Liza | Page 9

garden to
Gedeonovsky.
"I want to have a little more chat with you," she said, "about our poor
Fedia, and to ask for your advice."
Gedeonovsky smiled and bowed, took up with two fingers his hat, on
the brim of which his gloves were neatly laid out, and retired with
Maria Dmitrievna.
Panshine and Eliza remained in the room. She fetched the sonata, and
spread it out. Both sat down to the piano in silence. From up-stairs
there came the feeble sound of scales, played by Lenochka's uncertain
fingers.
* * * * *
Note to p. 36.
It is possible that M. Panshine may have been inspired by Heine's
verses:--
Wie des Mondes Abbild zittert In den wilden Meereswogen, Und er
selber still und sicher Wandelt an dem Himmelshogen.
Also wandelst du, Geliebte, Still und sicher, und es zittert Nur dein
Abbild mir im Herzen, Weil mein eignes Herz erschüttert.

V.
Christoph Theodor Gottlieb Lemm was born in 1786, in the kingdom of

Saxony, in the town of Chemnitz. His parents, who were very poor,
were both of them musicians, his father playing the hautboy, his mother
the harp. He himself, by the time he was five years old, was already
practicing on three different instruments. At the age of eight, he was
left an orphan, and at ten, he began to earn a living by his art. For a
long time he led a wandering life, playing in all sorts of places--in
taverns, at fairs, at peasants' marriages, and at balls. At last he gained
access to an orchestra, and there, steadily rising higher and higher, he
attained to the position of conductor. As a performer he had no great
merit, but he understood music thoroughly. In his twenty-eighth year,
he migrated to Russia. He was invited there by a great seigneur, who,
although he could not abide music himself, maintained an orchestra
from a love of display. In his house Lemm spent seven years as a
musical director, and then left him with empty hands. The seigneur,
who had squandered all his means, first offered Lemm a bill of
exchange for the amount due to him; then refused to give him even that;
and ultimately never paid him a single farthing. Lemm was advised to
leave the country, but he did not like to go home penniless from
Russia--from the great Russia, that golden land of artists. So be
determined to remain and seek his fortune there.
During the course of ten years, the poor German continued to seek his
fortune. He found various employers, he lived in Moscow, and in
several county towns, he patiently suffered much, he made
acquaintance with poverty, he struggled hard.[A] All this time, amidst
all the troubles to which he was exposed, the idea of ultimately
returning home never quitted him. It was the only thing that supported
him. But fate did not choose to bless him with this supreme and final
piece of good fortune.
[Footnote A: Literally, "like a fish out of ice:" as a fish, taken out of a
river which has been frozen over, struggles on the ice.]
At fifty years of age, in bad health and prematurely decrepid, he
happened to come to the town of O., and there he took up his
permanent abode, managing somehow to obtain a poor livelihood by
giving lessons. He had by this time entirely lost all hope of quilting the

hated soil of Russia.
Lemm's outward appearance was not in his favor. He was short and
high-shouldered, his shoulder-blades stuck out awry, his feet were large
and flat, and his red hands, marked by swollen veins, had hard, stiff
fingers, tipped with nails of a pale blue color. His face was covered
with wrinkles, his cheeks were hollow, and he had pursed-up lips
which he was always moving with a kind of chewing action--one which,
joined with his habitual silence, gave him an almost malignant
expression. His grey hair hung in tufts over a low forehead. His very
small and immobile eyes glowed dully, like coals in which the flame
has just been extinguished by water. He walked heavily, jerking his
clumsy frame at every step. Some of his movements called to mind the
awkward shuffling of an owl in a cage, when it feels that it is being
stared at, but can scarcely see anything itself out of its large yellow
eyes, blinking between sleep and fear. An ancient and inexorable
misery had fixed its ineffaceable stamp on the poor musician, and had
wrenched and distorted his figure--one which, even without that, would
have had but little to recommend it; but in spite of all that, something
good and honest, something out of the common run, revealed itself in
that half-ruined being, to any one who was able to