I


The child's world broadened. His sensitive hearing told him more and more of Nature. But darkness, deep, impenetrable, hung as always over and around him—a black cloud, weighing heavily upon his brain. It had hung over him from the day of his birth, and he might surely have grown accustomed, resigned to his misfortune. But he was not resigned. There was some instinct in his childish being that strove ceaselessly for freedom from the blackness. And this subconscious, but unintermittent quest for the light that he had never seen left its imprint more and more deeply on his face, in an expression of undefined and tortured effort.
Still, he too had his moments of unclouded pleasure, his bright childish raptures. These came when some powerful impression, accessible to his senses, brought him new knowledge of the unseen world. For Nature, in her might and grandeur, did not remain entirely a closed book to the blind child.
There was the day when they took him to a high rock overhanging the river, and he stood listening, with an altogether new expression, to the faint splashings of the water far below; and then the sound of the pebbles rolling from underfoot, dropping down the side of the rock, made him clutch at his mother's skirts with sinking heart. Always, afterwards, the concept of depth was associated in his mind with the murmur of water at the foot of the rock and the frightened scamper of falling pebbles.
Distance, to him, was the slow fading away of a song into nothingness. And when spring thunder rolled across the sky, filling all space with its rumbling, and then retiring, with a final wrathful roar, behind the clouds—at such moments the blind child would stand listening in reverent awe. His heart would swell, and in his mind would rise a poignant sense of the majesty and sweep of the heavenly vault above him.
Sound was thus the chief medium by which the outer world could reach his understanding. The impressions received through other senses served only to supplement his sound impressions, in which all his ideas of the world were shaped.
Sometimes, when the day was at its hottest, and all sounds were stilled; when human activity came to a standstill, and Nature lay in that peculiar hush in which one can sense no movement but the unceasing, soundless flow of vital energy—at such hours, sometimes, a new expression would transform the blind boy's face. It was as though he were listening, with strained attention, to sounds that none but he could hear—sounds rising from within, from the very depths of his being, called to the surface by the great stillness without. Watching his face, at such times, one had the impression that some dim thought was sounding in his heart in melody—vague as yet, and unformed.


II


He was in his fifth year, thin and weakly. Indoors, he moved, even ran, about the rooms with perfect freedom. A strange, seeing how confidently he walked—never hesitating at a turn, never at a loss to find things that he wanted—might not have realised that he was blind; might have taken him simply for an unusually contemplative child, with dreamy eyes that seemed to look far out into vague distances. Out of doors, however, things were not so easy. He walked with a stick, feeling the ground with it before every step he took. When he had no stick, he would get down on hands and knees and crawl, swiftly investigating with his fingers every object encountered in his path.


III


It was a quiet summer evening. Uncle Maxim was out in the garden. The child's father, as usual, was still away in some distant field. Everything was still. The village was sinking into sleep, and the talk in the servants' hall had died away. The child had been put to bed half an hour past.
He lay in his room, only half-asleep. For some days, now, the very thought of this quiet evening hour had called strange memories to his mind. He could not see the darkening sky, of course; could not see the swaying tree-tops outlined in black against its starry velvet, or the shadows that gathered under the shaggy eaves of barns and stable, or the blue blackness creeping over the earth, or the glinting gold of moonbeams and starlight. Yet, day after day, he would drop off to sleep under some beautiful spell that, in the morning, he could not explain.
It would come at the hour when sleep began to dull his senses, when he no longer consciously heard the murmur of the beeches at his window, or the distant barking of the village dogs, or the trilling of the nightingale beyond the river, or the mournful tinkle of tiny bells where a colt was grazing in the meadow; when all individual sounds seemed to fade and vanish. Merged in new, soft harmony, they would now seem to come again, all these sounds, and hover in his room, filling his heart with vague, but very pleasant fancies. When morning came, he would wake in a softened, tender mood, and question his mother eagerly:
"What was it, last night? What was it?"
The mother could not answer. Perhaps, she thought, the child had been having dreams. She would put him to bed herself, every evening, bless him devoutly, and linger by his side until he seemed asleep. She never noticed anything out of the ordinary. Yet, in the morning, he would speak again of a pleasant something experienced the night before:
"It was so fine, so fine! What was it, Mother?"
And so, this evening, she had decided to stay in the child's room and watch, in the hope of finding some solution to this riddle. She sat quietly beside the bed, knitting mechanically, listening to little Petro's even breathing. Soon he seemed fast asleep. But suddenly she heard him whisper through the darkness:
"Are you still here, Mother?"
"Yes, Petro."
"Do go away. It's afraid of you, and it doesn't come. I was almost asleep already, and it doesn't come."
This plaintive, sleepy whisper brought a strange feeling to the mother's heart. He spoke so confidently of his fancies, as though of something very real! Still, she got up, bent over the bed to kiss the child, and slipped quietly out of the room. She would go around through the garden, she thought, and creep up unnoticed outside his open window.
And as she was coming through the garden the mystery was suddenly solved for her. The soft strains of a village pipe came floating from the stable: a simple, unembroidered melody, mingling with the night's soft murmurings. Yes, clearly, it must be this music, coming at the magic moments just before sleep, that gave the child such pleasant memories.
She paused awhile to listen, charmed by the tender Ukrainian melody, then turned back, her heart at ease, to join Uncle Maxim in the garden.
How well Iochim played! Strange, that such tender, delicate feeling should come from so seemingly coarse a fellow.


