Hammer and Anvil Part 59

"Yes, that is true," cried Klaus, "I never thought of that. That would be something for you, sure enough. To-morrow morning I will advertise in all the papers: I'll bring the aunt if she lives a hundred thousand miles off."

"But suppose it is an uncle?"

"No, no, it is an aunt," said Klaus, with an air of a.s.surance.

"So be it!" said I, arising. "And now let us take a little walk. I must take a look at my new home."

There is probably no time in the twenty-four hours better fitted to impress a provincial with the greatness of a large city than the twilight of a gloomy autumn evening. In men of any liveliness of imagination the reality usually falls short of the fancy, but in an hour like this the reality and the fancy--what we perceive and what we imagine--blend indistinguishably together, and the barriers of the actual world seem broken down.

Such an evening was it when I strolled with Klaus through the streets of the city, which seemed enormous and gigantic in my eyes. Even now I can sometimes in the evening, and for a moment, behold it in the same light and with the same feelings as then. Coming from a region inhabited by workmen, we crossed in our walk one of the most brilliant quarters to reach the city proper, and returned through large squares, surrounded by magnificent palaces, to our own gloomy region again. And everywhere was the throng of hurrying crowds on the narrow sidewalks, and the rattle and thunder of vehicles, and the endless rows of lamps up and down the interminable streets, and the blaze of light from the shops illuminating the streets so that the figures of men, wagons and horses were strangely reflected from the wet pavement. Then the imposing ma.s.ses of tall buildings, rising above one another like mountains; the sight here of a bronze equestrian statue upon a pedestal, high as a house, riding aloft through the night, and then of a giant figure pointing down at us with a drawn sword; wide bridges with bal.u.s.trades peopled with white marble forms, and under whose arches rolled a black flood upon which quivered the reflections of a thousand lights; a glance into the shops where to uninitiated eyes the treasures of Arabia and the Indies seemed heaped up by fairy hands; dark yards, where, late as it was, mighty casks and chests were being piled by leather-ap.r.o.ned men--I walked, and stopped to gaze, and went on, and stopped again, staring, astonished, but not confounded, and altogether strangely happy. Was this the sea of ever-rolling life, engulfing itself and ever producing itself anew, towards which my teacher's prophecy had directed me--the sea whose mighty billows, if he had foreseen truly, where to be my home? Yes: this it was: this it must be. I felt it in the courageous beatings of my heart, in the power with which I clove this surge of men, in the delight with which I listened to the roar of this surf.

PART THIRD.

CHAPTER I.

In the machine-works of the commerzienrath a great boiler was being riveted. Three sooty workmen, with shirt-sleeves rolled above the elbows, and hammers in their strong hands, were waiting for the red-hot bolt which a fourth was bringing in the jaws of a pair of pincers from an adjacent forge. The bolt vanished into the boiler, and appeared in a few seconds through the rivet-hole; the cyclops grasped their hammers firmly, and, striking in measured cadence, finished the rivet-head.

This hammering produced a tremendous noise.

And if any one had told a spectator, uninitiated to the craft, that in the hollow of the boiler upon which the heavy hammers fell with such deafening clangor, there lay a man upon his back who received the rivet in a pair of pincers, and with these exerted all his strength in resistance, while the hammers were ringing on the rivet-head, the uninitiated spectator would scarce have believed it, and he could not fail to consider the man in the hollow of the boiler as one of the most miserable and most to be pitied of mortals.

The riveting was finished, the hammers at rest; the man with the pincers crawled out of the belly of the monster. I need scarcely tell the reader who this man with the pincers was. Nor am I ashamed thus to appear before him, for he has very likely seen me in similar costume, though it is true that at this moment I present a rather frightful appearance. The lower part of my face, my neck and breast, are covered with blood, which during the last hour has been running from my nose and mouth. But the three with the hammers only laugh; and one, the foreman, says:

"Next time remember to keep your mouth open, comrade, no roast pigeons will fly into it."

Rather a poor joke, it must be owned; but the rest laugh, and I laugh too: for as the prudent proverb advises us to "howl with the wolves,"

so I have rarely been able to refrain from joining in any laughter, even when, as at present, it was at my own expense.

