The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 09 / Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig

by Unknown

It is a peculiar life that goes on in the house with the green window-shutters. The sister-in-law, still a beautiful woman, little younger than the master of the house, treats him with a kind of silent respect, or even veneration. And her sons do the same. The old gentleman shows his sister-in-law a respectful consideration, a sort of chivalry that has something touching in its grave reserve; toward his nephews he displays the fondness of a father. Yet even there something lies between them that lends to their whole intercourse something of considerate formality.

The sabbath-like peace that now spreads its wings above the most strenuous activity of the dwellers in the house did not always hover there. There was a time when bitter sorrow that came from stolen happiness, and wild desires divided its inmates, when even the menace of murder cast its shadow into the house; when despair at self-created misery wandered, wringing its hands in the still night, from the back door, up the stairs and along the piazza and down again by the path between the little garden and the stable-yard to the shed, creeping restlessly to the front again and again to the back.

What, at that time, made the hearts in the house swell to the bursting-point, what went on in the shadowed souls and issued from them in part, in the self-forgetfulness of fear, or became a deed, a deed of desperation—all that may pass through the memory of the man with whom we have been occupied. It is thirty-one years today since he returned to his home town from a long absence. So we turn back the thirty-one years and find a young man instead of the old one whom we leave. He is tall, but not so strong; and, like the old man, he wears his brown hair cut short at the back and brushed into a "corkscrew-curl" above his high white forehead. The sternness of the old man does not yet appear in his face, and the scar of mental pain endured has not yet been stamped upon his good-humored expression. Yet he is far from showing the light-hearted carelessness usually belonging to his age and the easy-going manners that are so frequently habitual with the traveling journeyman. The high road still leads him through the dense woods; but from the town, far down below, the sound of St. George's bells rises up to the height, as impossible to restrain as a mother flying to the loved child that comes toward her. Home! How much lies in this one short syllable! What swells within the human heart when the voice of home, the tone of the bells, calls a welcome to him who is returning from abroad, the tone that called the child to church, the boy to his confirmation and his first communion, that spoke to him every hour! In the idea of home, all our good angels embrace one another.

Tears gathered in our young wanderer's serious and yet kindly eyes. If he had not been ashamed he would have sobbed aloud. He felt as if he had only dreamed his sojourn away from home and, now that he was awake, could scarcely remember the dream; as if he had only dreamed that he had grown to be a man while abroad; as if it had always seemed to him in his dreams that he was only dreaming abroad in order, when he should wake up at home, to be able to tell about it. It might have been noticed that, in spite of all this inward agitation of the moment, he did not fail to see the cobweb that the breeze from home laid as a greeting against his coat collar, and that he carefully dried his tears so that they might not fall on his neckerchief, and that he removed the last, tiniest scraps of the silver thread with the most persistent patience before he gave himself up to his feeling for home with his whole soul. And even his attachment to his home was in part only an expression of his obstinate need of cleanliness which made him regard everything alien that threatened to fly against him as dirt; and this need in turn sprang from the warmth of feeling with which he embraced everything that stood in closer relation to his personality. The clothes on his body were a piece of home to him, from which he must ward off everything strange.

Now the road turned; the mountain ridge which had closed it in up to this point was now left behind to one side and the top of a spire appeared above the young growth. It was the top of St. George's steeple. The young wanderer paused. Natural as it was that the highest building of the town should become visible to him before the others, the tender meaning with which his fancy imbued the fact made him forget that it was so. The slate roof of the church and steeple needed repairs. This work had been given to his father; and it was the reason, or at least the pretext, for his father's calling him back home sooner than he had intended. Perhaps tomorrow he would begin his part of the work. There, above the wide arch through which he saw the bells moving, the steeple door had been placed. There the two beams would have to be pushed out to bear the ladder on which he should climb up to the broach-post to fasten to it the rope of the contrivance in which he would make his airy circuit of the roof. And as it was his nature to bind the cords of his heart to the objects with which his work brought him in touch, he saw a greeting in the sudden appearance of the spire and involuntarily reached out toward it as if he would press a hand offered him in friendship. Then the thought of the work quickened his step, till a clearing in the wood and his arrival on the highest slope of the mountain showed him his whole home town lying at his feet.

Again he stopped. There stood his father's house with the slate shed behind it, not far from it the house where she had lived at the time he went away. Now she lived in his father's house, was his father's daughter, his brother's wife; and from now on he was to live in the same house with her and to see her daily as his sister-in-law. His heart beat harder at the thought of her. But it did not allow any of the hopes which had formerly been bound up with her memory to rise. His affection had become that of a brother for a sister, and what moved him now was more like anxiety. He knew that she thought of him with dislike. She was the only one in his father's whole house who looked forward to his coming with displeasure. How had this all come about? Had there not been a time when she seemed to be fond of him, when she had apparently liked to meet him as much as she later avoided him? Down below there, in front of the town, the shooting-house stood surrounded by gardens. How much bigger the trees round the house had grown since he had waved his last greeting to it from this height! Shortly before he had stood there under that acacia—it had been a beautiful spring evening, the most beautiful he thought he had ever known—at the Whitsuntide shooting. Within all the other young people were dancing; he walked happily round outside the house in which he knew her to be dancing. Even now he still felt embarrassed with girls and women and did not know how to talk to them; at that time he had felt even more so. How dearly he would have loved to tell her—how much he had to tell her, when he was alone, and how well he knew how to say it; and if chance ordained that he met her alone (it was wonderful how busy chance seemed to be in arranging such meetings) the thought that now the moment had come drove all the blood to his heart, the words from his tongue back into their hiding-place in the depths of his soul. Thus it had been when, her cheeks still glowing from the dance, she had come out of the house alone. She seemed to be concerned only with getting cool; she fanned herself with her white scarf, but her cheeks only grew the redder. He felt that she had seen him, that she expected him to come nearer; and it was the knowledge that he understood her that dyed her cheeks redder—that drove her, as he hesitated, back again into the hall. Perhaps, too, she had heard a third person coming. His brother came out of another door of the hall. He had seen the two standing silently opposite each other, perhaps had also seen the girl's blush. "Are you looking for Beate?" asked our hero to hide his embarrassment. "No," answered his brother, "she is not at the dance—and it's just as well. Nothing can come of it, after all; I must get another—and until I find one, Bohemian beer is my sweetheart."

There was something wild in his brother's speech. Our hero looked at him amazed and at the same time disturbed. "Why can nothing come of it?" he asked. "And what is the matter with you?"

"Oh, yes, you think I ought to be like you, pious and patient so long as there is no thread on your coat. But I am another kind of fellow, and if anybody upsets my calculations I have to let off steam. Why can nothing come of it? Because the old man in the blue coat won't have it."

"Father called you into the little garden yesterday—"

"Yes, and raised his white eyebrows, which are drawn with a ruler, an inch and a half. 'I thought it was so. You are going with Beate, the collector's daughter. That comes to an end today!'"