Selected Stories (9 page)

I hope no estrangement will ensue if I say that I am writing all these I trust pretty
and delicate lines with a quill from the Imperial High Court of Justice. Hence the
brevity, pregnancy, and acumen of my language, at certain points well enough perceptible,
at which now nobody need wonder any more.

But when shall I come at last to the well-earned banquet with my Frau Aebi? I fear
it will take quite a time, as considerable obstacles must first be put aside. Appetite
in unstinted abundance has been long enough present.

As I went on my way, like a better sort of tramp, a vagabond and pickpocket, or idler
and vagrant of a sort finer than some, past all sorts of gardens planted and stuffed
full with placid, contented vegetables, past flowers and fragrance of flowers, past
fruit trees and past beansticks and shrubs full of beans, past towering crops, as
rye, barley, and wheat, past a wood-yard containing much wood and wood shavings, past
juicy grass and past a gently splashing little waterway, rivulet, or stream, past
all sorts of people, as choice trade-plying market women, tripping past, and past
a clubhouse decoratively hung with banners flying for a celebration, or for joy, and
also past many other good-hearted and useful things, past a particularly beautiful
and sweet little fairy apple tree, and past God knows what else in the way of feasible
things, as, for example, also strawberry bushes and blossoms, or, even better, gracefully
past the ripe red strawberries, while all sorts of more or less beautiful and pleasant
thoughts continued to preoccupy me, since, when I’m out walking, many notions, flashes
of light, and lightning flashes quite of their own accord intrude and interrupt, to
be carefully pondered upon, there came a man in my direction, an enormity, a monster,
who almost completely darkened my bright and shining road, a tall, lanky beanpole
of a fellow, sinister, whom I knew alas only too well, a very curious customer; namely
the giant

T
OMZACK

In any other place and on any other road but this dear yielding country road I would
have expected him. His woeful, gruesome air, his tragic, atrocious appearance, infused
me with terror and took every good, bright, and beautiful prospect, all joy and gaiety
away from me. Tomzack! It is true, dear reader, is it not, the name alone has the
sound of terrible and mournful things? “Why do you persecute me, why need you meet
me here in the middle of my road, you miserable creature?” I cried to him; but Tomzack
gave me no answer. He turned his great eyes upon me; that is, he looked down from
high up on me below; for he surpassed me in length and height by very considerable
degrees. Beside him, I felt like a dwarf, or like a poor weak little child. With the
greatest of ease the giant could have trodden me underfoot and crushed me. Oh, I knew
who he was. For him there was no rest. Restlessly he went up and down in the world.
He slept in no soft bed, and could live in no comfortable homely house. He was at
home everywhere and nowhere. He had no home country, and of no state was he a citizen.
Without motherland and without happiness he was; he had to live completely without
love and without human joy. He had sympathy with no man, and with him and his mopping
and mowing no man had sympathy. Past, present, and future were to him an insubstantial
desert, and life was too small, too tiny, too narrow for him. For him there was nothing
which had meaning, and he himself in turn meant something to nobody. Out of his great
eyes there broke a glare of grief in overworlds and underworlds. Infinite pain spoke
from his slack and weary moments. A hundred thousand years old he seemed to me, and
it seemed to me that he must live for eternity, only to be for eternity no living
being. He died every instant and yet he could not die. For him there was no grave
with flowers on it. I eluded him, and murmured to myself: “Goodbye, keep well nevertheless,
friend Tomzack!”

