The Project Gutenberg eBook ofDame CareThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Dame CareAuthor: Hermann SudermannTranslator: Bertha OverbeckRelease date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8487]Most recently updated: February 26, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Text file produced by Ted Garvin, David Widger and the DistributedProofreading TeamHTML file produced by David Widger*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAME CARE ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Dame CareAuthor: Hermann SudermannTranslator: Bertha OverbeckRelease date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8487]Most recently updated: February 26, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Text file produced by Ted Garvin, David Widger and the DistributedProofreading TeamHTML file produced by David Widger
Title: Dame Care
Author: Hermann SudermannTranslator: Bertha Overbeck
Author: Hermann Sudermann
Translator: Bertha Overbeck
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8487]Most recently updated: February 26, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Text file produced by Ted Garvin, David Widger and the DistributedProofreading TeamHTML file produced by David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAME CARE ***
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
NOTES.
Just when Meyerhofer’s estate was to be sold by auction, his third son Paul was born.
That was a hard time indeed.
Frau Elsbeth, with her haggard face and melancholy smile, lay in her big four-post bed, with the cradle of the new-born child near her, and listened to every noise that reached her in her sad sickroom from the yard and the house.
At each suspicious sound she started up, and each time, when a strange man’s voice was heard, or a vehicle came driving along with a rolling sound, she asked, clinging with great anxiety to the bedposts:
“Has it come to the worst? Has it come to the worst?”
Nobody answered her. The doctor had given strict orders to keep every excitement from her, but little he thought, good man, that this constant suspense would torment her a thousand times more than the most terrible certainty.
One morning, the fifth day after her child’s birth, she heard her husband, whom she had scarcely seen during this trying time, pacing up and down in the next room, swearing and sighing. She could only understand one word, only one; that he repeated over and over again: the word “Homeless.”
Then she knew. It had come to the worst.
She put her feeble hand on the little head of the new-born child, who with his little serious face was quietly dozing, hid her face in her pillow and wept.
After a while she said to the servant who attended the little one,
“Tell your master I want to speak to him.”
And he came. With loud steps he approached the bed of the sick woman, and looked at her with a face that seemed doubly distorted and desperate in his endeavor to look unconcerned.
“Max,” she said, timidly, for she always feared him—“Max, don’t hide anything from me; I am prepared for the worst, anyhow.”
“Are you?” he asked, distrustfully, for he remembered the doctor’s warning.
“When have we to go?”
As he saw that she took their misfortune so calmly, he thought it no longer necessary to be careful, and broke out, with an oath:
“To-day—to-morrow—just as it pleases the new owner. By his charity only we are still here, and, if it pleased him, we might have to lodge in the streets this very night.”
“It won’t be as bad as that, Max,” she said, painfully striving to keep her composure, “if he hears that, only a few days ago, a little one arrived—”
“Oh, I suppose I shall have to beg of him—shall I?”
“Oh no; he will do it without that. Who is it?”
“Douglas, he is called. He comes from Insterburg. He seemed to swagger very much, this gentleman—very much. I should have liked to have driven him from the premises.”
“Is anything left us?” she asked, softly, looking hesitatingly down on the new-born child, for his young, tender life might be depending on the answer.
He broke out into a hard laugh. “Yes; a wretched pittance: full two thousand thalers.”
She sighed with relief, for she almost felt as if she had already heard that terrible “Nothing” hissed from his lips.
“What good are two thousand thalers to us?” he continued, “after we have thrown fifty thousand into the swamp? Perhaps I shall open a public-house in the town, or trade in buttons and ribbons. Perhaps you might help me, if you were to do the sewing in some aristocratic houses; and the children might sell matches in the streets. Ha, ha, ha!”
He thrust his hand through his gray and bushyhair, and inadvertently kicked the cradle with his foot, so that it swayed to and fro violently.
