The smoke began evidently to bite the old gentleman’s eyes again.
At that same moment beer and hot meat were brought in. The old gentleman commanded them to begin eating at once, and they answered that they dared -not do that in his presence; he told them that they were fools. But, in spite of his temper, he seemed an angel from heaven to them.
When they had eaten, clearly that delighted him much; he asked them to tell how they had come to America, and through what they had passed. So Vavron told him all, withheld nothing, just as he would confess to a priest. The old gentleman was angry, he scolded; and when it came to telling how Vavron wanted to drown his own daughter, he cried, —
“I would have flayed thee!”
Then he said to Marysia, —
“Come here, girl!”
When she went up to him, he took her head between his hands and kissed her on the forehead; then he thought a while, and said, —
“You have passed through misery. But this is a good country; only a man must know how to manage.”
Vavron stared at him: this worthy wise gentleman called America a good country!
“It is true, stupid fellow,” said he, observing Vavron’s astonishment, “a good country! When I came here, I had nothing; now I have a morsel of bread. For you peasants, though, land-tilling is the work, not wandering about the world. When you go away from home, who will remain over there? You are of no use in this country; but to come here is easy, to go back is difficult.”
He was silent a time, then added, as if to himself, —
“I am here forty and some years, and I have forgotten the country over there. But at times homesickness seizes me. William must go there; let him see how his fathers lived. This is my son,” said he, pointing to the boy. “William, thou wilt bring me a handful of earth from home to put under my head in the coffin.”
“Yes, father,” answered the boy, in English.
“And for my breast, William, and for my breast!”
“Yes, father.”
The smoke now affected the old gentleman’s eyes so terribly that his eyeballs were as if covered with glass. Then he was angry and, pointing to the boy, said, —
“This fellow understands Polish, but he likes English better. It has to be so here. What falls here is lost for the old thresholds. Go, William, tell thy sister that we shall have guests for dinner and for the night.”
The boy rushed away quickly. The old gentleman fell to thinking, and was silent a long time; then he said, as if to himself, —
“Even send them home, the cost would be great, and, besides, what would they return to? They have sold what they had; they would go to begging. In service God knows what would happen to the girl. Since they are here, they must try to find work. Send them to some colony; the girl will marry after a while. She and her husband will save something; if they want to go home, they will take the old man. Hast heard of our colonies in this country?” said he then to Vavron.
“I have not heard, great, mighty lord.”
“Oh, people! how they start here! By the dear God You will not be lost. In Chicago there are twenty thousand like thee, in Milwaukee as many, in Detroit a good number, in Buffalo many. They work in factories; but for a peasant, farming is better. We might send thee to Radomia, to Illinois, — hm! land is dear there. They are founding a new Poznan on the prairies of Nebraska; but that is far away. The railroad fare is costly. There is the Panna Maria (Virgin Mary) colony in Texas; that is far away also. Best of all is to go to Borovina, especially since I can get free tickets, and what I give thee in hand save for housekeeping.”
He thought a while still more deeply.
“Listen, old man,” said he on a sudden. “They are founding a new colony in Borovina in Arkansas. That is a nice country and warm, and the land is almost vacant. There thou wilt get a hundred and sixty acres from the Government for nothing, and from the railroad for a small price — dost understand? To begin housekeeping, I will give money, and I will give thee tickets, for I can do so. Ye will go to Little Rock; from that place thou must go in a wagon. Thou wilt find others there who will go with thee. Besides, I will give thee letters. I wish to help thee, for I am thy brother; but I care more a hundred times for thy daughter than for thee. Dost understand? Thank God who sent you both to me!”
Here his voice became perfectly mild.
“Listen, child,” said he to Marysia, “here is my card; keep it sacredly. Whenever trouble presses thee, shouldst thou be alone in the world and without assistance, find me. Thou art a poor child and good. If I die, William will care for thee. Do not lose the card. Come with me now.”
