Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/66

 everything in disorder. A cottage and a settled life do not create orderliness. And yet something still drew him back toward the cottage.

Then Venik struck off again from the hill-side, bent his steps into the world once more and hurled himself upon it like a drop of the mountain torrent which blindly hurls itself into the river that it may reach the sea at last.

He was again the wild Venik who made merry all night long with a merry gay brotherhood; who tippled with them heart and soul, who made them merry with music and jesting, and who would not feel the dint of care till morning. Venik was again the centre of a group of lads in their prime; only that at this time mothers would no longer have invited him to their homes: rather, they would have slammed the door in his face lest he should entice their son to drunkenness and debauch.

But he only acted thus in unfamiliar villages where he was not known in the days when he walked with Krista. When he came to the villages he knew he was different, as though he fain would humble himself, and as though he did penance for his nights of revelry elsewhere. He was gloomy and melancholy. Here he seemed to be still treading in Krista’s footprints: and sometimes he fancied that he was tracing her and on the search for her. His familiar listeners perceived in his silent moods something sinister and had him in compassion.

And even here summer sped away. Sometimes the days were indeed as interminable as the sea, but summer whirled away with them as with all else: it engulphed them and there was never a trace of them. Three years floated by from that time when Krista took to flight from her couch in the hollow tree.

Then Venik went again to the same town in which he and Krista had been in a theatre for the first time, and where the people had lifted him and Krista on to the stage for him to play to them.

And when he saw the theatre, he reconnoitred it and pryed about it, and felt he hated it so bitterly that he would not have hesitated to throw a burning brand upon it: if any one else had done so, he would have looked on with delight, while the tongues of flame devoured and reduced to nothing a place whence began his hardest turn of destiny. He would have helped the flames yet further to devour and annihilate it, till there remained no trace of it, just as no trace of Krista had survived.