The peculiar sound of his voice made Olénin look round.
The old man was weeping. Tears stood in his eyes and one tear was running down his cheek.
“You are gone, my young days, and will never come back!” he said, blubbering and halting. “Drink, why don’t you drink!” he suddenly shouted with a deafening roar, without wiping away his tears.
There was one Tartar song that specially moved him. It had few words, but its charm lay in the sad refrain. “Ay day, dalalay!” Eróshka translated the words of the song: “A youth drove his sheep from the aoul to the mountains: the Russians came and burnt the aoul, they killed all the men and took all the women into bondage. The youth returned from the mountains. Where the aoul had stood was an empty space; his mother not there, nor his brothers, nor his house; one tree alone was left standing. The youth sat beneath the tree and wept. ‘Alone like thee, alone am I left,’” and Eróshka began singing: “Ay day, dalalay!” and the old man repeated several times this wailing, heart-rending refrain.
When he had finished the refrain Eróshka suddenly seized a gun that hung on the wall, rushed hurriedly out into the yard and fired off both barrels into the air. Then again he began, more dolefully, his “Ay day, dalalay—ah, ah,” and ceased.
Olénin followed him into the porch and looked up into the starry sky in the direction where the shots had flashed. In the cornet’s house there were lights and the sound of voices. In the yard girls were crowding round the porch and the windows, and running backwards and forwards between the hut and the outhouse. Some Cossacks rushed out of the hut and could not refrain from shouting, re-echoing the refrain of Daddy Eróshka’s song and his shots.
“Why are you not at the betrothal?” asked Olénin.
“Never mind them! Never mind them!” muttered the old man, who had evidently been offended by something there. “Don’t like them, I don’t. Oh, those people! Come back into the hut! Let them make merry by themselves and we’ll make merry by ourselves.”
Olénin went in.
“And Lukáshka, is he happy? Won’t he come to see me?” he asked.