"Gentlemen, to the woods for mushrooms! The one who brings the finest to the table I will seat beside the prettiest girl; I will pick her out myself. If a lady finds it, she shall choose for herself the handsomest young man."

BOOK III.-FLIRTATION

ARGUMENT

The Count's expedition to the garden-A mysterious nymph feeding geese-The resemblance of mushroom-gathering to the wanderings of the shades in the Elysian Fields-Varieties of mushrooms-Telimena in the Temple of Meditation-Consultation in regard to the settlement of Thaddeus-The Count as a landscape painter-Thaddeus's artistic observations on trees and clouds-The Count's thoughts on art-The bell-The love note-A bear, sir!

The Count returned home, but he kept checking his horse, turning back his head, and gazing at the garden; and once it seemed to him that a mysterious, snow-white gown again flashed from the window; and that again something light fell from on high, and flitting across the garden in the twinkling of an eye, glittered among the green cuc.u.mbers, like a sunbeam that steals out from a cloud and falls on a slab of flint in a ploughed field, or on a small sheet of water in a green meadow.

The Count dismounted and sent his servants to the house, but himself set out secretly for the garden; soon he reached the fence, found an opening in it, and slunk in quietly, as a wolf into a sheepfold; unluckily he jostled some dry gooseberry bushes. The little gardener glanced around as though frightened by the rustling, but perceived nothing; however, she ran to the other side of the garden. But along the edge, among the great sorrel plants and amid the leaves of burdock, the Count, leaping like a frog over the gra.s.s, quietly crawled near on his hands and knees; he put out his head, and beheld a marvellous sight.

In that part of the garden grew scattered cherry trees; among them grain and vegetables, purposely of mixed varieties: wheat, maize, beans, bearded barley, millet, peas, and even bushes and flowers. The housekeeper had devised such a garden for the poultry; she was famous for her skill-her name was Mrs. Hennibiddy, born Miss Turkee. Her invention made an epoch in poultry-raising: to-day it is universally known, but in those times it was still pa.s.sed about as a novelty and received under the seal of secrecy by only a few persons, until at last the almanac published it under the heading, _A cure for hawks and kites, or a new method of raising poultry_-that meant this garden patch.

As soon as the c.o.c.k that keeps watch stands still, and, throwing back and holding motionless his bill, and inclining to one side his head with its red comb, that he may the more easily aim at the heavens with his eye, perceives a hawk hanging beneath the clouds, he calls the alarm: at once the hens take refuge in this garden-even the geese and peac.o.c.ks, and the doves in their sudden fright, if they have not time to hide beneath the roof.

Now no enemy was to be seen in the sky, but the summer sun was burning fiercely; from it the birds had taken refuge in the grove of grain: some were lying on the turf, others bathing in the sand.

Amid the birds' heads rose little human heads, uncovered, with short hair, white as flax, their necks bare to the shoulders; in their midst was a girl, a head higher than they, with longer hair. Just behind the children sat a peac.o.c.k, and spread out wide the circle of its tail into a many-coloured rainbow, against the deep blue of which the little white heads were relieved as on the background of a picture; they gathered radiance, being surrounded by the gleaming eyes of the tail as by a wreath of stars, and they shone amid the grain as in the transparent ether, between the golden stalks of the maize, the English gra.s.s with its silvery stripes, the coral mercury, and the green mallow, the forms and colours of which were mingled together like a lattice plaited of silver and gold, and waving in the air like a light veil.

Above the ma.s.s of many-coloured ears and stalks hung like a canopy a bright cloud of b.u.t.terflies,50 whose four-parted wings were light as a spider's web and transparent as gla.s.s; when they hover in the air they are hardly visible, and, though they hum, you fancy that they are motionless.

The girl waved in her uplifted hand a grey ta.s.sel, like a bunch of ostrich plumes, and seemed to be protecting with it the heads of the children from the golden rain of the b.u.t.terflies-in her other hand shone something horn-like and gilded, apparently an instrument for feeding children, for she approached it to each child in turn; it was formed like the golden horn of Amalthea.

Even though thus engaged she turned her head towards the gooseberry bushes, mindful of the rustling she had heard among them, and not knowing that her a.s.sailant had already drawn near from the opposite direction, crawling like a serpent over the borders. Suddenly he jumped out from the burdock; she looked-he was standing near at hand, four beds away from her, and was bowing low. She had already turned away her head and lifted her arms, and was hurrying to fly away like a frightened lark, and already her light steps were brushing over the leaves, when the children, frightened by the entrance of the stranger, and the flight of the girl, began to wail piteously. She heard them, and felt that it was unseemly to desert little children in their fright; she went back, hesitating, but she must needs go back, like an unwilling spirit, summoned by the incantations of a diviner.

She ran up to divert the child that was shrieking the loudest, sat down by him on the ground, and clasped him to her bosom; the others she soothed with her hand and with tender words until they became calm, hugging her knees with their little arms and snuggling their heads, like chickens beneath their mother's wing. "Is it nice to cry so?" she said, "is it polite? This gentleman will be afraid of you; he did not come to frighten you, he is not an ugly old beggar; he is a guest, a kind gentleman, just see how pretty he is."

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 gra.s.s 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 G.o.ddess 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 gra.s.s."

"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 gra.s.ses, 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 gra.s.s.

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 mult.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstances to adapt them to the place and time. Therefore, before they followed the Judge to the wood, they had a.s.sumed 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 mushrooms51 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.52 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 gla.s.ses filled with various sorts of wine; the _kozlak_, like the bulging bottom of an upturned cup; the _funnels_, like slender champagne gla.s.ses; 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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.sessor 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 gra.s.ses 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 gra.s.s, 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 gra.s.s, 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.