Children of the Soil

It was broken at last by Marynia, who was the first to come out of the closed chamber, her face as pale as linen, and she said hurriedly, —

“Water for the lady! the little lady is living no longer.”

CHAPTER XIX

Autumn, in its last days, smiles on people at times with immense sadness, but mildly, like a woman dying of decline. It was on such a mild day that Litka’s funeral took place. There is pain mingled with a certain consolation in this, – that those left behind think of their dead and feel the loss of them. Pan Stanislav, occupied with the funeral, was penetrated by that calm and pensive day with still greater sadness; but, transferring Litka’s feelings to himself, he thought that the child would have wished just such a day for her burial, and he found in this thought a certain solace. Till that moment he had not been able simply to measure his sorrow; such knowledge comes later, and begins only when the loved one is left in the graveyard, and a man returns by himself to his empty house. Besides, preparations for the funeral had consumed Pan Stanislav’s whole time. Life has surrounded with artificial forms, and has complicated, such a simple act as death. Pan Stanislav wished to show Litka that last service, which, moreover, there was no one else to perform. All those springs of life through which man thinks, resolves, and acts, were severed in Pani Emilia by the death of her child. This time the wind seemed too keen for the fleece of the lamb. Happily, however, excessive pain either destroys itself, or benumbs the human heart. This happened with Pani Emilia. Pan Stanislav noticed that the predominant expression of her face and eyes was a measureless, rigid amazement. As in her eyes there were no tears, so in her mouth there were no words, – merely a kind of whisper, at once tragic and childish, showing that her thought did not take in the misfortune, but hovered around the minutiæ accompanying it; she seized at these, and attended to them with as much carefulness as if her child were alive yet. In the room, now turned into a chamber of mourning, Litka, reposing on a satin cushion amid flowers, could want nothing; meanwhile the heart of the mother, grown childish from pain, turned continually to this: what could be lacking to Litka? When they tried to remove her from the body, she offered no resistance; she merely lost the remnant of her consciousness, and began to groan, as if pained beyond endurance.

Pan Stanislav and her husband’s brother, Pan Hvastovski, who had come just before the funeral, strove to lead her away at the moment Litka was covered with the coffin-lid; but when Pani Emilia began to call the little one by name, courage failed the two men.

The procession moved at last with numerous torches, and drew after it a train of carriages, preceded by priests, chanting gloomily, and surrounded by a crowd of the curious, who in modern cities feed their eyes with the sorrow of others, as in ancient times they fed them in the circus with the blood of people.

Pani Emilia, attended by her husband’s brother, and having Marynia at her side, walked also behind the caravan with dry and expressionless face. Her eyes saw only one detail, and her mind was occupied with that alone. It had happened that a lock of Litka’s flaxen, immensely abundant hair was outside the coffin. Pani Emilia did not take her eyes from it the whole way, repeating again and again, “O God, O God! they have nailed down the child’s hair!”

