CHAPTER III.
But the awakening came.
On a certain day, when the boat brought water and a supply of provisions, Skavinski came down an hour later from the tower, and saw that besides the usual cargo there was an additional package. On the outside of this package were postage stamps of the United States, and the address: “Skavinski, Esq.,” written on coarse canvas.
The old man, with aroused curiosity, cut the canvas, and saw books; he took one in his hand, looked at it, and put it back; thereupon his hands began to tremble greatly. He covered his eyes as if he did not believe them; it seemed to him as if he were dreaming. The book was Polish, — what did that mean? Who could have sent the book? Clearly, it did not occur to him at the first moment that in the beginning of his light-house career he had read in the Herald, borrowed from the consul, of the formation of a Polish society in New York, and had sent at once to that society half his month’s salary, for which he had, moreover, no use on the tower. The society had sent him the books with thanks. The books came in the natural way; but at the first moment the old man could not seize those thoughts. Polish books in Aspinwall, on his tower, amid his solitude, — that was for him something uncommon, a certain breath from past times, a kind of miracle. Now it seemed to him, as to those sailors in the night, that something was calling him by name with a voice greatly beloved and nearly forgotten. He sat for a while with closed eyes, and was almost certain that, when he opened them, the dream would be gone.
The package, cut open, lay before him, shone upon clearly by the afternoon sun, and on it was an open book. When the old man stretched his hand toward it again, he heard in the stillness the beating of his own heart. He looked; it was poetry. On the outside stood printed in great letters the title, underneath the name of the author. The name was not strange to Skavinski; he saw that it belonged to the great poet, [Footnote: Mickiewicz (pronounced Mitskyevich), the greatest poet of Poland.] whose productions he had read in 1830 in Paris. Afterward, when campaigning in Algiers and Spain, he had heard from his countrymen of the growing fame of the great seer; but he was so accustomed to the musket at that time that he took no book in hand. In 1849 he went to America, and in the adventurous life which he led he hardly ever met a Pole, and never a Polish book. With the greater eagerness, therefore, and with a livelier beating of the heart, did he turn to the title-page. It seemed to him then that on his lonely rock some solemnity is about to take place. Indeed it was a moment of great calm and silence. The clocks of Aspinwall were striking five in the afternoon. Not a cloud darkened the clear sky; only a few sea-mews were sailing through the air. The ocean was as if cradled to sleep. The waves on the shore stammered quietly, spreading softly on the sand. In the distance the white houses of Aspinwall, and the wonderful groups of palm, were smiling. In truth, there was something there solemn, calm, and full of dignity. Suddenly, in the midst of that calm of Nature, was heard the trembling voice of the old man, who read aloud as if to understand himself better:
“Thou art like health, O my birth-land Litva!
[Footnote: Lithuania.]
How much we should prize thee he only can know who has lost thee.
Thy beauty in perfect adornment this day
I see and describe, because I am yearning for thee.”
His voice failed Skavinski. The letters began to dance before his eyes; something broke in his breast, and went like a wave from his heart higher and higher, choking his voice and pressing his throat. A moment more he controlled himself, and read further:
“O Holy Lady, who guardest bright Chenstohova,
Who shinest in Ostrobrama and preservest
The castle town Novgrodek with its trusty people,
As Thou didst give me back to health in childhood,
When by my weeping mother placed beneath Thy care
I raised my lifeless eyelids upward,
And straightway walked unto Thy holy threshold,
To thank God for the life restored me, —
So by a wonder now restore us to the bosom of our birthplace.”
The swollen wave broke through the restraint of his will. The old man sobbed, and threw himself on the ground; his milk-white hair was mingled with the sand of the sea. Forty years had passed since he had seen his country, and God knows how many since he heard his native speech; and now that speech had come to him itself, — it had sailed to him over the ocean, and found him in solitude on another hemisphere, — it so loved, so dear, so beautiful! In the sobbing which shook him there was no pain, — only a suddenly aroused immense love, in the presence of which other things are as nothing. With that great weeping he had simply implored forgiveness of that beloved one, set aside because he had grown so old, had become so accustomed to his solitary rock, and had so forgotten it that in him even longing had begun to disappear. But now it returned as if by a miracle; therefore the heart leaped in him.
