Free Spring Will Be Ours by Sue Gee

canvas. His curiosity greatly excited, the old man cut through the canvas and saw books. He took one in his hand, looked, and laid it down again. Then his hands began trembling violently. He shaded his eyes, as though he could not trust them; he thought he was dreaming; the book was Polish. What could this mean? Who had sent the book to him?
    â€˜At the moment he had forgotten that quite at the beginning of his career in the lighthouse he had read one day in a Herald , borrowed from the Consul, of the foundation of a Polish Society in New York, and that he had immediately sent the society half of his monthly salary, for which as a matter of fact he had no use in the tower. The society had sent him the books as a token of gratitude. They had come in a natural way, but at first the old man could not grasp this idea. Polish books in Aspinwall, in his tower, in his solitude, were to his mind something extraordinary, like a breath of old days; a sort of miracle …
    â€˜He sat for a minute with closed eyes, and he was almost certain that when he opened them the dream would vanish. No! The packet on which the afternoon rays of the sun were shining lay distinctly before him, cut open, and on it the open book … It was poetry.’
    Anna closed her eyes again as Tata read aloud the lines the old man had read aloud, there on the narrow lonely shore of the lighthouse rock: they were verses by Adam Mickiewicz, who with hundreds of other Poles had lived in exile in Paris after the 1830 Rising against the Czar.
‘Lithuania, my country, thou art like health.
    How much to prize thee can only be told
    By him who hath lost thee. All thy beauty today
    I see, and I sing, for I pine after thee …
    â€˜Holy Virgin, who dost guard Czestochowa bright . . .
As by a miracle thou grantest me, a child, return to
health
    So thou shall grant us to return by a miracle to our
land.
    â€˜The old man uttered a loud cry, and flung himself on the ground. Forty years had passed since he had seen his country, and God knows how many since he had heard his native language; yet here that language had come to him of its own accord; it had crossed the ocean, and found the lonely recluse in the other hemisphere; that language so beloved, so dear, so beautiful! In the sobbing which shook him there was no grief, only a suddenly awakened, infinite love, beside which all else was as naught …
    â€˜Twilight had blotted out the letters on the white page; a twilight as short as the twinkling of an eye. The old man leant his head on the rock and closed his eyes … Long red and golden trails were still burning in the sky, and on those shafts of light he fled to his beloved land. The pine woods roared in his ears; his native rivers gurgled …
    â€˜He saw wide fields, green unploughed strips dividing them, meadows, woods and hamlets. By now it was night. At that hour his lantern was used to shine over the darkness of the sea; but he was now in his native village … he saw it as though he had left it yesterday: the row of cottages, with faint lights in their windows, the dykes, the mill, the two ponds lying over against each other, and ringing all night with choirs of frogs. Once, in that village of his, he was on sentry duty at night. That past now suddenly rose before him in a series of visions. He is again a lancer on guard …
    â€˜Wait a little, and you will hear the corncrake calling in the darkness and bitterns booming in the reeds. The night is calm and cool, a real Polish night. In the distance the pine forest murmurs with wind – like the waves of the sea. Soon the dawn will whiten the east; yes, the cocks are crowing already behind the edges. Each takes up the other’s voice, one after the other from cottage to cottage; suddenly the cranes, too, cry from high up in the sky.… Oh, beloved, beloved land!
    â€˜Hush! The watchful sentry hears footsteps approaching. They must be coming to relieve the