On the Heights: A Novel

by Berthold Auerbach

"No, let's eat together; I'm hungry, too," exclaimed the wife, while she laid her hymn-book aside, and removed her hat and jacket. She was good-looking, had a full, round, cheerful face, and large plaits of light hair encircled her brow. She forced herself to remain at the table and join in the meal with her husband and mother, but as soon as the last morsel had passed his lips, Hansei started on his errand.

It was high time for Annamirl to come. Before the chickens had gone to roost, the Sunday child, a screaming, fair-haired girl baby, had come.

Hansei was quite beside himself with joy, and did not know what to do. He had not had a comfortable dinner, and it seemed a great while since he had eaten anything. It was ever so long ago, for he had become a father since then; and it seemed as if years, instead of hours, had passed in the mean while. He cut off a large slice from the loaf, but when he got out of doors, where the birds were chirping so merrily and the starlings were so tame, he cried out: "Here! You shall have some too; I want you to know that I'm a father, and of a Sunday child at that!" He threw the soft bread-crumbs to them, and the crust into the sea, saying: "Here, ye fish who feed us; to-day I'll feed you!" He was overflowing with goodwill to the whole world, but there was no one left on whom he could exercise it. He knew not where he should betake himself to. Suddenly he spied the ladder leaning against the cherry-tree; he mounted it, plucked the cherries, and kept on eating until he quite forgot himself, and felt as if it were not he who was eating, but as if he were giving them to some one else. He no longer knew where or who he was, and at last began to fear that he was bewitched and would never be able to get down again. The telegraph wire ran by the house and almost touched the cherry-tree. Hansei looked at it as if to say: "Go, tell the whole world that I'm a father." He was delighted to see swallows and starlings sitting on the wire, and nodded to them, saying: "Don't disturb yourselves, I'll not harm ye." And so he went on plucking cherries, and looking straight before him for ever so long.

Then the grandmother put her head out of the window and called to him: "Hansei, your wife wants you."

He hurried down from the tree, and when he entered the room his wife laughed at him heartily, for his lips were black and his face was streaked with the juice of cherries.

"So you've been pilfering. Do leave a few cherries for me!"

"I'll bring the ladder into your room, so that I shant be able to go up into the tree again," said he, and there was merry laughter in the little cottage by the lake until the moon and stars looked down on it. The lamp in the little chamber was kept burning all night. The mother soon fell into a peaceful and happy slumber, and the Sunday child would whimper at times, but was easily quieted.

The grandmother was the only one awake--she had merely feigned sleep--and now sat on a footstool by the cradle of the new-born babe.

A bright star was shining overhead. It flickered and sparkled, and, within the cottage, the face of the mother was resplendent with joy as indescribable as the radiance of the star above. A child of man had become mother of a child of man, and she who watched over them was the one from whom both these lives had sprung. The soft air seemed laden with song and the sounds of heavenly music, and the room itself, as if thronged with fluttering, smiling cherubs.

The old grandmother sat there, resting her chin on her hand and gazing at the star above, whose rays fell upon her face. She sat there with bated breath, feeling as if transported into another world. The glory of the Highest had descended upon the cottage, and, like a halo, now encircled the head of the grandmother, Walpurga, and the infant.