The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Ix Part 131

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: Translation of the King James version.]

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH (1856)

By OTTO LUDWIG

TRANSLATED AND CONDENSED BY MURIEL ALMON

The little garden lies between the dwelling-house and the slate shed; whoever goes from one to the other must pa.s.s it. As you go from the house to the shed it is on your left; on the right there is a yard with a woodshed and a stable, separated from the neighboring house by a trellis-fence. Every morning the house opens twelve green shutters onto one of the busiest streets of the town, the shed opens a large gray door on a back street; the roses on the bushes that have been trained to grow like trees in the little garden can look out into the lane which connects its two larger sisters. On the other side of the lane stands a tall house which, in elegant seclusion, does not deign to bestow a glance on the smaller one. Its eyes are open only to the doings of the main street; if you look nearer at its closed eyes facing the narrow street, you soon see the reason for its eternal sleep--they are only a sham, painted on the outer wall.

Not all sides of the house that belongs to the little garden look as decorative as the one on the main street. There, a pale rose-colored tint contrasts not too sharply with the green window-shutters and the blue slate roof. The weather side of the house, on the narrow street, looks as if it were clad in an armor of slate from top to toe; the other gable-end joins directly on to the row of houses of which it is the beginning or the end; at the back, however, it is an example of the proverb that everything has its weak point. There, an upstairs piazza has been built onto the house, not unlike half a crown of thorns. Supported by roughly-hewn wooden posts it runs along the upper story and expands toward the left into a little room. There is no direct entrance to it from the upper story of the house. To reach the "gallery chamber" from there one must leave the house by the back door, walk perhaps six steps along the wall, past the dog-kennel, to the wooden stairs, resembling those of a henhouse, and after climbing these must wander the whole length of the piazza to the left.

If all the structures are not equally ornamental and if piazza, stable and shed stand out noticeably against the dwelling-house, yet there is nowhere lacking a quality which adorns more than beauty of form and shining ornamentation. Extreme cleanliness smiles at the observer from the most hidden corners. In the little garden it reaches such a pitch that it hardly dares to smile. The garden does not look as if it were cleaned with a hoe and broom; it looks as if it had been brushed. The little beds that stand out so sharply against the yellow gravel of the walks look, not as if they had been dug by a cord, but as if they were drawn on the ground with a ruler and compa.s.ses, the box edging has the air of being daily attended to by the most accurate barber in town with comb and razor. And yet the blue coat which, if one stands on the piazza, one may see twice daily stepping into the little garden and every day at exactly the same minute, is still more neatly kept than the garden. When, after doing various pieces of work, the old gentleman leaves the garden again--and every day he goes at the same minute, just as punctually as he comes--the white ap.r.o.n over his blue coat shines with such unblemished whiteness that it is really incomprehensible why the old gentleman should have put it on. When he moves about among the tall rose-bushes which seem to have taken the old gentleman's bearing for a model, each of his steps is like the other, none is longer or fails to keep the regularity of his tempo. If one looks at him closer as he stands thus in the middle of his creation, one sees that he has merely copied externally that of which nature has created the model in himself. The regularity of the different parts of his tall figure seems to have been as accurately measured as the beds of the little garden. When nature formed him, her countenance must have borne the same expression of conscientiousness as the old man's face--an expression which, because of its strength, would appear to be obstinacy if an expression of loving gentleness, indeed almost of dreamy enthusiasm, were not mixed with it. And even now nature seems to watch over him with the same care that his eye shows when it looks over his little garden. His hair, cut short at the back and twisted above his brow into a so-called "corkscrew-curl," is of the same unblemished whiteness that is shown by his neckerchief, waistcoat, collar and the ap.r.o.n over his b.u.t.toned-up coat. Here, in his little garden, he completes the finished picture that it presents; away from home his appearance and personality must appear a little odd. His hat still has the high pointed crown, his blue overcoat the narrow collar and padded shoulders of a long vanished fashion. These offer opportunities enough for bad jokes; but no one makes them. It is as if there were an invisible something emanating from the stately figure that prevents the rise of flippant thoughts.