“Why has this brat been born?” he murmured, gloomily. He knelt down near the cradle and buried the tiny little fists in his big red hands, and talked to his child: “If you had known, my boy, how bad and vile this world is, how impudence triumphs, and honesty goes to ruin in it, you would really have stayed where you were. What fate will yours be? Your father is a sort of vagabond, a ruined man, who has to roam about the streets with his wife and his three children till he has found a place where he can completely ruin himself and his family.”
“Max, do not speak thus; you break my heart!” called out Frau Elsbeth, crying, and stretching out her hand to lay it round her husband’s neck; but her hand sank down without strength ere it had reached its destination.
He sprang up. “You are right; enough of these lamentations. Yes; if I were alone now—a bachelor, as in former days—I should go to America, or the Russian Steppes—there one can get rich; or I should speculate on the Exchange—to-day up, to-morrow down. Oh, there one could earn money; but so tied as one is!” He threw a lamentable glance at his wife and child; then he pointed with his hand towards the yard, from whence resounded the laughing voices of the two elder children.
“Yes; I know we must be a burden to you now,” said the woman, meekly.
“Don’t talk to me of burdens,” he answered, gruffly; “what I said was not meant angrily. I love you, and that’s enough. Now the question only is, Where to go? If at least this baby had not come, the chance of an uncertain existence might be borne for some time. But now, you ill, the child requiring careful nursing, the end of it is there is nothing for it but to buy a farm, and to give the two thousand thalers for a premium. Hurrah! that will be a nice sort of life: I with the beggar’s wallet, you with the knapsack; I with the spade, you with the milk-pail.”
“That would not be the worst, after all,” said the woman, softly.
“No?” he laughed, bitterly. “Well, that I can get for you. There is Mussainen, for instance, which is to be sold—the wretched moorland on the heath yonder.”
“Oh, why that of all places?” she asked, shuddering.
He immediately fell in love with the idea.
“Yes; that would be emptying the cup to the dregs. The lost magnificence always in view—for, you must know, the manor-house of Helenenthal exactly overlooks it. It is surrounded by moor and fen—wellnigh two hundred acres. Perhaps one could cultivate some of it—one might be the pioneer of progress. What could people say?
“‘Meyerhofer is a brave fellow,’ they would say; ‘he is not ashamed of his misfortune; he looks at it with a certain irony.’ Pah, really oneshouldlook at it with irony; that is the only sublime view of the world—one should whistle at it!” and he uttered a shrill whistle, so that the sick woman started up in her bed.
“Forgive me, my darling,” he pleaded, caressing her hand suddenly in the rosiest of humors; “but am I not right? One should whistle at it. As long as one has the consciousness of being an honest man, one can bear all adversity with a certain relish. Relish is the right word. The ground is to be sold any day, for the owner has lately gained a rich estate by marriage, and leaves this rubbish entirely uncultivated.”
“Think well over it first, Max,” the woman pleaded, in great anxiety.
“What is the good of hesitating?” he replied, violently. “We must not be a burden to this Mr. Douglas, and we cannot lay claim to anything better with our miserable two thousand thalers; therefore, let us seize upon it promptly.” And without taking time to say good-bye to the sick woman, he strode away.
A few minutes later she heard his dog-cart driving away through the gate.
In the afternoon of the same day a strange visitor was announced. A beautiful, distinguished lady was said to have driven into the yard in a smart carriage, who wished to pay a visit to the mistress in her sick-room.
“Who was it?” She had refused to give her name.
“How strange!” thought Frau Elsbeth; but as in her grief she was beginning to believe in special providences, she did not say no.
The door opened. A slender, delicate figure, with gentle, refined features, approached the bed of the sick woman with gliding steps. Without speaking a word she seized her hand and said, in a soft, slightly veiled voice:
“I have concealed my name, dear Mrs. Meyerhofer, for I feared you would refuse to see me if I had given it beforehand. And I should like best even now to remain unknown. Unfortunately, I fear that you will not look at me with kindness any longer when you know who I am.”
“I hate no one in the world,” replied Frau Elsbeth, “least of all a name.”
“I am called Helene Douglas,” said the lady, gently, and she pressed the invalid’s hand closer.
