The Lighthouse Keeper

[Zbyszek]

I would like to make just one little comment on the following text. It is really a piece of LITERATURE! The author▓s intense national feeling has not prevented its recognition in other countries. Such situations used to happen not only in Panama. The human aspect of this unusual short story has been much appreciated. It has been translated into more than 25(!) languages in the world and you can find it in numerous collections of the best marine stories ever, along with Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway. I wish you a pleasant reading!
(please check for possible typing mistakes)
(Zbigniew & family)

Latarnik - The Lighthouse Keeper
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916), laureat nagrody Nobla, 1905

by Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916), the Nobel Prize winner, 1905.


Translated by MONIKA M. GARDNER

I

It so happened that the lighthouse-keeper in Aspinwall, not far from Panama, disappeared without leaving a trace. As this occurred during a storm it was supposed that the unfortunate man must have gone too near the edge of this island rock on which the lighthouse stood, and been washed away by a wave. This was the more probable, because his boat was not found the next day in its rocky niche. The post of lighthouse keeper therefore fell vacant; but it had to be filled as soon as possible, because the lighthouse is of no small importance both for the local shipping and for the vessels going from New York to Panama. The Mosquito Gulf abounds in sandbanks and reefs, through which navigation is difficult even in the day, but at night, especially in the fogs that often come up on those waters, heated through with the tropical sun, almost impossible. At such times the light of the lantern is the only guide for the numerous ships. The task of finding a new lighthouse √keeper devolved on the Consul of the United States who lived in Panama, and it was a task of no small difficulty; first, because it was absolutely necessary to find a successor to the post within twelve hours; secondly, because this was successor had to be trustworthy beyond the average, and it was therefore impossible to accept just the first who came; and lastly, because there was generally a dearth of candidates for the post. Life in the lighthouse tower is an extraordinarily hard one, and does not at all appeal to the natives of the south, lazy lovers of a free vagrant existence. The light-house-keeper is almost a prisoner. With the exception of Sundays he cannot stir from his island rock. A boat from Aspinwall brings him a stock of provisions and fresh water once a day; the man who bring these depart immediately; and in the whole of the little island that measures an acre, there is not one other human being. The lighthouse-keeper lives in the lighthouse, and keeps it in order. In the day he gives signals by handing out different coloured flags, according to the indications of the barometer, and in the evening he lights the lantern. That would be no great labour, if it were not that to get from the bottom to the lantern on the top on the tower he has to mount more than four hundred winding and exceedingly steep steps; yet the lighthouse-keeper must sometimes make that journey several times a day. To sum up, it is a claustral life, and even more that claustral, for it is a hermit▓s life. It is, therefore, not surprising that Mr. Isaac Folcombridge was in great perplexity where to find a permanent successor to the late lighthouse-keeper; and his joy may be imagined when that successor most unexpectedly appeared that very same day. He was a man already old, seventy years or more, but hale, erect, with the movements and bearing of a soldier. His hair was quite white; his complexion was an sunburnt as a Creole▓s, but judging from his blue eyes he belonged to not southern race. His face has an oppressed and, but honest, expression. Folcombridge took a fancy to him at the first glance. There was nothing left to do examine him, which resulted in the following conversation:
