Chapter Three
In the far northwest of the land, between wooded hills and small quiet lakes, lies the great Cistercian monastery of Maulbronn. The beautiful old buildings stand spacious, solid, and well preserved, and would make an inviting dwelling, for they are splendid, inside and out, and over the centuries have grown nobly and intimately together with their calm, lovely green surroundings. Whoever wants to visit the monastery passes through a picturesque gate that opens the high wall and comes out onto a wide and very quiet square. A fountain runs there, and old, grave trees stand there, and on both sides old, solid stone houses, and in the background the front of the mighty main church with a late Romanesque porch, called the Paradise, of a graceful, enchanting beauty without equal. On the massive roof of the church rides a needle-pointed, humorous little tower of which one cannot understand how it is supposed to carry a bell. The undamaged cloister, itself a beautiful work, holds as its jewel an exquisite fountain chapel; the monks’ refectory with its strong, noble ribbed vaulting, a wonderful room, then the oratory, the parlatorium, the lay brothers’ refectory, the abbot’s lodging, and two churches are joined massively to one another. Picturesque walls, oriels, gates, little gardens, a mill, and dwelling houses wreathe the ponderous old buildings comfortably and cheerfully. The wide forecourt lies quiet and empty and plays in its sleep with the shadows of its trees; only in the hour after noon does a fleeting semblance of life come over it. Then a troop of young people comes out of the monastery, scatters over the wide space, brings a little movement, calling, talk, and laughter with it, perhaps plays a ball game as well, and when the hour is up disappears quickly and without a trace behind the walls. Many a person has thought on this square that here would be the place for a good stretch of life and joy, that something living and gladdening ought to be able to grow here, that here ripe and good men ought to think their joyful thoughts and create beautiful, serene works.
In loving solicitude the government has given over this splendid monastery, lying far from the world, hidden behind hills and woods, to the pupils of the Protestant theological seminary, so that beauty and quiet may surround the receptive young minds. At the same time the young people are removed there from the distracting influences of the towns and of family life and are kept from the harmful sight of active life. This makes it possible, for years, to let the study of the Hebrew and Greek languages, along with subsidiary subjects, appear to the youths in all earnestness as the goal of life, and to turn the whole thirst of their young souls toward pure and ideal studies and pleasures. Added to this, as an important factor, is life in a boarding school, the compulsion to educate oneself, the feeling of belonging together. The government, at whose expense the seminarians are permitted to live and study, has thereby seen to it that its pupils become children of a particular spirit, by which they can be recognized at any time later on—a fine and sure kind of branding and a meaningful symbol of voluntary serfdom. With the exception of the wild ones who now and then break loose, one can in fact recognize every Swabian seminarian as such all his life. How different people are, and how different the surroundings and circumstances in which they grow up! The government evens this out justly and thoroughly among its wards, by a kind of spiritual uniform or livery.
Whoever still had a mother when he entered the monastery seminary thinks back on those days all his life with gratitude and smiling emotion. That was not Hans Giebenrath’s case, and he got through them without any emotion, but he was able to observe a great number of other people’s mothers and received a strange impression from them.
In the big corridors lined with wall cupboards, the so-called dorments, chests and baskets stood about, and the boys, accompanied by their parents, were busy unpacking and putting away their belongings. Each had been assigned his numbered cupboard, and in the study rooms his numbered bookshelf. Sons and parents knelt on the floor unpacking; the porter moved among them like a prince and now and then gave well-meant advice. Unpacked clothes were spread out, shirts folded, books stacked, boots and slippers set out in rows. The outfit was the same for all in its main pieces, for the minimum number of pieces of linen to be brought and the essentials of the other household goods were prescribed. Tin washbasins with names scratched into them came to light and were set up in the washroom, with sponge, soap dish, comb, and toothbrushes beside them. In addition each boy had brought a lamp, a can of kerosene, and a knife, fork, and spoon.
The boys were all exceedingly busy and excited. The fathers smiled, tried to help, often looked at their pocket watches, were rather bored, and made attempts to slip away. But the soul of the whole activity was the mothers. Piece by piece they took the clothes and linen in hand, smoothed out creases, straightened ribbons, and, with careful trying, distributed the pieces in the cupboard as neatly and practically as possible. Admonitions, advice, and tendernesses flowed in with it all.
