The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 4/Fame (3)
We had to comply. Soon afterwards our caravan was proceeding in the opposite direction down a gradual slope of the mountain into the wooded valley. At first the road led again only through dense thickets, but lower down we were surrounded by a regular leafy forest. Riding was pleasant through the deep hollow, above which on both sides an irregular array of beech, elm, ash, sycamore and other trees, covered with a clinging abundance of various creeping plants, with a thick undergrowth of thorn-bushes, laurel, flowering azaleas and manifold other shrubs, scattered by the wind lay slantwise across the hollow, and from them hung almost to the road way tangled creepers of ivy and honeysuckle, of wild hops and vine; in these spots we had to dismount from our horses and lead them by the bridle under these natural bridges, during which process strips of the tangled green fabric frequently got caught in the saddles. From the dim thicket above the hollow peeped forth many flowers, some of which were truly magnificent, with their large, glowing and many-colored eyes, and also upon the roadway among the ruts tall irises stretched forth their blue or yellow blossoms.
At the foot of the slope the forest opened out before us and disclosed to us a glimpse into the long narrow valley. We were afforded a view of unusually luxuriant vegetation. From both sides along the slope of the picturesque heights extended the shaggy fresh green of the forest down to the bottom, which was completely hidden in an incredible abundance of water-plants. I had never before seen leaves of such a girth and such a height. A very wide area was covered here by circular expanses of foliage which could easily have been used as umbrellas, and all the bottom of the valley, including the invisible stream in its midst, was thicky bespread with these green discs, among which projected the jagged leaves of some other species of plants, attaining almost the height of a grown man. It was as if beneath us in long and serried ranks an army of elves were marching through the valley in that military formation known to the ancients as a “Testudo”; from above I could see nothing but circular green shields and between them jutting green lances.
We rode on through this valley along a rarely frequented road which twined past the edge of the forest and here and there twisted into it. Although there was no trace of human habitation or of grazing herds to be seen anywhere, our journey proceeded nevertheless in the midst of ever-changing and absorbing views. The forest itself around which we ambled, was a perpetual source of delight to our eyes; the most expert of gardeners could not have contrived to form from the various trees, shrubs and creeping plants such manifold and picturesque arrangements of which this grove was composed. Those who are familiar only with the appearance afforded by the foliage in the woods of Central Europe—drab, mossy tree-trunks and green clouds delicately woven from just a few leafy shapes which are generally mingled only in the immediate vicinity of separate tree-tops and easily distinguishable summits,—cannot form any proper idea of this. Here the various trees show the greatest fondness for gathering together in close clusters of rankly intertwined branches and in unchecked entanglements of leafage most varied in shape; there below, one trunk fervidly clings to the other, yonder a vine-stem twists around a third one in huge coils like a boa constrictor; up yonder, leaves large and small, with plain edges and clipped into various patterns, of dark and light green, with coppery and silvery glitter, are woven into a picturesque chaos, amid which diverse tinges of greenish twilight effectively alternate with the fiery gleam of the sui.—And everywhere the wild vine trails with its peculiar charm. As you gaze at such an arrangement, there flits across your mind the thought of a swarm of priests and priestesses of Bacchus, mingling with joyous intoxication in a dancing cluster, around which the loosened vine garlands picturesquely beckon and flutter from the thyrsi, tresses and shoulders.
It was a ride through a park such as no magnate in our country could have procured. At every bend in the zigzag path I was astonished by the fresh and pleasing conjunctions of the forest upon one side, and upon the other by a new and beautiful outlook on to the varegiate green tree-tops, amid which from time to time a glimpse could be caught of the valley at the sides with the bluish silhouette of the mountains in the background.
Our party rode slowly, feasting their eyes upon the sight of this natural beauty, and expanding their lungs with the pure aid which was sheer lustre and fragrance. Insects hummed around the blossoms, in the bright blue sky a bird of prey wheeled here and there, some where beside the path there was a noisy splash in the water; doubtless a water-turtle, scared by the trotting of our horses. We were silent; only Duňaska twittered from time to time snatches of some half melancholy, half merry folk-song, thus compensating us for the lack of singing birds which was the only thing we missed so far in this charming spring landscape.
