The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Viii Part 9

They stopped the engine to let Barefoot get off, and with a cry of "G.o.d be praised that nothing has happened to you!" she hurried toward her brother. Damie, however, made no reply, and stood with both hands resting on the neck of one of the horses.

"What is it? Why don't you speak? Have you hurt yourself?"

"I have not hurt myself, but the fire has hurt me."

"What's the matter?"

"All I have is lost--all my clothes and my little bit of money! I've nothing now but what's on my back."

"And are father's clothes burnt too?"

"Are they fireproof?" replied Damie, angrily. "Don't ask such stupid questions!"

Barefoot was ready to cry at this ungracious reception by her brother; but she quickly remembered, as if by intuition, that misfortune in its first shock often makes people harsh, unkind, and quarrelsome. So she merely said:

"Thank G.o.d that you have escaped with your life! Father's clothes--to be sure, in those there's something lost that cannot be replaced--but sooner or later they would have been worn out anyway."

"All your chattering will do no good," said Damie, still stroking the horse. "Here I stand like a miserable outcast. If the horses here could talk, they'd tell a different story. But I am born to misfortune--whatever I do that's good, is of no use. And yet--" He could say no more; his voice faltered.

"What has happened?"

"There are the horses, and the cows, and the oxen--not one of them was burned. Look, that horse over there tore my shirt when I was dragging him out of the stable. This nigh horse here did me no harm--he knows me.

Eh, Humple, you know me, don't you? We know each other, don't we?" The horse laid his head across the neck of the other and stared at Damie, who went on:

"And when I joyfully went to tell the farmer that I had saved all his cattle, he said: 'You needn't have done it--they were all well insured, and I would have been paid good money for them.' 'Yes,' thinks I to myself, 'but to have let the poor beasts die, is that nothing? If a thing's paid for, is that all?' The farmer must have read in my face what I was thinking of, for he says to me: 'Of course, you saved your clothes and your property?' And then I says: 'No, not a st.i.tch. I ran out to the stable directly.' And then he says: 'You're a noodle!'

'What?' says I, 'You're insured?--Well then, if the cattle would have been paid for, my clothes shall be paid for--and some of my dead father's clothes were among them, and fourteen guilders, and my watch, and my pipe.' And says he: 'Go smoke it! My property is insured, but not my servant's property.' And I says: 'We'll see about that--I'll take it to court!' Whereupon he says: 'Now you may go at once. Threatening a lawsuit is the same as giving notice. I would have given you a few guilders, but now you shan't have a farthing. And now, hurry up--away with you!' And so here I am. And I think I ought to take my nigh horse with me, for I saved his life, and he would be glad to go with me, wouldn't you? But I have never learned to steal, and I shouldn't know what to do now. The best thing for me to do is to jump into the water.

For I shall never amount to anything as long as I live, and I have nothing now."

"But I still have something, and I will help you out."

"No, I won't do that any longer--always depending upon you. You have a hard enough time earning what you have."

Barefoot tried to comfort her brother, and succeeded so far that he consented to go home with her. But they had scarcely gone a hundred paces, when they heard something trotting along behind them. It was the horse; he had broken loose and had followed Damie, who was obliged to drive back the creature he was so fond of by flinging stones at it.

Damie was ashamed of his misfortune, and would hardly show his face to any one; for it is a peculiarity of weak natures that they feel their strength, not in their own self-respect, but always wish to show how much they can really do by some visible achievement. Misfortune they regard as evidence of their own weakness, and if they cannot hide it, they hide themselves.

Damie would go no farther than the first houses in the village. Black Marianne gave him a coat that had belonged to her slain husband; Damie felt a terrible repugnance at putting it on, and Amrei, who had before spoken of her father's coat as something sacred, now found just as many arguments to prove that there was nothing in a coat after all, and that it did not matter in the least who had once worn it.

Coaly Mathew, who lived not far from Black Marianne, took Damie as his a.s.sistant at tree-felling and charcoal-burning. This solitary life pleased Damie best; for he only wanted to wait until the time came when he could be a soldier, and then he would enter the army as a subst.i.tute and remain a soldier all his life. For in a soldier's life there is justice and order, and no one has brothers and sisters, and no one has his own house, and a man is provided with clothing and meat and drink; and if there should be a war, why a brave soldier's death is after all the best.

Such were the sentiments that Damie expressed one Sunday in Mossbrook Wood, when Barefoot came out to the charcoal-burner's to bring her brother yeast, and meal, and tobacco. She wanted to show him how--in addition to the general charcoal-burner's fare, which consists of bread baked with yeast--he might make the dumplings he prepared for himself taste better. But Damie would not listen to her; he said he preferred to have them just as they were--he rather liked to swallow bad food when he might have had better; and altogether, he derived a kind of satisfaction from self-neglect, until he should some day be decked out as a soldier.

Barefoot fought against this continual looking forward to a future time, and this loss of time in the present. She was always wanting to put some life into Damie, who rather enjoyed being indolent and pitying himself.