But despite the ardent zeal with which I entered into my new calling, I was not sorry that this work inside the boiler was but a temporary task, for which the foreman of my shop had lent me because another shop happened to be shorthanded, very unwillingly, and only at the order of the foreman of the works. To say that he did it very unwillingly sounds like a brag from one who like myself had only been a fortnight in the shop, and whose only work yet had been of the roughest sort, such as handling the sledge. Nor was it any merit of mine that the heavy sledge which others handled with difficulty was as light in my hands as an ordinary fore-hammer, and that my blow could easily be distinguished among the four or five that followed in regular cadence the foreman's stroke upon the glowing iron. It was no merit of mine; and yet in this place, where bodily strength played so important a part, it counted as a high one, even the highest. My foreman was proud of me; my fellow-workmen, in the most literal sense, looked up to me with admiration; and Klaus, whenever my name happened to be mentioned, showed all his white teeth, then shut his lips tight, held up his forefinger, and nodded mysteriously. I had strictly forbidden Klaus to indulge in these mysterious gestures, and Klaus had solemnly promised to avoid them, but in spite of all it was not his fault if all the two hundred hands in the establishment did not have the same exalted opinion of me with which his honest soul was overflowing.

"I declare," said Klaus--whenever I imparted to him some bit of information from my theoretical knowledge of machinery, or from my mathematical acquirements--"you know more about these things than any man in the works, the head-foreman and the engineers not excepted, and you deserve to be at least Chief of the Technical Bureau."

"You are a simpleton, Klaus," I said.

"But it is true, for all," answered he doggedly.

"No, Klaus, it is not true. In the first place, you far over-estimate my knowledge, and in the second place, one can be a very good theorist and at the same time a wretched bungler in practice. But I want to be both a good theorist and a skilful workman, and I must give many a stroke of hammer and of file before I get to be that. Just remember, Klaus, what a time it took you to rise from the common job-workman, who was glad if he could dress his round pliers decently, to the skilful machinist who can fit the straps on a connecting-rod as well as the best--"

"Yes," said Klaus, "but then you and I----"

"Forging is done everywhere at a fire, Klaus, and every piece must be hammered until it is finished; and so must a good machinist until he is finished; and there is much to be done before I can say that of myself, if I ever can."

"I am of a different opinion, then," answered the obstinate Klaus.

"Then be so good as to keep that opinion to yourself," I said, very earnestly.

I had good reasons for enjoining the honest Klaus to a silence which was so burdensome to him; for, beside the fact that he really had a ridiculously exaggerated opinion of me, his imprudence might be of serious inconvenience to me, and indeed might close against me the way which I was firmly resolved to tread. I wished to work my way up from the ranks in the calling to which I had devoted my life, remembering the saying of my never-to-be-forgotten teacher, that the true artist must understand the hand-work of his art. So for the present I was what I desired to be--a hand-worker, a laborer in the roughest work--and every one took me for just that, which was precisely what I wished.

My past history I had veiled under a simple story, which found ready belief with the simple fellows around me. I was the son of a seafaring man in Klaus Pinnow's native town. We had known each other from our boyhood; I had made up my mind to be a smith like him, and had worked awhile as an apprentice with his father. But ten years ago I had gone to sea, and had voyaged about the whole world as sailor, as ship's-carpenter, and, as ship's-blacksmith, and only returned home a short time before with the determination of quitting the sea for the future, and earning an honest living on land, for which purpose I was now learning the smith's craft regularly, which I had practiced as an apprentice.

I was seldom under the necessity of corroborating this story by accounts of my past adventures; and if now and then, when we were off work, some one more curious than the rest spoke of my travels, I understood enough of navigation and voyages, and had mixed too much with captains and mates, and read too many tales of the sea, not to be able to play the part of Sindbad for half an hour. One of my princ.i.p.al stories, the scene of which was laid somewhere in the Malay Archipelago, in which there was plenty of hot work and plenty of pirates knocked in the head, had procured me in the shop the nickname of "The Malay," which I bore until--but I must not antic.i.p.ate.

I was all the more readily believed to be what I gave myself out for, as I conformed my habits exactly to those of the common workman. I was dressed neither better nor worse than the rest; I ate my breakfast from my hand, as did the others; I dined at a cheap cook-shop, in which some fifty other workmen took their dinners. The only luxury which I allowed myself out of the little money which I had brought from the prison was a better lodging than workmen of my cla.s.s were accustomed to or could afford; and this deviation from the rule was due as much to necessity as to any consideration of comfort or taste. I could not, if I wished to prosecute my theoretical studies, live in a quarter where the streets were noisy until deep in the night with the rattling of vehicles, and too often with the uproar of drunken workmen in conflict with the police, and where, in the overcrowded houses, the ticking, pulsating, clattering clock of human life never stood still a moment.

For several days, during which I was Klaus's guest, I had looked about for a suitable lodging; and at last I found one.

