Chapter Two
That is how summer holidays ought to be! Above the mountains a sky as blue as gentian, for weeks one blazing hot day after another, only now and then a violent, short thunderstorm. The river, although it makes its way through so much sandstone rock and fir shade and so many narrow valleys, was so warm that one could swim until late in the evening. All around the little town there was the smell of hay and of the second mowing; the narrow strips of the few grain fields turned yellow and golden brown; along the brooks grew, rank and man-high, the white-flowering plants that look like hemlock, whose blossoms are shaped like umbrellas and always covered with tiny beetles, and out of whose hollow stalks one can cut flutes and whistles. Along the edges of the woods long rows of woolly, yellow-flowering, majestic mulleins made a show; loosestrife and willowherb swayed on their slender, tough stems and covered whole slopes with their violet red. Inside, under the firs, stood the tall, steep red foxglove, grave and beautiful and strange, with its broad, silver-woolly root leaves, its strong stalk, and its beautiful red bell flowers ranged high up the stem. Beside it the many kinds of mushrooms: the red, gleaming fly agaric, the fat, broad cep, the fantastic goatsbeard, the red, many-branched coral fungus, and the strangely colorless, sickly plump pinesap. On the many heathy strips between wood and meadow the tough broom flamed a burning yellow, then came long lilac-red bands of heather, then the meadows themselves, most of them already standing ready for the second cutting, overgrown with the colors of cuckooflower, campion, sage, and scabious. In the deciduous woods the chaffinches sang without stopping, in the fir woods fox-red squirrels ran through the treetops, along the field edges, walls, and dry ditches green lizards breathed and shimmered with pleasure in the warmth, and over the meadows the high, shrilling, never-tiring songs of the cicadas rang endlessly.
At this time of year the town made a very rustic impression; hay wagons, the smell of hay, and the hammering of scythes filled the streets and the air; if it had not been for the two factories, one would have thought oneself in a village.
Early in the morning of the first day of the holidays Hans was already standing impatiently in the kitchen waiting for his coffee, when old Anna had hardly gotten up. He helped make the fire, fetched bread from the baker’s, quickly gulped down his coffee, cooled with fresh milk, put bread in his pocket, and ran off. At the upper railway embankment he stopped, took a round tin box out of his trouser pocket, and began busily catching grasshoppers. The train went by—not in a rush, for the line climbs steeply there, but nice and comfortably, with all its windows open and few passengers, letting a long, cheerful banner of smoke and steam flutter behind it. He looked after it and watched the whitish smoke swirl and soon lose itself in the sunny, clear early air. How long it was since he had seen all this! He took deep breaths, as though he wanted to make up twice over now for the lovely time he had lost and be a little boy once more, really free and easy and without a care.
His heart was pounding with secret delight and the lust of the hunt as he walked with the box of grasshoppers and the new rod across the bridge and around behind the gardens to the Horse Pool, the deepest spot in the river. There was a place there where, leaning against a willow trunk, one could fish more comfortably and undisturbed than anywhere else. He unwound the line, fixed a small lead shot to it, mercilessly spitted a fat grasshopper on the hook, and cast the line with a wide swing toward the middle of the river. The old, familiar game began: the little bleak swarmed around the bait in whole shoals and tried to tug it off the hook. Soon it had been eaten away; a second grasshopper had its turn, and another, and a fourth and fifth. He fastened them to the hook more and more carefully; finally he weighted the line with another shot, and now the first proper fish tried the bait. It tugged at it a little, let it go again, tried it once more. Now it bit—a good angler feels that twitch in his fingers through line and rod! Hans gave an artful jerk and began to pull very carefully. The fish was hooked, and when it came into view, Hans recognized a roach. You know them at once by the broad, whitish-yellow shimmering body, the triangular head, and especially the lovely flesh-red base of the belly fins. How heavy might it be? But before he could guess, the fish gave a desperate lash, whirled about in terror on the surface of the water, and got away. He could still see it turning over three or four times in the water and then vanishing into the depths like a silver flash. It had not bitten well.
