Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/181

 above all things never to step out from the passiveness of his position.

But for all this there were moments when Vojtech felt happy. He felt a constant need to unburden his mind. And as teaching was the only opportunity he had of communicating his ideas he felt happy when he taught. He had a full heart, he had a full soul. This fulness is a burden if a man carries it intact within himself and rocks are rent if a strong spring arises within them and can find no outlet. And such an outlet teaching was to Vojtech. When he saw that he had the mind of youth so completely in his power, when he felt how faithfully his words imprinted themselves on youthful memory, when he saw Lidunka’s eyes flash with the very fires in which his own words melted, when he saw her borne along on the same wings as those with which he himself soared aloft, then his consciousness lost the touch of bitterness which destiny had imparted to it, then he felt absolute lord, a creator, in whose hands he was only a kind of servant. And let the Horskas impute to him what faults they pleased, so much even Pani Horska was forced to confess that with him her children really loved their lessons.

I have already said once, that Vojtech at times trembled at the thought that perhaps it would end with him at the Horskas’s just as it had hitherto done everywhere else. Not only because the family was now the one thread on which hung his penurious existence—ah! no: it was something infinitely nobler which filled him with dread, lest it should so turn out. There was in the family of the Horskas a kind of mysterious repose in the presence of which it seemed to Vojtech as though he had entered the depths of a green wood. These children were so caressing, they were so thoroughly children in the true sense of the word, not reduced to mere puppets, not perverted by a frivolous etiquette which subjects the spiritual fibre of a man to superficial formality. In those children uncontaminated Nature yet survived and when he instructed them in popular songs and fairy stories they seemed to him like a fresh breeze across sweetly scented meadows. Even the relation of the children to their mother and of their mother to them was free from all constraint and Vojtech saw here the sentiment of child to mother in its purest form. Their mother was a law to them, though she did not command, and the children turned themselves around her like threads around a finger. Here were no brief periods meted out when the mother had to feel herself a mother and the children might be children. Those Rh