Frau Elsbeth began at once to cry, while the visitor, as if she had been an old friend, put her arm round her neck, kissed her on the brow, and said, with a soft, comforting voice:
“Do not be angry with me. Fate has ordained that I should drive you from this house; but it is no fault of mine. My husband wanted to give me a pleasant surprise, for the name of this estate is identical with my Christian-name. My joy vanished directly when I heard under what circumstances he had acquired it, and how you, especially, dear Mrs. Meyerhofer, must have suffered in this doubly trying time. Then I felt compelled to unburden my heart by asking your pardon personally for the sorrow which I have caused you, and shall still have to cause you, for your time of suffering is not over yet.”
Frau Elsbeth had bent her head on the stranger’s shoulder, as if that was the most natural thing in the world, and went on softly crying to herself.
“And perhaps I can also be of use to you,” she continued; “at least, so far as I can take part of the bitterness from your soul. We women understand each other better than those hard, passionate men. The common sufferings that weigh on all of us bring us nearer to each other. And, above all, one thing: I have spoken to my husband, and beg you, in my name and his, to look on this house as your property for as long as ever it pleases you. We generally pass the winter in town, and we have another estate besides which we intend to let an inspector manage. You see, therefore, that you do not in any way disturb us, but, on the contrary, do us a favor if you will stay on here as before for another half year or longer.”
Frau Elsbeth did not thank her, but the tearful glance she gave the stranger was thanks enough.
“Now be cheerful again, dearest Mrs. Meyerhofer,” she continued, “and if in future you need advice or help, always remember that there is some one who has to make amends to you for much—And what a splendid baby!”—she turned towards the cradle—“a boy or a little girl?”
“A boy,” said Frau Elsbeth, with a feeble smile.
“Has he found any brothers or sisters already? But why do I ask? The two little stalwart fellows outside, who received my carriage—may I hope to know them better? No, not here,” she interposed, quickly; “it might excite you still more. Later on, later on. This little citizen of the world interests us most for the moment.”
She bent over the cradle and arranged the baby-clothes.
“He has quite a knowing little face,” she said, jestingly.
“Care stood at his cradle,” answered Frau Elsbeth, gently and sadly; “that’s why he has that old face.”
“Oh, you must not be superstitious, dear friend,” answered the visitor. “I have been told that newborn babes often have something old in their features; they soon lose that.”
“Surely you, too, have children?” asked Frau Elsbeth.
“Oh, I am still such a young wife,” answered her visitor, blushing. “Scarcely six months married. But—” and she blushed still more.
“God be with you in your time of trouble,” said Frau Elsbeth; “I will pray for you.”
The stranger’s eyes grew moist. “Thanks, a thousand thanks,” she said. “And let us be friends, I entreat you, with all my heart. Shall I propose something? Take me as godmother for your youngest child, and do me the same favor when Heaven blesses me.”
The two women pressed each other’s hands silently. The bond of friendship was sealed.
When the visitor had left her, Frau Elsbeth looked round with a shy, sad look. “Just now everything here was bright and sunny,” she murmured, “and now it has become so dark again.”
After a short time, in spite of the nurse’s opposition, the two eldest boys rushed into the sickroom with joyful clamor. Each had a bag with sweets in his hand.
“The strange lady has given us this,” they shouted.
Frau Elsbeth smiled. “Hush, children,” she said, “an angel has been with us.”
The two little boys opened anxious eyes, and asked,
“Mamma, an angel?”
So Mrs. Douglas became Paul’s godmother. Meyerhofer, indeed, was not a little indignant at the new friendship, for “I don’t want the pity of happy people,” he often used to say; but when the mild, gentle woman appeared in the manor-house for the second time, and tried to persuade him, he did not dare to say “No” any longer.
He also gave his consent to their prolonged stay in the old home, though he did it with repugnance. The farm Mussainen, which in fact he had bought that same day, was in so desolate a condition that it seemed dangerous for wife and children to stay there in the cold autumn days. Above all, the most needful repairs had to be made. Carpenter, mason, and builder had to be fetched ere it was possible to think of moving.