⌠Where do you come from?■
⌠I am a Pole.■
⌠What have you been doing up till now?■
⌠I▓ve led a roving life.■
A lighthouse-keeper must be fond of staying in one place.■
⌠I need rest.■
⌠have you ever been in any public service? Have you got any testimonial of good official service?■
The old man drew out from his breast-pocked a discoloured silk rag, resembling a strip of an old flag, unrolled it, and said:
⌠Here are my testimonials. I won this cross in ▓30. This second one is Spanish from the Carlist war, The third the French legion▓s: the fourth I got in Hungary. After that I fought in the States against the south, but there they don▓t give crosses. But here▓s a paper.■
Folcombridge took the paper and began reading.
⌠H▓m! Skawinski? That▓s your name? H▓m!...Two fags captured by your own hand in a bayonet charge. You▓ve been a plucky soldier.■
⌠I can be a good lighthouse-keeper too.■
⌠You▓ll have to go up the tower over there several times a day. Are your legs strong?■
⌠I▓ve crossed the plains on foot.■
(They call the immense prairies between New York and California plains.)
⌠All right ! Do you know anything about life at sea ? ⌠
⌠I served three years on a whaler.■
⌠You▓ve tried different occupations ?■
⌠It▓s because I never could find peace anywhere.■
⌠Why ?▓
The old man shrugged his shoulders.
⌠Fate.■
⌠You look to me too old for a lighthouse-keeper.■
⌠Sir !■ The candidate burst out in agitate tones. ⌠I am very tired and battered about. You see I▓ve gone through a lot. This post is one of those I▓ve most longed to get. I▓m old. I need rest. I need to be able to say to myself: You are going to settle down here now, you▓re in port. Oh, sir ! this depends only on you. A post like this mayn▓t fall vacant again. It was lucky that I was in Panama....I implore you....So help me God, I▓m like a ship which, if it doesn▓t get into port, will founder....If you want to make an old man happy...I swear that I▓m an honest man, but...I▓ve had enough of all that wandering.■
The old man▓s eyes were so beseeching that Folcombridge, who was kind and simple of hearth, felt touched.
⌠Well !■ he said. ⌠I accept you. You are the lighthouse-keeper.■
The old man face lit up with unspeakable joy.
⌠Thank you.■
Can you go to the tower to-day ?■
Yes, of course.■
⌠Well, then, good-bye. Just one word: for the slightest negligence in your duty you▓ll be dismissed.■
⌠All right.■
That same evening, when the sun had sunk to the other side of the isthmus and after a gorgeous day night without twilight had set in, the new lighthouse-keeper was evidently at his post, for the lantern cast as usual its sheaves of brilliant light over the water. The night was absolutely calm, still, a true tropical night, saturated with a bright mist that formed a great rainbow-coloured ring with faint melting edges round moon. Only the sea was restless, because the tide was coming in. Skawinski, looking from below like a little black dot, stood on the balcony close to the mighty lantern. He tried to collect his thoughts and to take in his new position. But his mind was too oppressed to be able to work properly. He felt somewhat as a hunted beast feels when it at last finds shelter in a inaccessible rock or cave. The time for rest had come for him at last.
[typed by Ania ]

