Beneath The Wheel Part 6

All next day they looked for him, but in vain. He spent his second night in a field near a village between bundles of straw. In the morning he retreated into the forest, and only toward evening, as he was about to visit another village, was he picked up by a gendarme. This man took charge of him with friendly mockery and deposited him at the city hall. There his wit and flattery won over the mayor, who took him home for the night and stuffed him with ham and eggs before putting him to bed. Next day his father, who had arrived in the meantime, came and fetched him.

The excitement was great at the monastery when the runaway was brought back. But he kept his head high and did not seem to regret his brilliant little jaunt. The authorities demanded that he throw himself on their mercy. He refused, and in front of the teachers' tribunal he was neither timid nor subservient. They had wanted to keep him at the school but now his cup had run over. He was expelled in disgrace and in the evening he left with his father, never to return. He had been able to say good-bye to his friend Giebenrath only with a brief handshake.

The speech the headmaster delivered on the occasion of this extraordinary case of insubordination and degeneration was of singular beauty and verve. Much tamer, more factual and feebler was the report he sent to the school board in Stuttgart. All future correspondence with the expelled monster was prohibited, an edict which merely caused Hans Giebenrath to smile. For weeks Heilner and his flight were the main topic of conversation. The pa.s.sage of time and his absence modified the general opinion of him and many looked back upon the fugitive, once so anxiously avoided, as an eagle escaped from captivity.

h.e.l.las now contained two empty desks and the latter of the lost two students was not as quickly forgotten as the first. Yet the headmaster would have preferred to be certain that the second one would be just as peaceable and well taken care of. But Heilner did nothing to disturb the calm of the monastery. His friend waited and waited, but no letter came. He had vanished, and his physical appearance and his flight gradually became history and finally turned into legend. After many further brilliant escapades and misfortunes the pa.s.sionate boy finally came into the strict discipline that a life of suffering can impose, and though he did not become a hero, he at least turned into a man.

The suspicion resting on Hans, of having known about Heilner's flight plans, cost him the rest of the teachers' goodwill. One of them said to him, when he could not answer a set of questions: 'Why didn't you run off with that fine friend of yours?"

The headmaster no longer called on him in cla.s.s and merely cast disdainful sidelong glances. Giebenrath no longer counted, he was one of the lepers.

Chapter Five.

Like a hamster, its cheeks distended by a store of provisions, Hans kept himself alive for a spell by drawing on his previously acquired knowledge. Then a painfully drawn-out death began, interrupted by brief ineffectual spurts whose utter futility made even Hans smile. He now stopped torturing himself uselessly, gave up on Homer and algebra as he had on the Pentateuch and on Xenophon, and watched with disinterest how his teacher's valuation sank step by step, from good to fair, from fair to satisfactory, and finally to zero. When he did not have a headache, which was rare, he thought of Hermann Heilner. Wide-eyed, he dreamed his lightheaded dreams and existed for hours on end as if he were only half-awake. To the growing annoyance of his teachers, he had recently begun to reply to them with a good-natured, humble smile. Wiedrich, a friendly young tutor, was the only one distressed at the sight of this smile and he treated the failing boy with sympathetic forbearance. The rest of the staff expressed indignation, punished Hans by not calling on him, or tried to rouse his sleeping ambition with occasional sarcasm.

"In case you're awake, might I trouble you to translate this sentence?"

The headmaster's state of indignation was nothing if not dignified. The vain man had the gift of the significant glance and was quite beside himself when Giebenrath countered his majestically threatening roll of the eyes with a meek, submissive smile. It finally got on the headmaster's nerves.

"Wipe the abysmally stupid smile from your face. You've more reason to weep."

A letter from Hans' father, beseeching him to improve, made a deeper impression. The headmaster's letter to Papa Giebenrath had frightened him out of his wits. His letter to Hans consisted of a collection of every encouraging and morally outraged cliche at the good man's disposal. It also revealed, though indirectly, a note of plaintive misery that distressed his son.

