Edelweiss Part 10

The young men thanked her.

A still pleasanter greeting awaited them at the doctor's. The servant-maid ran out and laid a wreath of flowers on the wagon.

"Who sends it?" asked Pilgrim, for Lenz was mute with astonishment.

"My young mistress," answered the girl, and disappeared into the house.

The two friends looked up at the window and saluted, but saw no one. A few minutes afterwards they heard The Magic Flute played from the doctor's parlor.

"It is a grand family, that of the doctor's," said Pilgrim. "I never know my own mind so little as when I ask myself which one of them all is the best. My favorite is the old mayoress. The neighborhood ought to sign a pet.i.tion to G.o.d that she might live forever. Now that your mother is gone, she is the last one left of that generation of dignified, motherly old ladies. But the granddaughters are fine women too. Amanda will make just such a grandmother as the old mayoress, one of these days."

Lenz was silent, and remained so during the whole walk to the city. But there, when the wagon had gone on, and the friends were sitting over their wine, he recovered his spirits, and felt, as he said, that he was beginning life anew.

"Now you must marry," was again Pilgrim's verdict. "There are two choices open to you; one is to marry a woman of thorough education,--one of the doctor's daughters, for instance. You can have one, if you will, and I advise you to take Amanda. It is a pity she cannot sing, like Bertha, but she is good and true. She will honor you, if you honor her, and will appreciate your art." Lenz looked down into his gla.s.s, and Pilgrim continued: "Or you will make your home comfortable by marrying an honest peasant, the bailiff's daughter Katharine. As Franzl says, the girl would jump to get you, and she would make a good, economical housewife. You would have half a dozen stout children tearing down the landlord's pine-trees behind your house, and you would grow a rich man. But, in that case, you must expect no sympathy from your wife in your art or in any of your great plans. You can have which you like, but you must decide. If your mind is made up, send me to which you will. I rejoice already in my dignity as suitor. I will even put on a white neckcloth, if necessary. Can the power of friendship go further?"

Lenz still looked down into his gla.s.s. Pilgrim's alternative excluded Annele. After a long pause, he said: "I should like to be for once in a great city, that I might hear such a piece of music as The Magic Flute played by a full orchestra over and over again. I am sure my pieces could be made to sound much better than they do. I am haunted by the idea of a tone I cannot produce. People may praise me as much as they like, but I know my pieces have not the right sound. I am sure of it, and yet I cannot make them better. There is something squeaking, dry, harsh about them, like the sounds made by a deaf and dumb person, which are like words, but yet are not words. If I could only bring out the right tone! I know it, I hear it, but I cannot produce it."

"I understand; I feel just so myself. I am conscious of a color, a picture which I ought to be able to paint. I seem on the point of seizing and fixing it, but I shall die without succeeding. That is our fate, yours and mine. You will never produce your ideal. It cannot be otherwise. Bellows and wheels cannot take the place of human breath and human hands; they bring tones from a flute and a violin which your machinery never can. It must be so. Come, let us empty our gla.s.ses and be off."

They finished their wine, and went merrily homeward through the autumn night, singing all sorts of songs, and, when they were tired of singing, varying their music by whistling. At Pilgrim's house they parted. Lenz's way led him past the Lion inn; and, as he saw it was still lighted, and heard a sound of voices within, he entered.

"I am glad you are come," said Annele, giving him her hand; "I was thinking you must be as lonely at home, now that your clock is gone, as you were when your mother died."

"Not quite that, but something like it. Ah! Annele, people may praise my work as much as they like, I know it is not what it should be. But one thing I may say of myself without conceit,--I do know how to hear music, and to hear music aright is something."

Annele stared at him. Know how to hear music! Indeed, what art is there in that? Any one can hear music who has ears, and does not plug them up! Still, she fancied that Lenz must have some hidden meaning.

Experience had taught her, that, when a man wants to bring out an idea of which his mind is full, his first utterances are apt to be rather disconnected; so she threw another wondering glance at Lenz, and said, "To be sure, that is something."

"You know what I mean," cried Lenz, delighted.

"Yes, but I cannot express it."

"That is just it; neither can I. When I come to that I am a wretched bungler. I never regularly learned music; I cannot play the violin or piano; but when I see the notes, I hear exactly what the composer meant to say. I cannot interpret music, but I can hear it."

