Seldwyla Folks: Three Singular Tales

by Gottfried Keller

And indeed, he had a terrible nose, one which broke forth from his emaciated swarthy face like a beak, or rather more like a good-sized club. As if it had been pasted on to his bony face it looked and below that the tiny mouth, in the shape of a small round hole, singularly contracted and expanded, and out of this hole his words constantly tumbled, whistling or buzzing or hissing. His small twisted felt hat, shapeless and shabby, pushed over his left ear, heightened the uncanny effect. This piece of his apparel seemed to change its form with every motion of the queer-looking head, although in reality it sat immovable on his pate. And of the eyes of this strange fellow nothing was to be noticed but their whites, since the pupils were flashing around all the time, just as though they were two hares jumping about to escape being seized.

"Look at me well," he then continued. "Your two fathers know all about me, and everybody in the village can identify me by my nose. Years ago they were spreading the rumor that a good piece of money was awaiting the heir to these fields here. I have called at court twenty times. But since I had no baptismal certificate and since my friends, the vagrants, who witnessed my birth, have no voice that the law will recognize, the time set has elapsed, and they have cheated me out of the little sum, large enough all the same to permit my emigrating to a better country. I have implored your fathers at that time, again and again, to testify for me to the effect that they at least believed me, according to their conscience, to be the rightful heir. But they drove me from their farms, and now, ha! ha! ha! they themselves have gone to the devil. Well and good, that is the way things turn out in this world, and I don't care a rap. And now I will just the same fiddle if you want to dance."

With that he was down again on the ground beside them, at a mighty bound, and seeing they did not want to dance he quickly disappeared in the direction of the village; there the crop was to be brought in towards nightfall, and there would be gay doings.

When he was gone the young couple sat down, discouraged and out of spirits, among the wilderness of stone. They let their hands drop and hung their poor heads too. For the sudden appearance of the vagrant fiddler had wiped out the happy memories of their childhood, and their joyous mood in which they, like they used in their younger days, had wandered about in the green and among the corn, had gone with him. They sat once more on the hard soil of their misery, and the happy gleam of childhood had vanished, and their minds were oppressed and darkened.

But all at once Vreni remembered the fiddler's nose, and his whole odd figure, and she burst out laughing loud and merry. She exclaimed: "The poor fellow surely looks too queer. What a nose he had!" And with that a charmingly careless merriment flashed out of her brown eyes, just as though she had only been waiting for the fiddler's nose to chase away all the sad clouds from her mind. Sali, too, regarded the girl, and noticed this sunny gaiety. But by that time Vreni had already forgotten the immediate cause of her gleefulness, and now she laughed on her own account into Sali's face. Sali, dazed and astonished, involuntarily gazed at the girl with laughing mouth, like a hungry man who suddenly is offered sweetened wheat bread, and he said: "Heavens, Vreni, how pretty you are!"

And Vreni, for sole answer, laughed but the more, and out of the mere enjoyment of her sweet temper she gurgled a few melodious notes that sounded to the boy like the warblings of a nightingale.

"Oh, you little witch," he exclaimed enraptured, "where have you learned such tricks? What sorcery are you applying to me?"

"Sorcery?" she murmured astonished, in a voice of sweet enchantment, and she seized Sali's hand anew. "There's no sorcery about this. How gladly I should have laughed now and then, with reason or without. Now and then, indeed, all by myself, I have laughed a bit, because I couldn't help it, but my heart was not in it. But now it's different. Now I should like to laugh all the time, holding your hand and feeling happy. I should like to hold your hand forever, and look into your eyes. Do you too love me a little bit?"

"Ah, Vreni," he answered, and looked full and affectionately into her eyes, "I never cared for any girl before. And I have never until now taken a good look at another girl. It always seemed to me as though some time or other I should have to love you, and without knowing it, I think, you have always been in my thoughts."

"And so it was in my case," said Vreni, "only more so. For you never would look at me and did not know what had become of me and what I had grown into. But as for me, I have from time to time, secretly, of course, and from afar, cast a glance at you, and knew well enough what you were like. Do you still remember how often as children we used to come here? You know in the little baby cart? What small folk we were those days, and how long, long ago that all is! One would think we were old, real old now. Eh?"