After riding through the valley for some time, we banched off from the pathway—which led on through the midst of the deserted mountains heaven knows whither—to something which Tabunov certainly designated by the name of road, but which in reality by no means deserved such a name. As we ascended the hill-side on this alleged road behind the surgeon and the Cossacks, I searched in vain upon the ground for any ruts or other traces of conveyances, horses or wayfarers; I saw nothing but high grass, stones and prickly shrubs. Later on in the forest I came to the conclusion that this gap between the dense trees which was narrow and overgrown with lower and sparser shrubs and along which we passed with some difficulty, was the trace of a roadway long since abandoned. And Tabunov partly corroborated my conjecture by informing us that this road was a survival. from Circassian days, and that owing to the remarkable rankness of the vegetation here, it would have long been covered up, if from time to time the Cossacks had not made use of it on their expeditions into the mountains.
It was not over pleasant to ride upon. The horses had to keep out of the way of the thorny brushwood, and our two Cossacks frequently drew the long broad daggers from their leathern scabbards at their sides to elip the long overgrowth of branches and the cross-wise outstretched tendrils and garlands with which the hops and the vine covered in our pathway, as the villagers used to do for a wedding procession. From the forest we then rode out on to a stony level where a deadly heat blazed down on to us, sweltering from above and below, and from where we had a difficult task to mount across the boulders along a bare steep hill-side to a rocky ravine from which we caught a discouraging glimpse of the troublesome road to the high stony slope opposite. To this we could at the most look forward like Eulenspiegel because of the journey down again, but this journey was even worse than the upward one. And so it went on the whole time.
Our humor became less cheerful. I myself no longer even looked at the landscape. It is difficult to take any pleasure in picturesque views when the sweat is trickling in streams from your forehead, when your jaded limbs grow aching and numb, and your cramped knees are chafed by a feeling as if they were being cut into two with a saw. Duňaška stopped singing. Suslikov had started some mordant argument with Aglaja Andrejevna, but they soon gave it up; argue, if you will, when your tongue is being perpetually threatened by jolts, and when at a most telling point in your speech your opponent suddenly disappears behind a boulder.
During this journey the ladies had to dismount from their horses several times, and upon us younger men devolved the more or less agreeable duty of helping them across the worst obstacles. Anna Kirilovna was especially insistent in her demands upon our support, and the task of helping her along was all the more laborious, since in addition to the burden of her capacious charms it was necessary at the same time to bear the brunt of her continual lamentations and reproaches: “Oh, oh—what a journey!—dear, dear!—how terribly hot it is!—my poor darlings (this was intended for the girls, who with a smile and as nimbly as fawns, were leaping across the stones)—what a hard time you are having! oh, Pavel Semenovitch, have you no conscience?—This is an outrageous sin, to lead us astray among such horrible precipices and abysses.”
The sinner obstinately held his peace. But all at once, as we were riding out towards the wood on the spacious projection of a peak, he stopped his horse and exclaimed, pointing to the little wood: “We are at our journey’s end, ladies and gentlemen. Look, there is the aúl—aúl—well, I do not know its name. Imagine, if you like, that this is the same Circassian aúl in which Pushkin’s prisoner of the Caucasus spent his days in grievous hardship and his nights in secret wooing of the unhappy Circassian girl.”
We stopped and looked more closely at the place which the surgeon pointed out, but we could see only the little wood which was indeed of recent growth and not very high, but extremely dense and full of wild beauty. And yet Tabunov was right—it was a decayed Circassian village of bygone times.
A decayed village. What a depth of poetry reposes in these words. Imagine in the slumbering depths of the forest a group of half-ruined cottages, or rather only the remains of low walls in the interior of which among ferns and heather there is a rank growth of dense briar which thrusts its prickly branches with wild roses through the cavities of the windows. The deserted scene of former human activity with its joys and sorrows, with its love and hatred is concealed and grown over by the victorious forest with its thick branches, through the gaps in which a sun-ray seldom penetrates into the dull, mysterious dusk and plays like a will-o-the-wisp on the rich velvety moss from which compassionate nature is weaving a green shroud for the dead village. Perhaps you also imagine in its midst a half-ruined chapel into whose bare interior the branches of old oak trees force their way through the Gothic windows and with their thick leafage replace the fallen roof, and in whose moss-covered belfry with its rusty cross instead of the sacred chimes only the song of the forest birds now resounds.