The excitement and passionate attention of the hunt had now awakened in the angler. His gaze clung sharply and steadily to the thin brown line where it touched the water; his cheeks were flushed, his movements spare, quick, and sure. A second roach bit and came out, then a small carp, which it was almost a pity to take, then three gudgeon one after the other. The gudgeon pleased him especially, since his father liked to eat them. They grow at most as long as a hand, and have a fat, small-scaled body, a thick head with a droll white beard, small eyes, and a slender tail end. Their color is between green and brown and, when the fish is brought to land, shades into steel blue.
Meanwhile the sun had climbed high; the foam at the upper weir shone snow-white; the warm air trembled over the water; and when you looked up you saw a few dazzling little clouds the size of a hand standing over the Muckberg. It was getting hot. Nothing expresses the warmth of a pure midsummer day so well as the few calm little clouds that stand still and white halfway up the blue and are so filled and soaked with light that you cannot look at them for long. Without them you would often not notice how hot it is, not from the blue sky nor from the glitter of the river’s surface, but as soon as you see the few foam-white, tightly packed noon sailers, you suddenly feel the sun burning, look for shade, and pass your hand over your damp forehead.
Gradually Hans paid less strict attention to his line. He was a little tired, and toward noon one usually catches almost nothing anyway. The whitefish, even the oldest and biggest, come up at this time to sun themselves. They swim dreamily upstream in great dark schools, close to the surface, take fright now and then suddenly for no visible reason, and in these hours will not go for any hook.
He let the line hang over a branch of the willow into the water, sat down on the ground, and looked at the green river. Slowly the fish came up; one dark back after another appeared on the surface—quiet, slowly swimming schools, lured up and spellbound by the warmth. They must feel fine in the warm water! Hans took off his boots and let his feet hang in the water, which was quite lukewarm at the surface. He looked at the fish he had caught, which swam motionless in a big watering can and only now and then splashed softly. How beautiful they were! White, brown, green, silver, dull gold, blue, and other colors gleamed on their scales and fins at every movement.
It was very still. You could hardly hear the noise of the wagons crossing the bridge; even the clatter of the mill was only faintly audible here. Only the steady, mild roar of the white weir came down calm, cool, and drowsy, and at the raft posts the soft, swirling sound of the moving water.
Greek and Latin, grammar and style, arithmetic and memorizing and the whole tormenting turmoil of a long, restless, harried year sank quietly away in the drowsy, warm hour. Hans had a slight headache, but not nearly as bad as usual, and now he could sit by the water again, after all; he watched the foam scatter at the weir, blinked at his line, and beside him the fish he had caught swam in the can. It was so delicious. In between it suddenly occurred to him that he had passed the state examination and come out second; at that he splashed his bare feet in the water, stuck both hands in his trouser pockets, and began to whistle a tune. He could not really and properly whistle, it was true; that was an old grief and had already earned him mockery enough from his schoolmates. He could only do it through his teeth, and only softly, but that was enough for household use, and now no one could hear him anyway. The others were sitting in school now having geography; only he was free and dismissed. He had overtaken them; they stood beneath him now. They had tormented him enough, because apart from August he had had no friendships and had never taken any real pleasure in their scuffles and games. Well, now they could watch him go, the dolts, the blockheads. He despised them so much that for a moment he stopped whistling to twist his mouth. Then he wound up his line and had to laugh, for there was not a shred of bait left on the hook. The grasshoppers left over in the box were set free and crawled, dazed and listless, into the short grass. Next door at the tannery they were already stopping for the noon meal; it was time to go and eat.
At the table hardly a word was spoken.
“Catch anything?” asked Papa.
“Five.”
“Is that so? Well, just watch out you don’t catch the old one, or there won’t be any young ones afterward.”
The conversation got no further. It was so warm. And it was such a pity that you were not allowed to go swimming right after eating. Why, actually? It was supposed to be harmful! Harmful, my foot; Hans knew better, he had gone often enough in spite of the rule. But not anymore now; he was too grown-up for naughtiness, after all. Good heavens, at the examination they had called him Sie, the way one speaks to a grown man!
