Chapters 1–4: The Grandmother Comes to the Bleachery

Chapter 1

Grandmother had a son and two daughters. The eldest daughter had lived for years in Vienna with relations, and there she married. Grandmother lived on in her own cottage in a village in the mountains, near the Silesian border, and was content. Then one day a letter came from the eldest daughter: her husband had taken service with a princess whose estate lay in Bohemia, only a few miles from Grandmother's mountains; they were moving there; and would not Mother come and live with them for good? Grandmother wept, and did not know what to do. Her heart drew her to her daughter and the grandchildren she had never seen; but it was hard to leave the place where she had lived so long. In the end the heart won. She gave her cottage and its little goods into the care of old Bětka, and set off.

At the house in the valley the children had been waiting at the gate since morning. When the carriage stopped, out climbed a little old woman in a dark fur jacket, a green cap and a red kerchief, and the children went shy at once and stared at her. She had a face full of wrinkles and four teeth, and her eyes were blue and kind. "Well, children, don't you know me? I'm your grandmother," she said; and out of her pocket, which seemed to have no bottom, came gingerbread, apples, little crosses and pictures, and in a moment Barunka, Jan, Vilém and little Adelka were hanging on her skirts. The baby in the cradle she took up and blessed.

It was harder with the grown-ups. Her son-in-law, Mr Prošek, was a good man, but he spoke German better than Czech, and she could talk with him only a little. Her daughter Terezka had grown into a city lady, with a dignified manner and a house full of strange furniture: soft settees she was afraid of spoiling, glass cabinets, and a piano, which Grandmother thought good for nothing but quieting the baby. But when Terezka asked her to help with the spinning, and with the yard and the dairy, she was glad. She took the baking of the bread on herself. Before she put the loaf in the oven she made the sign of the cross over it; and she could not bear to see a crumb on the floor. "Bread is God's gift," she said, "and you must not tread on God's gifts." The crumbs went to the hens and the sparrows, and the scraps to the animals; nothing was wasted.

Her room was the little room by the kitchen, and she made it her own: a painted chest at the foot of the bed, holy pictures on the walls, bunches of dried herbs under the beams, and a spinning wheel in the corner. In the chest she kept her treasures: her best clothes, a string of garnets, and a silver coin with a hole in it, given to her, she said, by the Emperor Joseph himself; she would tell them about it one day. Her daughter wanted her to dress like the town women. Grandmother would not hear of it. She had worn the clothes of her country all her life, and in them she would be buried.

And so, little by little, everyone in the house began to do as Grandmother did, and her word became law.

Chapter 2

In summer Grandmother rose at four, in winter at five. She crossed herself, kissed the cross on her rosary, dressed, sprinkled herself with holy water, and sat down to spin, singing a morning hymn under her breath. She slept little now; but she wished a good sleep to everyone else.

When she stepped out onto the porch, the yard came to greet her: the geese, the hens, the pigs, the cow, the cats, and the two dogs, Sultán and Tyrl. She loved every creature, and would not allow one to be hurt; if an animal had to be killed, it must be quickly, and the children must not watch. One night Sultán and Tyrl dug into the coop and killed ten ducklings, so that the poor duck had only three left. Grandmother scolded them so that they slunk away. Mr Prošek, seeing her tears, was alarmed, then laughed when he heard the cause, and beat the dogs with a stick; and Grandmother covered her ears, and afterwards went to see how they were. The dogs learned to look the other way when the young birds went by.

Then she woke the servants, and then the children, gently, Barunka first. They dressed — often with their clothes inside out — knelt before the crucifix and said the Our Father, and then came breakfast.

Grandmother knew every herb, and gathered them, especially on St John's Day, with the dew on them. She never sent for a doctor. Every autumn a herb woman came down from the Giant Mountains with remedies in her basket, and told the children about Rübezahl, the spirit of the mountains, who smashes everything in his path when he is angry.

On walks to the mill, to the woods and the meadows, the children sometimes saw Viktorka: a pale, wild-haired woman who never spoke, who lived in a cave in the woods and sang at night by the weir. In winter she would come silently to the door, take the bread that was put out for her, and run away if the children called. Why did she look like that? Was she not afraid of the water goblin? "She is mad, poor thing," said Grandmother.

On summer evenings, under the lime tree, the children sat at her feet while she told them about the angels who light the stars and watch over children, every child its own star. Which was his? asked Jan. God's chosen have bright stars, said Grandmother; and Viktorka's star was clouded. At bedtime Barunka begged her to stay until she fell asleep.

At ten Grandmother went round the house: she shut the cats in the loft, raked the fire, and laid out a candle and a loaf in a cloth — for if there should be a fire or a storm in the night, the bread must be saved first. Then she sprinkled herself once more with holy water, and slept with her rosary under her pillow.

Chapter 3

In a lonely, lovely valley stood the little house the people called the Old Bleachery. In front of it flowed the river Úpa; a vine climbed its sunny wall; it had a garden of flowers and vegetables, an orchard, a great pear tree, and a lime tree with a bench beneath it; and across a footbridge stood the drying shed. Life there was quiet. Troubles came — the father's journeys to the city, an illness — but joy and love lived under that low roof.

In autumn Jan and Vilém crept into the drying shed after the plums and pears. Grandmother knew at once. "Remember, God sees everything," she said; and they wondered how she always found out.