Nevertheless, Frau Elsbeth, through her husband’s obstinacy, was forced to move into the new dwelling long before the arrangements were finished. One day when an inspector from the new master appeared with a number of workmen and asked for shelter in his name, he declared this proceeding to be an intentional insult, and was firmly resolved not to stay a day longer on the ground which once had been his property.
It was a cold, dull November day when Frau Elsbeth and her children had to say farewell to the dear house. A fine, drizzling rain came from the sky, making everything damp.
The heath, shrouded in gray mist, lay desolate and comfortless before their eyes.
The youngest at her breast, the two other children crying near her, she stepped into the vehicle which was to lead her towards her new fate, which, alas! seemed so dark.
When they drove out of the gate, the cold winds from the heath whipped their faces with icy scourges. Then the little one, who for so long had been lying peaceful and quiet, began to cry bitterly. She wrapped him closer in her cloak and bent down low over the shivering little form, in order to hide the tears, which were streaming down her cheeks incessantly.
After half an hour’s drive over the heavy rain-soaked clay roads, they reached their destination. She could have shrieked aloud when she saw the new house before her in all its desolation and ruin.
Wretched mud farm-buildings; a swampy yard; a low dwelling-house with a shingle roof, from the walls of which the chalk had crumbled down and showed the bare wall underneath; a wilderness of a garden, in which the last sad remains of the summer asters and sunflowers stood among half-decayed vegetables, round about a gaudy painted fence, which seemed to have received extreme unction just before its end—this was the place where the family of the ruined squire had to live henceforth.
This was the place where little Paul grew up, and to which the love of his childhood, the care of half his life was devoted.
He was in his early years a delicate, sickly creature, and many a night his mother trembled lest the feeble light of his life should be extinguished before dawn. At such times she would sit in the dark, low bedroom, leaning her elbow on the edge of his little bed, gazing with feverish eyes at his little thin body, which was painfully convulsed by spasms.
But he passed all the crises of his early childhood, and at five years old, though pale and weak of limb and almost careworn in face—for he had really retained the old look—he was a healthy boy, who gave promise of long life.
At this time his first recollections begin. The earliest, which in after-years he often recalled, was as follows:
The room is half dark. Icicles are clinging to the windows, and through the curtains shines the red glow of the sunset. The elder brothers have gone skating, but he is in his little bed—for he has to go to bed early—and near him sits his mother, one hand encircling his neck, and the other on the edge of the cradle, in which the two little sisters sleep, which Master Stork brought a year ago, both on the same day.
“Mamma, tell me a fairy tale,” he pleads.
And his mother told him one. What? He could only remember very faintly, but there was something in it about a gray woman who had visited his mother in all her sad hours, a woman with a pale and haggard face, and dark, tear-stained eyes. She had come like a shadow, like a shadow she had gone, had extended her hands over his mother’s head, she knew not whether for a blessing or for a curse, and had spoken words which had reference to him—little Paul. In them there was the question of sacrifice and of redemption; the words he had forgotten again—probably he was too stupid to understand them. But one thing still remained clearly enough: while he listened to his mother’s words, breathless with terror and expectation, he suddenly saw the gray figure of whom she spoke, bodily standing at the door—exactly the same, with her arms uplifted, and her pale, sad face. He hid his head on his mother’s arm; his heart beat, his breath began to fail him, and, in deadly terror, he screamed out,
“Mamma, there she is, there she is!”
“Who? Dame Care?” asked his mother.
He did not answer, but began to cry.
“Where, then?” continued his mother.
“There, at the door,” he replied, raising himself and clutching her round the neck, for he was dreadfully frightened.
“Oh, you silly little one,” said his mother; “that is papa’s long travelling-cloak.” And she fetched it, and made him feel the lining and the stuff, so that he should be thoroughly convinced; and he gave in. But inwardly he was all the more firmly persuaded that he had seen the gray woman face to face. And now he also knew what she was called.