Well, the decayed Circassian village, before which we stood, presented a somewhat different appearance. The mountain hamlets in the Caucasus bear a strange resemblance to ruins, even before they are destroyed. You can see somewhere under a rock or upon a rock a heap of low, flat-rooted huts densely packed together and forming in appearance only a single terrace-like mass, in which can be seen only the narrow lines of windows like loop-holes in a castle wall. The whole thing is not distinguished in color from the rocky background. Sometimes a tapering, pinnacle turret projects from the aúl, and then such a village reminds you very strongly of some of the ruined masses of rock in Bohemia. That is generally the appearance of a Caucassian mountaneer’s hamlet, and that, no doubt, had been the appearance of this one as well. But its inhabitants, the Circassians, had deserted it, enemies had destroyed it, and the terribly luxuriant nature of the Caucasus held sway over a bare pile of stones. In the comparatively short number of years since the last inhabitant of the village had departed from his native treshold, nature had contrived to enwrap these ruins with an almost impenetrable forest thicket.
When with the help of our daggers we lad hacked a pathway to the ruins through the Gordian knots of clinging plants and thorn-bushes, it was with difficulty that we could distinguish a half-fallen stone hut; around the twisted walls there was a rank growth of prickly shrubs and weeds spread densely almost to the flat roofs, where huge ferns and other plants were mouldering in the shadow of thickly interwoven branches with which the young trees veiled the empty hut; in the low entrance a snake rose up and hissed, as if it wanted to prevent the intruders from making their way into the hut, of which it was now the sole inhabitant. And at the back could be seen, as far as the eye could at all penetrate the wild thicket, several other such ruins, which were more like a waste pile of stones overgrown with vegetation. The surgeon informed us that amid this desolation we should neither find nor see anything particular, and so we returned—all the more willingly, since any further penetration into this wild chaos which was inhabited by snakes and other reptiles, would have caused us much exertion and unpleasantness.
We mounted still further on to the flat mountain-ridge, and there we pitched our tents. Of course, only in a figurative sense. In spite of the scorching noon-tide sun, we had no need of artificial covering; a group of bushy trees with a thick undergrowth of shrubs, afforded us all shady and fragrant shelter. It was a delightful little spot with which the apostles would probably have been even more pleased than they were on the peak of Mount Tabor.
Thence upon all sides we had a captivating view of the surrounding mountains which filled the landscape along the horizon with billows of various form and size. Here was everything that the heart of a painter could desire; mountains and valleys covered with thick forests in all shades of green, fantastic rocks of various colors, delightful blossoming hollows, charming quiet dales, in the distance snowy peaks half concealed by a torn veil of mist, and then the sea appeared through the cleft of a distant rock like a moist sapphire-colored eye—but yet something was missing. There was no town which spread itself out in a valley, no tower which peeped forth behind the forests, no cottage which nestled against quiet hill-sides, no sign of a peasant, a shepherd or a forester which animated the landscape, nowhere could be seen a garden or a plot of land, nor any sign whatever of human life—amid a deep and holy calm nature alone held sway here in her utter beauty and magnificence.
On the western side of the flat mountain-ridge upon which we had ensconced ourselves, the mountain descended by a suddeh and almost vertical precipice into a deep inaccessible hollow filled with wild forest; our view in this direction was shut off by a rather beautiful young ash-tree, growing above the edge of the abyss isolated in the picturesque embrace of rich vine-tendrils, like a slender youth in the arms of a passionate girl.
Having feasted our gaze, we saw to it that our appetites were also satisfied. For a considerable while jaws were busy upon various wings, thigh-bones and similar matters, and finally the inevitable samovar again glittered in the midst of the party.
At first, as was natural, conversation centred around the decayed Circassian village and the Circassians generally, and in the course of this the curious circumstance was remarked upon by various persons that we were able to sit here so peacefully and undisturbedly gossiping in the midst of a region where only a short time previously the valiant nation of mountaneers dwell untroubled in their stone retreats, devoted with a fanatical love to Islam and their wild liberty. But suddenly Uljana, who during this conversation had fixed her dreamy eyes in silence upon the grass, turned to the surgeon with the bashful question: “But what else happened to the sick man in the Czech settlement, Pavel Semenovitch?”
