Hammer and Anvil Part 1

Hammer and Anvil.

by Friedrich Spielhagen.

CRITICAL NOTICES.

"Such a novel as no English author with whom we are acquainted could hare written, and no American author except Hawthorne. What separates it from the mult.i.tude or American and English novels is the perfection of its plot, and its author's insight into the souls of his characters.... If Germany is poorer than England, as regards the number of its novelists, it is richer when we consider the intellectual value of their works. If it has not produced a Thackeray, or a d.i.c.kens, it has produced, we venture to think, two writers who are equal to them in genius, and superior to them in the depth and spirituality of their art--Auerbach and Spielhagen."--_Putnam's Magazine_.

"The name is suggested by a pa.s.sage In Goethe, which serves as a motto to the book. Spielhagen means to ill.u.s.trate what Goethe speaks of--natures not In full possession of themselves, 'who are not equal to any situation in life, and whom no situation satisfies'--the Hamlet of our latest civilization. With these he deals in a poetic, ideal fashion, yet also with humor, and, what is less to be expected in a German, with sparkling, flashing wit, and a cynical vein that reminds one of Heine. He has none of the tiresome detail of Auerbach, while he lacks somewhat that excellent man's profound devotion to the moral sentiment. There is more depth of pa.s.sion and of thought in Spielhagen, together with a French liveliness by no means common in German novelists.... At any rate, they are vastly superior to the bulk of English novels which are annually poured out upon us--as much above Trollope's as Steinberger Cabinet is better than London porter.--_Springfield Republican_.

"The reader lives among them (the characters) as he does among his acquaintances, and may plead each one's case as plausibly to his own judgment as he can those of the men whose mixed motives and actions he sees around him. In other words, these characters live, they are men and women, and the whole mystery of humanity is upon each of them. Has no superior in German romance for its enthusiastic and lively descriptions, and for the dignity and the tenderness with which its leading characters are invested."--_New York Evening Post_.

"He strikes with a blow like a blacksmith, making the sparks fly and the anvil ring. Terse, pointed, brilliant, rapid, and no dreamer, he has the best traits of the French manner, while in earnestness and fulness of matter he is thoroughly German. One sees, moreover, in his pages, how powerful is the impression which America has of late been making upon the mind of Europe."--_Boston Commonwealth_.

"The work is one of immense vigor; the characters are extraordinary, yet not unnatural; the plot is the sequence of an admirably-sustained web of incident and action. The portraitures of characteristic foibles and peculiarities remind one much of the masterhand of the great Thackeray. The author Spielhagen In Germany ranks very much as Thackeray does with us, and many of his English reviewers place him at the head and front of German novelists."--_Troy Daily Times_.

"His characters have, perhaps, more pa.s.sion, and act their parts with as much dramatic effect as those which have pa.s.sed under the hand of Auerbach."--_Cincinnati Chronicle_.

The N. Y. Times, of Oct. 23d, in a long Review of the above two works, says: "The descriptions of nature and art, the portrayals of character and emotion, are always striking and truthful. As one reads, there grows upon him gradually the conviction that this is one of the greatest of works of fiction.... No one, that is not a pure _egoiste_, can read _Problematic Characters_ without profound and even solemn interest. It is altogether a tragic work, the tragedy of the nineteenth century--greater in its truth and earnestness, and absence of _Hugoese_ affectation, than any tragedy the century has produced. It stands far above any of the productions of either _Freytag_ or _Auerbach_."

_LEYPOLDT & HOLT, Publishers_,

25 BOND ST., NEW YORK.

PART FIRST.

CHAPTER I.

We were standing in a deep recess at the open window of our cla.s.s-room.

The sparrows were noisily chattering in the school-yard, and some scattered rays of the late summer sun glanced past the old gray walls down to the gra.s.s-grown pavement; from the cla.s.s-room, which was high-ceilinged, sunless, and ill-ventilated, came the buzzing sound of repressed talk from our schoolfellows, who were all in their places, bent over their Sophocles, and watching for the arrival of the "old man," who was looked for every moment.

"At the worst, you can shuffle through somehow," I was saying, when the door opened and he came in.

_He_--Professor Lederer, Provisory Director of the Gymnasium, and Ordinarius of the first form,[1] "the old man," as we used to call him--was in reality not exactly old, but a man past the middle of the forties, whose small head, already turning gray, rested upon a stiff white cravat, and whose tall and extraordinarily lean figure was b.u.t.toned up, from one year's end to the other, summer and winter, in a coat of the finest and glossiest black. His slender hands, of which he took extreme care, with their long and tapering fingers--when twitching nervously, as they had a habit of doing, close under my eyes--had always a sort of fascination for me, and more than once I could scarcely resist the temptation to seize one of those artistic-looking hands and crush it in my own coa.r.s.e brown fist.