“Dame Care,” she was called.
But his mother had grown thoughtful, and was not to be moved to tell the end of the fairy tale. Neither would she in later times, however urgently he might plead.
He had only a vague remembrance of his father in those days: a man with high Wellington boots, who scolded his mother and whipped his brothers, while he overlooked him altogether. Only at rare times he got a look askance, which did not seem to bode any good. Sometimes, especially when his father had been in the town, his face was dark red in color, like an overheated kettle, and his steps swayed from side to side when he crossed the room. Then the same thing was always enacted over again.
First he fondled the twins, whom he seemed to be particularly fond of, and rocked them in his arms, while his mother stood close beside him, following each of his movements with anxious looks. Then he sat down to eat, turned over what was in the dishes, pushed them aside, calling them poor and unsavory food, only fit for beasts. Occasionally he would hit Max or Gottfried with the rod, was angry with their mother, and finally went out to pick a quarrel with the servants. His bullying voice resounded in the yard, so that even Caro, chained up, hid his tail between his legs, and retired to the farthest corner of the kennel. If after a while he returned to the room, his humor had generally changed from anger to despair. He wrung his hands, lamented the misery in which he had to live there, talked to himself of all sorts of great things which he would have undertaken if one thing or another had not prevented him, and if heaven and earth had not conspired together to ruin him. Then he would often go to the window, and shake his fist at the White House yonder, which looked so attractive in the distance.
“Ah, the White House!”
His father abused it and knitted his brow if he only glanced in that direction; and he himself—he loved it, as if part of his soul lingered there. Why? He did not know. Perhaps only because his mother loved it. She, too, stood often at the window, gazing at it; but she did not knit her brow, not she; her face grew soft and melancholy, and from her eyes there shone a longing so ardent that he, standing near her, often felt a sensation of awe steal over him.
Was not his little heart filled with the same longing? Did not that home, ever since he could think at all, appear to him as the embodiment of everything beautiful and magnificent? Did it not always stand before him when he shut his eyes and even creep into his dreams?
“Have you ever been in the White House?” he asked his mother one day, when he could restrain his curiosity no longer.
“Oh yes, my son,” she answered, and her voice sounded sad and unsteady.
“Often, mamma?”
“Very often, my boy. Your parents once lived there, and you were born there.”
Ever since then the “White House” was to him what “Paradise Lost” is to mankind.
“Who lives in the White House now?” he asked another time.
“A beautiful kind woman, who loves everybody, and you especially, because you are her godchild.”
He felt as if an endless fountain of happiness streamed upon his head. He was so excited that he trembled.
“Why do you not drive, then, to the beautiful kind woman?” he asked, after a while.
“Papa won’t let us,” she answered, and her voice had a strangely sharp tone which struck him.
He did not ask any more, for his father’s wish was regarded as a law of which nobody had a right to ask the reason, but from that day the secret of the White House formed a new tie between mother and son. They could not speak about it openly.
His father was furious if one only hinted at its existence, and his brothers also did not like to talk about it with him, the younger one; very likely they feared that he would repeat it in his foolishness. But his mother—his mother trusted him.
When they were alone together—and they were nearly always alone during school-time—she would open her mouth and her heart, too, and the White House arose higher and brighter before his eyes from her description of it. Soon he knew each room, each arbor in the garden, the pond, surrounded by green bushes and shrubs, before it the shining glass balls, and the sundial on the terrace: only fancy, a clock on which the sun itself had to mark the hours.
What a marvel!
He could have walked about in Helenenthal with his eyes closed, and not have lost his way.
And when he played with his bricks, he built a White House for himself with terraces and sundials—two dozen at a time. He dug ponds in the sand and fastened pebbles on little posts to represent the glass balls. But, of course, they did not reflect anything.
