Seldwyla Folks: Three Singular Tales

by Gottfried Keller

During the next days the labor became harder and more strenuous, and some men had to be hired for it. For the task was this time to load and clean off the huge crop of stones along the entire length of the field.

There seemed to be no end to this work, and one would have said that all the stones in the world had been collected there. But Manz did not have the stones carted off entirely from the field, but every load was taken to the triangular piece of ground in dispute, where it was dumped. It was dumped on the neatly plowed soil that Marti had toiled over. Manz had previously drawn a straight line as boundary, and now he loaded this spot down with all these thousands upon thousands of pebbles, rocks and bowlders which he and Marti had for whole decades thrown upon ownerless soil. The heap grew, and grew for days and weeks, until there was a mighty pyramid of stone which, as Manz felt convinced, his adversary would surely be loath to trouble with. Marti, in fact, had expected nothing of the kind. He had rather thought that Manz would go to work with his plow, as he used to do, and had therefore waited to see him appear in that part. And Marti did not hear of the rocky monument until almost completed. When he ran out in the full blast of his anger, and saw it all, he hastened home and fetched the village magistrate in order to protest against the accumulation of stones on "his" ground, and to have the small bit of ground officially declared as in litigation.

From that sinister day on the two peasants sued and countersued each other in court, and neither desisted until both were completely ruined.

The thinking of these two ordinarily shrewd and fair men became fundamentally wrong and fallacious. They were unable to view anything henceforth as unrelated with their quarrel. Their arguments fell short of the mark in everything. The most narrow sense of legality, of what was permitted and what not, filled the head of each of them, and neither was able to understand how the other could seize so entirely without reason or right this bit of soil, in itself so insignificant. In the case of Manz there was added a wonderful sense for symmetry and parallel lines, and he felt really and truly shortened in his rights by Martins insistence on retaining hold of a fragment of property laid out on different geometrical lines. But both tallied in their conceptions in this that the other must think him a veritable fool to try and get the better of him in this particular manner, in this impudent and unparalleled manner, since to make such an attempt at all was perhaps thinkable in the case of a mere nobody, of a man without reputation and substance, but surely not in the case of an upstanding, energetic and able man, of one who was both willing and able to take care of his interests. And it was this consideration above all that rankled and festered in the heart of each of the two once so friendly neighbors. Each felt himself hurt in his quaint sense of honor, and let himself go headlong in the rush of passion and of combativeness, without even attempting at any time to stop the resultant moral and material decay and ruin. Their two lives henceforth resembled the torture of two lost souls who, upon a narrow board, carried along a dark and fearsome river, yet deal tremendous blows at the air, seize upon each other and destroy each other finally, all in the false belief of having seized and trying to destroy their evil fate itself.

As their whole matter in dispute was in itself and on both sides not clean or lucid, they soon got into the hands of all sorts of swindlers and cutthroats, of pettifoggers and evil counselors, men who filled their imagination with glittering bubbles, containing no substance whatever. And especially it was the speculators and dishonest agents of Seldwyla who found this case one after their own heart, and soon each of the two litigants had a whole train of advisers, go-betweens and spies around him, fellows who in all sorts of crooked ways knew how to draw cash money out of them. For the quarrel for that tiny fragment of soil with the stone pyramid on top on which already a perfect forest of weeds, thistles and nettles had grown anew, was only the first stage in a labyrinth of errors that little by little changed the whole character and method of living for the two. It was singular, too, how in the case of two men of about fifty there could shoot up and become fixed an entire crop of new habits and morals, principles and hopes, all of a kind which were foreign to their former natures, how men who all their lives had been noted for their hard common-sense could become day-dreamers and gullible oafs.

And the more money they lost by all this the more they longed to acquire more, and the less they possessed the more persistently they endeavored to become rich and to shine before their fellows. Thus they easily allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by the clumsiest tricks, and year after year they would play in all the foreign lotteries of which Seldwyla agents were praising to them the splendid chances. But never so much as a dollar came their way in prizes. On the other hand, they forever heard of the big winnings in these lotteries made by others; they also were told that it had hung just by a hair that they would have done as well, and thus they were constantly bled by these leeches of their scantier and scantier means.