IV


Yes, Iochim played well. Of the exacting fiddle, even, he was master; and, time had been, none could play a Cossack dance better than he, or a gay Polish Krakowiak, at the tavern of a Sunday. There he would sit, on his bench in the corner, his fiddle tucked under his shaven chin, his tall sheepskin hat jauntily tilted; and when he brought his curved bow down on the taut, waiting strings, not many in the tavern could sit still. Even the aged, one-eyed Jew who accompanied Iochim on the double-bass would get tremendously excited. His shoulders would twitch, and his bald head, in its black skull-cap, sway, and the whole of his thin little frame mark time to the sprightly melody, while his clumsy instrument seemed to strain almost to breaking point in the effort to make its heavy bass keep up with the fiddle's swift, light treble. What, then, remains to be said of the baptized—whose legs have always been prone to tap and swing at the first hint of gay dance music?
But Iochim fell in love with Marya, a servant girl on a neighbouring estate. And soon the merry fiddle lost all its charm for him. True, it had failed to win him cruel Marya's heart. She preferred a German valet's shaven features to the Ukrainian stableman's moustache and music. And from the day that Marya made her choice, Iochim's fiddle was never heard again at the tavern, nor yet at the young folks' evening gatherings. He hung the once-loved instrument on a peg on the stable wall, and did not seem to care when, one by one, what with the dampness and his neglect, its strings all snapped—snapped with such a loud and piteous twanging that even the horses neighed in sympathy and turned to stare at the fiddle's hard-hearted master.
From a Carpathian mountaineer passing through the village, Iochim bought a wooden pipe to replace his fiddle. Perhaps he felt that the pipe's sweet, plaintive tones would be more appropriate to his bitter lot, more expressive of the melancholy that filled his rejected heart. But the mountain pipe failed to satisfy his need. He tried others—a good half-score of them. He did everything a man could do: scraped them, whittled them, soaked them in water and dried them in the sun, hung them up where the wind could blow at them from every side. But nothing did any good. The mountain pipes would not express the grief of his Ukrainian heart. They whistled when they should have sung, and squealed when he tried to make them hum. They simply would not lend themselves to Iochim's mood. And so, in the end, he flew into a temper and declared that there wasn't a mountaineer in the world who could make a decent pipe. No, he would have to make his pipe himself, with his own hands.
For days he wandered, frowning, through the fields and marshes. At every clump of willow he would pause, to pick and choose among the branches. Here and there, he would cut a branch or two; but none of them seemed really to satisfy him. His frown never relaxed, and he did not drop his search. But then he came upon a quiet river pool, where the lazy current barely swayed the white cups of the water-lilies, and luxuriant growths of willow, bending dreamily over the still, dark depths, kept out every breeze. Iochim pushed through the willows to the river-bank, and stood a while, looking about him. And suddenly—he could not have said why—he knew that here he would find what he had been seeking. His face cleared, and he pulled his clasp-knife free of its strap inside his boot-top. After a searching look up and down the line of rustling bushes, he made his choice, and strode up to a straight, slender trunk at the very edge of the steep bank. He flipped it with his finger, and watched it sway, lithe and resilient; listened a while to the murmur of its leaves, and threw back his head in pleasure.
"There it is," he mumbled happily. And all the other branches he had cut went flying down into the water.
The pipe turned out wonderfully well.
First he dried the willow bole. Then he burnt out its heart with a red-hot wire; burnt six round holes in its side, and cut a seventh, slanted opening; and plugged one end tight with a bit of wood, with a narrow, slanted slit in it. He hung the pipe up out of doors, and let it hang a whole week for the sun to warm and the wind to cool. And when he took it down he shaped it carefully with his knife, and smoothed it with glass, and gave it a good rubbing with a bit of coarse woollen cloth. At the top he made it round; but the lower half was faceted, and on the facets, with the aid of twisted bits of iron, he burnt all sorts of interlaced designs. When all was done, he tried a swift scale or two—and, with a muffled exclamation, hid the pipe hurriedly away in a safe corner, by his bed. No, it was not for the bustling daylight hours—his first trial of its worth. But when evening fell, its music came pouring from the stable— tender, dreamy, vibrant. Iochim was satisfied. The pipe responded as though it were a part of his own being. Its music seemed to issue from his own warm, grieving heart.
Every turn, every shade in his sorrow sounded in this wonderful pipe, to fly, note by note, into the still, listening evening.


