Seldwyla Folks: Three Singular Tales

by Gottfried Keller

"Indeed, yes, one might do harm by interfering," rejoined Manz. "As it is we have to do with our own affairs, and it takes trouble enough now to keep this hobo from acquiring home rights in our commune. All the time they want to burden us with that expense. But if his folks once have joined the stray sheep, let him keep to them and play his fiddle for a living. How can we really know whether he is the hornblower's grandson or no? As far as I'm concerned, although I believe I can recognize the old fellow in his dark face, I say to myself: It is human to err, and the slightest scrap of a legal document, a bit of a baptismal record or something, would be to my mind better proof than ten sinful human faces."

"My opinion exactly," opined Marti, "although he says it is not his fault that he never was baptized. But are we to lug our baptismal fount around in the woods? No indeed. That stands immovable in the church, and on the other hand, to carry around the dead we have the stretcher which is always hanging from the wall. As it is, we are too many now in our village and shall soon need another schoolmaster."

With that the colloquy and the midday meal of the two peasants came to an end, and they now rose and prepared to finish the rest of their day's task. The two children, on the other hand, having vainly planned to drive home with their fathers, now pulled their little vehicle into the shade of the linden saplings close by, and next undertook a campaign of adventure and discovery into the vast wilderness of the waste fields. To them this wilderness was interminable, with its immense weeds, its overgrown flower stalks, and its huge piles of stone and rock. After wandering, hand in hand, for some time in the very center of this waste, and after having amused themselves in swinging their joined hands over the top of the giant thistles, they at last sat down in the shade of a perfect forest of weeds, and the little girl began to clothe her doll with the long leaves of some of these plants, so that the doll soon wore a beautiful habit of green, with fringed borders, while a solitary poppy blossom she had found was drawn over dolly's head as a brilliant bonnet, and this she tied fast with a grass blade for ribbon. Now the little doll looked exactly like a good fairy, especially after being further ornamented with a necklace and a girdle of small scarlet berries. Then she sat it down high in the cup on the stalk of the thistle, and for a minute or so the two jointly admired the strangely beautified dolly. The boy tired first of this and brought dolly down with a well-aimed pebble. But in that way dolly's finery got disordered, and the little girl undressed it quickly and set to anew to decorate her pet. But just when the doll had been disrobed and only wore the poppy flower on her head, the boy grasped the doll, and threw it high into the air. The girl, though, with loud plaints jumped to catch it, and the boy again caught it first and tossed it again and again, the little girl all the while vainly attempting to recover it. Quite a while this wild game lasted, but in the violent hands of the boy the flying doll now came to grief, and sustained a small fracture near the knee of her sole remaining limb. And from a small aperture some sawdust and bran began to escape. Hardly had he perceived that when he became quiet as a mouse, with open lips endeavoring eagerly to enlarge the little hole with his nails, in order to investigate the inside and find out whence the scattered bran came. The poor little girl, rendered suspicious by the boy's sudden silence, now squeezed up and noticed with terror his efforts.

"Just look!" shouted the boy and swung the doll's leg right before his playmate's nose, so that the bran spurted into her face. When she tried to recover her doll, and pleaded and shrieked, he sprang away with his prey, and did not desist before the whole leg had been emptied of its filling and hung, a mere hollow shell, from his hand. Then, to crown his misdeeds, he actually threw the remains of the doll away, and behaved in a rude and grossly indifferent manner when the little girl gathered up her treasure and put it weeping in her apron.

But she took it out after a while and gazed with tears at what was left. When she fathomed the full extent of the damage, she resumed weeping, and it was particularly the ruined leg that grieved her; indeed it hung just as limp and thin as the tail of a salamander. When she wept aloud for sorrow the sinner evinced evidently some qualms of conscience, and he stood stock-still, his features suffused with anxiety and repentance. When she became aware of this state of the case, she stopped crying and struck him several times with her doll, and he pretended that she hurt him and exclaimed in a natural manner: "Outch!" So naturally indeed did he do so that she was satisfied and now engaged with him in the great sport of further and complete destruction. Together they bored hole upon hole into the martyred body, and let the bran out everywhere. This bran they collected with great pains, deposited it on a big flat stone, and stirred it over and over to ascertain its mysterious properties.

