Читать книгу The Cuckoo Clock - Mary Stolz - Страница 6

Once upon a time, there lived a clockmaker in a village at the edge of the Black Forest in Germany. Long ago he had been known as Young Ula, the clockmaker. Then as Ula, the clockmaker. In time, he became Old Ula, the clockmaker.

For years past numbering, he had been the finest maker of the famous Black Forest cuckoo clock anywhere in the world. When the best was wanted in the way of such a clock, people came to Ula. Travelers from across the oceans, when they were near the Black Forest, stopped at his village to order a clock from him.

Some, when they heard how long it was going to take, went away without ordering. Angry. Or disappointed. Anyway, not patient.

“To make a clock takes time,” Ula would say, looking to see whether his customer appreciated the little joke. “To make a clock takes a good deal of time.”

Old Ula’s clocks were entirely hand-made. The workings were old-fashioned and simple. Four wheels in each train, verge escapements and foliot. He always began with the works. Carving the wooden wheels and spindles, fashioning the two long chains of brass links, fashioning the bellows and the wire gong that would give the bird its voice. He cast two weights of lead, in the form of fir cones. Then he would proceed to the dial face, carving lacy hands and numerals. Then he would make the house. Small, sometimes. Sometimes large. Usually something between small and large.

But never simple.

The workings of his clocks were so severe and plain that nothing ever went wrong with them. But the cases, the houses that surrounded these works, were of the most elaborate kind.

Naturally, people ordering a clock made by hand by the finest clockmaker in the Black Forest directed what they wished to have in the way of decoration. And usually they wished to display on the face of the clock their skill as hunters.

For instance, one day Baron Balloon came into the clockmaker’s small cottage. Baron Balloon himself lived in a castle at the top of a mountain from which he could look down on the village. Sometimes he did not come off his peak for weeks. But today he had ordered the carriage with its coachman and span of gray horses, and down the winding road he’d come, especially to commission the finest, largest, most intricate and imposing cuckoo clock that Old Ula had ever made. It was to be a present for his daughter at Christmas, now four months away.

Brangi, the clockmaker’s big brown dog, was lying across the doorstep in the sunlight. Brangi was getting old. Once he had frolicked through fields and forest, and fought other dogs, and loved other dogs. He had bayed at the moon with a full deep voice. But of late he preferred to lie on the doorstep in the warm sun, or lie beside the hearth in the evening by the leaping fire. The moon no longer called to him.

Now he was in the Baron’s way.

The Baron, accustomed to having everyone and everything get out of his way, stopped at the doorstep and said, “Hoh! Move!”

Brangi thumped his tail and sighed and relaxed. He hadn’t a notion of what was due a Baron in the way of obedience. The Baron’s own dogs jumped when he snapped his fingers, but they’d been trained by their parents.

Brangi just lolled there, blocking the Baron’s entrance.

“Hoh, Ula!” the Baron bellowed. “Get this hound out of my path, or I shall be obliged to have my coachman remove him!”

Ula, who had been growing rather deaf, had not heard the arrival of the Baron’s coach, but now he rose from his workbench and shuffled to the door.

“Come, Brangi,” he said mildly. “Don’t you know an important man when you’re lying across his path?”

Brangi glanced up, yawned, seemed to reflect, and, just as the Baron was on the point of bellowing again, moved slowly into the cottage, where he subsided on a rug beside the clockmaker’s worktable, put his head on his paws, and went to sleep.

“And now, Herr Baron,” said Ula. “What may I do for you?”

The Baron looked about the room. Accustomed as he was to castles, it seemed pretty poor stuff to him. A room with a workbench at one end, beneath a window. A fireplace with a box settle to one side and an old rocker to the other. A hooked rug. White curtains at the windows. Several clocks on the wall, finished and waiting to be picked up by those who had ordered them. Two on the workbench, undergoing repairs.

There was a longcase clock in one corner. “Did you make that?” the Baron demanded, pointing.

“Alas, no. I make only cuckoo clocks. That was made by a friend, now gone.”

“You bought it from him?” said the Baron in surprise. It was a clock, obviously, of great value.

“He gave it to me.”

“Hmph. It’s an exceedingly fine one.” Its fineness irritated the Baron. He had bought a great many things in his life, but had never been given anything. He considered offering to buy it, looked at the clockmaker and reconsidered.

He continued his haughty inspection of the cottage, but there was nothing more to see, except a staircase going up one wall to the clockmaker’s bedroom, and, at one side of the workbench, Erich the Foundling, carefully sanding a spindle.

