The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Xix Part 33

Now the music stopped, there was an intermission, and refreshments were served. The mail clerk hurried about in person with a tea-tray of herring salad, serving the ladies; but before Ingeborg Holm he actually dropped on one knee as he offered her the dish, making her blush for joy.

The people in the hall now began to be aware of the spectator in the doorway, after all, and strange, searching glances came upon him from pretty, heated faces; but he stood his ground. Ingeborg and Hans, too, pa.s.sed their eyes over him almost at the same moment, with that complete indifference which almost has the appearance of contempt.

Suddenly, however, he became conscious that from somewhere a glance had reached him and was resting on him ... He turned his head, and at once his eyes met the ones he had felt. A girl stood not far from him, with a pale, narrow, delicate face which he had noticed before. She had not danced much, the cavaliers had not paid much attention to her, and he had seen her sitting alone against the wall with bitterly closed lips.

And she stood alone now, too. She wore a bright, filmy dress, like the others, but under the diaphanous goods her bare shoulders looked sharp and scanty, and the lean neck went down so far between these pitiful shoulders that the quiet girl seemed almost a little deformed. She held her hands in their thin short gloves in front of her flat breast so that the fingertips barely touched. With lowered head she looked up at Tonio Kroger out of black, swimming eyes. He turned away ...

Here stood Hans and Ingeborg quite close to him. He had sat down beside her,--she was perhaps his sister,--and surrounded by other red-cheeked children of men they ate and drank, chattered merrily, called out teasing remarks to each other with ringing voices, and let their laughter peal out. Could he not approach them a little? Could he not direct to him or her a jest that would come to his mind, and that they must at least answer with a smile? It would make him happy, he longed for it; he would then return more contentedly to his room, with the consciousness of having established some little community with them. He thought out what he might say; but he did not find the courage to say it. And then too it was as of old: they would not understand him, would listen with disapproval to what he could say. For their language was not his language.

Now the dance was to begin again, it seemed. The mail clerk revealed an all-embracing activity. He hurried around and invited every one to engage partners, pushed and cleared away chairs and gla.s.ses with the aid of the waiter, gave orders to the musicians, and took some awkward ones, who did not know where to go, by the shoulders and pushed them along before him. What were they going to do? Groups of eight couples were forming sets ... A terrible memory made Tonio Kroger blush. They were dancing the quadrille.

The music began, and the couples bowed and marched past each other. The mail clerk called the figures, and he did so, by heaven, in French, and brought out the nasal sounds in an incomparably distinguished fashion.

Ingeborg Holm was dancing right in front of Tonio Kroger, in the set just next to the door. She moved back and forth in front of him, forward and backward, gliding and whirling; a perfume that came from her hair or the dainty stuff of her dress reached him occasionally, and he shut his eyes with a feeling that had been so familiar to him all his life, whose aroma and bitter stimulus he had faintly discerned all these last days, and that now filled him again completely with its sweet distress. What _was_ it? Longing? Tenderness? Envy, self-contempt?... _Moulinet des dames!_ Did you laugh, blond Inga, did you laugh at me when I danced _moulinet_ and made such a pitiable fool of myself? And would you laugh today, now that I have after all become something like a famous man? Yes, you would, and you would have thrice as much right as before! And if I, all by myself, had created the Nine Symphonies, The World as Will and Idea, and the Last Judgment--still you would be eternally justified in laughing ... He looked at her, and a line occurred to him which he had long forgotten, and yet was so familiar and so akin to him: "I fain would sleep, but thou must dance."

He knew so well the deep, clumsy, melancholy Scandinavian awkwardness of feeling that was expressed by it. To sleep ... To long to live simply and wholly for the feeling that sweetly and indolently satisfies itself, without the obligation of becoming a deed and a dance--and nevertheless to dance, to have to execute nimbly and with presence of mind the hard, hard and dangerous knife-dance of art, without ever quite forgetting the humiliating contradiction that lay in having to dance while one was in love ...