A feeling of security filled his soul with speechless delight. Yes, from this rock he could afford to laugh at his old wanderings, his old misfortunes and failures. He was, in fact, like a ship whose masts had been smashed by the tempest, its ropes, its sails rent, which the storm had sent hurtling from the clouds to the bottom of the sea, on which the waves had beaten, the foam spat √ and yet which had come into port. Memories of that storm now passed swiftly through his mind in contrast with the tranquil future which was now to begin. He had Falconbrige a part of his strange vicissitudes, but he had not mentioned thousands of other adventures. His misfortune had been that as often as he pitched his tent and lit the fire on his hearth to settle down for good, the wind tore away the tent pegs, scattered the ashes of his fire, and brought himself to ruin. Gazing now from the balcony of the tower on the shining waves he recalled all that he had passed through. He had fought in the four quarters of the globe √ and during his wanderings had tried nearly every calling. Hardworking and honest, he had often made a little money, and in spite of all his precautions and the greatest prudence had always lost it. He had been a gold-digger in Australia, searched for diamonds in Africa, had been a government hunter in the East Indies. When at one time he had started a farm in California a drought ruined him. He tried trading with the savage races inhabiting the interior of Brazil; his raft capsized on the Amazon, and he himself, unarmed and nearly naked, had taken refuge in the forests for several weeks, eating wild fruit, each moment exposed to death from the jaws of beast of prey. He had opened a blacksmith▓s forge in Helena, in Arkansas, and it was burnt to the ground in a great fire that raged through all the town. Next, he fell into hands of Indians in the Rocky Mountains, and it was only by a miracle that Canadian hunters rescued him. He served as a sailor on a vessel plying between Bahia and Bordeaux, afterwards as a harpooner on a whaler; both ships foundered.
He had cigar factory in Havana, and was robbed by his partner while he was lying sick of dysentery. Finally, he went to Aspinwall; and here he had surely come to an end of his misfortunes. For what more could overtake him on this island rock? Neither water nor fire nor man. As a matter of fact, Skawinski had experienced little harm from mankind. He more often met good men than bad.
Yet it seemed as though four elements persecuted him. Those who new him said that luck was against him, and so explained it. He himself at last became a little bit of monomaniac upon the subject. He believed that some powerful and avenging hand was pursuing him everywhere, by land and water. He disliked speaking about it; but sometimes, when asked whose hand it was, he would point mysteriously to the Polar Star, and say that it came from there. As a matter of fact his misadventures were so persistent that it was curious, and could easily have made any one get that idea into his head, especially the man who experienced them. Yet he had the patience of an Indian, and the great and quiet resisting power that springs from rectitude of soul. During his service in Hungary he received several bayonet thrusts because he refused to seize the strap shown him as his means of safety and cry: ⌠I surrender!■ Similarly he never gave in under his troubles. He crawled upwards as laboriously as an ant. Thrust down a hundred times, for hundred and first time he would calmly begin his journey over again. In his way he was something quite extraordinary. That old soldier, scorched in God knows what fires, steeled in adversity, beaten and moulded, had the heart of child. When there was an epidemic in Cuba he caught it because he gave away all his quinine of which he had a large stock without keeping so much as a grain for himself.
There was also this curious thing about him, that after so many disillusions he was always full of confidence, and never lost hope that all would be still well. In the winter he was always filled with fresh life, and foresaw great events. He waited for them impatiently, and for many a year lived on the thought of them. But one after the other the winters passed away and all Skawinski won by waiting was that his hair turned white. Finally, he grew old. He began to lose his energy. His patience began ever more to resemble resignation. His old tranquility changed into a tendency to sensibility, and that hardened soldier was beginning to degenerate into a fretful child, liable to melt into tears at the slightest pretext. Besides which, from time to time he was gripped by a terrible homesickness, which was the most trifling circumstance would rouse: the sight of swallows, of gray birds resembling sparrows, snow on the mountains, or some tune like one he had once heard.
At last he was overpowered by one thought only: the thought of rest. It took complete possession of the old man, and absorbed all other desires and hopes. The eternal wanderer could now picture in his dreams nothing more desirable, nothing more precious than some quiet corner where he might rest and tranquilly await the end. Perhaps it was just because some curious freak of fate had cast him forth by land and sea, with scarcely breathing space, that he now imagined the greatest happiness a man could have would simply be mot to wander. That modest happiness was now indeed his by rights, but by now he was so used to disappointment that he thought of it as men are wont to dream of something unattainable. He dared not expect it. But now, suddenly in the course of twelve hours, he had obtained a post that seemed chosen out of all others in the world for him. Hence, it was not surprising that after he had lit his lantern in the evening he was as though stunned; that he asked himself if this were true, and he dared not answer, Yes. Yet at the same time reality spoke to him with invincible proofs; therefore one hour followed another, and he was still on the balcony. He gazed; he drank his fill; he was convinced. He might have been seeing the sea for the first time in his life. The lens of the lantern flung into the darkness a mighty cone of light, beyond which the old man▓s eyes were lost in a distance, that was pitch black, mysterious, and terrible. Yet that distance seemed to be running towards the light. Long jagged waves rolled out from the darkness and, roaring, reached as far as the foot of the little island and then their foaming manes were visible, glittering, rose coloured, in the light of the lantern. The tide was fast coming in and pouring over the sandbanks. The mysterious language of the ocean was approaching from the deep, ever stronger, ever louder; at times like the thunder of cannon, then as the soughing of mighty forest, again like a far-off confused clamour of human voices. At moments a hush. Then a few great sighs beat on the old man▓s ear, then, sobbing √ and again sullen explosions. At the last the wind blew the mist asunder, but drove before it black, ragged clouds which were veiling the moon. It began to blow rougher from the west. The billows leapt with fury on the lighthouse rock, licking the masonry support with foam. A storm growled in the distance. On the dark heaving on the waste a few green lamps flashed, hanging on the masts of ships. These little green dots now rose, now sank, now wavered to the right, now to the left. Skawinski went down into his room. The storm had begun to howl. Out there men on those ships were battling with the night, with the dark, with the waves; but inside the room it was quiet and still. Even the echoes of the storm but faintly penetrated the thick walls, and there was only the rhythmic tick-tack of the clock that seemed to rock the tired old man to sleep.
[the end of part I]