When the older inhabitants of the town, meeting Herr Nettenmair, pause in their conversation to greet him respectfully, it is not alone the magic something that has this effect. They know what it is that they respect in the old gentleman; when he has pa.s.sed, their eyes follow him as they stand, still in silence, until he has disappeared round the corner; then it may well be that a hand is raised and an extended forefinger tells more eloquently than lips could of a long life adorned with all the virtues of a good citizen and untarnished by a single misdeed. He is never seen in a public place, unless indeed something relating to the common welfare is to be discussed or started. The recreation which he allows himself he seeks in his little garden. At other times he sits over his ledgers or stands in the shed superintending the loading and unloading of the slate which comes from his own quarry and which he sells all over the country and far beyond its borders. A widowed sister-in-law looks after his house for him and her sons manage the business of slating which is connected with the trade in slate and is scarcely inferior to it in size. It is their uncle's spirit, the spirit of orderliness, of conscientiousness to the point of obstinacy, that rests upon the nephews and gains and keeps for them such confidence that they are sent for from far away wherever a slater is needed to roof a new building or to make extensive repairs to an old one.

It is a peculiar life that goes on in the house with the green window-shutters. The sister-in-law, still a beautiful woman, little younger than the master of the house, treats him with a kind of silent respect, or even veneration. And her sons do the same. The old gentleman shows his sister-in-law a respectful consideration, a sort of chivalry that has something touching in its grave reserve; toward his nephews he displays the fondness of a father. Yet even there something lies between them that lends to their whole intercourse something of considerate formality.

The sabbath-like peace that now spreads its wings above the most strenuous activity of the dwellers in the house did not always hover there. There was a time when bitter sorrow that came from stolen happiness, and wild desires divided its inmates, when even the menace of murder cast its shadow into the house; when despair at self-created misery wandered, wringing its hands in the still night, from the back door, up the stairs and along the piazza and down again by the path between the little garden and the stable-yard to the shed, creeping restlessly to the front again and again to the back.

What, at that time, made the hearts in the house swell to the bursting-point, what went on in the shadowed souls and issued from them in part, in the self-forgetfulness of fear, or became a deed, a deed of desperation--all that may pa.s.s through the memory of the man with whom we have been occupied. It is thirty-one years today since he returned to his home town from a long absence. So we turn back the thirty-one years and find a young man instead of the old one whom we leave. He is tall, but not so strong; and, like the old man, he wears his brown hair cut short at the back and brushed into a "corkscrew-curl" above his high white forehead. The sternness of the old man does not yet appear in his face, and the scar of mental pain endured has not yet been stamped upon his good-humored expression. Yet he is far from showing the light-hearted carelessness usually belonging to his age and the easy-going manners that are so frequently habitual with the traveling journeyman. The high road still leads him through the dense woods; but from the town, far down below, the sound of St. George's bells rises up to the height, as impossible to restrain as a mother flying to the loved child that comes toward her.

Home! How much lies in this one short syllable! What swells within the human heart when the voice of home, the tone of the bells, calls a welcome to him who is returning from abroad, the tone that called the child to church, the boy to his confirmation and his first communion, that spoke to him every hour! In the idea of home, all our good angels embrace one another.

Tears gathered in our young wanderer's serious and yet kindly eyes. If he had not been ashamed he would have sobbed aloud. He felt as if he had only dreamed his sojourn away from home and, now that he was awake, could scarcely remember the dream; as if he had only dreamed that he had grown to be a man while abroad; as if it had always seemed to him in his dreams that he was only dreaming abroad in order, when he should wake up at home, to be able to tell about it. It might have been noticed that, in spite of all this inward agitation of the moment, he did not fail to see the cobweb that the breeze from home laid as a greeting against his coat collar, and that he carefully dried his tears so that they might not fall on his neckerchief, and that he removed the last, tiniest sc.r.a.ps of the silver thread with the most persistent patience before he gave himself up to his feeling for home with his whole soul. And even his attachment to his home was in part only an expression of his obstinate need of cleanliness which made him regard everything alien that threatened to fly against him as dirt; and this need in turn sprang from the warmth of feeling with which he embraced everything that stood in closer relation to his personality. The clothes on his body were a piece of home to him, from which he must ward off everything strange.

Now the road turned; the mountain ridge which had closed it in up to this point was now left behind to one side and the top of a spire appeared above the young growth. It was the top of St. George's steeple. The young wanderer paused. Natural as it was that the highest building of the town should become visible to him before the others, the tender meaning with which his fancy imbued the fact made him forget that it was so. The slate roof of the church and steeple needed repairs. This work had been given to his father; and it was the reason, or at least the pretext, for his father's calling him back home sooner than he had intended. Perhaps tomorrow he would begin his part of the work. There, above the wide arch through which he saw the bells moving, the steeple door had been placed. There the two beams would have to be pushed out to bear the ladder on which he should climb up to the broach-post to fasten to it the rope of the contrivance in which he would make his airy circuit of the roof. And as it was his nature to bind the cords of his heart to the objects with which his work brought him in touch, he saw a greeting in the sudden appearance of the spire and involuntarily reached out toward it as if he would press a hand offered him in friendship. Then the thought of the work quickened his step, till a clearing in the wood and his arrival on the highest slope of the mountain showed him his whole home town lying at his feet.

