Black Forest Village Stories Part 23

"But where did the swallow winter?" asked Maria, again.

"Among the Firelanders, I suppose," answered Ivo; and after a pause he read on:--

"I never knew till I got away from home how finely the larks sing. Only think! there are no larks here at all, and no nightingales either: but a great many other fine birds there are, and splendid pine and oak trees, and the tallest sort of timber.

"Dear mother, I wrote all this a week ago, and when I look over it I think I'm writing stuff and nonsense; but just now I feel as if I was sitting with you before Jacob the blacksmith's house at the well, and people pa.s.sing by and saying, 'Ha' ye good counsel?' and my heart is so full that I don't know what I ought to say first and what last. We are all in very good health, thank G.o.d: we like what we eat and drink, and it feeds us well. We've had to widen all the clothes we brought with us from Germany. It's a good thing Mechtilde has learned to sew.

"Whenever I eat a good dinner I think how nice it would be if my poor mother was here: I could just lay out the best bits for her, and say, 'There, mother: that's for you to help yourself; there's a choice morsel;' and I know you would like living in our house.

"Our Bat is getting on finely: he never had any thing to ail him yet.

Oh, if that dear little Maria was living yet! She would have been a year old next Michaelmas. She was a sweet little angel; she was only three weeks old, but when you called her by name she would look at you so cunning, and grab at your eyes. On All-Souls' day we are going to put an iron cross on her grave. Oh, my! oh, my! the dear child is in heaven now, and heaven is the real America, after all!

"I must write more about my household-matters. I oughtn't to think of the child so much; it works me too hard. I say, as the parson said, 'The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away: the name of the Lord be praised.'

"If the Lord will only keep us all in good health now! The Lord has always been very gracious to me: as far as the cattle go, I haven't lost one of them yet. There's nothing I like to think of more than that the cattle always have plenty to eat here. To the last day of my life I shall never forget what a misery it was when feed was so scarce, just the day before I went to Stuttgard, when there wasn't hardly a blade of gra.s.s on the ground. Do you remember what it used to be to get up in the morning and not give the poor beasts a quarter of a good breakfast, and then to see the flesh falling off their ribs? I often felt so unked I could have run away. Here the cows run about pasturing all the year round, and never know what it is to want; and yet I never had to kill one of them for having overeaten itself. Over there they stand in the stable all the year round, and then, when they do get into a clover-field, they eat till they burst. And just as it is with the cattle, so it is with men. Over there they have to stand in a stable, tied down by squires and clerks and office-holders, until their talons get so long that they can't walk any more, and the minute you let 'em out they go capering about like mad. This is what somebody was saying very finely in a public meeting the other day. Mother, it's a fine thing, a public meeting: it's just as if you were to go to church. And yet it isn't just so, neither; for everybody may speak there that can and likes: all are equal there. I want to tell you how they do it, and yet I believe I can't, exactly: only I must tell you that our Matthew is one of the princ.i.p.al speakers: they've put him on the committee two or three times, and the name of Matthew Sch.o.r.er is one for which the people have respect. I have spoken in public once or twice too. I don't know how it is; at first my heart thumped a little, but then I just felt as if I was speaking to you, just free 'from the liver,' as we used to say in Germany. What they were disputing about was, a German, a Wurtemberger, or, as we say over here, a Swobe,[11] came here, and he'd been an officer, and the king had pardoned him; he'd got up a conspiracy among the military, and afterward he betrayed all his comrades: here he gave himself out for a friend of freedom; but a letter came from over there to say that he was too bad for the gallows, and the devil had kicked him out of his cart. So they disputed about it for a long time whether he could be an officer here or not, and at last I said, 'I can find a handle to fit that hoe. Let him show a letter from his comrades to say that he did the fair thing by them: I can't believe that any Wurtemberger could be so mean as to betray his king first and his comrades afterward.' And they agreed to do just what I told them; but, when I looked at the fellow's face again, I thought, 'Well, that trouble's for nothing: he looks as if he'd stolen the horns off the goat's head.'