In Pan Stanislav’s sorrow, weariness, nervous disturbance, resulting from sleeplessness, became a feeling of such unendurable oppression that at moments he was seized by an invincible desire to turn back when he had gone halfway, – return home, throw himself on a sofa, not think of anything, not wish anything, not love any one, not feel anything. At the same time this revulsion of self-love astounded him, made him indignant at himself: he knew that he would not return; that he would drain that cup to the bottom, that he would go to the end, not only because it would happen so, but because sorrow for Litka, and attachment to her, would be stronger than his selfishness. He felt, too, at that moment, that all his other feelings were contracted and withered, and that for the whole world he had in his heart merely nothing, at least, at that moment. For that matter his thoughts and feelings had fallen into perfect disorder, composed of external impressions received very hastily, observations made, it was unknown why, and mixed all together mechanically with a feeling of sorrow and pain. At times he looked at the houses past which the procession was moving, and he distinguished their colors. At times some shop sign caught his eye; this he read, not knowing why he did so. Then again he thought that the priests had ceased to sing, but would begin directly; and he was waiting for that renewed continuance of sad voices, as if in a kind of dread. At times he reasoned like a man who, waking from sleep, wishes to give himself an account of reality: “Those are houses,” said he to himself; “those are signs; that is the odor of pitch from the torches; and there on the bier lies Litka; and we are going to the graveyard.” And all at once there rose in him a wave of sorrow for that sweet, beloved child, for that dear face which had smiled so many times at him. He recalled her from remoter and from recent days; remembered her in Reichenhall, where he carried her when returning from Thumsee; and later at Bigiel’s, in the country; and in Pani Emilia’s house, when she said that she wanted to be a birch-tree; and finally, when, a few hours before her death, she entreated Marynia to marry him. Pan Stanislav did not say directly to himself that Litka loved him as a grown woman loves, and that, in betrothing him to Marynia, she had performed an act of sacrifice, for the feelings of the little girl were not known, and could not be defined with precision; he felt perfectly, however, that there was something like that love in her, and that the sacrifice took place, flowed, in fact, from that deep and exceptional attachment which Litka had felt for him. Since the loss of even those who are dearest is felt most of all through the personal loss which we suffer, Pan Stanislav began to repeat to himself: “That was the one soul that loved me truly; I have no one in the whole world now.” And, raising his eyes to the coffin, to that tress of blond hair which was waving in the wind, he cried out in spirit to Litka with all those tender expressions with which he had spoken to her while in life. Finally, he felt that tears were choking him, because that was a call without echo. There is something heart-rending in the indifference of the dead. When the one who reflected every word and glance has become indifferent, when the loving one is icy, the one who was near in daily life, and next the heart, is full of solemnity, and far away, it avails not to repeat to one’s self: “Death, death!” In addition to all pain connected with the loss, there is a harrowing deception, as if an injustice to the heart had been wrought by that lifeless body, which remains deaf to our pain and entreaty. Pan Stanislav had, in this manner, at the bottom of his soul, a feeling that Litka, by taking herself from him, and going to the region of death, had done an injustice; and from being one who is near, she had become one remote; from being a confidant, she had become formal, far away, lofty, sacred, and also perfectly indifferent to the despair of her mother and the deep loneliness of her nearest friend. There was much selfishness in those feelings of Pan Stanislav; but were it not for that selfishness, which, first of all, has its own loss and loneliness in mind, people, especially those who believe in life beyond the grave and its happiness, would feel no grief for the dead.

The procession passed out at last from the city to clearer and more open spaces, and beyond the barrier advanced along the cemetery wall, which was fronted with a garland of beggars, and with garlands of immortelles and evergreens intended for grave mounds. The line of priests in white surplices, the funeral procession with torches, the hearse with the coffin, and the people walking behind it, halted before the gate; there they removed Litka. Pan Stanislav, Bukatski, Hvastovski, and Bigiel bore her to the grave of her father.

That silence, and the void which, after each funeral, is waiting for people at home when they return from fresh graves, seemed this time to begin even at the cemetery. The day was calm, pale, with here and there the last yellowed leaves dropping from the trees without a rustle. The funeral procession was belittled amid these wide, pale spaces, which, studded with crosses, seemed endless, – as if, in truth, that cemetery opened into infinity. The black, leafless trees with tops formed of slender branches, as it were, vanishing in the light, gray and white tombstones resembling apparitions, the withered leaves on the ground, covering long and straight alleys, – all these produced at once a genuine impression of Elysian fields of some sort, fields full of deep rest, but full also of deep, dreamy melancholy, certain “cold and sad places” of which the gloomy head of Cæsar dreamed, and to which now was to come one more “animula vagula.”

The coffin stopped at last above the open grave. The piercing “Requiem æternam” was heard, and then “Anima ejus.” Pan Stanislav, through the chaos of his thoughts and impressions, and through the veil of his own sorrow, saw, as in a dream, the stony face and glassy eyes of Pani Emilia, the tears of Marynia, which irritated him at that moment, the pale face of Bukatski, on whose features the expression was evident that his philosophy of life, having no work to do at that graveyard, had left him and Litka’s coffin at the gate. When each threw a handful of sand on the coffin-lid, he followed the example of others; when they lowered the coffin on straps into the depth of the grave, and closed the stone doors, something seized him anew by the throat, so that all of which he had been thinking, and had learned hitherto, was changed into one nothingness. He repeated in his soul the simple words: “Till we meet, Litus!” – words which, when he recalled them afterwards, seemed to have no relation to the torturing mental storm within him. This was the end. The funeral procession began to decrease and melt away. After a time Pan Stanislav was roused by the wind, which came from afar from between the crosses. He saw now at the grave Pani Emilia with Marynia, Pani Bigiel, Vaskovski, and Litka’s uncle; he said to himself that he would go out last, and waited, repeating in his soul, “Till we meet, Litus!” He was thinking of death, and of this, – that he, too, would come to this place of monuments, and that it is an ocean into which all thoughts, feelings, and efforts are flowing. It seemed to him then as if he and all who were there at the grave, or had returned home, were on a ship sailing straight to the precipice. Of life beyond the grave he had no thought at that moment.