All these conscientious guides of youth -- from the headmaster to Father Giebenrath, professors and tutors -- regarded Hans as an impediment in their path, a recalcitrant and listless something which had to be compelled to move. No one, except perhaps Wiedrich, the sympathetic tutor, detected behind the slight boy's helpless smile the suffering of a drowning soul casting about desperately. Nor did it occur to any of them that a fragile creature had been reduced to this state by virtue of school and the barbaric ambition of his father and his grammar-school teacher. Why was he forced to work until late at night during the most sensitive and precarious period of his life? Why purposely alienated from his friends in grammar school? Why deprived of needed rest and forbidden to go fis.h.i.+ng? Why instilled with a shabby ambition? Why had they not even granted him his well-deserved vacation after the examination?

Now the overworked little horse lay by the wayside, no longer of any use.

Toward summer the district doctor once more diagnosed Hans' difficulties as a nervous disorder, due princ.i.p.ally to his growing. Hans was told to convalesce during vacation, eat well, run about the woods, and he would soon be better.

Unfortunately it never came to that. Three weeks before summer vacation Hans was given a sharp tongue-las.h.i.+ng by a professor during the afternoon lesson. While the professor shouted, Hans sank back in his bench, began to tremble and burst into a prolonged fit of weeping, disrupting the entire lesson. He spent the next half-day in bed.

The day following, he was asked during math cla.s.s to draw a geometric figure on the board and demonstrate its proof. He stepped forward, but at the blackboard he felt dizzy, drew crazily with chalk and ruler, then dropped them and when he bent down to pick them up, he fell to the floor, unable to get up.

The district doctor was quite put out that his patient should indulge in such tricks. He ventured a cautious opinion, ordering an immediate sick-leave and calling in a nerve specialist. "That fellow will end up having St. Vitus's dance," he whispered to the headmaster, who nodded and found it expedient to change his facial expression from the previous ungracious angry look to a paternal and sympathetic one -- something which came easily to him and fit him well.

He and the doctor each wrote a letter to Father Giebenrath, put them in the boy's pocket, and sent him home. Then the headmaster's anger changed to profound concern: what was the Stuttgart school board, so recently upset by the Heilner case, to think of this new misfortune? To everyone's astonishment he even dispensed with a lecture suitable to the occasion, and during Hans' last hours in school treated him with an almost ominous affability. It was self-evident to him that Hans would not return after his sick-leave; this student, who had fallen so far behind, could not possibly make up the weeks and months he had missed even if he recovered completely. Although he bade Hans a hearty good-bye with an encouraging, "I hope we'll see you back here soon," whenever he entered h.e.l.las and caught sight of the three empty desks he felt a certain measure of embarra.s.sment. He had trouble suppressing the thought that part of the blame for the disappearance of the two talented boys might yet be attached to him. But as he was a courageous and upright man, he eventually succeeded in dispelling these useless and gloomy doubts.

The monastery with its churches, gateway, gables and towers sank away behind the departing academician with his small suitcase; and in the place of woods and ranges of hills the fertile orchards of Baden's borderland appeared, then came Pforzheim and after that the first of the blue-black spruce-covered hills of the Black Forest, intersected by many valleys and streams. It seemed bluer and cooler, holding more than the usual promise of shady bliss. Hans contemplated the changing and increasingly familiar landscape with pleasure, until he drew near his home town; then he remembered his father, and a deep anxiety about his reception thoroughly ruined what little relief the trip home had afforded him. The trip to Stuttgart and the first trip to Maulbronn and all their expectation, excitement and anxiety came back to mind. What use had it all been? Like the headmaster, he realized that he would never return. This was the end of his academy days and of his studies, and all ambitious hopes. Yet the thought did not really sadden him now; only the fear of his disappointed father, whose hopes he had betrayed, weighed heavily on his heart. He longed for only one thing at present -- to rest, to sleep, to cry, to dream as much as he wanted, to be left in peace. And he was afraid he would not be able to do this at home with his father. At the end of the trip, he had such a violent headache that he stopped looking out the window even though the train was pa.s.sing through his favorite region, whose heights and forest he had roamed with such pa.s.sion at one time. He almost failed to get off at the familiar railroad stop.

He stood there now, umbrella and suitcase in hand, while his father inspected him. The headmaster's last report had changed his disappointment and indignation into boundless fear. He had pictured Hans as hollow-cheeked and completely enfeebled; he found him looking thin and weak, but still walking on his own two legs. He felt a little easier now; but the worst thing was his secret dread of the nervous condition the headmaster and doctor had mentioned. No one in his family had ever suffered from nervous disorders. They always spoke of persons so afflicted with uncomprehending mockery or scornful pity, in the way they talked about lunatics. Now his own Hans was coming home with something like that.

