Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/326

 she felt the chill of the woodland, her little soul opened and something of the great Unknown entered into it. It was not so smiling nor clear as the white light of day which she saw from the cemetery, but it was just as majestic and inaccessible, so that she sat beside Frank silent and, as it were, full of reverent awe.

Neither the one nor the other knew how to express it all, but they knew so much as this—that in their inmost soul was a sort of language which explained it all. Once Staza said that they would sing; and they began to sing, “Odpocinte v pokoji verne dusicky” [“Rest in peace ye faithful spirits”], but scarcely had they pronounced the words before Staza burst into tears, and when she was quieted it seemed to her as though she heard organ-tones above her; then she said that never in her life, nor for the whole world would she dare to sing in this place again. And it seemed to the two as though she had expressed herself as follows: In the fields there is a presence which inviteth to the dance and singing, but here in the woodland there is a presence which inviteth to silence and attentiveness, because it would fain tell its own story.

That no doubt was the difference for Staza expressed in the most general terms. But otherwise she here entered into a new world, and still it appeared to her as though it was a world akin to the one she knew before. True, when she and Frank came out of the graves or from the graves themselves into the fields, gaiety, potent even to excess, and delight seized upon her spirits, her soul soared aloft with the very sky-larks, and fluttered into the blue of heaven and the clear transparent ether. But when she came hither into the wood she partially felt as though she were in the cemetery among the tombs and at home. Just as though she was actually seated in a spot which might be called a cemetery, a grave. But with all its closeness, it was so magnificent and so beautiful, with all its dusky twilight it was so open and so free, that her soul, although it had them not, yet felt on itself a kind of pinions, so that it fluttered and was carried aloft and even took Frank’s spirit with it, so that both fluttered together.

Again it was otherwise, when they ceased to listen to the murmur of the woodlands, when they ceased to look at all that grandeur, when before their soul the ha-haing of that organ was mute, and trivial things emerged—things easily comprehensible. Here was the call-note of the cuckoo, here a butterfly, a beetle, a fly. Here Staza again found speech, here words came to her,