Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/70

 beginning he was but sombre and melancholy, the further his merry companions prolonged their orgies, the gayerhe became. His gaiety waxed in proportion as his youthful followers slackened and grew weary.

If people from the villages in which he had been so dear, when he and Krista were still their young musicians, had seen him at such orgies, verily they would have shrugged their shoulders at him, and the mothers would have cried “What a pity it is, poor boy, so young and bonny as he is, and once so good and honest.” Now people began to nickname him “Wild Venik.”

Then again it would happen that he had nothing to say to anyone. He shunned the villages, or at most seated himself or laid him down somewhere behind the barn under the willows, as long ago he had done with Krista. And here, just as he who praying with a rosary takes and pushes one bead after another, so Venik dwelt in memory on Krista, and word by word repeated everything he had ever said with her, everything he had ever felt for her, each single recollection was like a single bead of the rosary, and the whole remembrance was like a single prayer. Sometimes these prayers soothed him, but yet it was so only apparently. Then again it seemed to him either that he felt surfeited, or that he had not begun to be satisfied at all.

Sometimes wishing neither to go to villages where he was known, nor to those where he was unknown,