[Zbyszek]

II
Hours, days, and weeks began to slip away. Sailors say that sometimes when sea is very rough something calls them by their name out of the night and darkness. If the infinite ocean can thus call, then it may be that when a man grows old another infinitude darker still, and more mysterious, calls him too; and the more wearied he is with life the sweeter to him is that call. But if he would hear it there must be silence. Besides which, old age is faint to withdraw into solitude as though in anticipation of grave. The lighthouse was kind of grave to Skawinski. There is nothing more monotonous than that life in the tower. If young men consent to undertake it, after a given time they resign the post. Therefore a lighthouse-keeper is usually a man no longer young, gloomy by nature, and sufficient to himself. When he chances to leave his lighthouse and goes among men, he walks in their midst like a man woken out of a deep sleep. In the tower all those small trifles which ordinary life trains us to consider important are lacking. Everything with which the lighthouse-keeper comes into contact is huge, without concrete or definite form. The sky is one element, water the other; and between those immensities one solitary human soul. It is a life in which a man▓s thoughts are continual dream, and nothing rouses the lighthouse-keeper from this dream, not even his tasks. One day is like another day as two beads on a rosary, and the changes in the weather are, in fact, the only variety. Yet Skawinski was happier than he had ever been in his life before. He rose at daybreak, breakfasted, cleaned the lens of the lantern, and then sitting in the balcony gazed far out to sea; and his eyes could never have their fill of the pictures that he saw before him. On the immense background of turquoise blue there was usually a flock of swelling sails, shining so brilliantly in the rays of the sun that he had to close his eyes against the excessive glare. Sometimes the ship, taking advantage of the eastern equatorial winds, went by in a long line behind the other like a string of gulls or albatrosses. The red buoys pointing out of the road rocked on the waves with a light, gentle motion. Every day at midday a huge grayish pennon of smoke appeared among the sails. It was the steamer from New York bringing passengers and cargo to Aspinwall, drawing behind it a long frothing trail of foam. From the other side of the balcony Skawinski saw it as on the palm of his hand Aspinwall and its busy harbour, inside the latter a forest of masts, ships, and boats, and a little farther of the white hoses and spires of the town. From the height of the tower the little houses looked like gulls▓ nests, the boats like black beetles, and the human being moving about on the white stone breakwater like minute specks. In the morning the light easterly breeze carried with it the confused clamour of human life, dominated by the whistles of steamboats. Midday brought the hour of the siesta. The activity in the harbour stopped. The gulls hid themselves in the crevices of the rocks the waves died down and seemed asleep; and then the moment of silence, unbroken by a single sound, came down on land and sea and lighthouse. The yellows sands, from which the waves had rolled back, glistened like spots of gold on the waste of water; the pillar of the tower was cut out sharply against the blue sky. Streams of sunlight flowed from the sky on the water on the sands, and on the rocks. At such times a sort of sweet faintness swept over th old man. He felt that this rest which he was enjoying was an exquisite thing, and when he told himself that it would last, he wanted nothing more. Skawinski was intoxicated with his own good fortune, but because a man soon grows to his better lot in life he gradually acquired faith and confidence; for he reflected that if men build homes for invalids, then wht should not God give shelter to His invalids when the end is nearly here? Time passed on and confirmed him in this conviction. The old man lived in the company of the tower, the lantern, the rock, the sanbanks, and solitude. He also made friends with the gulls who laid their eggs in the rocky clefts, and in the evening held their parliaments on the roof of the lighthouse. Skawinski usually threw the remains of his food but hey soon grew so used to him that when he did this he was surrounded by a perfect storm of white wings; the old man went about among the birds like a shepherd among his sheep. At low tide he went out on the low-lying sandbanks on which he gathered appetising shellfish and beautiful pearl-mussel shells which the retreating waves had washed up on the sand. At night, by the light of the moon and the lantern, he went after fish with which the crevices of the rocks swarmed. He ended by falling in love with his rock and his treeless island, covered with sturdy little plants