“Of course, of course—first of all you must finish your rather lengthy definition of fame,” added Suslikov facetiously, and the others also joined him in this request.
And Tabunov continued his narrative thus:
“First of all you perhaps want to know whether the poetical accomplishments of my patient were real or only a sick man’s fancy. Don’t be afraid, Aglaja, I am not going to launch forth into a literary and critical analysis, for which I feel neither desire nor qualification. I will merely tell you this: On the evening of the same day that I returned from Metodějovka, I was lying tired out in bed, and with a yawn I took up a book to read a few pages, according to my custom, before I went to sleep. At that moment my glance fell upon Jan’s large bundle of poems, which upon my return from the Czech village I had laid upon the table by the bed. Almost without thinking, I picked it up instead of a book. I expected, I must confess, merely something of a pathological interest.
I read the first lines listlessly, I yawned, and it was with difficulty that I could keep my eyes open, but—when the first gleam of morning stole into the room, it found me by the half-extinguished lamp, devouring the last verses of the poem with my eyes excitedly enkindled. I was almost frightened when, looking up from the manuscript which I had finished reading, I saw through the window opposite the green of the mountain slopes already blended with the gold of a spring morning. It was long since such thing had happened to me—the last time was in my youth when I had spent a whole night in ecstasy over Byron’s “Cain.”
I do not wish to suggest a comparison of the unfortunate Jan with the great Englishman. Altogether, I refrain from giving an opinion as to the literary value of his work. I am merely describing the effect that this poem had upon me. After a few stanzas I felt myself suddenly in the grip of something like the breath of the Lord, that vehement whirlwind of God, by which the prophets of old were borne through the air into distant places. Your smile, Aglaja, does not make the slightest difference; you may have already observed that I am matter-of-fact person—perhaps more so than you would like to appear—and that I am not given to exaggerating. But I tell you that I soared throught that night in the twinkling of an eye, rising in unearthly regions upon the mighty wing of poetry, which long after I had returned to earth, dimmed my thoughts with a strange rapture. For a considerable while after I had finished reading this poem, I felt like a man who gradually gropes his way back to reality from the embrace of a beautiful dream.
And how I roved about everywhere that night. I soared through the world, the past and the present, all the huge expanse which Jan’s poetry gauged life-size with its mighty rainbow-colored pinions. It was clear that he had desired to express all his poetical outlook on the world in this work, that he had desired to breathe into it, and had indeed breathed into it, his whole soul. Nature, all human relationships, all struggles and yearnings of mankind were exhibited here in a completely new and magical illumination, such as only spirits of genius can spread upon their earthly paths. And like Dante’s Beatrice, there uprose before him upon this poetical pilgrimage that graceful phantom that he had told me about. The poem ended here in the Causasus whose natural beauties were reflected in it with colors of rare splendor, as in the mirror of a magic lake—on the peak of a lofty mountain where the poet with a magnificent harangue took his farewell from life and the world, and his mysterious ideal placed a wreath of immortality upon his brow. In my judgment his work was truly worthy of undying fame.”
“And what happened to this poem? Where is it?” I exclaimed involuntarily, when the surgeon, after speaking these words, was silent for a while.
“In a moment, you shall hear in a moment” replied Tabunov quietly. “On my second visit to the sick man I saw that his condition was visibly becoming worse. I looked at his haggard, livid face with pity, and my voice trembled with sorrowful emotion as I bestoved sincerely enthusiastic praise upon his poetical work. He listened to it calmly without any signs of joy, as if he had not expected any other judgment. Then, taking back the manuscript from my hand, he said: “I rely upon your promise. You know where to find this which will be the only thing I leave behind me. But at the same time I beg of you imploringly to fulfil one more final wish. You know the decayed Circassian village not far from here in the mountains?”
I assented.
