Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/62

 He waited for Krista to come—for her return. But even if she had returned, it seemed to him that now the world would be the world no longer, that the heaven would be the heaven no longer, since once the sun had stooped from the sky and had lost its pathway in the heavens. And Krista returned not.

Venik waited that day and that night: he waited the next day and the next night. At night he slept on that couch of leaves and moss from which Krista had vanished. He only felt that he was alone, and the hollow of the tree resounded with his sighs. And once again he went out like a sportsman to the wood, and as though he was bent on sport, and shouted, “Krista! Krista!” But he was an unlucky sportsman, and then he felt as though a wound had been made in his side by some one, and as though blood trickled over that side of his body.

Krista had made that wound, she had deserted him, and now for the first time he was an orphan.

T seems to me that then for the first time was Venik without a public, without listeners, when seated again on the hill-side, he took once more his violin in his hands and played “The Orphaned Child”.

He was that orphaned child. Long ago, when Krista had accompanied him with her voice for the first time in the gloria, she had burst into tears because she was an orphan; and Venik convinced her that she was not an orphan. Then his father died: Krista was driven from the house, and when she had to begin her wandering in the world he had taken her by the hand, and wandered with her, and pointed out the way; again she was not an orphan. And when it was all finished, she voluntarily departed from him, at the moment when he had hoped with her to enter paradise. That paradise closed upon him—where was it now?

Venik’s thoughts had no beginning and no end, they were like an unbroken wilderness, where the eye tires itself. There was nothing for it to rest upon, nothing to look upon with pleasure. He had desired so little for himself; and when he lost even that little, it seemed to him that he had lost the whole world. He also had cherished her; and when he looked and saw how she had torn