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She gave a trembling sigh. "Those horrid rats! We'll put poison, won't we, darling? Poison for rats; but soon, or I shall die of fright." Mr. Trialla's farm lay some distance from the village, near the big pines and deep morass of Przykop. Starydwór was a large farm, and there were many in Starawieś who envied Mrs. Tiralla.
She submitted to it with closed eyes; she was deadly pale. Suddenly she twisted herself out of his arms, and, looking at him fixedly with her black eyes, she said slowly and very softly, but every syllable was distinct: "If you don't go to Gnesen now, I'll jump into the Przykop. I'll drown myself in that big pool under the firs. I can't stand this any longer. If you don't go, then I will."
Tiralla stood outside the door and called for her daughter, and when Rosa obediently came she gave her a basket and put on her broad-brimmed straw hat with her own hands, "There, my darling," and told her to go and look for mushrooms for her father's supper. Many different kinds of mushrooms were to be found in the Przykop yellow, red, brown, orange-coloured, and greenish.
For then you didn't feel the oppression quite so much. The strawberries were ripening in the Przykop. The children from Starawieś would go there to look for them, and when they had all been gathered it would be the time for mushrooms.
The deer would approach Rosa without fear, and look at her with their limpid eyes. But she was full of fear; not of the deer, however, but of the other creatures which surrounded her in the Przykop. The older she grew, the more fearful she became. Marianna had told her too many tales about them.
The golden sun was smiling down on the moss, and everything was bright and cheerful even in the Przykop when Mrs. Tiralla went with Rosa to gather mushrooms. "Look here, Röschen, this one. And here, this one." She pointed to different places in the moss with her foot and told the child to gather. "But aren't those poisonous, mammie? Marianna says " "Fiddle-de-dee. What does Marianna know about it?
The woman no longer thought of hiding her feelings; there was a look of wild terror in her eyes, and her agitated voice was full of despair. Rosa's face had flamed when her mother came into the room, but she turned deadly pale now. She did not answer, but she gazed at her mother as though she were trying to read her soul. A shot was heard in the Przykop. Mrs. Tiralla gave a shrill scream.
The tree-tops ceased their rustling, the autumn wind stopped blowing; the Przykop had grown perfectly calm and was listening. Then the two went home hand-in-hand with their aprons full of moss. They had not spoken much more, for Rosa had grown quiet.
A shudder ran down his back; he was seized with a superstitious fear, which he could not shake off again in spite of his common sense and his education. That was the witch that whistled in the pitch-dark Przykop. And he made the sign of the cross as the peasants do when they hear the witch whistling, and spat on the snow that gleamed in spite of the darkness.
But the village children did not like the gloom that reigned in the Przykop, they were accustomed to let the rays of the burning sun scorch their brown bodies a still darker brown amid the flat turnip fields and immense plains covered with corn, where there were no shadows to arrest its full force.
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