The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Xix Part 44

He did not see how the valley grew paler and filled with soft shadows, and how the clouds took on a rosy tint; he was blind to the mild, sweet evening colors of the sky and the mysterious blue that came over the distant mountains. He saw nothing but that lost gla.s.s of cider, the toil that waited inevitably for him on the morrow, and the hardness of his lot. Those were the kind of thoughts he had been used to having when he had pa.s.sed a day without getting anything to drink. What it would be like to have a gla.s.s of something stronger than cider was a thing he did not even dare to think about.

Stooping and languid, he made his way down to the house at supper-time, and took his seat ill-humoredly at the table. There was soup, bread, and onions, and he ate grimly as long as there was anything on his plate; but there was nothing to drink. After the meal he sat still disconsolately and did not know what to be at. Nothing to drink, nothing to smoke, no one to gossip with! For the weaver was working busily by lamplight, paying no attention to him.

Hurlin sat for a half hour at the empty table, listening to the click of Sauberle's machine and staring at the yellow flame of the hanging lamp, until he sank into an abyss of discontent, self-pity, envy, hatred and malice from which he neither sought nor found any way of escape. At last his silent anger and hopelessness grew too much for him. He raised his fist and brought it down on the table with a bang, rolling out a good German oath.

"Here!" said the weaver, coming over to him. "What's the matter with you? No cursing allowed where I am."

"Well, what in the devil's name am I to do?"

"Oh, you find the evening long? Then go to bed."

"There you are again! People send little children to bed at a certain time--not me!"

"Then I'll get a little work for you."

"Work? You're too free with your tyranny, you old slave-driver!"

"Come, keep cool! But there--there's something for you to read." He put out a couple of volumes from the thinly-furnished shelves that hung on the wall, and went back to his work. Hurlin had no inclination to read, but he took one of the books in his hand and opened it. It was an almanac, and he began to look at the pictures. The first was a fantastically dressed ideal woman's figure depicted as an ornament for the t.i.tle-page, with bare feet and flowing locks. Hurlin remembered that he had a stump of lead-pencil in his pocket. He took it out, wet it in his mouth, and drew two large round b.r.e.a.s.t.s on the woman's bodice, which he continued to emphasize, wetting his pencil again and again, until the paper was almost worn through. Then he turned the page and saw with satisfaction that the impress of his artistic design had gone through several other pages. The next picture on which he came ill.u.s.trated a fairy-story, and represented a kobold or some malicious spirit with evil eyes, a fierce moustache and a huge open mouth.

Eagerly the old man wet his pencil again, and wrote under the monster, in large, legible letters, "This is Weaver Sauberle, the manager."

He was proposing to go through the whole book and deface and defile it all. But the next picture arrested his attention, and he forgot himself in studying it. It represented the explosion of a factory, and consisted of little beyond a huge ma.s.s of smoke and fire, around and above which whole or fragmentary human bodies, bricks, plaster, laths, and beams were flying through the air. This interested him, and led him into trying to reconstruct the whole story, and especially to imagine how the victims must have felt at the moment of being hurled into the air. There was a charm and a satisfaction in this for him which held him intent on the picture a long time; with all his egoism, he belonged to the numerous cla.s.s who find more to think about in other people's fate, especially when it is strikingly ill.u.s.trated, than in their own.

When he had exercised his imagination sufficiently on this exciting picture, he went on turning over the pages, and presently came to another that arrested him, though in quite a different way. It was a bright and cheerful picture--a pretty arbor, on the outer boughs of which hung a star for a sign. On the star sat, with ruffled neck and open beak, a little bird singing. Inside the arbor was to be seen, about a rough rustic table, a small group of young men, students or roving journeymen, who chatted and drank a good wine out of cheerful-looking bottles. To one side of the picture was visible a ruined castle raising its towers to heaven, and in the background a fair landscape stretched away, as it might have been the Rhine valley, with a river and boats and distant hills. The revellers were all handsome youths, merry and amiable lads, smooth-faced or with light youthful beards, who were evidently singing over their wine the praises of friendship and love, of the good old Rhine and of G.o.d's blue heaven.

At first this engraving reminded the morose and lonely man who looked at it of his own better days, when he, too, could call for a bottle of wine, and of the many gla.s.ses of good sound stuff which he had consumed. But by degrees the conviction stole over him that he had never been as happy and gay as these young revellers, even long ago in his light-hearted years of wandering, when he had taken the road as a journeyman-locksmith. The summer gladness in the arbor, the bright, good-humored faces of the young people made him sad and angry. He wondered whether it was all the invention of a painter, idealized and false, or whether there were in reality somewhere such arbors and such merry, carefree youths. Their smiling faces filled him with an envious longing; the more he looked at the picture, the more he felt as though he were looking for a moment through a small window into another world, into a fairer country and the life of freer and more gracious men than he had ever met in his life. He did not know into what strange kingdom he was gazing, nor that his feelings were those of people who read poetry, and get their pleasure in the beauty of the description from the reflection how much smaller and meaner the every-day reality is, pa.s.sing into a slight, sweet sadness and longing. He did not well understand how to extract the sweetness from this kind of sadness, and so he shut the book, threw it angrily on the table, muttered a forced "Good night," and went up to his room, where the moonlight lay on bed and floor and chest and was reflected in the filled wash-basin. The deep stillness, early as the hour was, the peaceful moonlight, and the emptiness of the room, almost too large for a mere sleeping-chamber, awoke in the rough old fellow a feeling of unbearable loneliness, from which he escaped only after many muttered curses and some time later into the land of slumber.

