Adam Mickiewicz Collected Poetical Works

by Adam Mickiewicz

  She looked herself; the Count smiled pleasantly, and was evidently grateful to her for so many praises. She noticed this, and stopped, lowered her eyes, and blushed all over like a rosebud.

  He was really a handsome gentleman; of tall stature, with an oval face, fair and with rosy cheeks; he had mild blue eyes and long blonde hair. The leaves and tufts of grass in the Count’s hair, which he had torn off in crawling over the borders, showed green like a disordered wreath.

  “O thou!” he said, “by whatever name I must honour thee, whether thou art a goddess or a nymph, a spirit or a phantom, speak! Doth thine own will call thee to earth, or doth another’s power bind thee in this vale? Ah! I comprehend — surely some disdained lover, some powerful lord or envious guardian imprisons thee in this castle park as if under enchantment! Thou art worthy that knights should fight for thee in arms, and that thou shouldst be the heroine of mournful ballads! Unfold to me, fair one, the secret of thy dreadful fate! Thou shalt find a deliverer — henceforth, as thou rulest my heart by thy nod, so rule my arm.”

  He stretched forth his arms. — She listened to him with a maiden’s blush, but with a face once more cheerful. As a child likes to look at gay pictures and finds amusement in glittering counters before he learns their true worth, so her ears were soothed by the sounding words of which she did not understand the meaning. Finally she asked: “Where do you come from, sir, and what are you looking for here in the garden?”

  The Count opened his eyes, confused and amazed, and did not reply. Finally, lowering the tone of his discourse, he said: —

  “Pardon me, my little lady; I see that I have spoiled your fun! O pardon me, I was just hurrying to breakfast; it is late and I wanted to get there on time. You know that by the road one has to make a circuit; through the garden it seems to me there is a short cut to the house.”

  “There is your way, sir,” said the girl; “only you must not spoil the vegetable beds; there is the path between the strips of grass.”

  “To the left?” asked the Count, “or to the right?”

  The little gardener, filled with curiosity, raised her blue eyes and seemed to scrutinise him, for a thousand steps away the house was in plain sight, and the Count was asking the way! But the Count needs must say something to her, and was seeking an excuse for conversation.

  “Do you live here? near the garden? or in the village? How happens it that I have not seen you at the mansion? Have you come recently? Perhaps you are a visitor?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Pardon me, my little lady, but is not that your room, where we see the window?”

  “If she is not a heroine of romance,” he was thinking to himself, “she is a young and fresh and very pretty girl. Very often a great soul, a great thought, hidden in solitude, blooms like the rose in the midst of the forest; it will be sufficient to bring it forth to the light, and put it before the sun, to have it amaze by a thousand bright colours those who gaze upon it!”

  The little gardener meanwhile remained silent. She merely lifted up one child, who was hanging on her arm, took another by the hand, and, driving several of them before her like geese, moved on through the garden.

  “Can you not,” she said turning around, “drive my stray birds back into the grain?”

  “I drive birds!” cried the Count in amazement.

  Meanwhile she had vanished behind the shade of the trees. Only for a moment there shone from behind the hedgerow, through the dense greenery, something like two blue eyes.

  The deserted Count long remained standing in the garden; his soul, like the earth after sunset, gradually grew cool, and took on dark colours. He began to muse, but he had very unpleasant dreams; he awoke, not knowing himself with whom he was angry. Alas, he had found little, and had had too great expectations! For, when he was crawling over the field towards that shepherdess, his head had burned and his heart leapt high; so many charms had he seen in the mysterious nymph, so wondrously had he decked her out, so many conjectures had he made! He had found everything quite different; to be sure, she had a pretty face, and a slender figure — but how lacking in elegance! And that tender face and lively blush, which painted excessive, vulgar happiness! Evidently her mind was still slumbering and her heart inactive. And those replies, so village-like, so common!

  “Why should I deceive myself?” he exclaimed; “I guess the secret, too late! My mysterious nymph is simply feeding geese!”