Professor Lederer always paced the distance from the door to his desk in twelve measured, dignified strides, head and eyes a little drooped, with the austere look of intensest meditation; like a priest approaching the sacrificial altar, or a Caesar entering the senate--at all events like a being who, far removed from the modern plebeian sphere, walked day by day in the light of the sun of Homer, and was perfectly aware of the majestic fact. So it was never a judicious proceeding to try to detain this cla.s.sical man upon this short journey, and in most cases a prohibitory gesture of his hand checked the attempt; but the sanguine Arthur was so sure that his request would not be refused, that he ventured it, reckless of further consequences. So, stepping out in front of the professor, he asked for a holiday for the day, which was Sat.u.r.day.

"Certainly not," said the professor.

"To go sailing," urged Arthur, not in the least deterred by the stern tone of the professor, for my friend Arthur was not easily abashed--"to go in my uncle's steamboat to examine the oyster-beds which my uncle planted two years ago. I have a note from my father, you know, professor," and he produced the credential in question.

"Certainly not!" repeated the professor. His pale face flushed a little with irritation; his white hand, from which he had drawn his black glove, was extended towards Arthur with a cla.s.sical minatory gesture; his blue eyes deepened in hue, like the sea when a cloud-shadow pa.s.ses over it.

"Certainly not!" he exclaimed for the third time, strode past Arthur to his desk, and after silently folding his white hands, explained that he was too much excited to begin with the customary prayers. And presently followed a stammering philippic--the professor always stammered when irritated--against that pest of youth, worldliness and hankering after pleasure, which chiefly infected precisely those upon whom rested the smallest portion of the spirit of Apollo and Pallas Athene. "He was a mild and humane man," he said, "and well mindful of the words of the poet, that it was well to lay seriousness aside at the proper time and place; ay, even at times to quaff the wine-cup and move the feet in the dance; but then the cause should be sufficient to justify the license--a Virgil must have returned from a far-off land, or a Cleopatra have freed the people from imminent peril by her voluntary, yet involuntary death. But how could any one who notoriously was one of the worst scholars--yes, might be styled absolutely the worst, unless one other"--here the professor gave a side-glance at me--"could claim this evil pre-eminence--how could such a one dare to clutch at a garland which should only encircle a brow dripping with the sweat of industry! Was he, the speaker, too strict? He thought not. a.s.suredly, no one could wish it more earnestly than he, and no one would rejoice more heartily than he, if the subject of his severe rebuke would even now give the proof of his innocence by translating without an error the glorious chorus of the _Antigone_, which was the theme of the morning's lecture. Von Zehren, commence!"

Poor Arthur! I still see, after the lapse of so many years, his beautiful, but even then somewhat worn face, striving in vain to hold fast upon its lips the smile of aristocratic indifference with which he had listened to the professor's rebuke, as he took the book and read, not too fluently, a verse or two of the Greek. Even in this short reading the scornful smile gradually faded, and he glanced from under his dropped lids a look of beseeching perplexity towards his neighbor and Pylades. But how was it possible for me to help him; and who knew better than he how impossible it was? So the inevitable came to pa.s.s.

He turned the "shaft of Helios" into a "shield of aeolus," and blundered on in pitiable confusion. The others announced their better knowledge by peals of laughter, and a grim smile of triumph over his discomfiture even played over the grave features of the professor.

"The curs!" muttered Arthur with white lips, as he took his seat after the recitation had lasted a couple of minutes. "But why did you not prompt me?"

I had no time to answer this idle question, for it was now my turn. But I had no notion of making sport for my comrades by submitting to be cla.s.sically racked; so I declared that I was even less prepared than my friend, and added that I trusted this testimony would corroborate the charge that the professor had been pleased to bring against me.

I accompanied these words with a threatening look at the others, which at once checked their mirth; and the professor, either thinking he had gone far enough, or not deigning to notice my insolent speech, turned away with a shrug of the shoulders, and contented himself with treating us with silent contempt for the rest of the recitation, while towards the others he was unusually amiable, enlivening the lesson by sallies of the most cla.s.sical and learned wit.

No sooner had the door closed behind him, than Arthur stood up before the first form and said:

"You fellows have behaved meanly again, as you always do; but as for me, I have no notion of staying here any longer. The old man will not be back any more to-day; and if the others ask for me, say I am sick."

"And for me too," cried I, stepping up to Arthur and laying my arm on his shoulder. "I am going with him. A fellow that deserts his friend is a sneak."

