Chapter One
Mr. Joseph Giebenrath, middleman and agent, was distinguished from his fellow citizens by no merits or peculiarities whatever. Like them he possessed a broad, healthy figure, a passable talent for business, joined to a sincere and heartfelt reverence for money, and in addition a small house with a little garden, a family grave in the cemetery, a churchgoing piety that had become somewhat enlightened and threadbare, a proper respect for God and the authorities, and a blind submission to the iron commandments of middle-class respectability. He drank many a glass but was never drunk. On the side he undertook many a deal that was not quite above reproach, but he never carried one beyond the limits of what was formally allowed. He called poorer people starvelings and richer people show-offs. He was a member of the citizens’ club and took part every Friday in the bowling at the Eagle, and also in every baking day, as well as in the feasts of pickled tripe and the sausage-soup suppers at hog-killing time. For work he smoked cheap cigars, and after dinner and on Sundays a finer brand.
His inner life was that of the philistine. What little feeling he possessed had long since gathered dust, and consisted of little more than a traditional, gruff sense of family, a pride in his own son, and an occasional mood for giving to the poor. His mental gifts did not go beyond an inborn and strictly limited shrewdness and a knack for figures. His reading was confined to the newspaper, and to meet his need for the pleasures of art the citizens’ club’s yearly amateur theatricals sufficed, with a visit to a circus now and then.
He could have exchanged name and house with any neighbor at all without anything being different. Even the deepest thing in his soul, the sleepless distrust of every superior force and personality and the instinctive hostility, grown out of envy, toward everything out of the ordinary, freer, finer, more spiritual, he shared with all the other fathers of families in the town.
Enough of him. Only a profound ironist would be equal to depicting this shallow life and its unconscious tragedy. But this man had an only son, and it is of him that we have to speak.
Hans Giebenrath was without doubt a gifted child; one had only to look at him to see how fine and set apart he went about among the others. The little Black Forest town did not otherwise produce such figures; no one had ever come out of it who had had a vision or an influence reaching beyond the narrowest limits. God knows where the boy got his earnest eyes and his intelligent forehead and the fineness of his walk. From his mother, perhaps? She had been dead for years, and in her lifetime no one had noticed anything remarkable about her except that she had always been sickly and careworn. The father did not come into consideration. So the mysterious spark from above had really leaped, for once, into the old town, which in its eight or nine centuries had brought forth so many capable citizens but never yet a talent or a genius.
A subtle observer with a modern training, remembering the frail mother and the considerable age of the family, might have spoken of a hypertrophy of the intellect as a symptom of incipient degeneration. But the town was fortunate enough to harbor no people of that sort, and only the younger and more clever among the officials and schoolmasters had some uncertain notion, from magazine articles, of the existence of the “modern man.” One could still live there and be educated without knowing the speeches of Zarathustra; marriages were sound and often happy, and the whole of life had an incurably old-fashioned air. The snug, well-to-do citizens, a number of whom had risen in the last twenty years from craftsmen to manufacturers, did take off their hats to the officials and seek their company, but among themselves they called them starvelings and pen pushers. Strangely enough, they knew no higher ambition than to let their sons study, if possible, and become officials. Unfortunately this almost always remained a lovely, unfulfilled dream, for the younger generation mostly got through the Latin school only with much groaning and with being kept back a year more than once.
About Hans Giebenrath’s gifts there was no doubt. The teachers, the rector, the neighbors, the town pastor, his schoolmates, and everyone else agreed that the boy had a fine head and was something special altogether. With that his future was decided and settled. For in the Swabian lands there is only a single narrow path for gifted boys, unless their parents happen to be rich: through the state examination into the seminary, from there to the theological college at Tübingen, the Stift, and from there either into the pulpit or onto the lecturer’s platform. Year after year three or four dozen sons of the land set out on this quiet, safe road, thin, overworked boys newly confirmed, pass at the state’s expense through the various fields of humanistic learning, and eight or nine years later begin the second, usually longer part of their life’s journey, on which they are to pay back to the state the benefits they have received.
In a few weeks the “state examination” was to take place again. That is the name of the yearly hecatomb at which “the state” selects the intellectual flower of the land, and during which the sighs, prayers, and wishes of numerous families in towns and villages are turned toward the capital, in whose lap the examination is held.
Hans Giebenrath was the only candidate the little town intended to send into the painful competition. The honor was great, but he had by no means received it for nothing. The school lessons, which lasted every day until four o’clock, were followed by an extra lesson in Greek with the rector; at six the town pastor was then kind enough to give a review hour in Latin and religion; and twice a week, after supper, there was an hour’s further instruction with the mathematics teacher. In Greek the chief weight, after the irregular verbs, was laid on the variety of sentence connections to be expressed by the particles; in Latin the thing was to be clear and terse in style and above all to know the many fine points of prosody; in mathematics the main emphasis was placed on complicated problems of proportion. These, as the teacher often stressed, were apparently of no value for later study and life, but only apparently. In reality they were very important, indeed more important than many of the main subjects, for they train the logical faculties and are the foundation of all clear, sober, and successful thinking.