V


Now Iochim was in love with his pipe, and celebrating his honeymoon with it. Through the day he did his work as always—watered the horses, harnessed them when needed, drove for Pani Popelskaya or for Uncle Maxim; and at times, when he glanced in the direction of the neighbouring village, where the cruel Mary a lived, his heart would be very heavy. But when evening came all the world would be forgotten, and even the thought of Marya's dark eyes would haze over, somehow, losing its searing reality— would hover in a sort of misty veil, only so far perceived as to lend a wistful, dreamy flavour to the music of the wonderful new pipe.
And so, one evening, Iochim lay on his bed in the stable, in this state of musical ecstasy, pouring out his whole soul in vibrant melodies. He had altogether forgotten the hardhearted beauty—had forgotten, almost, his own existence—when suddenly he started, and sat up abruptly. Just as the music was at its sweetest, a tiny hand had brushed lightly, swiftly down his face, and over his hands, to the pipe. On the pipe it stopped, fingering it in eager haste. There was something alive, right there beside Iochim. He could hear the quick, excited breathing.
"The Lord preserve us!" he gasped—the usual formula for exorcising the powers of evil; and, to make sure, demanded sternly, "God's, or Satan's?"
But a moonbeam, glinting in at the open stable door, soon showed him his error. Beside the rough bed, his little hands eagerly extended, stood the manor folks' blind boy.
It was an hour or so later that the mother tiptoed into the nursery, to see how little Petro slept. His bed was empty. For a moment she was badly frightened; but she quickly guessed where the boy might be.
Iochim was very much abashed when, laying down his pipe for a breathing spell, he suddenly noticed his "gracious pani" in the stable doorway. She had evidently been standing there some time, listening to his music and watching her boy, who sat on Iochim's bed, wrapped in a big sheepskin jacket, still listening eagerly for the interrupted music.


