Page:Henryk Sienkiewicz - On the bright shore.djvu/60

 lus and Remus into his life-boat seemed to him simply unendurable. Not wishing then as a man of honor to curse Pani Elzen, he cursed Romulus and Remus, with their lisping, their birdlike, narrow heads and birdlike skulls.

"I have had my cares, but really I have been as free as a bird, and I could put my whole soul into my pictures," said he to himself; "now Satan knows how it will be!" And the cares of an artist, which he felt at that moment, spoiled his good-humor, though they turned his thoughts in another direction. Pani Elzen and the whole marriage question receded into the second place; and into the first came his picture, "Sleep and Death," on which he had been working for a number of months, and to which he attributed immense importance. This picture was a protest against the accepted idea of death. Frequently, while talking with artists, Svirski had been indignant at Christianity because it had brought into life and art the representation of death as a skeleton.