  With the disappearance of the nymph, all the magic glory had suffered a change; those bright bands, that charming network of gold and silver, alas! was that all merely straw?

  The Count, wringing his hands, gazed on a bunch of cornflowers tied round with grasses, which he had taken for a tuft of ostrich plumes in the maiden’s hand. He did not forget the instrument: that gilded vessel, that horn of Amalthea, was a carrot! He had seen it being greedily consumed in the mouth of one of the children. So good-bye to the spell, the enchantment, the marvel!

  So a boy, when he sees chickory flowers enticing the hand with soft, light, blue petals, wishes to stroke them and draws near — he blows — and with the puff the whole flower flies away like down on the wind, and in his hands the too curious inquirer sees only a naked stalk of grey-green grass.

  The Count pulled his hat over his eyes and returned whence he came, but shortened the way by striding over the vegetables, the flowers, and the gooseberry bushes, until, vaulting the fence, he at last breathed freely! He remembered that he had spoken to the girl of breakfast: so perhaps everybody was already informed of his meeting with her in the garden, near the house; perhaps they would send to look for him. Had they noticed his flight? Who knows what they would think? So he had to go back. Bending down near the fence, along the boundary strip, and through the weeds, after a thousand turns he was glad to come out finally on the highway, which led straight to the yard of the mansion. He walked along the fence and turned away his head from the garden as a thief from a corn house, in order to give no sign that he thought of visiting it, or had already done so. Thus careful was the Count, though no one was following him; he looked in the opposite direction from the garden, to the right.

  Here was an open grove, with a floor of turf; over this green carpet, among the white trunks of the birches, under the canopy of luxuriant drooping boughs, roamed a multitude of forms, whose strange dance-like motions and strange costumes made one think them ghosts, wandering by the light of the moon. Some were in tight black garments, others in long, flowing robes, bright as snow; one wore a hat broad as a hoop, another was bare-headed; some, as if they had been wrapt in a cloud, in walking spread out on the breeze veils that trailed behind their heads as the tail behind a comet. Each had a different posture: one had grown into the earth, and only turned about his downcast eyes; another, looking straight before him, as if in a dream, seemed to be walking along a line, turning neither to the right nor to the left. But all continually bent down to the ground in various directions, as if making deep bows. If they approached one another, or met, they did not speak or exchange greetings, being in deep meditation, absorbed in themselves. In them the Count saw an image of the shades in the Elysian Fields, who, not subject to disease or care, wander calm and quiet, but gloomy.

  Who would have guessed that these people, so far from lively and so silent, were our friends, the Judge’s comrades? From the noisy breakfast they had gone out to the solemn ceremony of mushroom-gathering; being discreet people, they knew how to moderate their speech and their movements, in order under all circumstances to adapt them to the place and time. Therefore, before they followed the Judge to the wood, they had assumed a different bearing, and put on different attire, linen dusters suitable for a stroll, with which they covered and protected their kontuszes; and on their heads they wore straw hats, so that they looked white as spirits in Purgatory. The young people had also changed their clothes, except Telimena and a few who wore French attire. — This scene the Count had not understood, being unfamiliar with village customs;
hence, amazed beyond measure, he ran full speed to the wood.

  Of mushrooms there were plenty: the lads gathered the fair-cheeked fox-mushrooms, so famous in the Lithuanian songs as the emblem of maidenhood, for the worms do not eat them, and, marvellous to say, no insect alights on them; the young ladies hunted for the slender pine-lover, which the song calls the colonel of the mushrooms. All were eager for the orange-agaric; this, though of more modest stature and less famous in song, is still the most delicious, whether fresh or salted, whether in autumn or in winter. But the Seneschal gathered the toadstool fly-bane.

