He had never experienced such a spring and such a summer as in this first blessed year of his life in Grunzenow. All the glories of a dream did not equal the reality of those golden days of love and hope on the shore of the Baltic. He looked into life clearly and courageously; whatever indecision and instability nature and fate had laid in his character he sought to thrust away from him with a manly will. All he had to thank fortune for he sought to deserve and more than deserve by faithful endeavor and earnest striving. The indefinite hunger of his youth had now become the quiet, deliberate, steady endeavor that, active in millions, keeps mankind in its course and leads it on. Johannes Unwirrsch had learnt to know life, both its good and its evil side. Now all the circles through which he had wandered with all their figures, charming and terrible, had sunk into the past; he stood in the middle of a sphere which his activity was to fill. It was not indifferent to him that no tie bound him to his home town any longer, that he could bring nothing with him from Kröppel Street into his new life but sweet, melancholy remembrance and the shining glass globe which had formerly hung above his father's table. This glass globe now threw its brilliance on the life which Master Anton Unwirrsch had built up in his dreams of the true life on earth; but no generation extends far enough into the coming generations to see fulfilled its ideals which by that time are seldom the only ones.
Autumn!
The days of spring and of summer were past; but the autumn sun shone as lovely as ever and land and sea rejoiced in it. Nevertheless the Assistant Pastor at the open window had the right to disregard it in spite of all its glory; it was the seventh of September and on the next day, the eighth, a Sunday, his wedding was to take place. He had not made those rhymes in the moment in which he scribbled them down among the other fragments of thought.
Pastor Tillenius had chosen and fixed the wedding day; with art and diplomacy Pastor Tillenius had cajoled Uncle Rudolf and Colonel von Bullau into giving their consent and had held them to their promise when the two old gentlemen had wanted to take it back and not give up "their girl." Pastor Tillenius, backed by the apostolic principle: a bishop must be the husband of one wife—had held the field against the two obstinate, stubborn old soldiers. It was settled that Fränzchen was to leave the Grunzenow mansion and move to the vicarage;—Fränzchen herself had also given her consent and after all that was the most important thing.
Autumn! What was all the rapture of spring and summer compared with the bliss that autumn promised to give? It seemed as if all the birds of passage must stay to join in the celebration of the wedding and the honeymoon.
After the Grunzenow household had once resigned itself to the inevitable, it took infinite pleasure in the necessity and threw itself into the preparations for the festive day with an eagerness that surpassed everything. The Colonel was in a mild fever day and night, the lieutenant in a similar condition; but great indeed was Grips, the man for everything.
Who can find praise enough for the man's dexterous hand? Now it boxed the ears of a too stupid stable-boy; now, with deliberation, it drove in a nail on which to hang a self-twined garland. Grips had learnt something during his campaigns.
The village was stirring too. Old and young wanted to do their part toward making the eighth of September a day to be remembered in the annals of Grunzenow. For weeks beforehand the women and girls were busy, for weeks the sexton, who was teaching the children the wedding cantata, slept badly with inward excitement and too vivid dreams of success and glory, of failure, disgrace and shame.
Pastor Josias Tillenius composed his wedding address and as he gave to it the most beautiful although the saddest memories of his own life, and all of his good, full, old heart, it turned out admirably without being written down or learnt by heart.
On the seventh of September all the preparations were ended: meat and drink were not lacking in the Grunzenow house; the columns and pillars were festooned, the doors stood open to let the wedding joy in and the bride out.