Adjoining the factory was a large lot of ground, which was covered in the most singular way with buildings, some half-finished and others only commenced. According to the account of the old man who, in a half-finished porter's lodge, exercised a sort of guardianship over the place, the whole had been intended as an establishment to compete with Streber's. But the projector of the scheme had failed, the property was put up at auction and bought in by a wealthy creditor, who thought the best thing he could do with it for the present was to leave all things as they were.

"You see," said the old man, "he hopes that in two or three years the ground will be worth three times as much as it now is; and perhaps also that the commerzienrath must of necessity take the thing off his hands at any price, since it is of the utmost importance to him to keep a rival from starting up, so to speak, under his very nose. And then the commerzienrath has to put up new buildings, for they are so crowded they can hardly work, and where is he to build if not just on these lots? But he thinks it over, and my employer thinks it over, and now they have both been thinking it over for these two years. Recently he has been here again and looked over the place for the twentieth or fiftieth time, I believe; but it did not seem that he had come to any determination. Well, it is all one to me; and if you, sir, would like one of the rooms in the garden-house, your beard may be grown two inches longer before you have to move out."

The satirical old porter pleased me well, and the garden-house still better. True it was a mere boast when the man spoke of "one of the rooms," while in reality it had but one in which a human being could possibly live, while the others, without doors or windows, seemed rather to be a caravanserai for homeless cats: an appearance which I found afterwards to be fully borne out by the facts. The little house, which was probably originally intended for the residence of the owner or manager, was planned in a very pleasing Italian style. An easy flight of stairs led to the rooms referred to, in which, to judge from the spots of ink on the unscrubbed floors, and several three-legged drawing-tables, and other similar bits of ruinous furniture, the architect of the building must have had his office; on the other side was a balcony. In front of the stairs a gra.s.s-plot had been designed, but at present it was only a plot without the gra.s.s; and similarly a great free-stone basin in the centre lacked the Triton and the water; and the trellis, which ran up between the windows, as high up as the projecting eaves, lacked its Venetian ivy. But I cared nothing for these deficiencies; on the contrary I regarded them as pointing to a better future, and they harmonized thus with my own frame of mind, which also looked from a barren present to richer and fairer days to come. Then this ruinous lodging had the real practical advantage of suitable cheapness, and also that of securing me the quiet which was so necessary to my studies; and, to tell the whole, the old man had told me that the young lady who had accompanied the commerzienrath, and must have been the old gentleman's daughter, had clapped her hands when she saw the garden-house, and said it was charming, and she would like to live in it.

"She'd soon get out of that notion," said the old growler. "She did not look as if the owl was her house-builder, and Skinflint her cook; but for one of our--I mean of your--sort, it will suit very well."

"It suits me exactly," I said; "and now, when can I move in?"

"When you please; no one has been before you, so you will not have to wait for the tenant to move out."

So on the same evening I took possession of my new lodging, with the a.s.sistance of the good Klaus, whose head scarcely stopped shaking the whole time.

What did I want with such a tumble-down old ruin, where I might be murdered and not a dog bark? And how could I fancy such furniture: two worm-eaten high-backed chairs, an arm-chair about a hundred years old, a table with clumsy twisted legs, and a looking-gla.s.s with tarnished gilt frame? To be sure, I had bought the rubbish cheap enough of a dealer in second-hand furniture, but for very little more he would have given me things of a very different sort; but somehow I had always had a strange sort of taste in those matters, and he remembered that I used to have a lot of just such useless rubbish in my own room in my father's house in Uselin.

So the good Klaus grumbled and scolded, and even Christel was seriously out of humor with me for some days. She had discovered a room in her own house, on the courtside, up two pair of stairs, beautifully furnished, and having only the inconvenience that to get to it one had to go through the kitchen and the landlady's room. And the landlady was a particularly respectable tailor's widow of eighty-two, with an excellent unmarried daughter of sixty, who would certainly have taken the very best care of me.

The honest Klaus and the good Christel! I could not help them; I could not for their sakes change my nature, to which this striving for freedom and independence was an absolute necessity. In my garret in my father's house, in my room at Castle Zehrendorf, even in my prison cell, I had ever felt too deeply the luxury and poetry of solitude to be able to dispense with it now that I was a man.

And now again I was alone in my room in the half-finished garden-house, among the ruins of buildings, large and small, that never would be completed. In the evening, when I looked up from my books, no sound reached me but the hollow unceasing rumble of vehicles, like the distant roll of the sea, or the bark of the s.h.a.ggy poodle that by day kept the old man company in the porter's lodge, and in the evening and all night long traversed the s.p.a.ces between the ruins and the ruins themselves, in, as it seemed to me, an interminable hunt after cats.

