Three Stories/Under the Hollow Tree/Chapter 1
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CHAPTER I.
HEN Venik was twelve years old, his father Riha took him from school. “You must help us now,” he said. “You will be our little shepherd, and will drive off the sheep to the hillside; then in the afternoon I will bring you your dinner there, and you will come home yourself for the evening meal.”
Venik spun round with delight on his right heel. His teeth flashed out from his gums, and his father added, “Take your violin with you to the pasturage.” After this, Venik was like one possessed; he skipped about the apartment, till he had skipped up to his violin, taken it down from its nail, stretched several of the strings, and played and skipped about at the same time.
Venik, it must be understood, learnt the violin at school, and on Sunday used to play primo in the gallery so well that the schoolmaster composed a solo in the gloria expressly for him; and when Venik played, people at church turned their eyes to the gallery instead of looking at the altar. But no one could see him from below, he was still so small that he scarcely touched the rail of the gallery with his head. Then year after year the head emerged just over the rail, but the violin was yet invisible from below.
So then pretty early next morning Venik drove off the sheep to the hillside below the wood, and took with him his violin. Below the hillside murmured a river, on the hillside began to murmur the oakwood. Venik skirted the wood, and at the edge of it he noticed a single old tree whose trunk was hollow, so that four people could comfortably seat themselves inside. This tree looked as though it had stepped out from the wood. It had a sort of door and threshold; on the threshold, beside the entrance, squatted Venik, that he might look after the sheep, and he said to himself “Here I like to be: beside this tree I shall remain.”
When he had sat thus a short time and saw how the river fled away below him, and how the sheep kept creeping over the hillside, and how the wood behind him kept murmuring so softly, something stirred within him like the river, and something murmured softly like the woodland.
But when birds began to call to one another from the wood, Venik thought that he ought to answer them. He took his violin to make them some response. He played a whole mass in their behoof and his own, just as he had played it last in chapel. He thought that in that way he should soonest make friends with them by showing them what he knew.
He played: and when he came to the gloria, where he had the solo in chapel, he thought he ought to do his very best. He did his best, and played till his face shone. If those birds had understood anything about playing they must have been well contented with him. When he had finished playing you might have heard an answer, but it was not the birds who answered, it was the little Krista who, when Venik had finished playing, began to sing over her solo for last Sunday’s mass. Unseen she had crept behind the tree, and now betrayed herself by her singing.
Venik was the violinist of the gallery, and Krista was its chief songstress; she had a voice like a little angel, and when she sang people said it was like stringing pearls on a silken thread. Venik and Krista made music in the gallery side by side; and when one accompanied the other people said the chapel was like paradise; they were not brother and sister, but people called them “those children,” because they always learnt together, together walked home from school, and from home to school, and stood together in the gallery. The village folk talked about “those children” on their way to the chapel; “those children” were like a miracle to them when they heard them in chapel, and they talked about “those children” again all the way from chapel.
Krista was an orphan; she was now nine years old, and had no recollection of her parents. She was attached to the home of Venik’s father like the swallow’s nest which hung from the eaves, and which no one thought of pulling down. Venik’s father, perhaps, did not the least know why he had her at his house. It may have been because she was an orphan; or, perhaps, it may have been because of her sweet little voice. She was like that swallow’s nest under the cornice: no one pulled down that nest.
Venik’s father was sometimes known as the cottager, because there was another Riha in the village—a peasant proprietor—the brother of Riha the cottager. They also talked of Riha as Riha the widower, because Venik had already lost his mother.
When Krista began to sing behind the tree, Venik put down his violin, turned in the direction where sat the little songstress, beat time to her, nodded with his head, and was well satisfied. But when she had quite ended he roughly accosted her: “Krista, why are you not at school,” he said.
“Why are you not there too,” said Krista.
“I, indeed! I am twelve years old and belong to school no longer, but you are only nine.”
“I dont belong there either now,” retorted Krista, “and I wont go!”
“How dare you? if Papa knew of it he would drive you there,” retorted Venik angrily.
“I am come to feed the sheep with you, and you want to drive me away,” pleaded Krista.
On this Venik stood up, took her by the hand, and said imperiously, “Go at once, or I will drive you hence. Hie away to school!”
“I wont go, and you know it,” retorted Krista.
And when she would’nt stir an inch, Venik took her round the waist and dragged her as far as his strength sufficed. Krista staggered back, sank to the ground, burst into tears, and cried plaintively, “Ah! I am only a poor orphan girl.”
These words touched Venik. He forgot all at once that he had to send her to school, and only saw that Krista was in plaintive mood, and that he was the cause of it. He stood as if fixed to the ground, and did not know in which direction to move, whether towards Krista or towards the tree; then he went to the tree and sat himself there. He wished to play but it would’nt come. No mass, no song even occurred to him. Then he looked round at Krista and could have cried with her, could have gone to her, could have soothed her, could have asked her pardon and have excused her school, but he did not know how he could do that.
He felt even worse when Krista ceased to cry, when she raised her head and in silent sort reiterated what she had said before in words. When having her hands clasped and herself sunk to earth, and when having her eyes full of salt tears and fixed on the vague distance, like an actor in his part, she confirmed even by the expression of her countenance the signature over which was written, “Ah! I am but a poor orphan girl.”
As she sat thus plunged in her childish grief, Venik silently approached her, squatted himself beside her, and after a few moments said, “Krista, how does it feel to be an orphan.”
