In bad company

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.