"I'm an officer in the militia,--a lieutenant: they chose me because I was in the military over there and understand the business. We choose our own officers here, for here every thing is free. The squire in Nordstetten was only a corporal, after all. If I was to come home---- No; come to think of it, I wouldn't dress like an officer, neither. I'm a free citizen, and that's better than to be an officer or a general. I wouldn't swop with a king. Mother, it's a great country is America. You've got to work right hard, that's a fact; but then you know what you're working for: the t.i.thes and taxes don't take the cream off your earnings. I live here on my farm, and no king and no emperor has any thing to say to me; and as for a presser, they don't know what that is hereabouts, at all. Good gracious! When I think how he used to travel through the village with the beadle, with a long list in his hand, while the people in the houses were weeping and wailing and slamming their doors; and then he would bring a pewter plate, a copper kettle, a pan, or a lamp, from a poor Jew's house to the squire! It is a shame there's so much suffering with us: it seems to me it might easily be done-away with. And yet I wouldn't coax anybody to come over.

It's no trifle to be so far away from home, even if you're ever so well off. Every now and then something makes me feel so soft that, when I think of it, I am ashamed of myself; and then I want to bundle up right-away and go to Germany. I must see it once more while I have an eye open to look at it. I can't tell you how I feel: sometimes I almost go to pieces, and feel like howling as if I was a dog. I know that that would never do for a man, but then I can't help feeling so, and I needn't conceal any thing from you, you know. I think, after all, maybe it only comes of longing to see you so much. More than a thousand times I've said to myself, 'If only my mammy was here too,--my dear, good mammy; if she'd only once sit on that bench there!' How glad you'd be to see the big milk-pans! and, oh, to think of your seeing little Bat, and the one that's coming soon! If I have ever done you any harm, forgive me; for you may be sure there's not a living soul on earth that loves you more than I do.

"I have been resting a little, and now I'm going on. What a fine thing it is that we've learned to read and write properly! I'm always grateful to you for having made me learn it. But you mustn't think I'm out of spirits. To-be-sure, I'm not so full of fun as I sometimes was, years ago, but then I've grown older, and had a good deal of experience; but still, sometimes I am so glad, and feel so kindly for every thing in the world, that I begin to whistle and dance and sing.

Sometimes I feel a little pang when I call something to mind; but then I say, 'Whoa!' and shake myself like a horse, and away with it. I and Mechtilde live as happy as two children, and our Bat has bones in him as strong as a young calf, and muscles like the kernel of a nut.

"On Sunday, when we go to church, we take salt with us, and what we need besides; and Mechtilde once said we get heavenly salt for it in the ma.s.s and the sermon, and salt our souls with it. Mechtilde often makes fine riddles and jokes. We've bought a story-book, too, about Rinaldo Rinaldini: it's a shuddersome story of knights and robbers, and we've read it move than ten times and the other day, when I overslept myself, she sang a song out of it and waked me. Talking of songs, I want to ask a favor of you, but you mustn't laugh at me.

"You see, when a fellow gets out alone into the world and wants to sing by himself, he finds out, all of a sudden, that of ever so many songs he only knows the beginning, and that the rest of it he has only just sung after somebody else; and then I want to pull my head off because it won't come into my mind; but it won't come in, nohow. There's a good many things just so you think you know them until somebody says, 'Now, old fellow, do it alone, will ye?'

"Now, I'd like to ask you--but you mustn't laugh at me--to please get the old schoolmaster to write down all the Nordstetten songs. I'll pay him for it well. You won't forget, will you? And then send it to me, or bring it when you come.

"I must tell you something else, too. Only think, mother! last Tuesday three weeks, as I was sitting at my wagon and mending the tongue,--you can't run to the wagoner's here every five minutes: you must do such things yourself,--what should I hear but somebody say to me, 'Hard at it, Aloys?' and, as I looked up, who should stand there but Long Heartz's Jake, who was in the Guards? We didn't use to be the best of friends; but I forgot all about it, and fell on his neck and almost hugged him to death. I do believe if George himself was to come I'd shake hands with him just to think he came from Nordstetten. I called the whole house together and cut the throat of a turkey. Jake ate his dinner with me just as anybody else would. The laws about eating with Jews, and so on, are for the Old World, and not for the New.