The first day home the boy was glad to have been spared recriminations. Then he began to notice the shy and anxious care his father took of him with such obvious effort on his part. Occasionally he also became aware of his father casting peculiarly probing looks in his direction, regarding him with an unholy curiosity and speaking to him in a muted hypocritical tone of voice, observing him only when he thought Hans would not notice. The upshot of this was that Hans became even more timid; a vague fear of his own condition began to torment him.

When the weather was fine, he would lie for hours in the forest -- and he felt soothed by this. A pale shadow of his former boyhood bliss touched his injured soul: pleasure in flowers and in insects, in observing birds or tracking animals. But this was short-lived. Most of the time he stretched out listless in the moss, suffered from headaches and vainly tried to think of something until daydreams returned to transport him into another realm.

Once he had a dream. He saw his friend Heilner, laid out on a stretcher. When he tried to approach, the headmaster and the teachers kept pus.h.i.+ng him back, and whenever he advanced, they gave him short, painful jabs. The professors and tutors from the academy were not his only tormentors -- the princ.i.p.al of the school and the Stuttgart examiners were also among them, all with embittered countenances. Suddenly the scene changed and the drowned Hindu lay on the stretcher, his comical father in his high top hat standing bowlegged by his side.

There was another dream. He was running in the forest looking for Heilner. He kept spotting him at a great distance among the trees but whenever he was about to shout his name he saw him disappear. Finally Heilner stopped, let him approach and then said: "Hey, you know, I have a sweetheart." Then he broke out into a terribly loud laugh and disappeared in the undergrowth.

In the same dream he saw a slim and handsome man alight from a boat, with tranquil, G.o.dlike eyes and peaceful hands, and he ran up to him. The scene dissolved and he tried to remember what it meant until the sentence in Mark came back to him:

"Straightaway they knew him, they ran up to him." Now he had to remember what form

was and what the present tense, infinitive, perfect and future of the verb were. He had to conjugate it in the singular, dual and plural, and he began to panic whenever he got stuck. When he came to himself again, he felt as if his head were sore inside. When his face involuntarily took on his old guilty and resigned smile, he instantly heard the headmaster say: "Wipe that grin from your face."

All in all, Hans' condition showed little improvement despite the few days during which he felt better. On the contrary, everything was still going downhill with him. The family doctor, who had treated his mother and p.r.o.nounced her dead and who attended his father when he came down with gout, pulled a long face and put off making a diagnosis from one day to the next.

During these weeks Hans realized for the first time that he had had no friends during his last two years in grammar school. Some of his former companions had left town altogether, and others, he noticed, had become apprentices. With none of them did he have anything in common, there was nothing he wanted from any of them, and none of them bothered with him. His old princ.i.p.al twice addressed a few friendly words to him. The Latin teacher and the pastor would give him a friendly nod when they met him on the street, but Hans was no longer any concern of theirs. He was no longer a vessel which could be stuffed with all sorts of things, no longer fertile ground for a variety of seeds; he was no longer worth their time and effort.

Perhaps it would have helped him if the pastor had shown some interest in him. But what should the pastor have done? What he was in a position to give -- knowledge, or at least the incentive to search for it -- he had not withheld from the boy, and that was all he had to give. He was not one of those pastors whose competence in Latin is in doubt and whose sermons are drawn from well-known sources, but to whom you gladly turn in troubled times because of their kind eyes and the friendly words they have for all who suffer. Nor was Papa Giebenrath a friend or consoler, even if he made an effort to conceal his anger and disappointment from Hans.

Thus the boy felt abandoned, unloved; he sat around in the small garden sunning himself, or lay in the woods and gave himself up to his dreams or tormenting thoughts. He was unable to find solace in reading because his eyes and head would begin to hurt as soon as he opened a book, and the ghost of his days at the academy and all his fears would return to haunt him, filling him with dreadful dreams during which he felt as if he were choking and being riveted by burning eyes.