"That is well said," chimed in Annele. "I shall remember that as long as I live. To interpret music and to hear it are two different things.

You show me so clearly what I have always felt, and yet never could express."

Lenz drank in the good wine, the kind words, and the kind looks of Annele, and went on: "Especially with Mozart; I hear him, and I think I hear him right. If I could but once in my life have shaken hands with him! If he had lived in my day, it seems to me I should have died of grief at his death; but, now that he is in heaven, I should like to do him some service. At other times, I think it is fortunate I cannot play any instrument, for I never could have learned to render music as I hear it. The hearing is a natural gift, for which I have to thank G.o.d.

My grandfather is said to have had a wonderful understanding of music.

If my playing were necessarily below my hearing and my conception, I should want to tear my ears out."

"That is the way with me," said Annele. "I like to hear music, but am too unskilful a performer. When one has to be busy about the house, and cannot devote much time to practising, there is no use in trying to play. I have given up the piano altogether, much to my father's vexation, for he spared no pains to have all his children taught; but I think what cannot be done thoroughly had better not be done at all.

Your musical clocks are meant for people like me, who like to hear music, but cannot make it. If I were master here, I should never allow your greatest work to go to Russia, but should buy it myself. It ought to stand in the public room to entertain the guests. It would bring you in ever so many orders there. Since I was up at your house, I have had constantly running in my head that beautiful melody, 'Das klinget so herrlich, das klinget so schon!'"

Beautiful and brave were the melodies playing in Lenz's heart. He tried to explain to Annele how the notes might be followed exactly, all the pins be put in the right places, and even the time in certain pa.s.sages changed, and yet, unless the man himself felt the music, he would make nothing but a hurdy-gurdy, after all. The piano pa.s.sages must be taken slower, the forte faster. A performer would naturally render them so; he could hardly help being more subdued at the piano pa.s.sages and more animated at the forte. The same effect must be wrought by the pins; but the hurrying and slackening needs to be very slight. In the forte pa.s.sages especial care is needed; for in them the works necessarily labor and are r.e.t.a.r.ded, so that they have to be, in some way, favored.

"I cannot tell you, Annele," he concluded, "how happy my art, my work, makes me. As Pilgrim says, I sit there in my room, and set up pieces lively or solemn, which play themselves, and make happy hundreds and hundreds of people that I never saw."

Annele listened intelligently to the end. "You deserve to be happy,"

she said, when he had finished. "Your beautiful words show me how beautiful your work is. Thank you very much for explaining it to me so thoroughly. Some people would be jealous if they knew you talked so to me."

Lenz pa.s.sed his hand across his brow as she spoke, and said, "Annele, may I ask you a question?"

"Yes, I will tell you anything."

"Don't be angry with me, but is it true that you are as good as engaged to the engineer?"

"Thank you for asking me so plainly. There is my hand upon it, there is no word of truth in the story; nothing has ever pa.s.sed between us."

Lenz held her hand firmly, and said, "Permit me one question more."

"Ask what you will, you shall have an honest answer."

"Why is your manner towards me so different when Pilgrim is here? Has anything ever pa.s.sed between you and him?"

"May this wine be poison to me, if I do not speak the truth," replied Annele, seizing Lenz's gla.s.s, and putting her lips to it, in spite of his a.s.suring her there was no need to swear; that he could not bear oaths. "If all men were like you," she continued, "there would be no need of oaths. Pilgrim and I are always teasing and bantering each other, but he does not really understand me; and, when you are by, I cannot endure his jesting and nonsense. But now I must ask you a favor.

If you want to know anything about me, no matter what, ask no one but myself. Promise me; give me your hand on it!"

They grasped each other's hand.

"I am a landlord's daughter," continued Annele, sadly. "I am not so fortunate as other girls, who do not have to receive every one that comes, and laugh and talk with him. I carry the thing through as well as I can, but am not always what I seem. I know I may say this to you.

I might often be depressed; but the only way is to put on a bold face, and laugh sadness away."

"I should never have imagined you could have a sad thought pa.s.s through your mind. I fancied you as merry as a bird the whole day long."

"I like better to be merry," answered Annele, with a sudden change of tone and expression. "I like nothing sad, not even sad music. 'Das klinget so herrlich, das klinget so schon!' that is a merry tune to jump and dance to."