Besides, it was not at all bad to lie under the spruce in the garden for an hour. There was shade enough, and you could read or watch the butterflies. So he lay there until two o’clock, and he very nearly fell asleep. But now for a swim! There were only a few little boys on the bathing meadow; the bigger ones were all sitting in school, and Hans did not grudge it to them one bit. Nice and slowly he took off his clothes and got into the water. He knew how to enjoy warmth and coolness by turns: now he swam a stretch and dived and splashed, now he lay on his stomach on the bank and felt the sun burning on his quickly drying skin. The little boys crept around him respectfully. Yes indeed, he had become a celebrity. And he looked so different from the rest, too. On the thin, tanned neck sat, free and elegant, the fine head with its intelligent face and superior eyes. For the rest he was very thin, slender-limbed, and delicate; you could count his ribs on his chest and back, and he had almost no calves at all.
Almost the whole afternoon he drifted back and forth between sun and water. After four o’clock most of his class came running up in a hurry and with a lot of noise.
“Hey, Giebenrath! You’ve got it good now.”
He stretched comfortably. “It’s not bad, no.”
“When do you have to go to the seminary?”
“Not till September. It’s vacation now.”
He let himself be envied. It did not even touch him when mockery rose in the background and one of them sang the verse:
If I could only be
Like the mayor’s Lisabeth!
She lies abed all day,
No such luck for me.
He only laughed. Meanwhile the boys were undressing. One jumped straight into the water, others first cooled themselves off carefully, some lay down in the grass for a while beforehand. A good diver was admired. A scaredy-cat was pushed into the water from behind and screamed bloody murder. They chased each other, ran and swam, splashed the dry bathers on the bank. The splashing and shouting were loud, and the whole width of the river gleamed with bright, wet, shining bodies.
After an hour Hans went away. The warm evening hours were coming, when the fish bite again. Until supper he fished on the bridge and caught next to nothing. The fish went greedily after the hook; every moment the bait was eaten off, but nothing stayed on. He had cherries on the hook; evidently they were too big and too soft. He decided to try again later.
At supper he learned that a lot of acquaintances had been by to congratulate him. And they showed him today’s weekly paper; under “Official Notices” there was an item: “To the entrance examination for the lower theological seminary our town this time sent only one candidate, Hans Giebenrath. To our joy we have just learned that he passed the examination in second place.”
He folded up the paper, put it in his pocket, and said nothing, but he was full to bursting with pride and jubilation. Afterward he went fishing again. For bait this time he took along a few little pieces of cheese; fish like the taste of it, and they can see it well in the dusk.
He left the rod standing and took along only a quite simple hand line. That was the fishing he liked best: to hold the line in his hand without rod and without float, so that the whole tackle consisted of nothing but line and hook. It was a little more laborious, but much more fun. You controlled the smallest movement of the bait, felt every nibble and every bite, and could watch the fish in the twitching of the line as though you saw them before you. Of course, this kind of fishing has to be understood; you must have skillful fingers and keep watch like a spy.
In the narrow, deeply cut, winding river valley dusk came early. The water lay black and still under the bridge; in the lower mill there was already a light. Talk and singing ran over bridges and lanes; the air was a little sultry, and in the river every moment a dark fish leaped up with a short slap. On such evenings the fish are strangely excited, dart back and forth in zigzags, fling themselves into the air, bump against the line, and hurl themselves blindly at the bait. When the last little piece of cheese was used up, Hans had pulled out four smallish carp; he meant to take them to the town pastor tomorrow.
A warm wind ran down the valley. It was getting quite dark, but the sky was still light. Out of the whole darkening little town only the church tower and the castle roof rose black and sharp into the bright heights. Somewhere far off there must be a thunderstorm; now and then a soft, far-distant thundering could be heard.
When Hans climbed into bed at ten o’clock, he was more pleasantly tired and sleepy in head and limbs than he had been for a long time. A long row of beautiful, free summer days lay before him, soothing and inviting, days for idling away, swimming away, fishing away, dreaming away. Only one thing nagged at him, that he had not come out first outright.
Early in the morning Hans was standing in the front hall of the town pastor’s house delivering his fish. The town pastor came out of his study.
“Ah, Hans Giebenrath! Good morning! I congratulate you, I congratulate you with all my heart.—And what have you got there?”
