Читать книгу Hammer and Anvil - Spielhagen Friedrich - Страница 32

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I ran for a short distance like a madman, when suddenly my limbs began to totter under me; the moonlit roofs, the lighted windows in some of the houses, danced wildly before my eyes; the fumes of the wine I had been drinking, repressed for a while by my mental excitement, now rose again to my brain; I had to lean against a wall to keep myself from falling.

I had probably remained for a few minutes in a state of partial insensibility when the voices of some maids, who were bringing water from the adjacent fountain, recalled me to consciousness. I roused myself, and staggered down the street. Soon my strong natural constitution began to assert itself; my steps grew firmer, and I began to consider what I should do, and first of all, whither I should go. The idea of seeking lodgings at an inn I rejected at once; I had never yet passed a night from home; and besides, my whole stock of money did not exceed one thaler--my father always kept me on a very meagre allowance of pocket-money--and I had an indistinct notion that I should have to make this slender sum go a long way. Had I not quarreled with Arthur and parted from him in anger, I should probably have gone to him; but as it was, I felt it impossible to present myself at his house as a supplicant; and, besides, by this time he was most likely sleeping off his intoxication, and his parents had never been friendly disposed towards me. The commerzienrath! He had embraced me, called me thou and brother: he would assuredly receive me with rapture, have me shown to a magnificent chamber, with a grand four-post curtained bed----

But while I was indulging in the picture of my brilliant reception at the commerzienrath's, I was hastening steadily in the opposite direction, towards the harbor. I passed some low taverns in which sailors were roaring out coarse songs. How if I went in and joined the drinkers, and to-morrow went out into the wide world a sailor, like my brother Fritz? That would be a way to be revenged upon my father! To lose two sons--both in the same way! And then to perish at sea, and my corpse to lie at the bottom of the ocean, where my brother's bones had long been lying! "Shame upon you, George!"--I said to myself--"shame! The poor old man!"

How if I turned back? The professor had certainly long since left the house. My father was alone in his room. I would go to him and say--"Strike me if you will, father; I will not resist; I will not move an eyelid!"

But I did not return, nor even slacken my pace; I had already left the town behind, and was now in the wide street of the suburb, on both sides of which stood the little cottages which at this season were chiefly occupied by the bathing-guests. Here and there they shone through the dark trees; some of them had lamps burning in glass globes at the doors, and under trellises, and in the little gardens sat cheerful groups; song and laughter and the merry voices of children came up on the pleasant evening air; a light breeze just stirred the tops of the trees over my head, and fire-flies twinkled in the bushes.

The moist, warm breeze from the sea seemed to refresh me; how pleasant it must be, I thought, over there beyond the houses; and on the instant, Smith Pinnow's cottage came into my mind. The very thing! there I was sure of a shelter. The old man would give me a bed, or at least a shake-down in the forge; or there was the old woman's great arm-chair--certainly she could not sit crouching in it all night as well as all day. Pity Klaus was not at home; but then the pretty Christel was there. Christel had always been a favorite of mine; indeed, at one time I had fancied myself really in love with her, and her charms had attracted me to the hut at least quite as often as the old man's four double-barrels and the long single-barrel, or the mulled wine which he used to sell in the winter to the skaters that thronged the beach.

Strange light-heartedness of youth! At this moment all the mischief I had done, my father's grief, my own serious position, were all forgotten; or, if not forgotten, they were only the dark background upon which shone brightly and cheerily the picture of the old ruinous hut with the glowing forge-fire, and above all the pretty figure of the brisk Christel moving lightly about. What was the school--what was my father's house and all the rest of my slavery to me now? At other times, when I had been out at this hour, I was haunted with anxiety how I should get in without the knowledge of my father, who went to bed punctually at half-past nine: now my father had himself driven me from his house. No need now to pull off my boots at the door, and creep softly up the creaking stair to my chamber; I was a free man and could do what I chose, and come and go at my pleasure.

The wide street and the suburbs were now behind me; I strode along the well-known path, on my left a little meadow, on my right a potato-field, here and there a solitary tree, blackly defined against the clear starlit sky, and on either side the water, whose hollow sound I heard plainer and plainer as the tongue of land narrowed, especially towards the west, the windward quarter, where lay the open sea. I noticed for the first time that I had no cap. I had either lost it or left it by the lamp on the hall-table; so much the better, the sea-breeze could play freely around my heated temples and in my loose hair.

A pair of wild swans flew high above me; I could not see them, but heard their peculiar wailing cry--two simple notes that rang strangely through the silence of the night. "Good speed!" I called out to them: "Good speed, my good comrades!"

