It was preparing for frost; but what cared Pan Klen? He merely went faster and faster; and, while going, he thought of that day, thought of Olka, and he was warm. A happier day in his life there had never been.

After an empty, treeless road, through frozen meadows covered with snow, now red and now blue beneath the sky, he carried his gladness like a lantern which he had to light him in the dark. He remembered again and again all that had happened: his conversation with the canon; the signing of the contract; every word with the tile-maker and Panna Olka.

When they were alone for a while she said to him, "It was all one to me!

I would have gone with you, Anton, without that, even beyond the sea; but for father it is better in this way!" He kissed her on the elbow with great gratitude, saying, "God reward thee, Olka, for the ages of ages, amen!" And now, when he recalled it, he was a little ashamed of himself, for having kissed her on the elbow, and for having said too little to her; for he felt that if the tile-maker would have permitted, she would have gone with him to the edge of the world. Such an honest girl! And then she would have gone with him if necessary along that empty road in the snow. "Oh, thou, my pure gold!" thought Pan Klen, "since it is so, thou wilt be a lady." Then he went still more swiftly, and the snow squeaked more loudly.

Soon he began to think, "Such a woman will not deceive a man." Then great gratitude mastered him. And indeed if Olka had been there with him, he would not have held out; he would have thrown his hautboy on the ground, and pressed her to his bosom with all the strength in his bones.

He ought not to have acted differently an hour earlier; but it is always so: wherever a man has to do anything or say anything from the heart, he "becomes a fool, and has a wooden tongue." It is easier to play on the organ.

Meanwhile, the golden and red stripes which were shining on the western sky changed gradually into golden ribbons and golden knots, and finally they vanished. Darkness came; and the stars twinkled in the heavens, looking sharply and dryly on the earth, as is usual in winter. The frost grew severe, and began to bite the ears of the future organist of Ponikla; so, knowing the road perfectly, Pan Klen decided to cut across the field, and reach his own house the more quickly.

After a while he seemed black on the level, snowy expanse,--tall, sticking up ridiculously. It occurred to him that to kill time he might play a little before his fingers got stiff; and as he thought so he did.

His voice sounded strangely in the night and on that waste, as if he were frightened a little by that white, melancholy plain; and it sounded all the more strangely that Klen played the most joyous things. He recollected that he had begun to play and sing, after one and another glass at the tile-maker's, that Olka accompanied him gladly with her thin little voice. He wished now to play those same songs, so he began with that with which she had begun:

"Level, O God, the mountains with the valleys, Let them be very level!

Bring, O God, my love, Bring him early!"

But the song did not please the tile-maker, for it seemed to him a "peasant song," and he commanded Klen to sing a "noble song." Then they took up another, which Olka had learned in Zagrabie:--

"Pan Ludwig went a hunting, He left Helunia like a picture.

Pan Ludwig came home, the music was playing.

The trumpeters trumpeting, Helunia was sleeping."

This was more to the taste of the tile-maker. But when pleasure seized them they laughed most at the "Green Pitcher." The lady in that song, before she laughed at the end, cried and sang piteously for her broken pitcher:

"My green pitcher, Oh, the Pan broke it!"

But the Pan falls to consoling her:--

"Quiet, Panna, weep not, I will pay thee for thy pitcher!"

Olka prolonged as much as possible, "My gre-e-e-en pitcher," and then laughed. Klen took his lips from the hautboy, and answered her as the Pan, with a great flourish:--

"Quiet, Panna, weep not--"

And now, remembering in the night that gladness of the daytime, he played to himself "My Green Pitcher," and smiled in addition, as much as his lips would allow, employed as they were in blowing the hautboy. But as the frost was violent, and his lips were freezing to the mouthpiece of the instrument, and his fingers were stiff going over the keys, he ceased to play and went on, somewhat panting, and with his face in a mist which rose from his breath.

After a time he got tired, for he had not counted on this, that in fields snow lies more deeply than on a beaten road, and that it is not easy to draw one's legs out of it. Besides, in meadows in some places there are hollows, made even by drifts through which one must wade to the knee. Klen began to regret then that he had left the road, for some wagon might have come along on the way to Ponikla.

The stars twinkled more and more sharply; the frost became more severe, but Pan Klen even sweated; still, when the wind rose at moments, and blew toward the river, he became very cold. He tried to play again, but as he had to keep his mouth closed he tortured himself all the more.

At last a feeling of loneliness seized him. Round about it was so empty, silent, and remote that he was wonder-stricken. In Ponikla a warm house was waiting for him; but he preferred to think of Zagrabie, and said to himself, "Olka is going to sleep; but there, praise be to God, it is warm in the house." And at the thought that it was warm and bright there for Olka, Pan Klen's honest heart rejoiced all the more, the colder and darker the way was for him.

The meadows ended at last, and then began pastures grown over here and there with juniper. Pan Klen was so tired now that a great desire seized him to sit down, with his hautboy, under the first sheltered bush, and rest. "But I shall freeze if I do so," thought he, and went on.

Unfortunately, among junipers, as along fences, snow-drifts form sometimes. Klen passed through a number of these, and became so exhausted that finally he said to himself,--

"I will sit down. Unless I fall asleep I shall not freeze; and to keep from sleeping, I will play again, 'My Green Pitcher.'"

