CHAPTER XIX.
Autumn, in its last days, smiles on people at times with immense sadness, but mildly, like a woman dying of decline. It was on such a mild day that Litka’s funeral took place. There is pain mingled with a certain consolation in this,—that those left behind think of their dead and feel the loss of them. Pan Stanislav, occupied with the funeral, was penetrated by that calm and pensive day with still greater sadness; but, transferring Litka’s feelings to himself, he thought that the child would have wished just such a day for her burial, and he found in this thought a certain solace. Till that moment he had not been able simply to measure his sorrow; such knowledge comes later, and begins only when the loved one is left in the graveyard, and a man returns by himself to his empty house. Besides, preparations for the funeral had consumed Pan Stanislav’s whole time. Life has surrounded with artificial forms, and has complicated, such a simple act as death. Pan Stanislav wished to show Litka that last service, which, moreover, there was no one else to perform. All those springs of life through which man thinks, resolves, and acts, were severed in Pani Emilia by the death of her child. This time the wind seemed too keen for the fleece of the lamb. Happily, however, excessive pain either destroys itself, or benumbs the human heart. This happened with Pani Emilia. Pan Stanislav noticed that the predominant expression of her face and eyes was a measureless, rigid amazement. As in her eyes there were no tears, so in her mouth there were no words,—merely a kind of whisper, at once tragic and childish, showing that her thought did not take in the misfortune, but hovered around the minutiæ accompanying it; she seized at these, and attended to them with as much carefulness as if her child were alive yet. In the room, now turned into a chamber of mourning, Litka, reposing on a satin cushion amid flowers, could want nothing; meanwhile the heart of the mother, grown childish from pain, turned continually to this: what could be lacking to Litka? When they tried to remove her from the body, she offered no resistance; she merely lost the remnant of her consciousness, and began to groan, as if pained beyond endurance.
Pan Stanislav and her husband’s brother, Pan Hvastovski, who had come just before the funeral, strove to lead her away at the moment Litka was covered with the coffin-lid; but when Pani Emilia began to call the little one by name, courage failed the two men.
The procession moved at last with numerous torches, and drew after it a train of carriages, preceded by priests, chanting gloomily, and surrounded by a crowd of the curious, who in modern cities feed their eyes with the sorrow of others, as in ancient times they fed them in the circus with the blood of people.
Pani Emilia, attended by her husband’s brother, and having Marynia at her side, walked also behind the caravan with dry and expressionless face. Her eyes saw only one detail, and her mind was occupied with that alone. It had happened that a lock of Litka’s flaxen, immensely abundant hair was outside the coffin. Pani Emilia did not take her eyes from it the whole way, repeating again and again, “O God, O God! they have nailed down the child’s hair!”
In Pan Stanislav’s sorrow, weariness, nervous disturbance, resulting from sleeplessness, became a feeling of such unendurable oppression that at moments he was seized by an invincible desire to turn back when he had gone halfway,—return home, throw himself on a sofa, not think of anything, not wish anything, not love any one, not feel anything. At the same time this revulsion of self-love astounded him, made him indignant at himself: he knew that he would not return; that he would drain that cup to the bottom, that he would go to the end, not only because it would happen so, but because sorrow for Litka, and attachment to her, would be stronger than his selfishness. He felt, too, at that moment, that all his other feelings were contracted and withered, and that for the whole world he had in his heart merely nothing, at least, at that moment. For that matter his thoughts and feelings had fallen into perfect disorder, composed of external impressions received very hastily, observations made, it was unknown why, and mixed all together mechanically with a feeling of sorrow and pain. At times he looked at the houses past which the procession was moving, and he distinguished their colors. At times some shop sign caught his eye; this he read, not knowing why he did so. Then again he thought that the priests had ceased to sing, but would begin directly; and he was waiting for that renewed continuance of sad voices, as if in a kind of dread. At times he reasoned like a man who, waking from sleep, wishes to give himself an account of reality: “Those are houses,” said he to himself; “those are signs; that is the odor of pitch from the torches; and there on the bier lies Litka; and we are going to the graveyard.” And all at once there rose in him a wave of sorrow for that sweet, beloved child, for that dear face which had smiled so many times at him. He recalled her from remoter and from recent days; remembered her in Reichenhall, where he carried her when returning from Thumsee; and later at Bigiel’s, in the country; and in Pani Emilia’s house, when she said that she wanted to be a birch-tree; and finally, when, a few hours before her death, she entreated