In these desperate and forlorn straits, another ghost approached the sickly boy in the guise of a treacherous comforter that gradually became familiar and indispensable: the thought of death. It was easy enough to obtain a gun or to attach a noose to a tree somewhere in the forest. The thought of death accompanied him on his daily walks. He inspected various quiet, lonely places until he finally chose one where it would be good to die. He designated this as the place where he would definitely end his life. He visited it time and again, and sitting there derived peculiar pleasure from imagining how they would soon find his corpse there. He not only chose a branch for the rope but had tested it -- no further obstacles stood in his way. Little by little he composed a brief farewell letter to his father and a much longer one to Hermann Heilner. They were to be found on his corpse.

These preparations with their sense of purposefulness exerted a beneficial influence on his state of mind. Sitting under the fateful branch, he enjoyed many hours during which the pressure lifted from him and a feeling of almost joyous well-being overcame him.

He did not really know why he hadn't hanged himself long ago. His mind was made up, he had pa.s.sed the death sentence on himself, and this made him feel so well that in the meantime he did not scorn -- in these his last days -- the enjoyment of suns.h.i.+ne and his solitary dreams in the way you do before setting out on a long trip. He could leave any day he chose, everything was settled. And he took particular and bitter satisfaction in lingering voluntarily for a while in his old surroundings, looking into the faces of people who had no idea of his dangerous resolve. Whenever he encountered the doctor, he could not help thinking: "Well, my friend, I'd almost like to be around to see the face you'll make."

Fate allowed him to enjoy his gloomy intentions. She watched him every day sipping a few drops of joy and zest from the cup of death. There might be precious little in store for this crippled young being, but nonetheless it must complete its appointed course and not leave this earth before having drunk a little deeper of life's bitter-sweet waters.

Inescapable, oppressive images haunted him less find less frequently. He gave way to a weary feeling of capitulation, a painless and listless mood in which he saw hours and days pa.s.s, gazed blandly into the blue sky. At times he seemed to be sleepwalking; at others he seemed to be returning to childhood. Once he sat beneath the spruce in their little garden, enveloped in a lazy twilit mood, and hummed, without being aware of it, the same old verses over and over to himself, verses he remembered from his grammar-school days:

"Oh, I am so weary Oh, I am so weak Have no money in my wallet And nothing in my satchel."

He hummed it in the old accustomed manner and thought nothing of repeating the same verse twenty times over. But his father happened to be listening near the window, and was shocked. This pleasant and mindless singsong was beyond his sober sensibility; he interpreted it, with a deep sigh, as a sign of hopeless mental decline. From that day on he watched his son even more anxiously. And his son, of course, noticed and suffered from this. Yet Hans still could not find the right moment to take the rope to the forest and put that strong branch to good use.

Meanwhile the hottest time of year had set in, and now twelve months had pa.s.sed since the examination and the summer holidays which followed. Every so often Hans thought back to those events, but without feeling any particularly strong emotion; he had become quite insensitive. He would have liked to go fis.h.i.+ng again but dared not ask his father for permission. Yet whenever he came near the water and stood any length of time in a place where no one could see him, his eyes eagerly followed the movement of the dark, noiseless fish as they swam about; it was agony to realize that he could not go fis.h.i.+ng.

Every day toward evening he walked a stretch downriver to go swimming. Because he always had to pa.s.s by Inspector Gessler's little house he discovered by chance the return of Emma Gessler, on whom he had such a crush three years ago. He cast a curious eye at her a few times, but he no longer much cared for her. She had been a finely built delicate girl at that time; now she had grown heavy, her movements were angular, her modern hairdo looked far too adult and disfigured her completely. Nor did long dresses suit her, and her attempt to look ladylike was decidedly unfortunate. Hans found her ridiculous but at the same time he felt sorry for her when he remembered how peculiarly sweet and dark and warm he had felt whenever he had seen her. Indeed, everything had been completely different, so much more beautiful, so much livelier! It had been such a long time since he had known anything but Latin, history, Greek, examinations, academy and headaches. In those days his books contained fairy tales, cops and robbers. The mill he had constructed in the garden had been running and in the evening he had listened to Liese tell her wild stories in the gateway of Naschold's house. At that time he had regarded his old neighbor Grossjohann, nicknamed Garibaldi, as a murderer and robber and had dreamed of him. Throughout the year he had always looked forward to something or other every month: hay-making, clover-mowing, the first day you could go fis.h.i.+ng, catch crayfish, pick hops, shake plums off the trees, burn weeds in potato fields, and the first day of thres.h.i.+ng. In between there had been Sundays and holidays. There had been so many things that mysteriously attracted him: houses, little alleys, haylofts, wells, fences; people and animals of every kind had been familiar and dear to him or fascinating. When he had gone hops-picking he listened to the older girls and memorized some of the verses they sang, most of them light and funny but a few oddly sorrowful.