He sat down, played again, again the vanishing voice of the hautboy was heard in the silence of night, and over the snow. But Klen's eyelids stuck together more and more, and the notes of the "Green Pitcher,"

growing weaker, and gradually growing silent, were silent altogether at last. Still he struggled against sleep; he was conscious yet; he was thinking still of Olka; but at the same time he felt himself in a greater desert, more and more alone, as if forgotten; and wonderment seized him that she was not there with him in that loneliness and that night.

He murmured, "Olka! where art thou?"

And once more he spoke as if calling her,--

"Olka!"

The hautboy dropped from his stiffened hands.

Next morning the dawn shone on his sitting figure, with the hautboy near his long legs, and his face was blue, astonished as it were, and at the same time fixed in listening to the last note of the song, "My Green Pitcher."

LUX IN TENEBRIS LUCET[12]

[12] Light shineth in the darkness.

Sometimes in the autumn, especially in November, such wet and gloomy days come that life becomes repulsive even to a healthy man. From the time that Kamionka had fallen ill and stopped work on his statue of "Compassion," bad weather had caused him more suffering than sickness itself. Every morning, when he had dragged his body out of bed, he rubbed the great sweating window of his studio and looked upward, in the hope that he would see some little strip of blue sky; but every morning disappointment awaited him. An oppressive lead-colored mist hung over the earth; rain was not falling, still the paving stones in the yard looked like sponges soaked in liquid; everything was wet, slippery, penetrated through and through with water, single drops of which falling from the eave-troughs sounded with a peculiar and desperate monotony, as if measuring that sluggish time of sadness.

The window of the studio looked out on a courtyard, which was bounded by a garden. The grass beyond the paling was green yet with a sort of sickly greenness, in which were death and decay; but the trees with their yellow leaves, and their branches black from dampness and also effaced by the mist somewhat, seemed dead altogether. From among those trees came every evening the cawing of crows, which had flown in from the forests and fields to the city for winter quarters, and which, with a great clattering of wings, settled down for the night on the branches.

The studio in days like this was as gloomy as the place for bones in a cemetery. Marble and plaster of Paris need azure. In that leaden light the whiteness had something sad in it; figures in dark terra-cotta lost all precision of lines and changed into indefinite forms almost terrible.

Dirt and disorder increased the gloom of the studio. On the floor was a thick layer of dust, formed from pieces of dry terra-cotta ground fine from trampling; to this was added mud from the street. The naked walls were merely ornamented here and there with models of hands and feet in plaster of Paris; near the window hung a small mirror, above it a horse skull, and a bouquet of artificial flowers quite black from dust.

In the corner was a bed covered with a quilt, old and rumpled; near the bed a commode; on this an iron candlestick.

Kamionka, through reasons of economy, kept no separate lodging-place; he slept in the studio. Usually the bed was concealed by a screen, but the screen had been removed to let the sick man look out more easily through the window near the foot of his bed, and see if the weather were clearing. Another and larger window placed in the ceiling of the studio was covered with dust on the outside to such a degree that even on bright days a gray and gloomy light passed in through it.

But the weather did not clear. After a number of days of darkness the clouds settled down thoroughly, the air was penetrated to the last degree with a watery, heavy mist, and became still darker. Kamionka, who so far had lain on the bed in his clothing, felt worse, so he undressed and lay down for good.

Speaking precisely, he was not so much sick with any definite disease as he was bowed down, dissatisfied, exhausted, and sad in general. His weakness cut the feet from beneath him. He had no wish to die; but neither did he feel strength to live.

The long hours of the dismal day seemed longer because he had no one for company. His wife had been dead twenty years; his relatives lived in another part of the country; and he did not live with his colleagues. In recent years every acquaintance had withdrawn from him because of his ever-increasing sorrow. At first, his disposition amused people; but later, when he grew stranger and stranger, when every jest roused a permanent feeling of offence in him, even those nearest the man broke off all relations with him.

People took it ill of him also that with age he had grown devout, and his sincerity was suspected. Malicious tongues said that he sat in church only to receive orders from churches through his relations with priests. This was not true. His piety did not flow from deep and calm faith, perhaps, but it was unselfish.

What, however, lent a show of truth to the critics, was the penuriousness which increased more and more in Kamionka. For a number of years he had lived in his studio to lessen expenses; he lived God knows on what food, and injured his health so much that at last his face was as yellow and transparent as if moulded from wax. He avoided people also for this, lest some one might ask of him sometime a favor.

In general, he was a man of broken character, embittered and uncommonly unhappy. Still his was not a common nature at bottom, for even his faults had artistic traits which were special to him. Those who judged that with his penuriousness he must have collected a considerable property were mistaken. In truth, Kamionka was poor; for all that he owned he had spent on engravings of which he had whole portfolios at the bottom of his bureau; these, from time to time, he counted with the greed and the care of a usurer counting his money. He concealed this taste the more carefully, perhaps, because it had grown on the basis of great misfortune and deep feeling.

On a time, a year more or less after the death of his wife, he saw in an antiquarian's collection an old engraving, representing Armida. In the face of this Armida he detected a likeness to the face of his dead one.

He bought the engraving immediately, and from that time on he sought copperplates, those at first representing only Armida, then, as the fancy increased, every other.

Those who have lost persons much loved by them are forced to attach life to something, or they could not exist. As to Kamionka, no one would have thought that this rather aged original and egotist had ever loved his wife more than he loved his existence. It is likely, moreover, that had she not died, life would have flowed on for him more broadly, more calmly, and more in human fashion. Be that as it may, love in Kamionka survived his happy days, his youth, and even his talent.

His piety, which in the course of years turned into a custom resting on the preservation of external forms, flowed from this love of his also.