There followed days in which he sawed wood and enjoyed his afternoon refreshment, alternating with days in which he was idle and did without it. He often sat up there by the roadside, full of poisonous, malicious thoughts, spitting down toward the town with all the bitterness of his unrestrained heart. The feeling he had hoped for, of being at peace in a safe haven, failed to visit him; instead, he felt himself sold and betrayed, and either made violent scenes with the weaver or brooded secretly in his own heart on the feeling of defeat and disgust and ennui.

Meanwhile the term for which board had been paid for one of the pensioners in private houses expired, and one day there came to the "Sun" as a second guest, the former sailmaker, Lukas h.e.l.ler.

While business reverses had made a drinker out of Hurlin, it was just the opposite with h.e.l.ler. Nor had he, like the manufacturer, fallen suddenly from the height of showy riches; he had gone down slowly and steadily, with the necessary pauses and interludes, from an uncommon workman to a common vagabond. His good and energetic wife had been unable to save him; rather, the hopeless struggle had been too much for her, though she seemed much stronger than he, and she had died--while her good-for-nothing husband enjoyed rude health, played the fool for a few more years, and then, after he was ruined and dependent, went lazily on with no apparent diminution of strength toward a ripe old age. Of course his conviction was that he had had bad luck with his wife as well as with the sail-making business, and that his gifts and performances had merited a better fate.

Hurlin had awaited this man's arrival with great eagerness, for he was growing daily more utterly weary of being alone. But when h.e.l.ler appeared, the ex-manufacturer stood on his dignity and would scarcely have anything to do with him. He even grumbled because h.e.l.ler's bed was put in the same room with his, although he was secretly glad of it.

After supper, since his comrade seemed disposed to be so grumpy, the sailmaker took a book and began to read. Hurlin sat opposite him and threw occasional glances of suspicious observation at him. Once, when the reader could not help laughing at something amusing, the other was very much tempted to ask him what it was. But as h.e.l.ler looked up from his book at the same moment, evidently willing to communicate the joke, Hurlin a.s.sumed a gloomy expression and pretended to be wholly absorbed in the contemplation of a fly that was crawling across the table.

So they sat the whole evening through. One read, looking up occasionally as if ready for a chat, the other watched him incessantly, only turning his eyes away haughtily when his companion happened to raise his. The manager worked away busily until late. Hurlin's face grew more and more sour and hostile, although he was really pleased to think he would no longer be alone in his bedroom. When ten o'clock struck, the manager spoke: "Now you might as well be going to bed, you two." Both rose and went upstairs.

While they were slowly and stiffly undressing in the dimly-lighted room, Hurlin thought the time had come to enter on an inquiry into the qualities of the companion in misfortune whom he had so long desired.

"Well, there's two of us now," he remarked, throwing his waistcoat on a chair.

"Yes," said h.e.l.ler.

"It's a pig-sty, this," the other went on.

"Oh--is it?"

"_Is_ it? I ought to know! But now there'll be a little life in it--yes."

"Say," asked h.e.l.ler, "do you take your shirt off at night or keep it on?"

"In summer I take it off."

So h.e.l.ler took his shirt off too, and lay down in the creaking bed.

Soon he began to snore loudly. But Hurlin's curiosity was not yet exhausted. "Are you asleep, h.e.l.ler?"

"No."

"There's plenty of time.... Tell me, you're a sailmaker, aren't you?"

"I was--a master sailmaker."

"And now--?"

"And now--you must think a lot of me, to ask such silly questions."

"Oh, you needn't be so snippy! You old fool, you may have been a master sailmaker, but that's not so much. I was a manufacturer--I owned a factory, do you understand?"

"You needn't shout at me--I knew that before. And after that, what did you manufacture?"

"What do you mean, after that?"

"You know what I mean--in jail."

Hurlin emitted a bleating laugh. "Oh, I suppose you're one of the pious kind--a psalm-singer, eh?"

"I? That's the last thing! No, I'm not pious--but at the same time I've never been in jail."

"You wouldn't have been at home there. Most of the people there are fine fellows."

"O Lord! Fine fellows of your sort? You're right--I shouldn't have liked it."

"Some people have got to talk, whether they know what they're talking about or not."

"Just what I was thinking."

"Oh, come now, be a good fellow! What made you give up the sailmaking?"

"Oh, don't bother me! The business was all right, but the devil got into it somehow. It was my wife's fault."

"Your wife? Did she drink?"

"That would have been too much. No, I did all the drinking that was done, as is mostly the case, not the wife. But it was her fault just the same."

"Was it? What did she do?"

"Don't ask so many questions!"