Bashan and I

by Thomas Mann

It is beautiful here when the sky is blue and the flat ferry decorated with a pennant in honour of the weather or some other festival occasion. There are other boats in this spot, but the ferry is fastened to a wire rope which in turn is fastened to another and thicker wire cable. This is stretched across the river in such a way as to let a pulley run along it. The current itself furnishes the motive power for the ferryboat and a pressure from the ferryman’s hand upon the rudder does the rest. The ferryman lives in the ferry-house with his wife and child, and this house lies a short distance from the upper footpath. It has a little garden and a hen-house, and is evidently an official dwelling and therefore rent-free. It is a kind of villa of liliputian proportions, lightly and whimsically built with little bays and gables, and appears to boast of two rooms below and two above. I love to sit on the bench in front of the garden close to the upper footpath. Bashan then squats upon my foot; the hens of the ferryman amble about me and give their heads a forward jerk with every step. And usually the cock comes to perch upon the back of the bench and lets the green Bersaglieri feathers of his tail hang down behind, sitting beside me thus and measuring me luridly from the side with his red eye.

I watch the traffic on the ferry. It could scarcely be called strenuous, nor even lively, for it consummates itself, at large and liberal intervals. So I find all the more pleasure in the scene when a man or a woman with a market-basket appears on the farther bank and demands to be carried across the river. For the poetic element in that fine call, “Ferry ahoy!” remains full of human captivation as in ancient days, even though the action fulfils itself, as here, in new and progressive forms. Double steps of wood for the coming and the departing traveller lead down the escarpment on both sides into the bed of the river and to the landing-places. And on both sides there is an electric button affixed to the rail.

A man appears on the other bank, stands still and peers across the water. No longer, however, as in former times, does he hollow his hands into a trumpet and shout through them. He walks towards the push-button, stretches out his arms and performs a slight pressure with his thumb. There is a clear, thin tinkle in the house of the ferryman. This is the modern “Ferry ahoy!” and it is poetic even thus. There stands the prospective passenger and watches and waits. And almost at the very moment at which the bell tinkles, the ferryman comes out of his little house, just as though he had stood or sat behind the door, merely waiting for the signal. The ferryman, I repeat, comes out—and in his walk there is something which suggests that he has been set in motion directly by the pressure upon the push button—just as one may shoot at a door in a tiny hut among the targets in the shooting-galleries. If you chance to make a bull’s-eye, it flies open and a tiny figure comes out—say a milkmaid or a soldier.

Without showing the slightest sign of undue haste the ferryman walks with swinging arms through his little garden, crosses the footpath, descends the wooden steps to the river, pushes off the ferry, and holds the rudder whilst the pulley runs along the taut wire, and the boat is driven across by the current. The boat bumps against the other bank; the stranger jumps in; upon reaching the hither bank he hands the ferryman a nickel coin and leaps up the wooden steps with alacrity. He has conquered the river, and turns either to the right or to the left. Sometimes when the ferryman is prevented from being at his post, either through illness or more urgent household affairs, then his wife or even his child will come out of the house and fetch the stranger across. They are able to perform this office as well as he—even I could attend to it. The job of the ferryman is an easy one and requires no special capacity or training. Surely he is a lucky man, this ferrymaster, in having such a job and being able to live in the neat dwarf villa. Any fool would at once be able to step into his place, and the knowledge of this keeps him modest and grateful. On the way back to his house he greets me very politely (with Grüss Gott) as I sit there on the wooden bench between the dog and the rooster. It is clear that he wishes to remain on a good footing with every one.

A smell of tar, a wind brushing across the waters, and a plashing sound against the wooden sides of the boats. What more could I desire? Sometimes I am seized by another memory of home. It comes upon me when the water is deep and still and there is a somewhat musty odour in the air, and then these things take me back to the Laguna, back to Venice, where I spent so many years of my youth. And then again there is storm and there is flood, and the everlasting rain comes pouring down. Wrapped in a rubber coat, with wet and streaming face, I brace myself against the stiff west wind along the upper way, a wind that tears the young poplars from their poles and makes it clear why the trees here incline away from the west and have crowns which grow only from one side of the branches. When we go walking in rains such as these, Bashan frequently stands still and shakes himself so that he is the dark centre of a dull, gray flurry of water. The river at such times is a different river. Swollen, murky-yellow, it comes rolling on, wearing upon its face an ominous catastrophic look. This storm-flood is full of a lurching, crowding, tremendous haste, an insensate hurry. It usurps the entire reserve channel up to the very edge of the escarpment, and leaps up against the concrete walls, the protective works of willow boughs, so that one involuntarily utters thanks to the wise forethought which established these defences. The eerie thing about these flood-waters is that the river grows quiet, much quieter than usual, in fact it becomes almost silent. The customary surface rapids are no longer visible; the stream rolls too high for these. But the spots where these rapids were, are to be recognised by the deeper hollows and the higher waves, and by the fact that the crests of these waves curl over backwards and not forwards—like the waves of the current. The waterfall no longer plays a part, its glistening curved body is now flat and meagre, and the pother at its base has vanished through the height of the water level.