“You must take special care of the new shirts; they cost three marks fifty.”
“You’ll send your laundry home every four weeks by rail—if it’s urgent, by post. The black hat is only for Sundays.”
A stout, comfortable woman sat on a tall chest and taught her son the art of sewing on buttons.
“If you’re homesick,” it was said elsewhere, “just write to me as often as you like. It isn’t so terribly long till Christmas.”
A pretty, still fairly young woman surveyed her little son’s filled cupboard and passed a caressing hand over the little piles of linen and the jackets and trousers. When she was done with that, she began to stroke her boy, a broad-shouldered, chubby-cheeked fellow. He was ashamed and fended her off with an embarrassed laugh, and on top of that, so as not to look tender on any account, stuck both hands into his trouser pockets. The parting seemed to be harder for the mother than for him.
With others it was the other way around. They looked at their busy mothers, at a loss what to do or say, and looked as if they would have liked best to go back home with them. But in all of them the fear of parting and the heightened feeling of tenderness and attachment lay in a hard struggle with shyness before onlookers and with the defiant sense of dignity of first manhood. Many a boy who would have liked best to howl now put on an artificially carefree face and acted as though nothing touched him. And the mothers smiled at it.
Almost all of them took out of their chests, besides the bare necessities, a few luxuries as well, a little sack of apples, a smoked sausage, a little basket of pastries, and the like. Many had brought skates. A colossal sensation was caused by a small, sly-looking youth through his possession of a whole ham, which he made no attempt whatever to hide.
One could easily tell which of the boys came directly from home and which had been at institutes and boarding schools before. But in these too one could see the excitement and suspense.
Mr. Giebenrath helped his son unpack and behaved cleverly and practically in doing so. He was finished sooner than most of the others and stood about in the dorment with Hans for a while, bored and helpless. Since on all sides he saw admonishing and instructing fathers, comforting and advising mothers, and sons listening in anxiety, he too thought it fitting to give his Hans a few golden words to take with him on his way through life. He thought for a long time and crept tormentedly along beside the silent boy; then he suddenly launched forth and brought out a little anthology of solemn phrases, which Hans received in silent astonishment, until he saw a pastor standing nearby smiling with amusement at the paternal speech; then he was ashamed and drew the speaker aside.
“So, you’ll do your family honor, won’t you? And obey your superiors?”
“Yes, of course,” said Hans.
His father fell silent and breathed a sigh of relief. He was beginning to be miserably bored. Hans too felt rather lost; now he looked down with anxious curiosity through the windows into the quiet cloister, whose ancient, hermitlike dignity and calm stood in strange contrast to the young life making noise up here, now he shyly watched his busy classmates, not one of whom he knew yet. The boy from Göppingen whom he had met at the examination in Stuttgart, for all his sophisticated Latin, seemed not to have passed; at least Hans saw him nowhere. Without thinking much about it, he looked over his future schoolmates. However similar in kind and number the outfits of all the boys were, you could still easily tell the town boys from the farmers’ sons and the well-to-do from the poor. Sons of rich people, to be sure, seldom came to the seminary, which allows one to infer partly the pride or deeper insight of the parents and partly the gifts of the children; yet many a professor and higher official, remembering his own years in the monastery, does send his boy to Maulbronn. So among the forty little black coats there was a good deal of difference in cloth and cut, and the young people differed still more in manners, dialect, and bearing. There were lean Black Foresters with stiff limbs, lusty sons of the Alb, straw-blond and wide-mouthed, nimble lowlanders with free and cheerful manners, fine boys from Stuttgart with pointed boots and a spoiled, that is to say refined, dialect. Nearly a fifth of this flower of youth wore spectacles. One of them, a slight and almost elegant mother’s darling from Stuttgart, was got up in a stiff, fine felt hat, behaved like a gentleman, and did not suspect that this unaccustomed ornament was already, on the very first day, making the bolder ones among his classmates itch for later teasing and acts of violence.
