Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/189

 ly as they are accustomed. It is true that a certain amount of rye and barley,—corn to a smaller extent,—is cultivated, but the chief attention has to be paid to tobacco, vines, maize and cattle breeding. That at least is my view. There is little outlet for the produce. Our people are not used to the climate which is rather unhealthy. Besides that there is the remoteness of this region, the sparse population, the scanty connection with the rest of the world. But I think that in spite of it all the Czech settlers could have prospered here after overcoming the first difficulties and getting used to the character of the country. The soil is fertile, there is an abundance of supplies. If you go over to the Government of Tiflis, you will see there a number of pleasant German settlements; a stone church, a school, neat and inviting cottages built of bricks and beams, covered with vines, with beautiful little gardens in front, everything is orderly and clean, there are stalwart men in German attire, sturdy girls in broad straw hats,—in short, you would imagine that you had been conveyed by magic to some township right in the middle of Germany. But I must cease reflecting about colonisation, and return to my story.

“So I rode to Metodějovka, and on the way my thoughts were occupied with my new patient. From what the father had told me in the morning about his only son, he was not an uninteresting person, especially in our district. I understood that he had completed his studies at school in his native land, and had in fact even attended the University, but he had not finished his studies, he had got hold of various queer ideas, had given up studying, and, to make matters worse, had fallen ill,—in short, he had returned as a worthless student to his father in the country and had remained there. Then his health had gradually improved. But shortly after that, his father had been induced by unfavorable circumstances to emigrate to the Caucasus. He had taken his son with him. The latter was not a suitable partner for this region, where there is a need for strong and industrious hands. The young man then began to fall ill again, and this time he had to take to his bed. As far as I could judge from his father’s brief remarks. he was suffering from a disease of the chest. This was a sad ending for a voung man’s wasted life, here in this distant and lonely foreign country.

“Amid such thoughts I reached the end of my journey. The sick man’s parents. a solemn, elderly farmer, and his statelv middle-aged wife with kind features now filled with sadness, led me amid the freshly whitewashed walls of a low room, the ceiling of which consisted only of logs and planks, and the floor of which was formed of earth stamped down flat. Unvarnished chairs and a table of soft wood, a small mirror decorated with a switch of catkins and a number of tawdry pictures of Saints,—this was the whole furniture. One part of the room was divided off by a plank partition of medium height something like a screen, upon which were pasted little pictures cut out of calendars and papers. Behind it I found my patient.

He was a young man of about twenty-four, of slender build and with a longuish face, the features of which were exactly regular and beautiful, but which nevertheless, and also in spite of the thinness and pallor caused by his illness, could not be called ugly. His pallor was heightened by his thick black hair which in a state of disorder enclosed his high white forehead and his sunken temples and cheeks. His eyes were dark, large and with a kind of dreamy stare. He was lying upon a straw mattress on top of a coarse sheet which covered a wretched bedstead of plain wood, with three ordinary red-striped pillows under his head, and dressed in an old, faded and tattered dressing gown. In the recess behind him, upon the chair by the bed and upon the ground, various books and papers lay scattered in disorder. Upon my arrival he raised himself laboriously from the bed, slipped a pair of worn-out slippers on his feet, and propped himself up with his delicate and almost transparantlytransparently [sic] white hand against the back of the chair. But at that moment he was shaken by a violent and painful fit of coughing, and his weak body sank halfway back on to the bed.

When his coughing had become easier, I addressed him in Czech. I am something of a Panslav, as they call it in Western countries; I have become especially fond of your language, and from grammars and books as well as from frequent contact with the settlers here, I have acquired it sufficiently well to speak it with a fair amount of fluency. I asked him a number of questions directed towards the diagnosis of his illness. He replied briefly. but all at once he asked with a vivid gleam in his eye:—“Are you a Czech, sir?”

“No, but I understand Czech fairly well’ I answered.

“How glad I am of that” said the sick man and added softly: “I am anxious for you, sir, to ask my parents to go out of the room. I should very much like to speak to you alone.”

After looking at him with a slight astonishment, I complied with his request. When we were left alone in the room, the sick man stood up and throwing the books off the chair by the bed, he offered it to me with a weary movement of his hand and a beseeching glance: then he sat or rather sank down on the edge of the bed and pronned himself up with his hands against the bed-post. Through the small windows, from which could be seen the rankly tangled brushwood of the forest close by, pierced a narrow strip of sunshine, which, lightly sprinkling a golden tinge unon the hair by the sick man’s temples, fell like a halo upon the