Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/287

 With his so-called folly Vena provoked much merriment, and by what he said in earnest he raised the merriment a degree higher; it is often the fate of truth that we receive it with laughter.

And thus so many mouths were fed on and off the estate that if Loyka, the peasant proprietor, had shewn all these guests the door, he might have given three shares of the produce as a pension to his father and still have had enough for himself. But, of course, such an idea had never even occurred to any one; thus it had ever been on Loyka’s farm so long as he could remember; it had been thus all through the life-time of his grandfather and even earlier. And yet we have heard that Loyka, the peasant, went to law about every quarter of wheat with his own father. What congruity was there in all this?

All whom we have mentioned: the tinkers, the family of the kalounkar, the cloth-pedlar, the sieve-maker, the knife-grinder, the fiddlers, and the harpers, assembled at the Loykas’s when Frank’s grandfather died, and they were there when Frank led Staza to the farmstead. They assembled at his grandfather’s death as if they had been summoned.

The fiddlers and the harpers considered it their duty to present themselves to see whether their services would be required. It was the custom in our districts to go by easy stages from the burial to music, from music to lively music, from lively music to a downright banquet, and from a banquet to a debauch. Just as if at the funeral they had been sad against their will, and required a lively banquet quickly to counterpoise their weight of woe. They took good care to keep sorrow at arm’s length, and must need have something to divert them from it. Or perhaps genuine sorrow is so rare and portentous a thing that it is necessary to give it a fillip with a flourish of light music whensoever it reveals itself. Or perhaps true sorrow is a superfluous thing, if we needs must lay our dead in the grave with sighs and tears through which all the time we catch the sound of instruments which are tuning for a dance. Or perhaps our sorrow is but as a game of play from which we shake ourselves free in a moment, and which with a dance is ended. But at any rate such is the fact: after a funeral there must be music, and music of a light and cheerful sort.

So then the musicians came confident of employment, and the Loykas conscientiously and sedulously completed all their preparations.