Tales by Polish Authors Part 13

When he sat down, it was on the very edge of the chair, as if anxious that when he rose quickly his ca.s.sock should hinder him and make him move like a priest; he walked on tiptoe as if a mystic heel protected him from the dust of the earth; he shunned society, he murmured a prayer at the sight of a village girl.

Every day at dawn he left the house, and went into the fields. He felt that there he could be in closest communication with his Creator, there ecstatic visions came to him most clearly. He followed the beaten track through numberless rye-fields to the upland, where a half-ruined little chapel lay hidden in the shade of the pine forest.

One morning he went there as usual. The landscape was still buried in the night-mist, but a violet streak of daybreak had begun to spread on the horizon. The bearded rye brushed against his knees and scattered large dewdrops, yet the pathway was not damp, being sheltered by the full drooping ears. The corn, feebly illumined by the early morning light, rose in great waves along the hill, where the undulating line of the fields showed against the wood. The scent of earth and ripening corn hung on the breeze, bringing a sense of health, strength, and youth. From the dark gloom of the huge trees, whose tops were beginning to break up the expanse of dawning blue, came the keen, damp breath of the forest. The seminarist walked along slowly and lazily, pa.s.sing his hand over the surface of the rye. Sky larks and crested larks rose at his feet, and dropped again like stones into the thickly-growing corn.

The dawn was now tinging the horizon with a rosy light; it burst forth like a wide flash of lightning, illuminating the rifts and curves in the dark clouds which lay idly over the wood. Unexpectedly hundreds of red firs, crowning the summit of the hill, emerged tall and grand from the night, their boughs standing out prominently against the transparent background of blue, as if stretching out their arms to the approaching sun.

Suddenly a thrill pa.s.sed through the earth. The next moment a puff of wind, the forerunner of daybreak, stirred the boughs of the firs, and announced alike to plant, to gra.s.s, and corn--the coming of the sun.

It seemed as if the earth were quivering, as if her heart began to beat. Then the wind spread its wings, and hovered over the scented trunks, over the osiers and corn in the distance. A long, soothing moment of death-like silence followed, and then that mysterious moment of early dawn, when each living plant glows in its every part as if on fire.

The student walked with his face turned eastwards. Words of prayer rose from his heart to his lips as the sap rises to the bark of the pines when Spring comes. He went up to the little chapel, opened the grey wooden door, studded with nails, and fell on his face with outstretched hands before the picture of Christ, clumsily drawn by a rustic hand.

He felt as if his soul had fled from earth to the very Throne of G.o.d.

The scales had fallen from his eyes in a moment: he was gazing on the face of the Eternal.

All at once a rough, coa.r.s.e peasant's song was heard:

'It was then that I liked you best, Hanka, When you bleached yourself in the fields, in the fields, like a gosling.'

This was answered by a woman's voice, approaching from a distance:

'I did not bleach myself, I bleached a linen s.h.i.+rt, But you, Kaska, thought that I was painted.'

The young man rose from the ground, and stood at the door of the chapel. He saw a st.u.r.dy farmer's lad in s.h.i.+rt sleeves, bare-foot, in a straw hat, and loaded like a horse, with juniper wood. This strapping fellow was taking up a kilo of roots--digging out bushes with the clods, and moistening his hands in the branches. A girl was going along the path, carrying a load of weeds on her back. The corners of her petticoat were turned up and tucked into her belt, her broad shoulders were bent together under the heavy burden, only her head, tied round with a red handkerchief, was raised towards the hill where the lad was working. When she reached the turn of the path, he stopped her, pulled down the hem of her skirt from her waist, and laid her bundle on the ground. She pushed him away with her hands, laughing.

The student shaded his eyes with his hand, but dropped it again the next minute, as the sound of the two singing a fresh song echoed through the glade. It was strange music. The wood, like a tuned string, seemed to quiver in harmony with the sound of those two voices:

'In the garden is a cherry tree, In the orchard there are two; I have loved you, Ha.n.u.s, since you were small, n.o.body else but you.'

They went down into the hollow through the corn, which reached up to their heads, bent towards one another. Those two heads stood out in sharp relief against the dark rye, while the giant, brazen s.h.i.+eld of the sun was rising over the ridge. They walked thus for a long time, never completely hidden by the corn.

Tears flowed from under the young man's closed eyes, and he clenched his hands convulsively. Words unknown to him, words known as longing and the desire for love, forced themselves unnoticed to his lips.

In a vision he saw moist eyes and a girl's long braided hair rising and sinking in some sea cavern. An unknown force, inexpressibly sweet, a force which could be neither expelled nor conquered, rose within him, carrying him far away into s.p.a.ce. His soul threw off its fetters, and rushed forth in its wild freedom, as a colt starts for a mad gallop....

SRUL--FROM LUBARTW

ADAM SZYMANSKI

I

It happened in the year,...; but no matter what year. Suffice it to say that it happened, and that it happened at Yakutsk in the beginning of November, about a month after my arrival at that citadel of frosts.

The thermometer was down to 35 degrees Ramur. I was therefore thinking anxiously of the coming fate of my nose and ears, which, fresh from the West, had been making silent but perceptible protests against their compulsory acclimatization, and to-day were to be submitted to yet further trials. These latest trials were due to the fact that one of the men in our colony, Peter Kurp, nicknamed Baldyga,[10] had died in the local hospital two days before, and early that morning we were going to do him a last service, by laying his wasted body in the half-frozen ground.