VI


From that time on, Petro went out to the stable every evening. It never occurred to him to ask Iochim to play in the day-time. To his mind, evidently, the bustle and movement of the daylight hours excluded all thought of these gentle melodies. But as evening drew on the child would be seized with a feverish impatience. Tea, and then supper, were of significance only as signs that the eagerly awaited time was near. And though the mother felt an unreasoning, instinctive dislike for this attraction that drew him so strongly, she could not forbid her darling the pleasure of spending the evening hours, before he was put to bed, listening to Iochim's music in the stable. These hours were now the happiest the child knew. The evening's impressions, as the mother saw with searing jealousy, would remain with him all through the following day. Not even her caresses could evoke his former undivided response. Even when he nestled in her arms, his dreamy look would show that he was thinking of Iochim's music.
It was then that she recalled her own musical accomplishments. It was not so many years, after all, since she had come out of boarding school—Pani Radetskaya's establishment, in Kiev, where, among other "pleasant arts", she had been taught to play the piano. True, this was not too pleasant a memory; for it involved a lively recollection of Fraulein Klapps, the music teacher, an elderly German spinster, hopelessly thin, and hopelessly prosaic, and—what was worst of all—hopelessly cross. She had been very skilful, this acid-tempered lady, at "breaking in" her pupils' fingers and making them flexible; and wonderfully successful, too, in murdering any feeling the girls might have had for the poesy of music. That is a timid feeling, often; and Fraulein Klapps' very presence would have been enough to frighten it away—not to speak of her methods of teaching. And so, after leaving school, young Anna Yatsenko had never had the slightest inclination to go on playing. Nor had this changed with marriage. But now, as she listened to the music this simple Ukrainian peasant drew from his pipe, a new feeling—a lively feeling of melody—began to grow in her heart, side by side with her growing jealousy; and the memory of the German spinster began to fade. And, in the end, Pani Popelskaya asked her husband to buy her a piano.
"As you wish, my love," replied this model husband. "I had thought you weren't fond of music."
The order was sent off that very day. But it would take two or three weeks, at the least, before the piano could be purchased and brought out from town.
And still the pipe trilled its summons every evening; and the boy would run off to the stable without even stopping to ask permission.
The stable smelled of horses, fresh, fragrant hay, and leather harness. The horses would stand quietly munching, with an occasional rustle as they nosed at the hay in their mangers. When the pipe fell silent for a moment, the murmur of the beeches in the garden would come clearly through the evening hush. Petro would sit motionless, as under a charm, drinking in the music.
He would never interrupt. But whenever the music stopped, if it was more than for a minute or two, his charmed listening would give way to a strange, eager excitement. He would stretch out his hands for the pipe, and, with trembling fingers, press it to his lips; but his breath would come so short, in his eagerness, that at first he could produce only faint, quivering trills. Later, little by little, he began to master the simple instrument. Iochim would place his fingers, showing him how to produce each different tone; and, though his tiny hand could barely reach .across the row of finger holes, he soon learned how all the notes were placed. Each note, to him, had its own countenance, its own individual nature. He knew, now, in which of the holes it lived, and how to bring it out. And often, when Iochim was playing some simple tune, the child's fingers would move in unison with his teacher's. He had gained a clear conception of the notes of the scale, their sequence and their location.


VII


Three weeks passed, and, at long last, the piano arrived. Petro stood in the yard, listening intently to the bustle. It must be very heavy, this "imported music", for the wagon creaked when the men started to lift it, and the men themselves kept grunting, and their breath came loud and laboured. Now they moved towards the house, with heavy, measured step. And at each step something above them hummed and moaned and tinkled in the strangest way. Then they set this queer "music" down in the drawing-room, and again it made that deep, dull, humming sound—as though it were threatening someone, in passionate anger.
All this induced a feeling very near to fright, and did not incline the child in favour of the new arrival—inanimate, perhaps, but clearly not sweet-tempered. He wandered away into the garden. There, he did not hear the workmen setting up the instrument in the drawing-room; did not hear the tuner, summoned from town, trying the keys and adjusting the wire strings. Only when all was ready did his mother send for him.
Now Anna Mikhailovna was ready to celebrate her triumph over the simple village pipe. Her piano came from Vienna, and it was the work of a famed master. Surely, now, Petro would stop running to the stable. Once again, all his joys would have their source in his mother. With a gay smile in her eyes, she watched the child come timidly into the room, with Uncle Maxim; gaily, she glanced at Iochim, who had asked permission to come and hear the "foreign music", and now stood bashfully in the doorway, his eyes on the floor, his forelock dangling. When Maxim and the child had settled themselves to listen, she brought her hands down suddenly on the piano keys.
It was a piece she had mastered brilliantly at Pani Radetskaya's boarding school, under the guidance of Fraulein Klapps. A tremendously loud composition, and quite complicated, demanding great flexibility in the player's fingers. At the public examination before leaving school, Anna Mikhailovna had earned herself—and particularly her teacher—great praise by her performance of this difficult work. And, though no one could be sure, of course, there were many who suspected that her capture of quiet Pan Popelsky had been accomplished precisely in the brief fifteen minutes it had taken her to play her piece. Today, she played it in the hope of quite another victory—to win back her old place in her son's little heart, beguiled from her by the love of a peasant pipe.
This time, however, her hopes were in vain. The piano came from Vienna; but it could not contend with a bit of Ukrainian willow. True, the piano had great advantages: costly wood, the finest of strings, the wonderful craftsmanship of its Viennese maker, the broad range of tone that it afforded. But the Ukrainian pipe had allies, too; for here it was in its own homeland, surrounded by its native Ukrainian countryside.
Until Iochim cut it with his knife, and burnt out its heart with red-hot wire, it had stood swaying on the bank of a little river the child knew and loved. It had been warmed by the same Ukrainian sun as he, and cooled by the same Ukrainian wind, until that day when the sharp eye of a Ukrainian piper had spied it out on its high bank. And, too, it was the harder for the foreign instrument to conquer the simple village pipe, in that the pipe had first sung to the blind child in the quiet hour when sleep was stealing over him—through the mysterious whisperings of evening, and the drowsy murmur of the beeches, with all Ukraine’s Nature as accompaniment.
Nor could Pani Popelskaya rival Iochim. True, her slender fingers were swifter than his, and more flexible, and the melody she played more intricate and colourful; and Fraulein Klapps had laboured earnestly to help her pupil master the difficult instrument. But Iochim had a native feeling for music. He loved and grieved, and in his love and grief turned to Nature for comfort. It was Nature that taught him his simple melodies: the murmur of the woods, the soft whisperings of the grass-grown steppelands; these, and the old, old songs, so infinitely dear, that had been sung to the rocking of the cradle when he was still a baby.
No, it was not so easy for the Viennese piano to conquer the simple Ukrainian pipe. Hardly a minute had passed before Uncle Maxim thumped loudly on the floor with his crutch. And, turning, Anna Mikhailovna saw on her son's pale face the same expression it had worn when he fell back into the grass on that memorable day of their first spring outing.
Iochim looked pityingly at the child, and—with a contemptuous glance at the "German music"—strode out of the house, his clumsy boots clattering loudly across the floor.