"Jake stayed a week and helped me work in the field: he can do it just as well as a Christian. I was so glad to see he's come to understand that, for a soldier who has honor in him, it isn't the thing to run about peddling. He's going to buy land somewhere hereabouts. I'm helping him do it. I must have my dear Nordstetten Jews here too, for it wouldn't be Nordstetten without them. After that, he's going to join the militia. He'll be an officer before long, most likely. In the evening we used to sit together, I and my Mechtilde, my brothers-in-law and my sisters-in-law, and their boys and girls, and Jake, and we'd sing the songs we used to sing at home; and then I felt just as I did that time Mary Ann got her new distaff. But you mustn't suppose I think very often of Mary Ann. I love my Mechtilde very much, and she loves me too. I wish every couple loved each other as much as we do, and lived as happily together.

"Now, about your coming here. I don't want to beg you too hard: Mat'll write all about it. But, if it's possible---- No, no, I won't beg you.

Jake tells me that our Xavier goes to see Valentine's Mag: well, she won't be afraid of the sea I guess, and he can bring her over too. It's all one now, Nordstetten here or Nordstetten there.

"Write me an answer right soon. Only send the letter to Mat, as you did before: he goes to town oftener than I do.

"Now, good-bye to you, and I hope this will find you very well indeed.

Think of me sometimes. My Mechtilde and my Bat and my parents-in-law send you their best loves. My sister-in-law has taught little Bat to say, when they ask him, 'Where's your grandmother?' 'Over there in the Black Forest.' I am your loving son.

"ALOYS SCh.o.r.eR.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Bat's hand.]

"See how I reach my little hand Far over to your distant land.

"That's my Bat's hand: I drew it, dear mother, just as he laid it on the paper, because there was room enough."

Ivo was asked to read Mat's letter also; but he promised to do so another time, and took his leave, the grateful mother, who was wiping the tears from her eyes, having accompanied him to the door. Outside of the village he saw his sister Mag walking in the meadow with Xavier. He now understood what it was that often made her so disputatious and discontented: her father would not tolerate her acquaintance with "the American," as he called Xavier.

With a skip and a bound, Ivo shook off the oppressive dignity of his station. He danced and sung as he had formerly done, always clearing the heaps of broken stones at the roadside at a bound. The letter of Aloys had made a great impression upon him. He saw in it the picture of a truly honest living,--a life rendered happy by hard work and independence. For the first time he perceived how all the corporal powers of a student lie fallow, and learned to see that it was this which often so greatly "unsettles" the minds of those most favored by natural endowments among the youth of a country. He thought of going to America to be parson and farmer at one and the same time, to go visiting his sister, to travel from farm to farm, instructing the children, and fostering the effort to look upward among all with whom he conversed.

Absorbed with such reflections, he reached Horb. The town did not look near so fine, nor the houses so large, as before: he had seen larger ones. The chaplain was delighted with his former pupil, and Mrs.

Hankler, who was ill in bed, said that it made her well only to see him. The Judge's sons were no longer there; for, as it may be remembered, their father had been transferred to another district.

It was night when Ivo returned home. In the village he found Constantine leading Peter by the hand, and walking the street with the half-grown boys, singing. He taught them new songs, and made them laugh uproariously by recounting all sorts of tricks which he had played upon his teacher at the convent. Ivo walked with them quietly till they reached his father's house, when he said, "Good-night," and went in.

Throughout the holidays he was left much to himself. He would either take solitary walks in the fields, or practise at home on a bugle which he had borrowed from Conrad the baker. His mother always urged him to go out and not mope about the house. Sometimes he would walk out with the new schoolmaster. Constantine he never a.s.sociated with, except when it was not to be avoided.