Again he stopped. There stood his father's house with the slate shed behind it, not far from it the house where she had lived at the time he went away. Now she lived in his father's house, was his father's daughter, his brother's wife; and from now on he was to live in the same house with her and to see her daily as his sister-in-law. His heart beat harder at the thought of her. But it did not allow any of the hopes which had formerly been bound up with her memory to rise.

His affection had become that of a brother for a sister, and what moved him now was more like anxiety. He knew that she thought of him with dislike. She was the only one in his father's whole house who looked forward to his coming with displeasure. How had this all come about? Had there not been a time when she seemed to be fond of him, when she had apparently liked to meet him as much as she later avoided him? Down below there, in front of the town, the shooting-house stood surrounded by gardens. How much bigger the trees round the house had grown since he had waved his last greeting to it from this height!

Shortly before he had stood there under that acacia--it had been a beautiful spring evening, the most beautiful he thought he had ever known--at the Whitsuntide shooting. Within all the other young people were dancing; he walked happily round outside the house in which he knew her to be dancing. Even now he still felt embarra.s.sed with girls and women and did not know how to talk to them; at that time he had felt even more so. How dearly he would have loved to tell her--how much he had to tell her, when he was alone, and how well he knew how to say it; and if chance ordained that he met her alone (it was wonderful how busy chance seemed to be in arranging such meetings) the thought that now the moment had come drove all the blood to his heart, the words from his tongue back into their hiding-place in the depths of his soul. Thus it had been when, her cheeks still glowing from the dance, she had come out of the house alone. She seemed to be concerned only with getting cool; she fanned herself with her white scarf, but her cheeks only grew the redder. He felt that she had seen him, that she expected him to come nearer; and it was the knowledge that he understood her that dyed her cheeks redder--that drove her, as he hesitated, back again into the hall. Perhaps, too, she had heard a third person coming. His brother came out of another door of the hall.

He had seen the two standing silently opposite each other, perhaps had also seen the girl's blush. "Are you looking for Beate?" asked our hero to hide his embarra.s.sment. "No," answered his brother, "she is not at the dance--and it's just as well. Nothing can come of it, after all; I must get another--and until I find one, Bohemian beer is my sweetheart."

There was something wild in his brother's speech. Our hero looked at him amazed and at the same time disturbed. "Why can nothing come of it?" he asked. "And what is the matter with you?"

"Oh, yes, you think I ought to be like you, pious and patient so long as there is no thread on your coat. But I am another kind of fellow, and if anybody upsets my calculations I have to let off steam. Why can nothing come of it? Because the old man in the blue coat won't have it."

"Father called you into the little garden yesterday--"

"Yes, and raised his white eyebrows, which are drawn with a ruler, an inch and a half. 'I thought it was so. You are going with Beate, the collector's daughter. That comes to an end today!'"

"Is it possible? And why?"

"Did you ever know old Blue-coat to give any 'why'? And did you ever ask him 'But why, father?' He didn't say so, but I know why it has to come to an end with me and Beate. I've been expecting it the whole week; whenever he raised his hand I thought he was pointing to the little garden and was ready to follow him like a poor sinner. That is the place where he gives his cabinet orders. The collector is said not to be in very good circ.u.mstances. There is some gossip about his spending more than his pay. And--well, you are a quill-driver, too, like old Blue-coat. But what can the girl do? Or I? Well, the affair must stop--but I'm sorry about the girl, and I must see how I can forget her. I must drink or get another one."

Our hero was accustomed to his brother's manner; he knew that the words were not intended to be as wild as they sounded, and his brother was showing his love and respect for their father by the fact of his obedience; still our hero would have liked to see them shown in speech as well as in action. It seemed to Apollonius as if there were something unclean on his brother's soul and involuntarily he stroked the other's coat collar several times with his hand as if he could brush it off him from outside. Dust had collected on the collar during the dance; when he had removed it he felt as if he had really removed what had troubled him.

