At last, after three weeks had gone by, the piano was brought from town.
Pétya[9] stood in the yard and listened attentively, in order to discover
how the workmen hurrying to and fro would carry “the music” into the
rooms. Surely it must be very heavy, for when they lifted it down from
the cart there was a creaking noise, and also much groaning and puffing
among the men. And now he could hear their heavy, measured tread; and at
every step there was a jarring, a rumbling, and a ringing above their
heads. When this strange music was placed on the drawing-room floor, it
again sent forth a dull rumbling sound like the threatening tones of an
angry voice.
All this alarmed the boy and by no means attracted him toward this new
guest, at once inanimate and wrathful. He went into the garden, and thus
he missed hearing them set up the instrument; neither did he know when
the tuner, who had arrived from town, tuned it with his tuning-hammer,
tried the key-board, and tightened the wires. It was not until all was in
readiness that the mother ordered Pétya to be brought into the room.
With the best Vienna instrument as an auxiliary, Anna Michàilovna felt
confident of victory over the simple rustic pipe. Now her Pétya is to
forget the stable and the piper, and she will once more become the source
of all his joys. She glanced merrily at her boy as he timidly entered the
room, accompanied by Uncle Maxim and Joachim; the latter, having asked
leave to listen to the foreign music, with down-cast eyes and overhanging
forelock now stood bashfully in the doorway. Just as Uncle Maxim and
Pétya seated themselves on the lounge Anna suddenly struck the keys of
the piano. She played the piece that she had learned to perfection at
the _pension_ of Pani Radètzka, under the instruction of Fräulein Klapps.
It was not a particularly brilliant piece, but quite complicated, and
one that required a certain amount of dextrous fingering; at the public
examination Anna Michàilovna gained much praise, both for herself and
her teacher, by the playing of this piece. No one positively knew, but
many surmised, that the silent Pan Popèlski was first charmed with
Pani Yatzènko during the identical quarter of an hour required for the
performance of her difficult music. _Now_ the young woman played it with
the view of winning a second victory: she wished to bind still more
closely to herself her son’s young heart, enticed away from her by the
pipe of the Hohòl.
But the fond mother’s hope was doomed to disappointment; the Vienna
instrument proved no match for the willow twig of Ukraine. True, the
piano from Vienna was rich in resources,—expensive wood, fine strings,
the skilled workmanship of a Vienna artisan, and all the wealth of
its wide musical range; but the pipe of the Ukraine had allies of its
own,—it was in its native haunts, surrounded by its own Ukraine nature.
Before Joachim had cut it with his knife and burned out its heart with
red-hot iron, it had swung to and fro above the river, so dear to the
boy’s heart; it had been caressed by the sun of the Ukraine, and fanned
by its breezes until the keen eye of the piper had caught sight of it
overhanging the precipice. The foreign visitor had but a slender chance
against the simple native pipe, whose tones had first been heard by the
boy at the peaceful hour of bedtime, through the mysterious rustling
of the night and the murmuring of the green beech-trees, with all the
well-known voices of Nature in the Ukraine that found an echo within his
soul.
There could, moreover, be no fair comparison between Pani Popèlska and
Joachim. Her fingers, it is true, were more dextrous and flexible; the
melody she played was richer and more complex; and Fräulein Klapps
had labored diligently to make her pupil mistress of this difficult
instrument. But Joachim had the true musical instinct. He had loved also,
and sorrowed; and animated by these emotions, he sought his themes in the
surrounding Nature, and there he found his simple melodies,—the soughing
of the forest, the gentle whisper of the grass upon the steppes, the sad,
old, national melodies that he had heard sung over his crib when he was
an infant.
The instrument from Vienna had truly but a slender chance against the
magic of the Hohòl’s pipe. Not more than a minute had passed before Uncle
Maxim with sudden energy rapped on the floor with his crutch. When Anna
Michàilovna turned toward him, she saw on Pètrik’s pale face the same
expression it had worn as he lay upon the grass on the memorable day of
their first spring walk. Joachim in his turn looked sympathetically at
the boy, then with one disdainful glance at the German music he left the
room, his heavy boots resounding across the drawing-room floor.