Short Fiction - Vladimir Korolenko (easy books to read in english txt) 📗

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 hardhearted, 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 bandura-players of the Ukraine, were for the most part blind men, who had been driven by misfortune or physical incapacity to the lyre, or bandura, 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, everyday 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 hillsides 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.

“Doroshenko45 at the head,
Leading his army, his Zaporòg army
Gallantly.”

And the prolonged note of the epic song