“Tell that boy to leave,” ordered the Baron Balloon.

Old Ula smiled and shook his head. “Not possible, Mein Herr. He is my assistant.”

Erich the Foundling lowered his glance proudly, but he was alarmed. The Baron was so huge and important and loud, and Old Ula so gentle and quiet.

“You, boy—out!” said the Baron.

Erich the Foundling, used to obeying orders, started from the bench, but Old Ula said again, “Not possible, Herr Baron. Remain where you are, Erich. And now, Herr Baron, tell me. Is there something I can do for you?”

“You can begin by heeding my order.”

“Oh, dear.” Old Ula shook his head regretfully. “Then our business is concluded before it is begun. You must understand, Herr Baron, that I do not heed orders from other men. I obey my stomach when it demands to be fed, and my body when it asks to be put to bed, and my heart when it bids me love—” He glanced at Erich. “I shall obey my God, when he summons me from here. But as to obeying you—” He sighed. “No, I fear that will not be possible.”

The Baron turned and made for the cottage door in noisy fury; then he paused, waiting for Ula to plead with him not to leave. As no words came, he stomped back into the room. “What I have to do here with you is a matter of great secrecy. I propose a splendid gift for my daughter—” He stopped again, looking expectant.

Old Ula said, “A beautiful girl, Mein Herr.” He did not mind saying this, even though the Baron expected him to, because Britt, the Baron’s daughter, was indeed a beautiful girl. Just about Erich’s age, thought Ula. Ten. Ten years, for her, of being made to feel the center of the world. Ten years, for Erich, of wondering where in the world he had come from, where in it he belonged.

Under such difficult, very different, circumstances, they were both nice children. Old Ula found this wonderful to contemplate.

“I think that Erich and I,” he said, “will be able to keep your secret.”

“Oh, very well then,” said the Baron with bad grace. “This is what I want. You are to make for me, by Christmas, the finest, largest, most intricate and imposing cuckoo clock that ever has been. This is how I wish the decorations to be…write down what I say!”

“I can remember.”

“How can I be sure of that? You are an old man. You might forget some detail.”

Brangi, who had begun to dislike the sound of the Baron’s voice, got to his feet with a low snarl. Old Ula put a hand on the dog’s head, fondled his ears. “Herr Baron, I have a suggestion.”

“And what may that be?”

“There is Fritz, the young clockmaker, at the other end of the village. I am sure that he would write down everything you say, and would make you a fine clock. He is going to be—that is to say, he is—a fine workman. But I could not possibly finish a clock for you, even of the simplest, by Christmas. To make a clock takes time.”

Again the Baron started for the door, again wheeled and stomped back into the room. Fritz was a good clockmaker, but everyone knew that Old Ula was the best anywhere. And for the Baron’s daughter, even the best would scarcely serve. He would give it to her for her birthday, in April. Surely even this stubborn old man could get the fanciest clock done by then.

Breathing heavily, the Baron said, “You are to make this clock precisely as I say, forgetting nothing. Do you understand?”

“I understand what you have said.”

The Baron, taking this for agreement, continued. “The entire face of the house is to be decorated, every inch. And, mind you, the sides!” He looked triumphantly at Old Ula. “What do you think of that, eh? Never thought of decorating the sides, have you?”

“In fact, I have, upon occasion, done this.”

“Old man, you are deliberately trying to annoy me!”

“No, no, no…not at all. I should never dream of trying to annoy a Baron.”

Baron Balloon looked at the clockmaker suspiciously, but saw only an open, frank, friendly, wrinkled face. Were the eyes a shade merry?

“For two pfennigs I’d go to Munich over this business,” he growled. The clockmaker remained silent. The Baron scowled. Erich looked at the floor. Brangi yawned.

“Very well,” the Baron resumed. “I shall wait until April. My daughter’s birthday is on the eighteenth of April. The clock must be ready by then. Understood? Now, to the decorations…a stag’s head, with five-branched antlers to surmount the whole, with a large bow and arrow just beneath. It was with a bow and arrow that I brought down my finest beast. You may come up to the castle and sketch his head. Down one side I wish a brace of geese to hang by their feet, and on the other a brace of hare. Fowling pieces on each side, fit them how you will. At the bottom, stretched at length, a wild boar—”

“Dead?”

“Of course, dead. With large tusks. Hunting rifles to each side of him. And, old man, just see here—I have brought you the skull of a little doe to be used for the pendulum bob. Is it not beautiful?”

