The trumpeter of Krakow : $b A tale of the fifteenth centuryKelly, Eric P. (Eric Philbrook)
History
The trumpeter of Krakow : $b A tale of the fifteenth century
Kelly, Eric P. (Eric Philbrook)
Middle Ages -- Juvenile fiction; Poland -- History -- Casimir IV, 1447-1492 -- Juvenile fiction
The trumpet had in the meanwhile sounded the first hour, but still she
was not able to sleep. Her natural thoughts of her uncle and Tring were
followed by a flood of fanciful imaginings, and in them she saw the
figures warped and distorted out of their natural proportions; persons
who are sick and persons who carry troubles in their minds experience
this frequently, at a time when the body is tired and aching for sleep
and yet when the mind is overactive with worries. Her uncle at one
minute of normal and ordinary size seemed at intervals to shrink or
enlarge without warning; Tring was now a student of the collegiate type,
now a nightmare of a thing with the head of a pumpkin that grew until
the whole sky was filled with the darkness of his shadow. They were
engaged in many nefarious enterprises: they were releasing great hordes
of bats from baskets, bats that they had created out of old sandals;
they were leaping into the air and catching huge birds like eagles which
they were imprisoning under the roof of the loft; they were mixing fiery
liquids that hissed and bubbled and foamed—they were doing a thousand
things at once and all of them somehow of evil. For nearly an hour these
phantoms of half sleep danced in her brain, and then suddenly the bell
on the tower sounded twice.
“The second hour,” she exclaimed, the drowsy phantoms of her brain
taking sudden flight.
The Heynal began. “That is Joseph,” she thought.
She was humming the tune, already following him note by note—she
reached the place where the hymn ended, and ceased there, to wait until
he began to play again from the second of the four windows. But the next
second she realized to her vast amazement that Joseph had not stopped
upon the broken note that came at the end of the Heynal, but had added a
note or two, and brought the little hymn to an end in the way that
pieces of music usually end.
Elzbietka sat upright on the bed, although she was quite certain that
some trick had been played upon her by her senses. “Perhaps I was but
half awake,” she thought. “I will listen more closely when he plays it
the second time.”
He began to play from the south side. This time she did not hum the tune
over but followed each note intently. When he had finished she realized
that for the second time he had not stopped upon the broken note but had
gone ahead with the additional notes which made the Heynal sound like a
finished piece of music and not one that was broken off.
[Illustration: _The ending of the Heynal, showing the broken note._
_The Heynal as Joseph played it, showing the notes which he added._]
“He _is_ playing it wrongly,” she repeated to herself.
He played next on the east side but the wind carried the sound away this
time. When he came to the last window, the window on the north, the
sound came clearly to Elzbietka’s ears. “This time I shall know,” she
said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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