“What a beautiful tradition!” exclaimed Pani Osnovski. And, raising her hands, she began to move them, imitating the motion of wings, and repeating,—
“This way, forever through the air.”
The comparison flattered her, though she was astonished that Pan Stanislav had uttered it with a serious voice, but with an inattentive and, as it were, ironical face. He began to interest her, for he seemed very intelligent, and more difficult to master than she had expected.
Meanwhile they arrived at Three Fountains. They visited the garden, the church, and the chapel, in the basement of which three springs were flowing. Pan Osnovski explained, in his kind, somewhat monotonous voice, what he had read previously. Marynia listened with interest; but Pan Stanislav thought,—
“Still to live three hundred and sixty-five days in a year with him, must be a little tiresome.”
That justified Pani Osnovski in his eyes for the moment; she, taking upon herself now the new role of bird of paradise, did not rest for a moment, not merely on the ground, but on any subject. First she drank eucalyptus liquor, which the cloister prepared as a means against fever; then she declared decisively that if she were a man she would be a Trappist. Later, however, she remembered that her sailing career would be agreeable “ever between sea and sky, as if living in endlessness;” at last the wish to become a great, a very great writer, gained the day against everything else,—a writer describing the minutest movements of the soul, half-conscious feelings, desires incompletely defined, all forms, all colors, all shades. The party learned also, as a secret, that she was writing her memoirs, which “that honest Yozio” considers a masterpiece; but she knows that that is nothing, she has not the least pretensions, and she ridicules Yozio and the memoirs.
“Yozio” looks at her with loving eyes, and with great affection on his pimpled face, and says with a protest,—
“As to the memoirs, I beg pardon greatly.”
They drove away about sundown. There were long shadows from the trees; the sun was large and red. The distant aqueducts and the Alban hills were gleaming in rose-color. They were halfway when the “Angelus” was sounded in the tower of St. Paul’s, and immediately after were heard a second, a third, a tenth. Each church gave the signal to the succeeding one; and such a mighty chorus was formed as if the whole air were ringing, as if the “Angelus” had been sounded not merely by the city, but the whole region, the plains, and the mountains.
Pan Stanislav looked on Marynia’s face, lighted by the golden gleams. There was great calm in it and attention. It was evident that she was repeating the “Angelus” now, as she had repeated it in Kremen, when it was sounded in Vantory. Always and everywhere the same. Pan Stanislav remembered again the “service of God.” It seemed to him more simple and pacifying than ever. But now, while approaching the city, he understood the permanence, the vitality, the immensity, of those beliefs. “All this,” thought he, “has endured thus for a thousand and a half of years; and the strength and certainty of this city is only in those towers, those bells, that permanence of the cross, which endures and endures.” Again Svirski’s words came to him: “Here a ruin, on the Palatine a ruin, in the Forum a ruin, but over the city crosses, crosses, crosses and crosses.” It seemed to him beyond a doubt that in that very permanence there is something superhuman. Meanwhile the bells sounded, and the heavens above the city were covered with twilight. Under the impression produced by the praying Marynia, and the bells, and that vesper feeling, which seemed to hover over the city and the whole land, the following thought began to take form in Pan Stanislav, who had much mental directness: “What an idiot and vain fool should I be, in view of the needs of faith and that feeling of God, were I to seek some special forms of love and reverence of my own, instead of accepting those which Marynia calls ‘service of God,’ and which still must be the best, since the world has lived nearly two thousand years in them!” Then the reasoning side of this thought struck him as a practical man, and he continued to himself, almost joyously: “On one side the traditions of a thousand years, the life of God knows how many generations and how many societies, for which there was and is delight in those forms, the authority for God knows how many persons who consider them as the only forms; on the other side, who? I, a partner in the commission house of Bigiel and Polanyetski; and I had the pretension to think out something better into which the Lord God would fit Himself more conveniently. For this it is needful at least to be a fool! I, besides, am a man sincere with myself; and I could not endure it if from time to time the thought came to me,—I am a fool. But my mother believed in this, and my wife believes; and I have never seen greater peace in any one than in them.”