“Did you hear that row?” I enquired.
“Most certainly,” I was told.
“What does it mean?”
“It is the birthday of Spring.”
The birthday of Spring! March had just begun, and it had snowed the greater part of the day before. All the neighbouring mountains were white, and there was not the faintest trace of verdure to be seen; even the pitch pines were hidden by the frost.
This birthday of Spring seemed to me a little precocious. In the Engadine it takes place on the eve of Shrovetide, and the formidable uproar is intended to drive away the winter, to give it its rude dismissal. Possibly that is necessary in a country where the winter is prone to fall asleep and never depart. If one did not scream in his ears “Go away” he might remain throughout the year. Therefore in that country they pray to Spring in the midst of cold and darkness.
At the Sleeping Woods such a hubbub is not necessary. Things happen differently. But that day is so important to me that, reluctant to recall it, I have interposed some other recollections. Still, nothing happened to me on that day.
Nothing happened to me on that day, and yet that day is the brightest of my life!
Little girls and boys, all of them barefooted—for those who had shoes carried them in their hands in order not to wear them out on the hard roads—appeared at the end of the avenue of oaks. I stood astonished at the window.
“What does that lot of brats want?” I thought. They marched along singing, and very quickly, too, for their little legs. When they reached the arches of the cloister, just below me, they entertained me with a song. It was an old folk song, which I had once heard sung at a concert, but had not imagined to be genuine; by that I mean to say I did not know that it was really sung in the country. Out in the open air, bursting from these youthful lips, it soared in swift flight far higher than in any theatre.