“Above this village” continued the sick man in a feeble voice, “on the flat peak of the mountain, is a spot where I have spent the most beautiful moment of my life. It used to be my favorite haunt as long as I could still leave the house. Above the edge of the abyss stands a solitary young ash-tree, with vine-tendrils trailing over it; in its shadow I have sat for hours at a time, with a notebook in my lap and a pencil in my hand . . . dreaming and writing. I used to be so unspeakably happy in that beautiful solitude where around me, as far as my eye could reach, I saw nothing but magnificent mountains, and above me the radiant vault of heaven. I was there alone with my poetry. Everything round about was silent with a holy stillness, and she alone whispered to me her wondrous sayings. And the light mist, fluttering afar above the forest, would gradually take on the form of a maiden, the likeness of my beauteous unknown, and come aquiver towards me in the air like a white cloud with open embrace. Yearningly I stretched out my hands towards her, plunging my whole soul in the mysterious sapphire depths of her eyes. She nestled tremblingly in my embrace, and then I closed my eyes with inexpressible joy, my head sank back upon the trunk of the ash-tree, and when a breeze passed through its foliage, I used to think that the beautiful vision, bending down gently above me, was whispering words of unearthly grace. How often have I desired in such a moment to rest thus for ever. Well, if I succumb to this illness, it is there that I wish to be buried. My parents would perhaps regard this wish as the expression of a morbid craving, and would bury me in spite of it amid the narrow walls of a graveyeard. So please see to it yourself that my last wish is fulfilled. Do you promise me this?”
I promised and I kept my promise. The unhappy Jan does actually rest yonder in front of us, in the shadows of this ash-tree. Above his grave was also raised a simple wooden cross, but the rank vine-tendril soon trailed all over it with their dense leafage. When I was here the last time, I found two fresh wreaths of wild flowers on top of the cross—no doubt they had been gathered shortly before by Jan’s mother and the beautiful girl whose hopeless love for the sick poet I think I mentioned on our way to the lonely grave. Now this cross is completely hidden by vine leaves.”
The surgeon made a short pause. The rest of us were also silent as we gazed thoughtfully at the ash-tree. It was clear that all were moved at having been told that we were standing so near to the grave of the frenziedly inspired poet who had faded in the flower of his youth. Even Aglaja Andrejevna’s lips lost their usual contemptuous smile. Tears glistened in Uljana’s beautiful blue eyes. It semed to me then that for a moment in the shadow of the ash-tree beneath the drooping garland of emerald vine-leaves, I caught a glimpse of the figure of a young man with black hair, seated with his pale face bent forward, his eye dreamily staring into the distance.
“When I visited my young patient in Metodějovka for the third time” continued Tabunov, “I found him in the middle of the room on a low trestle formed from planks and chairs, clad in a simple shroud, with his hands crossed upon his breast. He was entirely covered with fiery azaleas and gaudy pictures of saints. On the ground beside him, with her head at the feet of the corpse, knelt the girl who had stopped me in the forest the first time I was returning from the sick man. His father stood by the window in mournful lethargy, with his eyes duly fixed upon the ground: his mother was sobbing and wringing her hands in a circle of neighbors who were speaking words of comfort to her. My entry into the room aroused loud lamentation. Silently I advanced towards the corpse and glanced for a moment into his face.
“It had not changed much, except that the closed eyes made its gauntness and shadowiness even more conspicuous. And what is the face of a corpse else than the mere shadow of a beloved person who is departing; they have already crossed the threshold of the house, for a moment their shadow still flickers before us on the surface of the door or upon the opposite wall, and then vanishes—for ever. My gaze wandered from the dead man to the village girl who now stood beside him, hiding her eyes and face in the palms of her beautiful soft hands; from beneath them and alon the side of them, bright tears were flowing and glistened also upon her fresh lips like the morning dew upon a ripe cherry. What a contrast was this lovely creature brimming over with life, with her wealth of fair hair, in her bright colored dress and close red bodice, beneath which her lovely, full breast surged with heavy sighs,—what a contrast to the dead faded object beside her.
I gazed afresh into the face of the corpse, and I now perceived that his lips were half opened, and that a calm and happy smile rested upon them. This was, as it were, a rigid expression of the bliss which the last moment of his life had bestowed upon him. He had probably died according to his desire. The vision which haunted him, the airy blue-eyed beloved, had nestled into his arms, his head had sunk back into the pillows as if upon the trunk of the trusty ash-tree, his eyes were closed, and above the dying man was wafted a sweet whisper of love and fame, of immortality in the poem which he had left behind him upon this earth. Suddenly I remembered the promise I had made to the sick man.