The subject of their conversation changed. They began to speak of the girl who had just been out, fanning herself to get cool; Apollonius certainly did not know that he was responsible for this. Just as the girl was the goal to which all his lines of thought led, so, too, when once he began to speak of her he could not escape from his theme. He forgot his brother so completely that at last he was really talking to himself. His brother now seemed for the first time to perceive all the beautiful and good things in her that the hero lauded with unconscious eloquence. He agreed with more and more enthusiasm until he broke into a wild laugh which roused the hero from his self-forgetfulness and dyed his cheeks as red as those of the girl had been a short time before.

"And so you slink about round the hall where she is dancing with others, and if she shows herself you haven't the heart to draw her into conversation. Wait, I will be your amba.s.sador. From now on she shall dance no turn except with me, so that no one else shall cross your plans. I know how to get on with girls. Let me take your part for you."

Our hero was frightened at the thought that the girl should learn that very day what he felt for her. Besides, he was ashamed of his own embarra.s.sed and awkward behavior to her, and of what she must think of him when she knew that he needed a mediator. He had already raised his hand to stop his brother when the appearance of the girl herself caused everything else to grow dark to him. Quietly and alone, as before, she stepped out of the door. Beneath the scarf with which she had fanned herself she seemed to glance furtively about her. Again he saw her cheeks grow redder. Had she seen him? But she turned her face in the opposite direction. She seemed to be looking for something in the gra.s.s in front of her. He saw her pick a little flower, lay it on a bench and, after she had stood for a time as if in doubt whether she should pick it up again or not, with quick decision turn again to the door. A half involuntary movement of her arm seemed to tell him to take it, that it was picked for him. Once more a wave of red rushed up over her face to her dark brown hair, and the haste with which she disappeared in the door seemed intended to prevent a regret which might give rise to anxiety as to how her conduct would be understood.

The brother, who seemed not to have noticed anything of all this, had continued to speak in his lively, vehement fashion; his words were lost; our hero would have had to have had two lives in order to hear them, for all the one he possessed was in his eyes. Now he saw his brother rushing away toward the hall. He thought of detaining him, but it was too late. In vain he hurried after him up to the door. There the flower absorbed him again which the girl had left lying for some finder, for a happy one, if _he_ found it for whom it was intended.

And while his lips continued to call softly and mechanically to his brother, who no longer heard him, to keep silence, he was inwardly asking himself: "Was it really I for whom she laid the flower here?

Did she lay it here for any one?" His heart answered both questions with a happy "Yes," while at the same time the thing that his brother intended to do troubled him.

If it was a sign of love from her and for him, then it was the last.

Twice he glanced surrept.i.tiously into the hall when the door was opened; he saw her dancing with his brother and then, when they were resting after the dance, he saw his brother talking persuasively to her in his hasty way. "Now he is talking of me," he thought, his whole face burning. He rushed into the shade of the bushes when she left the hall. His brother took her home. He followed them at as great a distance as he thought necessary to prevent her seeing him. When his brother came back from accompanying her he stepped away from the door.

He felt naked with shame. His brother had noticed him nevertheless. He said: "She won't hear of you yet; I don't know whether she means it, or whether it is just airs. I shall meet her again. No tree falls at one stroke. But I must confess, you have good taste. I don't know where my eyes have been up to now. She's away ahead of Beate; and that's saying a good deal!"

From then on his brother had danced untiringly with Walter's Christiane and spoken for Apollonius and always, after he had taken her home, he came and gave our hero an account of his efforts on his behalf. For a long time he was uncertain whether it was only affectation, or whether she really looked with disfavor on our hero.

He repeated conscientiously what he had said in our hero's praise, and how she had answered his questions and a.s.surances. He still had hope after our hero had already given it up. And her behavior toward the latter would have compelled him to realize that he could expect no return of his affection, even if he had not known what answers she gave his brother. She avoided him wherever she saw him as a.s.siduously as she had formerly seemed to seek him. And had it really been he whom she had sought before, if indeed she had sought any one?

A hundred times his brother urged him to waylay her and press his own suit. He exerted all his inventive power to procure him an opportunity of speaking to her alone. Our hero refused to be urged or to accept his offers. After all, it was useless. All that he might accomplish would be to make her still more angry.

"I can't stand by any longer and see you growing thinner and paler all the time," said his brother one evening, after he had reported how unsuccessfully he had spoken for him again that day. "You must go away from here for a while; that will have good results for you in two ways. When I tell her that it is on her account that you have gone out into the world, perhaps she will turn. Believe me, I know the long-haired tribe, and I know how to treat them. You must write her a touching letter for good-by; I will deliver it, and I'll manage to soften her heart. And if it can't be accomplished, it will do you good to be away from here where everything reminds you of her, for a year--or several years. And finally, strange places will make another man of you, who will know better how to get round the ap.r.o.n-wearers.

