CHAPTER VII
The strawberries were ripening in the Przykop. The children from Starawieś would go there to look for them, and when they had all been gathered it would be the time for mushrooms. But the village children did not like the gloom that reigned in the Przykop, they were accustomed to let the rays of the burning sun scorch their brown bodies a still darker brown amid the flat turnip fields and immense plains covered with corn, where there were no shadows to arrest its full force.
The big pines commenced just at the back of Starydwór, and beyond those were the alders and willows, extending as far as the low-lying marshes, where the frogs croaked at night, the white water-lilies opened their golden calices at midday, and where towards evening the game from the royal forest in the blue distance beat a path through the rustling reeds on their way to quench their thirst at the pools. A long, long time ago the whole of the Przykop was said to have been an enormous lake, ten times as big as now. Now nothing remained of it but the basin in the centre, that deep depression which, so to speak, formed a hollow amid the yellow and green carpet of this fruitful corn-land. But at night, when the will-o'-the-wisps wandered about the marshes and danced on the duckweed, in which a man could be swallowed up if he did not take care where he put his foot, the pious people would make the sign of the cross when they were obliged to pass that way. For the will-o'-the-wisps were the souls of those who could not find peace in the grave.
Rosa Tiralla much preferred the Przykop to the bare fields. If she stood at the farm gate and looked across the fields she could see the whole way to Starawieś, the path she took to school every day, the wooden church tower and the cottage roofs covered with moss, that almost disappeared from view behind the pale, waving corn when it stood high. But from her bedroom window at the back of the house, she could look into the Przykop, where the dark trees rustled so strangely.
The white-faced child felt the mystery of the morass just as much as the brown-skinned children from Starawieś; but while it terrified them, it attracted her. How beautiful to be in the deep, cool shade when the sun was scorching outside. There was always a soft twilight under the trees, and when the light fell through the interlaced branches on the damp, green moss, it was no longer cruel, it was transfigured.
Even as a small child Rosa Tiralla had often been in the Przykop. Her nurse had always taken her there, for the wind, which swept across the plain endangering the life of the delicate child, was hardly felt there. The trees in the hollow were so well protected by the rising ground that only their tops rustled slightly in the wind. Rosa very often lifted the rusty latch of the gate that separated the morass from the little garden at the back of Starydwór. "How lovely the mountains and valleys of the Przykop were," thought the child of the plain. In her eyes the slight incline down which she used to glide was a deep, deep valley, and the hill she used to climb so laboriously, holding fast to the luxuriant moss, ferns, and projecting tree-roots, a big, big mountain.
The deer would approach Rosa without fear, and look at her with their limpid eyes. But she was full of fear; not of the deer, however, but of the other creatures which surrounded her in the Przykop. The older she grew, the more fearful she became. Marianna had told her too many tales about them. The deep, deep silence, in which the woodpecker's hammering on the bark used to sound like peals of thunder, made her shudder. And still she would not have liked to give up that sweet emotion, nor give up lying in the thick moss, gazing up into the tree-tops to find a bit of sky. She was always within call, and that reassured her. But if a sound found its way to her--her father's deep, bass voice, or her mother's treble, or the maid's "Psia krew, where have you got to?"--she would give a start as though she had been roughly handled or had been caught doing something wrong, and turn scarlet and sigh as she smoothed her thick, tousled hair.
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Rosa Tiralla was very busy looking for mushrooms in the Przykop this summer. It was the time of the damp, sultry dog-days, in which they sprang up in a night. But not many were eaten in Starawieś or the neighbourhood, for the public had been warned against them. The schoolmaster had also warned the children in the school; they were neither to gather nor eat any they were not quite sure of. People grew alarmed.
"Many people have made themselves ill with eating mushrooms," said Marianna to her mistress, when the latter spoke of sending Rosa to fetch some.