A more perceptive onlooker could well see that the timid little band was no bad selection from the youth of the land. Next to average heads, on whom you could see from afar the funnel that had poured their learning in, there was no lack either of fine fellows or of defiantly firm ones, behind whose smooth foreheads a higher life might still lie half in a dream. Perhaps there was one or another among them of those shrewd and stubborn Swabian skulls that now and then in the course of time have pushed their way into the middle of the great world and made their always somewhat dry and obstinate thoughts the center of new, powerful systems. For Swabia supplies itself and the world not only with the best-bred theologians, but also commands with pride a traditional capacity for philosophical speculation, from which more than once considerable prophets, or heretics too, have sprung. And so the fertile land, whose great political traditions lie far behind it and which now nestles like a harmless chick against the sharp-beaked eagle of the north, still exercises its sure influence on the world at least in the intellectual fields of divinity and philosophy. Besides this, there has been in the people from of old a delight in beautiful form and dreamy poetry, out of which from time to time rhymers and poets grow up who are not among the bad ones. Lately, to be sure, they count for little, for in poetry too our gentlemen brothers living farther north have taken over the leadership, find the southern speech uncouth, and with their sharper tongues set the tone, which is directed now at the smell of the soil, now at Berlin elegance, and which is, admittedly, far superior to our old-fashioned lyre in smartness. Unfortunately it will not do, here or anywhere else, to rear up against it and to rub off those proud Berliners’ still very young patina. Besides, we gladly grant everyone his own: to us Swabians our old Hohenstaufen, where above quiet woods the few remains of ancient glory slumber and dream, and to the others their Hohenzollern, where smooth, painfully clean drives lead past gleaming cannon. There is something to be said for both, after all.
In the arrangements and customs of the Maulbronn seminary, looked at from the outside, there was nothing Swabian to be felt; on the contrary, besides the Latin names left over from monastic times, many a classical label had lately been pasted on as well. The rooms into which the pupils were divided were called Forum, Hellas, Athens, Sparta, Acropolis, and the fact that the smallest and last was called Germania almost seemed to suggest that there were reasons to make out of the Germanic present, as far as possible, a Roman and Greek dream image. But this too was again merely outward, and in truth Hebrew names would have suited better. And so happy chance would have it that the Athens room got as its occupants not, say, the most broad-minded and eloquent people, but precisely a couple of upright bores, and that Sparta was inhabited not by warriors and ascetics but by a handful of jolly and free-living guest students. Hans Giebenrath was assigned to the Hellas room, together with nine classmates.
He did have a strange feeling at heart when that evening, for the first time, he entered the cool, bare dormitory together with the nine and lay down in his narrow school bed. A big kerosene lantern hung from the ceiling, by whose red light they undressed and which was put out by the porter at a quarter past ten. There they lay now, one beside the other; between every two beds stood a little chair with clothes on it; from the pillar hung the rope by which the morning bell is rung. Two or three of the boys already knew each other and exchanged a few timid whispered words, which soon fell silent; the others were strangers to one another, and each lay a little oppressed and deathly still in his bed. Those who had fallen asleep could be heard breathing deeply, or one of them moved his arm in his sleep so that the linen cover rustled; whoever was still awake kept quite still. Hans could not fall asleep for a long time. He listened to the breathing of his neighbors and after a while heard a strangely anxious sound from the bed next but one; someone lay there crying, the blanket pulled over his head, and the soft sobbing, which sounded as if from far away, stirred Hans strangely. He himself was not homesick, but he was sorry for the quiet little room he had had at home; and to that was added a timid dread of the uncertain new life and of all the many classmates. It was not yet midnight when no one in the dormitory was awake anymore. Side by side lay the young sleepers, cheeks pressed into the striped pillows, sad ones and defiant ones, merry ones and timid ones, overcome by the same sweet, deep rest and forgetting. Over the old pointed roofs, towers, oriels, pinnacles, battlements, and pointed-arched galleries a pale half-moon rose; its light settled on cornices and thresholds, flowed over Gothic windows and Romanesque gates, and trembled pale gold in the great, noble basin of the cloister fountain. A few yellowish streaks and patches of light fell through the three windows into the Hellas dormitory too, and dwelt beside the dreams of the sleeping boys as neighborly as once beside those of the generations of monks.