Having made sure that Jan was dead, I advanced to the couch on which he had lain during his illness. It contained neither a feather bolster nor a straw mattress,—it was completely empty. I asked his parents whether they had not found any papers in it. His grief-stricken father glanced questioningly at his sobbing wife, but she sorrowfully shook her head.
At that moment the girl came up to me with downcast and tearful eyes, and said simply: “Are you speaking about the writings which Jan composed, and hid under the pillow in his bed?”
“Yes, it is of tme I am speaking.”
“I took them away” the girl told me in enbarrassment. “It happened in this way. His mother accepted my offer to watch by the sick man with her. It was yesterday evening. Jan was asleep. I remembered what you said about the great harm that writing did him, and for safety’s sake I took away ink, pen and paper from the table beside his bed. After that we prayed quietly, sitting in this corner. A candle was burning behind the shade by his bed, his mother was sleeping, and through the gap between the wall and the shade I watched the sick man’s bed upon which the light was shining clearly. He was sleeping quietly. Unexpectedly I was also overcome hy drowsiness. When I woke up again. I saw that Jan was awake. He had raised himself up a little in bed, he had a thick pile of paper on his lap and was writing slowly with a pencil, which I had forgotten on the table. I wanted to tell him to leave off, but at that moment he stopped writing, his head sank back on to the pillow, he dropped the pencil which fell on the edge of the bed, his eyes closed and his deep sigh passed through the room. Driven by fear. I went quietly up to the bed,—he had died.”
There was renewed lamentation which I interrupted with the eager question: “And what about the papers?”
“Ah, the papers” replied the girl, “they threw them off the dead man on to the ground. I picked them up later and laid them on the table. Then I remembered that these papers were the chief reason why he had died before his time, and in my anger I nearly tore them up and threw them out of the window. But then the thought came to me that this was Jan’s writing,—that it contained his thoughts, I should have liked to read them, and perhaps keep them for a remembrance. I knew that Jan’s father had often called his writing a foolish pastime, and had threatened his son that he would burn these papers if he caught him at them again. So as I came away, I tok the papers with me.”
“And you have them at home?” I asked.
“Yes,” declared the girl, and with that she stared at me with astonishment in her clear brown eyes, upon whose lashes tiny tears were glistening. “But is there anything important in these papers?”
I merly gave a slight nod, and after taking my leave of Jan’s parents, I asked the girl to go with me and bring me the papers. How differrent was the view which greeted me outside, when I had left the close room, the scene of death and sorrow. The lovely smile of the spring sun was shinging on the cottages, on the vine-leaves and the hopes which trailed around them, in countless flowers and upon the rich green tree-tops of the forest close by, in front of which, upon the fresh grass of a meadow under a blossoming pear-tree, a troop of children was romping around a merrily blazing little fire.
I went with the girl to a low-roofed hut. On the threshold a wrinkled old woman was warming herself in the sun; she had a crutch under her arm and in her hand a rosary, whose pimpernel beads her shrunken fingers were slowly counting out. “I am praying for neighbour’s Jenik” she mumbled with her toothless lips, “God grant that he may enter into heaven”. The girl slipped, passed her into the cottage and remained there for a considerable time. She returned in manifest alarm, and asked the old woman: “Do you know, what has become of those papers that I put on the box?”—“How should I know” muttered the old woman. “I expect those young imps of ours,—they are always getting up to some mischief or other,—I think they took some papers out of the room,—they are over there, hm, hm,” and with a cough she lifted her crutch and pointed to the group of children under the pear-tree.
I hurried there with the girl, and in the middle of the frolicking band of children I saw upon a small, half burnt-out fire a smouldering pile of papers; some of them had just finished burning and were still writhing and softly wheezing as if in pain. The children were gloating over the death struggles and sighs of the unhappy poem, and were delighted by the gambols of the playful sparks upon the blackening fibres. Of course, they had not the slightest notion that each one of these sparks meant that a great and beautiful thought was being utterly destroyed, that with them, the last traces of an extraordinary and lofty spirit were vanishing for ever from te surface of the earth.”