A moment later we had dropped from the window twelve feet into the yard, and crouching between two b.u.t.tresses that the professor might not espy us as he went out, we consulted what was next to be done.

There were two ways of getting out of the closed court in which we now were: either to slip through the long crooked corridors of the gymnasium--an old monastery--and so out into the street; or to go directly through the professor's house, which joined the yard at one corner, and thence upon the promenade, which nearly surrounded the town, and had in fact been constructed out of the old demolished town-walls. The first course was hazardous, for it often happened that a pair of teachers would walk up and down the cool corridors in conversation long after the regular time for the commencement of the lessons, and we had no minute to lose in waiting. The other was still more dangerous, for it led right through the lion's den; but it was far shorter, and practicable every moment, so we decided to venture it.

Creeping close to the wall, right under the windows of our cla.s.s-room, in which the second lesson had already begun, we reached the narrow gate that opened into the little yard of the professor's house. Here all was quiet; through the open door we could see into the wide hall paved with slabs of stone, where the professor, who had just returned, was playing with his youngest boy, a handsome black-haired little fellow of six years, chasing him with long strides, and clapping his white hands. The child laughed and shouted, and at one time ran out into the yard, directly towards where we were hidden behind a pile of firewood--two more steps of the little feet, and we should have been detected.

I have often thought, since that time, that on those two little steps, in reality, depended nothing less than the whole destiny of my life. If the child had discovered us, we had only to come forward from behind the wood-pile, which every one had to pa.s.s in going from the gymnasium to the director's house, as two scholars on their way to their teacher to ask his pardon for their misbehavior. At least Arthur confessed to me that this idea flashed into his mind as the child came towards us.

Then there would have been another reprimand, but in a milder tone, for the professor was a kind man at the bottom of his heart; we should have gone back to the cla.s.s-room, pretended to our schoolmates that our running away was only a joke, and--well, I do not know what would have happened then; certainly not what really did happen.

But the little trotting feet did not come to us; the father, following with long strides, caught the child and tossed it in the air till the black curls glistened in the sunshine, and then carried it back, caressing it, to the house, where Mrs. Professor now appeared at the door, with her hair in papers, and a white ap.r.o.n on; and then father, mother, and child disappeared. Through the open door we could see that the hall was empty--now or never was the time.

With beating hearts, such as only beat in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of school-boys bent on some dangerous prank, we stole to the door through the silent hall where the motes were sparkling in the sunbeams that slanted through the gothic windows. As we opened the house-door, the bell gave a clear note of warning; but even now the leafy trees of the promenade were beckoning to us; in half a minute we were concealed by the thick bushes, and hastening with rapid steps, that now and then quickened to a half run, towards the port.

"What will you say to your father?" I asked.

"Nothing at all, because he will ask no questions," Arthur replied; "or if he does, I will say that I was let off; what else? It will be capital; I shall have splendid fun."

We kept on for a while in silence. For the first time it occurred to me that I had run away from school for just nothing at all. If Arthur came in for a couple of days in the dungeon, he, at all events, would have had "splendid fun," and thus, for him at least, there was some show of reason in the thing. His parents, too, were very indulgent; his share of the danger was as good as none, while I ran all the risk of discovery and punishment without the least compensation; and my stern old father was a man who understood no trifling, least of all in matters of this sort. So once again, as many times before, I had helped to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for somebody else. However, what did it matter? Here, under the rustling trees, after our brisk race, it was more pleasant than in the stifling cla.s.s-room; and for me, in those times, every silly, venturesome frolic had a pleasure in itself. So I felt it a special piece of magnanimity on the part of my usually selfish friend, when he suddenly said:

"Look here, George, you shall come too. Uncle charged me particularly to bring as many friends as I could. I tell you it will be splendid.

Elise Kohl and Emilie Heckepfennig are going with us. For once I shall leave Emilie to you. And then the oysters, and the champagne, and the pineapple punch--yes, you certainly must come."

"And my father?" I said; but I only said it, for my resolution to be one of the party was already taken. Emilie Heckepfennig--Emilie, with her little turned-up nose and laughing eyes, who had always shown me a decided preference; and recently, at forfeits, had given me a hearty kiss, to which she was in no wise bound, and whom Arthur, the c.o.xcomb, was going to leave especially to me! Yes, I must go along, happen what might.

"Can I go as I am, do you think?" I asked, suddenly halting, with a glance at my dress, which was plain and neat, it is true--I was always neat--but not exactly the thing for company.

"Why not?" said Arthur. "What difference does it make? And, besides, we have not a minute to spare."