In the house she was indeed a treasure, but for us children, especially me, she was even more than that, she was a real blessing. The training we received from our parents advanced by fits and starts; sometimes there was training and again there was none, and never any thought of continuity. But the Schröder girl supplied the continuity. She had no favorites, never allowed herself to be outwitted, and knew just how to handle each one of us. As for me, she knew that I was good-natured, but sensitive, proud, and under the control of a certain degree of megalomania. These bad inclinations she wished to hold in check, and so said to me times without number: "Yes, you think you are a marvelous fellow, but you are only a childish boy, just like the rest of them, only at times a bit worse. You always want to play the young gentleman, but young gentlemen don't lick honey from their plates, or at least don't deny it if they have done so, in fact they never tell lies. Not long ago I heard you prating about honor, but I want to tell you, that doesn't look to me like honor." She insisted upon truthfulness, treated boasting with fine ridicule, and was chary of compliments. But when she did praise it was effective. She did me many a good turn, and not until late in life, when I was past fifty, did I meet another woman, this time an elderly lady, who exerted such an educational influence upon me. Even now I am still taking lessons and learn from people who are young enough to be my grandchildren.
Thus much about the good Schröder girl, and after this digression in memory of her I ask once more: "Well, how did we live?" I propose to show how we lived, by means of a series of pictures, and in order to introduce order and clarity into the description it will be well to divide our life as we lived it into two halves, a summer life and a winter life.
First, then, there was the summer life. About the middle of June we regularly had the house full of visitors; for my mother, in accordance with the old custom, still kept in touch with her relatives, a trait which we children only very imperfectly inherited from her. But let it be understood, she kept in touch with her relatives, not to derive advantages from them, but to bestow advantages. She was incredibly generous, and there were times when we, after we had grown up, asked ourselves the question, which passion really threatened us most, the gaming passion of our father, or the giving and presenting passion of our mother. But we finally discovered the answer to the question. What our father did was simply money thrown away, whereas the excessive amounts given away by our mother were always unselfishly given and carried with them a quiet blessing. No doubt a certain desire to be, so far as possible, a grande dame, if only in a very small degree, had something to do with it, but then all our doings show some elements of human weakness. Later in life, when we talked with her about these things, she said: "Certainly, I might have refrained from doing many things. We spent far more than our income. But I said to myself: 'What there is will be spent anyhow, and so it is better for it to go my way than the other.'"
These summer months, from the middle of June on, were often made especially charming by the numbers of visitors in our home, mostly young women relatives from Berlin, who were both cheerful and talkative. The household was then completely changed, for weeks at a time, and, the hatchet being temporarily buried, merriment and playing of sly tricks, with occasional boisterous pranks, became the order of the day. The most brilliant performer in the fun-making competitions that frequently arose was always my father himself. He was, as handsome men often are, the absolute opposite of Don Juan, and proud of his virtue. But by as much as he was unlike Don Juan, he was charming as a Gascon, when it came to a spirited discussion of pert and often most daring themes, with young ladies, of whom he made but one requirement, that they be handsome, otherwise it was not worth his while. I inherited from him this inclination to enter into subtle discussions with ladies, in a jesting tone; indeed I have ever carried this inclination over into my style of writing, and when I read corresponding scenes in my novels and short stories it once in awhile seems to me as though I heard my father speaking. Except with this difference, that I fall far short of his felicitousness, as people who had known him in his prime often told me, when he was over severity and I was correspondingly along in years. I have frequently been addressed in some such way as this: "Now see here, you do very well, when you have your good days, but you can't compete with your father." And that was certainly true. His small talk, born of bonhomie and at the same time enlivened with fantastic lawyerly artifice, was simply irresistible, even when dealing with business matters, in which as a rule heartiness has no place. And yet his remarks on money matters had a lasting effect, so that none of us children ever cherished the slightest feeling of bitterness on account of his most remarkable financial operations. My mother, however, was of too different a nature to be easily converted or carried away by his social graces. These matters were to her most repugnant when treated lightly and jestingly. "Whatever is serious is not funny, that's all." But she never disputed the fact that, as a happy humorist, he always succeeded in drawing people over to his side, though she never failed to add: "unfortunately."
