Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/231

 Otherwise no signs of vexation were visible in him, perhaps he had slept or driven off his annoyance of yesterday.

They greeted one another, and when Malka had produced the dinner from her basket—“I am just going to have a look at the water for a minute”, said she, and away she went.

Here it appeared to Poldik as if he had already dined. Whether he ate or not he himself scarcely knew, but he soon got himself and his horse under weigh without waiting until they had satisfied their hunger, threw the basket with the fragments of his meal into the cart, drove off to the beach for sand, and asked half mechanically, “Where is she?”

“Ask Francis when he returns with her”, said one of the wherrymen who was loading his cart with sand.

Poldik asked no more nor said another word, but as he was driving off he put Malka’s basket with the plates and knives and spoons on to a boat which was loaded with sand, and said generally to those on board, “When Malka returns tell her I shall not require dinner to-morrow.”

This speech seemed to the sandmen and wherrymen somewhat too serious to be considered a mere matter for jest, and as jest they had hitherto looked upon all which had been enacted at the quay-side.

“But, but!”—began some attempting to humour Poldik—“who would take matters so seriously all at once?”

But Poldik paid scanty attention to what they said, and vanished with his vehicle as quickly as Francis had done with the skiff on which he was giving Malka a trip.

And this time Francis and Malka were really long in returning. They must have put in somewhere or other beyond Vysehrad, otherwise wherever they had gone they could have already returned. Poldik was already a second time at the quay for sand, when the wherrymen shouted, “Look, there they go!”

Poldik did not look to see who was going or where they were going—he only made haste to finish the loading of his cart before the skiff had reached the shore. And he had just finished as they lay to, and Malka stepped smiling out of the skiff, on which the jolly waterman remained smiling also. Though Malka stepped out off the skiff as quickly as she could, she did not move quickly enough to stop Poldik, who was just that instant driving off and discharging upon his horses every oath in his vocabulary like a shower of hail. Rh