Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish, Greek, Belgian, Hungarian | Page 6

look from his height and gaze on those matos, admire
their beauty, and be guarded from their treacherousness. His tower
preserved him from every evil. He left it only for a few hours on
Sunday. He put on then his blue keeper's coat with silver buttons, and
hung his crosses on his breast. His milk-white head was raised with a
certain pride when he heard at the door, while entering the church, the
Creoles say among themselves, "We have an honorable light-house
keeper and not a heretic, though he is a Yankee." But he returned

straightway after Mass to his island, and returned happy, for he had still
no faith in the mainland. On Sunday also he read the Spanish
newspaper which he brought in the town, or the New York Herald,
which he borrowed from Falconbridge; and he sought in it European
news eagerly. The poor old heart on that light-house tower, and in
another hemisphere, was beating yet for its birthplace. At times too,
when the boat brought his daily supplies and water to the island, he
went down from the tower to talk with Johnson, the guard. But after a
while he seemed to grow shy. He ceased to go to the town to read the
papers and to go down to talk politics with Johnson. Whole weeks
passed in this way, so that no one saw him and he saw no one. The only
signs that the old man was living were the disappearance of the
provisions left on shore, and the light of the lantern kindled every
evening with the same regularity with which the sun rose in the
morning from the waters of those regions. Evidently, the old man had
become indifferent to the world. Homesickness was not the cause, but
just this,--that even homesickness had passed into resignation. The
whole world began now and ended for Skavinski on his island. He had
grown accustomed to the thought that he would not leave the tower till
his death, and he simply forgot that there was anything else besides it.
Moreover, he had become a mystic; his mild blue eyes began to stare
like the eyes of a child, and were as if fixed on something at a distance.
In presence of a surrounding uncommonly simple and great, the old
man was losing the feeling of personality; he was ceasing to exist as an
individual, was becoming merged more and more in that which
inclosed him. He did not understand anything beyond his environment;
he felt only unconsciously. At last it seems to him that the heavens, the
water, his rock, the tower, the golden sand-banks, and the swollen sails,
the sea-mews, the ebb and flow of the tide,--all form a mighty unity,
one enormous mysterious soul; that he is sinking in that mystery, and
feels that soul which lives and lulls itself. He sinks and is rocked,
forgets himself; and in that narrowing of his own individual existence,
in that half- waking, half-sleeping, he has discovered a rest so great that
it nearly resembles half-death.
CHAPTER III.

But the awakening came.
On a certain day, when the boat brought water and a supply of
provisions, Skavinski came down an hour later from the tower, and saw
that besides the usual cargo there was an additional package. On the
outside of this package were postage stamps of the United States, and
the address: "Skavinski, Esq.," written on coarse canvas.
The old man, with aroused curiosity, cut the canvas, and saw books; he
took one in his hand, looked at it, and put it back; thereupon his hands
began to tremble greatly. He covered his eyes as if he did not believe
them; it seemed to him as if he were dreaming. The book was Polish,--
what did that mean? Who could have sent the book? Clearly, it did not
occur to him at the first moment that in the beginning of his light-
house career he had read in the Herald, borrowed from the consul, of
the formation of a Polish society in New York, and had sent at once to
that society half his month's salary, for which he had, moreover, no use
on the tower. The society had sent him the books with thanks. The
books came in the natural way; but at the first moment the old man
could not seize those thoughts. Polish books in Aspinwall, on his tower,
amid his solitude,--that was for him something uncommon, a certain
breath from past times, a kind of miracle. Now it seemed to him, as to
those sailors in the night, that something was calling him by name with
a voice greatly beloved and nearly forgotten. He sat for a while with
closed eyes, and was almost certain that, when he opened them, the
dream