Without looking back at the phantom, the pitiful colossus and superman, and candidly
I had not the remotest desire to do so, I walked on and soon afterwards, proceeding
thus in the warm yielding air and erasing the sad impression which the strange figure
of a man, or rather of a giant, had made upon me, I came into a pine forest, through
which coiled a smiling, serpentine, and at the same time roguishly graceful path,
which I followed with pleasure. Path and forest floor were as a carpet, and here within
the forest it was quiet as in a happy human soul, as in the interior of a temple,
as in a palace and enchanted dream-wrapped fairy-tale castle, as in Sleeping Beauty’s
castle, where all sleep, and all are hushed for centuries of long years. I penetrated
deeper, and I speak perhaps a little indulgently if I say that to myself I seemed
like a prince with golden hair, his body clad in warrior’s armor. So solemn was it
in the forest that lovely and solemn imaginings, quite of their own accord, took possession
of the sensitive walker there. How glad I was at this sweet forest softness and repose!
From time to time, from outside, a slight sound or two penetrated the delicious seclusion
and bewitching darkness, perhaps a bang, a whistle, or some other noise, whose distant
note would only intensify the prevailing soundlessness, which I inhaled to my very
heart’s content, and whose virtues I drank and quaffed with due ceremony. Here and
there in all this tranquillity and quietude a bird let his blithe voice be heard out
of his charmed and holy hiding place. Thus I stood and listened, and suddenly there
came upon me an inexpressible feeling for the world, and, together with it, a feeling
of gratitude, which broke powerfully out of my soul. The pines stood straight as pillars
there, and not the least thing moved in the whole delicate forest, throughout which
all kinds of inaudible voices seemed to echo and sound. Music out of the primeval
world, from whence I cannot tell, stole on my ear. “Oh, thus, if it must be, shall
I then willingly end and die. A memory will then delight me even in the grave, and
a gratitude enliven me even in death; a thanksgiving for the pleasures, for the joys,
for the ecstasies; a thanksgiving for life, and a joy at joy.” High up, a gentle rustling,
whispering down from the treetops, could be heard. “To love and to kiss here must
be divinely beautiful,” I told myself. Simply to tread on the pleasant ground became
a joy, and the stillness kindled prayers in the feeling soul. “To be dead here, and
to lie inconspicuous in the cool forest earth must be sweet. Oh, that one could sense
and enjoy death even in death! Perhaps one can. To have a small, quiet grave in the
forest would be lovely. Perhaps I should hear the singing of the birds and the forest
rustling above me. I would like that.” Marvelous between trunks of oaks a pillar of
sunbeams fell into the forest, which to me seemed like a delicious green grave. Soon
I stepped out into the radiant open again, and into life.

Now there should come, as it emerges here, an inn, and, that is, a very fine, attractive,
and coaxing one, an inn situated near the edge of the forest out of which I have this
moment walked, an inn with a charming garden full of refreshing shade. The garden
should lie on a pretty hill with a good view all around, and right beside it there
should stand an extra, artificial hill, or bastion, where one could stay and for quite
a long time enjoy the splendid prospect. A glass of beer or wine would also certainly
not be unwelcome; but the person who is out walking here recalls just in time that
his excursion is not really all that strenuous. The toilsome mountains lie far off
in the bluish, luminous, white-misted distance. He must frankly confess that his thirst
is neither murderous nor heathenish, since till now he has had to cover only relatively
short stretches of the road. Indeed, it is here a question more of a delicate, gentle
walk than of a voyage or excursion, more of a subtle circular stroll than a forced
march; and therefore he justly, as well as wisely, declines to enter the house of
joy and refreshment, and he takes his leave. All serious people who read this will
certainly accord him affluent applause for his fine decision and goodwill. Did I not,
as much as an hour ago, take the opportunity of announcing a young songstress? Now
she enters.

Enters, that is, at a ground-level window.

For now I returned from the forest recess to the highway, and there I heard——

But stop! Relax in brief respite. Writers who understand their profession take the
same as easily as possible. From time to time they like to lay their pens aside a
while. Uninterrupted writing fatigues, like digging.

What I heard from the ground-level window was the most delicious, fresh folk or opera
song, a matutinal banquet of sound, a morning concert, which entered my astonished
ears completely free of charge. A young girl, still a schoolgirl, but slim already
and tall, was standing in her bright dress at a drab suburban window, and this girl
was singing out and up into the blue air simply ecstatically. Most agreeably surprised,
and enchanted by the unexpected song, I stood a little to the side lest I might disturb
the singer and rob myself both of my attendance and of my pleasure. The song which
the little one sang seemed to be of a cheerful and delicious nature; the notes had
the very sound itself of young innocent joy in life and in love; they flew, like angel
figures wearing the snow-white plumage of delight, up into the heavens, whence they
seemed to fall down again and to die smiling. It was like dying from affliction, dying
perhaps also from too delicate a delight, like a too exultant loving and living and
a powerlessness to live any more because of a too rich and beautiful vision of life,
so that to some extent its tender thought, overflowing with joy and love, rushing
exuberantly into being, seemed to fall over itself and break itself in pieces. When
the girl has finished her simple but rich and charming song, her melodious Mozartian
or shepherd girl’s aria, I went up to her, greeted her, asked her for permission to
congratulate her on her beautiful voice, and complimented her on her extraordinarily
spiritual performance. The little songstress, who looked like a doe, or a sort of
antelope in girl’s form, looked at me with her beautiful brown eyes full of question
and surprise. She had a very delicate, gentle face, and she gave me a captivating
and polite smile. “To you,” I said to her, “if you know how to train carefully and
tend your beautiful, young, and rich voice, a process which will require your own
intelligence as well as that of others, belongs a brilliant future and a great career;
for to me you seem, I frankly and honestly confess, to be the great operatic singer
of the future in person! You are obviously clever, you are tender and supple, and
you possess, if my suppositions do not entirely deceive me, a most decidedly courageous
soul. You have fire, and an evident nobility of heart; this I just heard in the song
which you sang so beautifully and really well. You have talent, but more: you have
indubitably genius! And now I speak no vain and untrue words. I take it upon myself
therefore to ask you to pay very special attention to your noble gift, to preserve
it from deformity, mutilation, and thoughtless premature exhaustion. At present, I
can only tell you in all sincerity that you sing exceedingly well, and that this is
something very serious; for it means much; it means above all that you will be expected
industriously to sing a little bit further every day. Practice and sing with wise,
beautiful moderation. The extent and scope of the treasure in your possession you
yourself certainly know not at all. In your vocal accomplishment there sounds already
a high degree of natural grace, a rich sum of unsuspecting vigorous being and life,
and an abundance of poetry and humanity. It is permissible to tell you, and to give
you positive assurance, that you therefore promise to become in every way a genuine
singer, because it is likely that you are a person who is compelled to sing by her
very inmost nature, and who appears only to live, and only to be able to enjoy life,
when she begins to sing, thus transforming all her actual delight in life into the
art of song, whence all that is humanly and personally significant, all that is suffused
with soul, all that is full of understanding, ascends into something higher, into
an ideal. In a beautiful song there is always a concentration and compression of experience,
perception, and feeling, an explosive aggregate of condensed life and animation of
the soul, and with such a song, a woman who makes good use of her situation, and mounts
the ladder of her opportunities, may as a star in the firmament of music move profoundly
the hearts of many people, amass great wealth, transport a public to demonstrations
of stormy and enthusiastic applause, and draw down upon herself the sincere love and
admiration of kings and of queens.”

Serious, and astonished, the girl listened to the words I spoke, though I uttered
them certainly more for my own delight than in any hope that the little thing might
appreciate and understand them, for she lacked the necessary maturity.

From afar I can already see a railway crossing which I shall have to traverse; but,
at present, I have not got that far; for I shall have, it must be clearly realized,
two or three important commissions to execute, and several insuperable arrangements
to make. On these commissions a report must be drawn up, or delivered, in as much
detail, and with as much precision, as possible. It will generously be permitted me
to remark that I have in passing to present myself with all expediency at an elegant
gentleman’s outfitters or tailor’s workshop to discuss a new suit which I must try
on and have tailored. Second, I have to pay off heavy taxes in the local office or
town hall; and third, I ought to take a noteworthy letter to the post office and throw
it into the letter box. It will be seen how much I have to do, and how this apparently
idle and easygoing walk is full of practical business affairs, and people will therefore,
I hope, be so good as to excuse my loitering, appreciate my delays, and approve the
long-winded discussions with professional and clerical people; yes, perhaps even welcome
them as acceptable adjuncts and contributions to the entertainment. For all consequent
lengths, breadths, and heights I humbly request in advance the reader’s pardon. Has
a provincial or metropolitan author ever been more diffident and courteous toward
the circle of his readers? I hardly think so, and therefore, with my conscience utterly
clear, I continue my little chat and narrative and report the following: