Three Stories

Front matter

by

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Preface

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If the reader will take a map of the world and draw three lines, one from Venice to Dantzig, another from Constantinople to the White Sea, and a third from the Erz Mountains, west of Prague, to Kamschatka, he will be able to form some idea of the vast stretch of territory affected by Sclavonic civilization.

No confraternity of nations, not even the Anglo-Saxon, occupies so large a portion of the earth’s surface as the rapidly-increasing Sclavonic brotherhood.

On this account alone, if for no other reason, any attempt to bring home to English readers something of the inner life of some of these peoples is worthy of attention. Bohemian literature, moreover, has several special claims upon English readers. In the first place more than once the royal families of England and Bohemia have been united. Then again the country to some extent in its configuration and the variety of its strata, still more in its plethora of coal, ironstone, and other minerals has much in common with England. Bohemia has never broken entirely with the traditions of feudalism, and in the flourishing condition of its principalities and great-estates, the richness of its woodland, the abundance of its game, its fine breed of horses, and the excellence of its beer, we seem to see a copy of old England, and are reminded that similar causes produce similar effects: not that this is exactly true of the last item, however, which is at once milder and of purer quality than our own. Lastly, the religious struggles of the Reformation were fought out in Bohemia much on the same lines as in England, and while we may proudly claim some spiritual affinity between our own Protestant martyrs and the victims of Papal power in Prague, we are also reminded that in the national hero of Bohemia, John Hus, more than in any other of the great Protestant martyrs, were exhibited the most spotless purity of life, the most complete absence of self-seeking or worldly ambition, the most loyal devotion to duty, and the most simple and ready self-sacrifice in the cause of truth. The literature of a country which has produced the most perfect type of Christian piety which the world has yet seen, a man who of all others approximates most in his life and death to the originator of the Christian cult, merits something better than neglect at the hands of Christians steeped in the flimsy rhetoric of French triviality and the latest production of a civilization which was of no mean order while England still revelled in barbarism, might occasionally be exchanged with advantage for the endless verbiage of our own school of novels or the edifying lucrubations of Emile Zola, Gôethe, in a conversation with Eckerman, speaks with admiration of the simplicity and purity of the Bohemian writers, and since his time there has been a great re-awakening of the national spirit, and the language which had sunk to be a despised dialect of the common people of the towns and the peasantry of the rural districts, now claims half of the University of Prague, has its seat in one of the finest theatres in Europe, and is once more the proud mouthpiece of art and science.

The writer, some of whose stories are here brought to the notice of the English reading public, was one of those who helped on the attainment of this proud result. Palacky and Jungmanns aroused the interest of the people in their own history by publishing historical and antiquarian works in the vernacular. Cajetan Tyl is still remembered as a patriotic dramatist and writer of fiction, and Erben’s Sclavonic folk-lore has a general interest, but none of the Bohemian writers has caught so speaking a likeness of the inner life of the Bohemian people as Viteslav Halek, no one is remembered with such enthusiastic affection by all classes, or strikes so responsive a chord in the feelings of high and low. Already throughout Bohemia societies have been formed for the reading of his works, although he has not been dead fifteen years, and when I lodged in Smichoff with an honest Bohemian stonemason and his wife, I found it difficult to keep their hands off my copy of his stories. The more cultivated classes admire him for the simplicity of his style, and even the Germans are constrained grudgingly to acknowledge his merits. A complete edition of his works has indeed, been lately published in the original language edited by a writer, whom from his name (Ferdinand Schultz), I should judge to be a German.

These works consist of some half dozen dramas drawn chiefly from Sclavonic history, The first of these, Carevic Aleksej, was acted about the year 1860, and is modelled to some extent on Gôethe’s Egmont. For another, composed and brought out about the same time, (Kral Rudolf) the author had the honour of a short imprisonment at the hands of the Austrian Government. Sergius Catiline, Zavis z Falkenstjerna, Kral Vukasin (dealing with Servian history) and Amnon and Tamar are the names of his other dramas. They are all tragedies, and somewhat heavy reading. Amnon and Tamar, written in 1874, is the most powerful of them, but the subject is objectionable.