All of that had come to an end without his even noticing it. First the evenings with Liese had been no more, then fis.h.i.+ng for minnows on Sunday mornings, then the reading of fairy tales and so on, one thing after the other, including hops-picking and the mill in the garden. Where had it all gone?

And what happened was that the precocious boy experienced an unreal second childhood during this period of illness. His sensibility, robbed of its real childhood, now fled with sudden yearning back to those already dimming years and wandered spellbound through a forest of memories whose vividness was perhaps of an almost pathological nature. He relived these memories with no less intensity and pa.s.sion than he had experienced them in reality before. His betrayed and violated childhood erupted like a long pent-up spring.

When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.

This is what was happening to Hans Giebenrath, so let us accompany him into his childhood land of dreams.

The Giebenrath house stood near the old stone bridge on a corner between two entirely different streets. The first of these streets, to which the house actually belonged, was the longest, widest, most dignified in town. It was called Tannery Street. The second street led up a steep hill, was short, narrow and miserable; it was named Falcon after an age-old inn that had long since been shut down, whose sign had displayed a falcon.

In house after house on Tannery Street there lived good, solid, well-established families, people who owned their own houses, had their own pews in church, whose gardens rose in terraces steeply uphill and whose fences, all overgrown with yellow broom, bordered on the railroad right-of-way that had been laid out in the 1870's. For splendor and respectability, nothing could compare with Tannery Street except the town square, where church, courthouse, county administration, town hall and vicarage were situated with unalloyed dignity and lent this little town a certain n.o.bility, the illusion of being a city. Tannery Street, though lacking such official attributes, consisted of old and new middle-cla.s.s dwellings with impressive doors, old-fas.h.i.+oned half-timbered houses with brightly decorated gables. The entire street exuded a friendly atmosphere of well-lighted comfort, due in large part to the fact that it consisted of a single row of houses. The other side of the street was open, save for a wall, propped up by wooden pilings, behind which the river flowed.

If Tannery Street was long, wide and s.p.a.ciously dignified, Falcon was the opposite. Here stood warped gloomy houses with splotched and crumbling plaster, gables that lurched forward, broken and often patched windows and doors, crooked chimneys, leaky rain pipes. The houses deprived each other of room and light and the little alley was narrow, oddly twisted and cast in a perpetual gloom which rainstorms or dusk changed into damp darkness. Ma.s.ses of wash always hung on lines and poles outside the windows. As small and miserable as the street was, hordes of people made their homes here, not even counting the subtenants and those who flopped there for the night. Every nook and cranny of these ill-shaped, aging houses was occupied. The street was densely populated and poverty, vice and sickness were rank. If a typhus epidemic broke out, it would start here; if manslaughter were to occur, it would be here, and if something was stolen in town people looked first in the Falcon. Peddlers had their lodgings there, among whom were Hottehotte, the queer vendor of silver polish and Adam Hittel, the scissors grinder, a man accused of every imaginable crime and vice.

During his first years in school Hans had been a frequent visitor in the Falcon. In the company of a dubious gang of flaxen-haired, ragged boys he had listened to the notorious Lotte Frohmuller's tales of murder. She was divorced from a small innkeeper and had spent five years in prison. She had been a well-known beauty in her day, had had any number of lovers among the factory workers, and caused any number of scandals and knife fights. Now she lived alone and spent her evenings, after the factory closed, making coffee and telling stories. Her door was always open and besides the wives and young workers a horde of neighborhood children listened from the doorstep with a mixture of delight and terror. The water in the kettle boiled on the black stone hearth, a tallow candle burned nearby. It added its adventurous flickering to the blue flame from the little coal fire; together they illuminated the overcrowded dark room and cast hugely enlarged shadows of the listeners on walls and ceilings, filling the room with ghostly activity.

