Hania

CHAPTER XXIII

OH, save me or I die of laughter. Antek and his wife have come home from Paris. She poses as the wife of an artist of golden Bohemia; he wears silk shirts, has a forelock, and wears his beard wedge-form. I understand all; I understand that she could overcome his habits, his character; but how did she conquer his hair? – that remains for me an endless puzzle.

Antek has not stopped painting "corpses;" but he paints also genre pictures of village life. He has great success. He paints portraits too; these, however, with less result, for the carnation always recalls the "corpse."

I asked him, through old friendship, if he is happy with his wife. He told me that he had never dreamed of such happiness. I confess that Kazia has disappointed me in a favorable sense.

I too should be perfectly happy, were it not that Eva begins to be a little weak, and, besides, the poor thing becomes peevish. I heard her crying once in the night. I know what that means. She is pining for the theatre. She says nothing, but she pines.

I have begun a portrait of Pani Ostrynski. She is simply an incomparable woman! Regard for Ostrynski would not restrain me, of course, and were it not that to this hour I love Eva immensely, I know not —

But I love Eva immensely, immensely!

THE END

1

Lord's daughter, or young lady.

2

To cook crawfish, to blush.

3

A man raised from the dead by Saint Stanislav.

4

This word is the genitive of the Polish word rod, "stock," or "ancestry." Integra rodu dignitas means "the unspotted dignity of ancestry."

5

Mussulmans.

6

Mayors of the air were officials who saw that the air was made offensive to the pestilence. According to popular belief, the pestilence appeared in the form of a woman.

7

Styx.

8

A Suabian, a German.

9

The translation of those four lines is: —

Star of the sea who nourished

The Lord with thy milk,

The seed of death engrafted by our first father,

Thou didst crush.

The last line in the Polish if taken alone would mean, our first father, Skrushyla, and the wise Gomula takes it alone. Taken in connection with its pronoun and ending the compound Tys, the first word in the third line, it means: Thou hast crushed.

10

A great ink blot.

11

Two pigeons in one of the Persian fables of Bidpay or Pilpay.

12

Two pigeons in one of the Persian fables of Bidpay or Pilpay.

13

Light shineth in the darkness.

14

Romulus and Remus lisp or pronounce r in the Parisian manner, hence the use of h instead of r in the above words, both French and Polish.

15

Romulus and Remus lisp or pronounce r in the Parisian manner, hence the use of h instead of r in the above words, both French and Polish.

16

Romulus and Remus lisp or pronounce r in the Parisian manner, hence the use of h instead of r in the above words, both French and Polish.

17

Romulus and Remus lisp or pronounce r in the Parisian manner, hence the use of h instead of r in the above words, both French and Polish.

18

Death.

19

For the French Sapristi.

20

Refusal.

21

A form of endearment for Kazia.

22

A form of endearment for Eva.

23

This means farewell.

24

A form of endearment for Vladek or Vladislav.

25

Eva.

26

Helena.

27

This is Russian. Glory to God.