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

that might almost be called alarm. The eyes alone constantly preserved their steady, unchanging, and sightless gaze.

Having reached the hill, all three seated themselves. As the mother was lifting the boy to place him in a more comfortable position, he caught nervously at her dress like one who is on the point of falling, almost as if he no longer felt the ground beneath his feet. Again the mother took no heed of his alarm, because both her own eyes and attention were absorbed in the charming spring landscape.

It was noonday. Slowly the sun sailed across the blue sky. From the elevation where they sat could be seen the wide-spreading river. Its ice had already floated down the current, save a few occasional fragments dotting the surface here and there, which were fast melting away. On the low meadows the water was still standing in broad lagoons, which reflected the blue dome of the heavens and the snowy clouds that slowly passed and vanished like the melting ice. A gentle breeze rippled the glistening surface of the river. Looking across to the opposite shore one could see the dark grainfields, whose steaming vapor rising wave after wave veiled the thatched huts far away in the distance, and obscured the vague blue outline of the forest. It was as if the earth sent up its clouds of incense to the sky.

All this, however, was visible only to those who had eyes. The boy saw nothing of this picture; he could not look upon that festival of Nature, nor on her marvellous temple; his sensations were vague and broken; his childish heart was troubled. When he had first started, with the sun’s rays falling full upon his face, warming his delicate skin, he instinctively turned his sightless eyes in its direction, as if he realized the central force in the invisible picture before him. The transparent distance, the blue dome overhead, the wide horizon, had no existence so far as he was concerned. The sole effect produced on him was a sense of some material substance, warming his face with its soft caress. Then something both cool and light, although less tangible than the warmth of the sun, lifted from his face this sensation of tender caressing languor, and left behind a delicious coolness. Within the house the boy had become accustomed to move freely, conscious of the space surrounding him. Here he was encompassed by pursuing waves, which now caressed and now excited and intoxicated him. The sun’s warm touch was suddenly brushed away; a gust of wind began to ring in his ears and to blow about his face and temples⁠—indeed all over his head, down to the very nape of his neck, whirling around him as though it were trying to bear him away, or to entice him somewhere into the invisible space, benumbing his consciousness, and lulling him into a languor of forgetfulness. Then the boy’s hand would cling more closely to his mother’s, and it seemed to him as though his heart must cease to beat. However, after he was seated he appeared to grow calmer. Already, notwithstanding the strange sensation that pervaded his whole being, he had begun to distinguish the separate sounds. The atmospheric waves were still dashing tumultuously about him; and as the throbbings of his quickened pulse beat time to the music of these waves, it seemed to him that they were entering his very body. From time to time they brought to him the lark’s sharp trill, the soft whisper of the budding birch, or the gentle splash of the flowing river. The lark, whizzing by on its light wings, paused just overhead to describe its capricious circles; the gnats buzzed; and over all, sad and prolonged, rose the occasional cry of the ploughman, urging his horses over a half-ploughed strip of land.

The boy failed to grasp these sounds in their entirety; he could neither unite them nor group them in any satisfactory sequence. One by one they seemed to project themselves into his dark little head, now soft and vague; now loud, sharp, and deafening. At times they came crowding confusedly on each other, jumbled in meaningless discord. Faster and faster ran the waves; now it seemed to the boy as if above all this tumult of sounds he could hear muffled echoes, like memories of the past, coming to him from another world. When the sounds grew fainter, a sense of dreamy languor came over him; a convulsive twitching betrayed the successive waves of feeling that swept across his face; he closed his eyes, then opened them, and every feature seemed to ask a question, striving to grasp the situation. His childish sense of appreciation, as yet but feeble⁠—overwhelmed as it was with new impressions, although it still struggled against the tide, making an effort to hold its own, to combine them into something like unity, and thus to gain the victory over them⁠—showed signs of giving away. The task was too great for the brain of a blind child, destitute of the necessary images by means of which he might have achieved it.

All these sounds rose into the air, flying to and fro, and falling one by one, all too varied, too resonant. The waves that had taken possession of the boy rose with greater force from the darkness that encompassed him with its reverberating echoes, and were again resolved into the same darkness, only to be replaced by other waves and other sounds more and more hurried, soaring above him, filling his soul with anguish; again they seemed to lift him up, as if lulling him to repose with gentle rocking motion. Suddenly above this vague confusion arose the long-drawn note of a human call; then all at once everything became still. With a faint moan the boy rolled over backward on the grass. The mother turned instantly, and she in her turn uttered a cry: he was lying on the grass in a deep swoon.