In bad company

V

And so, try as he might to eliminate all outer stimuli, Maxim would never be able to destroy the pressure from within, the pressure of a need unsatisfied At best, the care he exercised might succeed only in delaying the awakening of this need, in preventing the too early intensification of the blind child's suffering. For the rest, the boy's unhappy fate must take its course, with all the bitter consequences of his blindness.
And it advanced upon him, his fate, a heavy storm cloud. His inborn liveliness subsided more and more, as the years passed by—like a receding tide; and an inner melancholy, vague as yet, but unremitting, sounded more and more strongly in his soul, and began to affect his character. The laughter that had rung out, in his early childhood, at every vivid new impression, now sounded less and less frequently. He was able to perceive but little of life's laughter, merriment, humour; but was wonderfully sensitive to the shadowy, wistful melancholy that sounded in Nature in his southern homeland, and in the songs of its people. His eyes would fill with tears at the song of how "the grave whispered with the wind, out in the open field", and he liked to go out into the fields himself, to listen to this whispering. More and more, he developed the desire to be alone; and when, his lessons over, he wandered away by himself, none of the household, if it could be helped, would break in on his seclusion. He would go off to some ancient burial mound, out in the steppe, or to his hillock by the river-bank, or to that high rock he knew so well, and lie there listening, with not a sound about him but the rustle of leaves and the whispering of the grass, and, perhaps, the faint sighing of the wind over the steppe. These things harmonised in some very special way with the depths of his soul's mood. To the extent that he was capable of apprehending Nature, it was out here that he understood her best—completely, to the very bottom. Here, Nature did not worry him with insoluble problems. Here, there was this wind pouring itself straight into his soul, and the grass, that seemed to whisper soft words of sympathy; and when his young soul, tuned to the gentle harmony around him, relaxed in Nature's caressing warmth, he would feel something rising in his breast, something that flooded his whole being. He would bury his face, at such moments, in the cool, damp grass, and let the soft tears flow; soft tears, not bitter. Or, sometimes, he would take up his pipe, and forget all the world in wistful melodies congenial to his mood and to the quiet harmony of the steppe.
Any human sound that might break suddenly in upon this mood affected him, always, as a jarring dissonance. And that was natural enough. It is only with the closest, the most kindred of hearts that there can be communion at such moments; and the boy had only one such friend of his own age—the fair-haired little girl from the possessor's estate.
Their friendship grew steadily stronger. It was a completely reciprocal relationship. Evelina brought her friend her tranquillity, her quiet joy in life. She helped him, in his blindness, to perceive new shadings in the life around them. And he—he brought her his sorrow. It was as though her first knowledge of his grief had dealt the little woman's tender heart a deep and cruel wound, and—remove the dagger from the wound that it had dealt, and she would bleed to death. After the poignant sympathy that had hurt her so on that day of their first talk together, on the hillock by the riverside, his company grew daily more essential to her. When they were apart, the wound would begin to bleed, and the pain would fill her heart again; and she would hasten to her friend, to ease her own suffering in unceasing care for him.