VIII


This failure cost the poor mother many tears—tears, and shame. That she, "gracious Рапi" Popelskaya, whom "the best society" had thunderously applauded—that she should be so cruelly defeated! And by whom? By that coarse stableman, Iochim, and his idiotic pipe! The angry blood came rushing to her face at the very thought of the contempt she had glimpsed in his eyes after her unfortunate concert. With all her heart, she hated "that horrid peasant".
Yet every evening, when her little one ran off to the stable, she would open her window and stand listening. At first it was with contempt and anger that she listened, seeking only to pick out the comic aspects of this "silly piping". But then, little by little—she could not herself have said how it came about—the silly piping began to hold her attention, and she would listen eagerly for the wistful, dreamy melodies. Sometimes, catching herself at this, she would wonder what it was that made them so attractive, that gave them their mysterious charm. And as time passed her question found its answer, in the blue of these summer evenings, in the blurred shadows of the twilight hours, in the amazing harmony of song and surrounding Nature.
Yes—she reflected, altogether conquered now—this music had something about it all its own, a genuine depth of feeling, a poetry and charm never to be mastered simply by rote.
True, very true. The secret of this poetry lay in the wonderful tie that binds the long-dead past with Nature, witness of this past—Nature, that never dies, and never ceases to sing to the heart of man. And Iochim, a coarse, horny-handed peasant, in clumsy boots, carried in his heart this wonderful harmony, this genuine feeling of Nature.
And Pani Popelskaya's aristocratic pride was humbled, in her heart, before this peasant stableman. She would forget his coarse clothing, and the smell of tar that hung about him—would remember nothing, through his soft melodies, but the kindly face, the gentle grey eyes, the bashful humour of the smile, half-hidden by the drooping moustache. There were still moments, however, when the angry blood would flush her cheeks; for she could not but feel that, in the struggle to win her child's interest, she had put herself on an equal footing with this peasant, in his own field, and the peasant had won.
But, day after day, the trees murmured overhead, and evening lit the stars in the dark blue of the sky and poured soft, blue-black shadow over the earth; and, day after day, Iochim's songs poured their warm melancholy into the young mother's heart. More and more, she submitted to their power; more and more, she learned to understand the secret of their simple, unaffected, untainted poetry.