Indeed, he seemed to find a sort of satisfaction in his downward course, for it gave him an opportunity to pity himself to his heart's content, and did not require him to make any physical exertion. With great difficulty Barefoot managed to prevail so far that he at least bought an ax of his own out of his earnings; and it was his father's ax, which Coaly Mathew had bought at the auction in the old days.

Barefoot often came back out of the Wood in profound despair, but this state of mind never lasted long. Her inward confidence in herself, and the natural cheerfulness that was in her, involuntarily burst forth from her lips in song; and anybody who did not know her, would never have thought that Barefoot either had a care then, or ever had had one in all her life.

The satisfaction arising from the feeling that she was st.u.r.dily and untiringly doing her duty, and acting as a Samaritan to Black Marianne and Damie, impressed an indelible cheerfulness on her countenance; in the whole house there was no one who could laugh so heartily as Barefoot. Old Farmer Rodel declared that her laughter sounded like the song of a quail, and because she was always serviceable and respectful to him, he gave her to understand that he would remember her in his will. Barefoot did not pay much attention to this or build much upon it; she looked only for the wages to which she had a true and honest claim; and what she did, she did from an inward feeling of benevolence, without expectation of reward.

CHAPTER VIII

"SACK AND AX"

Scheckennarre's house was duly rebuilt, and in handsomer style than before; and the winter came, and with it the drawing for recruits. Never had there been greater lamentation over a "lucky number" than arose when Damie drew one and was declared exempt. He was in complete despair, and Barefoot almost shared his grief; for she looked upon this soldiering as a capital method of setting Damie up, and of breaking him of his slovenly habits. Still she said to him:

"Take this as a sign that you are to depend upon yourself now, and to be a man; for you still behave like a little child that can't shift for itself and has to be fed."

"You're reproaching me now for feeding upon you."

"No, I didn't mean that. Don't be so touchy all the time--always standing there as if to say: 'Who's going to do anything for me, good or bad?' Strike about for yourself."

"That's just what I am going to do, and I shall strike with a good swing," said Damie.

For a long time he would not state what his real intention was; but he walked through the village with his head singularly erect and spoke freely to everybody; he worked diligently in the forest with the woodcutters, having his father's ax and with it almost the bodily strength of him who had swung it so st.u.r.dily in the days that were gone.

One evening in the early part of the spring, when Barefoot met him on his way back from Mossbrook Wood, he asked, taking the ax from his shoulder and holding it up before her:

"Where do you think this is going?"

"Into the forest," answered Barefoot. "But it won't go alone--there must be a chopper."

"You are right; but it's going to its brother--and one will chop on this side and another will chop on that side, and then the trees crash and roar like cannons, and still you will hear nothing of it--and yet _you_ may, if you wish to, but no one else in this place."

"I don't understand one peck of all your bushel," answered Barefoot.

"Speak out--I'm too old to guess riddles now."

"Well, I'm going to uncle in America."

"Indeed? Going to start to-day?" said Barefoot, laughing. "Do you remember how Martin, the mason's boy, once called up to his mother through the window: 'Mother, throw me out a clean pocket-handkerchief--I'm going to America!' Those who were going to fly so quickly are all still here."

"You'll see how much longer I shall be here," said Damie; and without another word he went into Coaly Mathew's house.

Barefoot felt like laughing at Damie's ridiculous plan, but she could not; she felt that there was some meaning in it. And that very night, when everybody was in bed, she went to her brother and declared once for all that she would not go with him. She thought thus to conquer him; but Damie replied quickly:

"I'm not tied to you!" and became the more confirmed in his plan.

Then there suddenly welled up in the girl's mind once more all that flood of reflections that had come upon her once in her childhood; but this time she did not ask advice of the tree, as if it could have answered her. All her deliberations brought her to this one conclusion: "He's right in going, and I'm right, too, in staying here." She felt inwardly glad that Damie could make such a bold resolve--at any rate, it showed manly determination. And although she felt a deep sorrow at the thought of being henceforth alone in the wide world, she nevertheless thought it right that her brother should thrust forth his hand thus boldly and independently.

Still, she did not yet quite believe him. The next evening she waited for him and said:

"Don't tell anybody about your plan to emigrate, or you'll be laughed at if you don't carry it out."

"You're right," answered Damie; "but it's not for that. I'm not afraid to bind myself before other people; so surely as I have five fingers on this hand, so surely shall I go before the cherries are ripe here, if I have to beg, yes, even to steal, in order to get off. There's only one thing I'm sorry about--and that is that I must go away without playing Scheckennarre a trick that he'd remember to the end of his days."

"That's the true braggart's way! That's the real way to ruin!" cried Barefoot; "to go off and leave a feeling of revenge behind one! Look, over yonder lie our parents. Come with me--come with me to their graves and say that again there if you can. Do you know who it is that turns out to be a no-good?--the boy who lets himself be spoiled! Give up that ax! You are not worthy to have your hand where father had his hand, unless you tear that thought out of your mind, root and branch! Give up that ax! No man shall have that who talks of stealing and of murdering!