At this time he made the plan to pay a visit to the White House quite on his own account. He put it off till spring, but when spring came he did not find the necessary courage; he put it off till summer, but even then all sorts of hindrance came between plan and execution. Once he had seen a big dog roving alone in the meadow—who could know whether it might not be a mad one? and at another time a bull had made straight for him with his horns lowered.
“Yes; when I am big like my brothers,” he consoled himself by thinking, “and when I go to school, then I’ll take a stick and kill the mad dog, and the bull I’ll seize by the horns so that he cannot harm me any more.” He put it off until next year, for then he was to begin going to school, just like his big brothers.
These brothers were the objects of his veneration. To be like them seemed to him the brightest aim of all earthly wishes—to ride on horses, on big real ones, to skate, to swim quite without the help of either floats or bladders, and to wear shirt-fronts, white starched ones, which were fastened with ribbons round the waist—oh, if he could do all that! But for that one must first grow big, he comforted himself by thinking. He kept these thoughts quite to himself; he did not like to tell his mother, and, as to his brothers, they occupied themselves with him very little.
He was a little manikin in their eyes, and when their mother told them to take him with them anywhere they were angry, because then they had to take care of him, and on account of his silliness could not play so many tricks. Paul felt that very well, and in order to escape their angry faces and still more angry blows, he generally said he wanted to stay at home, however sore his heart might feel. Then he seated himself on the pump-handle, and, rocking himself to and fro, dreamed of the time when he could do as his brothers did.
In learning, too, and that was no small matter; for both of them, Max as well as Gottfried, were always the highest in their school, and always brought home for the holidays excellent testimonials of good conduct; how excellent they were was quite evident, for their father always gave them a silver groschen and their mother a honey-cake in consequence.
On such joyful days he used to hear his father say:
“Yes; if only the two eldest could go to a good school, something might be made of them, for they have clear heads; but beggars as we are, I suppose we shall have to bring them up like beggars.”
Paul reflected a good deal about this, for he already knew that Max was born to be a Field-marshal, and Gottfried to be Chief Master of the Ordnance.
The fact was that once a Rapine picture-book, with pictures of the Austrian army, had found its way into the Howdahs, and on that day the brothers had agreed to divide the two highest dignities in the army between themselves, while to him, the younger, the place of a non-commissioned officer was assigned. Since then, indeed, there had been periods when one of them had inclined to the vocation of a trapper, and the other to that of an Indian chief, but Paul’s thoughts clung to those gold-braided uniforms, with which the wooden spears, and the patched rag sandals, which the brothers wore in their games—the latter they called moccasins—could by no means bear comparison; also, why they afterwards wanted to be naturalist and superintendent was incomprehensible to him; the new Rapine pictures always remained the best.
At this time the twins began to walk; Katie, the elder one—she was born three-quarters of an hour before her sister—made the beginning, and Greta followed her three days after.
That was an important event in Paul’s life.
He suddenly found himself in a round of duties from which he could not easily get free. Nobody had ordered him to watch his little sisters’ first steps, but just as it had always been natural to him to clean his boots in the evening, and his brothers’ into the bargain, to fold his little frock in a square, and to put it at the head of his bed, with his stockings across it, never to make a spot on the tablecloth, and to receive the punishment from his father when the self-same accidents happened to his brothers—so it became just as natural that he should henceforth look after his little sisters, and, with premature care, watch over their most rash attempts to stand and walk.
He appeared to himself so full of importance in this office that even the longing to go to school became less, and if by a lucky chance he had only been able to whistle, there would have been no wish left him.
Ah! to be able to whistle, like Jones, the farm-servant, or like his elder brothers; that was now the goal of all his wishes, the object of incessant practice. But however much he might point his lips, however much he might moisten them to make them flexible, no sound came forth. If he drew in the air, then accidentally he would do it. Once he had even succeeded in producing the first notes of “IST in J.D. im Washer gefallen” (A Jew Tumbled into the Water); but each professional whistler knows that the air must be blown from the mouth, and this was just what he could not learn.
Here also the thought comforted him: “When I am big.”