“Just a few fish. I went fishing yesterday.”
“Well, look at that! Thank you very much. But now come in.”
Hans stepped into the study he knew so well. It did not really look like a pastor’s study here. It smelled neither of potted plants nor of tobacco. The considerable collection of books showed almost nothing but new, neatly varnished and gilded spines, not the battered, crooked, wormeaten, and foxed volumes one otherwise finds in parsonage libraries. Whoever looked more closely could tell from the titles of the well-ordered books, too, that a new spirit lived here, a different one from the spirit that lived in the old-fashioned, venerable gentlemen of the dying generation. The respectable showpieces of a parsonage library, the Swabian Pietist divines Bengel, Ötinger, and Steinhofer, along with the devout hymn singers whom Mörike celebrates so beautifully and warmly in “The Weathercock,” were missing here, or at least disappeared in the mass of modern works. All in all, with the files of periodicals, the standing desk, and the big writing table strewn with papers, it looked learned and serious. One got the impression that much work was done here. And much work was done here, too, though less on sermons, catechism lessons, and Bible classes than on studies and articles for learned journals and on preliminary studies for books of his own. Dreamy mysticism and brooding full of presentiment were banished from this place; banished too was the naive theology of the heart, which bends down over the chasms of science toward the thirsting soul of the people in love and compassion. Instead, biblical criticism was zealously pursued here, and a search was on for the “historical Christ,” who flows from the modern theologians’ mouths like water, it is true, but also slips through their fingers like an eel.
It is no different in theology than anywhere else. There is a theology that is art, and another that is science, or at least strives to be. That was so in olden times as it is today, and the scientific ones have always neglected the old wine for the new wineskins, while the artists, carelessly persisting in many an outward error, have been comforters and bringers of joy for many. It is the old, unequal struggle between criticism and creation, science and art, in which the former is always right, without anyone being served by it, while the latter again and again casts out the seed of faith, of love, of comfort, and of beauty and the sense of eternity, and again and again finds good soil. For life is stronger than death, and faith is mightier than doubt.
For the first time Hans sat on the little leather sofa between the standing desk and the window. The town pastor was exceedingly friendly. Quite like a comrade he told him about the seminary and how one lived and studied there.
“The most important new thing,” he said at the end, “that you will meet with there is the introduction to New Testament Greek. A new world will open up to you with it, rich in work and joy. At first the language will give you trouble; it is no longer Attic Greek, but a new idiom created by a new spirit.”
Hans listened attentively and felt with pride that he had come closer to true scholarship.
“Being introduced to this new world in the classroom,” the town pastor went on, “naturally takes away some of its magic. And at the seminary Hebrew may at first take up your time too one-sidedly. Now, if you would like, we could make a small beginning in these holidays. At the seminary you will then be glad to have time and strength left over for other things. We could read a few chapters of Luke together, and you would learn the language almost in play, on the side. I can lend you a dictionary. You would put in about an hour a day on it, two at the most. No more than that, of course, for above all you must have your well-earned rest now. Naturally this is only a suggestion—I wouldn’t want to spoil your lovely holiday feeling with it, after all.”
Hans accepted, of course. To be sure, this Luke hour seemed to him like a light cloud in the happy blue sky of his freedom, but he was ashamed to refuse. And learning a new language like this on the side in the holidays was surely more pleasure than work. He had a faint fear in any case of all the new things that would have to be learned at the seminary, especially of the Hebrew.
Not dissatisfied, he left the town pastor and made his way up the Larch Path into the woods. The little ill humor had already blown away, and the more he thought the matter over, the more acceptable it seemed to him. For he knew well enough that at the seminary he would have to work even more ambitiously and doggedly if he wanted to leave his classmates behind there too. And he decidedly wanted to. Why, actually? He did not know himself. For three years people had had their eye on him; the teachers, the town pastor, his father, and above all the rector had spurred him on and kept him goaded and breathless. The whole long time, from class to class, he had been the undisputed top boy. And now he himself had gradually come to take his pride in being at the top and tolerating no one beside him. And the stupid fear of the examination was over now.
