WARSAW AND CRACOW.

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 72, 18 December 1928, Page 16 (Supplement)

WARSAW AND CRACOW.

Candles and Ghosts.

THE LEGEND OF THE BUGLER

The great main boulevard running out from Warsaw to the residential parts of the town, is about 200 yards from the small Lazienki Palace, .and at a guess, about 200 years. At least, at evening, or on that particular evening, writes H. Wolfe, In the London “Observer.” It is, after all, a small palace, as palaces go, that King Stanislas Augustus used in summer. It has its pillared front on the lake, and its Corinthian theatrelet in the park. It is calm and slender, and old, a very friendly little palace that might on a hot night take off its pillars, and sitas it were, in its shirt-sleeves. But that would be in summer, when there were no visitors.

In autumn, with a hint of winter in the air, it is a great gentlemen of a palace—indeed, the greatest gentleman of all—a king. It has, above all, that perfect gift of kings—of knowing tho hearts and wishes of men, and of being able to fulfil them each in his degree. Thus, on this night, as I stepped out of the taxi, a footman in the liveries of Napoleon, flung open the great door as I mounted the steps. His arm, clothed in red, was like the note of a herald’s trumpet. “Enter,” the arm signalled, “by virtue of the spell.” What spell? The intertwined spell of candle-notes and flames of sound.

There was no light but candle-light in all the palace—old, lean, candles, like exclamation marks upside down with the flame for the dot. In that light it became apparent how it was that those who had been to Court never left it, or, if they did, came back, ghosts. They had been through the candle-flame. And, lest we should escape that ordeal by taper-light, all eveuingthe wicks were majestically snuffed with great snuffers out of a craftsman’s Pa radise. The candles did not strangle the dark with shrill, electric cries; they melted it. By that benificient reticence, it was possible through the windows to see the faintly flower-lit lake, lit, it seemed, not with lamps, but with a handful of luminous floating waterlilies. It was even possible to see the statue at the lake-end, a statue as peaceful and as ivory as Buddha. And then,to turn to the candle-light, and to see the company, as they passed under the red arm, ascend the steps a little doubtfully, as though betrayed without their knowledge into the forgot-

ten figure of a Pavane or later Minuet :—

They danced under candles, they rode out and were not, The loved and the lovers in all those eyes— And now the snow dances for those who stir not,

For those who grieve not the high wind grieves.

Would it be strange if all those who had danced when Stanislaus was king should have come back after the cold years now that the candles were lit again? Or that there should be an instant of doubt as to which were ghosts and which were real? Above all, when suddenly from an inner room fingers began to move on keys with the lightness of a leaf? Was it Chopin and a piano? Or Galuppi and a clavichord? Who was to answer, who to know when sometimes the musicianer touched na note and sometimes a flame till the room was full of a soft snowstorm of tumbling snow-notes and falling snow-flames, and those who listened almost felt the flakes of sound and light brush against their lips? And when the music died suddenly, and the whole company turned to look for someone who was to walk our from the throne-room, whom under the candles and between the notes did not expect to see

That is old Poland, but there is an older —Cracow, with its eighty-eight churches, its Barbacan and Wawel. There is no proper translation of either of these words, though Barbacan can be translated into French as Carcassone and Wawel can be “charmed” into Keats as ’’magic casements.” Geographically it is, I understand, situated east of the sun and west of the moon. But it is not of Wawel that I have to speak, though there is an inner courtyard, where the rede-tiled roof is held

up like the awning of a royal barge by Venetian flagstaffs of stone. It is not of Wawel, though its cathedral has thd great grace of a sailing ship beating up against the wind. It is not of Wawel, but of one of the towers of St. Mary’s in the Square of the Drapers’ Hall. St. Mary’s has two towers, but oue is like Apollo and the other like Vulcan —both gods, but one having to do with the gold business of the sun, the other with the darker mystery of iron. The first wears a gold crown, and below the crown is a little room with four doors, from which at the hour a bugler blows north and south, east and west, a temporal muezzin of the west.

There is, or you can be led to believe that there is, an addity in this bugling. “Listen,” they say, as in the night hours the high notes divide the air. “What do you notice?” “It is high and lonely and clear.” “Is that all?” "It is strange”s—“Yes,” they say, “strange is right. Don’t you see that the tune breaks off in the middle?” Wait an hour and listen again! Yes, they are right. It does break, and why ?

Six hundred years ago a watchman climber the tower to look for Tartar raids. At his note, if he played, the townsfolk would rush for shelter into the Barbacan. He looked out and saw dust in the plains drawing rapidly near, dust that changed to a glitter.' He set the bugle to his lips and played the alarm. But the call was not finished, because the bugler died with a Tartar arrow in his throat. After six hundred years the bugle still breaks

"The equator is an imaginary line running around the earth,” said the boy who likes to tell what he has learned at school. .

“An imaginary line,” repeated the great railway financier, absent-mind-edly. “Who is promoting it?”