All at once the whole throng broke into mad and exuberant motion. The sets had broken up, and the dancers shot around jumping and gliding: the quadrille was ending with a galop. The couples flew past Tonio Kroger to the furious beat of the music, _cha.s.seing_, hurrying, overtaking each other, with quick, breathless laughter. One couple came along, carried away by the universal race, whirling and whizzing forward. The girl had a delicate, pale face and lean, very high shoulders. And suddenly, close before him, there was a stumbling, sliding, and falling ... The pale girl fell down. She fell so heavily and violently that it almost looked dangerous, and her cavalier fell with her. The latter must have hurt himself so painfully that he forgot his partner altogether, for he began amid grimaces to rub his knees with his hands, without getting off the floor; and the girl, seemingly quite stunned by the fall, still lay on the floor. Now Tonio Kroger stepped forward, grasped her gently by the arms, and lifted her up.

Exhausted, confused, and unhappy, she looked up at him, and suddenly her delicate face was suffused with a faint flush.

"Tak! O, mange Tak!" (Thanks, Oh, many thanks), she said, and looked up at him with dark, swimming eyes.

"You should not dance any more," he said gently. Then he looked around at _them_ once more, at Hans and Ingeborg, and went out, leaving the verandah and the dance, and going up to his room.

He was intoxicated by the festivities in which he had had no part, and weary with jealousy. It had been like long ago, just like long ago.

With heated face he had stood in a dark spot, full of grief on your account, ye blond ones, happy and full of life, and then had gone away lonely. Some one ought to come now. Ingeborg ought to come now, ought to notice that he was gone, follow him secretly, lay her hand on his shoulder and say: Come in and join us. Be happy! I love you ... But she came not at all. Such things did not happen. Yes, it was just like those days, and he was happy as in those days. For his heart was alive.

But what had there been during all the time in which he had become what he now was?--Stupefaction; desolation; ice; and intellect. And art!...

He undressed, lay down to rest, and put out the light. He whispered two names into the pillow, these few chaste Norse syllables which designated for him the real and original type of his love, suffering, and happiness, which meant life, simple and intimate emotion, home. He looked back upon the years elapsed from that time to this. He thought of the wild adventures his senses, nerves, and intellect had gone through, saw himself devoured by irony and brilliance, made stagnant and lame by knowledge, half worn out by the fevers and frosts of creative work, unstable and in torments of conscience between cra.s.s extremes, cast back and forth between sanct.i.ty and pa.s.sion, exquisite, impoverished, exhausted by frigid and artificially selected exaltations, astray, laid waste, tortured, diseased--and he sobbed with repentance and homesickness.

About him it was quiet and dark. But from below the sweet, trivial waltz time of life came up to him m.u.f.fled and swaying.

IX

Tonio Kroger sat in the North and wrote to Lisaveta Ivanovna, his friend, as he had promised.

Dear Lisaveta, down yonder in Arcadia, whither I shall soon return, he wrote. Here, then, is something like a letter, but it will probably disappoint you, for I am thinking of keeping it somewhat general. Not as if I had nothing to tell, or had not had this or that experience on my journey. At home, in my native town, they were actually going to arrest me ... but of that you shall hear by word of mouth. Now I frequently have days on which I prefer making some good general observations to telling stories.

I wonder if you still remember, Lisaveta, that you once called me a commoner, a commoner astray. You called me so at a time when I was confessing my love for that which I call Life, being led on to it by other confessions which I had allowed to escape me; and I ask myself whether you knew how closely you struck the truth in calling me so, how nearly my commonership and my love for "life" are one and the same thing. This journey has given me occasion to think about it ...

My father, you know, was of a Norse temperament: reflective, thorough, Puritanically correct, and inclined to melancholy; my mother of nondescript exotic blood, beautiful, sensual, nave, at once slovenly and pa.s.sionate, and of an impulsive and unprincipled mind. Quite without doubt this was a mixture which involved extraordinary possibilities, and extraordinary dangers. What came of it was this: a commoner who lost his way into art, a Bohemian homesick for a model nursery, an artist with a bad conscience. For it is of course my bourgeois conscience which makes me see in all artistry, in all unusualness and all genius something deeply ambiguous, deeply dubious, deeply disreputable, and which fills me with this lovelorn weakness for the simple, candid, and agreeably normal, for the decent and mediocre.