And now let us return to the summer visitors in our home. At times it was rather difficult to furnish continual rounds of entertainment for the young women, and would perhaps have proved impossible, if it had not been for the horses. Almost every afternoon, when the weather was good, the carriage drove up to our door, and such days during the bathing season, when we were often almost completely overwhelmed with visitors, were probably the only times when my mother, without in the least sacrificing her fundamental convictions, was temporarily reconciled to the existence of horse and carriage. Whoever knows Swinemünde, and there are many who do know the place, is aware of the fact that one is never embarrassed there for a beautiful spot to visit on afternoon drives, and even in those days this was as true as it is today. There was the trip along the beach to Heringsdorf, or, on the other side, out to the moles; but the most popular drives, because they afforded protection from the sun, were those back into the country, either through the dense beech forest toward Corswant, or better still to the village of Camminke, situated near the Haff of Stettin and the Golm (mountain). There was a much frequented skittle-alley there, where women played as well as men. I myself liked to stand by the splintery lath trough, in which the skittle-boy rolled back the balls. My only reason for choosing this position was because I had heard a short time before that one of the players at this very alley, in catching a ball as it rolled to him, had run a long lath splinter under the nail of his index finger. That had made such an impression on me that I always stood there shuddering for fear of a repetition of the accident, which fortunately did not occur. When I finally grew tired of waiting I stepped through a lattice gate, always hanging aslant and always creaky, into a garden plot running along close by the skittle-alley and parallel with it. It was a genuine peasant's garden, with touch-me-nots and mignonette in bloom, and in one place the mallows grew so tall that they formed a lane. Then when the sun went down behind the forest the Golm, which lay to the west, was bathed in red light, and the metal ball on its tall pillar looked down, like a sphere of gold, upon the village and the skittle-garden. Myriads of mosquitoes hung in the air, and the bumble bees flew back and forth between the box-edged beds.
Our visitors usually left at the beginning of August, and when September came the last of the hotel guests departed from the city. If anybody chose to remain longer it was inconvenient for the landlords, in which connection the following scene occurred. A man, a Berliner of course, on returning to his hotel, after accompanying some departing friends to their steamer, sat down leisurely by his host and hostess, rubbed his hands together, and said: "Well, Hoppensack, at last the Berliners are all gone, or at least nearly all of them; now we shall have a good time, now it will be cozy." He expected, of course, that the host and hostess would agree with him most heartily. But instead of that he found himself looking into long faces. Finally he screwed up his courage and asked why they were so indifferent. "Why, good heavens, Mr. Schünemann," said Hoppensack, "a recorder and his wife came to us the last of May and now it is almost the middle of September. We want to be alone again, you see." As Mrs. Hoppensack nodded approvingly, there was nothing left for Schünemann to do but to depart himself the next day.
Not long after the last summer guests had gone the equinoctial storms set in, and, if it was a bad year, they lasted on into November. First the chestnuts fell, then the tiles rattled down from the roof, and from the eaves-troughs, always placed with their outlets close by bedroom windows, the rain splashed noisily down into the yard. In the course of time, scattered clouds sailed across the clearing sky and the air turned cold. Everybody felt the chilliness, and all day long there was an old woodchopper at work in the shed. My father would often go down to see him, take the ax and split wood for him a half-hour at a time.
Social activities were at a standstill during these late autumn days. People were recovering from the strain of the summer season and storing up strength for winter entertainments. Before these began there was an interregnum of several weeks, the slaughtering and baking times, the latter coinciding with the Christmas period. First came the slaughtering of geese. A regular household without a goose-killing time could hardly have been thought of. Many things had to be taken into account. First of all, perhaps, were the feathers to make new beds, which were always needed for guest chambers; but the chief concern were the smoked goose-breasts, almost as important articles as the hams and sides of bacon hanging in the chimney. Shortly before St. Martin's day, if enough geese had been collected to supply the needs, they were penned up for fattening, in the court, which gave rise to a horrible cackling, well calculated to rob us of our night's rest for a whole week. But a day was straightway set for the beginning of the feast, about the middle of November. In the court, in a lean-to built near the end of the house, and, strange to say, with a dove-cote over it, was the servants' room, in which, beside the cook, two house-maids slept, provided always they did any sleeping. The coachman was supposed, according to a rule of the house, to occupy the straw-loft, but was happy to forego the independence of these quarters, which went with his position, preferring by his presence to crowd still worse the already crowded space of the servants' room, in full accord with Schiller's lines,
"Room is in the smallest hovel
For a happy, loving pair."
But when goose-killing time came it meant a very considerable further overcrowding, for on the evening that the massacring was to begin there was added to the number of persons usually quartered in the servants' room a special force of old women, four or five in number, who at other times earned a living at washing or weeding.