Moments vanished one after another; he lay there continually. The mews flew over the light-house, crying as if alarmed for their old friend. The hour in which he fed them with the remnants of his food had come; therefore, some of them flew down from the light-house to him; then more and more came, and began to pick and to shake their wings over his head. The sound of the wings roused him. He had wept his fill, and had now a certain calm and brightness; but his eyes were as if inspired. He gave unwittingly all his provisions to the birds, which rushed at him with an uproar, and he himself took the book again. The sun had gone already behind the gardens and the forest of Panama, and was going slowly beyond the isthmus to the other ocean; but the Atlantic was full of light yet; in the open air there was still perfect vision; therefore, he read further:
“Now bear my longing soul to those forest slopes, to those green meadows.”
At last the dusk obliterates the letters on the white paper, — the dusk short as a twinkle. The old man rested his head on the rock, and closed his eyes. Then “She who defends bright Chenstohova” took his soul, and transported it to “those fields colored by various grain.” On the sky were burning yet those long stripes, red and golden, and on those brightnesses he was flying to beloved regions. The pine-woods were sounding in his ears; the streams of his native place were murmuring. He saw everything as it was; everything asked him, “Dost remember?” He remembers! he sees broad fields; between the fields, woods and villages. It is night now. At this hour his lantern usually illuminates the darkness of the sea; but now he is in his native village. His old head has dropped on his breast, and he is dreaming. Pictures are passing before his eyes quickly, and a little disorderly. He does not see the house in which he was born, for war had destroyed it; he does not see his father and mother, for they died when he was a child; but still the village is as if he had left it yesterday, — the line of cottages with lights in the windows, the mound, the mill, the two ponds opposite each other, and thundering all night with a chorus of frogs. Once he had been on guard in that village all night; now that past stood before him at once in a series of views. He is an Ulan again, and he stands there on guard; at a distance is the public-house; he looks with swimming eyes. There is thundering and singing and shouting amid the silence of the night with voices of fiddles and bass-viols “U-ha! U-ha!” Then the Ulans knock out fire with their horseshoes, and it is wearisome for him there on his horse. The hours drag on slowly; at last the lights are quenched; now as far as the eye reaches there is mist, and mist impenetrable; now the fog rises, evidently from the fields, and embraces the whole world with a whitish cloud. You would say, a complete ocean. But that is fields; soon the land-rail will be heard in the darkness, and the bitterns will call from the reeds. The night is calm and cool, — in truth, a Polish night! In the distance the pine-wood is sounding without wind, like the roll of the sea. Soon dawn will whiten the East. In fact, the cocks are beginning to crow behind the hedges. One answers to another from cottage to cottage; the storks are screaming somewhere on high. The Ulan feels well and bright. Some one had spoken of a battle to-morrow. He
i! that will go on, like all the others, with shouting, with fluttering of flaglets. The young blood is playing like a trumpet, though the night cools it. But it is dawning. Already night is growing pale; out of the shadows come forests, the thicket, a row of cottages, the mill, the poplars. The well is squeaking like a metal banner on a tower. What a beloved land, beautiful in the rosy gleams of the morning! Oh, the one land, the one land!
Quiet! the watchful picket hears that some one is approaching. Of course, they are coming to relieve the guard.
Suddenly some voice is heard above Skavinski, —
“Here, old man! Get up! What’s the matter?”
The old man opens his eyes, and looks with wonder at the person standing before him. The remnants of the dream-visions struggle in his head with reality. At last the visions pale and vanish. Before him stands Johnson, the harbor guide.
“What’s this?” asked Johnson; “are you sick?”
“No.”
“You didn’t light the lantern. You must leave your place. A vessel from St. Geromo was wrecked on the bar. It is lucky that no one was drowned, or you would go to trial. Get into the boat with me; you’ll hear the rest at the Consulate.”
The old man grew pale; in fact he had not lighted the lantern that night.
A few days later, Skavinski was seen on the deck of a steamer, which was going from Aspinwall to New York. The poor man had lost his place. There opened before him new roads of wandering; the wind had torn that leaf away again to whirl it over lands and seas, to sport with it till satisfied. The old man had failed greatly during those few days, and was bent over; only his eyes were gleaming. On his new road of life he held at his breast his book, which from time to time he pressed with his hand as if in fear that that too might go from him.
FROM THE DIARY OF A TUTOR IN POZNAN.
