Children of the Soil

“Pan Kopovski, Lineta, and Stefania remained in the conservatory,” answered Pani Mashko; “the two ladies are painting orchids, and Pan Kopovski amused us.”

“How?” asked Osnovski.

“With conversation; we laughed heartily. He told us that his acquaintance, Pan Vyj, who very likely is a great man at heraldry, told him in all seriousness that there is a family in Poland with the escutcheon, ‘Table legs.’”

“If there is one,” muttered Osnovski, humorously, “it is the family of the Kopovskis, beyond doubt.”

“And did Steftsia remain, too, in the conservatory?” asked Pani Aneta.

“Yes; they are sketching together.”

“Dost wish to go to them?”

“Let us go.”

But at that moment the servant brought letters, which Pan Osnovski looked over, and delivered. “For Anetka, for Anetka!” said he; “this little literary woman has an enormous correspondence always. For you,” added he, turning to Pani Mashko; “for aunt; and this is for Steftsia, – somehow a known hand, quite familiar. The ladies will permit me to carry her this letter.”

“Of course; go,” said Pani Aneta, with animation; “and we will read ours.”

Osnovski took the letter and went in the direction of the conservatory, looking at it, and repeating, “Whence do I know this hand? – as if – I know that I have seen this hand.”

In the conservatory he found three young people, sitting under a great arum at a yellow iron table, on which the orchid was standing. Both ladies were painting it in albums. Kopovski, a little behind them, dressed in a white-flannel costume and black stockings, was looking over the shoulders of the young ladies into the albums, smoking meanwhile a slender cigarette, which he had taken from an elegant cigarette-case lying near the flower-pot.

“Good-day!” said Osnovski. “What do you think of my orchids? Splendid, aren’t they? What peculiar flowers they are! Steftsia, here is a letter; ask the company to excuse thee, and read it, for it seems to me that I know the handwriting, but I cannot in any way remember whose it can be.”

Panna Ratkovski opened the letter, and began to read. After a while her face changed; a flame passed over her forehead, then paleness, and again a flame. Osnovski looked at her with curiosity. When she had finished reading, she showed him the signature, and said, with a voice which trembled somewhat, —

“See from whom the letter is.”

“Ah!” said Osnovski, who understood everything at once.

“May I ask thee for a moment’s talk?”

“At once, my child,” answered he, as if with a certain tenderness; “I will serve thee.”

And they went out of the conservatory.

“But they have left us alone for once even,” said Kopovski, naïvely.

Lineta did not answer; but, taking Kopovski’s white-leather cigarette-case, which was lying on the table, began to draw it across her face gently.

He looked at that beautiful face with his wonderful eyes, beneath which she simply melted. Lineta had known for a long time what to think of him; his boundless stupidity had no longer any secret from her. Still the exquisiteness and incomparable beauty of that dullard brought her plebeian blood into some uncommon movement. Every hair in his beard had a certain marvellous and irresistible charm for her.

“Have you noticed that for a long time they are watching us, like I know not whom?” continued Kopovski.

But she, feigning not to hear, continued to draw the cigarette-case across her delicate face, and, bringing it nearer and nearer to her lips, said, —

“How soft this is; how pleasant to the touch!”

Kopovski took the cigarette-case; but he put it to his lips and began to kiss lightly the part which a while before had touched Lineta’s face. Then a moment of silence rose between them.

“We must go from here,” said Lineta.

And, taking the pot of orchids, she wished to put it on steps in the conservatory; she was not able to do so, however, because of the slope of those steps.

“Permit me,” said Kopovski.

“No, no!” answered Lineta; “it would fall, and be broken; I will put it on the other side.”

Saying this, she went with the pot of orchids in her hands around to the other side of the steps, where between them and the wall was a narrow passage. Kopovski followed her. There she stepped on to a pile of bricks, and put the orchids on the highest step; but at the moment when she turned to descend, the bricks moved under her feet, and she began to totter. Just at that moment, Kopovski, who was standing behind, caught her by the waist.

For a few seconds they remained in that posture, she leaning with her shoulder against his breast, he drawing her toward him. Lineta leaned over more, so that at last her head was on his shoulder.

“What are you doing? This is wrong!” she began to whisper, with panting breast, surrounding him with her hot breath.