On hot days she took the children to bathe in the millrace, no deeper than their knees, and they floated twigs and followed them downstream. A twig caught in the grass, she said, will never get where it is going. And where does the water go? asked Adelka. And Grandmother followed it for her, past the villages, into the Elbe, and down to the sea; and made up a story about a boy who would find Adelka's twig on the shore, and plant it, and it would grow into a tree with birds singing in it.

The gamekeeper from the lodge, Adelka's godfather, would pass by and tease Adelka for a water sprite; Grandmother always asked him in, and though he always said he had to see to his young pheasants or his dog, he always stayed for wine and bread and salt. The miller, whom everyone called "Father," came to look at the weir every morning about ten: a sly man, said Grandmother, and a tease. He asked the boys riddles, offered snuff, made Adelka say tongue-twisters, and called her his little magpie.

Kristla, the innkeeper's daughter, a laughing girl, came in the evenings. Once the steward's wife and two other ladies came to visit Mrs Prošková, and Grandmother offered them bread and salt, as custom required; they refused it with disdain, and Grandmother was hurt, and when her daughter reproached her she said that she did not understand these new fashions. Pedlars came: the Italian with his sweets, a salve-seller, a tinker, a Jewish trader; Grandmother made them all welcome. Once a year the gypsies came, and were fed at the edge of the orchard. And there was Mojžíš, the tall estate watchman with his sack, whom the children feared, because the maids Bětka and Vorša told them he carried off naughty children.

But best of all was Mr Beyer, the forester from the Giant Mountains, who came every spring to see the timber floated down the Úpa: a tall, lean man with a long face, a bushy moustache and a feather in his hat. He told the children of storms and cliffs and snow in the mountains, of losing one's way, and of summer on the top of Sněžka; he brought them crystals and fragrant moss; and Jan was his favourite. When the other gamekeeper offered to take Jan as his pupil, Beyer said no: let the boy first learn how hard the trade is. In the morning he left, the children walked him part of the way, and for days afterwards they talked of nothing but the mountains.

Chapter 4

Sunday was the best day of the week. On Sundays Grandmother did not wake the children early; and when she came back from early Mass in the town, in her new black slippers and her white cap with its starched bow like a dove, they ran to meet her, and she looked gentler and lovelier than on weekdays. Barunka carried her prayer-book bag, and the boys quarrelled to peep inside it, for there was always something in it for them. Every week their mother begged her not to bring so much, and every week Grandmother said, "I was never better than they are," and brought it.

The miller and his wife often walked back with them: the miller's wife small and round and merry, with dark eyes and pearls round her neck on Sundays; the miller in his grey coat and tall tasselled boots. In the afternoon the children went to the mill, where the miller's wife set out buns, bread, honey, cream and dried plums — coffee was not yet the fashion among common people — and Grandmother protested that the children were given too much, and the miller's wife laughed that children have no bottom to their stomachs.

Behind the barn they played with the Kudrnas, six children who lived above the inn in the old paper mill. Their father went round with a barrel organ, their mother patched clothes for a few coppers, and the children were thin but merry. One Sunday the miller's daughter Mančinka came back from them saying she had eaten a delicious rabbit; Cilka, the eldest Kudrna girl, explained that it was a cat, which her father had caught, and her mother had rendered the fat to rub on his chest for his cough. They ate squirrels too, and crows. The miller's wife was disgusted and sent Cilka away; the miller said there was no arguing about taste, and that he might invite himself to a squirrel dinner; and Grandmother threatened to cook him a crow with peas. But the Kudrna children were always welcome to play, and when they went home hungry, the miller's wife fed them all.

In winter the children spent half the day up on the big stove at the mill, playing with dolls — they held a wedding, with a chimney sweep doll for the priest — and playing school, with Jan as the teacher. The dog, who learned nothing but snoring, was given a slate to hang round his neck, and leapt off the stove in a fury, and there was such a commotion that Grandmother said the devil was in them, and took them home before they turned the mill upside down.

Once, at the mill, the men were talking of the French war, and of the three icy men — December, January and February — who froze the French in Russia; and one of them asked Grandmother whether she had known the Emperor Joseph. She had; and she showed them the silver coin round her neck, and told the story again.

When she was a girl at home in Olešnice, the widow Novotná, who wove woollen blankets, had taught her to weave, and let her help carry the blankets to sell at the new fortress of Pless, which is now Josefov. There they saw a young man looking through a spyglass; and he came up and bought a blanket, and asked the widow about her family — her son Jiří was a choirboy at Rychnov, and might become a priest. Then he let the girl look through his spyglass, and she saw far away across the fields; but the widow would not look. Grandmother said she prayed for the Emperor and for his long life. And the young man gave her a silver thaler as a keepsake, and asked her to pray for him; and his clerk paid the widow three times what she had asked. It was the Emperor himself. Her mother bored a hole in the coin, and she had worn it ever since. Everyone said what a pity it was that the Emperor was dead; and the children looked at the coin with new eyes, and at Grandmother too.

On the way home they passed the inn, where there was music. Kristla was carrying beer through the orchard to the gentlemen from the castle, who sat there at tables. "Those gentlemen are not to be trusted with a girl like her," said the miller's wife. "Kristla can look after herself," said Grandmother. And they saw one of the gentlemen whisper to her, and Kristla send him packing, and go off to dance with a tall young man. "She would rather have that one," said Grandmother, "than all the lords and all the treasure in the castle."