No one was to be seen. The house was dark and empty. Everything was quiet except the crickets. The trumpeter had gone, but so, apparently, had Johanna. She had forgotten to lock the door, so that all we—or anybody else passing that way—had to do was to walk in. Nobody, however,—and by nobody I mean the criminally intentioned, briefly burglars—walks into houses perched as ours is. They would be very breathless burglars by the time they got to our garden gate. We should hear their stertorous breathing as they labored up well in time to lock the door; and Papa, ever pitiful and polite, would as likely as not unlock it again to hasten out and offer them chairs and lemonade. It was not, then, with any misgivings of that sort that we went into our deserted house and felt about for matches; but I was surprised that Johanna, when she could sit comfortably level on the seat by the door, should rather choose to go and stroll in the garden. You cannot stroll in my garden. You can do very few of the things in it that most people can do in most gardens, and certainly strolling is not one of them. It is no place for lovers, or philosophers, or leisurely persons of the sort. It is an unrestful place, in which you are forced to be energetic, to watch where you put your feet, to balance yourself to a nicety, to be continually on the alert. I lit a lantern, and went out in search of Johanna strolling. I stood on the back door steps and looked right and looked left. No Johanna. No sounds of Johanna. Only the crickets, and the soft darting by of a bat. I went down the steps—they are six irregular stones embedded one beneath the other in the clay and leading to the pump from which, in buckets, we supply our need for water—and standing still again, again heard only crickets. I went to the mignonette beds I have made—mignonette and nasturtiums; mignonette for scent and nasturtiums for beauty, and I hope you like nasturtiums—and standing still again, again heard only crickets. The night was dark and soft, and seemed of a limitless vastness. The near shrill of the crickets made the silence beyond more intense. A cat prowled past, velvet-footed, silent as the night, a vanishing gray streak, intent and terrible, concentrated wholly on prey. I went on through the grass, my shoes wet with dew, the lantern light fitfully calling out my possessions from the blackness,—the three apple-trees, the currant-bush, the pale group of starworts, children of some accidental wind-dropped seed of long ago; and beside the starworts I stopped again and listened. Still only the crickets; and presently very far away the whistle of the night express from Berlin to Munich as it hurried past the little station in the Paradies valley. It was extraordinarily quiet. Once I thought my own heart-beats were the footsteps of a late wanderer on the road. I went further, down to the very end, to the place where my beautiful, untiring monthly-rose bush unfolds pink flower after pink flower against the fence that separates us from our neighbor's kingdom, and stopped again and listened. At first still only crickets, and the anxious twitter of a bird toward whose nest that stealthy, murderous streak of gray was drawing. It began to rain; soft, warm drops, from the motionless clouds spread low across the sky. I forgot Johanna, and became wholly possessed by the brooding spirit of the night, by the feeling of oneness, of identity with the darkness, the silence, the scent. My feet were wet with dew; my hair with the warm and gentle rain. I lifted up my face and let the drops fall on it through the leaves of the apple-trees, warm and gentle as a caress. Then the sudden blare of a trumpet made me start and quiver. I quivered so much that the lantern fell down and went out. The blare was the loudest noise I thought I had ever heard, ripping up the silence like a jagged knife. The startled hills couldn't get over it, but went on echoing and re-echoing it, tossing it backward and forward to each other in an endless surprise, and had hardly settled down again with a kind of shudder when they were roused to frenzy by another. After that there was blare upon blare. The man only stopped to take breath. They were louder, more rollicking than any I had heard him produce. And they came from the neighbor's house, from the very dwelling of him of the easily tortured ears, of him for whom Wagner is not good enough. Well, do you know what he had done? I ran down to question, and to extract Johanna and explain the trumpeter, and I met the poor genius, very pale and damp-looking, his necktie struggled up behind to the top of his collar, its bow twisted round somehow under his left ear. He was hurrying out into the night as I arrived, panting, on the doorstep. 'Why in the world—' I began; but a blast drowned further speech.
He flung up his hands, and the darkness engulfed him.
'It's raining,' I tried to cry after his hatless figure.
I thought I heard him call back something about Pilsner—'It's the Pilsner,' I thought I heard him say; but the noise coming from the kitchen was too violent for me to be sure.
His father was in the passage, walking up and down it, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders up to his ears as though he were shrinking from blows. He told me what his unhappy son had done. Not able to endure the trumpet when it was being blown up at our house earlier in the evening, not able to endure it even softened, chastened, subdued by distance and the intervening walls, he had directed his mother to go up and invite the player down to her kitchen, where he was to be cajoled into eating and drinking, because, as the son explained, full of glee at his sagacity, no man who is eating and drinking can at the same time be blowing a trumpet. 'Thus,' said his father, in jerks coincident with the breath-takings of the trumpeter, 'did he hope to obtain peace.'
'But he didn't,' said I.
'No. For a period there was extreme, delicious quiet. Mother'—so he invariably describes his wife—' sacrificed her best sausage, for how shall we permit our son to be tortured? The bread was spread with butter three centimeters deep. The trumpeter and his Schatz sat quietly in the kitchen eating it. We sat quietly on the veranda discussing great themes. Then that good beer my son so often praises, that excellent, barrel-kept, cellar-lodged Pilsner beer, bright as amber, clear as ice, cool as—cool as—'
'A cucumber,' I assisted.
'Good. Very good. As a cucumber—as a salad of cucumbers.'
'No, no—there's pepper in a salad. You'd better just keep to plain cucumber,' I interrupted, always rather nice in the matter of images.