He said it with all the sympathy of which, at his age, he was capable. He said it as if he would have told her, “Tell me how it feels and I will share it with you.”
“How does it feel?” said Krista, in reply to his question. “When I have only you, and you drive me from you, how can I be anything but an orphan?” and her eyes still moist with weeping turned from the vague distance to him, and were full of mute reproach
“Nay, I do not drive you from me, but I want you to go to school, and to school you must go, for you are not twelve years old like me,” said Venik.
“I dont want to go to school any more,” retorted Krista, “I like to be here on the hill side, and stay here I will.”
“And where will you learn to sing?” asked Venik as a last resource.
“With you,” said Krista, and this quite beat Venik what to say next.
However, he answered, “You might go to school, and after school come here on the hill side. Lord! how we should get on if you learnt at school and here as well!”
At these words Krista fella thinking, then she looked at Venik, took him by the hand and said, “You are right, I will do so. I will go to school, and after school I will come to you on the hill side.”
Thus did these two young diplomatists come to a mutual understanding. And when both were satisfied, Venik said, “Are you still a poor orphan girl, Krista?”
“You know that I am an orphan. I have neither papa nor mamma,” she said, and Venik felt again so sorry, that he thought he must still try to do something for Krista to make her less an orphan.
And he said, “I have no mother either.” He said it as if he gloried in it, and as if he made Krista a sort of present, and as if that present was the mother whom he had lost.
Venik thought then that he had effected in Krista what he wanted to effect in her. Renouncing his own mother, he laid that renunciation in the balance, and Krista seemed by so much the nearer to him. He gloried in his own orphanhood that Krista might bear to be an orphan more easily. He discarded his own mother as though he would discard even life itself for Krista’s sake.
Krista’s case was indeed different. She had never seen Venik’s mother; she had not known her, and so she thought that at the Riha’s there had never been a Mrs. Riha, and that Venik all his life had never had a mother. But now when Venik announced his loss, Krista perceived that what he did not possess he had really lost. “Did they bury your mamma?” asked Krista, as if all at once his misfortune presented itself to her imagination.
“They did not bury her,” said Venik, “because I was still quite little and it was winter, but in the cemetery she lies for all that.”
Venik’s mind was haunted by a notion that when his mother’s death took place people had said that they were not going to bury her; and he had clung to this idea ever since, just as it happens still oftener that a chance word which we have heard in childhood, and which we have clothed with a wholly incorrect meaning, hampers us with that incorrect meaning years after our reason has learnt the right one. So Venik till now would have it that his mother was not buried, that thus she was perhaps not entirely a corpse, and that consequently he was exaggerating a little when he said that he had not a mother either.
“Stay, if she is not buried let us bury her here on the hillside,” said Krista, “and then you will always be near her; you shall dig the grave and I will bring her here.”
Very little of all this certainly did Venik understand, either of what Krista wanted to do or what she had got in her mind. But children quickly adapt themselves to everything. They pretend a tile to be a basin, a fragment of crumbling earth to be a cake, a pebble is a house, a bit of wood is a shopkeeper, the trestle of a table is a school, a scrap of rag is a shopful of dresses, a scrap of paper is a book. The fancies of children are omnipotent, and if a child says “our apartments with papa and mamma are better than the whole world,” it is true from the moment that the child says it.
So when Krista got up to bring Venik’s mamma, Venik got up also and began to make his mamma’s grave beside the hollow tree. He grubbed in the earth with his pocket knife. And when he had done with the grave Krista brought his mamma. She had her lapful of her, and had collected her all over the wood and over the hillside.
And now they began to lay her in the tomb. First Krista strewed the grave with moss that mamma might feel it soft beneath her. Then she took a briar in full bloom and said, “look, that is her heart,” and she laid the briar in the middle of the grave. Then she took two willow wands and said, “Look, those are her hands, and laid them next the heart. Then two other wands were for two feet, and finally she took from her lap sweet marjoram, and said, “Look, that is her head,” and laid it on the top. Nothing more was wanted in her opinion to make a woman. So the corpse was done with and Venik’s little mother lay in the grave.
After this began the funeral in due form. Krista began to weep, and Venik wept with her. And they wept in earnest. Then Venik took his violin and played a “miserere,” just as he usually did in the cemetery, and Krista sang. Then Krista sang over the funeral hymns, and Venik accompanied her on his violin. They sang and played everything they knew; they sang funeral hymns for the burial of a child; then those for youths, and lastly those for adults. And they sang and played with so much earnestness and with so much warmth of feeling that they were both quite ill after it, and hiccoughed with emotion. A more touching funeral never took place in reality than the imaginary one conducted by these children. If the spirit of Venik’s mother hovered above them, doubtless it rejoiced and wept with them.
Then the little gravedigger filled in the grave with earth, and his little mother was buried. They still had to sing over, “Oh! rest in peace,” and afterwards “We bid adieu to this body, we bury it in peace.” Thereupon they quitted the tomb to the sound of the song and the violin. But once more they returned, not indeed to the grave exactly, but aside to the hollow tree, for Venik said that he would compose a requiem, and that there should be a full choral mass. And he played and Krista sang. They played and sang through all the solos, and the hollow tree was both church and gallery.
Even when late that evening they drove home the flock they were still sobbing and crying, and the next day Krista would’nt think of going to school, “for you know,” she said, “it is the vigil after the funeral.”
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