It is difficult for a foreigner with an imperfect knowledge of the language to judge correctly, but I should say that none of the other plays rise much above the level of Tennyson and Swinburne’s dramatic efforts. Most of them, however, are the work of the poet’s earlier years as a writer, and it is noteworthy that his latest works are far above those of a more youthful period, and this makes his somewhat premature death the more regrettable. These dramas fill two volumes. Another volume is devoted to lyrical pieces, ballads, and romances, written at different times between 1854 and 1870. A few samples are given in the present book of translations. These were most of them written in 1858. They are very popular in Bohemia. In fact a large number of them have been set to music and are now the ‘volks-lieder’ of the people. The student of Heine will observe that several of the ideas in these Bohemian poems have been adapted from the Jewish writer; for example, one of Halek’s lyrics beginning:

Nay marvel not if thou should’st hear Schweigt still? wenn mein Herz es höret

is a very close copy of Heine’s

Wer hat euch dies Wortlein gelehret Ihr Vöglein in lustiger Höh? Schweigt still? wenn mein Herz es höret Denn thut es noch einmal so weh.

Es kam ein Jung-fräulein gegangen Sie sang es immerfort Da haben wir Vöglein gefangen Das hubsche, goldene wort.

A wild poem by Heine, beginning

Schweigt still? wenn mein Herz es höret

in which the dead are supposed to rise from their graves and recount to one another what brought them there is also twice imitated by Halek in his idyllic poems. Once ina scene in a poem called Alfred (1858) and again most elaborately in a poetical historical retrospect, Dedicove bile hory (1869).

This brings me to mention his volume of Idyllic poems written at different times between 1858 and 1871, some of which I judge to be the most perfect of his works. In the latest of these Idylls Devce z Tater (a maiden of the Carpathians) the splendour of the language and melody of the verse outshine that of any modern poet (Leopardi not excepted). The story is simple and interesting, the sentiment healthy, and the characters life-like; could it be adequately translated English critics would, I think, admit it to be one of the most perfect Idylls in any language. Krasna Lejla and Mejrima and Husejn, Turkish Stories in verse, (1859) and Alfred (a Czech romance) are also readable and highly poetical. Goar and Cerny prapor (the black flag) are the names of two others, A volume of prose stories written between 1857 and 1859 is of less interest.. The stories are diffuse, full of criticisms about art and Wagner’s music, the plot is slight and the characters commonplace. Two volumes of prose stories written at a much later period, a story called “In the cottage and on the estate,” and a volume or two of criticism comprise the rest of Halek’s works. One of these volumes of stories is here presented to the public in an English dress and of their merits the English reading public can therefore form its own opinion. The stories are for the most part translated literally and I must apologize for retaining here and there Bohemian words, sometimes where an English equivalent is wanting, sometimes, in order to give an idea of the character of the original language, which also means the character of the people who speak it. The stories have been twice revised. Once by a learned Bohemian Jew in Prague, to whom I read them aloud and who was kind enough to appreciate them in their English dress. “They are written from the heart to the heart,” he said. And again a second time by an English literary man to whom the sentiment of the stories was so obnoxious that he put his pen through about one third part of them. Most of his excisions I have rejected. In spite of these revisions I cannot hope to have avoided many errors of translation which I hope may be corrected by the critical reader; nor can I expect a wide circle of English readers. The stories appeal to a civilization developing on different lines from our own, and, although they are a true picture of Sclavonic life and sentiment, they will no doubt often appear to English readers fantastic and overstrained. It may be worth noticing, in passing, that ‘Poldik,’ the name of a character in , is the diminutive of Leopold, and that of Bartos, in another of them, stands for Bartholomew.

He who can read between the lines will perceive in both these stories ingenious political allegories. These I will leave him to discover for himself, premising that in both the main idea is the maintenance of the Bohemian nationality against the encroachments of the centralizing Austrian power. The last story is based on a strange institution in the rural districts of Bohemia—that of “vejminkar.” In the case of small freehold estates or farms held on a long lease, the owner, as his sons grow up, pensions himself off; or, to put it differently, retires upon a settlement from the active management of the estate, in order that the eldest, youngest, or favorite son may marry and have the enjoyment of it. The pathetic fate of the village Lear in this story is an eloquent exposition of the abuses of the system which exists to this day in some parts of Bohemia.

I began this preface by pointing out what an immense portion of the globe forms the nidus of Sclavonic civilization, and as many people have very indefinite ideas about Slavism and its languages, it may not he amiss to conclude with a few remarks upon the Czech or Bohemian language and its relation to other Sclavonic dialects. As I do not profess to be a learned man, I have extracted the little I have to say on the subject from Mikes’s Russo-Czech grammar.

The Sclavonian nation, he writes, now contains eighty million souls, and is divided by its position into Southern, Eastern, and Western. I. In Eastern Sclavonia we find

(1) The Cyrilian or Ancient Sclavonic used, like the Latin, but very much modified, as the language of the Church, by Russians, Servians, Bulgarians, and part of the Dalmatians.