Christmas this year brought glad tidings. There arrived a big box from his “good aunt” out of the town, a sister of his mother’s, with all sorts of beautiful and useful things: books, linen for his brothers’ shirts, little frocks for his sisters, and for himself a velvet coat—a real velvet coat, with military braidings and big shining buttons. That was a delight. But the most beautiful Christmas-box was contained in the letter, which his mother read aloud with tears of emotion. The good aunt wrote that she had seen from Elsbeth’s last letters that it was her husband’s dearest wish to be able to give a better education to his two eldest boys, and that in consequence she had decided to receive them in her own house, and to let them go to college at her expense. His brothers shouted with joy, his mother cried, his father walked up and down the room, passed his hand through his hair, and muttered excited words.
He meanwhile sat quietly at his sisters’ little bed, rejoicing inwardly.
Then his mother came to him, buried her face in his hair, and said,
“Willyouever have such luck, my boy?”
“Oh, he,” said his father—“he never understands anything!”
“He is so young still!” answered his mother, stroking his cheeks; and then she dressed him in his beautiful velvet coat, and he was allowed to wear it till night because it was a holiday. And his brothers came and fondled him, partly because their hearts were so full of joy, partly on account of the beautiful velvet coat.
They had never been so good to him before.
Ah, that was a Christmas!
And as spring drew near a great deal of sewing and embroidering for the outfit began. Paul was allowed to help with the cutting-out: to hold the yard-measure and to hand the scissors; and the twins lay on the ground, rummaging among the white linen. The brothers were fitted out like two princes. Nothing was forgotten. They even received neckties, which his mother had manufactured from an old silk bodice.
The brothers meanwhile were immensely proud. They already played at being gentlemen in every possible way. Max rolled cigarettes by putting the tobacco from his father’s canister into little paper bags, which he lighted at the thick end, and Gottfried put on a pair of spectacles, which he had purchased at school for six trouser buttons.
“Does this suit me?” he asked, strutting up and down before Paul, and as the latter said “Yes,” he was caressed; had he said “No,” he would have had a box on the ear.
Soon after Easter the two brothers went away. There was much weeping in the house, but when the dog-cart had rolled out of the yard gate his mother pressed her tear-stained face against Paul’s cheeks and whispered,
“You have long been neglected, my poor child; now we two are together again as before.”
“Mamma, tiss me, too!” screamed little Kate, stretching out her tiny arms, and her sister did the same.
“Yes; of course you are there as well!” their mother cried, and bright sunshine lighted up her pale face.
And then she took one on each arm and approached the window with them, and gazed a long time at the White House.
Paul hid his head in the folds of her dress and did the same.
His mother looked down upon him, and as she met the prematurely wise look in the child’s eyes she blushed a little and smiled, but neither spoke a word.
When his father came back from the town he wanted Paul to begin going to school.
His mother grew very sad, and begged that he might be left at home for one half-year longer, so that she should not miss the two eldest ones too much. She would teach him herself, and surely get him on more than the school-master would do. But his father would not listen to anything of the sort, and called her “a weeping fool.”
Paul was terrified. The longing for school that he had formerly felt had now quite disappeared; but then of course the brothers, whom he wished to emulate, were no longer there.
The following day his father took his hand and led him into the village, the first houses of which were a few hundred yards from Meyerhofer’s farm—at all events, a tolerable distance for such a little fellow.
But Paul kept up bravely. He had such fear of a thrashing from his father that he would have marched to the end of the world.
The school was a low, thatched building, not very different from a peasant’s hut; but near it there stood all sorts of long poles, ladders, and scaffoldings.
“That’s where lazy children are hanged,” explained his father.
Paul’s anxiety rose still higher; but when the teacher, a kind old man with a white stubby beard and greasy waistcoat, took him on his knee and showed him a beautiful, many-colored picture-book, he felt calmer; only the many strange faces that stared at him from the benches seemed to forebode no good to him.
He had to take the lowest place, and during two hours made pothooks on a slate.