The sole part of the doll still in its former state was the head, and thus of course it attracted the special attention of the two children. With great care they separated it from the trunk, and peered in amazement at its hollow interior. Seeing this great hollow the thought occurred to them to fill it up with the loose bran. With their tiny baby fingers they stuffed and stuffed by turns the bran into the empty space, and for the first time in its existence this head was filled with something. The boy, however, evidently deemed the task incomplete; probably it required some life, something moving, to satisfy him. So he caught a huge blue fly, and while he held it tight he instructed the little girl to let out the bran once more. Then he placed the fly into the hollow head, and stopped up the exit with a small bunch of grass. The two children held the head to their ears, and then put it solemnly upon a great rock. Since the head was still covered with the scarlet poppy, this receptacle of sound now closely resembled a soothsaying oracle, and the two listened with great respect to queer noises it emitted, in deep silence as if fairy tales were being told, holding each other close meanwhile. But every prophet awakens not only respect but also terror and ingratitude. The odd noises inside the hollow head aroused the human cruelty of the children, and jointly they resolved to bury it. They dug a shallow grave, and placed the head in it, without first obtaining the views of the imprisoned fly on it. Then they erected over the grave a monument of stone. But awe seized them at this instance, since they had buried something living and conscious, and they went away from the scene of this pagan sacrifice. In a spot wholly overgrown with green herbs the little girl lay down on her back, being tired, and began singing, over and over again, a few simple words in a monotonous voice, and the little boy sat near and joined singing, and he, too, was so tired as almost to fall asleep. The sun shone right into the open mouth of the singing girl, illuminating her white little teeth, and rendered her scarlet lips semi-transparent. The boy saw these white teeth, and he held her head and curiously investigating them he said: "Guess how many teeth you have." The little girl reflected for a moment, and then she said at random: "A hundred!" "No," said the boy, "two and thirty." But he added: "Wait, I will count them!"

And he started to count them, and counted over and over, and it was at no time thirty-two, and so he resumed his count. The girl kept patient for a long time, but at last she got up and said: "Now I will count yours." And the boy lay down amongst the herbs, the little one above him, and she embraced his head, he opened wide his mouth, and she began to count: One, two, seven, five, two, one; for the little thing knew not yet how to count. The boy corrected her and instructed her how to go about it, and thus she also started again and again, and curiously enough it was precisely this little game that pleased them best of all that day. But at last the little girl sank down on the soft couch of herbs, and the two children fell asleep in the full glare of the noon sun.

Meanwhile the fathers had finished their job of plowing and had changed the stubble field into a brown plain, strongly scenting the earth. When at the end of the last furrow the helper of one of the two wanted to stop, his master shouted: "Why do you stop? Turn up another furrow!" "But we're done," said the helper. "Shut your mouth, and do what I tell you," replied the other. And they did turn once more and tore a big furrow right into the middle, the ownerless, field, so that weeds and stones flew about. But the peasant took no time to remove these. Probably he considered that there was ample time for that some other day. He was satisfied to do the thing for the nonce only in its main feature. Thus he went up the height softly, and when up on top and the delicious play of the wind now turned once more the tip of his white cap backwards, on the other side of the fallow field the second peasant was just plowing a similar furrow, the wind having also reversed the tip of his cap, and cut also a goodly furrow off from the same fallow field. Each of them saw, of course, what the other did, but neither seemed to do so, and thus they once more strode away one from the other, each falling star finally disappearing below the curve of the ground. Thus the woof of Fate spins its net around us, "and what he weaves no weaver knows."

One harvest after another went by and the two children grew steadily taller and handsomer, and the ownerless fields as steadily smaller between the two neighbors. With every new plowing the section between lost hither and thither one furrow, without there being a word said about it, and without a human eye apparently noting the misdeed. The stones and rocks became more and more compact and formed already a perfect and continuous ridge the whole length of the field, and the shrubs and weeds on it had already attained such an altitude that the two children, although they, too, had grown, could no longer see each other across them.

They no longer went to the field together, since ten-year-old Salomon, or Sali, as he was mostly called, now kept with the bigger boys or the men, and dusky Vreni,[^[1]] though a fiery little thing, had already to place herself under the supervision of those of her sex, for fear of being laughed at as a tomboy. In spite of all that they improved the occasion of the harvest, when everybody was out in the fields, to climb once on top of the huge stony ridge, or breastworks, which ordinarily divided them, and to wage a toy war, pushing each other down from it, as the culmination of the battle. Even though they had no longer anything more to do with each other, this annual ceremony was maintained by them all the more carefully since the land of their fathers did not meet anywhere else.