On the road he bought linen for them and clothing: then he took them to his house and entertained them. That was a house filled with kind people, for William and Jennie occupied themselves with both as if they had been relatives. William treated Marysia as if she had been some “lady;” this embarrassed her terribly. In the evening a number of young girls, nicely dressed and kind, with bangs on their foreheads, visited Panna Jennie. These took Marysia among them, wondered that she was so pale, and so pretty, that she had such bright hair, that she bent to their feet and kissed their hands, — at this they laughed greatly.
The old gentleman went among the young people, shook his white head, muttered, was angry at times, spoke now in English, now in Polish, spoke with Marysia and Vavron of his and their distant native places, recalled, forgot, and from time to time the smoke of the cigar affected his eyes evidently, for he rubbed them often in secret.
When all separated to sleep, Marysia could not restrain her tears, seeing that Panna Jennie prepared the bed for her with her own hands. Oh, how kind these people were! But what wonder, — the old gentleman was also from Poznan!
On the third day Vavron and Marysia were on the way to Little Rock. The old man had a hundred dollars in his pocket, and had forgotten his misery altogether. Marysia felt above her the visible hand of God, and believed that that hand would not let her perish; that as it had brought her out of misfortune, it would bring Yasko also to America, and watch over both, and would let them even return to Lipintse.
Meanwhile cities and farms shot past the car-windows. That was different entirely from New York. There were fields and pine woods in the distance, and cottages and trees growing around them; a fleece of every kind of grain was green in great streaks on the earth, exactly as in Poland. At sight of this Vavron’s breast swelled so that he had the wish to shout, “Hei, ye pine woods, ye green fields!” Herds of cows and flocks of sheep were pasturing on meadows; on the edges of forests men with axes were visible. The train flew farther and farther. Gradually the country became less populated. The farms vanished, and the country opened out into a wide and unoccupied prairie. The wind bent waves of grass on it, and it glittered with flowers. In places there wound, in the form of a golden ribbon, roads covered with yellow blossoms, upon which no wagon had ever passed. Lofty grass plots, mulleins, and thistles nodded their heads as if greeting the traveller. Eagles floated on broad wings over the prairie and surveyed the grass carefully. The train tore on, as if wishing to fly to that place where those prairie expanses are lost to the vision and blend with the sky. From the car-window were seen whole flocks of rabbits and prairie dogs. At times the horned head of a deer appeared above the grass. Nowhere were church spires, or towns, or villages, or a house, — nothing save stations, and between stations and behind them no living soul.
Vavron looked at all this, tortured his brain, but could not understand how so much “goodness,” as he called land, should lie idle.
Day and night passed. One morning they entered forests in which the trees were entwined with plants as thick as the arm of a man, which made the forest so dense that one would have to cut with an axe through it, as through a wall. Unknown birds were singing in these green densities. Once it seemed to Vavron and Marysia that amid these labyrinths they saw certain horsemen with feathers on their heads, and faces as red as polished brass. Seeing those fores
ts, and unoccupied prairies, and empty pine woods, all these unknown wonders and strange people, the old man could not restrain himself at last, and said, —
“Marysia?”
“What, father?”
“Dost see?”
“I see.”
“And dost wonder?”
“I wonder.”
They passed a river now three times wider than the Varta, and late that night they arrived at Little Rock.
From there they had to inquire for the road to Borovina. We will leave them here for the moment. The second division of their wandering for bread is finished. The third was to be worked out in the woods, amid the sound of axes, and in the oppressive heat of life in a colony. Whether there were fewer tears in it, less suffering and misfortune, we shall know before long.