  The remainder of the mushroom family are despised because they are injurious or of poor flavour, but they are not useless; they give food to beasts and shelter to insects, and are an ornament to the groves. On the green cloth of the meadows they rise up like lines of table dishes: here are the leaf-mushrooms with their rounded borders, silver, yellow, and red, like little glasses filled with various sorts of wine; the kozlak, like the bulging bottom of an upturned cup; the funnels, like slender champagne glasses; the round, white, broad, flat whities, like china coffee-cups filled with milk; and the round puff-ball, filled with a blackish dust, like a pepper-shaker. The names of the others are known only in the language of hares or wolves; by men they have not been christened, but they are innumerable. No one deigns to touch the wolf or hare varieties; but whenever a person bends down to them, he straightway perceives his mistake, grows angry and breaks the mushroom or kicks it with his foot: in thus defiling the grass he acts with great indiscretion.

  Telimena gathered neither the mushrooms of wolves nor those of humankind; distracted and bored, she gazed around with her head high in air. So the Notary angrily said of her that she was looking for mushrooms on the trees; the Assessor more maliciously compared her to a female looking about for a nesting-place.

  She seemed in search of quiet and solitude; slowly she withdrew from her companions and went through the wood to a gently sloping hillock, well shaded by the trees that grew thickly upon it. In the midst of it was a grey rock; from under the rock a stream gurgled and spouted, and at once, as if it sought the shade, took refuge amid the tall, thick greenery, which, watered by it, grew luxuriantly on all sides. There that swift rogue, swaddled in grasses and bedded upon leaves, motionless and noiseless, whispered unseen and almost inaudibly, like a tired child laid in a cradle, when its mother ties above it the bright green curtains, and sprinkles poppy leaves beneath its head. It was a lovely and quiet spot; here Telimena often took refuge, calling it the Temple of Meditation.

  Standing above the stream, she threw on the greensward, from her shoulders, her waving shawl, red as carnelian; and, like a swimmer who bends down to the wintry bath before she ventures to plunge in, she knelt and slowly inclined on her side; finally, as if drawn down by the stream of coral, she fell upon it and stretched out at full length: she rested her elbow on the grass, her temple on her palm, with her head bent down; beneath her head glittered the vellum paper of a French book; over the alabaster pages of the book there wound her black ringlets and pink ribbons.

  Amid the emerald of the luxuriant grass, on the carnelian shawl, in her long gown, as though in a wrapper of coral, against which her hair was relieved at one end and her black shoes at the other, while along the sides glittered her snowy stockings, her handkerchief, and the whiteness of her hands and face, she showed from afar like a many-coloured caterpillar, crawling upon a green maple leaf.

  Alas! all the charms and graces of this picture vainly awaited experts to appreciate them; no one heeded them, so deeply were all engrossed in the gathering of mushrooms. But Thaddeus heeded them and kept glancing sideways; and, not daring to go straight on, edged along obliquely. As a huntsman, when, seated between two wheels beneath a moving canopy of boughs, he advances on bustards; or, when approaching plover, he hides himself behind his horse, putting his gun on the saddle or beneath the horse’s neck, as if he were dragging a harrow or riding along a boundary strip, but continually draws near to the place where the birds are standing: even so did Thaddeus steal forward.

  The Judge foiled his plan; and, cutting him off, hurried to the spring. In the wind fluttered the white skirts of his dressing-gown and a large handkerchief, of which the end was fastened in his girdle; his straw hat, tied beneath his chin, flapped in the wind from his swift motion like a burdock leaf, falling now on his shoulders and now again over his eyes; in his hand was an immense staff: thus strode on the Judge. Bending down and washing his hands in the stream, he sat down on the great rock in front of Telimena, and, leaning with both hands on the ivory knob of his enormous cane, he thus began his discourse: —

  “You see, my dear, that ever since our Thaddeus has been our guest, I have been not a little disquieted. I am childless and old; this good lad, who is really my only comfort in the world, is the future heir of my fortune. By the grace of heaven I shall leave him no bad portion of gentleman’s bread; it is time too that we think over his future and his settlement. But now, my dear, pray observe my distress! You know that Jacek, my brother, Thaddeus’s father, is a strange man, whose intentions are hard to penetrate. He refuses to return home; God knows where he is hiding; he will not even let us inform his son that he is alive, and yet he continually gives us directions in regard to him. At first he wanted to send him to the legions; I was fearfully distressed. Later, however, he agreed that he might remain at home and marry. He would easily find a wife; I have a match in mind for him. None of our citizens compares in name or connections with the Chamberlain; his elder daughter Anna is of marriageable age, a fair and well-dowered young lady. I wanted to begin negotiations.”

