BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH (1856)

By OTTO LUDWIG

TRANSLATED AND CONDENSED BY MURIEL ALMON

The little garden lies between the dwelling-house and the slate shed; whoever goes from one to the other must pass it. As you go from the house to the shed it is on your left; on the right there is a yard with a woodshed and a stable, separated from the neighboring house by a trellis-fence. Every morning the house opens twelve green shutters onto one of the busiest streets of the town, the shed opens a large gray door on a back street; the roses on the bushes that have been trained to grow like trees in the little garden can look out into the lane which connects its two larger sisters. On the other side of the lane stands a tall house which, in elegant seclusion, does not deign to bestow a glance on the smaller one. Its eyes are open only to the doings of the main street; if you look nearer at its closed eyes facing the narrow street, you soon see the reason for its eternal sleep—they are only a sham, painted on the outer wall.

Not all sides of the house that belongs to the little garden look as decorative as the one on the main street. There, a pale rose-colored tint contrasts not too sharply with the green window-shutters and the blue slate roof. The weather side of the house, on the narrow street, looks as if it were clad in an armor of slate from top to toe; the other gable-end joins directly on to the row of houses of which it is the beginning or the end; at the back, however, it is an example of the proverb that everything has its weak point. There, an upstairs piazza has been built onto the house, not unlike half a crown of thorns. Supported by roughly-hewn wooden posts it runs along the upper story and expands toward the left into a little room. There is no direct entrance to it from the upper story of the house. To reach the "gallery chamber" from there one must leave the house by the back door, walk perhaps six steps along the wall, past the dog-kennel, to the wooden stairs, resembling those of a henhouse, and after climbing these must wander the whole length of the piazza to the left.

If all the structures are not equally ornamental and if piazza, stable and shed stand out noticeably against the dwelling-house, yet there is nowhere lacking a quality which adorns more than beauty of form and shining ornamentation. Extreme cleanliness smiles at the observer from the most hidden corners. In the little garden it reaches such a pitch that it hardly dares to smile. The garden does not look as if it were cleaned with a hoe and broom; it looks as if it had been brushed. The little beds that stand out so sharply against the yellow gravel of the walks look, not as if they had been dug by a cord, but as if they were drawn on the ground with a ruler and compasses, the box edging has the air of being daily attended to by the most accurate barber in town with comb and razor. And yet the blue coat which, if one stands on the piazza, one may see twice daily stepping into the little garden and every day at exactly the same minute, is still more neatly kept than the garden. When, after doing various pieces of work, the old gentleman leaves the garden again—and every day he goes at the same minute, just as punctually as he comes—the white apron over his blue coat shines with such unblemished whiteness that it is really incomprehensible why the old gentleman should have put it on. When he moves about among the tall rose-bushes which seem to have taken the old gentleman's bearing for a model, each of his steps is like the other, none is longer or fails to keep the regularity of his tempo. If one looks at him closer as he stands thus in the middle of his creation, one sees that he has merely copied externally that of which nature has created the model in himself. The regularity of the different parts of his tall figure seems to have been as accurately measured as the beds of the little garden. When nature formed him, her countenance must have borne the same expression of conscientiousness as the old man's face—an expression which, because of its strength, would appear to be obstinacy if an expression of loving gentleness, indeed almost of dreamy enthusiasm, were not mixed with it. And even now nature seems to watch over him with the same care that his eye shows when it looks over his little garden. His hair, cut short at the back and twisted above his brow into a so-called "corkscrew-curl," is of the same unblemished whiteness that is shown by his neckerchief, waistcoat, collar and the apron over his buttoned-up coat. Here, in his little garden, he completes the finished picture that it presents; away from home his appearance and personality must appear a little odd. His hat still has the high pointed crown, his blue overcoat the narrow collar and padded shoulders of a long vanished fashion. These offer opportunities enough for bad jokes; but no one makes them. It is as if there were an invisible something emanating from the stately figure that prevents the rise of flippant thoughts.

When the older inhabitants of the town, meeting Herr Nettenmair, pause in their conversation to greet him respectfully, it is not alone the magic something that has this effect. They know what it is that they respect in the old gentleman; when he has passed, their eyes follow him as they stand, still in silence, until he has disappeared round the corner; then it may well be that a hand is raised and an extended forefinger tells more eloquently than lips could of a long life adorned with all the virtues of a good citizen and untarnished by a single misdeed. He is never seen in a public place, unless indeed something relating to the common welfare is to be discussed or started. The recreation which he allows himself he seeks in his little garden. At other times he sits over his ledgers or stands in the shed superintending the loading and unloading of the slate which comes from his own quarry and which he sells all over the country and far beyond its borders. A widowed sister-in-law looks after his house for him and her sons manage the business of slating which is connected with the trade in slate and is scarcely inferior to it in size. It is their uncle's spirit, the spirit of orderliness, of conscientiousness to the point of obstinacy, that rests upon the nephews and gains and keeps for them such confidence that they are sent for from far away wherever a slater is needed to roof a new building or to make extensive repairs to an old one.