Of course, having holidays was really the best thing after all. How unaccustomedly beautiful the woods were again now in these morning hours, when there was no other walker in them but him! Column after column the spruces stood, vaulting an endless hall in blue-green. There was little undergrowth, only here and there a thick tangle of raspberry canes, but instead a soft, furry floor of moss stretching for hours, grown with low bilberry bushes and heather. The dew had already dried, and between the bolt-straight trunks hung the peculiar sultriness of the morning woods, which, mixed of sun warmth, dew haze, the scent of moss, and the smell of resin, fir needles, and mushrooms, nestles coaxingly against all the senses with a faint numbness. Hans threw himself down in the moss, grazed the dark, thickly grown bilberry bushes bare, heard here and there the woodpecker hammering on a trunk and the jealous cuckoo calling. Between the blackish dark crowns of the firs the sky looked in, spotless and deep blue; in the distance the thousands and thousands of upright trunks crowded together into a grave brown wall; here and there a yellow patch of sun lay strewn on the moss, warm and richly glowing.
Hans had really meant to take a long walk, at least as far as the Lützel farm or the Crocus Meadow. Now he lay in the moss, ate bilberries, and stared lazily into the air. He himself began to wonder that he was so tired. Before, a walk of three or four hours had been nothing at all to him. He resolved to pull himself together and march a good stretch. And he walked a few hundred paces. Then, he did not know how it happened, he was lying in the moss again, resting. He stayed lying there; his gaze wandered, blinking, through trunks and treetops and along the green ground. To think this air could make one so tired!
When he came home toward noon, he had a headache again. His eyes hurt too; on the forest path the sun had dazzled so terribly. Half the afternoon he sat around the house in a sulk; only when he went swimming did he feel fresh again. It was time now to go to the town pastor.
On the way Flaig the shoemaker, who was sitting on his three-legged stool at the window of his workshop, saw him and called him in.
“Where are you off to, my son? We never see you at all anymore.”
“I have to go to the town pastor now.”
“Still? The examination’s over, isn’t it?”
“Yes, now something else is coming. The New Testament. You see, the New Testament is written in Greek, but in a quite different Greek again from what I’ve learned. I’m supposed to learn that now.”
The shoemaker pushed his cap far back on his neck and drew his big brooding forehead together into thick furrows. He sighed heavily.
“Hans,” he said softly, “I want to tell you something. Until now I’ve kept quiet, on account of the examination, but now I have to warn you. You must know, you see, that the town pastor is an unbeliever. He’ll tell you and make you believe that the holy scriptures are false and full of lies, and when you’ve read the New Testament with him, you’ll have lost your faith yourself and not know how.”
“But, Master Flaig, it’s only about the Greek. I have to learn it at the seminary anyway.”
“So you say. But it’s one thing whether you learn to study the Bible with devout and conscientious teachers or with one who no longer believes in the dear Lord.”
“Yes, but you don’t know whether he really doesn’t believe in him.”
“Yes, Hans, we do know it, unfortunately.”
“But what am I supposed to do? I’ve already arranged with him that I’ll come.”
“Then you must come, that goes without saying. But better not too often. And if he says such things about the Bible, that it’s the work of men and full of lies and not inspired by the Holy Ghost, then you come to me and we’ll talk about it. Will you?”
“Yes, Master Flaig. But it surely won’t be as bad as that.”
“You’ll see; mark my words!”
The town pastor was not home yet, and Hans had to wait for him in the study. While he looked at the gold titles on the books, the shoemaker’s words gave him something to think about. He had often heard such remarks about the town pastor and the new-fashioned clergymen in general. But now for the first time he felt himself drawn into these matters, with suspense and curiosity. They were not as important and terrible to him as to the shoemaker; rather, he scented here the chance to get behind old, great secrets. In his earlier school years the questions of God’s omnipresence, of where souls go, of the devil and hell, had now and then stirred him to fantastic broodings, but all that had fallen asleep in the last strict, industrious years, and his schoolroom Christian faith had only occasionally awakened to some personal life in his talks with the shoemaker. He had to smile when he compared him with the town pastor. The boy could not understand the shoemaker’s harsh firmness, won in bitter years, and besides, Flaig was a clever man, but a simple and one-sided one, mocked by many for his Pietist ways. In the meetings of the prayer-meeting brethren he appeared as a stern brotherly judge and a mighty expounder of Holy Scripture, and he also held his devotional hours out in the villages round about; but otherwise he was just a little craftsman and as narrow as all the others. The town pastor, on the other hand, was not only a skillful, eloquent man and preacher, but also an industrious and rigorous scholar. Hans looked up at the bookshelves with awe.