A deep sorrow stole into his heart when he became aware of the half-concealed dissensions existing between his parents. Before leaving home he had been so habituated to all the incidents of the household that it did not occur to him to speculate about them. At the convent his imagination had pictured home-life as a paradise embosomed in endless peace: all harsh and uninviting a.s.sociations had disappeared from his memory. Thus, he returned to contrast with a highly-wrought ideal the sober realities of every-day existence; and much that he saw could not fail to shock him, and perhaps to appear even worse than it really was. He came fresh from a household where all things moved according to external laws fixed by unvarying regulations,--where discussion or contradiction was out of the question as much as in the interior of a piece of mechanism; and, though depressed by the rigor of these ordinances, he did not understand that in the free const.i.tution of a family, where each one acts for the whole according to his individual judgment, much difference of opinion and many an altercation is almost inevitable. Even the loud tone of voice in which everybody spoke was not pleasant; and his father's manner, in particular, was such as to cause him frequently to shake his head. When his mother listened in silence to Valentine's expositions of his plans of building houses "for sale" and without previous orders, he would cry out, "There it is, you see: you never care a b.u.t.ton for what I say: whether a dog barks, or whether I talk, it's all one to you." If she made objections, he said, "It's the old story: whatever I want to do never suits you."

If Christina treated him gently and kindly, like one who needed indulgence, he would perceive it at once, and curse and swear. If, on the contrary, she was firm and decided, and stood her ground, he said, "All the world knows you don't live for me, but for your children: wouldn't you be glad if I was to die?" And then he would sit down, refusing to eat, or drink, or speak: he would go to the inn, but without getting any thing to eat there,--as he feared it would make people talk and grieve his wife,--so that he generally went to bed without his supper.

When such things happened, Christina would look at Ivo with indescribable pain. She saw all the anguish which her troubles wrote upon his face, and redoubled her efforts to conceal all things and smooth them over. The other children were accustomed to such scenes and no longer distressed by witnessing them.

Seeing the necessity of an explanation with her youngest son, she sat down one evening by his bedside and said,--

[Ill.u.s.tration: She sat down one evening by his bedside.]

"Do you see? your father is the best and most upright man in the world; but he has an unlucky disposition, and is not well pleased with himself, because he sometimes neglects things and spoils a job, and things won't go as he likes; and then he wants other people to be all the better pleased with him. When he sees that that isn't so, and it can't be so, his spirit rises up in him still more: and yet I owe it to my children not to let things go backward. As for myself, I'm willing to eat dry bread all my life; but, for the sake of my children, I can't sit by and see us beggared in five years and my children jostled about among strangers. I know he loves me better than anybody else in the world. He would shed his last drop of blood for me, and I for him; but he wants to mortgage the house and the fields, and to go to work with Koch, the other carpenter, to build houses for sale; and that's what I won't do, and no ten horses shall drag me into it. It's my children's property, and I must be a good mother to them. We're not rich people any more, and the poor mustn't suffer by our losses, either: they must have their gifts just as before, if I must squeeze it out of my own eating. Yes, my dear Ivo, take your mother's advice, and don't forget the poor. The corn grows on the lea, though you give away some of it; and our Lord blesses the bread in the cupboard, so that it nourishes better. You love your father dearly too, don't you, dear Ivo? He is the best man in the world. You honor him, don't you? You are his pride, though he don't tell you so, for it's not in him to say it. When he comes home from the Eagle, where they're always praising you so much because Christian the tailor's son Gregory writes so well of you, you could twist him round your little finger. Just make up your mind not to be distressed by any thing, and don't be sad. What one firmly resolves to do, one can do, believe me."

Ivo nodded and kissed his mother's hand; but a deep sadness stole over him. The paradise of his parental home had sunk in ruins, over which the figure of his mother alone hovered like an angel of light; and once he said to himself, very softly, "Her name is not Christina in vain: she is just like the Savior. She bears the heaviest cross with a smile, and thinks not of herself, but of others."

Thus it came to pa.s.s that he looked forward to the end of the holidays with far less regret than he would have supposed when he first returned home.

9.

THE FRIENDS.

In the first few days of his renewed convent-life the old home-sickness returned. He reproached himself with not having enjoyed his holidays to the full, with having suffered himself to be put out by things which were not so bad as they seemed; but he had made up his mind to profit by the example of Aloys, and not add to his mother's troubles by writing her sorrowful letters.

During his former stay at the convent his thoughts had been so much at home that he had not identified himself with the peculiar circ.u.mstances and a.s.sociations of this abode. All this was now otherwise. "My mother says we can do any thing we really want to do," he said to himself, "and that shall henceforth be my motto."

