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Updated: May 3, 2025
But from her bedroom window at the back of the house, she could look into the Przykop, where the dark trees rustled so strangely. The white-faced child felt the mystery of the morass just as much as the brown-skinned children from Starawieś; but while it terrified them, it attracted her. How beautiful to be in the deep, cool shade when the sun was scorching outside.
"I came past the farm the other day on my way from the Przykop, and found the servant lounging at the gate Marianna Śroka, from Althof, you know, a buxom lass, but awfully cheeky. 'Panje, said she in a low voice, and crept close up to me, 'Panje, there's murder in that house. She pointed to the Tirallas' house and made such eyes, she looked quite mad. She wouldn't let me go.
Then she had given a loud, scornful laugh; in spite of all his cleverness he did not know where she was to go either. There really was nobody, nobody who could advise her. What would he say if she went into the Przykop into the deep morass, where the pool under the drooping birches was just now as deep as any lake on account of the rainy spring?
Am I to act in opposition to the nobility, who would continue to do exactly what they liked all the same, or am I to let the peasants kill me when they commit outrages in the royal woods? Of course I always go to the Przykop when I hear a shot; but if they don't shoot, if they only make use of their cudgels, what then?" He was right. They all agreed that it was no easy matter to be a forester.
Oh, no, on the contrary he was able to breathe once more when he reached the open fields, and the howling wind threw a whole load of snow into his face and over his clothes. "Ah," he drew a long, trembling breath. But all at once he felt terrified. There came a long-drawn, shrill whistle from the Przykop, a quite peculiar whistle. No bird screamed like that, and no human being either.
Marianna firmly believed that ghosts were screaming in the pines outside, and that witches were dancing in the wind that howled round the farm; but above all she believed that the devil was running about on the Przykop like a will-o'-the-wisp, and was longing to get into the house, in order to fetch a soul to hell.
A long, long time ago the whole of the Przykop was said to have been an enormous lake, ten times as big as now. Now nothing remained of it but the basin in the centre, that deep depression which, so to speak, formed a hollow amid the yellow and green carpet of this fruitful corn-land. For the will-o'-the-wisps were the souls of those who could not find peace in the grave.
He led her into the Przykop. But when he caught her to his heart in a wild embrace behind the first bushes, she repulsed him. "No, not like that." She was no love whom he had picked up in the street, she was his bride, his wife, and when they later on went to heaven, she wanted to stand pure before the throne of God. Martin Becker was speechless; he did not know what to answer to this.
They had made up their minds to take him by surprise some time, and now they had found him. "Psia krew, old fellow," cried Jokisch, "where have you been? You and I are neighbours, and still I never see you." The forester, who had been obliged to complain of Mr. Tiralla formerly, said to him in a friendly, reproachful voice, "I never meet you in the Przykop now."
Rosa Tiralla much preferred the Przykop to the bare fields. If she stood at the farm gate and looked across the fields she could see the whole way to Starawieś, the path she took to school every day, the wooden church tower and the cottage roofs covered with moss, that almost disappeared from view behind the pale, waving corn when it stood high.
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