Hans made his first acquaintance with the brothers Finkenbein at the age of eight and remained friends with them for almost a year, despite his father's strict prohibition. Dolf and Emil Finkenbein were the sharpest street boys in town. Famous for stealing cherries and apples and minor transgressions against the forestry laws, they were also expert in all kinds of tricks and pranks. On the side they conducted a flouris.h.i.+ng trade in bird eggs, lead pellets, young ravens, starlings and rabbits, and transgressed a town ordinance by leaving baited lines in the river overnight. They felt at home in every garden in town, for no fence was too sharply pointed, no wall so thickly crowned with broken gla.s.s that they could not easily scale it.

Hans had become an even closer friend of Hermann Rechtenheil, who also lived in the Falcon. He was an orphan, a sickly, precocious and unusual child. Because one of his legs was shorter than the other, he could only hobble with the help of a stick and took no part in the street games. He was of slight build and had a pale, ailing face with a mouth prematurely bitter and a chin that was excessively pointed. He was an exceptionally dexterous and enthusiastic angler, a pa.s.sion he communicated to Hans. Hans did not have a fis.h.i.+ng license at that time but they went anyway, secretly, to out-of-the-way spots. If hunting is a pleasure, then poaching, as everyone knows, is a supreme delight. The hobbled Rechtenheil taught Hans to pick the right rods, pleat horsehair, dye his lines, tie running knots and sharpen fishhooks. He taught him to watch for telltale weather signs, to observe the water and muddy it with white clay, select the right bait for fastening to his hook; he also taught him to distinguish the various kinds of fish, to listen for the fish and to keep the line at the proper depth. By wordless example he communicated to Hans the delicate sense of when to pull in or let out the line. He vociferated against store-bought rods, floats and transparent lines and all other artificial paraphernalia, and he convinced Hans that there was no real fis.h.i.+ng with tackle whose parts you had not put together yourself.

Hans and the Finkenbein brothers had gone their separate ways after an angry quarrel. Hans' friends.h.i.+p with the quiet, lame Rechtenheil ended on a different note. One day in February his friend crawled into a miserable little bed, after laying his crutch across his clothes on the chair, and pa.s.sed away quickly and quietly; the Falcon forgot him immediately and only Hans cherished his memory for long.

But this death by no means exhausted the fund of odd people that inhabited the Falcon. Who for instance didn't know Rotteler, the former postman, fired for being an alcoholic, who now lay every week or so in the gutter, the cause of endless nightly uproars but otherwise as gentle as a child, always beaming with goodwill? He had given Hans a sniff from his oval snuffbox, accepted an occasional fish from him, fried them in b.u.t.ter and invited Hans to lunch. He was the proud owner of a stuffed buzzard with gla.s.s eyes, of an old music box that played old-fas.h.i.+oned dances in thin, delicate tones. And who for instance didn't know Porsch, the overaged mechanic, who always wore a tie even when he went barefoot? As the son of a strict rural teacher of the old school he knew half the Bible by heart and could stuff your ears with sayings and moral aphorisms. But neither his tendency to moralize nor his snow-white hair kept him from flirting with all the girls or getting soused regularly. When he was good and high he liked to sit on the curb by the Giebenrath house, addressing everyone by first names and showering them with proverbs.

"Hans Giebenrath, my good son, pray listen to what I have to tell thee! How sayeth Ecclesiasticus? 'Blessed is the man that has not sinned with his mouth and whose conscience hath not condemned him. As of the green leaves on a thick tree, some fall and some grow; so is the generation of flesh and blood, one cometh to an end and another is born.' Well, now be off with you, you old scoundrel."

In spite of all his Christian utterances, old Porsch was full of terrifying legends about ghosts and the like. He was familiar with the places they haunted and always teetered between belief and disbelief in his own stories. Generally he would launch one of them in an uncertain, boastful tone of voice, mocking both story and listener, but during the process of narration he began to hunch forward anxiously; his voice lost more and more volume and in the end became an insistent, uncanny whisper.

What a number of ominous, obscurely alluring things this wretched little street contained! Locksmith Brendly lived there after his business failed, after his disheveled workshop went completely to pot. He sat half the day at his little window, gazing grimly out at the bustling alley; occasionally when one of the filthy, ragged neighborhood children fell into his hands, he tortured it in a fit of malicious glee, pulled its ears and hair and pinched it until its whole body was black and blue. Yet one day he was found hanging from his banister on a piece of zinc wire, looking so hideous that no one dared come near him until old Porsch, the mechanic, cut the wire with metal shears from behind, whereupon the corpse, tongue protruding, plunged head over heels down the stairs into the midst of the horrified spectators.

