In bad company

III

Passing through the yard, one day, Maxim heard strange sounds floating from the drawing-room, where Petro should have been having a music lesson. A strange sort of exercise, this! It consisted of only two notes. First, the very highest, brightest note of the upper register, quivering as it was struck—repeatedly, rapidly, over and over again; then, suddenly—and also over and over—a low, rolling bass note. What could such extraordinary music mean? Maxim turned quickly towards the house, and a moment later, opening the drawing-room door, stopped short in amazement at the scene confronting him.
Petro, in his tenth year now, sat on a low stool at his mother's feet. Beside him, its neck outstretched and its long beak turning restlessly from side to side, stood a young stork Iochim had tamed and given to the boy. Petro always fed his pet from his own hand, and the bird followed him everywhere. Now he was holding it still with one hand, and with the other gently stroking its feathers—the neck, the back, the wings. His face was set in strained attention. And his mother, at the piano—her face aflame with excitement, her eyes dark with grief—was striking one of the keys, rapidly, repeatedly, evoking that continuous, quivering highest note of all. As she played, she looked with painful intentness into the child's face at her knee. And then, when the boy's hand, stroking the stork, reached the point at the end of the wing where the intense white of the feathers ended abruptly in as intense a black, the mother's hand swept down across the keyboard and a low, bass note came rumbling through the room.
They were so absorbed in what they were doing that neither of them noticed Maxim until, recovering from his amazement, he interrupted them with a loud, "Anna! What does all this mean?"
Meeting her brother's searching glance, Anna Mikhailovna hung her head like a little girl whom her teacher has caught at some childish mischief.
"Well, you see," she explained awkwardly, "Petro says he feels some difference in the colouring of the feathers. Only he can't understand just what the difference is. He spoke of it himself, truly he did, and I think he really feels it."
"And if he does, what then?"
"Why, nothing, only ... you see ... I thought perhaps I could help him a little to understand the difference, by using this difference of sounds. Don't be cross with me, Max. I really think it's very similar."
Maxim was so amazed by this new thought that, at first, he could find nothing to say. He made her repeat her experiment, and watched the boy's strained face in silence, shaking his head. -
"Do try to understand me, Anna," he told his sister, when the boy had left the room. "It's not a good thing to raise questions in the child's mind that you can never, never answer to his full satisfaction."
"But he brought it up himself, truly he did," she cried. "That makes no difference. The boy has no choice but to settle down to his blindness. And we must try to make him forget any such thing as light. I do my best to prevent any outer stimulus that might lead him to fruitless questioning. And if we could rid him of all such stimuli, he'd never feel the lack in his sensations—just as we, with all five senses, never long for some unknown sixth."
"Ah, but we do," she answered softly.
"Anna!"
"We do," she persisted. "We often long for what's impossible."
Still, she yielded to her brother's counsel.
But this time Maxim was wrong. In his eagerness to block all outer stimuli, he had failed to take into account those impulses which Nature had implanted in the child's own being.