A strangely happy feeling, mingled of sadness and joy, came over me, such as I had never known before. I could have thrown myself upon the earth and wept; I could have leaped and shouted in exultation. I could not then comprehend what it was that so singularly possessed me. Now I know well what it was: it was the sense of delight that must thrill through the fish when he darts like an arrow through the liquid crystal, the bird when he sweeps on expanded pinions through the air, the stag when he bounds over the wild plain; the rapture that thrills man's breast when in the full glow of youth and vigor he feels himself one with the great mother, Nature. The fore-feeling of this delight, the longing to taste it, are what drives the man from the narrow round of circumstances in which he was born, out into the wide world, across seas, into the desert, to the peaks of the Alps, anywhere where the winds blow free, where the heaven broadens grandly above, where he must risk his life to win it.

Does this after-thought excuse the insolent obstinacy of which I had been guilty towards my father; and the terrible rashness with which I staked my whole future on a cast of the die? Assuredly not. I will excuse nothing, extenuate nothing; but simply narrate what happened to me and within me during these events and those that followed; only giving an explanation here and there when circumstances seem to require it. Let the story tell its own moral; only this will I add, for the consolation of thoughtful souls, that if, as cannot be gainsaid, my conduct deserved punishment, this punishment was dealt out to me speedily, and that in no stinted measure.

But at the time the haggard form with the lame foot was still too far behind to cast the shade of her terrors upon me; two other figures, however, as I hastened with a quickened pace over the heath, appeared in sight, who had assuredly nothing spectral about them, for they were standing in a close embrace. They sprang apart, with a cry of alarm from a female voice, as, turning sharply around a hillock, I came directly upon them. The maiden caught up a great basket, which she had set upon the ground, having just had other employment for her arms, and her companion gave an "Ahem!" which was so loud and so confused that it could only have proceeded from a very innocent breast.

"Good evening," I said; "I trust----"

"Good Lord! is it really you?" said the man. "Why, Christel, only think it's him!"--and Klaus caught Christel Möwe, who was about taking to flight, by her dress, and detained her.

"Oh! I thought it was him!" stammered Christel, whose mind did not seem entirely relieved by the discovery that if they had been espied it was by a good friend.

Although the position in which Klaus and Christel evidently stood to each other did not exactly require an explanation, still I was somewhat astonished. As long as Klaus lived with his father, from the commencement of our friendship, I had never detected in the good fellow's heart anything more than brotherly affection for his pretty adopted sister; but then that was four years ago. Klaus was but sixteen when he went to work with locksmith Wangerow; and perhaps this temporary separation had aroused the love which otherwise would have calmly slumbered on, and possibly never awakened of itself. This was confirmed by what the lovers themselves told me, as we walked slowly on together towards the forge, often stopping for a minute at a time when the story reached a point of particularly critical interest. One of these points--and indeed the most serious--was the strongly and even violently expressed aversion of old Pinnow to the engagement. Klaus did not say so, but from all that I gathered I surmised that it was not altogether impossible that the old man himself had cast an eye upon his pretty adopted daughter; at least I could see no other reasonable explanation of the fact that year by year, and day by day, he had grown more morose and rancorous towards Klaus, and at last, after much snarling and storming over his gadding about, and his shameful waste of time, had ended by forbidding him the house, without the good fellow--as he solemnly asseverated, and I believed him--having ever given him the slightest cause of complaint. Therefore they--the lovers--were under the necessity of keeping their meetings secret, a proceeding not without considerable difficulties, as the old man was extraordinarily watchful and cunning. For instance, he would send the deaf and dumb apprentice, Jacob, to the town to make the necessary purchases, although he was certain to make some blunder or other; and to-day he would not have sent Christel, had he not heard that Klaus had some late work to do on board the steamer, that would prevent his coming ashore.

As I had a sincere affection for the good Klaus, who had been my comrade in many a merry frolic by land and water, and was no less fond of the rosy, soft-voiced Christel Möwe, I felt the liveliest sympathy with them; and improbable though it may seem, their love, with its sorrows and its joys, and the possibility of its happy termination, lay at this moment nearer my heart than the thought of my own fortune. My mind, however, recurred to my own situation, when, as we reached a slight elevation in the path, the forge, with the light of the kitchen-fire shining through its low window, appeared close at hand, and Klaus asked if we should now turn back. He then for the first time learned that it was no mere evening stroll that had brought me so far from the town across the heath, and that my intention was to ask his father for shelter for a day at least, or perhaps for several days. At the same time I briefly explained to him the cause that compelled me to so singular a step.

Klaus seemed greatly affected by what he heard; he grasped me by the hand, and taking me a little aside, asked in an agitated whisper if I had well considered what I was about? My father, he said, could not mean to deal so harshly with me, and would certainly forgive me if I returned at once. He himself would go and prepare the way, and let the storm spend its first wrath upon him.

"But, Klaus, old fellow," I said, "you are no better off than I. We are comrades in misery: your father has forbidden you his house, just as mine has done with me. What difference is there between us?"