Marynia to marry him. Pan Stanislav did not say directly to himself that Litka loved him as a grown woman loves, and that, in betrothing him to Marynia, she had performed an act of sacrifice, for the feelings of the little girl were not known, and could not be defined with precision; he felt perfectly, however, that there was something like that love in her, and that the sacrifice took place, flowed, in fact, from that deep and exceptional attachment which Litka had felt for him. Since the loss of even those who are dearest is felt most of all through the personal loss which we suffer, Pan Stanislav began to repeat to himself: “That was the one soul that loved me truly; I have no one in the whole world now.” And, raising his eyes to the coffin, to that tress of blond hair which was waving in the wind, he cried out in spirit to Litka with all those tender expressions with which he had spoken to her while in life. Finally, he felt that tears were choking him, because that was a call without echo. There is something heart-rending in the indifference of the dead. When the one who reflected every word and glance has become indifferent, when the loving one is icy, the one who was near in daily life, and next the heart, is full of solemnity, and far away, it avails not to repeat to one’s self: “Death, death!” In addition to all pain connected with the loss, there is a harrowing deception, as if an injustice to the heart had been wrought by that lifeless body, which remains deaf to our pain and entreaty. Pan Stanislav had, in this manner, at the bottom of his soul, a feeling that Litka, by taking herself from him, and going to the region of death, had done an injustice; and from being one who is near, she had become one remote; from being a confidant, she had become formal, far away, lofty, sacred, and also perfectly indifferent to the despair of her mother and the deep loneliness of her nearest friend. There was much selfishness in those feelings of Pan Stanislav; but were it not for that selfishness, which, first of all, has its own loss and loneliness in mind, people, especially those who believe in life beyond the grave and its happiness, would feel no grief for the dead.
The procession passed out at last from the city to clearer and more open spaces, and beyond the barrier advanced along the cemetery wall, which was fronted with a garland of beggars, and with garlands of immortelles and evergreens intended for grave mounds. The line of priests in white surplices, the funeral procession with torches, the hearse with the coffin, and the people walking behind it, halted before the gate; there they removed Litka. Pan Stanislav, Bukatski, Hvastovski, and Bigiel bore her to the grave of her father.
That silence, and the void which, after each funeral, is waiting for people at home when they return from fresh graves, seemed this time to begin even at the cemetery. The day was calm, pale, with here and there the last yellowed leaves dropping from the trees without a rustle. The funeral procession was belittled amid these wide, pale spaces, which, studded with crosses, seemed endless,—as if, in truth, that cemetery opened into infinity. The black, leafless trees with tops formed of slender branches, as it were, vanishing in the light, gray and white tombstones resembling apparitions, the withered leaves on the ground, covering long and straight alleys,—all these produced at once a genuine impression of Elysian fields of some sort, fields full of deep rest, but full also of deep, dreamy melancholy, certain “cold and sad places” of which the gloomy head of Cæsar dreamed, and to which now was to come one more “animula vagula.”
The coffin stopped at last above the open grave. The piercing “Requiem æternam” was heard, and then “Anima ejus.” Pan Stanislav, through the chaos of his thoughts and impressions, and through the veil of his own sorrow, saw, as in a dream, the stony face and glassy eyes of Pani Emilia, the tears of Marynia, which irritated him at that moment, the pale face of Bukatski, on whose features the expression was evident that his philosophy of life, having no work to do at that graveyard, had left him and Litka’s coffin at the gate. When each threw a handful of sand on the coffin-lid, he followed the example of others; when they lowered the coffin on straps into the depth of the grave, and closed the stone doors, something seized him anew by the throat, so that all of which he had been thinking, and had learned hitherto, was changed into one nothingness. He repeated in his soul the simple words: “Till we meet, Litus!”—words which, when he recalled them afterwards, seemed to have no relation to the torturing mental storm within him. This was the end. The funeral procession began to decrease and melt away. After a time Pan Stanislav was roused by the wind, which came from afar from between the crosses. He saw now at the grave Pani Emilia with Marynia, Pani Bigiel, Vaskovski, and Litka’s uncle; he said to himself that he would go out last, and waited, repeating in his soul, “Till we meet, Litus!” He was thinking of death, and of this,—that he, too, would come to this place of monuments, and that it is an ocean into which all thoughts, feelings, and efforts are flowing. It seemed to him then as if he and all who were there at the grave, or had returned home, were on a ship sailing straight to the precipice. Of life beyond the grave he had no thought at that moment.