And when occasionally, to cool my heated head, I stepped out upon the balcony, all again was deserted, vacant, and dark around, only here and there the light of a solitary lamp, and sometimes a red pillar of flame which rose from one of the furnace-chimneys of our works into the night sky, and reddened the edges of the dark clouds which a sharp November wind drove before it. Then, when I returned to my room, how cheerful looked my modest lamp, before which lay open my book with figures and formulas; how cosily the old carven oak furniture, which had so moved the spleen of the good Klaus; and above all, with what pleasure I contemplated the two small antique vases of terracotta upon the mantel-piece, and the beautiful copy of the Sistine Madonna, which hung on the wall facing my worktable. The picture and the vases had been taken from my cell when the new superintendent came, but upon my release I had demanded them with so fixed a determination that they did not venture to withhold them: so I had packed them carefully in a box and placed them in the hands of a person whom I could trust, to be forwarded to me whenever I should have fixed myself somewhere. This very day they had arrived, and to-night, for the first time, again I enjoyed the pleasure of gazing at them.

And while I contemplated these precious relics I reproached myself earnestly that I had never prevailed upon myself to visit or give any token of my existence to the dearest friend I had in the world, in the same city with whom I had now been living a fortnight. It seemed so entirely contrary to my nature not at once to obey the impulse of my heart, and that so urgent an impulse--not to hasten without delay to her with whom I had lived in closest friendship so many years of my life, and whose heart I was convinced beat as warmly for me as ever. We had not kept up a very lively correspondence during the year of our separation, but we had agreed when we parted that we would not write except upon some especial emergency, as anything like a correspondence carried on under the eyes of the new superintendent and Herr von Krossow seemed an impossibility. An emergency of this kind occurred, when the baseness of this well-matched pair procured me a seven months'

addition to my term of incarceration: I wrote to her, simply acquainting her with the fact, and she answered with but a word: "Endure."

No, this was not the cause of my reluctance; and indeed it had but one, which I was unwilling to admit, even to myself I knew how the dearest, n.o.blest girl had to work and to care for herself and for those dear to her. For a year it had been my dearest wish--indeed it often seemed to me the single aim and object of my life--to attain a position that would enable me to lift this load from her frail shoulders. And now, when she perhaps more than ever needed a friend, a supporter, I must appear before her in a condition in which, even if I needed no a.s.sistance myself, I was utterly unable to afford it to others. That might have been foreseen; as things were, it was inevitable, and yet----

But will she, then, will she ever accept my a.s.sistance? I interrupted the course of my thoughts as I paced up and down my room with my hands behind me, a habit I had caught from my father. Has she not given me a hundred proofs how jealous she is of her independence? And has she not given me especially to understand, even at our parting, that if she should require a support it should not be my arm?

I called to mind the last days that I had spent with Paula and her family. There were not many of them, for they had urged Frau von Zehren to make room for her husband's successor with an insistance that was really indecent. This successor, a major on half-pay, and a special pet of the pietistic president, had long waited for the place, and, so to speak, had been standing at the door. The brutality with which he took possession at once of the superintendent's house, without the least consideration for the bereaved family, was really unexampled. He had given the afflicted lady the alternative of removing with her family to one of the prison cells, which he magnanimously offered to have cleared out for their occupation, or of taking refuge in one of the wretched taverns of the town. Frau von Zehren, of course, had not hesitated a moment as to what was to be done; and thus within three days after the death of my benefactor all the old familiar faces had vanished from the house in which he had lived so long. All had gone. Doctor Snellius, in the very first hour in which he had the questionable honor of being presented to the new superintendent, spoke his mind to him in full; and when Doctor Snellius spoke his mind to any one whom he had reason to despise and abhor, you might rest a.s.sured that the individual addressed would not have the slightest ground to complain of any obscurity in the doctor's expressions.

Immediately upon his heel followed old Sergeant Sussmilch; and although the register of the old man's voice lay fully two octaves lower than the doctor's, yet the melody which both sang must have been the same; at all events the result in both cases was identical, namely, Major D.

foamed with rage, then stamped with his feet, and ordered the insolent fellow to be put in the dungeon immediately. Happily, the old man had been prudent enough to ask for and to obtain his discharge before he thoroughly eased his heart to his new chief, who therefore, rage as he might, had no authority over the old man, and on Sergeant Sussmilch threats were thrown away.