Once, as he was crossing the yard, Maxim heard from the drawing-room, where the music-lessons usually took place, some very queer exercises. They consisted of two notes. First, the highest key of the upper register was struck incessantly, in swift repetition; then the low reverberation of a bass note jarred upon the ear. Curious to discover what might be the meaning of these strange musical exercises, Maxim hobbled across the yard, and a minute later entered the drawing-room. He paused, and stood motionless in the doorway, contemplating the scene before him.
The boy, who was now ten years old, sat on a low stool at his mother’s feet. Beside him, craning his neck and turning his long beak from side to side, stood a tame stork which Joachim had presented to the “Panitch.” The boy fed him every morning from his own hands, and the bird followed his new friend and master from morning till night. At this moment Petrùsya was holding him by one hand, and slowly stroking his neck and back with the other, while an expression of deep thought and absorption rested on his face. The mother meanwhile, evidently excited and at the same time with a look of sadness, was striking with her finger the key that sent forth that sharp resonant note. At the same time, slightly bending forward from her seat, she watched the boy’s face with a painful scrutiny. When his hand, gliding along the brilliant white plumage, reached the tips of the wings, where the white plumes were suddenly replaced by black ones, Anna Michàilovna instantly moved her hand to the other key, and the low bass note, with its deep reverberations, echoed through the room.
Both mother and son were so much engrossed in their occupation that they had not observed Maxim’s entrance, until, recovering from his astonishment, he interrupted this performance: “Annùsya, what does this mean?”
Meeting Maxim’s searching glance, the young woman was as much confused as if a severe tutor had detected her in the commission of some fault. “You see,” she said in confusion, “he tells me that he can distinguish a certain difference between the colors of the stork, but he cannot understand wherein this difference consists. Truly he was the first one to mention it, and I believe he is right.”
“Well, what of it?”
“Well, I was trying, after a fashion, to explain this difference to him by sounds. Don’t be vexed, Max, but I really think that there is a correspondence.”
This unexpected idea took Maxim so entirely by surprise that at first he was at a loss for an answer. He asked her to repeat her experiments, and as he watched the rigid concentration of the boy’s expression he shook his head. “Believe me, Anna,” he said when he was alone with her, “it is better not to arouse thoughts in the boy’s mind, to which you can give no satisfactory solution. He must resign himself to his blindness,—there is no help for it; and it is our duty to keep him from trying to comprehend the light. For my part, I make every effort to avert each question, and if it were but possible to keep him removed from all objects likely to suggest them, he would no more realize that a sense is missing than we who possess five deplore the want of a sixth.”
The sister yielded as usual to her brother’s persuasive arguments; but this time both were mistaken. While overrating the influence of outside impressions, Maxim forgot the powerful stimulus which Nature communicates to a child’s soul.
IV.
They had before them a blind child, a future man, the possible father of a family. “Malevolent fate,” or perhaps “accident” hidden within the mysterious realm of phenomena, had closed forever those eyes,—the windows through which the soul receives impressions from the glowing, many-colored, changing world. Doomed never to behold the light of the sun, although not himself the offspring of the blind, he was still a link in the illimitable chain of bygone lives, and contained within himself the possibilities of future lives. All those living links now lost in the remote past, corresponding in proportion to their capacity to the impressions of light, had transmitted to him the inner faculty, and through him, blind though he was, to an endless succession of future generations who would possess the power of vision.[14]