Children of the Soil

by Henryk Sienkiewicz

“In every case I shall be in Prytulov to-morrow, or I shall write a letter; I hope that the answer will be favorable.”

Then he kissed her hands with great friendship, and, after a while, found himself alone in his droshky, in clouds of yellow dust, and in his own thoughts.

As an artist he was so accustomed to seizing in artist fashion various details which intruded themselves on his eyes that he did so even now, but mechanically, without proper consciousness, as if only at the surface of his brain. But in the depth of it he was meditating on everything that had happened.

“What the devil, Svirski!” said he to himself; “what is happening to thee? Hast thou not passed twenty-five years so as to be able to jump over this ditch? Has not that happened for which thou wert eager this morning? Where is thy transport? thy delight? Why art thou not shouting, At last! Thou art about to marry! Dost understand, old man? At last! At last!”

But that was vain urging. The internal man remained cold. He understood that what had happened ought to be happiness; but he did not respond to it. Greater and greater astonishment was seizing him. He had acted, it seems, with all knowledge and will and choice. He was not a child, nor frivolous, nor a hysterical person, who knows not what he wants. Having reasoned out, finally, that it would be well, he had not changed his opinion. Panna Ratkovski, too, was ever that same retiring, “very reliable person;” why did the thought that she would be the “little woman,” desired from of old, not warm him more vigorously? Why did hope, changed now almost into certainty, not turn into joy? And at the bottom of his soul there remained a certain feeling of disappointment.

“What I told her,” thought he, “might be adroit, but it was dry. Let a thunderbolt strike me, if it was not, and, besides, it was unfinished. Simply I have no certainty yet, and I do not feel the thing as finished.”

Here the impressions of an artist interrupted the thread of his thought. Sheep scattered on a sloping field visible from the road shaded by distance, and also bathed in the sunlight, seemed on the green background bright spots, with a strong tint of blue fringed with gold.

“Those sheep are sky blue,—impressionists are right in a small degree,” muttered Svirski; “but may the devil take them! I am going to marry!”

And he returned to his meditations. Yes! The result did not answer to his hope and expectation. There are various thoughts which a man does not wish to confess to himself; there are feelings also which he does not wish to turn into definite thoughts. So it was with Svirski. He did not love Panna Ratkovski, and here was the direct answer to all the questions which he put to himself. But he dodged this answer as long as he could. He did not like to confess that he took that girl only because he had a great wish to marry. He wanted to explain to himself that he did not feel the affair finished, which was an evasion. He was not in love! Others reached love through a woman; but he wanted to fit a woman to his general internal demand for loving,—that is, he went by a road the reverse of the usual one. Others, having a divinity, built for it a church; he, having a church ready, was bringing into it a divinity, not because he had worshipped the divinity with all his power previously, but because it seemed to him not badly fitted for the architecture of the temple. And now he understood why he had shown so much ardor and resolution in the morning, but was so cold at that moment. By this was explained too the immense impetus in carrying out his plan, and the want of spiritual “halleluia,” after it had been carried out.

Svirski’s astonishment began to pass into sadness. He thought that he would have done better, perhaps, if, instead of thinking so much about a woman, instead of forming theories of what a woman ought to be, he had caught up the first girl who pleased his heart and senses. He understood now that a man loves the woman whom he does love, and that he does not fit to her any preconceived ideas, for ideas of love—like children—can be born only of a woman. All this was the more felt by him since he was conscious that he could love immensely; and he saw more and more positively that he was not loving as he might love. He remembered what in his time Pan Stanislav had told him in Rome of a certain young doctor, who, trampled by a thoughtless puppet, said: “I know what she is; but I cannot tear my soul from her.” There was love strong as death; that man loved! It is unknown why Panna Castelli and Pan Ignas came at once to Svirski’s mind; he remembered also Pan Ignas’s face as he had seen it in Prytulov, lost in contemplation and, as it were, rapt into Heaven.