"This difference," Klaus answered, "that I have done nothing to give my father the right to be angry with me, while you tell me yourself that you--don't take it hard of me--have been playing a very ugly trick."

I answered that, be that as it might, home I would never go. What further I should do, I did not know: I would come on board the steamer to-morrow and talk the matter over with him; it was very likely that I would need his assistance.

Klaus, who saw that my resolution was taken, and who had always been accustomed to adapt himself to my plans, gave my hand another hearty grasp, and said: "Well, then, till to-morrow."

His good heart was so full of what he had just heard that he was going off without bidding Christel good-by, had I not, laughing, called his attention to this highly reprehensible oversight. But he did not get the kiss I had hoped for him; Christel said I had been very wicked; and so we departed, Klaus going back towards the town, and soon disappearing in the darkness, and Christel and I keeping on to the forge, where through the window the fire was now blazing brighter than before.

"How does the old man come to be working so late?" I asked the girl.

"It just happens so," she answered.

I put other questions, to all of which I received but the briefest possible answers. Christel and I had always been the best friends in the world, and I had ever known her as the brightest, merriest creature. I could only suppose that she had been seriously offended by my bit of sportiveness. As it was never my nature, unless when overcome with passion, to wound the feelings of any one, least of all a poor girl of whom I was really fond, so I did not for a moment hesitate to frankly ask her pardon, if I had offended her, saying that what I had done was with the best intention in the world, namely, that her lover should not, through my fault, leave her without a good-by kiss. Christel made me no answer, and I was about placing my arm around her trim waist, in order to give more emphasis to my petition for forgiveness, when the girl suddenly burst into tears, and in a frightened tone said that I must not go with her to "his" house; and that it was anyhow of no use, for "he" would certainly give me no lodging there.

This declaration and this warning would have made most persons hesitate. The forge was in such a lonely place, the reputation of the old smith was far from being a good one, and I was sufficiently versed in robber-stories to recall the various romantic situations where the robber's daughter warns the hero, who has lost his way, against the remaining members of her estimable family, and at the same time reveals her love for him in a style equally discreet and intelligent. But I was never subject to those attacks of timidity to which imaginative persons are so liable; and besides, I thought, if the old man is jealous of his son--and this I set down as certain--why may he not be so of me?--and in the third place, a little cur at this moment rushed, furiously barking, at my legs, and simultaneously appeared a stout figure at the open door of the forge, and Smith Pinnow's familiar voice called out in his deep bass: "Who is there?"

"A friend--George Hartwig," I answered, tossing the little yelping brute with my foot into the bushes.

Christel must have given the old man an intimation of what I wanted as she pushed by him into the house, for he said at once, without moving from his post in the doorway, "I can give you no lodging here; my house is not an inn."

"I know that very well, Pinnow," I answered, stepping up and offering my hand; "but I thought you were my friend."

The old man did not take my hand, but muttered something that I did not catch.

"I shall not return home, you maybe sure of that," I continued. "So, if you do not mean that I shall lie here in the bushes, and join your dog in howling at the moon, you will let me in, and mix me a glass of grog--half-and-half, you know; and take a glass or two yourself: it will do you good, and put better thoughts in your head."

With these words, I laid my hand on the shoulder of the inhospitable smith, and gave him a hearty shake, in token of my friendly feelings.

"Would you attack a weak old man in his own house?" he exclaimed in an angry tone, and in my turn I felt on my shoulders two hands whose size and steely hardness were, for "a weak old man," quite remarkable. My blood, which the cooler night air had by no means yet lowered to the desirable temperature, needed but little provocation; and besides, here was too favorable an opportunity to put to the proof my much-admired strength; so I seized my antagonist, jerked him at a single effort from the threshold, and hurled him a couple of paces to one side. I had not the slightest design of forcing an entrance into his house; but the smith, who feared that this was my intention, and was resolved to prevent it at all hazards, threw himself upon me with such fury that I was obliged in self-defence to exert my whole strength. I had had many a hard tussle in my time, and had always come off victorious; but never before had I been so equally matched as now. Perhaps it was from some small remains of regard for the old man who now assaulted me, in sailor fashion, with heavy blows of his fist, that I refrained from repaying him in the same coin, but endeavored to grapple with him. At last I felt that I had him in my power: seizing a lower hold, I raised him from the ground, and the next moment he would have measured his length upon the sand, when a peal of laughter resounded close at hand. Startled, I lost my hold, and my antagonist, no sooner felt himself free, than he rushed upon me again. Unprepared for this new attack, I lost my balance, stumbled and fell, my antagonist above me. I felt his hands of iron at my throat, when suddenly the laughter ceased. "For shame, old man!" cried a sonorous voice, "he has not deserved that of you;" and a pair of strong arms tore the smith from me. I sprang to my feet and confronted my deliverer, for so I must call him, as without his interference I do not know what would have happened to me.