exuding a sticky resin, the only thing that grew there. The distant views made up to him for the barrenness of the island. In the afternoon, when the atmosphere became very clear, the whole of the isthmus could be seen, covered as far as the Pacific with the most luxuriant vegetation. It seemed at such times to Skawinski as though he were looking at one gigantic garden. Clusters of coco-nut trees and mighty bananas were grouped like superb, tufted bouquets close behind the houses of Aspinwall. Farther away, between Aspinwall and Panama, an immense forest was to be seen, above which a reddish vapour rising from its exhalations always hung after sunrise and towards nightfall; a true tropical forest, soaked in its lower depths with stagnant water, entangled with lianas, murmuring like one wave of gigantic orchids, palms, milk-trees, iron-trees, and gum-trees.
Through his official telescope the old man could see not only the trees, not only the widespreading leaves of the bananas, but even troops of monkeys, of great marabouts, and flocks of parrots flying like a rainbow cloud over the forest. Skawinski knew that sort of forest at close quarters, because after he had been wrecked on the Amazon he had wandered for weeks under the same sort of trees and among the same sort of jungles. He had seen how under their lovely smiling surface danger and death lay hidden. In the nights he had spent within them he had heard close at hand the menacing voices of monkeys and the roar of jaguars; he had seen huge snakes swaying like lianas on trees; he knew those sluggish forest ponds overflowing with cramp-fish and swarming with crocodiles. He knew what dread a man lives under in those unfathomable jungles where a single leaf is ten times his size, which swarm with bloodthirsty mosquitoes, tree leeches, and gigantic poisonous spiders. He knew all this for himself. He himself had experienced it. He had won through it all himself. Therefore it was all the greater delight to him to look out from his height at those matos, to admire their
beauty, and yet to be shielded from their treachery. His tower guarded him against all evil. He only indeed left it at intervals, on Sunday mornings. He then put on his long blue official coat with silver buttons, hung his crosses on his breast; and he carried his milk-white head with a certain pride when, as he came out of church, he heard the Creoles say to one another: " We' ve got a proper lighthouse-keeper ! " "And not a heretic though he 's a Yankee " But he returned to the island immediately after Mass, and was glad to return, for he still felt some lurking distrust of the mainland. On Sundays, too, he would read a Spanish newspaper that he bought in the town, or the New York Herald, borrowed from Folcombridge, searching through them for their scanty news of Europe. Poor old heart ! In that watchtower and in another hemisphere it still beat for his country. Sometimes, also, when the boat that daily brought him his provisions and water landed at the island, he came down from the tower for a chat with the watchman, Johns. But he was noticeably growing more of a recluse. He ceased going to the town, reading newspapers, or coming down for Johns's political discussions. Whole weeks passed without his seeing any one or any one seeing him. The only sign that the old man was alive was the disappearance of the provisions left on the bank, and the light of the lantern that was lit each evening as regularly as the sun in those parts of the world rises out of the water. This was caused not by homesickness, but by the fact that homesickness had passed into resignation. The whole world now began and ended for the old man on his little island. He lived upon the thought that he would leave his island no more until his death, and he frankly forgot that there was anything left beyond it. Moreover he was becoming a mystic. His gentle blue eyes began to be the eyes of a child, eternally gazing, as though fastened on something far away. In his continual isolation and in surroundings that were of no ordinary simplicity and grandeur the old man began to lose the consciousness of his own identity; he was ceasing to exist as a separate personality, and was becoming ever more one with that which surrounded him. He did not reason about it, he only instinctively felt it; but in the end it seemed to him that the sky, the water, his rock, the tower, and the golden sandbanks, and the swelling sails and the gulls, the incoming and outgoing tide:;, were all one great harmony and one mighty, mysterious soul; and he was submerged in that mystery, and felf the presence of that soul which was living and at rest. He sank into it, ha was cradled by it, memory fled, and in that captivity of his own separate existence, in that half-consciousness, half-sleep, he found a peace so great that it almost resembled death.
[the end of part II]