But he, instead of an answer, pressed his mustaches to her lips. All at once her arms embraced his neck with a passionate movement, and she began breathlessly and madly to return his kisses.

In their ecstasy, neither observed that Osnovski, in returning through the open doors of the conservatory, passed along on the soft sand beyond the entrance, and looked at them with a face changed and pale as linen from emotion.

CHAPTER LVI

Meanwhile Pan Ignas spent the time between Warsaw and Buchynek, going from one place to the other daily, remaining now here, now there, just as his work and business commanded. Since his marriage was to take place in the fall, immediately after the season in Scheveningen, Pan Stanislav told him that it was time to find a dwelling, and furnish it, even in some fashion. He and Bigiel promised every assistance in that affair. Pani Bigiel was to see to the part which pertained to housekeeping. Pan Ignas’s presence in Buchynek was necessary also in view of his relations with Panna Helena. Though the will of her father, bearing date a year earlier, made her the only heiress of the whole immense property, she did not hide in the least that she knew that her father did not make another will simply because either he had not foreseen a death so sudden, or had deferred the matter from day to day, in the manner of old people. She had not the least doubt, however, that her father wished to do something for a man of the same name, and a relative; and she said openly that she held it a duty to carry out her father’s wish. No one, it is true, could foresee in what measure she would decide to do that; and for her too it was difficult to answer such a question, before she had made an exact inventory of all the properties and moneys; meanwhile, however, she began to present Pan Ignas with everything which, in her opinion, male heirs should inherit. In this way, she gave him a part of the household plate, left after the deceased, as well as a considerable and valuable collection of arms, which the old man prized, and horses greatly esteemed by him, – these Polanyetski took on commission; and, finally, that collection of pipes the fate of which had concerned Kopovski so much.

Cold, and apparently indifferent to all, intimidating people by her severe and concentrated expression of face, she had for Pan Ignas alone, in her voice and look, a certain something almost motherly; just as if with the property she had inherited from her father his inclination for the young man. He was indeed the only person on earth with whom she was connected by bonds of blood, or at least by identity of name. Learning from Pan Stanislav of the steps taken by Pan Ignas toward furnishing a house, she begged him to put in the bank for her a considerable sum in the name of “Pan Ignas,” for outlays toward that end, begging, however, not to mention the matter to him immediately.

Pan Ignas, who had a young and grateful heart, became attached to her quickly, as to an elder sister; and she felt perfectly that sympathy of two natures, who wish each other well, and feel mutual confidence. Time usually changes original sympathies of that sort into great, enduring friendship, which in evil periods of life may be of great support. But at that juncture, Pan Ignas could devote to her barely a tiny part of his soul; for he had applied soul, heart, and all his powers, with the entire exclusiveness of a fanatic in love, to the greater and greater adoration of “Nitechka.”

Meanwhile he was as busy as a fly in a pot, between Buchynek and the city, and even made new acquaintances. One of these was Professor Vaskovski; who had returned from his pilgrimage among the “youngest of the Aryans.” He had visited the shores of the Adriatic, and the entire Balkan peninsula; but the state of his health was so pitiful that Pan Stanislav took him for good to Buchynek, to save the poor man from being cheated, and to give him needful care, which in his loneliness he could not have found in another place. Pan Ignas, himself a person of lofty soul, and ready to grasp every broad idea, though it might seem absurd to common-sense fools, conceived from the first day a love for the old man, with his theory of a historical mission predestined to the youngest of the Aryans. Of this theory he had heard already more than once from Svirski and Polanyetski, and considered it a splendid dream. But it struck him and Svirski and the Polanyetskis that the professor, on returning from his journey, answered only that “No one could escape the service which Christ had preordained to him;” then he gazed forward with his mystic eyes, as if seeking something, or looking for something in infinity, and his old face took on an expression of such deep sorrow, and even of such pain, that no one had the heart to touch that particular question. The doctor called in by Polanyetski declared that the greasy kitchen of the youngest of the Aryans had given the old man a serious catarrh of the stomach, to which was added marasmus senilis. The professor had, in fact, a serious catarrh of the stomach; but Pan Ignas divined in him something else, – namely, a desperate struggle between doubt and that in which he believed, and to which, as a real maniac-idealist, he had devoted a lifetime. Pan Ignas alone understood the whole tragedy of such a final ergo erravi; and he was doubly moved, – first, as a man with a heart, second, as a poet, who at once saw a theme for a poem: the old man before the house, in the sun, sitting on the ruin of his life and beliefs, with the words, “vanity, vanity,” on his lips, and waiting for death, whose steps he hears now in the distance.