(2) The Russian language divided into three slightly different dialects.

(a) Great Russian spoken by thirty-five million people.

(b) Little Russian spoken by thirteen million people. And

(c) White Russian spoken by three million people.

II. South Sclavonic is divided into (a) Servian spoken by five million people.

(b) Croatian spoken by one million people.

(c) Carinthian-Slovenian spoken by one million people.

(d) Bulgarian spoken by seven million people.

III. Western Sclavonic is divided into (1) Polish employed by about ten million people.

(2) Czech divided into

(a) Cesko-Moravian spoken by over four million people.

and

(b) Hungarian-Slovenian spoken by two million people.

(3) Lusatian-Servian divided into Upper and Lower, and spoken by 150,000 people in Saxony. I will not weary the reader by going over in detail the relationship of these languages to one another; suffice it to say that the Czech or Bohemian is most closely related to the Upper Lusatian, the Croatian and the Little Russian dialects. The Bohemians, like most of the Catholic and Western Sclavonians, use the Latin characters, and thus their language forms a good introduction to the study of the rest.

Under the Hollow Tree, chapter 1

CHAPTER I.

WHEN Venik was twelve years old, his father Riha took him from school. “You must help us now,” he said. “You will be our little shepherd, and will drive off the sheep to the hillside; then in the afternoon I will bring you your dinner there, and you will come home yourself for the evening meal.”

Venik spun round with delight on his right heel. His teeth flashed out from his gums, and his father added, “Take your violin with you to the pasturage.” After this, Venik was like one possessed; he skipped about the apartment, till he had skipped up to his violin, taken it down from its nail, stretched several of the strings, and played and skipped about at the same time.

Venik, it must be understood, learnt the violin at school, and on Sunday used to play primo in the gallery so well that the schoolmaster composed a solo in the gloria expressly for him; and when Venik played, people at church turned their eyes to the gallery instead of looking at the altar. But no one could see him from below, he was still so small that he scarcely touched the rail of the gallery with his head. Then year after year the head emerged just over the rail, but the violin was yet invisible from below.

So then pretty early next morning Venik drove off the sheep to the hillside below the wood, and took with him his violin. Below the hillside murmured a river, on the hillside began to murmur the oakwood. Venik skirted the wood, and at the edge of it he noticed a single old tree whose trunk was hollow, so that four people could comfortably seat themselves inside. This tree looked as though it had stepped out from the wood. It had a sort of door and threshold; on the threshold, beside the entrance, squatted Venik, that he might look after the sheep, and he said to himself “Here I like to be: beside this tree I shall remain.”

When he had sat thus a short time and saw how the river fled away below him, and how the sheep kept creeping over the hillside, and how the wood behind him kept murmuring so softly, something stirred within him like the river, and something murmured softly like the woodland.

But when birds began to call to one another from the wood, Venik thought that he ought to answer them. He took his violin to make them some response. He played a whole mass in their behoof and his own, just as he had played it last in chapel. He thought that in that way he should soonest make friends with them by showing them what he knew.

He played: and when he came to the gloria, where he had the solo in chapel, he thought he ought to do his very best. He did his best, and played till his face shone. If those birds had understood anything about playing they must have been well contented with him. When he had finished playing you might have heard an answer, but it was not the birds who answered, it was the little Krista who, when Venik had finished playing, began to sing over her solo for last Sunday’s mass. Unseen she had crept behind the tree, and now betrayed herself by her singing.

Venik was the violinist of the gallery, and Krista was its chief songstress; she had a voice like a little angel, and when she sang people said it was like stringing pearls on a silken thread. Venik and Krista made music in the gallery side by side; and when one accompanied the other people said the chapel was like paradise; they were not brother and sister, but people called them “those children,” because they always learnt together, together walked home from school, and from home to school, and stood together in the gallery. The village folk talked about “those children” on their way to the chapel; “those children” were like a miracle to them when they heard them in chapel, and they talked about “those children” again all the way from chapel.

Krista was an orphan; she was now nine years old, and had no recollection of her parents. She was attached to the home of Venik’s father like the swallow’s nest which hung from the eaves, and which no one thought of pulling down. Venik’s father, perhaps, did not the least know why he had her at his house. It may have been because she was an orphan; or, perhaps, it may have been because of her sweet little voice. She was like that swallow’s nest under the cornice: no one pulled down that nest.

Venik’s father was sometimes known as the cottager, because there was another Riha in the village—a peasant proprietor—the brother of Riha the cottager. They also talked of Riha as Riha the widower, because Venik had already lost his mother.