Every time Hans stepped from the well-lighted broad Tannery Street into the dank darkness of Falcon, its peculiarly cloying air caused a marvelously gruesome sense of oppression, a mixture of curiosity, dread, bad conscience and blissful intimation of adventure. The Falcon was the only place where a fairy tale, a miracle or an unspeakable act of horror might happen, where magic and ghosts were credible, even likely, and where you could experience the very same painfully delicious shudder that comes with reading sagas, or the scandalous Reutlinger Folk Tales, which teachers confiscate and which recount the wicked deeds and punishments of villains like Sonnenwirtle, Schinderhannes, the Postmichel, Jack-the-Ripper and similar sinister heroes, criminals and adventurers.

Apart from the Falcon there was one other place where you could experience and hear unusual things, become lost in dark lofts and strange rooms. That was the nearby tannery, the huge old building where the animal hides hung in the twilit lofts, where the cellars contained hidden covers and forbidden tunnels and where in the evening Liese often told her wonderful stories to all the children. What transpired at the tannery was friendlier and calmer, more human than in the Falcon, but no less mysterious. The work the tanners performed in the various holes, in the cellar, in the tannery yard and on the clay floors seemed strange and unintelligible. The vast rooms were as quiet and as intriguing as they were ominous; the powerfully built and ill-tempered master was shunned and dreaded like a cannibal, and Liese went about this remarkable building like a good fairy, a protector and mother to all children, birds, cats and little dogs, the embodiment of goodness, fairy tales and songs.

Hans' thoughts and dreams now moved in this world to which he had been so long a stranger. He sought refuge from his great disappointment and hopelessness in a past that had been good to him. In those days he had been full of hope, had seen the world lying before him like a vast enchanted forest holding gruesome dangers, accursed treasures and emerald castles in its impenetrable depths. He had entered a little way into this wilderness but he had become weary before he had found miracles. Now he stood once more before the mysteriously twilit entrance, as an exile whose curiosity was futile.

Hans went back to the Falcon a few times and found there the familiar dankness and vile odors, the old nooks and lightless stairwells. h.o.a.ry men and women still sat about on doorsteps, and unwashed, flaxen-haired children ran around yelling. Porsch, the mechanic, looked older than ever, no longer recognized Hans and replied to his timid greeting with derisive cackling. Grossjohann, nicknamed Garibaldi, had died, as had Lotte Frohmuller. Rotteler, the mailman, still existed. He complained that the boys had ruined his music box, proffered his snuffbox and then tried to touch Hans for a few pennies; finally he told about the brothers Finkenbein -- one of them worked at the cigar factory and was drinking as heavily as his old man; the other had fled after being involved in a knife fight at a church bazaar and had not been heard of or seen for a year. All that made a pitiful impression on Hans.

One evening Hans went over to the tannery. Something seemed to draw him through the gateway and across the damp yard as though his childhood and all its vanished joys lay hidden in the huge old building.

After walking up the uneven steps and across the cobblestone court, he came to the dark stairway and groped his way to the clay court where the hides were stretched to dry: there with the pungent smell of the leather he inhaled a whole world of resurgent memories. He climbed down again and looked into the backyard that contained the tannery pits and the high, narrow-roofed frames for dying tanner's bark. Liese sat at her appointed spot on the bench by the wall, a basket full of potatoes in front of her, and a few children around her, listening.

Hans stopped in the dark doorway and c.o.c.ked his ear in her direction. A great sense of peace filled the twilit tanner's garden. Apart from the soft rus.h.i.+ng sound the river made as it flowed past, behind the wall, all there was to hear was the soft rasping of Liese's knife against the potatoes and her voice, telling stories. The children sat or crouched calmly and hardly moved. She was recounting the tale of St. Christopher, whom a child's voice called across the stream at night.

Hans listened for a while. Then he walked slowly back through the courtyard and home. He felt that he could not become a child again after all and sit beside Liese, and from now on he avoided the tannery as much as the Falcon.

Chapter Six.

Fall had left its marks: isolated beech trees and birches held yellow and red torches among the dark spruces. Fog hovered in the ravines for longer periods, and the river steamed in the mornings.

