Uncle Maxim simply tolerated all these musical experiments. Strange
though it may seem, the inclinations which had so unmistakably manifested
themselves in the boy excited mingled emotions in the breast of the old
soldier. On the one hand, this intense passion for music indicated the
boy’s inherent musical talent, and foreshadowed a possible career; but in
spite of this, a vague sense of disappointment filled Uncle Maxim’s heart.
“It cannot be denied,” thus ran Maxim’s thoughts, “that music is a power
by which a man may sway the hearts of the multitude. He, the blind man,
will attract dandies and fashionable women by the hundreds, will play a
valse or a nocturne,”—here Uncle Maxim’s musical vocabulary came suddenly
to an end,—“and they will wipe away their tears with their delicate
handkerchiefs. Ah, the deuce take it! that is not what I could have
wished for him. But what’s to be done about it? The fellow is blind; he
must do what he can with his life. But if it had only been singing! A
song speaks not alone to the fastidious ear,—it excites fancies, arouses
thoughts in the mind, and kindles courage in the heart.”
“Look here, Joachim,” Uncle Maxim said one evening, as he followed the
blind boy into the stable, “do for once stop that whistling! It might do
well enough for a street urchin, or for the shepherd boy in the field;
but you are a grown-up peasant, although that silly Màrya has made a calf
of you. Fie! I am really ashamed of you! The lass proved hard-hearted,
and that has made you so soft that you whistle like a quail caught in a
net.”
As he listened in the darkness to this sharp tirade from the Pan, Joachim
smiled at his unnecessary indignation. But he did feel somewhat wounded
by his allusion to the street urchin and the shepherd boy, and replied,—
“Don’t say that, Pan! Not a shepherd in the Ukraine has a pipe like
that, let alone the shepherd boy. Theirs are nothing but whistles; but
mine—just listen!” He closed all the openings with his fingers, and
struck the two notes of the octave, drinking in as he did so the fullness
of the tones.
Maxim spat. “The Lord have mercy on us, the lad has lost his wits! What
do I care for your pipe? They are all alike, both pipes and women, with
your Màrya into the bargain! You had better sing us a song, if you know
how,—a good song of our fathers’ or grandfathers’.”
Maxim Yatzènko, a Little Russian himself, was simple and unassuming in
his manners toward peasants and servants. Although he often scolded
and shouted at them, he never hurt any man’s feelings; and while his
inferiors were on familiar terms with him, they never failed to treat him
with respect. Hence to the Pan’s request, Joachim replied,—
“Why not? I used to sing as well as the next man. But, Pan, do you think
our peasant songs are likely to please you?” he asked, slightly sarcastic.
“Eh, what nonsense, fellow!” replied Maxim. “A pipe cannot be compared
with a good song, if only a man can sing well. Let us listen to Joachim’s
song, Petrùsya. But only you may not understand it, my boy.”
“Is it to be a peasant’s song?” inquired the boy. “I understand their
language.”
Maxim heaved a sigh. “Ah, my dear boy, these are not slave songs; they
are the songs of a strong and free people. Your mother’s ancestors sang
them on the steppes of the Dnièper, the Danube, and the Black Sea. Well,
you will understand them sooner or later, but just now I am anxious about
something else.”
In point of fact, what Maxim really feared was that the picturesque
language of the folk-songs would not appeal to the vaguely obscure mind
of the child; he felt that the animated music of epic song must be
interpreted to the heart by familiar images. He forgot that the old
bards, the singers and bandur-players of the Ukraine, were for the most
part blind men, who had been driven by misfortune or physical incapacity
to the lyre, or bandur, to gain their daily bread. It is true that these
men were but beggars and artisans with harsh voices, some of whom had not
become blind until they were old men. Blindness wraps the outer world
about with a dark veil, which likewise envelops the brain, entangling and
impeding its processes; and yet by the aid of inherited conceptions and
impressions gained from other sources, the brain creates in this darkness
a world of its own, sad, gloomy, and sombre, but not devoid of a vague
poetry peculiar to itself.