I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it. You artists call me a commoner, and commoners feel tempted to arrest me ... I do not know which wounds me more bitterly. Commoners are stupid; but you worshippers of beauty who call me phlegmatic and without yearning, ought to reflect that there is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for the raptures of commonplaceness.

I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn "man"--but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding bra.s.s or a tinkling cymbal.

What I have done is nothing, not much--as good as nothing. I shall do better things, Lisaveta--this is a promise. While I am writing, the sea's roar is coming up to me, and I close my eyes. I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once--and to these I am very devoted. But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the bright-spirited living ones, the happy, amiable, and commonplace.

Do not speak lightly of this love, Lisaveta; it is good and fruitful.

There is longing in it and melancholy envy, and a tiny bit of contempt, and an unalloyed chaste blissfulness.

LUDWIG THOMA

MATT THE HOLY (1904)

_The remarkable fortunes of the Reverend Matthew Fottner of Eynhofen, Studiosus, Soldier, and later Pastor at Rappertswyl_

TRANSLATED BY BAYARD QUINCY MORGAN, PH.D.

a.s.sistant Professor of German, University of Wisconsin

Whoso has six horses in the stable is a freeholder, and he sits next to the burgomaster in the tavern and is a burgess. When he sees fit to open his head and grumble about the hard times and the taxes, his words are heeded, and the small fry go about the next day telling how Harlanger, or whatever his name is, has spoken his mind for once.

Whoso has five horses or less is a farmer, and he grumbles too. But it does not have the same weight, and is not worth spreading.

But whoso has no horses, and makes a pair of lean oxen draw his plow, is a cotter and must hold his tongue. In the tavern, in the town meeting, and everywhere. His opinion is worthless, and no regular farmer pays any attention to the poor beggar.

The professor of the Cobbler-Sebastian property, house number eight in Eynhofen, George Fottner by name, was a cotter. And a beggarly one at that. As to oxen, he had one, of cows very few, but a swarm of children. Four girls and three boys, making seven according to Adam Reese[A]; and when there was scarce enough food for the two old folks, it took good figuring and dividing to give the young ones something.

[Footnote A: popular arithmetic primer--TRANSLATOR.]

But in the country no one ever starved yet, and so the Fottners managed to pull their children through. As soon as one of them was eight or nine years old, it could begin to earn a bit, and of course there was no danger after it could quit school.

The girls soon went into service; of the boys the oldest, Georgie, stayed at home, the second, Vitus by name, went to the Shuller Farm, and the third--well, I am going to tell you about him.

Matthew his name was, and he came into the world long after the sixth child, and quite unexpectedly.

At that time Fottner was already fifty, and his wife was in the forties.

So in the opinion of all acquaintances there was absolutely no necessity of getting a seventh child to add to their six.

In its early years this child was weakly and puny to boot; its parents often thought it looked sickly and would soon become a little angel in Heaven. But it was not so; Matthew thrived, became a priest subsequently, and weighed in his prime two hundred and fifty, and not a pound less.

His choice of a clerical profession was unforeseen, and caused by nothing less than the p.r.i.c.ks of conscience of the Upper-Bridge Farmer in Eynhofen.

The same had much money, no children, and a grievous sin that weighed on his heart. Years before he had perjured himself in a lawsuit with his neighbor and had won thereby.

At first he did not care much, for in swearing he had taken the precaution of turning down the fingers of his left hand. Venerable tradition has it that in this way the oath pa.s.ses downward through the body into the ground, like a bolt striking a lightning-rod, and so can do no harm.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LUDWIG THOMA]

But the Bridge Farmer was a timid person, and as he grew older he brooded frequently over the affair, and resolved to repair the damage.

That is, not the damage which the neighbor had suffered, but the disadvantages that might accrue to his own immortal soul.