But with the professor it was not so bad, perhaps, as Pan Ignas had imagined. “The youngest of the Aryans” might, indeed, have disappointed him; but there remained the faith that Christianity had not uttered its last word yet, and that the coming epoch in the life of humanity would not be anything else than a spreading of the spirit of Christ, and a transfer of it from relations between individuals to general human relations. “Christ in history” did not cease to be for him a vision of the future. He believed even always that the mission of introducing love into history was predestined to the youngest of the Aryans; but from the time of his journey a deep sadness had seized him, for he understood that, before that could be realized, not only he, but whole generations, must die of catarrh of the stomach, caused by the indigestible kitchen of principalities on the Danube.

Meanwhile he shut himself up in himself, and in silence which had more the appearance of life-sorrow than it was in reality. Of his “idea,” he hardly ever spoke directly, but the idea was evident. Just as the hand of a clock, stopped at a certain hour, never indicates any hour but that, so the indicator of his thought did not desert that idea; for to various questions he answered with words which were rather connected with it than the thing touching which he was questioned. Whenever they wished to call him back to reality, it was needful to rouse him. In dress he neglected himself utterly, and seemed every day to forget more and more that buttons on a vest, for example, are there to be buttoned. With his eternal absence of mind; with his eyes both short-sighted and child-like, reflecting in some mechanical way external impressions; with a face of concern, on which pimples had become still more evident because of defective digestion; finally, with a neglect of dress, and his wonderful trousers, which, it is unknown for what reason, were twice as wide as the trousers of other men, – he roused mirth in strangers, and became frequently the object of jokes more or less malicious. It seems that he roused such feelings first of all in the “youngest of the Aryans.” In general, they considered him as a man in whose head the staves lacked a hoop; but some showed him compassion. The word “harmless” struck his ears frequently, but he feigned not to hear it. He felt, however, that at Pan Stanislav’s he was comfortable; that no one laughed at him, no one showed him the compassion shown idiots.

Finally, neither the too greasy kitchen of the “youngest of the Aryans,” nor the catarrh of the stomach, had taken away his boundless forbearance, and his kindness to people. He was always that dear old professor who fell into revery, but who recovered his senses when it was a question of others. He loved, as of old, Marynia, Pan Stanislav, Pani Emilia, Svirski, the Bigiels, even Mashko, – in a word, all those with whom life had brought him in contact. In general, he had a certain strange understanding of people; namely, that all, whether willing or unwilling, were serving some purpose, and were like pawns which the hand of God is moving for reasons which He Himself knows. Artists, like Svirski, he esteemed as envoys who “reconcile.”

He looked in the same way on Pan Ignas, whose poetry he had read before. On becoming acquainted with the author, he looked at him as curiously as at some peculiar object; but in the morning, when the poet had gone to the city, and they began to talk about him during tea, the old man raised his finger, and, turning to Marynia, said, with a look of mystery, —

“Oh, he is God’s bird! He does not know what God wrote on his head nor to what He designed him.”

Marynia told him of Pan Ignas’s approaching marriage, of his feeling for Panna Lineta, and of her, praising her goodness and beauty.

“Yes,” said the professor, when he had heard all, “you see she too has her mission, and she too is ‘chosen.’ God commanded her to watch over that flame; and since she is chosen, she should be honored for having been chosen. Do you see? Favor is upon her.” Then he grew thoughtful and added, “All this is precious for humanity in the future.”

Pan Stanislav looked at his wife, as if wishing to say that the professor was dreaming disconnectedly; but the latter blinked somewhat, and, looking before him, continued, —

“There is in the sky a Milky Way; and when God wishes, He takes dust from it and makes new worlds. And you see, I think there is likewise a spiritual Milky Way, made up of all that people have ever thought and felt. Everything is in it, – what genius has accomplished, what talent has wrought; in it are the efforts of men’s minds, the honesty of women’s hearts, human goodness, and people’s pains. Nothing perishes, though everything turns to dust, for out of that dust, by the will of God, new spiritual worlds are created for people.”

Then he began to blink, weighing what he had said; after that, as if coming to himself, he looked for the buttons of his vest, and added, —