So that there should be no mental overload, however, and so that the feelings should not be forgotten and wither away over the exercises of the intellect, Hans was allowed to attend the confirmation class every morning an hour before school began, where out of Brenz’s catechism, and out of the stimulating memorization and recitation of its questions and answers, a refreshing breath of religious life passed into the youthful souls. Unfortunately he spoiled these restorative hours for himself and robbed himself of their blessing. He secretly laid sheets of paper with writing on them in his catechism, Greek and Latin vocabulary or exercises, and occupied himself almost the whole hour with these worldly studies. Yet his conscience was at least not so dulled that he did not feel a constant painful uncertainty and a faint sense of fear as he did so. When the dean came near him, or even called his name, he started timidly each time, and when he had to give an answer his forehead was wet with sweat and his heart was pounding. But the answers were faultlessly correct, the pronunciation too, and the dean set great store by that.
The assignments, for writing or memorizing, for review and preparation, that piled up from lesson to lesson during the day, could then be done at home late in the evening by cozy lamplight. This quiet work, so beneficially sheltered by domestic peace, to which the form master ascribed a particularly deep and helpful effect, lasted on Tuesdays and Saturdays usually only until about ten o’clock, but otherwise until eleven, until twelve, and now and then past that. His father grumbled a little over the boundless use of lamp oil, but still looked upon this studying with complacent pride. For any leisure hours, and for the Sundays, which after all make up the seventh part of our lives, the reading of a few authors not read in school and an ample review of grammar were urgently recommended.
“In moderation, of course, in moderation! Going for a walk once or twice a week is necessary and does wonders. In fine weather you can take a book outdoors with you, too—you’ll see how easily and cheerfully you learn out there in the fresh air. And in general, head up!”
So Hans kept his head up as well as he could, from now on used his walks for studying too, and went about quietly and timidly with a face worn from lack of sleep and tired eyes ringed with blue.
“What do you think of Giebenrath? He’ll get through, won’t he?” the form master said to the rector one day.
“He will, he will,” the rector cried out happily. “He’s one of the really clever ones; just look at him, why, he looks positively spiritual.”
In the last week the spirituality had become striking. In the pretty, delicate boy’s face burned deep-set, restless eyes with a dull glow; on the handsome forehead fine lines twitched that betrayed intellect; and the arms and hands, thin and gaunt in any case, hung down with a weary grace that recalled Botticelli.
Now the time had come. Early tomorrow he was to travel with his father to Stuttgart and show there, in the state examination, whether he was worthy to enter through the narrow monastery gate of the seminary. He had just paid his farewell call on the rector.
“This evening,” the dreaded ruler said at the end, with unusual gentleness, “you’re not to do any more work. Promise me. You must be absolutely fresh when you present yourself in Stuttgart tomorrow. Go for a walk for an hour, and afterward go to bed in good time. Young people must have their sleep.”
Hans was astonished to meet with so much kindness instead of the dreaded mass of advice, and stepped out of the schoolhouse with a breath of relief. The great lindens on the church hill gleamed dully in the hot sunlight of late afternoon; in the market square both big fountains splashed and sparkled; over the irregular line of the roofs the near, blue-black fir-covered mountains looked in. The boy felt as if he had not seen all this for a long time, and everything seemed to him unusually beautiful and inviting. He had a headache, it was true, but today he did not have to study anything more.
Slowly he strolled across the market square, past the old town hall, through Market Street and past the cutler’s shop to the old bridge. There he wandered back and forth for a while and finally sat down on the broad parapet. For weeks and months he had walked past here four times every day and had had no eye for the little Gothic chapel on the bridge, nor for the river, nor for the sluice gate, the weir, and the mill, not even for the bathing meadow and the willow-lined banks, where one tanners’ yard lay next to another, where the river stood deep, green, and still as a lake, and where the curved, pointed willow branches hung down into the water.
Now he remembered again how many half days and whole days he had spent here, how often he had swum and dived and rowed and fished here. Oh, the fishing! He had almost unlearned and forgotten that too, and last year he had cried so bitterly when it was forbidden him, because of the work for the examination. Fishing! That had been the best thing in all the long years of school. Standing in the thin shade of the willows, the nearby roar of the mill weirs, the deep, quiet water! And the play of light on the river, the gentle swaying of the long rod, the excitement of the bite and the pull, and the peculiar joy when you held a cool, fat, wriggling fish in your hand!
