Page:The Best Continental Short Stories of 1923–1924.djvu/69

 I liked. Then, at home, no one ever spoke to me and I used to go and talk with the stonebreakers. Old Hanousek never spoke, he only swore a little. But his daughters talked a lot, and so gently ”

Boura, somehow, was almost intimidated. “What did you do then?”

“Well what?” But the redheaded man was thinking. Boura waited sullenly. Perhaps he would speak of his own accord. So much time, so vast a distance, had separated them that endless words would have found it hard to bridge the abyss.

He was thinking: “See, brother, we will stay for years thus, side by side, talking of trivial everyday things, all we know. An infinite number of trivialities is required for men to understand each other.” But the big brother was content to sit and smoke, and spit and stare at the floor. A childish feeling awoke in Boura: “It is he, the big brother who can do what he wants and who possesses secrets. I should like to know all he has done, but he will not tell me all. I should like to tell him all I have done, but he will not ask me. Ah, never will I get to understand him!

“How many times have I not seen him come home with absentminded, sated, mysterious face, like a cat that has just greedily and cruelly eaten up a bird in the loft and comes back dirty, conscious of crime, with flashing eyes! How many times I went to the places you had just left to see what you had discovered or what you were hiding there, and, having searched every corner, found only the reverse side of things!

“Today, again I see you with the old remembered expression. Again you come home, mysterious now as then, like the cat rolling over in its mind the memory of past delights while getting a foretaste of future escapades.”

“Well,” suddenly said this big brother, as if relieved, “I must run. I am very, very happy to have seen you.”

Boura rose in some confusion.

“I too, have been very glad. But remain a little while. We have not seen each other for so many years!”