The others in the class have been working an extra year and a half ... There ... that’s the last boy going up now, I think.”
But it was not quite the last boy. The last boy was now being called. “And finally,” the Director announced, beaming, “with the highest honors of the class, Ignace Jan Paderewski.”
Mr. Paderewski remembered few details after that. All twelve Kerntopfs were trying to shake his hand at once, and then Ignace was playing the Grieg Piano Concerto with the orchestra, and everyone in the hall was cheering for him. Then the father realized something that must have made him even happier than this moment of triumph: in six short months young Ignace must have done quite a bit of growing up.