He had pulled out many a juicy carp, after all, and whitefish and barbel, and now and then a delicate tench, too, or one of the small, rare, beautifully colored minnows. For a long time he gazed over the water, and at the sight of the whole green bend of the river he grew thoughtful and sad and felt the lovely, free, wild joys of boyhood lying so far behind him. Mechanically he took a piece of bread out of his pocket, formed big and little balls out of it, threw them into the water, and watched how they sank and were snapped up by the fish. First came the tiny goldfins and bleak, greedily ate the smaller pieces, and pushed the big ones ahead of them in zigzags with hungry snouts. Then, slowly and cautiously, a larger whitefish approached, its dark, broad back standing out faintly against the bottom, sailed deliberately around the ball of bread, and then let it vanish into its suddenly opened round mouth. From the sluggishly flowing water a moist, warm smell rose up; a few bright clouds were mirrored indistinctly in the green surface; in the mill the circular saw groaned, and the two weirs roared coolly and deeply into each other. The boy thought of confirmation Sunday, which had been only recently, and on which he had caught himself memorizing a Greek verb in the midst of all the solemnity and emotion. Lately it had often happened to him at other times too that his thoughts got mixed up, and that in school he kept thinking, instead of about the work in front of him, about the work before it or one still to come. A fine examination it was going to be!
Absently he got up from his seat and could not decide where to go. He started violently when a strong hand took hold of his shoulder and a friendly man’s voice spoke to him.
“Good day, Hans, will you walk along with me a bit?”
It was Flaig the shoemaker, with whom he had sometimes spent an evening hour in the past, but none for a long while now. Hans went along and listened to the devout Pietist without real attention. Flaig talked about the examination, wished the boy luck, and gave him courage, but the final purpose of his speech was to point out that an examination like that was, after all, only something outward and accidental. To fail was no disgrace; it could happen to the best; and if it should go that way with him, he should remember that God had his special purposes with every soul and led each one by its own ways.
Hans did not have an altogether clear conscience toward the man. He felt a high regard for him and his sure, impressive manner, and yet he had heard so many jokes about the prayer-meeting brethren and had laughed along at them, often against his better knowledge; besides, he had his cowardice to be ashamed of; for some time now he had been avoiding the shoemaker almost fearfully because of his sharp questions. Since he had become the pride of his teachers and a little arrogant himself, Master Flaig had often looked at him so oddly and tried to humble him. Because of that the boy’s soul had gradually slipped away from its well-meaning guide, for Hans was in the full flower of boyish defiance and had fine feelers for any unwelcome touch to his self-esteem. Now he walked beside the talking man and did not know how anxiously and kindly the other looked down on him.
In Crown Street they met the town pastor. The shoemaker greeted him with measured coolness and was suddenly in a hurry, for the town pastor was one of the new-fashioned kind and had the reputation of not even believing in the resurrection. The pastor took the boy along with him.
“How are things?” he asked. “You must be glad the time has come at last.”
“Yes, it’s all right with me.”
“Well, do your best! You know we’re all setting our hopes on you. In Latin I expect a special performance from you.”
“But if I fail,” Hans said shyly.
“Fail?!” The clergyman stopped short in alarm. “Failing is simply impossible. Simply impossible. What thoughts you have!”
“I only mean it could happen, after all…”
“It can’t, Hans, it can’t; you can set your mind entirely at rest about that. And now give my regards to your papa, and have courage!”
Hans looked after him; then he looked around for the shoemaker. What was it he had said? Latin didn’t matter so much, as long as your heart was in the right place and you feared God. It was easy for him to talk. And now the town pastor on top of it. He could never show his face to him again if he failed.
Downcast, he crept home and into the small, sloping garden. Here stood a rotting garden house that had not been used for a long time; in it, in his day, he had knocked together a hutch of boards and kept rabbits in it for three years. Last fall they had been taken away from him, because of the examination. He had no longer had time for amusements.
He had not been in the garden for a long time either. The empty hutch looked ready to fall down, the little grotto of tufa stones in the corner of the wall had collapsed, the small wooden waterwheel lay bent and broken beside the water pipe. He thought of the time when he had built and carved all this and had had his joy in it. That too was two years ago now—a whole eternity. He picked up the little wheel, bent it this way and that, broke it completely, and threw it over the fence. Away with the stuff, it was all long since over and done with. At that his school friend August came into his mind. August had helped him build the waterwheel and mend the rabbit hutch. Whole afternoons they had played here, shot with the slingshot, stalked the cats, built tents, and eaten raw yellow carrots for their afternoon snack. But then the grinding had begun, and a year ago August had left school and become a mechanic’s apprentice. Since then he had shown up only twice. Of course, he too had no time anymore now.
