They stood before me—these two old men grown grey in adversity—as small children stand before a stern father, feeling their helplessness; the lame shoemaker with the hollow eyes, leaning on his stick, and that huge peasant with his hands hanging down and head bowed humbly, imploring this in a quiet whisper.
We should certainly have sat there a long while in painful musing if it had not been for the shoemaker. Stanisław was the first to rouse himself from the lethargy into which we had fallen.
"What the devil are we doing! Maciej, bestir yourself! The sausages are burning in there, and the brandy is getting stale! Eh, Maciej, look sharp!"
Maciej crept to the kitchen, and returned to us—not, to say the truth, very quickly—preceded by the smell of well-fried sausages. We shook off our lethargy so slowly, however, that even the brisk shoemaker had to make an effort to put a good face on it. His first toast was, "The success of the letters." To this Maciej responded with "Amen," and a sigh which might have come from a pair of blacksmith's bellows. The vodka did its work, however. Our recent emotion strengthened its effect, and after two glasses even an observant person would never have guessed what we had thought and felt here a few moments earlier, but for the letters lying in Stanisław's trunk. The last vestiges of sadness were charmed away by the little song which Stanisław began to sing:
"The splinters fall in showers
Where woodmen trees are felling;
Oh, good and pretty children
Are dear beyond all telling!"
But in his present cheerful frame of mind Maciej protested energetically against even this slight echo of sadness.
"Eh! just you shut up about your children! I've five of them, and I don't care as much for them all together as you do for the one."
The shoemaker evidently acknowledged the justice of this bold remark, for he passed it over in silence, and only proposed to Maciej with a gesture to put on the samovar. Maciej did his work in the kitchen noisily and cheerily. He had completely forgotten about his favourite place, "the little bench a bit stronger," and he returned to us without delay. His voice, always absolutely unsuited to the acoustic properties of the room, now sounded as perhaps it once did in those years on the fields of Mazowsze. When he spoke, it was simply a shout, for he did not modify the intonation by any expression whatever. He talked about his work, gesticulated, and waved his arms; when obliged to stand up, he moved suddenly, and the same when he sat down; he became indignant, and retracted his words; he squeezed his fingers together and spread them out; but he did all this slowly and accurately, just in the way he spoke. He said not a single word nor related a single fact without supporting and illustrating it by expressive mimicry, by a movement or a pose, which he always tried to make as near the original as possible. So when I returned to his protests against the shoemaker's sadness, and asked him: "Have you five sons, Maciej?" he answered: "Five, like the five fingers on my hand"; and, holding up his fist, he carefully spread out his fingers one by one. He laughed long and heartily at this, in the way that only children laugh, his whole body shaking.
But it was not only his laugh that was childlike; Maciej's big broad face, portraying his inward calm, reminded me of the face of a little child whose thoughts have as yet not influenced its features. In proportion to his height and breadth Maciej's head seemed to me smaller than it really was. His wide neck diminished it still more. But when he sat down, resting his hands on his knees in his usual manner, somehow his head disappeared entirely, and then from behind he was very like a pointed hayrick, while from the side he reminded me of those clumsy but impressive figures which people of past ages cut out in rocks and stone.