Maxim and the blind boy seated themselves on the hay, while Joachim
reclined on his bench,—a position which seemed especially conducive to
his artistic efforts,—and after musing for a moment he began to sing.
Whether by chance or by instinct, his choice was a happy one. He
selected a historical picture,—
“Over yonder on the hill the reapers are reaping.”
No one who has heard this beautiful song well rendered can ever forget
its strange melody,—high-pitched and plaintive, as though oppressed
by the sadness of historical reminiscence. It contains no stirring
incidents, no bloody battles or exploits; neither is it the farewell of
a Cossack to his beloved, nor a daring invasion, nor a naval expedition
on the blue sea or the Danube. It is but a fleeting picture that comes
uppermost in the memory of a Little Russian, like a vague revery, like
the fragment of a dream from an historic past. In the midst of his
monotonous, every-day life that picture rises before his imagination,
its outlines dim and indistinct, steeped in the strange melancholy that
breathes from bygone days,—days that have left their impress on the
memory of man. The lofty burial-mounds beneath which lie the bones of
the Cossacks, where fires are seen burning at midnight, where groans are
sometimes heard, still remind us of the past. The popular legends as well
as the folk-songs, now fast dying out, also tell us of the past.
“Over yonder on the hill the reapers are reaping,
And beneath the hill, the green hill,
Cossacks are passing,
Cossacks are passing!
They are reaping on the hill, while below the troops are marching.”
Maxim Yatzènko was lost in admiration of the sad song. That charming
melody, so well suited to the words, called up before his fancy a scene
illumined by the melancholy rays of sunset. Along the peaceful slopes
of the hill-sides he seemed to see the bowed and silent figures of the
reapers, and below moving noiselessly, one after the other, the ranks of
the army, blending with the shades of evening in the valley.
“Doroshenko[10] at the head,
Leading his army, his Zaporòg army
Gallantly.”
And the prolonged note of the epic song resounds, vibrates, and dies away
upon the air, only to start forth anew, evoking fresh images from the dim
twilight. These were the pictures which at the bidding of the song took
form in Uncle Maxim’s mind; and the blind boy, who had listened with a
sad and clouded face, was also impressed by it after his own fashion.
When the singer sang of the hill where the reapers were reaping, Petrùsya
was straightway transported in his imagination to the summit of the
familiar cliff. He recognizes it by the faint plashing of the river
against the stones below. He knows very well what reapers are,—he has
heard the ringing sound of the sickles and the rustle of the falling
ears. But when the song went on to describe the action under the hill,
the imagination of the blind listener at once transported him into the
valley below. Though he no longer hears the sound of the sickles, the boy
knows that the reapers are still up there on the hill, and he knows that
the sound has died away, because they are so high above him,—as high as
the pine-trees, whose rustling he hears when he stands on the cliff; and
below, over the river, echoes the rapid monotonous tramp of the horses’
hoofs. There are many of them, and an indistinct murmur rises through the
darkness from under the hill. Those are the Cossacks “on the march.”
Petrùsya also knows what “Cossacks” means. The Cossack Hvèydka,[11] who
sometimes stops at the house, is called by everybody “the old Cossack.”
Many a time has he lifted Petrùsya to his lap and smoothed his hair
with his trembling hand. When the boy according to his custom felt of
his face, he found deep wrinkles under his sensitive fingers, a long,
drooping mustache and sunken cheeks, and on those cheeks the tears of
old age. It was such Cossacks as he that the boy pictured to himself
marching below the hill. They are on horseback, and like Hvèydka they
wear long mustaches, and are old and wrinkled too. These vague forms
advance slowly amid the darkness, and like Hvèydka are weeping for grief.
It may be that the echo of Joachim’s song suggests the lament of the
unfortunate Cossack who exchanged his young wife for a camp-bed and the
hardships of a campaign, as it rings over hill and valley.
One glance was enough for Maxim to discover that despite the boy’s
blindness the poetic images of the song appealed to his sensitive nature.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: III. THE FIRST FRIENDSHIP.]