Markof, the Russian Violinist

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE FUTURE CHANGED. autumn came, then the winter. The long nights, L thick with snow, whose silence nothing disturbed, passed one after 'the other over the bed where Victor lay?Victor, who had become as white as the fields without, and as frail as the slender birch branches the wind waved before the window opposite. The sole diversion of the poor being whose strength and grace was thus destroyed, was in listening to the sounds which his brother DJmiane drew from his small, hoarse violin, that however was always in tune. Stretched out almost flat upon his back with his waxen- like hands spread out on the coverlet, gazing vacantly into the gray atmosphere of the sullen winter time, he was entranced by the strange music of the unconscious artist. While Demiane, who was frowning in the earnestness of his work, was endeavoring with all his soul to render the mystic sweetness of the church hymns, and with the audacity of those who know nothing, was trying to find the thirds and fifths of chords that he heard within himself without imagining that it was a master stroke, and would begin again and again, until he had acquired the softness he sought, Victor dreamed of a thousand sweet things that were lost to him. The forest was in the spring-time season; the liliesof-the-valley grew by thousands in the yet short grass; the little plants in the form of a thyrsus, which smell like orange blossoms and possess an incomparable beauty, carpeted the hollows where roots of pine trees had formerly grown; the greenfinches chattered, the blackbirds whistled, and far, far away at the entrance of the wood, the cuckoo made its melancholy call heard at regular intervals. It was good to jump with one's feet close together into the mossy holes, and to bury one's self up to one's kn...