Hans, the pale ex-academician, still roamed the countryside each day. He felt listless and unhappy and avoided what little company he could have had. The doctor prescribed drops, cod liver oil, eggs and cold showers.

No wonder that none of this helped. Every healthy person must have a goal in life and that life must have content; young Giebenrath had lost both. His father now concluded that Hans should become a clerk or be apprenticed to some craftsman. But the boy was still weak and needed to regain more of his strength. Even so, the time had come to get serious with him.

Since the first bewildering impressions had receded and since he no longer believed in committing suicide, Hans had drifted from his hysterically unpredictable state of fear into one of uniform melancholy into which he sank deeper slowly and helplessly as if in a bog.

Now he roamed the autumnal fields and succ.u.mbed to the influence of that season. The decline of the year in silently falling leaves, the fading of the meadows in the dense early morning fog and the ripe, weary yearning for death of all vegetation induced in Hans, as in all sick persons, a receptivity to melancholy and despair. He felt the desire to sink down, to fall asleep, to die, and suffered agonies because his youth itself made this impossible, clinging to life with its quiet obstinacy.

He watched the trees turn yellow, brown, bare; the milk-white fog rise like smoke out of the forests and gardens where all life has died out after the last fruits are picked but in which no one paid heed to the colorfully fading asters. He watched fallen leaves cover the river where no one fished or swam any more, whose cold edge was left to the tanners alone.

During the last few days ma.s.ses of apple-pulp had been floating down-river. People were busy making cider and the fragrance of fermenting fruit juice could be smelled all over town.

In the mill, which was furthest downstream, shoemaker Flaig had rented a small cider press and invited Hans to help him with the work.

The yard in front of the mill was covered with cider presses, large and small, with carts, baskets and sacks full of fruit, with tubs, vats, barrels, whole mountains of brown apple-pulp, wooden levers, wheelbarrows, empty carts. The presses labored, crunched, squeaked, groaned and bleated. Most of them were lacquered green, and this green along with the yellowed pulp, the colors of the fruit in baskets, the light green river, the barefoot children and the clear autumn sun made on everyone witnessing this scene an impression of joy, zest and plenty. The crunching of the apples sounded harsh but appetizing. Anyone pa.s.sing by who heard this sound could not help reaching for an apple and taking a bite. The sweet cider poured out of the pipes in a thick stream, reddish-yellow, sparkling in the sun. Anyone pa.s.sing by who saw this could not help asking for a gla.s.s, taking a sip and then just standing there, his eyes moistened by a sense of well-being and sweetness which surged through him. And this sweet cider filled the air far and wide with its delicious fragrance.

This fragrance really was the best part of the year, for it is the very essence of ripeness and harvest. It is good to suck it into your lungs with winter so near since it makes you grateful and brings back a host of memories: of the gentle May rains, summer downpours, cool morning dew in autumn, tender spring sun, blazing hot summer afternoons, the whites and rose-red blossoms and the ripe red-brown glow of fruit trees before the harvest -- everything beautiful and joyful that happens in the course of a year.

Those were marvelous days for everyone. The ostentatiously rich, inasmuch as they condescended to appear in person, weighed a juicy apple in one hand, counted their half-dozen or more sacks, sampled their cider with a silver beaker and made sure everyone heard how not a single drop of water weakened it. The poor brought only one sack full of apples, sampled their cider with a gla.s.s or an earthenware dish, added water and were no less proud or happy. Those unable to make their own cider ran from one acquaintance and neighbor's press to the other, received a gla.s.sful of cider and an apple from all of them and demonstrated by way of expert commentary that they knew their part of the business too. All the children, rich and poor, ran about with little beakers, each clutching a half-eaten apple and a hunk of bread, for, according to an old but unfounded legend, if you ate enough bread while drinking new cider you would avoid an upset stomach.

Hundreds of voices yelled and screamed at the same time, that is, apart from the racket the children made, and all these noises contributed to a busy, excited and cheerful hubbub.

"Hey, Hannes, come here! Over here. Just one gla.s.sful."

"Thanks, thanks. I've the runs already."

"What d'you pay for the hundredweight?"

"Four marks. But they're great. Here, have a sip."

Occasionally a small mishap occurred. A sack of apples would burst and the apples would roll into the dirt.

"Dammit, my apples! Help me, you people!"

Everyone would help pick up the spilled apples and only a few little punks would take advantage of the situation.