Cloud shadows ran hastily across the valley; the sun already stood near the rim of the mountains. For a moment the boy had the feeling that he must throw himself down and howl. Instead he fetched the hatchet out of the shed, swung it through the air with his skinny little arms, and hacked the rabbit hutch into a hundred pieces. The slats flew apart, the nails bent with a screech, a bit of rotten rabbit fodder, still from last summer, came to light. He hacked away at it all as though he could kill his longing for the rabbits and for August and for all the old childish things.
“Now, now, now, now, now, what sort of business is this?” his father called from the window. “What are you doing there?”
“Firewood.”
He gave no further answer, but threw the hatchet away, ran across the yard into the lane, and then upstream along the bank. Out near the brewery two rafts lay tied up. On rafts like these he had often drifted downriver for hours in the past, on warm summer afternoons, at once excited and lulled to sleep by the ride on the water that slapped between the logs. He jumped across onto the loose, floating logs, lay down on a heap of willow withes, and tried to imagine that the raft was under way, moving now quickly, now hesitantly, past meadows, fields, villages, and cool edges of woods, under bridges and through raised sluice gates, and he was lying on it and everything was the way it used to be, when he still gathered rabbit fodder on the Kapfberg, fished in the tanners’ gardens along the bank, and had no headache and no worries yet.
Tired and sulky, he came home to supper. His father was terribly excited about the coming trip to Stuttgart for the examination and asked a dozen times whether the books were packed, whether he had laid out his black suit, whether he did not want to read in his grammar on the way, whether he felt well. Hans gave short, snappish answers, ate little, and soon said good night.
“Good night, Hans. Sleep well, now! I’ll wake you at six tomorrow, then. You haven’t forgotten the lexicon, have you?” “No, I haven’t forgotten ‘the’ lexicon. Good night!”
In his little room he sat awake for a long time without a light. Up to now this had been the only blessing the business of the examination had brought him—the little room of his own, in which he was master and was not disturbed. Here, in the struggle with fatigue, sleep, and headache, he had brooded away long evening hours over Caesar, Xenophon, grammars, dictionaries, and mathematical problems, tenacious, defiant, and ambitious, often close to despair too. But here he had also had the few hours that were worth more to him than all the lost pleasures of boyhood, those few dreamlike, strange hours full of pride and intoxication and the courage of victory, in which he had dreamed and longed his way beyond school, examination, and everything into a circle of higher beings. Then a bold, blissful presentiment had seized him that he really was something other and better than his fat-cheeked, good-natured classmates and might perhaps one day look down on them in superiority from a remote height. Now too he breathed more freely, as though there were a freer and cooler air in this little room, sat down on the bed, and drowsed away a few hours in dreams, wishes, and presentiments. Slowly the light lids fell over his large, overworked eyes, opened once more, blinked, and fell again; the pale boyish head sank onto the thin shoulder, the slender arms stretched out wearily. He had fallen asleep in his clothes, and the soft, motherly hand of slumber smoothed the waves in his restless child’s heart and erased the little lines on his pretty forehead.
It was unheard of. The rector himself, despite the early hour, had taken the trouble to come to the station. Mr. Giebenrath was encased in his black frock coat and could not stand still for excitement, joy, and pride; he tripped nervously around the rector and around Hans, let the stationmaster and all the railway men wish him a good journey and good luck for his son’s examination, and held his small, stiff suitcase now in his left hand, now in his right. His umbrella he held now under his arm, now clamped between his knees; he dropped it several times and each time set the suitcase down in order to be able to pick it up again. One would have thought he was traveling to America and not to Stuttgart on a round-trip ticket. The son seemed quite calm, but secret fear was choking him in the throat.
The train came in and stopped, they got on, the rector waved his hand, the father lit a cigar, below them in the valley the town and the river disappeared. The journey was torture for both of them.
In Stuttgart the father suddenly came to life and began to be cheerful, affable, and a man of the world; he was animated by the bliss of the small-town man who has come to the royal capital for a few days. Hans, though, grew quieter and more fearful; a deep oppression took hold of him at the sight of the city; the strange faces, the swaggeringly tall, overdressed houses, the long, tiring walks, the horse-drawn streetcars and the noise of the streets intimidated him and hurt him. They were lodging with an aunt, and there the strange rooms, the friendliness and talkativeness of the aunt, the long, aimless sitting around, and the father’s endless encouraging talk crushed the boy completely. Strange and lost, he hunched about the room, and when he looked at the unfamiliar surroundings, the aunt and her city clothes, the large-patterned wallpaper, the mantel clock, the pictures on the wall, or through the window at the noisy street, he felt utterly betrayed, and it seemed to him then that he had been away from home for an eternity already and had for the time being entirely forgotten everything he had learned with so much toil.
In the afternoon he had wanted to go over the Greek particles once more, but the aunt suggested a walk. For a moment something like green meadows and the rushing of woods rose before Hans’s inner eye, and he gladly accepted. Soon enough, though, he saw that taking a walk here in the big city was a different kind of pleasure from walking at home.
