Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/178

 more houses than one but never for very long. From one family he received his dismissal because he played with their boy rather than taught him, and a boy has the whole day for playtime but study demands application. He left another house of his own accord because as he thought his pupil had no elasticity of mind and he could not impart it to her. From a third they gave him his dismissal on the understanding that their boy must cultivate practical science from the Vojtechian fantasies good Lord deliver him! And everywhere people said the same thing in different words.

Vojtech then had plenty of self-experience and might have regulated his life accordingly: but, alas! we have just seen that from all this experience he reaped but little benefit and that it was by no means impossible that the Horskas also would give him his dismissal. Horska was the name of the family whither we have conducted him. This possibility had occurred to Vojtech himself more than once and oppressed him like a hideous dream out of which he could not arouse himself. Everywhere hitherto it had ended thus. Was he not tending to the same goal at the Horskas’s? Was he teaching with any better success there than in any other houses? In Prague one family recommends its domestic teacher to other families. What family would receive him for the causes through which he had lost so many good positions? And if Vojtech counted these lost houses and the state of his finances, it must have been evident to him that it was a dreary wan reckoning which looked out of him with hungry eyes. It must have been clear to him that he had within himself an unfruitful year, which swallowed even the years of fertility.

Vojtech was, moreover, somewhat peculiar in character. He was unsuited for the so-called solid business of life, that he knew full well. And because he knew it, he did not search for such employment. He was perfectly cultivated, and was better versed in old-world lore and pagan history than his contemporaries. When he studied he did not make the sign of the cross under his reading-desk like others who ran the risk of losing all sympathy with the kingdom of mind when they left the schools and from whom one was doomed to hear, under smooth words and other appropriate forms, little save a voice which cried continually, “Bread, bread!” Vojtech felt that hitherto he had somehow only tasted life and he began to long to sate himself therewith.

Sometimes it shocked him like a blow from a mailed hand.