So far as Bashan is concerned, his astonishment at such a change in the aspect of things is beyond expression. He remains in a state of constant amazement. He is unable to realise that the places in which he has been accustomed to trot and run should have vanished, should have utterly vanished—think of it!—and that there should be nothing there but water—water! In his fright he scampers up the escarpment in a kind of panic—away from the plunging, spattering flood and looks around at me with waggings of his tail, after which he casts further dubious glances at the water. A kind of embarrassment comes upon him—and he gives way to a trick of his—opening his mouth obliquely and thrusting his tongue into the corners—a play of feature which affects one as being as much human as it is animal. As a means of expression it is somewhat unrefined and subservient, but thoroughly comprehensible. The whole effect is about the same as would be conveyed by a rather simple-minded yokel in the face of an awkward situation, provided he went so far as to scratch his head as Bashan scratches his neck.

Having occupied myself in some detail with the zone of the river, and described the whole region, I believe that I have succeeded in giving my readers a picture of it. I rather like my own description of the place, or rather the place as presented in my description, but I like it still better as a piece of nature. For there is no doubt that as a piece of living nature, it is still more diversified and vivid, just as Bashan himself is in reality warmer, more lively and lovable than in this counterfeit presentment. I am attached to this stretch of landscape and grateful to it, and so I have described it with something of the meticulosity with which the old Dutch masters painted. It is my park and my solitude, and it is for this reason that I have sought to conjure it up before the reader’s eye. My thoughts and my dreams are mingled and intergrown with its scenes, like the leaves of its creepers with the stems of its trees.

I have looked upon it at all hours and at all seasons; in autumn when the chemical smell of the fading leaves fills the air, when the white legions of the thistle-down have all been blown to the winds, when the great beeches of the Kurgarten spread a rust-coloured carpet of leaves about them on the meadows, and when afternoons dripping with gold merge into theatrically romantic twilights with the crescent moon swimming in the skies, with a milky brew of mist hovering over the levels and the afterglow of the sunset smouldering through the black silhouettes of the trees. And also in winter when all the gravel is covered with snow and soft and smooth, so that one may walk upon it in one’s rubber overshoes, and when the river goes shooting black between the pale frost-bound shores and the cry of hundreds of fresh-water gulls fills the air from morning to evening. Nevertheless the easiest and most familiar intercourse with this landscape is during the mild months, when no special equipment in the way of defensive clothing is necessary, and one may go for a quick stroll for a quarter of an hour, betwixt and between two showers of rain, and, in passing, bend aside the branch of a black alder tree and cast a look into the wandering waves. It is possible that visitors have been to call upon me, and I have been left behind, stranded, as it were, within my own four walls, crushed by conversation, and with the breath of the strangers apparently still hanging in the air. It is good then to go at once and loaf for a little along the Heine or Schiller Street, to draw a breath of fresh air and to anoint myself with Nature. I look up to the heavens, peer into the green depths of the world of tender and delicate leaves, my nerves recover themselves and grow quiet—peace and serenity return to my spirit.

Bashan is always with me on such forays. He had not been able to prevent an invasion of the house by the outer world in the shape of the visitors, even though he had lifted up his voice in loud and terrible protest. But that had done no good, and so he had stepped aside. And now he is jubilant that he and I are once more together in the hunting-grounds. With one ear turned carelessly inside out, and loping obliquely, as is the common habit of dogs—that is, with his hind legs moving not directly behind his front legs, but somewhat to the side, he goes trotting on the gravel in front of me. And suddenly I see that some tremendous emotion has seized him, body and soul. His short bobbed tail begins to wave furiously. His head lunges forward and to one side, his body stretches and extends itself. He jumps hither and thither, and the next moment, with his nose still glued to the ground, he goes darting off. He has struck a scent. He is on the spoor of a rabbit.

THE CHASE