Meanwhile the short autumn twilight came on; the crosses grew still less distinct. The old professor and Pan Hvastovski conducted Pani Emilia to the cemetery gate without resistance on her part. Pan Stanislav repeated once more, “Till we meet, dear child!” and passed out.

Beyond the gate he thought: “It is fortunate that the mother is unconscious, for what a terrible thought to leave a child there alone. The dead forsake us, but we too forsake them.”

In fact, he saw from a distance the carriage in which Pani Emilia was riding away, and it seemed to him that such an order of things in the world has in it something revolting. Still when he had sat down alone in his droshky, he felt a moment of selfish relief, flowing from the feeling that a certain torturing and oppressive act had been ended, after which would come rest. On returning to his own dwelling, it appeared empty, without a ray of gladness, without consolation or hope; but when at tea, he stretched himself on the sofa, an animal delight in repose after labor took possession of him, with a feeling of solace, and even as it were of satisfaction, that the funeral was over and Litka was buried. He remembered then the opinion of a certain thinker: “I know no criminals; I know only honest people, and they are disgusting.” Pan Stanislav seemed to himself repulsive at that moment.

In the evening he remembered that it was needful to inquire about Pani Emilia, whom Marynia was to take for some weeks to her own house. While going out, he saw a photograph of Litka on the table, and kissed it. A quarter of an hour later he rang the bell at the Plavitskis’.

The servant told him that Plavitski had gone out, but that Professor Vaskovski and Father Hylak were there beside Pani Emilia. Marynia received him in the drawing-room; her hair was badly dressed, her eyes red; she was almost ugly. But her former way of meeting him had changed entirely, as if she had forgotten all offences in view of more unhappy subjects.

“Emilia is with me,” whispered she, “and is in a bad state; but it seems that at least she understands what is said. Professor Vaskovski is with her. He speaks with such feeling. Do you wish to see Emilia absolutely?”

“No. I have come merely to inquire how she feels, and shall go away directly.”

“I do not know – she might like to see you. Wait a moment; I will go and say that you are here. Litka loved you so; for that reason alone perhaps it would be pleasant for Emilia to see you.”

“Very well.”

Marynia went to the next chamber; but evidently did not begin conversation at once, for to Pan Stanislav there came from the door, not her voice, but that of Vaskovski, full of accents of deep conviction, and also, as it were, of effort, striving to break through the armor of insensibility and suffering.

“It is as if your child had gone to another room after play,” said the old professor; “and as if she were to return at once. She will not return, but you will go to her. My dear lady, look at death, not from the side of this world, but from the side of God. The child lives and is happy; for, being herself in eternity, she considers this separation from you as lasting one twinkle of an eye. Litka is living,” continued he, with emphasis; “she is living and happy. She sees that you are coming to her, and she stretches forth her hands to you; she knows that in a moment you will come, for from God’s point of view life and pain are less than the twinkle of an eye, – and then eternity with Litka. Think, dearest lady, with Litka in peace, in joy, – without disease, without death. Worlds will pass away, and you will be together.”

“It would be well were that certain,” thought Pan Stanislav, bitterly. But after a while he thought, “If I felt that way, I should have some cause to go in; otherwise not.”

Still in spite of this thought he went in, not waiting even for Marynia’s return; for it seemed to him that if he had no cause, he had a duty, and he was not free to be cowardly in presence of the suffering of others. Selfishness is “cotton in the ears against human groans,” and excuses itself in its own eyes by saying that nothing can be said to great suffering to relieve it. Pan Stanislav understood that this was the case, and was ashamed to withdraw comfortably instead of going to meet the sorrow of a mother. When he entered, he saw Pani Emilia sitting on the sofa; above the sofa was a lamp, and lower than the lamp a palm, which cast a shadow on that unhappy head, as if gigantic fingers were opened above it. Near Pani Emilia sat Vaskovski, who was holding her hands and looking into her face. Pan Stanislav took those hands from him, and, bending down, began to press them to his lips in silence.

Pani Emilia blinked a while, like a person striving to rise out of sleep; then she cried suddenly, with an unexpected outburst, —

“Remember how she – ”

And she was borne away by a measureless weeping, during which her hands were clasped, her lips could not catch breath, and her bosom was bursting from sobs. At last strength failed her, and she fainted. When she recovered, Marynia led her to her own chamber. Pan Stanislav and Vaskovski went to the adjoining reception-room, where they were detained by Plavitski, who had come in just that moment.