“So it is all burnt up?” I exclaimed almost simultaneously with Uljana.
“Practically all. Only a single sheet of paper was saved from the children’s auto-da-fé. It lay beside the fire with its edges only slightly charred. It was the epilogue, the lines of which had ben completed in pencil, and with them the poet had accomplished his life’s work,—now rendered useless,—almost in the very moment of death. I have kept this sheet in my pocket-book. Perhaps after you return home you could publish at least these few verses in some native periodical. In my opinion they are beautiful, extremely beautiful, and yet they form only a very insignificant and paltry fragment of the splendid magical palace,, through the radiant passages of which I walked alone that night, and which collapsed into nothing behind me as if at the touch of an evil wizard. At the most they can arouse profound regret at the loss of an extraordinary—”
Two shots in quick succession interrupted his words. Alarmed and also inquisitive, the party scrambled to the slope of the mountain from which they had resounded. I also joined in. I soon observed that something very ordinary had happened. As time was hanging heavily on their hands, our Cossacks had been doing some hunting and they had shot an animal. So I returned to our camping-place. But there my steps were arrested by the following brief incident which I saw through a gap in the thicket which separated me from our deserted camp with the lonely ash-tree in the background. It was not entirely deserted. Uljana, whose agitation and moodiness I had noticed the whole time that the surgeon was speaking, had remained there. Perhaps in her deep thoughts she had overheard even the two shots. She was sitting there with her head buried in her hands. Now she suddenly arose, looked hastily around her, and perceiving nobody upon the camping-place, she gave a single leap up to the young ash-tree, clasped her hands around its slender trunk, and half concealed by the vine-tendrils trailing about it, she pressed her lips upon the grey bark. She remained for a little while in this posture. And just at that moment the top of the ash-tree quivered in the light breeze, its feathery, transparent foliage began gently to sway and rustle.
What was the meaning of this incident? Was it one of those mysterious outbursts of unfathomed emotion, which suddenly with the vehemence of a whirlwind set a young soul astir, and then suddenly disappear without after-effects? Or was Uljana the incarnation of that beautiful vision, for which the unhappy youth had vainly sighed throughout his life and with whose bodily image he would only meet beyond the grave? And truly, the ash-tree quivered as strangely as if Jan himself were actually standing there in that green guise upon his grave, and as if he had felt the inexpressible bliss of that embrace and of the glowing kiss which penetrated thru the cold bark into his heart.
The party reutrned. Uljana was already sitting quietly in her place again.
“Our good fellows have been passing their time in a more useful way,” said old Ivan Ivanovitch jovially, smoothing his white mustache, “they have bagged a first-rate roebuck.”
This hunting episode was discussed in a jocular manner. But I had no thoughts except for Jan’s epilogue.
“Please show me the page that you saved from my fellow-countryman’s poem”, I asked Tabunov.
“Ah yes, here it is.” And the surgeon took a charred and yellow sheet of paper out of his pocket-book.
“And read us these verses aloud, please,—I should so much like to hear what a Czech poem sounds like,” exclaimed Anna Kirilovna.
“Yes, recite it to us with the appropriate feeling,—stand over there in the shadow of the ash-tree by the poet’s grave, it will be very touching”, remarked Aglaja Andrejevna, and it was difficult to decide whether these words were ironical or the expression of a momentary sentimental mood.
Involuntarily I stepped up to the ash-tree, the top of which was now trembling from time to time in the wind. Holding the paper in my hand, I gave another glance at Uljana,—her enchanting blue eyes, glistening with tears, were resting fixedly upon my lips.
“Mind your hat!” Suslikov admonished me at this moment, and while I clutched at my hat with one hand, a violent puff of wind suddenly dragged the paper out of the other, and in a twinkling carried it away over the abyss.
“Ah!” exclaimed everybody with one accord, and they all scrambled to the edge of the chasm.
Tabunov stretched his hand out towards the paper, which was gently fluttering through the air above the abyss and falling into an inaccessible ravine in the wild depths of the forest: he turned his face to us with a bitter smile and said: “See friends,—that is fame!”