During the time for recreation the big boys came up to him and asked about his luncheon, and when they saw that it was a sausage sandwich they took it away from him. He quietly yielded, for he thought it must needs be so. On the way home they beat him, and one stuffed some nettles inside his collar. He thought that, too, was only to be expected because he was the smallest; but when he had left the village behind him and was walking alone across the sunny heath, he began to cry. He threw himself down underneath a juniper-tree and gazed up at the blue sky, where the swallows flitted to and fro.
“Oh, if only one could fly like that, too,” he thought. Then the White House came into his mind; he raised himself up, and strained his eyes to look for it; it shone from afar (like the enchanted castles of which his mother spoke in her fairy tales); the windows sparkled like carbuncles, and the green bushes surrounded it like a hedge of thorns of a hundred years’ growth.
A feeling of pride and self-importance mixed with his grief. “You are big now,” he said to himself, “for you go to school. And if you were to undertake your pilgrimage now, nobody could say anything against it.”
And then fear overcame him again. The wicked bull and the mad dogs—one never knew. He resolved to consider the matter till next Sunday.
But henceforth the White House left him no peace. Each time when he went across the heath he asked himself what could really be in that road more than on the road to school. The high-road, indeed, ran across a dark fir-wood, and in such woods all sorts of goblins and witches live; even wolves are no rare occurrence, as the Story of Little Red Ridinghood clearly shows; but if he were to go over the fields he could always keep his home in view and be sure of the way back.
It seemed to him he was in honor bound to undertake this journey, because he was “big” now, and when his fears arose anew he called himself a coward. This word in school was considered a great insult.
When Sunday came he resolved to risk the expedition. He crept along the fence, and ran as quickly as he could across his father’s meadows, in the direction of the White House.
Then came a stile which could be easily climbed over, and then a piece of unknown heath-land, on which he had never yet been. But there was nothing dangerous here, either. The heath glittered in the sun, the withered hawkweed crackled at his feet, a warm wind blew softly towards him. He tried to whistle, but still he had to draw in the air to produce any sound. At that he was ashamed, and a feeling of despondency seized him. Then came a swampy moor that again belonged to his father. Of this the latter often spoke; he meditated the idea of cutting peat there, but he only wanted to begin on a large scale, and for that he lacked the necessary capital. Paul sank up to his ankles in the marsh, and now for the first time the thought occurred to him that he might, perhaps, dirty his new boots. He was terrified, for he remembered his mother saying: “Be very careful of them, my boy; I have saved them from my milk money.”
He was also wearing his beautiful velvet coat, because it was Sunday. He looked down at the shining silk braid, and for a moment hesitated whether he had not better return, not for the sake of the velvet coat, but only in order not to grieve his mother.
“But perhaps I shall get through unhurt,” he consoled himself by thinking, and began to run on. The ground gave under his feet, and at every step a squashy sound was heard, as if the handle were being drawn out of a churn.
Then came a black morass, at the edge of which stood white-haired cotton-grass, and on which swam a layer of dissolved iron, shining like verdigris.
He carefully avoided it, though he got into the morass after all, but finally struggled back to dry land. The boots were ruined, but he thought perhaps he could wash them secretly at the pump.
He marched on. He was no longer in the mood to whistle, and the clearer the White House rose from the bushes, the more embarrassed he felt. He could already distinguish a kind of rampart, which was surrounded by trees, and through a breach in the foliage he saw a long, low building, which from a distance he had never noticed; behind that another one, and in a black hollow a high flame which quivered up and down. “That must be a forge; but did they work even on Sundays?”
An incomprehensible desire to cry seized him, and while he blindly ran on tears gushed from his eyes.
Suddenly he saw a wide ditch before him filled to the edge with water. He knew very well he could not get across, but obstinacy compelled him to prepare for a spring, and the next moment the thick and dirty water closed over him.
He reached land wet to the skin, covered with a layer of morass and weeds.
He tried to let his clothes dry, sat down on the grass, and looked over at the White House. He had grown quite despondent, and as he began to shiver very much, he turned sadly and slowly homeward.