Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/222
joked with the soldiers to such an extent that they gave her a roaring ovation when we moved off.
Standing on the platform of the Turnov station, we were confronted with the necessity of making a choice. Miloš now disclosed that the next stage of our progress would involve a railway journey of a kilometer or two to a little cross-roads station from which we would proceed on foot. Our train would leave in half an hour. In the meantime we could deploy ourselves sight-seeing in Turnov, or we could eat luncheon in the station restaurant. Here was a dilemna of the gravest sort. It was solved at length by Milada, whose feminine intuitions revealed themselves more and more as equal to any situation, however trying. Milada deposed that Turnov was a permanent fixture, while luncheon was not. Turnov would remain there for months and years to come, and we might come back perennially to see it. But with luncheon it was now or never. Viewed in this light, the problem became easy. So we went into the station building, pre-empted a table and demanded to be given a meal. This, when it came, was not very good, and I remember that we were somewhat disposed to blame Milada because she had let us in for it. But Milada behaved serenely in the face of criticism and affirmed that food was good, and we would agree with her later in the afternoon. Of course she was quite right, as we subsequently admitted of our own free will.
After luncheon, the other train arrived and carried us away. We alighted at a depot-house which belonged to one of the more removed suburbs of Turnov. Possibly in the early morning it was a rallying-point for Turnov commuters, but I suspect not, for I do not think the Turnovers ever really commute. It is American to commute, just as it is Scotch to dance the Highland Fling, or Spanish to goad bulls, or French to be vinously disposed and fond of revues.
From the little depot-house we took an uphill path through a field. The field was a bare place, covered with scrubby grass, scattered stones and a few insignificant flowers that poked up between clods of earth. There was a lark singing loudly somewhere out of the blue, although it was already afternoon. Miloš objected to him on the ground of untimeliness, but I set myself up to defend him, and Milada eventually judged that he was entirely excusable for making a mistake about the time of day, because the season was so young that one time was a good deal like another. The period of drowsy, spellbinding mid-days had not yet set in.
We went on and up. On the summit of the hill was a man-built observatory reached by a short flight of winding steps. To its top platform we ascended, and looked out over a land covered with spring haze. In every direction were flowering orchards, some pink, some white. The nearer ones were positively lustruos; they glowed with a soft light that was self-created and not merely reflected from the sun. The farther ones were nothing but luminous spots. These groves of fruit-trees were the spectacular element in the landscape. The intervening spaces were quiet. It was all rolling country, partly pasture partly tilled fields and meadow. Bold on the northern horizon rose the hill and fortress of Ještěd. From that high landmark we could have seen a far wider sweep of Bohemia, the giant Mountains, and far into Saxony. Yet what was visible from our pigmy tower sufficed to loose the springs of patriotic emotion in Miloš.
“Our land!” he exulted, and began addressing it in passionate apostrophe. “Free at last! Free after centuries of bondage! No longer leased out to a Hapsburg tenant who turns about and ejects the rightful owners! No longer ours to look at and yearn for, but ours to cry aloud and rejoice in. Bohemia! Our homeland! Do you know what that means to me, you American?”
Immediately afterwards he sighed. Neitheir Milada nor I said a word, but we knew what that sigh meant. He was thinking of the birth-throes with which the new state had come into being. He remembered lonely men dying in far lands, women and children going about starved and freezing in Prague, and those social nightmares which are the camp-followers of war: mass demoralization, class extravagance and industrial chaos. The three of us gazed silently over the smiling country for a little while. Then we turned and went down the stairs from the observatory.
The next section of the walk was along the edge of an evergreen grove, out of