I was only waiting for an acquaintance, who was to tell me the hour of the funeral, and I had not long to wait. Having wrapped up my nose and ears with the utmost care, I set out with the others to the hospital.

The hospital was outside the town. In the courtyard, and at some distance from the other buildings, stood a small shed--the mortuary.

In this mortuary lay Baldyga's body.

When the doors were opened, we entered, and the scene within made a painful impression on the few of us present. We were about ten people, possibly a few more, and we all involuntarily looked at one another: we were standing opposite a cold and bare reality, not veiled by any vestige of pretence....

In the shed,--which possessed neither table nor stool, nothing but walls white with h.o.a.rfrost and a floor covered with snow,--lay a large bearded corpse, equally white, and tied up in some kind of sheet or s.h.i.+rt. This was Baldyga.

The body, which was completely frozen, had been brought near the light to the door, where the coffin was standing ready.

Never shall I forget Baldyga's face as I saw it then with the light full upon it, and washed by the snow. There was something strange and indescribably sad in the rough, strongly marked countenance; the large pupils and projecting eyeb.a.l.l.s seemed to look far away into the distance towards the stern frosty sky.

'That man,--he was a good sort,' one of those present said to me, noticing the impression which the sight of Baldyga made on me. 'He was always steady and industrious; people who were hard up used to go to him and he would help them. But there never was anyone so obstinate as Kurp: he believed to the last that he would go back to the Narev.[11]

Yet before the end came it was plain that he knew he would never get there.'

Meanwhile the petrified body had been laid in the coffin, and placed upon the small one-horse Yakut sledge.

Then the tailor's wife--a person versed in religious practices,--undertook the office of priest for such time as we could give her, and began to sing 'Ave Maria,' while we joined in with voices broken with emotion. After this we proceeded to the cemetery.

We walked quickly; the frost was invigorating, and made us hasten our steps. At last we reached the cemetery. We each threw a handful of frozen earth on to the coffin.... A few deft strokes of the spade ...

and in a moment only a small freshly turned mound of earth remained to bear witness to Baldyga's yet recent existence in this world. This witness would not last long, however,--scarcely a few months. The spring would come, and, thawed by the sun, the mound on the grave would sink and become even with the rest of the ground, and gra.s.s and weeds would grow upon it. After a year or two the witnesses of the funeral would die, or be dispersed throughout the wide world, and if even the mother who bore him were to search for him, she would no longer find a trace on the earth. But, indeed, none would seek for the dead man, nor even a dog ask for him.

Baldyga had known this; we knew it too: and we dispersed to our houses in silence.

The day following the funeral the frost was yet more severe. There was not a single building to be seen on the opposite side of the fairly narrow street in which I lived, for a thick mist of snow crystals overspread the earth, like a cloud. The sun could not penetrate this mist, and although there was not a living soul in the street, the air was so highly condensed through the extreme cold that I continually heard the metallic sound of creaking snow, the sharp reports of the walls and ground cracking in the frost, or the moaning song of a Yakut. Evidently those Yakut frosts were beginning, which reduce the most terrible Arctic cold to insignificance. They fill human beings with unspeakable dread. Every living thing feels its utter helplessness, and although it cowers down and shrinks into itself for protection, knows quite well--like the cur worried by fierce mastiffs,--that all is in vain, for sooner or later the inexorable foe is bound to be victorious.

And Baldyga was continually in my mind, as if he were alive. I had sat for hours at my half-finished task. Somehow I could not stick to work; the pen fell from my hand, and my unruly thoughts ranged far away beyond the snowy frontier and frosty ground. In vain I appealed to my reason, in vain I repeated wholesome advice to myself for the tenth time. Hitherto I had offered some resistance to the sickness which had consumed me for several weeks; to-day I felt completely overcome and helpless. Homesickness was devouring and making pitiless havoc of me.

I had been unable to resist dreaming so many times already; was it likely I should withstand the temptation to-day? The temptation was stronger, and I was weaker than usual.

So begone frost and snow, begone the existence of Yakutsk! I threw down my pen, and surrounding myself with clouds of tobacco smoke, plunged into the waters of feverish imagination.

And how it carried me away!... My thoughts fled rapidly to the far West, across mora.s.ses and steppes, mountains and rivers, across countless lands and cities, and spread a scene of true enchantment before me. There on the Vistula lay my native plains, free from misery and human pa.s.sions, beautiful and harmonious. My lips cannot utter, nor my pen describe their charm!

I saw the golden fields, the emerald meadows; the dense forests murmured their old legends to me.

I heard the rustle of the waving corn; the chirping of the feathered poets; the sound of the giant oaks as they haughtily bid defiance to the gale.

And the air seemed permeated by the scent of those aromatic forests, and those blossoming fields, adorned in virgin freshness by the blue cornflowers and that sweetest beauty of Spring,--the innocent violet.

... Every single nerve felt the caress of my native air.... I was touched by the life-giving power of the sun's rays; and although the frost outside creaked more fiercely, and showed its teeth at me on the window panes more menacingly, yet the blood circulated in my veins more rapidly, my head burnt, and I sat as if spellbound, deaf, no longer seeing or hearing anything round me....

II

I did not notice that the door opened and someone entered my room, neither did I see the circles of vapour, which form in such numbers every time a door is opened that they obscure the face of the person entering. I did not feel the cold: it penetrates human dwellings here with a sort of shameless, premeditated violence. In fact, I had seen or heard nothing until suddenly I felt a man close to me, and even before catching sight of him, found myself involuntarily putting him the usual Yakut question: