It was All Saints' Day, in October. During the day a southwest wind had raged; at night a half moon was in the sky, dark brown clouds chased by it, and shadows and dim light flitted over the earth in confusion. The storm was growing. In the room of the dikemaster's house stood the cleared supper table, the hired men were sent to the stables to look after the cattle; the maids had to see if the doors and shutters were closed everywhere in the house and attic, so that the storm would not blow in and do harm. Inside stood Hauke beside his wife at the window, after he had hurriedly eaten his supper. He had been outside on the dike. On foot he had marched out, early in the afternoon. Pointed posts and bags full of clay or earth he had had brought to the place where the dike seemed to betray a weakness. Everywhere he had engaged people to ram in the posts and make a dam of them and the bags, as soon as the flood began to damage the dike; at the northwestern corner, where the old and the new dike met, he had placed the most people, who were allowed to leave their appointed posts only in case of need. These orders he had left when, scarcely a quarter of an hour ago, he had come home wet and dishevelled, and now, as he listened to the gusts of wind that made the windows rattle in their leaden casements, he gazed absently out into the wild night. The clock on the wall was just striking eight. The child that stood beside her mother, started and buried her head in her mother's clothes. "Claus!" she exclaimed crying, "where's my Claus?"
She had a right to ask, for this year, as well as the year before, the gull had not gone on its winter journey. Her father overheard the question; her mother took the child on her arm. "Your Claus is in the barn," she said; "there he is warm."
"Why?" said Wienke, "is that good?"
"Yes, that is good."
The master of the house was still standing by the window.
"This won't do any longer, Elke!" he said; "call one of the maids; the storm will break through the window-panes--the shutters have to be fastened!"
At the word of the mistress, the maid had rushed out; from the room one could see how her skirts were flying. But when she had loosened the hooks, the storm tore the shutter out of her hand and threw it against the window, so that several panes flew splintered into the room and one of the candles went out, smoking. Hauke had to go out himself to help, and only with trouble did they gradually get the shutters fastened in front of the windows. As they opened the door to step back into the house a gust blew after them so that the glass and silver in the sideboard rattled; and upstairs, over their heads the beams trembled and creaked, as if the storm wanted to tear the roof from the walls. But Hauke did not come back into the room; Elke heard him walk across the threshing floor to the stable. "The white horse! The white horse, John! Quick!" she heard him call. Then he came back into the room with his hair dishevelled, but his gray eyes beaming. "The wind has turned!" he cried, "to the northwest; at half spring tide! Not a wind--we have never lived through a storm like this!"
Elke had turned deadly pale. "And you want to go out once more?"
He seized both her hands and pressed them almost convulsively. "I have to, Elke."
Slowly she raised her dark eyes to his, and for a few seconds they looked at each other; but it seemed an eternity. "Yes, Hauke," said his wife, "I know--you have to!"
Then trotting was heard outside the house door. She fell upon his neck, and for a moment it seemed as if she could not let him go; but that, too, was only for a moment. "This is our fight!" said Hauke, "you are safe here; no flood has ever risen up to this house. And pray to God that He may be with me too!"
Hauke wrapped himself up in his coat, and Elke took a scarf and wrapped it carefully round his neck, but her trembling lips failed her.
Outside the neighing of the white horse sounded like trumpets amid the howling of the storm. Elke had stepped out with her husband; the old ash tree creaked, as if it would fall to pieces. "Mount, sir!" cried the hired man; "the horse is like mad; the reins might tear!"
Hauke embraced his wife. "At sunrise I'll be back."
He had already leaped onto his horse; the animal rose on its hind legs, then, like a warhorse rushing into battle, it tore down the hill with its rider, out into the night and the howling storm. "Father, my father!" a plaintive child voice screamed after him, "my dear father!"
Wienke had run after her father as he was tearing away; but after a hundred steps she stumbled over a mound of earth and fell to the ground.
The man Iven Johns brought the crying child back to her mother. She was leaning against the trunk of the ash tree the branches of which were whipping the air above her, and staring absently out into the night where her husband had vanished. When the roaring of the storm and the distant splashing of the sea stopped for a few moments, she started as if in fright; it seemed to her now as if all were seeking to destroy him and would be hushed suddenly when they had seized him. Her knees were trembling, the wind had unloosed and was sporting with her hair. "Here is the child, lady," John cried to her; "hold her fast!" and pressed the little girl into her mother's arms.
"The child?--I had forgotten you, Wienke!" she cried. "God forgive me!" Then she lifted her to her heart, as close as only love can hold, and with her fell on her knees. "Lord God and Thou my Jesus, let us not be widow and orphan! Protect him, oh, good God; only Thou and I, we alone know him!" Now the storm had no more pauses; it howled and thundered as if the whole world would pass away in this uproar.
"Go into the house, lady!" said John; "come!" and he helped them up and led both into the house and into the room.
The dikemaster Hauke Haien sped on his white horse to the dike. The small path seemed to have no bottom, for measureless rain had fallen; nevertheless, the wet, sucking clay did not appear to hold back the hoofs of the animal, for it acted as if it felt the solid ground of summer beneath it. As in a wild chase the clouds wandered in the sky; below lay the marshes like an indistinct desert filled with restless shadows. A muffled roaring rose from the water behind the dike, more and more horrible, as if it had to drown all other sounds. "Get up, horse!" called Hauke, "we are riding our worst ride."
Then a scream of death sounded under the hoofs of his horse. He jerked back the reins, and turned round: beside him, close above the ground, half flying, half hurled by the wind, a swarm of white gulls was passing by with derisive cackling; they were seeking shelter on land. One of them--the moon was shining through the clouds for a moment--lay trampled by the way: the rider believed that he saw a red ribbon flutter at its throat. "Claus!" he cried; "poor Claus!"
Was it the bird of his child? Had it recognised horse and rider and wanted to find shelter with them? The rider did not know. "Get up!" he cried again; the white horse raised his hoofs to gallop once more. All at once the wind stopped, and in its place there was a deathlike silence--but only for a second, when it began again with renewed rage. But human voices and the forlorn barking of dogs meanwhile fell upon the rider's ear, and when he turned his head round to look at his village, he recognised by the appearing moonlight people working round heaped up wagons on the hills and in front of the houses. Instantly he saw other wagons hurriedly driving up to the higher land; he heard the lowing of cattle that were being driven up there out of their warm stables. "Thank God! They are saving themselves and their cattle!" his heart cried within him; and then with a scream of fear: "My wife! My child! No, no; the water doesn't rise up on our hill!"
A terrible gust came roaring from the sea, and horse and rider were rushing against it up the small path to the dike. When they were on top, Hauke stopped his horse violently. But where was the sea? Where Jeverssand? Where had the other shore gone? He saw only mountains of water before him that rose threateningly against the dark sky, that were trying to tower above one another in the dreadful dusk and beat over one another against the solid land. With white crests they rushed on, howling, as if they uttered the outcry of all terrible beasts of prey in the wilderness. The horse kicked and snorted out into the uproar; a feeling came over the rider that here all human power was at an end; that now death, night, and chaos must break in.
But he stopped to think: this really was the storm flood; only he himself had never seen it like this. His wife, his child, were safe on the high hill, in the solid house. His dike--and something like pride shot through his breast--the Hauke-Haien dike, as the people called it, now should show how dikes ought to be built!
But--what was that? He stopped at the corner between the two dikes; where were the men whom he had placed there to keep watch? He glanced to the north up at the old dike; for he had ordered some there too. But neither here nor there could he see a man. He rode a way further out, but he was still alone; only the blowing of the wind and the roar of the sea all the way from an immeasurable distance beat with deafening force against his ear. He turned his horse back again; he reached the deserted corner and let his eyes wander along the line of the new dike. He discerned clearly that the waves were here rolling on more slowly, less violently; there it seemed almost as if there were a different sea. "That will stand all right!" he murmured, and something like a laugh rose within him.
But his laughter vanished when his eyes wandered farther along the line of his dike: in the northwestern corner--what was that? A dark mass was swarming in confusion; he saw that it was stirring busily and crowding--no doubt, there were people! What were they doing, what were they working for now at his dike? Instantly his spurs dug into the shanks of his horse, and the animal sped thither. The storm rushed on broadside; at times the gusts of wind were so violent, that they would almost have been hurled from the dike into the new land--but horse and rider knew where they were riding. Already Hauke saw that a few dozen men were gathered there in eager work, and now he saw clearly that a groove was dug diagonally across the new dike. Forcibly he stopped his horse: "Stop!" he shouted, "stop! What devil's mischief are you doing there?"
In their fright they had let their spades rest, when they had suddenly spied the dikemaster among them. The wind had carried his words over to them, and he noticed that several were trying to answer him; but he saw only their violent gestures, for they stood to the left of him and their words were blown away by the wind which here at times was throwing the men reeling against each other, so that they gathered close together. Hauke measured the dug-in groove with his quick glance and the might of the water which in spite of the new profile, splashed almost to the top of the dike and sprayed horse and rider. Only ten minutes more of work--he saw that clearly--and the flood would break through the groove and the Hauke-Haien-land would be drowned by the sea!
The dikemaster beckoned one of the workmen to the other side of his horse. "Now, tell me," he shouted, "what are you doing here? What does that mean?"
And the man shouted back: "We are to dig through the new dike, sir, so that the old dike won't break."
"What are you to do?"
"Dig through the new dike."
"And drown the land? What devil has ordered that?"
"No, sir, no devil, the overseer Ole Peters has been here and ordered it."
Rage surged into the rider's eyes. "Do you know me?" he shouted. "Where I am, Ole Peters can't give any orders! Away with you! Go to your posts, where I put you!"
And when they hesitated, he made his horse gallop in among them. "Away to your own or the devil's grandmother!"
"Sir, take care!" cried one of the crowd and hit his spade against the animal that acted as if it were mad; but a kick of its hoof flung the spade from his hand; another man fell to the ground. Then all at once a scream rose from the rest of the crowd--a scream such as only the fear of death can call forth from the throat of man. For a moment all, even the dikemaster and the horse were benumbed. Only one workman had stretched out his arm like a road sign and pointed to the northwestern corner of both dikes where the new one joined the old. Nothing could be heard but the raging of the storm and the roar of the water. Hauke turned round in his saddle: what was that? His eyes grew big: "Lord God! A break! A break in the old dike!"
"Your fault, dikemaster!" shouted a voice out of the crowd; "your fault! Take it with you before the throne of God."
Hauke's face, red with rage, had turned deathly pale; the moon that shone upon it could not make it any paler; his arms hung down limply; he scarcely knew that he was holding his reins. But that, too, was only for a moment. Instantly he pulled himself erect with a heavy moan; then he turned his horse silently, and the white horse snorted and tore away with him eastward upon the dike. The rider glanced sharply to all sides; in his head these thoughts were raging: what fault had he to bear to God's throne? The digging through of the new dike--perhaps they would have accomplished it, if he had not stopped them; but--there was something else that shot seething into his heart, because he knew it all too well--if only, last summer, Ole Peters's malicious words hadn't kept him back--that was the point. He alone had recognised the weakness of the old dike; he ought to have seen the new repairs through in spite of all. "Lord God, yes, I confess it," he cried out aloud suddenly into the storm: "I have fulfilled my task badly."
To his left, close to the horse's hoofs, the sea was raging; in front of him, now in complete darkness lay the old enclosed land with its hills and homelike houses. The pale light of the sky had gone out altogether; from one point only a glimmer of light broke through the dark. A solace came into the man's heart: the light must have been shining over from his own house. It seemed like a greeting from wife and child. Thank God, they were safe on their high hill! The others surely were up in the village of the higher land, for more lights were glimmering there than he had ever seen before. Yes, even high up in the air, perhaps from the church steeple, light was piercing the darkness. "They must all have left--all!" said Hauke to himself; "to be sure, on many a hill the houses will lie in ruins; a bad year will come for the flooded fens; sluices and locks will have to be repaired! We'll have to bear it and I will help even those who did me harm; only, Lord, my God, be merciful to us human beings!"
Then he cast a glance to his side at the new enclosed land; the sea foamed round it, but the land lay as if the peace of night were upon it. An inevitable sense of triumph rose out of the rider's breast. "The Hauke-Haien dike will hold all right, it will hold after a hundred years!"
A thundering roar at his feet waked him out of his dreams; the horse refused to go on. What was that? The horse bounded back, and he felt that a piece of the dike was crashing into the depth right before him. He opened his eyes wide and shook off all his pondering: he was stopping by the old dike; his horse had already planted his forelegs upon it. Instinctively he pulled his horse back. Then the last mantle of clouds uncovered the moon, and the mild light shone on all the horror that was rushing, foaming and hissing into the depth before him, down into the old land.
Hauke stared at it, as if bereft of his senses; this was a deluge to devour beasts and men. Then the light glimmered to his eyes again, the same that he had seen before; it was still burning up on his hill. When he looked down into the land now, encouraged as he was, he perceived that behind the chaotic whirlpool that was pouring down, raging in front of him, only a breadth of about a hundred paces was flooded; beyond he could recognise clearly the path that led through the land. He saw still more: a carriage, no, a two-wheeled cart was driven like mad toward the dike; in it sat a woman--yes, a child too. And now--was that not the barking of a little dog that reached his ears through the storm? Almighty God! It was his wife, his child; already they were coming close, and the foaming mass of water was rushing toward them. A scream, a scream of despair broke forth from the rider's breast: "Elke!" he screamed; "Elke! Back! Back!"
But the storm and sea were not merciful, their raving scattered his words. The wind had caught his cloak and almost torn him down from his horse; and the cart was speeding on without pause towards the rushing flood. Then he saw that his wife was stretching out her arms as if toward him. Had she recognised him? Had her longing, her deathly fear for him driven her out of her safe house? And now--was she crying a last word to him? These questions shot through his brain; they were never answered, for from her to him, and from him to her, their words were all lost. Only a roar as if the world were coming to an end filled their ears and let no other sound enter.
"My child! Oh, Elke, oh, faithful Elke!" Hauke shouted out into the storm. Then another great piece of the dike fell crashing into the depth, and the sea rushed after it, thundering. Once more he saw the head of the horse below, saw the wheels of the cart emerge out of the wild horror and then, caught in an eddy, sink underneath it and drown. The staring eyes of the rider, who was left all alone on the dike, saw nothing more. "The end!" he said, in a low voice to himself. Then he rode up to the abyss where the water, gurgling gruesomely, was beginning to flood his home village. Still he saw the light glimmer from his house; it was soulless now. He drew himself up erect, and drove the spurs into his horse's shanks; the horse reared and would almost have fallen over, but the man's force held it down. "Go on!" he called once more, as he had called so often when he wanted a brisk ride. "Lord God, take me, save the others!"
One more prick of the spurs; a scream from the horse that rose above the storm and the roar of the waves--then from the rushing stream below a muffled sound, a short struggle.
The moon shone from her height, but down on the dike there was no more life, only the wild waters that soon had almost wholly flooded the old land. But the hill of Hauke Haien's farm was still rising above the turmoil, the light was still glimmering there and from the higher land, where the houses were gradually growing darker, the lonely light in the church steeple sent its quivering gleams over the foaming waves.
The story-teller stopped. I took hold of my full glass that had for a long time been standing before me, but I did not raise it to my lips; my hand remained on the table.
"That is the story of Hauke Haien," my host began again, "as I have been able to tell it according to my best knowledge. To be sure, the housekeeper of our dikemaster would have told it differently. For people tell this too: the white horse skeleton was seen after the flood again, just as before, by moonlight on Jevers Island; the whole village is supposed to have seen it. But this is certain: Hauke Haien with wife and child perished in this flood. Not even their graves have I been able to find up in the churchyard; their dead bodies must have been carried by the receding water through the breach into the sea and gradually have been dissolved into their elements on the sea bottom--thus they were left in peace by men at last. But the Hauke-Haien dike is still standing after a hundred years, and to-morrow, if you are going to ride to the city and don't mind half an hour's longer way, your horse will feel it under its hoofs.
"The thanks of a younger generation that Jewe Manners had once promised the builder of the dike he never received, as you have seen. For that is the way, sir: Socrates they gave poison to drink, and our Lord Christ they nailed to the cross. That can't be done so easily nowadays, but--making a saint out of a tyrant or a bad, stubborn priest, or turning a good fellow, just because he towers above us by a head, into a ghost or a monster--that's still done every day."
When the serious little man had said that, he got up and listened into the night. "Some change must have gone on outside," he said, and drew the woolen covering from the window. There was bright moonlight. "Look," he went on, "there the overseers are coming back; but they are scattering, they are going home. There must have been a break in the dike on the other shore; the water has sunk."
I looked out beside him. The windows up here were above the edge of the dike; everything was just as he had said. I took up my glass and drank the rest: "I thank you for this evening. I think now we can sleep in peace."
"We can," replied the little gentleman; "I wish you heartily a good night's sleep."
As I walked downstairs, I met the dikemaster in the hall; he wanted to take home a map that he had left in the tavern. "All over!" he said. "But our schoolmaster, I suppose, has told you a fine story--he belongs to the enlighteners!"
"He seems to be a sensible man."
"Yes, yes, surely; but you can't distrust your own eyes. And over there on the other side--I said it would--the dike is broken."
I shrugged my shoulders. "You will have to think that over in bed. Good night, dikemaster."
The next morning, in the golden sunlight that shone over wide ruin, I rode down to the city on the Hauke-Haien dike.
Theodor Fontane, though ranking as one of the greatest of German novelists, was by race entirely of French Huguenot stock. He was born at Neu-Ruppin, near Berlin, on December 30, 1819. His father, the son of a Gascon drawing-master at the court of Prussia, was an apothecary; but his happy-go-lucky disposition and his passion for gambling hindered his success in business. The mother was able and practical, but was unable to keep up the family fortunes, and the marriage was finally dissolved.
After a somewhat irregular education, Theodor was apprenticed to an apothecary in Berlin when he was sixteen, and after four years of preparation he found himself qualified to practice a profession in which he had no interest. Before he was twenty he had published verses and a story, and he spent his leisure in literary clubs. In 1850 he received a position in the press department of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, on the strength of which he married. Two years later he was sent to London to write reports on conditions in England for government journals, and this was only the first of a series of visits to Britain. He acted as war correspondent in the campaigns of 1864, 1866, and 1870, being taken prisoner by the French when visiting the home of Joan of Arc. His interest in the picturesque history of Scotland seems to have led him to the study of the past of his own region, the Mark of Brandenburg, his thorough knowledge of which appears both in his descriptive works and in his fiction. The greater part of his life was spent in Berlin, where he died on September 20, 1898, honored as one of the leading men of letters of his time.
Fontane's earlier literary efforts were mainly in verse, the best of which is ballad poetry, largely of Scottish inspiration. His middle period was chiefly devoted to descriptions of travel. It was not till he was nearly sixty that he really found himself and turned to the writing of the novels on which his fame chiefly depends. He began in 1878 with "Before the Storm," a long romance after the manner of Sir Walter Scott, and for the next twenty years he drew on his accumulated knowledge of life and produced with great fertility. His most successful field was the Berlin life with which fifty years in the Prussian capital had made him intimately familiar, and his chief works are "L'Adultera" (1882), "Petöfi" (1884), "Cécile" (1887), "Stine" (1890), "Frau Jenny Treibel" (1892), "The Poggenpuhls" (1896), and, in the year of his death, "Stechlin."
The interest of these novels lies rather in character than in action. While he portrays many types characteristic of Berlin and the surrounding region, and is very successful in rendering local color and the atmosphere of the particular circle described in each book, his penetration into universal human nature is sufficiently deep to raise him far above provincialism. His effort is to represent people vividly and naturally in their normal relations, not to strain after sensational or even dramatic situations, though two of his shorter tales, "Grete Minde" and "Ellernklipp," dealing as they do with crimes, are to some extent exceptions to this rule. "Trials and Tribulations" ("Irrungen Wirrungen", 1887) gives an excellent idea of his power. In a gently moving story, told without the forcing of emotion or the contriving of exciting scenes, he deals with the pathos of the relation between a man and a woman, alike in an attractive simplicity of character, but forced apart by difference of rank. The situation is laid before us without expressed censure or protest, and is allowed to have its effect by the sober truth of its presentation. Fontane's is an honest and sincere art, none the less great because unpretentious.
W. A. N.
Fontane possesses the wonderful irony of the Berliner--an irony which, paradoxical as it may sound, is naïve; for it is nothing but an involuntary doubt of his equally naïve conceit, as Fontane often likes to say. Assuredly the Berliner is inclined to a certain conceitedness. He belongs to a city which has grown great in a struggle against antipathies--antipathies of the Government and of the "Junker" class, of the poets and of the rival capitals, one might almost say of nature herself, so sparingly has she dealt with this city on the Spree. In this constant struggle Berlin has been victorious, and every Berliner to this day feels that victory to the marrow of his bones. Fontane, using his friend Lepel as his mouthpiece, makes him say, "Well, Fontane, there you are again; talking like an oracle. It all comes from that curiously naïve belief in yourself. You always think you know everything best. But I can tell you, there are people living on the other side of the mountains too." This quiet feeling of superiority the Berliner has gained only after a struggle, and therefore he is at bottom precisely aware of his limits. No one can express this more strikingly than Fontane himself: "Deeply penetrated by my insufficiency and my ignorance, I saw--incredible though it may seem--that the ignorance of my fellow-creatures was even greater than my own. So I was at the same moment both humble and conceited." There is the typical Berliner! He knows well his own weakness, but, since he is successful, he takes it for granted in all naïveté that he is yet the one-eyed among the blind.
It is this attitude which gives Fontane's irony its peculiar flavor....
The gentle melancholy of two people coming together in a way which can never lead to full satisfaction, the quiet tragedy of a separation not forced by external powers but by the constant pressure of circumstances--this is what sounds through this splendid story. "Trials and Tribulations" is built entirely on this motive. An honest sturdy young officer and a decent pretty girl get to know each other on an excursion. Unconsciously they drift into a relation where heart meets heart, the breaking of which causes the deepest pain. But both see clearly from the beginning that there is no other end. For they know that the world is stronger than the individual, and the many small moments than the one supreme. They know it, for they are, like their creator, resigned realists. They shut their eyes only in order not to see the end too near. Then comes the parting, still and quiet: "She leaned on him and said quietly and warmly, 'And so this is the last time that I shall hold your hand in mine?'"--From "Die deutsche Litteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" (1910).
In 1898, Germany suffered a great loss in the person of Theodor Fontane, who represented a superior kind of realism, and to whom the modern German novel was very much indebted. As he was of French origin, his writings naturally possessed more equilibrium and measure than one usually finds in German writers; he also had a fine and keen esprit, never importuning, never displaying his wit, never running into pathos. For that reason his novels seemed cold to sentimental readers and frivolous to moralists. But the cultivated and unprejudiced reader admired his quiet experience and his deep knowledge of external life as well as of the depths of the human soul, qualities which were mingled with a love of his native country, Brandenburg. But although dead, Fontane has not ceased to be the father of modern realism. All that is good, true, beautiful, and important in the German realistic novel comes from Theodor Fontane. Naturalism and symbolism stand far apart from him; but even the most passionate and the most intelligent adversaries of symbolism point to him as a representative of true art.--From "The Modern German Novel," in "The Contemporary Review" (1904).
At the junction of the Kurfürstendamm and the Kurfürstenstrasse, diagonally across from the Zoological Garden, there still remained, about the middle of the seventies, a large market-garden, extending towards the open country. The little house belonging to this property had but three windows, and was set about a hundred paces back in a front garden; yet in spite of its small size and its secluded position, it could be plainly seen from the road that ran past. But all else that belonged to the place, and indeed formed the principal part of it, was hidden behind this little dwelling as if by the side-scenes of a theatre, and only a little red and green painted tower with a half broken dial beneath its peak (nothing remained of the clock itself) gave one a hint, that behind this "coulisse" something more must be hidden, a hint which was confirmed from time to time by the rising and circling of a flock of pigeons around the tower, and still more by the occasional barking of a dog. Where this dog was actually kept it was indeed impossible to find out, in spite of the fact that the door of the house, which was close to the left corner, stood open early and late and afforded a glimpse of a small part of the yard. However, nothing seemed to have been purposely hidden, and yet everyone who came along the road at the time when our story begins, had to be satisfied with a glimpse of the little house with its three windows and of a few fruit trees that stood in the front garden.
It was the week after Whitsunday, when the days are so long that it seems as if the dazzling light would never come to an end. But to-day the sun was already hidden behind the church-tower of Wilmersdorf and instead of the light, with which it had filled the front garden all day, the shades of evening had already fallen, and the half mysterious silence was only surpassed by that of the little house which was occupied by old Frau Nimptsch and her adopted daughter Lena as tenants. But Frau Nimptsch was sitting as usual by the large low hearth in her front room, which took in the whole width of the house, and, bending forward, she was gazing at a blackened old tea kettle, whose lid kept up a continual rattling, although the steam was pouring out of the spout. The old woman was holding her hands out towards the glowing embers and was so lost in her thoughts and dreams that she did not hear the hall door open and a stout woman enter somewhat noisily. Only when the latter cleared her throat and greeted her friend and neighbor, our Frau Nimptsch, quite affectionately by name, did the latter turn around and speak to her guest in friendly fashion and with a touch of playfulness: "Well, this is good in you, dear Frau Dörr, to come over again. And from the 'castle' too. For it is a castle and always will be. It has a tower. And now do sit down.... I just saw your dear husband go out. Of course he would have to. For this is his evening at the bowling alley."
She who received this friendly greeting as Frau Dörr was not only stout, but was an especially imposing-looking woman, who produced the impression of narrow-mindedness as well as that of kindliness and trustworthiness. Meanwhile Frau Nimptsch apparently took no offence and only repeated: "Yes, his evening at the bowling alley. But what I was going to say was, that Dörr's hat really will not do any longer. It is all threadbare and really disgraceful. You ought to take it away from him and put another in its place. Perhaps he would never know the difference.... And now draw up your chair, dear Frau Dörr, or perhaps over there where the footstool is.... Lena, you know, has slipped out and left me in the lurch again."
"Has he been here?"