[Edited by Zbyszek on 1st October 2002 at 15:15]

[Zbyszek]

III

But the awakening came.
One day after the boat had brought water and a stock of provisions, Skawinski, coming down an hour later from the tower, saw that besides the ordinary load there was another packet. On the outer cover of the packet there were United States postage stamps, and the address, ⌠Skawinski Esq.,■ written clearly on the rough canvas and saw books. He took one in his hand, looked, and laid it down again. Then his hands began trembling violently. He shaded his eyes, as though he could not trust them; he though he was dreaming; the book was Polish. What could this mean ? Who could have sent the book to him ? At the moment he had forgotten that quite at the beginning of his career in the lighthouse he had read one day in a Herald, borrowed from the consul, of the foundation of a Polish Society in New York, and that he had immediately sent the society half of his monthly salary, for which as a matter of fact he had no use in the tower. The society had sent him the books as a token of gratitude. They had come in a natural way, but at the first moment the old man could not grasp this idea. Polish books in Aspinwall, in his tower, in his solitude, were to his mind something extraordinary, like a breath of old days; a sort of miracle. Then it seemed to him as to those sailors in the night, that something had called him by his name in a voice greatly loved, but wellnigh forgotten. He sat for a minute with closed eyes, and he was almost certain that when he opened them the dream would vanish. No! The packet on which the afternoon rays of the sun were shining lay distinctly before him cut open and on it the open book. When the old man once more stretched out his hand for it he heard in the stillness the beating of his own heart. He looked. It was poetry. The title was written on the cover in large letters, and below was the name of the author. The name was not a stranger to Skawinski. He knew that it belonged to a great poet whose works he had even read after the year ▓30 in Paris1. Later, when he was fighting in Algeria and Spain, he heard from compatriots or the ever increasing fame of the great prophet-poet, but at that time he was not familiar with a gun that he never took a book in his hand. In the year ▓49 he went to America, and in the adventurous life he led he scarcely ever came across any Pole, and never a Polish book. So it was with all the greatest haste and with the more wildly palpitating heart that he turned the title-page. Then it seemed to him that something sacred was beginning to take place on his lonely rock. It was indeed a moment of great peace and stillness. The clocks of Aspinwall had struck five o▓clock in the afternoon. Not a single cloud cast a shadow over the bright sky, only a few gulls floated in its blue depths. The ocean was rocked to sleep. The quiet waves near the shore scarcely so much as rippled, as they melted gently away on the sands. The white houses of Aspinwall and the lovely groups of palms smiled in the distance. There was indeed something sacred, and quet and solemn. Suddenly in the midst of that peace of Nature the trembling voice of the old man rang out; he was reading aloud to make what he read easier for him to understand:
O Lithuania my country, thou
Art like good health ; I never knew till now
How precious, till I lost thee. Now I see
The beauty whole because I yearn for thee.

Skawinski▓s voice failed. The letters began to swim before his eyes. Something snapped in his breast, and ran like a wave from his heart higher and higher, stifling his voice, clutching his throat...A moment later he mastered himself, and read on:

O Holy maid, who Czestochowa▓s shrine
Dost guard and on the Pointed gateway shine
And watchest Nowogrodek▓s* pinnacle !

As thou didst heal me by a miracle
(For they my weeping mother sought thy power,
I raised my dying eyes, and in that hour
My strength returned and to Thy shrine I trod
For life restored to offer thanks to God),
So by a miracle Thou ▒lt bring us home...



(* The town in Lithuania where Mickiewicz lived when a boy).

The rising wave burst the barrier of the will. The old man uttered a loud cry, and flung himself on the ground; his milk-white hair mingled with the sand of the seashore. Forty years had passed since he had seen the country, and God knows how many since he heard his native language; yet here at this actual moment that language had come to him of its own accord; it had crossed the ocean, and found the lonely recluse in the other hemisphere; that language so beloved, so dear, so beautiful! In the sobbing which shook him there was no grief but only a suddenly awakened, infinite love, beside which all else was naught. That passionate weeping was simply his entreaty for forgiveness from the loved, distant country, because he had grown so old, lived so intimately with a solitary rock, and forgotten so much, that even the homesickness of his soul had begun to wear away. And now he had ⌠returned by a miracle■; and his heart was torn within him. The moments passed one after the other. He still lay there. Few gulls flew over the lighthouse, crying intermittently, as if uneasy about their old friend. It was near the hour when he used to feed them with the remains of his provisions, so a few of them flew down to him from the top of the lighthouse. Then more of them kept coming, and began gently pecking him, and fluttering over his head. Having wept his fill, he now felt full of piece and radiant joy; his eyes shone is if they were inspired. Unconsciously he gave away the whole of his provisions to the birds, who swooped upon them screeching; and he himself took up the book again. The sun had by now passed over the gardens
And the virgin forest of Panama and was slowly sinking beyond the isthmus, towards the other ocean, but the Atlantic was still all glowing. The sky was quite light, so he read on:

Till then carry my yearning soul
Unto those wooden hills, those meadows green.