He went alone with the aunt, since Papa was paying calls in the city. On the very stairs the misery began. On the second floor they met a stout, haughty-looking lady, to whom the aunt dropped a curtsy and who at once began to chat with great eloquence. The halt lasted more than a quarter of an hour. Hans stood beside them, pressed against the banister, was sniffed at and growled at by the lady’s little dog, and understood vaguely that they were talking about him too, for the stout stranger looked him up and down repeatedly through her pince-nez. They were barely out on the street when the aunt went into a shop, and it was a good while before she came back. Meanwhile Hans stood shyly in the street, was pushed aside by passersby and jeered at by street boys. When the aunt came back out of the shop, she handed him a bar of chocolate, and he thanked her politely, although he did not like chocolate. At the next corner they got on the horsecar, and now they rode in the overcrowded car with constant ringing through streets and more streets, until at last they reached a great avenue and park. There a fountain was playing, fenced flowerbeds were blooming, and goldfish swam in a small artificial pond. They strolled up and down, back and forth, and in circles amid a swarm of other strollers, and saw a mass of faces, of elegant and other clothes, bicycles, invalid chairs, and baby carriages, heard a tangle of voices, and breathed a warm, dusty air. At the end they sat down on a bench beside other people. The aunt had talked away almost the whole time; now she sighed, smiled lovingly at the boy, and told him to eat his chocolate now. He did not want to.
“Good Lord, you’re not going to be shy? No, go on and eat it, eat!”
So he took out his little bar, tugged for a while at the silver paper, and finally bit off a tiny piece. Chocolate was something he simply could not stand for the life of him, but he did not dare tell the aunt so. While he was still sucking and choking on the bite, the aunt had discovered an acquaintance in the crowd and dashed off.
“Just stay sitting here, I’ll be right back.”
Hans breathed with relief, used the opportunity, and flung his chocolate far away onto the lawn. Then he swung his legs in time, stared at all the people, and felt unhappy. In the end he began once again to recite the irregular verbs, but to his mortal terror he knew almost none of them anymore. Forgotten, all of it! And tomorrow was the state examination.
The aunt came back and had learned in the meantime that there were a hundred and eighteen candidates for the state examination this year. Only thirty-six could pass, though. At that the boy’s heart sank completely into his boots, and he did not say another word the whole way home. At the house he got a headache, again would not eat anything, and was in such despair that his father gave him a sound scolding and even the aunt found him unbearable. In the night he slept heavily and deeply, pursued by hideous dream scenes. He saw himself sitting in the examination with the hundred and seventeen others; the examiner looked now like the town pastor at home, now like the aunt, and heaped up mountains of chocolate in front of him that he was supposed to eat. And while he ate in tears, he saw the others stand up one after another and disappear through a little door. They had all eaten their mountain, but his grew bigger and bigger before his eyes, swelled over table and bench, and seemed about to smother him.
The next morning, while Hans was drinking his coffee and not letting the clock out of his sight, so as not to be late for the examination on any account, many people in his home town were thinking of him. First of all Flaig the shoemaker; he said his prayer before the morning soup, the family together with the journeymen and both apprentices stood in a circle around the table, and to his usual morning prayer the master today added the words: “O Lord, hold thy hand also over the pupil Hans Giebenrath, who goes into the examination today; bless and strengthen him, and let him one day become a true and valiant preacher of thy divine name!”
The town pastor did not pray for him, it is true, but at breakfast he said to his wife, “Now the little Giebenrath is going into the examination. He’ll become something special yet; people will take notice of him, and then it won’t do any harm that I stepped in to help him with the Latin lessons.”
The form master, before he began the lesson, said to his pupils, “So, now the state examination is starting in Stuttgart, and we want to wish Giebenrath all the best. Not that he needs it, for he can put ten lazybones like you in his pocket.” And now almost all the pupils too thought of the absent one, especially the many who had made bets among themselves on his passing or failing.
And since heartfelt intercession and fervent sympathy easily work at a distance across great stretches, Hans too could feel that they were thinking of him at home. True, he went into the examination hall with a pounding heart, accompanied by his father, followed the instructions of the attendant timidly and fearfully, and looked around the large room full of pale boys like a criminal in the torture chamber. But when the professor had come in, called for silence, and dictated the text for the Latin composition, Hans found it, with a breath of relief, ridiculously easy. Quickly and almost cheerfully he made his rough draft, then wrote it out in a careful fair copy, and was one of the first to hand in his work. Afterward, to be sure, he missed the way to the aunt’s house and wandered about for two hours in the hot city streets, but that did not much disturb the balance he had found again; he was even glad to escape from the aunt and his father for a while longer, and as he wandered through the strange, noisy streets of the capital he felt like a daring adventurer. When at last he had asked his way with difficulty and found his way home, he was stormed with questions.