"Of course he has. And they have both gone a little way towards Wilmersdorf; nobody comes along the footpath. But they may be back again any minute."
"Well, then I had better go."
"Oh, no indeed, dear Frau Dörr. He will not stay. And even if he should, you know, he would not mind."
"I know, I know. And how are things then?"
"Why, how should they be? I believe she is thinking of something even if she does not want others to know it, and she is imagining something or other."
"Oh, my goodness," said Frau Dörr, as she drew up a somewhat higher stool instead of the footstool that had been offered her. "Oh, my goodness, then it's bad. Whenever one begins to imagine things, trouble begins. It is just like the Amen in church. See here, dear Frau Nimptsch, it was just the very same with me, only there was no imagining. And that is just why everything was really quite different."
Apparently Frau Nimptsch did not really understand what Frau Dörr meant, and so the latter went on: "And because I never took any notions into my head, things always went perfectly well and smoothly and now I have Dörr. Oh well, that isn't much, but still it is something respectable and I can show my face everywhere. And that is why I went to church with him too, and not merely to the registrar's office. If you only go to the registrar's office, there will always be talk."
Frau Nimptsch nodded.
But Frau Dörr repeated: "Yes, in church, in the Matthäikirche. But this is what I was really going to say, don't you see, my dear Frau Nimptsch, I was really taller and more pleasing than Lena, and if I was not prettier (for that is something one can never rightly know and tastes differ so), yet my figure was stouter and a great many like that. Yes, so much is certain. But even if I was, as you might say, more solid and weighed more, and there was a something about me--well yes, there was something about me--yet I was always very innocent, almost simple; and as to him, my Count, with his fifty years on his shoulders, well, he was very simple too and always very gay and would never behave properly. And before very long, I told him: 'No, no, Count, this will never do; I can't allow anything like this....' And old people are always like that. I will only say, dear Frau Nimptsch, you can't imagine anything of the sort. It was dreadful. And now when I see Lena's Baron, it makes me ashamed to think what mine was like. And now as to Lena herself. My Lord, of course she isn't exactly an angel, but she is neat and industrious and knows how to do everything, and loves order and practical things. And don't you see, Frau Nimptsch, that is just the sad part of it. These fly-abouts, that are here to-day and there to-morrow, well, they never come to grief, they always fall on their feet like a cat, but such a good child, who takes everything seriously, and does everything for the sake of love, that is bad.... Or perhaps it may not be so bad; you only adopted her and she is not your own flesh and blood and perhaps she is a princess or something like that."
At this conjecture Frau Nimptsch shook her head and looked as if she were about to answer. But Frau Dörr had already risen and said, as she looked along the garden path: "Heavens, there they come. And he is just in civilian's clothes, with coat and trousers to match. But you would notice him all the same! And now he is whispering something in her ear and she is smiling to herself. But she is blushing so.... And now he is going away. And now ... Really, I believe, he is turning back. No, no, he is only saying good-bye again and she is throwing him a kiss.... Yes, I think something like that would have suited me.... No, mine was not like that."
Frau Dörr went on talking, until Lena came in and greeted both women.
The next forenoon the sun, which was already rather high, shone into the yard of the Dörr's little establishment and lighted up a considerable number of buildings, among which was the "castle" of which Frau Nimptsch had spoken on the previous evening with roguish playfulness. Such a "castle"! In the twilight its general outlines might have passed for something of the sort, but to-day, as it stood in the remorselessly bright light, one could see only too plainly, that the building with its Gothic windows painted on the walls clear to the top, was nothing more than a wretched old wooden house, in the two gable ends of which had been set some timber framing, the spaces of which were filled with plaster, a comparatively solid structure which indicated two gable rooms. All the rest of the house was merely a stone-paved space from which a confused looking set of ladders led to a loft or garret and from that to the tower which served as a pigeon house. Formerly, before Dörr's time, the whole great wooden "shack" had served merely as a store-house for bean poles and watering pots, perhaps even as a potato cellar, but since, some years ago, the garden had been bought by its present owner, the real dwelling house had been rented to Frau Nimptsch, and the old building painted in the Gothic style, with the addition of the two gable rooms already mentioned, had been arranged as a dwelling for Dörr, who was then a widower; a very primitive arrangement it was, which was in no wise altered by his speedy second marriage. In the summer this cool store house with its stone pavements and almost no windows was not a bad dwelling place, but in the winter Dörr and his wife as well as a rather feeble-minded twenty-year-old son of the former marriage, would have actually frozen, had it not been for the two big hothouses which stood on the other side of the yard. In these the three Dörrs spent their time exclusively from November until March, but even in the warmer and more comfortable part of the year, the family life, when it was not actually necessary to seek refuge from the sun, was mostly carried on in front of these hot houses or in them, because everything there was more convenient. Here were the steps and shelves on which the flowers that were brought out of the hothouses every morning had their airing, here was the stall for the cow and the goat, and here the kennel for the dog that was used to pull the little wagon, and from here extended outward the double row of hotbeds, perhaps fifty paces long, and with a little path between, until they reached the vegetable garden which lay further back. This garden did not look very neat, partly because Dörr had no sense of order, and also because he had such a passion for poultry, that he would allow his favorites to scratch and pick everywhere, without regard to the damage that they did. To be sure, the damage was not great, for there was nothing very fine in the garden except the asparagus beds. Dörr thought that the commonest things were also the most profitable, and therefore raised marjoram and other herbs for seasoning sausages, especially "borré," concerning which he held the opinion that a genuine Berliner really needs only three things: his pale ale, his "gilka" and "borré." "With borré," he always concluded, "one is never at a loss." He was decidedly an eccentric, wholly self-sufficient in his views and was decidedly indifferent as to what might be said about him. His second marriage was in keeping with this tendency, a marriage of inclination, upon which the idea of his wife's unusual beauty had had its effect as well as her former relation to the Count, which instead of injuring her chances, had tipped the balance for the better and had simply served as a complete proof that her charms were irresistible. If there was any hint of overvaluing personal charms--and there was good ground for this opinion--it could not be on the side of Dörr himself, for whom nature, so far as outward appearances were concerned, had done uncommonly little. Thin, of medium height and with five strands of grey hair drawn over his head and brow, his looks would have been completely ordinary had not a brown mole between his eye and his left temple given him a certain mark of distinction. For this reason his wife, with some reason and in her own free and easy fashion used to say: "He is withered looking, but from the left he reminds me of a 'Borsdorfer'."
This description was well hit off and would have served to identify him anywhere if he had not continually worn a linen cap with a big visor, which being drawn well down over his face, hid its every-day as well as its unusual aspect.
And so, with his cap and visor drawn down over his face, he stood once more, on the day after the conversation between Frau Dörr and Frau Nimptsch, before a flower stand that stood against the front greenhouse, setting to one side various wallflower and geranium pots, which were to go to the weekly market on the morrow. They were all plants that had not been raised in pots, but simply set into them, and with especial joy and satisfaction he passed them in review, laughing beforehand at the "madams," who would come the next day to spend their usual five pfennigs, but in the end would be fooled. He considered this one of his greatest pleasures and indeed it was the principal part of his mental life. "If I could only hear them scold about it ... If I only could."
He was talking to himself in this vein, when he heard from the garden the barking of a little cur together with the distressed crowing of a cock, and unless he was very much deceived, of his cock, his favorite with the silvery feathers. And looking toward the garden, he actually saw his flock of hens rushing this way and that, while the cock had flown up in a pear tree, from which he constantly called for help while the dog barked beneath.
"Thunder and lightning," cried Dörr in a rage. "There is Bollmann's dog again.... He has got through the fence again.... But we shall see." ... And quickly setting down the geranium pot that he was examining, he ran to the dog kennel, caught up the hook of the chain and turned the big dog loose, who rushed furiously through the garden. But before he could reach the pear tree, "Bollmann's beast" had already given leg bail and was disappearing under the fence into the open, the big yellow dog pursuing him with great leaps. But the gap that had sufficed for the pug would not let him through, and he was forced to give up the chase.
Dörr himself had no better luck, when he came up with a rake and exchanged glances with the dog. "Well, Sultan, we didn't catch him this time." And so Sultan trotted back to his kennel in a slow, puzzled way, as if he had been blamed for something. But Dörr himself gazed after the pug who was running over the ploughed ground and said to himself presently: "The Devil take me, if I don't get me an air gun at Mehle's or somewhere. And then I'll get the beast out of the way so silently that neither cock nor hen will make a sound. Not even mine."
The cock, however, seemed to have for the present no use for the quiet attributed to him by Dörr, but continued to use his voice just as strenuously as before. And meanwhile he puffed out his silver white throat as proudly as if he wanted to show the hens that his flying up into the pear tree was a well-considered "coup" or else a mere whim.
But Dörr said: "Oh Lord, what a cock. He thinks he is something wonderful. And yet his courage doesn't amount to much."
And so saying he went back to his flower stand.