Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/235

 difficulty, and the deep lines across his cheeks betokened his decay.

During the days of this summer, as soon as he had sunk back into his chair and told the lackeys to be off, he would lose himself in silent, passionate dreams. He was living through his youth once more. The more recent layers of his memory had died already, had decayed, and disclosed the older strata. Events and pictures long obliterated began to glow and spend their last warmth on the aged man when he sat in the heat of the midday summer sun, which made the sluggish blood course more violently through his veins. His lips meanwhile remained cold and half-open, like those of a man dying of thirst; his throat felt dry, and his dull eyes glowed as in a fever.

Sometimes he would ask the lackeys who came to fetch him to his dinner: ‘Has Lisa come? And do not forget, the Haydn Quartet are coming to-night.’

But Lisa had been rotting for a score of years in the chapel vault, and the players of the Haydn Quartet had been dispersed even longer than that, and fate had blown them hither and thither before throwing their bones into the cemeteries of various countries.