Now and then the rascally Seldwylians played a trick on the two deadly enemies which for its peculiar raciness was specially relished by them, the people of Seldwyla, that is. They would sell the two peasants sections of the same lottery tickets, so that Manz as well as Marti would build their hopes of a rich strike on precisely the same fallacious foundation, and also in the end would feel the same despondency from the same source. Half their time the two now spent in town, and there each had his headquarters in a miserable tavern. There they would indulge in foolish bragging and bluster, would drink too much and play the Lord Bountiful to loafers that would flatter the simpletons to the top of their bent, and all the while the dark doubt would assail them that they who in order not to be reckoned dunces had gone to law about a trifling object, had now really become just that and furthermore, were so reckoned by general consent.

The other half of the time they spent at home, morose and incapable of steady work or sober reflection. Habitually neglecting their farm labor, at times they tried to make up for that by undue haste, overworking their help and thus soon unable to retain any respectable men in their employ.

Thus things went from bad to worse little by little, and within less than ten years both of them were overburdened with debts, and stood like storks with one leg upon their farms, so that the slightest change might blow them over. But no matter how else they fared, the hatred between them grew more intense every day, since each looked upon the other as the cause of his misfortune, as his archenemy, as his foe without rhyme or reason, as the one being in the world whom the devil purposely had invented to ruin him. They spat out before each other when they saw the adversary approaching from afar. Nobody belonging to them was permitted to speak to wife, child or servants of the other, on pain of instant brutal punishment. Their wives behaved differently under these circumstances. Marti's wife, who came of good family and was of a fine disposition, did not long survive the rapid downfall of her house and family, sorrowed silently and died before her little daughter was fourteen. The wife of Manz, on the other hand, altered her whole character. Only for the worse, of course. And to do that all she needed to do was to aggravate some of her natural defects, let them go on, so to speak, without bridling them at all. Her passion for tidbits and sweets became boundless; her love of gossip deteriorated into a veritable craze, and she soon became unable to tell the truth about anything or anybody. She habitually spoke the very contrary of what was in her thoughts, cheated and deceived her own husband, and found keen pleasure in getting everybody by the ears. Her original frankness and her harmless delight in satisfying her feminine curiosity turned into evil intrigue and the inclination to make mischief between neighbors and friends. Instead of suffering patiently under the rudeness and changed habits of her husband, she fooled him and laughed behind his back in doing so. No matter if he now and then behaved with cruelty to her and his household, she did not care. She denied herself nothing, became more luxurious in her tastes as his money affairs grew steadily more involved, and fattened on the very misfortunes that were rapidly leading to complete ruin.

That with all that the two children fared any better was scarcely to be expected. While still mere human buds and incapable of meeting the harsh fate slowly preparing for them, they were done out of their youth and out of the hopes and advantages incident to their tender years. Vreni indeed was worse off in this respect than Sali, the boy, since her mother was dead and she was exposed in a wasted home to the tyranny of a father whose violent instincts found no check whatever. When sixteen Vreni had developed into a slender and charming young girl. Her hair of dark-brown naturally curled down to her flashing eyes; her swiftly coursing blood seemed to shimmer through the delicate oval of her dusky cheeks, and the scarlet of her dainty lips made a strikingly vivid contrast, so that everybody looked twice when she passed. And despite her sad bringing-up, an ardent love of life and an inextinguishable cheerfulness were trembling in every fibre of Vreni's being. Laughing and smiling at the least encouragement she forgot her troubles easily, and was always ready for a frolic and a romp if domestic weather permitted at all, that is, if her father did not hinder and torture her too cruelly. However, with all her lightheartedness and her buoyant temperament, the deepening shadows over the house inevitably enshrouded her all too often. She had to bear the brunt of her father's soured disposition, and she had hardly any help in trying to keep house for him after a fashion. On her young shoulders mainly rested the embarrassments of a home constantly threatened by importunate creditors and wild boon companions of her dissolute father. And not alone that. With the natural taste of her sex for a neat and clean appearance her father refused her nearly every means to gratify it. Thus she had great trouble to ornament her pretty person the way it deserved. But somehow she managed to do it, to possess always a becoming holiday attire, including even a couple of vividly colored kerchiefs that set off marvelously her darksome beauty. Full of youthful animation and gaiety she found it hard to mostly have to renounce all the social pleasures of her years; but at least this prevented her from falling into the opposite extreme. Besides, young as she was, she had witnessed the declining days and the death of her mother, and had been deeply impressed by it, so that this had acted as another restraint on her joyous disposition. It was almost a pathetic sight to observe how notwithstanding all these serious obstacles pretty Vreni instantly would respond to the calls of joy if the occasion was at all favorable, as a flower after drooping in a heavy rainstorm will raise its head at the first rays of the reappearing sun.