Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/112

 was deprived of its last shelter. What had shielded it from cold and rain, was rent in twain as by a gust of infuriated wind.

Where she wandered all that night it is hard to say. Drenched to the skin she ran later into a house which still remained half-open. The house was empty, she found there a small corner, dusky and empty, where she felt assured that no one would disturb her.

The next day when she awoke in the morning she saw that her little daughter was dead: at the same time she recognized that she was in the house of Havel.

Summer past and Karla grew accustomed to misery as though it had been her native element. She grew accustomed to it as the eyes to darkness. She grew accustomed to the bread of charity, she grew accustomed to imploring pitiously on the threshold and at the door, she grew accustomed to a quiet nod of assent, and to seeing the door rudely closed in her face.

A gentle word seemed to her like the dawn of a saint’s day, a hard word was common enough, she had plenty of such words every day. She grew accustomed to hunger and cold, she grew accustomed to the dress of poverty and a hard couch and her home was everywhere and yet nowhere. She was like a tender shrub which clings to a rock where there is little soil. It clings with its small roots where it can: it is exposed to wind and scorching sun, the earth beneath is continually burning and its spare foliage excites more pity than delight.

About her husband she only learnt that he was imprisoned. She did not inquire further and as he had never grown dear to her heart, he easily fell out of her recollection. She did not curse him for having prepared this fate for her; she felt somehow as though things could not have been different from what they were. Her young life seemed to her utterly valueless. She was so poor, so very poor that the brief gleam that had first enveloped her, seemed like a fair vase in which grew poverty. The vase split, poverty fell out of it and the world called her a beggar. She felt it now too well; but if she were to speak the full truth she felt richer now than when they called her Pani Hurka.

She gained feeling, when she recognized how contention weakens, she gained knowledge, when she recognized how sympathy endears; having nothing to call her own, she felt none the less that inward warmth which multiplies our existence so that in ourselves we feel strength after many sufferings and manage to