On the following day the solemn ceremony of admission took place in the oratory. The teachers stood there in frock coats, the ephorus, as the head of the seminary is called, gave an address, the pupils sat thoughtfully bent forward in their chairs and now and then tried to steal a glance back at their parents sitting farther behind. The mothers gazed pensively and smilingly at their sons; the fathers held themselves upright, followed the speech, and looked serious and resolute. Proud and praiseworthy feelings and fine hopes swelled their breasts, and not a single one thought that today he was selling his child to the state for a financial advantage. At the end one pupil after another was called up by name, stepped before the rows, was received and bound to his duty by the ephorus with a handshake, and was thereby, provided he behaved himself, provided for and housed by the state until the end of his life. That they might perhaps not have all this entirely for nothing, none of them gave any thought, any more than the fathers did.
The moment when they had to take leave of father and mother seemed far more serious and moving to them. Some on foot, some in the mail coach, some in all sorts of vehicles caught up in haste, the parents vanished from the sight of the sons left behind; handkerchiefs waved for a long while yet through the mild September air; finally the woods took in the departing ones, and the sons went back into the monastery, quiet and thoughtful.
“So, now the lady and gentleman parents have left,” said the porter.
Now they began to look at one another and get acquainted, at first each room among itself. They filled their inkwells with ink, their lamps with oil, arranged books and notebooks, and tried to feel at home in the new room. Meanwhile they looked at one another curiously, began a conversation, asked one another about their home towns and their schools so far, and recalled the state examination they had sweated through together. Groups formed chatting around particular desks; here and there a bright boyish laugh ventured out; and by evening the roommates were already much better acquainted with one another than ship’s passengers at the end of a sea voyage.
Among the nine classmates who lived with Hans in the Hellas room there were four decided characters; the rest belonged more or less to the good average. First of all there was Otto Hartner, a professor’s son from Stuttgart, gifted, calm, self-assured, and faultless in his conduct. He was broad and stately in build and well dressed, and he impressed the room with his firm, capable manner.
Then Karl Hamel, the son of a small village mayor from the Alb. It took some time to get to know him, for he was full of contradictions and seldom came out of his apparent phlegm. When he did, he was passionate, boisterous, and violent, but it never lasted long before he crept back into himself, and then you did not know whether he was a quiet observer or only a sneak.
A striking, though less complicated figure was Hermann Heilner, a Black Forester from a good family. On the very first day it was known that he was a poet and an aesthete, and the story went around that he had written his composition in the state examination in hexameters. He talked a great deal and vivaciously, owned a beautiful violin, and seemed to wear his nature on the surface, a nature that consisted mainly of a youthfully unripe mixture of sentimentality and frivolity. But less visibly he carried deeper things in him as well. He was developed beyond his years in body and soul and was already beginning, tentatively, to go his own ways.
The oddest inhabitant of Hellas, however, was Emil Lucius, a secretive, pale-blond little man, tough, industrious, and dry as an old peasant. In spite of his unformed build and features he did not give the impression of a boy, but had something grown-up about him everywhere, as though there were simply nothing left to change in him. On the very first day, while the others were bored, chatted, and tried to get used to things, he sat quiet and composed over a grammar, his ears stopped with his thumbs, and studied away as though it were a matter of making up for lost years.
It was only little by little that they found out the tricks of this quiet odd fish, and they found him so refined a skinflint and egoist that his very perfection in these vices earned him a kind of respect, or at least tolerance. He had a cunning system of saving and profit, whose individual refinements came to light only gradually and aroused astonishment. It began early in the morning on getting up, with Lucius entering the washroom either first or last, so as to use another boy’s towel and if possible his soap too and spare his own things. In this way he managed to make his towel always last two weeks and more. Now, the towels had to be changed once a week, and every Monday morning the head porter made an inspection of this. So every Monday morning Lucius too hung a fresh towel on his numbered nail, but took it away again in the noon break, folded it neatly, put it back in his cupboard, and hung up the spared old one again in its place. His soap was hard and gave little, but for that it lasted for months. Emil Lucius was not on that account in the least neglected in his appearance, though; he always looked neat, combed and parted his thin blond hair with care, and took the best possible care of his linen and clothes.