Twilight had blotted out the letters on the white page; a twilight as short as the twinkling of an eye. The old man leant his head on the rock and closed his eyes. And the, ⌠She who guards bright Czenstochowa■ took the herself his soul and bore it ⌠ to those fields painted with any coloured grains.■ Long red and golden trails were still burning in the sky, and on those shafts of light he fled to the beloved land. The pine woods roared in his ears, his native rivers gurgled. He saw it all is it used to be. It all asked him:■ Do you remember?■ Did he remember! Besides, he saw;-wide fields, green unploughed strips dividing them, meadows, woods and hamlets. By now it was night. At that hour his lantern was used to shine over the darkness of the sea; but he was now in his native village. His old head was bowed on his breast, and he was dreaming. Scenes passed one another before his eyes swiftly and a trifle confused. He did not see the house where he had been born because war had wiped it out; he did not see his father or mother, because they had died when he was a child; but he saw the village as though he had left it yesterday; the row of cottages with faint lights in their windows, the dikes, the mill, the two ponds lying over against each other, and ringing all night with choirs of frogs. Once, in that village of his, he was on sentry duty at night. That past now suddenly rose before him in a series of visions. He is again a lancer on guard. The tavern is looking out from the distance with streaming eyes, and ringing and singing and roaring in the stillness of the night with the stamping of feet, with the voices of the fiddles and double √ basses. ⌠U √ ha! U √ ha!■ The lancers are dancing till their ironshod heels send out sparks, while he is bored out there alone on his horse. The hours drug on slowly. At last the lights go out. Now as for as the eye can see is mist, impenetrable mist. It must be the damp rising from the meadows, and folding the whole world in a gray √ white cloud. You would think it was the ocean: but it is the meadows that are there. Wait a little, and you will hear the corncrake calling in the darkness and bitterns booming in the reeds. The night is calm and cool, a real Polish night. In the distance the pine forest murmurs without wind √ like the waves of the sea. Soon the dawn will whiten the east; yes, the cocks are crowing already behind the hedges. Each takes up the other▓s voice, one after the other from cottage to cottage; suddenly the cranes, too, cry from high up in the sky. A feeling of life and health sweeps over the lancer. The were saying something over yonder about to-morrow▓s battle. Ha ! He▓ll be going too like the others with a shout and fluttering of flags. His young blood plays like a trumpet, although the night breeze has chilled it. But now it is dawn, dawn ! The night is waning. The forests, the tickets, the row of cottages, the mill, the poplars, steal out of the shadows. The well-sticks creak like the tin flag on the tower. That dear country, beautiful in the rosy light of dawn ! Oh, beloved, beloved land !
Hush! The watchful sentry hears footsteps approaching. They must be coming to relieve the guard.
Suddenly a voice rang out over Skawinski▓s head.
⌠Hi, old chap! Get up. What▓s the matter with you?■
The old man opened his eyes, and gazed bewildered at the man standing before him. Remnants of the visions of his dreams struggled in his brain with reality. Finally, the visions grew faint and vanished. Johns, the harbour watchman, was standing in front of him.
⌠What▓s all this? Johns asked. ⌠Are you sick?■
⌠No.■
⌠You didn▓t light the lantern. You are going to be dismissed from the service. A boat from San Geromo has been wrecked on a sand-reef. Luckily no one was drowned. If they had been you▓d have been tried for it. Get into the boat with me. You▓ll hear the rest in the Consulate.■
The old man turned pale. Indeed, he had not lit the lantern that night.
A few days later Skawinski might have been seen on the deck of a vessel going from Aspinwall to New York. The poor old man had lost his post. New ways of a wanderer▓s existence had opened again before him. Again the wind had blown the leaf away to cast it forth by land and sea, to make sport of it at its will. During those few days the old man had grown very shrunken and bent: only his eyes shone. But in his breast he carried into the new roads of his life his book, which from time to time his hand grasped as though fearful lest that too should be taken from him.

[ this story was published as a part of ⌠Tales from Henryk Sienkiewicz, Everyman▓s Library, London-New York, 1931. I copied it at the National Library in Warsaw]


THE END


[typed by Zbigniew & Andrzej ]

Post Script

Maybe you recall another short story written by Ernest Hemingway ,entitled ⌠Old Man and the Sea■. I find the similar unbending faith in basic human values and the similar wonderful ability to say so much writing so little. Please, tell me whether a story written more than hundred years ago can still move us, people of the turn of the third millenium. For me, Skawinski▓s devotion to a specific idea can be easily meant much more general. "Poland" can easily be replaced by "Ukraine", "Lithuania" or "Russia". It can be just one of any affectionate loves we dream of for years and experience sometimes, without even noticing how much we win every single day. It is just like our father▓s and mother▓s love. Only when we are thousands miles away, we gradually understand what it really meant.
We are really fortunate to have planes and mobile phones which give us the chance of satisfying our longings.
(Please, look for possible typing mistakes and let me know as soon as possible).



[Edited by Zbyszek on 1st October 2002 at 15:14]