IX


Yes, Iochim's power lay in the depth, the truth of his emotion. And she—had she no share of such emotion? Why, then, did her heart burn so, and beat so wildly in her breast? Why could she not keep back the tears?
Was it not true feeling—the burning love that filled her heart for her afflicted child? Yet he kept running from her side to be with Iochim, and she knew no way of giving him such pleasure as Iochim could give.
The hot tears would flow at every remembrance of that look of pain her music had brought into his face; and there were moments when she could barely repress the sobs that choked and tore her.
Unhappy mother! Her child's blindness had become her own incurable affliction. It was this that caused her exaggerated, almost morbid tenderness; this, engrossing her whole being, that rent her poor, sore heart by a thousand unseen ties at every sign of suffering in the child. And it was this that made her strange rivalry with a peasant piper—a thing that could ordinarily have caused no more than faint annoyance or chagrin—the source of such extravagant, such cruel suffering.
The passing days brought her no relief. But each day did bring definite gain. More and more, she began to sense within herself the rise of that same feeling of melody, of poetry, that charmed her so in Iochim's playing. And with this new feeling came new hope. There were evenings when she hastened to the piano, in sudden confidence—determined, with its ringing chords, to drown out the gentle pipe. But, every time, a sense of fear and shame restrained her from the attempt, turning her confidence into irresolution. She would recall the pain in her child's face, and the peasant's contemptuous look—and her cheeks would burn with shame in the dark drawing-room, and her hands flutter in timid longing over the silent keyboard, that she dared not touch.
Yet, as day succeeded day, she felt an increasing sense of a new power within her. And she began to try herself, at hours when the child was out walking, or playing by himself in some far corner of the garden. Her first attempts did not satisfy her. Her hands would not play what her heart felt. The sounds they produced seemed altogether alien to her mood. Gradually, however, the mood began to come through, with ever greater power and ease. The peasant's lessons had not been in vain; and the mother's poignant love, her sensitive perception of just what it was that had won her child's heart so completely, helped her to master these lessons quickly. Now her fingers no longer drummed out noisy, complicated "pieces". Gentle melodies flowed from the keyboard, plaintive Ukrainian dumkas, filling the shuttered rooms, throbbing in the mother's heart.
And, at last, she gained the courage to enter into open struggle. A strange contest began, in the evening hours, between the drawing-room and Iochim's stable. As the soft trilling of the pipe began to float from the shadowed, straw-thatched stable, new sounds, full, resonant, would float out to meet it from the open windows of the drawing-room, glittering through the beeches in the bright moonlight.
Neither the child nor Iochim, at first, would listen to the "artful" manor music, so strongly were they prejudiced against it. The boy would frown at every pause in Iochim's piping, and cry impatiently,
"Why don't you play?"
But after a day or two of this Iochim's pauses became more and more frequent. Again and again he would lay down his pipe to listen, with rapidly increasing interest. The boy, too, began to listen, and no longer urged his friend to play. And a moment came when Iochim said wonderingly,
"Hear that, now—isn't it fine!"
And, still listening raptly, he took up the child and carried him through the garden to the open window of the drawing-room.
He thought that the "gracious рапi" was playing for her own pleasure, and would not notice that she had listeners. But Anna Mikhailovna, too, had been listening, in pauses, for her rival, Iochim's pipe. She had noticed that it played no more. She saw her victory, and her heart beat high with joy.
With victory, all remnant of her anger at Iochim vanished. She was happy, and realised that she owed her happiness to him; for it was he who had taught her to win back her child. And if, now, she could give the child a wealth of new impressions, they would both have their teacher, the peasant piper, to thank.


X


The ice had been broken. The next day the boy ventured, timid, but curious, into the drawing-room, which he had not entered since the day the strange new-comer, so noisy and bad-tempered, as it seemed to him, had been established there. The new-comer's songs, last evening, had conquered his delicate ear and overcome his prejudice. With only a faint trace of his earlier fear, he came towards the piano. A step or two away he paused, and stood listening. There was no one there. The mother, sewing in an adjoining room, watched him breathlessly, admiring his every movement, every change of expression in his nervous features.
From where he stood, he stretched out a hand and touched the polished surface of the piano—and at once drew timidly away. He tried again, and once again—then came up closer and began to examine the instrument carefully, moving all around it, bending to the floor to follow the lines of its legs. And finally his fingers touched the keys.
A faint, hesitant note trembled in the air. The boy stood listening long after all sound had vanished to the mother's ear. Then, absorbed, expectant, he pressed another key. After that, his hand swept across the keyboard, and he struck a new note, in the highest register. He let each tone sound, and tremble, and die away before he touched another; and, as he listened, his face expressed not only intense interest, but enjoyment. He seemed to take pleasure in each individual note, with an artist's sensitive receptiveness to the elements of music, to the separate components of potential melody.
But in each note, besides its sound, the blind boy seemed to feel other distinctive features. When his fingers pressed a clear, joyful note of the upper register, his face, bright with pleasure, would turn upwards, as though following the airy sound in its skyward flight. When he struck a bass note, he would tilt his head downwards to catch the deep vibration, as though feeling that this heavy note must roll low, low, over the very floor, to vanish in the farthest corners of the house.