“How did it go? What was it like? Did you know your stuff?”
“It was easy,” he said proudly. “I could have translated that in the fifth form.”
And he ate with honest hunger.
He had the afternoon free. Papa dragged him around to a few relatives and friends. At one of them they found a shy boy dressed in black who had come from Göppingen, also to take the state examination. The boys were left to themselves and looked at each other shyly and curiously.
“What did you think of the Latin paper? Easy, wasn’t it?” Hans asked.
“Awfully easy. But that’s just the thing, in easy papers you make the most blunders. You don’t pay attention. And there’ll have been hidden traps in it too, all right.”
“You think so?”
“Of course. Those gentlemen aren’t so stupid.”
Hans was a little startled and grew thoughtful. Then he asked timidly, “Do you still have the text?”
The other brought his notebook, and now they went through the whole paper together, word for word. The boy from Göppingen seemed to be a sophisticated Latinist; at least he twice used grammatical terms that Hans had never heard at all.
“And what do you think comes tomorrow?”
“Greek and composition.”
Then the boy from Göppingen asked how many candidates had come from Hans’s school.
“None,” said Hans, “only me.”
“Whew, there are twelve of us from Göppingen! Three really clever ones among them; they’re expected to come out among the first. Last year the top boy was from Göppingen too.—Will you go to the gymnasium if you fail?”
There had never been any talk of that at all.
“I don’t know… No, I don’t think so.”
“No? I’m going on with my studies in any case, even if I fail now. Then my mother will let me go to Ulm.”
That impressed Hans enormously. The twelve from Göppingen with the three really clever ones frightened him too. He could never show his face again.
At home he sat down and went over the verbs in -mi once more. He had not been at all afraid of the Latin; there he felt sure of himself. But with Greek it was a peculiar thing. He liked it, he was almost enthusiastic about it, but only for reading. Xenophon especially was written so beautifully and nimbly and freshly; everything sounded cheerful, lovely, and vigorous and had a brisk, free spirit, and it was all easy to understand, besides. But as soon as it came to grammar, or to translating from German into Greek, he felt himself lost in a labyrinth of conflicting rules and forms and felt almost the same fearful awe of the foreign language as he had in the first lesson long ago, when he could not even read the Greek alphabet yet.
The next day, sure enough, Greek came up, and after it German composition. The Greek paper was rather long and not at all easy; the subject of the composition was tricky and could be misunderstood. From ten o’clock on it grew sultry and hot in the hall. Hans did not have a good pen and spoiled two sheets of paper before the Greek paper was written out in fair copy. During the composition he got into the direst straits because of a brazen neighbor who pushed a sheet of paper with a question on it across to him and nudged him in the ribs to make him answer. All communication with one’s neighbors on the bench was most strictly forbidden and was inexorably followed by exclusion from the examination. Trembling with fear, he wrote on the slip, “Leave me alone,” and turned his back on the questioner. It was so hot, too. Even the supervising professor, who paced the hall steadily and evenly and did not rest for a moment, passed his handkerchief over his face several times. Hans sweated in his thick confirmation suit, got a headache, and in the end handed in his sheets quite miserably, with the feeling that they were full of mistakes and that the examination was probably finished for him now.
At the table he did not say a word, but only shrugged at every question and made a face like a condemned man. The aunt comforted him, but his father grew agitated and unpleasant. After the meal he took the boy into the next room and tried once more to question him.
“It went badly,” said Hans.
“Why didn’t you pay attention? A person can pull himself together, after all, damn it.”
Hans said nothing, and when his father began to scold, he turned red and said, “You don’t understand anything about Greek anyway!”
The worst of it was that at two o’clock he had to go to the oral examination. He dreaded that most of all. On the way, in the burning-hot city street, he felt utterly wretched, and for misery and fear and dizziness he could hardly see out of his eyes.
For ten minutes he sat before three gentlemen at a big green table, translated a few Latin sentences, and answered the questions put to him. Then for ten minutes he sat before three other gentlemen, translated Greek, and again was asked all sorts of things. At the end they wanted an irregularly formed aorist from him, but he gave no answer.
“You may go. There, the door on the right.”
He went, but in the doorway the aorist came to him after all. He stopped.
“Go on,” they called to him, “go on! Or are you perhaps unwell?”
“No, but the aorist just came to me.”
He called it into the room, saw one of the gentlemen laugh, and rushed away with his head burning. Then he tried to remember the questions and his answers, but everything got mixed up. He saw only, again and again, the big green surface of the table, the three old, serious gentlemen in frock coats, the open book, and his hand laid on it, trembling. Good God, what answers might he have given!
As he walked through the streets it seemed to him that he had been here for weeks already and could never get away again. Like something very far away, something seen once long ago, the picture of his father’s garden appeared to him, the mountains blue with firs, the fishing spots on the river. Oh, if only he could go home today! There was no point in staying any longer, after all; the examination was botched in any case.
