The room on the street-side, which had at the same time been Meister Anton’s workshop, was kept unchanged in its former condition. With anxious care did the widow see to it that none of the tools belonging to the deceased were moved. Her uncle Grünebaum had declared his willingness to purchase all the unnecessary implements at an acceptable price; but Frau Christine could not bring herself to sell a single piece. In all her leisure hours she sat at her wonted seat beside the shoemaker’s work-table, and in the evening it was, as we know, only by the light of the glass-ball that she could knit or sew or read her hymnal.
The poor woman worked hard to gain an honest living for herself and her child. In the little bedroom, the windows of which looked out into the yard, she lay many a night wakeful and anxious, while Hans Unwirrsch in his father’s large bedstead was dreaming of the large rolls and buttered slices of bread that the neighbours’ happy children enjoyed. Wise Meister Grünebaum did what he could by his relatives, but he was not very successful in his trade; he was too fond of delivering long speeches at the ale-house; and his customers were more willing to give him a pair of shaky boots to be mended than to order a new pair of him. It was with difficulty that he kept his head above water; but he was never chary about giving advice, indeed he gave it gladly and in large quantities, and unfortunately we must call attention to the not unusual fact that the quantity stood for the most part in no proper relation to the quality. Cousin Schlotterbeck, though by no means so wise as Meister Grünebaum, was more practical, and it was upon her advice that Frau Christine became a washerwoman, getting up in the morning between two and three, and returning at night tired and aching, to still the primary, physical hunger of her child, and translate his dreams into reality.
Hans Unwirrsch retained faint, odd, and uncertain memories of this period of his life, which he has reported to his nearest friends. He had a light sleep from early youth, and so he often awoke by the light of a match, with which in cold, dark nights of winter his mother lit her lamp to prepare for her early walk. He lay in his warm pillow, and did not stir until his mother bent over him to see if she had awakened the little sleeper by the pattering of her slippers. Then he would throw his arms about her neck and laugh, while she gave him a kiss and an exhortation to go quickly to sleep again, for the day was far distant. This exhortation he would obey at once, or else later. In the latter case he looked at the burning lamp through his half-closed eye-lids, and at his mother and the shadows on the wall.
Strange it is that all his recollections seem to be of winter; there was a misty atmosphere about the flame of the lamp; his breath made a cloud between him and the light; the frozen window-panes glittered, it was bitter cold, and the comfort he felt in his safe, warm bed was intermingled with terror of the bitter cold without, which made him pull the blanket over his nose.
He never could understand why his mother got up so early, while it was so dark and so cold, and while such queer, black shadows were gliding along the wall, nodding, rising, and bending. Still more vague were his thoughts about the places his mother went to; in accordance with his momentary mood, he pictured them more or less pleasantly, mingling in all sorts of details taken from fairy-tales, and fragments out of the conversations of grown persons that he had overheard, and which in these misty moments between sleeping and waking took on more and more of a gaudy colouring.
At last his mother was dressed, and once more she bent over the child’s bed. Again he received a kiss, a great deal of good advice, and many enticing promises, if he would lie still, not cry, and go to sleep again. The assurance was added that the morning, and with it Cousin Schlotterbeck, would be coming ere long; the lamp was blown out, the room grew dark, the door creaked, the steps of his mother passed away; soon he was fast asleep, and when he awoke again Cousin Schlotterbeck was generally sitting by his bedside, and in the adjoining room he could hear the fire crackle in the stove.
Cousin Schlotterbeck, although she was not much older than Frau Christine Unwirrsch, had always been Cousin Schlotterbeck. No one in the Kröppelstrasse knew her by any other designation, and she was as well known in the Kröppelstrasse as the “old Fritz,” as the Emperor Napoleon, and old Blücher, although she had no further resemblance to these celebrated heroes than that she used snuff like the Prussian king, and had a hooked nose like the “Corsican bloodhound.”
Of right she should have filled a chapter by herself in this book, for she had a gift of which not every one can boast: to her the dead had not departed this earth; she saw them walk the streets, she met them on the market-place as one sees the living, and comes upon them unexpectedly around the corner. There was nothing weird about this to her; she spoke of it as of something quite natural and unsurprising, and to her there was no difference whatever between the Burgomaster Eckerlein, who had died in the year 1769, and often met her in his wig and red velvet coat near the apothecary’s shop, and the grandson of this man, who owned this same apothecary’s shop in the year 1820, and who was now looking out of the window with no faculty for seeing his grandfather walking below.
Even in the minds of Cousin Schlotterbeck’s acquaintances this strange “gift” of hers no longer awakened horror. The unbelieving ceased scoffing at it, and the believing—of whom there was a goodly number—did not cross themselves any more. Upon the character of the good little woman this high favour had no perverting influence. She was not made supercilious by her marvellous seer’s gift; she took it as an undeserved favour of God, and remained more humble than many other people who did not see nearly as much as the oldish spinster in the Kröppelstrasse.
As far as her external appearance is concerned, Cousin Schlotterbeck was of medium height, but she stooped perceptibly, and walked with a far-protruding head. Her clothes hung about her like something that does not belong there, and her nose was, as we have said, very sharp and very hooked. It would have impressed one disagreeably, this nose would, if it had not been for the eyes. But her eyes did penance for every sin her nose committed; they were remarkable eyes, and saw remarkable things. Clear and beaming they were up to her old age,—blue, young eyes in an old, old, dried-up face! Hans Unwirrsch never forgot them, although he looked into much more beautiful eyes in his life.