The town pastor came soon, exchanged his frock coat for a light black house jacket, put a Greek edition of the Gospel of Luke into his pupil’s hands, and told him to read. That was quite different from the way the Latin lessons had been. They read only a few sentences, which were translated with painstaking literalness, and then the teacher, out of inconspicuous examples, skillfully and eloquently drew out the peculiar spirit of this language, talked about the time and the way in which the book came into being, and in that single hour gave the boy a quite new idea of learning and reading. Hans got an inkling of what riddles and problems lay hidden in every verse and word, how since ancient times thousands of scholars, ponderers, and researchers had labored over these questions, and it seemed to him that he himself was being received in this hour into the circle of the seekers after truth.
He was lent a lexicon and a grammar and went on working at home the whole evening. Now he felt over how many mountains of work and knowledge the road to true scholarship led, and he was ready to fight his way through and leave nothing lying by the way. The shoemaker was forgotten for the time being.
For several days this new pursuit took him over entirely. Every evening he went to the town pastor, and every day true learning seemed to him more beautiful, more difficult, and more worth striving for. In the early mornings he went fishing, in the afternoons to the bathing meadow; otherwise he hardly left the house. His ambition, which had gone under in the fear and triumph of the examination, was awake again and gave him no rest. At the same time the peculiar feeling in his head began to stir again that he had felt so often in the last months—not a pain, but a hasty, triumphant driving of quickened pulses and violently excited powers, a hurried, impetuous craving to press forward. Afterward, to be sure, came the headache, but as long as that fine fever lasted, his reading and work stormed ahead; then he read the hardest sentences in Xenophon, which otherwise cost him a quarter of an hour, as if in play; then he almost never needed the dictionary, but flew quickly and joyfully over whole difficult pages with a sharpened understanding. And with this heightened fever for work and thirst for knowledge went a proud sense of himself, as though school and teachers and the years of learning already lay far behind him and he were already striding along a path of his own, toward the heights of knowledge and ability.
This came over him again now, and with it the light, often interrupted sleep with strangely clear dreams. When he woke at night with a slight headache and could not fall asleep again, an impatience to get ahead came over him, and a superior pride when he thought of how far ahead of all his classmates he was, and how the teachers and the rector had looked at him with a kind of respect and even admiration.
For the rector it had been a heartfelt pleasure to guide this fine ambition, which he had awakened, and to watch it grow. Let no one say that schoolmasters have no heart and are ossified and soulless pedants! Oh no, when a teacher sees how a child’s talent, long coaxed in vain, breaks forth, how a boy lays aside wooden sword and slingshot and bow and the other childish toys, how he begins to strive forward, how the seriousness of work makes out of a rough, chubby-cheeked youngster a fine, serious, and almost ascetic boy, how his face grows older and more spiritual, his gaze deeper and more purposeful, his hand calmer, whiter, and stiller, then his soul laughs with joy and pride. It is his duty and the calling entrusted to him by the state to tame and root out in the young boy the raw forces and desires of nature and to plant in their place quiet, moderate ideals recognized by the state. How many a man who is now a contented citizen and an aspiring official would, without these efforts of the school, have become an unrestrained, storming innovator or a fruitlessly brooding dreamer! There was something in him, something wild, lawless, uncivilized, that first had to be broken, a dangerous flame that first had to be put out and stamped out. Man as nature creates him is something incalculable, opaque, hostile. He is a torrent breaking out of an unknown mountain, and he is a primeval forest without path or order. And just as a primeval forest must be thinned and cleared and forcibly restrained, so the school must break, conquer, and forcibly restrain natural man; its task is to make him a useful member of society according to principles approved from above, and to awaken in him the qualities whose complete development is then crowned and concluded by the careful discipline of the barracks.