XI


Uncle Maxim's attitude to all this musical experimentation was barely tolerant. Strange as it might seem, he could not altogether reconcile himself to the boy's leanings, so clearly manifested. On the one hand, of course, this passionate love of music indicated unquestionable talent, and pointed the way to an attainable future. But—on the other hand, the thought of such a future brought the old soldier a feeling of obscure disappointment.
Music, of course, was a great power too, he reflected. With music, one could sway the heart of the mob. Hundreds of fine ladies and dressed-up dandies would crowd to hear the blind musician. He would play them all sorts of ... um ... waltzes, and nocturnes (to tell the truth, Uncle Maxim's knowledge of music hardly went beyond this conception of "waltzes" and "nocturnes"), and they would dry their tears with lacy handkerchiefs. Ah, the devil damn it! That was not what Uncle Maxim had been hoping for. But—what was to be done? The boy was blind. Let him do what he could best succeed in. Only, if it had to be music, let it be song, at least. Song reached deeper than a mere meaningless tickling of the sensitive ear. A song told a story; it aroused the mind to thought, and the heart to courage.
"Look here, Iochim," Maxim exclaimed one evening, coming into the stable with Petro, "can't you drop that pipe of yours for once? It's well enough for shepherd boys, but you're a grown man, after all, for all that silly Marya's made such a calf of you! Ugh! You ought to be ashamed—moping because a girl turned up her nose! Shrilling away on a pipe, like a bird in a cage!" Iochim grinned, in the darkness, at Pan-Maxim's causeless anger. Of all this irascible peroration, only the reference to shepherd boys aroused him to mild protest. "Don't you think it, Pan Maxim," he said. "You won't find such a pipe as this in all the Ukraine. Shepherd boys!
Whistles, that's all they know how to make. A pipe like this... Just you listen!"
He stopped all the finger holes and blew two notes in octave, beaming with pleasure at the full, clear tone. Maxim spat.
"Ugh! God in heaven! The fellow's lost all the brains he ever had! What do I care for your pipe? They're all alike—pipes, and women, and that Marya of yours to boot. Give us a song, if you know any. One of the good old songs.
There's some sense in that."
Ukrainian himself, Maxim Yatsenko was simple and unpretentious in his relations with the peasantry and the manor servants. He often shouted at them, true, but—inoffensively, somehow; and so they treated him with respect, but with no sign of fear.
"A song, is it?" Iochim returned. "Well, and why not? I used to sing, once, no worse than the next fellow. Only—our peasant songs—you might not like them, either."
This last was said with a hint of irony.
"Don't talk foolishness," Maxim exclaimed. "A good song—as if you could compare it with that piping of yours! If a man can sing, of course. Let's listen, then, Petro, while Iochim gives us a song. I wonder, though—will you understand it, youngster?"
"Will it be in serf talk?" the boy asked. "I understand that talk."
Uncle Maxim sighed. There was much of the romantic in his nature, and he had dreamed, once, of a revival of the old days of Cossack glory.
"Those are no serf songs, youngster," he told the child. "They're the songs of a free, strong people. Your mother's forefathers sang them, all through the steppes— along the Dnieper, and the Danube, and the Black Sea coast. Ah, well, you'll understand all that some day. What worries me now—" and his tone was suddenly uneasy—"what worries me now is quite a different thing."
Yes, it was a different understanding that he feared the boy might lack. The vivid pictures drawn by the old epic songs, he thought, could reach the heart only through visual concepts; and, lacking these, the boy's unseeing mind might be unable to master the language of folk poetry. But there was one thing Maxim had forgotten. Were not the ancient boyans, were not the Ukrainian kobzars and bandurists,* in their majority, blind? [ Boyans, kobzars, bandurists—wandering minstrels.—Tr.] True, in many cases it was simply the misfortune that came with blindness that drove them to take up the lyre or the bandura, as a means of begging alms. But not all, by far, of these wandering musicians were mere beggars, singing hoarsely for their bread. And not all of them, either, were old men when they lost their sight. Blindness blots out the visual world behind an impenetrable veil, that weighs down heavily, of course, upon the brain—an oppressive burden, hindering understanding. But there are things that come down by inheritance, and things that are learned through other senses and by other means than sight; and out of these things, for all the darkness, the brain creates a living world of its own—a shadowed world, perhaps; wistful, and melancholy; yet not devoid of a vague poetry.


