Though best known as a poet and a writer of novels of epic character, Svatopluk Cech was also among the most prominent of Czechoslovakia’s modern short story writers.
He was a man who had travelled extensively, and had wide literary and journalistic training. His writing is characterized by keenness of observation, a kindly philosophy, and a mild, chuckling humor. He had a deep national feeling, and one of his books, “The Blacksmith of Lesetin,” was confiscated three times by the Austrian government. He died in 1918 at the age of sixty-two.
IN the roster of legal cases tried by Dr. X, the rural district is very poorly represented. But to make up for the lack of many cases, there is one which presents a picture of pastoral life with all its characteristics.
I am of the opinion that every attorney’s office in the city has at least one such typical rural figure which refreshes now and then with its zephyrs of old-fashioned simplicity the heavy air poisoned by the newfangled maladies of society.
Such cases are for the lawyer himself, no doubt, a necessary mental diversion. He has disposed of a long line of hardened, distrustful, city clients who, like the possessed animal in Goethe’s simile, whirl about perpetually in the empty circle of their own dryasdust affairs. His head is full of figures, merchandise, drafts, pensions, mortgages and similar things. Just then the door opens again and with a respectful “May God grant you good afternoon!” there enters a bulky figure squeezing a shaggy cap between his hands in great embarrassment.
The face of the lawyer brightens.
“A right good welcome to you, my good man! Sit down, sit down! Well, have you had rain out your way, too? And what are you bringing us?”
And the “good man” tells his story in his simple “home grown” manner, interspersing his remarks with pithy phrases and many gestures. The lawyer smiles. He is amused by the history of the dispute which has as its stage a village green in the center of thatched roofs covered with moss and a mass of rustling golden sheaves, a wide, free region which he probably does not long for in his comfortable city room, but to which at times he likes to fly in fancy, leaving behind him the piles of dusty documents and law books. He is amused by his country client’s naive confidence in his all powerfulness and utterly diabolical shrewdness. Finally, there is a pleasant fascination in the silent readiness with which a rustic of that sort before each interview draws out, of his own accord, an advance payment from some tattered little book or
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