Short Fiction - Vladimir Korolenko (easy books to read in english txt) 📗

was a boy.”

“Have you no fear of God?”

“God?”⁠ ⁠… he repeated, smiling, and tossed his head. “I squared up my accounts with the Lord a long time ago, and well I might!⁠ ⁠… Considering all my prayers, I shouldn’t wonder if He were still my debtor. Look here, sir!” he said, changing his tone, “those things are not for the like of us. Why do you hound me? Haven’t I told you that such is my lot! I can talk pleasantly to you here, but if we happened to meet in the forest, or as we did that time in the Hollow⁠—then, it would be a very different matter.⁠ ⁠… It is all fate.⁠ ⁠… Heigh-ho!”

He shook his brown locks, exclaiming:⁠—

“Won’t you give me some tobacco, sir? I want it badly!” But the light tone in which he spoke seemed to me forced and artificial.

I gave him a cigarette, and, leaving him, went out into the vestibule. Away beyond the forest the sun was just rising; and the night-mist, drifting eastward, rested on the tops of the pines and the cedars.⁠ ⁠… The dew sparkled on the grass, and through the window I could see the yellow flame of the tapers that stood near the head of the corpse.

The Blind Musician I The Blind Infant⁠—The Family I

At the hour of midnight, in a wealthy family living in the southwestern part of Russia, a child was born. As the first faint, pitiful cry of the baby echoed through the room, the young mother, who had been lying with closed eyes, unconscious to all appearances, stirred uneasily in the bed. She murmured a word or two in a low whispering tone, while her pallid face, with its sweet and almost childlike features, was disfigured by an expression of impatience⁠—like that of a spoiled child, who resents the unwonted suffering as something new to her experience. The nurse bent low to catch the inarticulate sounds that fell from her whispering lips.

“Why, why does he⁠—?” murmured the invalid in the same impatient whisper.

The nurse did not understand the question. Again the child cried out, and again the same shadow of sharp pain darkened the face of the mother, while large tears rolled down from her closed eyes.

“Why, why,” she repeated in a whisper.

At last the meaning of her question seemed to occur to the nurse, who answered quite calmly⁠—

“Oh, you mean why does the child cry? Babies always do. You must not agitate yourself.”

But the mother was not to be pacified. She started every time the little one cried, and kept repeating in tones of angry impatience, “Why⁠—why⁠—so dreadfully?”

To the nurse there seemed nothing unusual in the cries of the infant; and supposing the mother to be either unconscious or simply delirious, she left her, and busied herself with the child.

The young mother said no more, but from time to time an anguish too deep for expression brought the tears to her eyes. They forced their way through the thick black eyelashes, and slowly rolled down her pale marble-like cheeks. Perchance her mother’s heart was torn by a presentiment of some dark, abiding misery hanging like a heavy cloud over the infant’s crib, and destined to accompany him through life even unto the grave. These signs of emotion, on the other hand, were very likely nothing more than the wanderings of delirium. But however this may have been, the child was indeed born blind.

II

At first no one perceived it. The boy had that vague way of looking at objects common to all very young infants. As the days went by, the life of the newborn man could soon be reckoned by weeks. His eyes grew clearer; the thin film that had overspread them disappeared, and the pupil became defined. But the child was never seen to turn his head, to follow the bright sunbeams that found their way into the room; nor did the merry chirping of the birds, nor the rustling of the branches of the green beech-trees in the shaded garden beneath the windows, attract his notice.

The mother, who had now recovered, was the first one to mark with anxiety the strange immobility of the child’s expression, so invariably calm and serious. With pitiful eyes, like a frightened dove, she would question those about her: “Tell me what makes him look so unnatural?”

“What do you mean?” strangers would reply in tones of indifference; “he looks like all other children of his age.”

“But watch him! See how oddly he fumbles with his hands!”

“The child cannot yet regulate the movements of his hands by the impressions which his eyes receive,” replied the doctor.

“Why does he look constantly in one direction? He is⁠—blind!”

As the dread suspicion found utterance in words, not one of them could calm the mother’s agitation. The doctor took the child in his arms, and turning him suddenly toward the light, looked into his eyes. An expression of alarm passed over his countenance, and after a few vague remarks he took his leave, promising to return in two days. The mother moaned and fluttered like a wounded bird, pressing the child to her bosom, while the boy’s eyes kept ever the same steadfast and rigid stare.

The doctor did return in two days, bringing with him an ophthalmoscope. After lighting a candle, he proceeded to test the eyes of the infant by flashing it suddenly before them and as suddenly withdrawing it; finally, with an expression of distress, he said⁠—

“It grieves me deeply, Madam, but I am forced to admit that you have divined the truth. The boy indeed is blind⁠—irremediably blind.”

Sadly, but without agitation, the mother listened to this announcement. “I knew it long ago,” she softly murmured.

III

The family into which this blind child was born was a small one. Its other two members were the father and “Uncle Maxim,” so called not only by his own people, but also by friends and acquaintances. The father was a