Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/41

 Venik’s mind was haunted by a notion that when his mother’s death took place people had said that they were not going to bury ber; and he had clung to this idea ever since, just as it happens still oftener that a chance word which we have heard in childhood, and which we have clothed with a wholly incorrect meaning, hampers us with that incorrect meaning years after our reason has learnt the right one. So Venik till now would have it that his mother was not buried, that thus she was perhaps not entirely a corpse, and that consequently he was exaggerating a little when he said that he had not a mother either.

“Stay, if she is not buried let us bury her here on the hill-side,” said Krista, “and then you will always be near her; you shall dig the grave and I will bring her here.”

Very little of all this certainly did Venik understand, either of what Krista wanted to do or what she had got in her mind. But children quickly adapt themselves to everything. They pretend a tile to be a basin, a fragment of crumbling earth to be a cake, a pebble is a house, a bit of wood is a shopkeeper, the trestle of a table is a school, a scrap of rag is a shop full of dresses, a scrap of paper is a book. The fancies of children are omnipotent, and if a child says, “Our apartments with papa and mamma are better than the whole world”, it is true from the moment that the child says it.

So when Krista got up to bring Venik’s mamma, Venik got up also and began to make his mamma’s grave beside the hollow tree. He grubbed in the earth with his pocket-knife. And when he had done with the grave Krista brought his mamma. She had her lapful of her, and had collected her all over the wood and over the hill-side.

And now they began to lay her in the tomb. First Krista strewed the grave with moss that mamma might feel it soft beneath her. Then she took a brier in full bloom and said, “Look, that is her heart”, and she laid the brier in the middle of the grave. Then she took two willow-wands and said, “Look, those are her hands”, and laid them next the heart. Then two other wands were for two feet, and finally she took from her lap sweet marjoram, and said, “Look, that is her head”, and laid it on the top. Nothing more was wanted in her opinion to make a woman. So the corpse was done with and Venik’s little mother lay in the grave.

After this began the funeral in the due form. Krista began to weep, and Venik wept with her. And they wept in earnest. Then Venik took his violin and played a miserere, just as he usually