When Krista began to sing behind the tree, Venik put down his violin, turned in the direction where sat the little songstress, beat time to her, nodded with his head, and was well satisfied. But when she had quite ended he roughly accosted her: “Krista, why are you not at school,” he said.

“Why are you not there too,” said Krista.

“I, indeed! I am twelve years old and belong to school no longer, but you are only nine.”

“I dont belong there either now,” retorted Krista, “and I wont go!”

“How dare you? if Papa knew of it he would drive you there,” retorted Venik angrily.

“I am come to feed the sheep with you, and you want to drive me away,” pleaded Krista.

On this Venik stood up, took her by the hand, and said imperiously, “Go at once, or I will drive you hence. Hie away to school!”

“I wont go, and you know it,” retorted Krista.

And when she would’nt stir an inch, Venik took her round the waist and dragged her as far as his strength sufficed. Krista staggered back, sank to the ground, burst into tears, and cried plaintively, “Ah! I am only a poor orphan girl.”

These words touched Venik. He forgot all at once that he had to send her to school, and only saw that Krista was in plaintive mood, and that he was the cause of it. He stood as if fixed to the ground, and did not know in which direction to move, whether towards Krista or towards the tree; then he went to the tree and sat himself there. He wished to play but it would’nt come. No mass, no song even occurred to him. Then he looked round at Krista and could have cried with her, could have gone to her, could have soothed her, could have asked her pardon and have excused her school, but he did not know how he could do that.

He felt even worse when Krista ceased to cry, when she raised her head and in silent sort reiterated what she had said before in words. When having her hands clasped and herself sunk to earth, and when having her eyes full of salt tears and fixed on the vague distance, like an actor in his part, she confirmed even by the expression of her countenance the signature over which was written, “Ah! I am but a poor orphan girl.”

As she sat thus plunged in her childish grief, Venik silently approached her, squatted himself beside her, and after a few moments said, “Krista, how does it feel to be an orphan.”

He said it with all the sympathy of which, at his age, he was capable. He said it as if he would have told her, “Tell me how it feels and I will share it with you.”

“How does it feel?” said Krista, in reply to his question. “When I have only you, and you drive me from you, how can I be anything but an orphan?” and her eyes still moist with weeping turned from the vague distance to him, and were full of mute reproach

“Nay, I do not drive you from me, but I want you to go to school, and to school you must go, for you are not twelve years old like me,” said Venik.

“I dont want to go to school any more,” retorted Krista, “I like to be here on the hill side, and stay here I will.”

“And where will you learn to sing?” asked Venik as a last resource.

“With you,” said Krista, and this quite beat Venik what to say next.

However, he answered, “You might go to school, and after school come here on the hill side. Lord! how we should get on if you learnt at school and here as well!”

At these words Krista fella thinking, then she looked at Venik, took him by the hand and said, “You are right, I will do so. I will go to school, and after school I will come to you on the hill side.”

Thus did these two young diplomatists come to a mutual understanding. And when both were satisfied, Venik said, “Are you still a poor orphan girl, Krista?”

“You know that I am an orphan. I have neither papa nor mamma,” she said, and Venik felt again so sorry, that he thought he must still try to do something for Krista to make her less an orphan.

And he said, “I have no mother either.” He said it as if he gloried in it, and as if he made Krista a sort of present, and as if that present was the mother whom he had lost.

Venik thought then that he had effected in Krista what he wanted to effect in her. Renouncing his own mother, he laid that renunciation in the balance, and Krista seemed by so much the nearer to him. He gloried in his own orphanhood that Krista might bear to be an orphan more easily. He discarded his own mother as though he would discard even life itself for Krista’s sake.

Krista’s case was indeed different. She had never seen Venik’s mother; she had not known her, and so she thought that at the Riha’s there had never been a Mrs. Riha, and that Venik all his life had never had a mother. But now when Venik announced his loss, Krista perceived that what he did not possess he had really lost. “Did they bury your mamma?” asked Krista, as if all at once his misfortune presented itself to her imagination.

“They did not bury her,” said Venik, “because I was still quite little and it was winter, but in the cemetery she lies for all that.”

Venik’s mind was haunted by a notion that when his mother’s death took place people had said that they were not going to bury her; and he had clung to this idea ever since, just as it happens still oftener that a chance word which we have heard in childhood, and which we have clothed with a wholly incorrect meaning, hampers us with that incorrect meaning years after our reason has learnt the right one. So Venik till now would have it that his mother was not buried, that thus she was perhaps not entirely a corpse, and that consequently he was exaggerating a little when he said that he had not a mother either.