He bought himself a milk roll and loafed about the streets the whole livelong afternoon, just so as not to have to answer to his father. When he finally came home, they had been worried about him, and since he looked exhausted and miserable, they gave him an egg soup and sent him to bed. Tomorrow came arithmetic and religion, and then he could leave again.
It went quite well the following morning. Hans felt it as bitter irony that everything went right for him today, after he had had such bad luck yesterday in the main subjects. No matter, just away now, home!
“The examination is over, now we can go home,” he announced at the aunt’s.
His father wanted to stay on today. They were going to drive to Cannstatt and drink coffee in the spa gardens there. But Hans begged so imploringly that his father allowed him to leave alone that very day. He was put on the train, received his ticket, got a kiss from the aunt and something to eat for the journey, and now rode home, exhausted and empty of thought, through the green hill country. Only when the blue-black fir-covered mountains came into view did a feeling of joy and deliverance come over the boy. He looked forward to the old maid, to his little room, to the rector, to the familiar low schoolroom, and to everything.
Luckily there were no curious acquaintances at the station, and he could hurry home with his little parcel unnoticed.
“Was it nice in Stuttgart?” asked old Anna.
“Nice? Do you think an examination is something nice? I’m just glad I’m back. Father isn’t coming till tomorrow.”
He drank a bowl of fresh milk, fetched in his bathing trunks that were hanging outside the window, and ran off, but not to the meadow where all the others did their swimming.
He went far out beyond the town to the Scales, where the water flows deep and slow between high bushes. There he undressed, put his hand and then his foot gropingly into the cool water, shivered a little, and then threw himself into the river with a quick plunge. Swimming slowly against the gentle current, he felt the sweat and fear of these last days slide from him, and while the river embraced his slight body and cooled it, his soul took possession of the lovely homeland with new delight. He swam faster, rested, swam again, and felt himself enfolded in a pleasant coolness and tiredness. Lying on his back, he let himself drift downstream again, listened to the fine humming of the evening flies swarming in golden circles, and saw the late sky cut through by small, swift swallows and lit rosy by the sun, already gone, from behind the mountains. When he was back in his clothes and strolling dreamily home, the valley was already full of shadow.
He passed the garden of Sackmann the dealer, where, as a very small boy, he had once stolen unripe plums with a few others. And Kirchner’s timber yard, where the white fir beams lay about, under which he used always to find earthworms for fishing. He also passed the little house of Inspector Geßler, whose daughter Emma he would so much have liked to court on the ice two years ago. She had been the daintiest and most elegant schoolgirl in town, the same age as he, and at that time there had been a while when he wished for nothing so ardently as to speak to her once or give her his hand. It had never come to that; he had been too shy. Since then she had been sent away to a boarding school, and he hardly knew anymore what she looked like. But these boyhood stories came back to him now, as though from the farthest distance, and they had such strong colors and so strangely foreboding a fragrance as nothing of all he had lived through since. Those had been the days, when you sat in the gateway with Naschold’s Liese in the evening, peeling potatoes and listening to stories, when on Sundays, at the crack of dawn, with your trousers rolled up and a bad conscience, you had gone crayfishing or catching goldfins at the lower weir, only to get a thrashing from your father afterward in your soaked Sunday clothes! There had been so many puzzling and strange things and people then, whom he had not thought of at all for a long time now! The little shoemaker with the crooked neck, Strohmeyer, who everyone knew for certain had poisoned his wife, and the adventurous “Mr. Beck,” who roamed the whole district with a stick and a knapsack and whom people called Mister because he had once been a rich man and had owned four horses and a carriage. Hans knew nothing more of them than their names and felt dimly that this obscure little world of the lanes had been lost to him, without anything living and worth experiencing having come in its place.
Since he still had leave for the following day, he slept late into the morning and enjoyed his freedom. At noon he went to meet his father, who was still blissfully full of all the pleasures of Stuttgart.
“If you’ve passed, you may wish for something,” he said in a good humor. “Think it over!”
“No, no,” the boy sighed. “I’ve failed for sure.”
“Nonsense, what are you talking about! Better wish for something before I change my mind.”
“I’d like to go fishing again in the holidays. May I?”
“All right, you may, if you’ve passed the examination.”
The next day, a Sunday, a thunderstorm broke with a downpour, and Hans sat in his room for hours, reading and thinking. He went over his performance in Stuttgart once more in detail and came again and again to the conclusion that he had had terrible luck and could have done much better papers. It would never be enough to pass now. The stupid headache! Gradually a growing anxiety weighed on him, and finally a heavy worry drove him over to his father.
“Father?”
“What do you want?”
“To ask something. About the wishing. I’d rather give up the fishing.”
“So, why that all of a sudden?”