XII


Maxim and Petro settled down on a heap of straw. Iochim stretched out on his bench (such being the pose best suited to his mood) and, after a moment's reflection, began to sing. His choice—whether prompted by chance or by sensitive instinct—was very fortunate. It was a scene from the history of years long past:

High, high on the hillside the reapers bend,
Reaping the ripened grain....

No one, surely, who has once heard this wonderful folk song, sung as it should be sung, can forget its melody: an old, old tune, high pitched, unhurried, tinged with the melancholy of historical reminiscence. There are no events in this song, no battle and bloodshed, no heroic deeds. It tells no story of a Cossack's parting with his sweetheart, no tale of daring raids by land, or voyages along the Danube and across the rolling blue of the sea. There is nothing in all the song but a fleeting picture, rising for an instant in a Ukrainian's memory—a wistful fancy, a fragment of a dream of the historic past. It rises suddenly, amidst the grey commonplace of the present day—dim, misty, tinged with the peculiar melancholy that breathes from memories of the vanished past. Vanished—yes, but not without trace! It still lives, this past, in the tall grave mounds where the bones of Cossack heroes lie buried, and where strange lights hover at midnight, and heavy groans are heard. It lives in legend, lives in this song, now less and less to be heard:

High, high on the hillside the reapers bend,
Reaping the ripened grain,
And down below, down at the green hill's foot,
The Cossacks go riding by,
The Cossacks go riding by.

On the green hillside, grain is being reaped. Down below, Cossack troops are riding by.
Maxim Yatsenko forgot the world around him. The rueful melody, so wonderfully at one with the content of the song, brought the scene vividly before him: peaceful hillside fields, in the chastened evening light; the bent, silent figures of the reapers; and down below, silent too, the horsemen, rank upon rank, merging as they pass by with the evening shadows gathering in the valley.

Doroshenko himself in the fore,
Leading his men, leading his Cossack troops,
Leading them bravely and well.

And the long-drawn-out notes rang and quavered and died away, only to ring once more, calling out of the darkness new and ever new figures of past history.


XIII


The boy's face, as he listened, was sad and thoughtful. When the song dwelt on the hillside, and the reaping of the grain, he felt himself at the top of a high rock he knew, overhanging the river. Yes, that was the place. He knew it by the splashing of the river down below, where the waves struck, barely audibly, against the stones. And he knew about the reaping, too. He could hear the sound of the sickles, and the rustle of the cut ears as they fell.
But when the song turned to what was happening down below, the blind child's imagination carried him down at once from the heights to the valley.
The sound of the sickles faded away; but the boy knew that the reapers were still there, up on the hillside. They were still there, but he could not hear them because they were up there so high, high as the pines whose rustling he could hear down at the foot of his rock. And here below, down at the riverside, came the quick, even beat of horses' hoofs. Many, many horses, their hoofbeats merging into dull thunder down here in the darkness. That was the Cossacks riding by.
The Cossacks—yes, he knew about them, too. "Old Cossack"—that was what everyone called old Fedko, when he turned up, from time to time, at the manor. Many a time, Fedko had held the blind boy on his knee and passed a trembling hand over his hair. And when the boy put up his own hand to feel Fedko's face, as he did with everyone, his sensitive fingers found deep furrows, and a long, drooping moustache, and sunken cheeks, wet with the involuntary tears of deep old age. That was the sort of Cossacks that he now imagined, down at the foot of the hill, as he listened to the song. Riding their horses—bent and old and long-moustached, like Fedko. Noiseless, shapeless shadows, advancing through the darkness, weeping as Fedko always wept—weeping, perhaps, because of this moaning song that hung over hillside and valley: Iochim's mournful song of the "careless Cossack lad" who left his young wife for war's adversities, for a pipe smoked on the march.
It needed only a glance to convince Maxim that, blind though the child might be, his sensitive nature fully responded to the poetry of the song.