“Stay, if she is not buried let us bury her here on the hillside,” said Krista, “and then you will always be near her; you shall dig the grave and I will bring her here.”

Very little of all this certainly did Venik under- stand, either of what Krista wanted to do or what she had got in her mind. But children quickly adapt themselves to everything. They pretend a tile to be a basin, a fragment of crumbling earth to be a cake, a pebble is a house, a bit of wood is a shopkeeper, the trestle of a table is a school, a scrap of rag is a shopful of dresses, a scrap of paper is a book. The fancies of children are omnipotent, and if a child says “our apartments with papa and mamma are better than the whole world,” it is true from the moment that the child says it.

So when Krista got up to bring Venik’s mamma, Venik got up also and began to make his mamma’s grave beside the hollow tree. He grubbed in the earth with his pocket knife. And when he had done with the grave Krista brought his mamma. She had her lapful of her, and had collected her all over the wood and over the hillside.

And now they began to lay her in the tomb. First Krista strewed the grave with moss that mamma might feel it soft beneath her. Then she took a briar in full bloom and said, “look, that is her heart,” and she laid the briar in the middle of the grave. Then she took two willow wands and said, “Look, those are her hands, and laid them next the heart. Then two other wands were for two feet, and finally she took from her lap sweet marjoram, and said, “Look, that is her head,” and laid it on the top. Nothing more was wanted in her opinion to make a woman. So the corpse was done with and Venik’s little mother lay in the grave.

After this began the funeral in due form. Krista began to weep, and Venik wept with her. And they wept in earnest. Then Venik took his violin and played a “miserere,” just as he usually did in the cemetery, and Krista sang. Then Krista sang over the funeral hymns, and Venik accompanied her on his violin. They sang and played everything they knew; they sang funeral hymns for the burial of a child; then those for youths, and lastly those for adults. And they sang and played with so much earnestness and with so much warmth of feeling that they were both quite ill after it, and hiccoughed with emotion. A more touching funeral never took place in reality than the imaginary one conducted by these children. If the spirit of Venik’s mother hovered above them, doubtless it rejoiced and wept with them.

Then the little gravedigger filled in the grave with earth, and his little mother was buried. They still had to sing over, “Oh! rest in peace,” and afterwards “We bid adieu to this body, we bury it in peace.” Thereupon they quitted the tomb to the sound of the song and the violin. But once more they returned, not indeed to the grave exactly, but aside to the hollow tree, for Venik said that he would compose a requiem, and that there should be a full choral mass. And he played and Krista sang. They played and sang through all the solos, and the hollow tree was both church and gallery.

Even when late that evening they drove home the flock they were still sobbing and crying, and the next day Krista would’nt think of going to school, “for you know,” she said, “it is the vigil after the funeral.”

Under the Hollow Tree, chapter 2

CHAPTER II.

FROM that day forth these children felt that they were equals. From that day forth one was no more an orphan than the other. From that day forth the hillside was their consecrated ground, it was also their home. In the house they had a father, even Krista had a father in old Riha; on the hillside they had a mother, even Krista had there a mother. Immediately after school she used to be with Venik, and when there was no school she was with him the whole day.

Such days were like saints days to both of them. Then she sang till her voice rang all through the woodland, and Venik would play on his violin, till people going past used to pause, and all the shepherds of the village would most gladly have pastured their flocks on the hillside if they had had the right of pasturage there. When it rained the two crept into the hollow tree, and then it seemed as if the tree was resonant with string and song, as if in its old age it grew young again in heart and mouth, and as if itself played and sang.

The rain drops fell splashing among the leaves of the old tree, and from its hollow, from its extinct portion, issued songs as though the tree had a young heart and a young mouth. When the sun shone the children seated themselves before the tree in the cool shade; and while all around the faded grass drooped and died, in the cool shade of that hollow it grew rich and strong as if it had been watered by the dew.

After a time Venik learnt also to imitate the birds on his violin, and when he had a mind could arouse such a concert that Krista herself sat beside him in astonishment, and as if in the presence of a revelation.

In the meantime Krista learnt to sing at school, and learnt also with Venik; at school with more ardour than formerly, in order to give pleasure to Venik, and when with Venik with more ardour still, in order to give pleasure to him and herself too. And so over the hillside these two young artists fluttered like two birds with happy notes. They reanimated it, for all its life the like of these had never there been heard. They were like the living heart of that hillside; they were its language and its speech, and could well have been a consolation to any who chose to listen to their conversation.