“Such a sad person in the house,” said he, – “it spoils life terribly. A little peace and freedom should be due to me; but what is to be done, what is to be done? I must descend to the second place, and I am ready.”

At the end of half an hour Marynia came with the announcement that at her request Pani Emilia had gone to bed, and was a little calmer. Pan Stanislav and Vaskovski took leave, and went out.

They walked along in a dense fog, which rose from the earth after a calm day, hiding the streets and forming parti-colored circles around the lamps. Both were thinking of Litka, who was passing her first night among the dead, and at a distance from her mother. To Pan Stanislav this seemed simply terrible, not for Litka, but for Pani Emilia, who had to think of it. He meditated also over the words spoken by Vaskovski, and said at last, —

“I heard thy words. If they gave her solace, it is well; but if that were true, we should make a feast now, and rejoice that Litka is dead.”

“But whence dost thou know that we shall not be happy after death?”

“Wilt thou tell me whence thou hast the knowledge that we shall?”

“I do not know; I believe.”

There was no answer to this; therefore Pan Stanislav said, as if to himself, “Mercy, empyrean light, eternity, meeting; but what is there in fact? The corpse of a child in the grave, and a mother who is wailing from pain. Grant that death has produced thy faith at least; yet it brings doubt, because thou art grieving for the child. I am grieving still more; and this grief casts on me directly the question, ‘Why did she die? Why such cruelty?’ I know that this question is a foolish one, and that milliards of people have put it to themselves; but, if this knowledge is to be my solace, may thunderbolts split it! I know, too, that I shall not find an answer, and for that very reason I want to gnash my teeth and curse. I do not understand, and I rebel; that is all. That is the whole result, which thou canst not recognize as the one sought for.”

Vaskovski answered also, as if speaking to himself, “Christ rose from the dead, for He was God; but He rose as man, and He passed through death. How can I, poor worm, do otherwise than magnify the Divine Will and Wisdom in death?”

To this Pan Stanislav answered. —

“It is impossible to talk with thee!”

“It is slippery,” answered Vaskovski; “give me thy arm.” And, taking Pan Stanislav by the arm, he leaned on him, and said, “My dear friend, thou hast an honest and a loving heart; thou didst love that little girl greatly, thou wert ready to do much for her. Do this one thing now, – whether thou believest or not, – say for her, ‘Eternal rest!’ If thou think that that will be no good to her, say to thyself, ‘I can do no more, but I will do that.’”

“Give me peace!” answered Pan Stanislav.

“That may not be needful to her, but thy remembrance of her will be dear; she will be grateful, and will obtain the grace of God for thee.”

Pan Stanislav remembered how Vaskovski, at news of Litka’s last attack, said that the life of the child could not be purposeless, and that if she had to die she was predestined to do something before death; and now he wished to attack Vaskovski on this point, when the thought flashed on him that, before her death, Litka had united him with Marynia; and it occurred to him that perhaps she had lived for this very purpose. But at that moment he rebelled against the thought. Anger at Marynia seized him; he was full of stubbornness, and almost contempt.

“I do not want Marynia at such a price!” thought he, gritting his teeth; “I do not! I have suffered enough through her. I would give ten such for one Litka.”

Meanwhile Vaskovski, trotting near him, said, —

“Nothing is to be seen at a step’s distance, and the stones are slippery from fog. Without thee I should have fallen long ago.”

Pan Stanislav recovered himself, and answered, —

“Whoso walks on the earth, professor, must look down, not up.”

“Thou hast good legs, my dear friend.”

“And eyes which see clearly, even in a fog like this which surrounds us. And it is needful, for we all live in a fog, and deuce knows what is beyond it. All that thou sayest makes on me such an impression as the words of a man who would break dry twigs, throw them into a torrent, and say, Flowers will come from these. Rottenness will come, nothing more. From me, too, this torrent has torn away something from which I am to think that a flower will rise? Folly! But here is thy gate. Good-night!”

And they separated. Pan Stanislav returned to his own house barely alive, he was so weary; and, when he had lain down in bed, he began to torture himself with thoughts further continued, or rather with visions. To begin with, before his eyes appeared the figure of Pani Emilia, powerless from pain; she was sitting in Marynia’s parlor, under the palm-leaf, which was hanging over her head like an immense ill-omened hand, with outspread, grasping fingers, and it cast a shadow on her face. “I might philosophize over that till morning,” muttered he. “Everything out of which life is constructed is a hand like that, from which a shadow falls, – nothing more. But if there were a little mercy besides, the child would not have died; but with what Vaskovski says, you couldn’t keep life in a sparrow.”