III. LIFE IN THE COLONY.
WHAT was Borovina? A colony to be founded. But evidently the name was thought out in advance, starting from the principle that where there is a name there must be a thing. Preliminarily Polish, and even American, papers, published in New York, Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, Milwaukee, Manitowoc, Denver, Calumet, in a word, in all places where it was possible to hear Polish speech, announced, urbi et orbi (to the city and the world) in general, and to Polish colonists in particular, that whoever of them wished to be healthy, rich, happy, eat fatly, live long, and after death receive salvation surely, should inscribe himself for a share in an earthly paradise, or in Borovina.
The advertisements declared that Arkansas, in which Borovina was to rise, was a country still unoccupied, but the wholesomest on earth. It is true that the town of Memphis, lying at the very border on the other hank of the Mississippi, was a hotbed of yellow fever; but, according to the advertisements, neither yellow, nor any other fever could cross such a river as the Mississippi. On the higher bank of the Arkansas River it did not exist, because the neighboring Indians, the Choctaws, would scalp it without mercy. Fever trembles at sight of a redskin. Because of this combination of circumstances, colonists of Borovina would dwell in a perfectly neutral zone between fever on the east and Indians on the west. Having before it, moreover, such a future, Borovina would, in a thousand years, contain, beyond doubt, two million inhabitants; and laud, for which to-day one dollar and fifty cents an acre was paid, would be sold at auction for no less than a thousand dollars a square yard.
It was difficult to resist such promises and prospects. Those to whom the neighborhood of the Choctaws was less pleasing, were assured by advertisements that this valiant tribe was animated by a most particular sympathy for Poles, that therefore it was proper to look forward to most agreeable relations. Moreover, it was known that when the railroad passed through the prairies, and there would be telegraph poles in the form of crosses, those crosses would soon serve as monuments above the graves of Indians; and since the land of Borovina was obtained from the railroad, the disappearance of the Indians was a question of time, nothing more.
The land had been acquired, indeed, from the railroad; this assured the colony connection with the world, an outlet for products, and future development. The advertisements had forgotten to add, it is true, that this railroad was only projected, and that the sale of sections of land, granted roads by the Government in uninhabited places, was to guarantee, or rather to complete, the capital needful to build. This omission was, however, pardonable in business so complicated. Moreover, it involved this difference for Borovina, that the colony, instead of being on the line of the road, was in a deep wilderness to which one had to go amid immense difficulties, with wagons.
From these omissions, various disputes might rise, which were only temporary, however, and would cease at once with the building of the road. Besides, it is known that advertisements in America are not to be taken literally, for as plants transferred to American soil flourish surely, but at the cost of their fruit, in like manner advertisements in American papers increase so in every direction that at times it is difficult to separate the one grain of truth from rhetorical chaff.
But putting aside everything which in the advertisements touching Borovina should be considered as humbug, so called, it might still be supposed that that colony would not be worse than a thousand others, the rise of which was announced with no less exaggeration.
The conditions appeared in many respects favorable, hence a multitude of persons, and even of Polish families, scattered throughout the Union, from the Great Lakes to the palm forests of Florida, from the Atlantic to the coast of California, inscribed themselves as settlers in the colony about to be founded. Mazovians from Prussia, Silesians, people of Poznan, Galicia, Lithuanians from Augustov, and Mazovians from near Warsaw, who worked in factories in Chicago and Milwaukee, and who for a long time had been sighing for a life which a peasant should lead, seized the first opportunity to escape from stifling cities, blackened with smoke and soot, and betake themselves to the plough and axe in the broad fields, forests, and prairies of Arkansas. Those for whom it was too hot at Panna Maria in Texas, or too cold in Minnesota, or too damp in Detroit, or too hungry in Radomia in Illinois, joined with the first, and a number of hundreds of people, mostly men, but still a good many women and children, moved to Arkansas. The name “Bloody Arkansas” did not overmuch terrify the colonists. Though, to tell the truth, this section abounds yet in thieving Indians, and so-called outlaws or robbers, fleeing from justice, and wild squatters who cut timber on Red River in defiance of Government, and various other adventurers or scoundrels avoiding the gallows; though hitherto the western part of the State was famous for savage struggles between Indians and the white buffalo-hunters, and for the terrible “lynch” law, — still it was possible to help one’s self in all this. The Mazovian who feels a knotty club in his fist, and especially when he has a Mazovian at each side of him and a Mazovian behind, will not yield much to any one, and to the man who crawls into his path he is ready to shout, “Do not move, do not push in here, or we will pound you till you are lame!” It is also known that Mazovians like to keep together and settle so that Matsek may hurry at any moment to help another Matsek with a club.