The clockmaker thought the slender skull was indeed a pretty thing, but he lifted a hand to prevent Baron Balloon from putting it on the workbench.

“Effective, hah?” said the Baron, tossing the little skull from one hand to the other. “As to the rest of the clock case, fill it in with more hunting gear, also doves, geese, rabbits. These can look as if they had not yet been killed. A few vines, some leaves. You’ll know what I mean, but make sure every inch is carved in some manner. I want this to be such a clock as has never been seen before, anywhere.”

“Herr Baron—”

Being interrupted one moment and not replied to the next was beginning to get on the Baron’s nerves. How he longed for the old days—distant, but still current in his family’s stories—the feudal days, when a man like this Ula would scarcely dare lift his eyes to a Baron’s.

“Well, what is it?” he snapped. “Get on with it. I am in a vast hurry.”

Old Ula, who was not in a hurry, looked about his little cottage for a few moments longer.

“It is this way, Baron Balloon,” he said at length. “I am, as you have observed several times, an old man. But mark you, Mein Herr, an old person has one great advantage over a young one who is still pressing forward, striving to do, to be, to get, to grow rich or grow famous, to command and to possess. I have no interest in these matters. And—I come to the point—I have decided to make a clock for myself.”

In fact, this notion, which had only come upon him since the Baron’s arrival, now seized his imagination, and he marveled that he had not thought of it before. It would be, of course, his last clock. Already his hands were beginning to stiffen, his fingers to ache. But he felt they would do this last piece of work for him. A clock made by himself, to his own order!

So enchanted was he by the idea that he turned from the Baron to the boy at the table and said, “Look here, Erich, we have no time to lose. We must work hard to repair these two clocks in short, but good, order. And then, my son, why, then—”

“Ula!”

The clockmaker turned. “Ah, Herr Baron, excuse me. I forget my manners. May I bid you good day,” he said hastily.

The Baron sputtered. Sputtered!

“Do you mean to imply—are you meaning to say—is it possible that you are refusing to make my clock? The one I came all the way down the mountain to order from you? How dare you refuse me anything? I am the Baron Balloon, and from my castle I look down on the entire village!”

Oh, how he yearned to say, I own this village! as his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather would have said.

Old Ula stroked his beard in silence for a while and then said, “That is how it seems to be.”

“You refuse?”

“I refuse.”

“But this is not possible!”

“Let me explain. I have decided to make a clock for myself, to my own order. I have never done this in all my years of clockmaking. Yes, I shall begin to make my very own clock as soon as these two on the table are set right.”

Baron Balloon was beside himself with rage, with outrage, with sheer blistering fury. People did not decline to do what he, the Baron Balloon, wished done! Yet here was this poor, witless, aged, annoying man—refusing!

What was more, the Baron saw no way around the problem. The old idiot shimmered with stubbornness. The Baron had seen the same look in the eyes of a mule that had made up its mind not to move.

With another sigh for the days when a Baron’s will was law, he said, “Very well, then. How long will it take you to make this clock you are ordering for yourself?”

Old Ula thought. Then he said, “The rest of my life.”

Baron Balloon stamped out of the cottage, uttering oaths. He drove across the village to Fritz, the young clockmaker, who eagerly agreed to all the Baron’s stipulations, even to having the clock completed by Christmas. He would put aside all other work, put his present customers off, work night as well as day, and he would produce a clock that would put proud Old Ula’s work in the shadow.

His mind awhirl with fowling pieces, boars’ tusks, doe’s-skull pendulum bobs, he could scarcely wait for the Baron to leave so that he could begin work on his masterpiece.

At the cottage of Old Ula, Erich the Foundling stared with wide eyes at his ancient friend. “Are you not afraid?” he asked.

“Do you think I should be?”

Erich nodded solemnly. “He is big and powerful, the Baron. He can—he can—”

Ula patted the boy’s head in the same soothing manner as he had patted Brangi’s. “You see? You cannot even think of something for me to be afraid of. The Baron huffs and puffs, but can he blow my house in?”

Erich thought the Baron could easily do that. He knew that most people in the village leaped to do his bidding. Certainly the Goddharts, with whom Erich had lived all his life, leaped. Herr Goddhart, whom Erich loved, leaped reluctantly. Frau Goddhart, whom he did not love, leaped promptly. But they were not different from the rest of the villagers.

“Why are you not afraid?” he asked Old Ula curiously.

“Because, as I explained to the Baron Balloon, I am too old to fear anything a man can do to me, and I know my Maker means me only good. So, young Erich, let us set to work on these two infirm clocks and make them healthy again.”