Ivo and Clement had welcomed each other warmly in the presence of the other boys. Everybody had a great deal to tell. At noon, when the cla.s.s were taking their usual ramble, Ivo and Clement, as if by a tacit understanding, lagged behind; and, under a blooming hawthorn, where no one could see them, they fell upon each other's necks and kissed each other fervently. The larks roystered in mid-air, and the hawthorn waved to a gentle breeze. With faces radiant with joy, their arms flung around each other's necks, they went back to the road and rejoined their comrades. Ivo made a long imaginary speech, of which he only p.r.o.nounced aloud the words "still and holy," and looked into the shining depths of Clement's eye, and they grasped each other's hands.

Then Clement struck Ivo and ran away to the others. Ivo well understood this as a hint to conceal their league and covenant from general observation. They mingled with the others; but, soon finding themselves side by side again, they struck, chased, and dodged each other, until they were again separated from the crowd; then they began a sham wrestle, which soon turned to a warm embrace, and each murmured, "Dear Ivo," "Dear Clement." So inventive was this young friendship in its early bud.

Both of the boys now entered upon a new and happy life. Ivo had never had a brother's heart of his own age; Clement, in the frequent migrations of his father's family, had never attached himself to any one but an elder sister. Now Ivo, when he awoke in the morning, looked up joyfully and said, "Good-morning, Clement," although Clement slept in another apartment. Though away from home, he was a stranger no longer. The convent had ceased to be a place of coercion and unpitying law: he did all things willingly, because his Clement was with him. It cost him no further resolution to write cheerful letters home. All his life was a life of pleasure; and his mother often shook her head when she read his sounding periods. Clement, who had read innumerable fairy-tales and books of knight-errantry, introduced his friend to a world of wonders and strange delights. He made two banished princes of Ivo and himself, and a giant Goggolo of the director; and for a time they always addressed each other by the names of their imaginary characters.

The world of wonders and fairy-tales, which strive to outdo the riddle of existence by still more puzzling combinations and thus in a manner to expound the world of every day, this self-oblivious dream of a toying, childish fancy, had not hitherto met the mental gaze of Ivo.

What Nat had told him was too much intertwined with the rude and simple experiences of field and forest life, and knew nothing of subterranean castles of gold and precious stones. He was entirely unprepared for the gorgeous trappings of these magic gardens and these cities at the bottom of the sea.

The hawthorn was venerated by both as the trysting-tree of their friendship, and they never pa.s.sed it without looking at it and at each other. Ivo, whom we already know as well versed in the Bible, once said, "We have just had the same luck as Moses. Jehovah appeared to him in the bush, and it was burning, but yet was not consumed. Do you know what Jehovah means? I am he who shall be: it is the future of Hava. We shall be friends in future too, as we are now, sha'n't we?"

"I'll tell you a story," replied Clement. "Once there was a princess on an island: her name wasn't Leah, like the old lady in the Bible, but Hawa. She hadn't red eyes, either, but beautiful dark-blue ones. But she couldn't abide thorns: the least little thorn was a thorn in her eye, and the moment she saw one she always cried out, 'Oh dear! it is in me; I feel it in my fine dark-blue eyes.' So to please her they had to cut off every thing on the island which bore thorns, and to grub up every bit of the roots; and when the princess died they buried her; and, to punish her for hating thorns, a thorn grew out of each of her two eyes, and they bear beautiful blue eyes to this day, just like those the princess had, and they call them hawthorns."

Thus Clement ended his story with a triumphant smile. Ivo regarded him with a bright, merry face. Whatever Clement told was so delightful! His words clung to each other like the pearls of a beautiful necklace: all Clement did or said was far beyond compare with any thing else in the wide, wide world.

At Ivo's suggestion they had vowed to each other to be great men, and they now encouraged each other to the most unremitting industry. Every thing was easily done, as each did it for the other's sake. Ivo even kept the head-place in the cla.s.s for a whole year. Clement was not so lucky, because his imagination always ran away with him. Whatever he saw excited him, and he forgot the subject on which he should have been engaged: when the teacher addressed questions to him he awoke as from a dream and answered awry.