On the contrary: it is sometimes boring, but beneficial as well.’ The old man crimsoned to the roots of his hair, threw an oblique glance at Liza and hurriedly left the room.

Marya Dmitrievna asked Panshin to repeat his romance, but he announced that he had no wish to offend the ears of the learned German and suggested to Liza that they should practise the Beethoven Sonata. Then Marya Dmitrievna sighed and suggested for her own part that Gedeonovsky should accompany her for a walk in the garden. ‘I wish’, she said, ‘to have a few more words with you about our poor Fedya and to seek your advice.’ Gedeonovsky grinned, bowed, picked up his hat with two fingers at the point where his gloves had been neatly laid on its brim and departed with Marya Dmitrievna. Panshin and Liza remained in the room; she drew out and opened the Sonata; both of them sat down silently at the piano. From above resounded the faint sounds of scales played over and over by Lenochka’s unskilled fingers.

V

CHRISTOPHER THEODORE GOTTLIEB LEMM was born in 1786 into a family of penurious musicians in the town of Chemnitz in the Kingdom of Saxony. His father played the French horn, his mother played the harp; by his fifth year he was himself practising three different instruments. At eight he was orphaned and at ten he began earning his daily bread by his playing. For a long time he led a vagrant life, playing everywhere – at inns, at fairs, at peasant weddings and at balls. Finally he found a place in an orchestra and, moving ever higher and higher, eventually became conductor. He was a rather poor performer, but he had a fundamental understanding of music. In his twenty-eighth year he emigrated to Russia. He had been booked by a grandiose member of the gentry who could not endure music but maintained an orchestra for show. Lemm spent seven years as his director of music and left without a penny to show for it: the gentleman in question went bankrupt, wanted to give him an I.O.U. but later refused to give him even that – in short, did not pay him a farthing. He was advised to go abroad; but he did not wish to return home from Russia a beggar, from that great Russia, the gold mine of all artists. He decided to remain and try his luck. The poor German tried his luck for twenty yean: he was employed by various gentlemen, lived both in Moscow and in provincial towns, endured and suffered much, experiencing poverty and struggling for life like a fish out of water. But the idea of returning to his homeland never left him amid all the misfortunes which beset him. That idea alone kept him going. Fate, however, did not think fit to gladden him with this first and last happiness: at fifty, sick and prematurely decrepit, he found himself in the town of O… and remained there forever, having finally abandoned all hope of leaving the Russia that was so hateful to him and relying somehow on his lessons to make a paltry living. Lemm’s appearance was no advantage to him. He was short in stature, round-shouldered, with protuberant bent shoulder-blades and shrunken stomach, large flat feet and pale-blue nails on the stiff, inflexible fingers of his sinewy red hands. He had a wrinkled face, sunken cheeks and compressed lips which were endlessly making a chewing motion that, combined with his usual taciturnity, produced an almost menacing effect. His grey hair hung in tufts over his low forehead. His tiny motionless eyes had a dull glow like recently extinguished coals. He had a ponderous gait, swinging his cumbersome body from side to side at each step. Some of his movements were reminiscent of the preenings of an owl in a cage when it feels it is being watched and yet itself can hardly see out of its large, yellow, fearful and sleepily blinking eyes. Longstanding, implacable grief had left its ineradicable mark upon the poor musician and contorted and disfigured his already unbecoming person; but for those who could see beyond first impressions there was something kindly, honourable and unusual to be discerned in this half-ruined man. A devotee of Bach and Handel, expert at his craft, gifted with a lively imagination and that boldness of thought which is uniquely characteristic of the Germans, Lemm in time – who knows? – might have taken his place among the great composers of his country if life had led him on a different course; but he was not born under an auspicious star. He had written a great deal in his time – and he had not succeeded in seeing a single one of his compositions published; he had no idea how to set about things in the right way, to whom to bow at the right moment or when was the best time to busy himself.