In the autumn, when the great fields yellowed all the hillsides, Peer and Merle had a little plot of their own that showed golden too. The dimensions of things had shrunk not a little for these two. A bushel of corn was much to them now. It hit them hard if their potato-patch yielded a couple of measures less than they had reckoned on. But the housewives from the farms near by would often look in on Merle to see how bright and clean she kept her little house; and now that she had no one to help her, she found time herself to teach the peasant girls something of cooking and sewing.
But one habit had grown upon her. She would stand long and long by the window looking down the valley to where the hills closed it in. It was as if she were looking constantly for something to come in sight, something that should bring them better days. It was a kind of Sunday for her to stand there and look and wait.
And the time went on.
Chapter VII
DEAR KLAUS BROCK,
I write to tell you of what has lately happened to us here, chiefly in the hope that it may be some comfort to yourself. For I have discovered, dear friend, that this world-sorrow of ours is something a man can get over, if only he will learn to see with his own eyes and not with those of others.
Most men would say things have steadily gone from bad to worse with me, and certainly I shall not pretend to feel any love for suffering in itself. On the contrary, it hurts. It does not ennoble. It rather brutalises, unless it becomes so great that it embraces all things. I was once Engineer in charge at the First Cataract—now I am a blacksmith in a country parish. And that hurts. I am cut off from reading because of my eyes, and from intercourse with people whose society would be a pleasure because there are no such people here. All this hurts, even when you’ve grown used to it—a good thing in itself it is not. Many times I have thought that we must have reached the very bottom of the inclined plane of adversity, but always it proved to be only a break. The deepest deep was still to come. You work on even when your head feels like to split; you save up every pin, every match; and yet the bread you eat often tastes of charity. That hurts. You give up hoping that things may be better some day; you give up all hope, all dreams, all faith, all illusions—surely you have come to the end of all things. But no; the very roots of one’s being are still left; the most precious thing of all is still left. What can that be, you ask?
That is what I was going to tell you.
The thing that happened came just when things were beginning to look a little brighter for us. For some time past my head had been less troublesome, and I had got to work on a new harrow—steel again; it never lets one rest—and you know what endless possibilities a man sees in a thing like that. Merle was working with fresh courage. What do you think of a wife like that? taking up the cross of her own free will, to go on sharing the life of a ruined man? I hope you may meet a woman of her sort one day. True, her hair is growing grey, and her face lined. Her figure is not so straight as once it was; her hands are red and broken. And yet all this has a soul of its own, a beauty of its own, in my eyes, because I know that each wrinkle is a mark left by the time when some new trouble came upon us, and found us together. Then one day she smiles, and her smile has grown strained and full of sadness, but again it brings back to me times when both heaven and earth breathed cold upon us and we drew closer to each other for warmth. Our happiness and our sufferings have moulded her into what she now is. The world may think perhaps that she is growing old; to me she is only more beautiful than before.