How nicely little Giebenrath had developed! Roaming and playing he had given up almost by himself; the silly laughing in lessons had long since stopped with him; and gardening, keeping rabbits, and that tiresome fishing too he had let himself be broken of.
One evening the rector appeared in person at the Giebenrath house. After politely getting rid of the flattered father, he stepped into Hans’s room and found the boy sitting over the Gospel of Luke. He greeted him most kindly.
“That’s fine, Giebenrath, busy again already! But why don’t you show yourself at all anymore? I expected you every day.”
“I would have come,” Hans apologized, “but I wanted at least to bring you a nice fish.”
“Fish? What sort of fish?”
“Well, a carp or something.”
“Oh, I see. So you’re fishing again?”
“Yes, just a little. Father allowed it.”
“Hm. I see. Do you enjoy it a lot?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good, very good, you’ve honestly earned your holidays, after all. So you probably don’t much feel like studying on the side now?”
“Oh yes, sir, of course I do.”
“But I wouldn’t want to force anything on you that you don’t want to do yourself.”
“Of course I want to.”
The rector took a few deep breaths, stroked his thin beard, and sat down on a chair.
“You see, Hans,” he said, “the matter stands like this. Experience has long shown that a sudden setback often follows precisely on a very good examination. At the seminary you have to work your way into several new subjects. Now there are always a number of pupils who arrive having worked ahead in the holidays—often just those who did less well in the examination. They then suddenly move up, at the expense of those who have rested on their laurels during the vacation.”
He sighed again.
“Here at school it was easy for you to be first all the time. But at the seminary you will find other classmates, all of them gifted or very industrious people, who won’t let themselves be overtaken so easily. You understand that?”
“Oh yes.”
“Now I wanted to suggest that you work ahead a little in these holidays. In moderation, of course! You have the right and the duty to rest thoroughly now. I thought an hour or two a day would be about right. Without that it is easy to get out of the groove, and afterward it takes weeks before you are running smoothly again. What do you think?”
“I’m quite ready, sir, if you would be so kind…”
“Good. Next to Hebrew it will be Homer above all who opens up a new world for you at the seminary. You would read him with twice the enjoyment and understanding if we laid a solid foundation now. Homer’s language, the old Ionic dialect together with Homeric prosody, is something quite peculiar, quite a thing of its own, and demands diligence and thoroughness if one is to come to a real enjoyment of these poems at all.”
Of course Hans was glad to make his way into this new world too, and promised to do his best.
But the worst was still to come. The rector cleared his throat and went on in a friendly way: “To be frank, I would also be glad if you would devote a few hours to mathematics. You are not a bad arithmetician, but mathematics has not exactly been your strong point so far. At the seminary you will have to begin algebra and geometry, and so it would surely be advisable to take a few preparatory lessons.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You are always welcome at my house, you know that. It is a point of honor with me to see something fine become of you. But for the mathematics you would have to ask your father to let you take private lessons with the professor. Perhaps three or four a week.”
“Yes, sir.”
Work was now in the most gratifying bloom again, and when Hans did go fishing or walking for an hour now and then, he had a bad conscience. The self-sacrificing mathematics teacher had chosen the usual swimming hour for his lessons.
With all his diligence, Hans could not find these algebra lessons enjoyable. It was bitter, after all, in the middle of a hot afternoon, to go into the professor’s warm room instead of to the bathing meadow, and in the dusty air humming with gnats, with a tired head and a dry voice, to recite the a plus b and a minus b. There was something paralyzing and exceedingly oppressive in the air then, which on bad days could turn into hopelessness and despair. Mathematics was altogether a strange thing for him. He was not one of those pupils to whom it is closed and impossible to grasp; he sometimes found good, even elegant solutions and then took pleasure in them. What he liked about mathematics was that there were no errors and no humbug here, no chance of straying from the subject and grazing deceptive side issues. For the same reason he liked Latin so much, for this language is clear, sure, unambiguous, and knows almost no doubts. But even when all the results in arithmetic came out right, nothing real ever came of it. The mathematical work and lessons seemed to him like walking along a level highway: you always get ahead, every day you understand something you did not understand yesterday, but you never came to a mountain where wide views suddenly opened up.
