There is a short silence. Then a thin voice is heard. It is the girl,
slender as a young birch, with the sharp, cheerful little face, who is
speaking.
“My God! What strength! What eloquence!”
Mikhail Lvovich slowly turns his face toward her. He smiles severely
and says nothing.
The girl has her hands clasped across her knees. It is an extremely
pretty pose. Her face has suddenly assumed a very grave air, breathing
passionate entreaty and fiery determination. She exclaims fervently:
“Let’s all sing the chorus! Mikhail Lvovich will teach us. You will
teach us, Mikhail Lvovich, won’t you?”
“Very well,” Mikhail Lvovich replies with his usual severe dignity.
He casts his dull, heavy gaze round the crowded circle of delighted
young faces. He alone sits with his back to the open glade and to the
witching moon. His face, now in the shade, has become even more
significant. And his whole bearing is one of imposing solemnity.
The faces of the younger people are white in the moonlight. Their
garments are luminously bright. Their voices are brilliantly clear. In
their simple trust there is the sense of an avowal.
“Well, let us begin!” exclaims the slender girl, somewhat agitated.
Mikhail Lvovich raises his hand with a solemn gesture and begins:
“Arise, ye branded with a curse!”
The children sing with a will, mingling their high, clear voices with
Mikhail Lvovich’s deep, low voice. Their young voices are blazing with
the passionate flame of freedom and revolt. Higher and still higher,
above the white mists, above the black forest, toward the silver clouds
and the quiet glimmering stars, toward the aspectful moon, rise the
sounds of the invocation.
And the white-trunked birches, the milk-white moon, motionless in the
sky, the white, silvery grass, pressed down by children’s knees—all is
still, all is silent, all is harkening with a sensitive ear. Everything
around listens with poignant and solemn intentness to the song of these
luminous children who, bathed in the translucent silver of the cool,
lunar glimmer, their knees on the grass, their eyes burning in their
uplifted faces, are repeating faithfully the words sung by the tall,
self-contained young man whose dark face with fixed glance gazes
morosely on the ground. They repeat after him:
In the International
As brothers all men shall meet.
The strange foreign word, un-Russian in its ring, suggests to them the
lofty, holy designation of a promised land, a new land under new skies,
a land in which they have faith.
After the hymn there is silence, a holy silence, solemn and palpable,
reaching from the earth to the heavens. They might have been in the
temple of a new, as yet unknown religion, in a mystic moment of
sacrificial rites.