  At this Telimena grew pale, closed her book, rose a bit, and sat up.

  “As I love my mother,” she said, “is there any sense in this, my dear brother? Are you a God-fearing man? So you think that you will really be doing a good turn to Thaddeus if you make a sower of buckwheat out of the young man! You will close the world to him! Believe me, some time he will curse you! To think of burying such talent in the woods and the garden! Believe me, judging from my knowledge of him, he is a capable boy, worthy of acquiring polish in the great world. You will do well, brother, if you send him to the capital, for instance, to Warsaw; or, if you wish to know my real opinion, to St. Petersburg. I shall surely be going there this winter on business; we will consider together what to do with Thaddeus. I know many people there and have influence; that is the best means of making a man. Through my aid he will gain access to the leading houses, and when he is known to important people he will get an office and a decoration; then let him abandon the service if he wishes and return home, being by that time of some importance and well known in society. What do you think about that, brother?”

  “In his early years,” said the Judge, “it is not bad for a young man to gain social experience, to see the world, and acquire polish among men. I myself, when young, covered no small ground; I have been in Piotrkow and in Dubno, now following the court as a lawyer, now attending to my own affairs; I have even visited Warsaw. Not a little did I profit by this. I should like to send out my nephew also among men, simply as a traveller, as an apprentice who is finishing his term, in order that he might acquire some little knowledge of the world. Not for the sake of office-holding or decorations! I beg your most humble pardon; a rank in the Muscovite hierarchy, a decoration, what sort of distinction are they? What man among our ancient notables — nay, even among those of this present day — what man of any prominence among the district gentry cares for such trifles? And yet these men are esteemed among us, for we respect in them their family, their good name, or their office — but a local office, conferred by the votes of their fellow-citizens, and not by the influence of any one set in authority.”

  “If that is your opinion, brother,” interrupted Telimena, “so much the better; send him out as a traveller.”

  “You see, sister,” said the Judge, mournfully scratching his head, “I should like to do so very much, but what if
I have new perplexities! Brother Jacek has not abandoned the oversight of his son, and has just sent down upon me that Bernardine Robak, who has arrived from across the Vistula, a friend of my brother, who knows all his plans. And so the fates have already uttered their decree as to Thaddeus, and will have him marry, but marry Zosia, your ward; the young couple will receive, besides my own fortune, a dowry in ready money by the generosity of Jacek. You know that he is rich, and that through his favour I possess almost all my own estate; thus he has the right to give directions. Pray think this over, in order that it may be accomplished with the least possible trouble; we must make them acquainted. To be sure, they are very young, especially little Zosia, but that is no matter; it is time at last to release Zosia from confinement, for at all events she is growing up and is no longer a child.”

  Telimena, amazed and almost panic-stricken, raised herself gradually and knelt on the shawl; at first she listened with attention, then with a gesture she opposed him, waving her hand vigorously over her ear, as if she were driving off the unpleasant words like gnats, back into the mouth of the speaker.

  “Ha! ha! that is a new idea! Whether that is good or bad for Thaddeus,” she said angrily, “you may judge for yourself, my dear sir. I don’t care anything about Thaddeus, plan for him yourselves; make him a steward, or put him in a tavern; let him be a bar-tender, or bring game for your table from the woods; do with him whatever you wish! But as for Zosia! What have you men to do with Zosia? I control her hand; I alone. That Jacek provided money for Zosia’s education, and that he has assigned her a small yearly allowance, and has deigned to promise more, does not mean that he has bought her. Besides you both know, and it is pretty generally known too, that your generosity for us is not without its reasons; the Soplicas owe something to the family of the Horeszkos.”

  To this part of her speech the Judge listened with indescribable confusion and grief and with evident repugnance. As though fearing what she might say further, he bowed his head, made a gesture of assent, and flushed deeply.