“Because I… Oh, I wanted to ask whether I couldn’t…”
“Out with it, what a comedy! Well, what?”
“Whether I can go to the gymnasium if I fail.”
Mr. Giebenrath was speechless.
“What? Gymnasium?” he then burst out. “You, to the gymnasium? Who put that into your head?”
“Nobody. I was just wondering.”
Mortal fear could be read in his face. His father did not see it.
“Go on, go on,” he said, laughing with annoyance. “That’s extravagant nonsense. To the gymnasium! I suppose you think I’m a commercial councillor.”
He waved it away so violently that Hans gave up and went out in despair.
“What a boy!” he grumbled after him. “Well, I never! Now he even wants to go to the gymnasium! Cheers to that, you’ve got another think coming.”
Hans sat on the windowsill for half an hour, stared at the freshly scrubbed floorboards, and tried to imagine what it would be like if nothing really came of the seminary and the gymnasium and studying. They would put him to work as an apprentice in a cheese shop or in an office, and all his life he would be one of the ordinary, miserable people he despised and absolutely wanted to rise above. His pretty, clever schoolboy face twisted into a grimace full of anger and pain; furiously he jumped up, spat, seized the Latin reader lying there, and threw the book with all his might against the nearest wall. Then he ran out into the rain.
On Monday morning he went back to school.
“How are you?” asked the rector, and gave him his hand. “I thought you would come to see me yesterday. How was it at the examination, then?”
Hans lowered his head.
“Well, what is it? Did it go badly for you?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Well, patience!” the old gentleman comforted him. “The report from Stuttgart will probably come this very morning.”
The morning was horribly long. No report came, and at the noon meal Hans could hardly swallow for the sobbing inside him.
In the afternoon, when he came into the schoolroom at two o’clock, the form master was already there.
“Hans Giebenrath,” he called out loudly.
Hans stepped forward. The teacher gave him his hand.
“I congratulate you, Giebenrath. You have passed the state examination in second place.”
A solemn silence fell. The door opened and the rector came in.
“I congratulate you. Well, what do you say now?”
The boy was completely paralyzed with surprise and joy.
“Well, don’t you have anything to say?”
“If I’d known that,” burst out of him, “I could have gone all the way and come out first.”
“Now go home,” said the rector, “and tell your papa. You don’t need to come to school anymore now; the holidays begin in a week anyway.”
Dizzy, the boy came out onto the street, saw the lindens standing and the market square lying in the sun, everything as usual, but everything more beautiful and more meaningful and more joyful. He had passed! And he was second! When the first storm of joy was over, a warm feeling of gratitude filled him. Now he did not need to avoid the town pastor. Now he could study! Now he no longer needed to fear either the cheese shop or the countinghouse!
And now he could go fishing again, too. His father was just standing in the front door when he came home.
“What’s new?” he asked lightly.
“Not much. They’ve dismissed me from school.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I’m a seminarian now.”
“Well, I’ll be darned, have you passed, then?”
Hans nodded.
“Did you do well?”
“I came out second.”
The old man had not expected that, after all. He did not know what to say at all, kept clapping his son on the shoulder, laughed, and shook his head. Then he opened his mouth to say something. But he said nothing, and only shook his head again.
“Thunderation!” he cried at last. And once more: “Thunderation!”
Hans rushed into the house, up the stairs and into the attic, tore open a wall cupboard in the empty garret, rummaged around in it, and pulled out all sorts of boxes and bundles of line and pieces of cork. It was his fishing tackle. Now above all he had to cut himself a good rod to go with it. He went down to his father.
“Papa, lend me your pocketknife!”
“What for?”
“I have to cut a switch, for fishing.”
Papa reached into his pocket.
“Here,” he said, beaming and grand, “here are two marks, you can buy yourself a knife of your own. But don’t go to Hanfried, go across the way to the cutler’s.”
Now it went at a gallop. The cutler asked about the examination, got to hear the good news, and handed over an extra-fine knife. Downstream, below the Brühel bridge, stood fine, slender alder and hazel bushes; there, after long choosing, he cut himself a flawless, toughly springing rod and hurried back home with it.
With a flushed face and shining eyes he set to the happy work of rigging his tackle, which was almost as dear to him as the fishing itself. The whole afternoon and evening he sat over it. The white, brown, and green lines were sorted, painstakingly examined, mended, and freed of many an old knot and tangle. Pieces of cork and quills of all shapes and sizes were tried out or newly carved; little pieces of lead of various weights were hammered into balls and notched, for weighting the lines. Then came the hooks, of which there was still a small supply. They were fastened partly to fourfold black sewing thread, partly to a remnant of gut string, partly to twisted lines of horsehair. Toward evening everything was ready, and Hans was sure now that he would not have to be bored in the long seven weeks of the holidays, for with his rod he could spend whole days alone by the water.