The conversation returned to the subject of music, and the clock that had been sent off that day. Lenz liked to tell of his having accompanied The Magic Flute through part of its long journey, and how he wanted to call out to every porter and driver and sailor on the way: "Take care! pity you cannot hear what you have got packed up there."

Lenz had never before been the last guest in the inn. He could not make up his mind to get up and go home. The great clock in the public room struck the hour noisily and admonishingly, the weights rattled angrily, but Lenz did not hear. The landlord was the only other person in the room, his wife having long since gone to bed. He left his seat at the adjoining table, where he had been reading the paper, and signed to Annele to put up her work. She could not have understood him, for she went on talking eagerly. He put out his light with a clatter, but even that failed to rouse the pair. He walked up and down the room in his creaking boots; Lenz paid no attention. Never before had the landlord's presence been thus ignored. He struck his repeater; Lenz gave no heed.

At last--for mine host was not accustomed to put restraint upon himself for any man--he spoke: "Lenz, if you mean to spend the night here, I will show you a room."

Lenz roused himself, shook hands with Annele, and would have liked to do the same with the landlord; but that was too great a liberty to take unless invited. Revolving many thoughts in his mind, he left the house, and silently took his way homeward.

CHAPTER XIII.

LION, FOX, AND MAGPIE.

In the early winter, as in the early spring, the Morgenhalde was the pleasantest place in the whole country. Old Lenz was right in saying that the morning sun lay on his house and meadow all day long. But little fire was needed half the day. Flowers blossomed in the garden behind the house long after they had disappeared everywhere else, and put out their leaves again in the spring, when everything else was bare. This garden was as sheltered as a room, and in it grew, what was rare in those parts, a chestnut-tree, which attracted many an unwelcome squirrel and nutp.e.c.k.e.r from the neighboring forest. The house protected the garden on one side without keeping from it the sun after ten o'clock; and the mighty forest which covered the upper part of the steep mountain seemed to take special pleasure in both house and garden, and had stationed two of its tallest pines as sentinels at the gate.

Had there been many promenaders in the town, they certainly, in these first chilly winter months, would have often taken the path up the meadow, past Lenz's house into the wood, and returned along the mountain ridge. But there was only one promenader, or rather there were only two, in the town,--Petrovitsch and his dog Bubby. Every day before dinner Petrovitsch got up an appet.i.te by walking through the meadow, past the house, and over the ridge of the mountain. Bubby doubled and trebled the distance by leaping back and forth across the gullies which to the right of Lenz's house the water had channelled down into the valley. The gullies were dry at this season, but served in spring and summer to carry off the rushing water. Petrovitsch was very loving towards his dog, and in moments of special affection would call him Sonny. The old man had come home rich from his foreign journeyings. His neighbors naturally estimated his property at three times its actual value, but it was really considerable. The longing for home which the inhabitants of the mountains and of Upper Germany never outgrow had brought him, in his old age, back to his native valley, where he lived, after his fashion, a contented life. His happiest time was in midsummer, when the merchants from all quarters of the world a.s.sembled at the Lion, and all the tongues of the earth were spoken there,--Spanish, Italian, English, Russian, and Dutch,--while in the midst of them, from the very same men, would be heard good Black Forest German. Then was Petrovitsch a person of consequence, and great was his pride at being able to show off his knowledge of Spanish and Russian.

Whereas in ordinary times he always left the Lion punctually at an appointed hour, then he would spend whole days there, staying sometimes even into the night. And when the market was over he stayed behind, and amused himself with calculating how far on their way such and such merchants were who had gone to the Lower Danube.

Petrovitsch kept the whole country in suspense. It was generally understood, though he had not said so, that he meant to found a great charitable inst.i.tution for the neighborhood. Every room of the great house he had built for himself had a stove in it, signifying, according to the common report, which he neither denied nor confirmed, that he designed the building as a home for invalid workmen. Lenz, his only heir, was left in uncertainty also; for it was naturally taken for granted that a considerable part of the fortune would be left to him.

Lenz himself, however, counted not much upon it. He paid his uncle all proper respect, but was man enough to take care of himself. He bade his apprentice keep always in good order the path where his uncle liked to walk, without any reference having been made to the attention on either side. The cackling of Lenz's hens and geese, and the barking of a dog, were the signal every noon of his uncle's approach. He nodded to him through the window where he sat at work. His uncle returned the greeting and pa.s.sed on. Neither ever entered the house of the other.