You must learn to dance; that's already half the battle. And anyway, the old Blue-coat has been asked by his cousin in Cologne to send one of us to him; I read it the other day in a letter that had fallen out of his pocket. Just tell him that you have gathered something of the sort from several things he has said lately and that you are ready to go if he wants you to. Or let me do that. You are too honest."

And he really did arrange it. It is a question whether our hero would have been able voluntarily to make up his mind to leave home. He could not understand how any one could live anywhere else but in his home town; to him it had always seemed like a fairy tale that there were other towns and people living in them. He had not imagined the life and doings of these people as real, like those of the inhabitants of his home, but as a kind of shadow-play that existed only for the looker-on, not for the shadows themselves. His brother, who knew how to treat the old man, led the conversation up to the cousin in Cologne as if by chance, and was clever enough to interpret the suggestions that Herr Nettenmair made in his diplomatic way as preliminary hints and connect them with others that referred to our hero. After frequent conversations he seemed to take it as the express desire of the old man that Apollonius should go to his cousin in Cologne. This put the idea into the old man's mind and, as it pa.s.sed for his own, he brooded over it in his own way. There was little work to do at the time, and there seemed to be no prospect of its increasing materially for some time. A pair of hands could be spared; if they remained in the business all the workers would be condemned to semi-idleness. The old man could stand nothing as little as what he called dawdling. The only thing that was lacking was that our hero should resist. He knew nothing of his brother's plans. The latter had wisely not initiated him into them, because he knew him too well to expect his support in a matter that he would have rejected as both underhand and disrespectful to his father.

"You want to send Apollonius to Cologne," said his brother to the old man one afternoon; "but will he want to go? I don't think so. You will have to send me out on my travels. Apollonius won't go--at least not today, nor tomorrow."

That was enough. That very evening the old man beckoned our hero to follow him into the little garden. He stopped in front of the old pear-tree and, removing a little twig that was growing out of its trunk, said: "Tomorrow you will go to your cousin in Cologne."

With a rapid movement he turned toward his son, and saw with astonishment that Apollonius nodded his head obediently. It seemed almost to displease him that he should have no self-will to break.

Did he think that the poor boy was nursing defiant thoughts, even if he did not express them, and did he want to break down even the defiance of thoughts? "You pack your knapsack this very day, do you hear?" he shouted at him.

"Yes, father," said Apollonius.

"You start tomorrow at sunrise." After he had seemed to try almost to force a defiant answer, he may have regretted his anger. He made a gesture of dismissal; Apollonius went obediently. The old man followed him, and several times he came up to the brothers' room with milder sternness to remind his son, who was packing, of this and that which he was not to forget.

And the last of four strokes was just ringing out from the tower of St. George's when the door of the house with the green shutters opened, and our young wanderer stepped out, accompanied by his brother. At the same spot where he now stood looking down on the town lying below him, his brother had taken farewell of him, and he had looked after him a long, long time. "Perhaps I can win her for you after all," his brother had said; "and then I'll write you so at once.

And if you can't get her, she isn't the only one in the world. I can tell you, you are as good-looking a fellow as any; and if you'll only lay aside your stupid way you can get on with any of them. Once for all, things are so that the girls can't court us--and I shouldn't even want one that threw herself at my head of her own accord. And what can a lively girl do with a dreamer? Our cousin in Cologne is said to have a couple of pretty daughters. And now, good-by. I will deliver your letter today." With that his brother had left him.

"Yes," said Apollonius to himself as he looked after him. "He is right. Not because of my cousin's daughters, or any other girl, no matter how pretty she might be. If I had been different perhaps I need not have had to go away now. Was it I for whom she laid the flower there at the Whitsuntide shooting? Did she want to meet me then, and before then? Who knows how hard it has become for her! And having done all that in vain must she not have felt ashamed? Oh, she is right not to want to have anything more to do with me. I must learn to be different."

And this resolution had been no bloomless bud. His cousin's house in Cologne did not encourage dreaming of any kind. Apollonius found an entirely different family life there from that in his own home. His old cousin was as full of life as the youngest member of the family.

Loneliness was impossible. A lively sense of the ridiculous [Ill.u.s.tration: Jacob's Journey. Schnorr Von Carolsfeld] [Blank Page]

prevented the growth of any kind of peculiarity. Every one had to be on his guard; no one could let himself go.