The rallying point for the majority was Little Rock; but from Little Rock to Clarksville, the settlement nearest Borovina was a little farther than from Warsaw to Cracow, and, what was worse, colonists had to pass through an uninhabited country, and make their way through forests and deep water. In fact a number of people, unwilling to wait for the whole company, started on alone, and perished without tidings; but the main camp arrived successfully, and fixed itself in the midst of the forest.
When the colonists reached the place, they were in truth greatly disenchanted. They had hoped to find in the colony lands, forests, and fields; they found only forests, which had to he felled. Black oak, redwood, cottonwood, the light-colored sycamore, and the dark hickory stood side by side in one mass.
That wilderness was no joke, lined with chaparral below, entangled with hanging plants above, which went from tree to tree like cables and ropes, forming, as it were hanging bridges, curtains, as it were, festoons covered with flowers, and so dense, so packed and entangled, that the eye could not see in the distance as in our forests; and whoso went into them more deeply could not see the sky above his head, but had to wander in darkness, and might go astray and be lost forever. One and another Mazovian looked at his fist, at his axe, then at those oaks, a number of yards in circumference, and more than one man grew sad. It is well to have timber for a cottage and for fuel; but for one colonist to cut down a forest of a hundred and sixty acres, pull the stumps out of the ground, level the land, and then plough it, is the work of years.
But there was nothing else to be done, hence the day after the arrival of the company each man made the sign of the cross on himself, spat on his hands, caught up his axe, grunted, whirled the axe, struck; and from that time forth the noise of axes was heard in that Arkansas forest, and at times too songs attended with echoes, —
“Kasenko came.
He came from the mansion,
Dear, darling Kasenko.
Come to the pinewood,
Come to the pinewood, come to the dark one.”
The camp stood at the bank of a river, or rather on a broad plain at the edge of which were to stand in a quadrangle the cottages; in the middle, with time, was to be a church and a school. But that was far ahead; meanwhile the wagons in which the colonists’ families had arrived were put in line. Those wagons were arranged in a triangle so that in case of attack people might defend themselves behind them as in a fortress. Beyond the wagons, on the rest of the plain, were the mules, horses, oxen, cows, and sheep, watched by a guard composed of armed young men. The people slept in the wagons, or inside the triangle at fires.
In the daytime women and children remained in the camp; the presence of men was known only by the sound of axes, which filled the whole forest. At night wild beasts howled in the thickets, jaguars, Arkansas wolves, and coyotes. Terrible gray bears, which fear the glare of fire less than other beasts, approached rather near the wagons at times; wherefore gunshots were heard frequently in the darkness, and shouts of “Hurry to kill the beast!” Men who had come from the wild regions of Texas were trained hunters, for the greater part, and those obtained with ease, for themselves and their families, the flesh of wild beasts; namely, antelopes, deer, and buffaloes, for that was the time of spring migration when those animals went northward. The rest of the colonists nourished themselves with supplies bought in Clarksville or Little Rock, and composed of Indian corn and salt pork. Besides, they killed sheep, a certain number of which had been brought by each family.
In the evening, when a large fire was made near the wagons, the young people danced, after supper, instead of going to sleep. A certain man who could play had brought with him a violin; on this he played the Obertas by ear, and when the sound of the violin was lost amid the noise of the forest and under the open sky, others helped the player in American fashion with tin plates.
Complete Works of Henryk Sienkiewicz Page 735