THE lamp, though shaded, roused me, and more than once I saw Mihas still working at two or three o’clock in the morning. His small, fragile figure, dressed only in sleeping clothes, was bent over a book; and in the stillness of the night his drowsy and wearied voice repeated Latin and Greek conjugations mechanically, and in that humdrum voice with which people at church respond to a litany. When I called him to go to bed the boy would answer: “I don’t know my lessons yet, Pan Vavrykevich.” I worked out his lessons however from four till eight, and then from nine till twelve o’clock, and did not go to bed myself till I was convinced that he had learned everything; but in truth all this was too much for the boy. When he had finished the last lesson he had forgotten the first; the conjugations of Greek, Latin, German, and the names of various districts brought his poor head into such confusion that he could not sleep. He crept out from under the quilt then, lighted his lamp, and sat down at the table. When I reproved him, he begged me to let him stay, and he shed tears. I grew so accustomed to those night sittings, to the light of the lamp and to the mumbling of conjugations, that when they were absent I myself could not sleep. Perhaps it was not right for me to permit the child to torture himself beyond his strength; but what was I to do? He had to learn his lessons daily even in some fashion, or he would be expelled from school; and God alone knows what a blow that would have been for Pani Marya, who, left with two orphans after the death of her husband, placed all her hopes on Mihas. The position was wellnigh without escape, for I saw that excessive mental effort was undermining the health of the boy, and might endanger his life. It was needful at the least to strengthen him physically, train him in gymnastics, make him walk a good deal, or ride on horseback; but there was no time for this. The child had so much to do, so much to learn by rote, so much to write every day, that on my conscience I say that there was no time. Every moment required for the recreation, health, and life of the boy was taken by Latin, Greek, and German.
In the morning, when I put his books into the satchel and saw his lean shoulders bending under the weight of those great volumes, my heart simply ached. At times I asked kindness and forbearance for him; but the German professors merely answered that I was spoiling and petting the child, that evidently Mihas was not working enough, and that he would cry for any cause. I am weak-breasted myself, solitary, and sensitive; hence these reproaches poisoned more than one moment for me. I knew best whether Mihas was working enough. He was a child of medium gifts, but so persevering, and, with all his mildness, gifted with such strength of character as I have never chanced to meet in another boy. Poor Mihas was attached to his mother passionately, blindly; and since people told him that she was very unhappy, and sickly, that, if in addition to other things, he would learn badly it might kill her, the boy trembled at the thought of this, and sat whole nights over his books, only to escape mortifying his mother. He burst into tears when he received a bad mark; but it did not come to the head of any one to inquire why he cried, or to what terrible responsibility he felt himself bound at such moments. Indeed, what did any one care? I was not spoiling him, nor petting him; only I knew him better than others. That I tried to comfort instead of scolding him for failures was my affair. I have toiled myself in life no little; I have suffered hunger and sorrow enough; I have not been happy; I shall not be happy, and — devils take it! — I do not even grit my teeth when I think of this. I do not believe that life is worth living; but perhaps for that very reason I have true sympathy for every misfortune.
At Mihas’s age, when I ran after pigeons on the streets, or played wagtails under the town-hall, I had my hours of health and joyousness at least. A cough did not torment me. When some one flogged me I cried during the flogging; but I was as free as a bird and cared for nothing. Mihas had not even that. If life had put him on the anvil and beaten him with its hammer, he would have gained this much, — that as a boy he would have laughed heartily at that which amuses children; he would have played tricks, and tired himself in the open air, in the sunlight. But I had not before me such a union of labor with childishness. On the contrary, I saw a little boy going to school and coming home, gloomy, bent, straining under the weight of books, with wrinkles in the corners of his eyes, ever holding back, as it were, an outburst of weeping; therefore, I sympathized with him, and wished to be a refuge for him.
I am a tutor, though a private one, and I know not what I should do in the world were I to lose faith in the value of knowledge and the benefit which flows from it. But I think that study should not be the tragedy of our early years; that Latin cannot take the place of air and health; and that a good or bad accent should not decide the fate and life of children.
I think, too, that the task of instruction is better accomplished when a boy feels a hand leading him kindly, and not a foot, pressing his breast and trampling everything which they teach him at home to love and revere. I am such an obscurant that I shall be sure not to change my opinion in this respect, for I become confirmed in it more and more when I remember my Mihas, whom I loved so sincerely. I taught him six years, first as a governor, and, when he entered the second class, as a tutor. I had time therefore to grow attached to him. Besides, why should I hide from myself that he was dear to me because he was the son of a being dear to me above all others. She has never known this, and never will. I remember that I am — well, Pan Vavrykevich, a private tutor, and a sickly man in addition; she the daughter of a rich, noble house, a lady to whom I dared not raise my eyes. But since a lone heart, dashed about by life as a mussel is dashed by the waves, must attach itself at last to something, my heart grew to her. How can I help it? And besides, how does that harm her? I do not deprive her of light, any more than I do the sun which warms my weak breast.
Complete Works of Henryk Sienkiewicz Page 656