CHAPTER I
WHEN Venik was twelve years old his father Riha took him from school. “You must help us now”, he said. “You will be our little shepherd, and will drive off the sheep to the hill-side; then in the afternoon I will bring you your dinner there, and you will come home yourself for the evening meal.”
Venik spun round with delight on his right heel. His teeth flashed out from his gums, and his father added, “Take your violin with you to the pasturage.” After this, Venik was like one possessed; he skipped about the apartment, till he had skipped up to his violin, taken it down from its nail, stretched several of the strings, and played and skipped about at the same time.
Venik, it must be understood, learnt the violin at school, and on Sunday used to play primo in the gallery so well that the schoolmaster composed a solo in the gloria expressly for him; and when Venik played, people at church turned their eyes to the gallery instead of looking at the altar. But no one could see him from below, he was still so small that he scarcely touched the rail of the gallery with his head. Then year after year the head emerged just over the rail, but the violin was yet invisible from below.
So then pretty early next morning Venik drove off the sheep to the hill-side below the wood, and took with him his violin. Below the hill-side murmured a river, on the hill-side began to murmur the oak-wood. Venik skirted the wood, and at the edge of it he noticed a single old tree whose trunk was hollow, so that four people could comfortably seat themselves inside. This tree looked as though it had stepped out from the wood. It had a sort of door and threshold; on the threshold, beside the entrance, squatted Venik, that he might look after the sheep, and he said to himself, “Here I like to be: beside this tree I shall remain.”
When he had sat thus a short time and saw how the river fled away below him, and how the sheep kept creeping over the hill-side, and how the wood behind him kept murmuring so softly, something stirred within him like the river, and something murmured softly like the woodland.
But when birds began to call to one another from the wood, Venik thought that he ought to answer them. He took his violin to make them some response. He played a whole mass in their