Things were somewhat livelier in the lessons with the rector. True, the town pastor still knew how to make something far more attractive and splendid out of the degenerate Greek of the New Testament than the rector made out of the youthfully fresh language of Homer. But it was Homer after all, with whom surprises and pleasures spring up right behind the first difficulties and lure one on irresistibly. Often Hans sat before a mysteriously beautiful-sounding verse, hard to understand, full of trembling impatience and suspense, and could not find quickly enough in the dictionary the keys that opened the quiet, serene garden to him.
He had homework enough again now, and many an evening he sat again at the table until late, his teeth sunk into some task. Father Giebenrath looked on this diligence with pride. In his ponderous head there dimly lived the ideal of so many narrow and insignificant people, to see a branch from his stock grow up beyond himself to a height that he revered with dull respect.
In the last week of the holidays the rector and the town pastor suddenly showed themselves remarkably gentle and solicitous again. They sent the boy out walking, stopped their lessons, and stressed how important it was that he enter upon his new career fresh and refreshed.
Hans went fishing a few more times. He had a lot of headaches and sat without real attention on the bank of the river, which now mirrored a light-blue early autumn sky. It was a riddle to him why he had once looked forward so much to the summer vacation. Now he was rather glad that it was over and he was going to the seminary, where a quite different life and learning would begin. Since it meant nothing to him, he hardly caught any fish anymore either, and when his father once made a joke about it, he stopped fishing and put his lines back up in the cupboard in the garret.
Only in the last days did it suddenly occur to him that he had not been to Flaig the shoemaker’s for weeks. Even now he had to force himself to go to see him. It was evening, and the master was sitting at the window of his living room with a small child on each knee. Although the window stood open, the smell of leather and blacking filled the whole apartment. Self-consciously Hans laid his hand in the master’s hard, broad right hand.
“Well, how are things?” the master asked. “Have you been going to the town pastor faithfully?”
“Yes, I was there every day and learned a lot.”
“What, then?”
“Mainly Greek, but all sorts of other things too.”
“And you didn’t care to come to me anymore?”
“I cared to, Master Flaig, but it never seemed to work out. An hour at the town pastor’s every day, two hours at the rector’s every day, and four times a week I had to go to the arithmetic teacher.”
“Now, in the holidays? That’s nonsense!”
“I don’t know. The teachers thought so. And studying isn’t hard for me, after all.”
“Maybe so,” said Flaig, and took hold of the boy’s arm. “The studying would be all right, but what sort of skinny little arms have you got there? And your face is so thin too. Do you still have headaches?”
“Now and then.”
“It’s nonsense, Hans, and a sin besides. At your age you have to have proper air and exercise and proper rest. What do they give you holidays for? Surely not for sitting in your room and going on studying. You’re nothing but skin and bones.”
Hans laughed.
“Well, all right, you’ll get through. But too much is too much. And the lessons at the town pastor’s, how have they gone? What did he say?”
“He said lots of things, but nothing bad at all. He knows a tremendous lot.”
“Did he never speak disrespectfully of the Bible?”
“No, not one single time.”
“That’s good. For I tell you this: better be ruined ten times in body than take harm to your soul! You want to become a pastor later on; that’s a precious and a hard office, and it takes different people from what most of you young folk are. Maybe you’re the right one and will one day be a helper and teacher of souls. I wish it with all my heart and will pray for it.”
He had stood up and now laid both hands firmly on the boy’s shoulders.
“Farewell, Hans, and abide in what is good! The Lord bless thee and keep thee, Amen.”
The solemnity, the praying, and the speaking in High German instead of his everyday dialect were oppressive and embarrassing to the boy. The town pastor had done nothing of the kind when they said goodbye.
With preparations and leave-takings the few days passed quickly and restlessly. A chest with bedding, clothes, linen, and books had already been sent off; now the traveling bag was packed too, and one cool morning father and son set off for Maulbronn. It was strange and depressing, after all, to leave home and move away from his father’s house into a strange institution.