From the washroom they went to breakfast. With it came a cup of coffee, a lump of sugar, and a roll. Most of them did not find this lavish, for young people usually have a hearty morning hunger after eight hours of sleep. Lucius was content, saved his daily lump of sugar by denying it to his own mouth, and always found buyers for it, two lumps for a pfennig or twenty-five lumps for an exercise book. That in the evening, to save the expensive oil, he liked to work by the light of other people’s lamps goes without saying. And he was not the child of poor parents, either, but came from quite comfortable circumstances, as indeed the children of truly poor people seldom know how to manage and save, but always spend as much as they have and know nothing of putting by.
Emil Lucius extended his system not only to material possessions and tangible goods, however, but also tried, wherever he could, to get his advantage out of the kingdom of the mind. Here he was clever enough never to forget that all intellectual possessions have only a relative value; therefore he applied real diligence only to the subjects whose cultivation could bear fruit in a later examination, and in the others contented himself modestly with a moderate average mark. He always measured what he learned and achieved only against the achievements of his schoolmates, and he would rather have been first with half the knowledge than second with double. That was why in the evenings, when his classmates gave themselves up to all sorts of pastimes, games, and reading, he could be seen sitting quietly at work. The noise of the others did not disturb him in the least; he even cast an occasional pleased glance at it, without envy. For if all the others had worked too, his trouble would not have paid, after all.
No one held all these dodges and tricks against the industrious grind. But like all who overdo things and are too intent on profit, he too soon took a step into folly. Since all instruction in the monastery was free, he hit upon the idea of taking advantage of this and having violin lessons given to him. Not that he had any previous training, any ear and talent, or even any pleasure whatever in music! But he thought that, after all, one could learn to fiddle as well as Latin or arithmetic. Music, as he had heard said, was useful in later life and made its man liked and agreeable, and in any case the thing cost nothing, for the seminary provided a school violin as well.
Haas, the music teacher, felt his hair stand on end when Lucius came to him and wanted violin lessons, for he knew him from the singing lessons, in which Lucius’s performances, it was true, delighted all his schoolmates highly, but drove the teacher to despair. He tried to talk the boy out of it; but here he had come to the wrong man. Lucius smiled finely and modestly, appealed to his good right, and declared his desire for music irresistible. So he was handed the worst of the practice violins, received two lessons a week, and practiced his half hour every day. After the first practice hour, however, his roommates declared that this had been the first and last time and that they would not put up with the hideous moaning. From then on Lucius roamed restlessly through the monastery with his violin, looking for quiet corners to practice in, from which strange sounds then came forth, scratching, squealing, and whimpering, and alarmed the neighborhood. It was, said the poet Heilner, as though the tormented old violin were begging desperately for mercy out of all its wormholes. Since no progress followed, the tortured teacher became nervous and rude; Lucius practiced more and more desperately, and his shopkeeper’s face, self-satisfied until then, put on bitter lines of worry. It was a pure tragedy, for when in the end the teacher declared him completely incapable and refused to go on with the lessons, the infatuated lover of learning chose the piano and tormented himself with that too through long, fruitless months, until he was worn down and quietly gave it up. In later years, though, when there was talk of music, he would let it be understood that he too had once learned both piano and violin and had only gradually, unfortunately, been estranged from these fine arts by circumstances.
So the Hellas room was often in a position to amuse itself over its comic inhabitants, for the aesthete Heilner too staged many a ridiculous scene. Karl Hamel played the ironist and witty observer. He was a year older than the others, which gave him a certain superiority, but he never achieved a respected part; he was moody and felt the need about once a week to test his bodily strength in a scuffle, in which he was wild and almost cruel.
Hans Giebenrath looked on at this with astonishment and went his own quiet way as a good but reserved classmate. He was industrious, almost as industrious as Lucius, and enjoyed the respect of his roommates, with the exception of Heilner, who had written brilliant recklessness on his banner and now and then mocked him as a grind. On the whole all these many boys, in the midst of the rapid development of their years, got along well with one another, even if evening brawls in the dorments were nothing rare. For though they strove zealously to feel grown-up and to justify, by scholarly seriousness and good behavior, the teachers’ still unaccustomed way of calling them Sie, and though they looked back on the Latin school they had just left at least as arrogantly and pityingly as a new university student looks back on the gymnasium, still now and again an unadulterated boyishness broke through the artificial dignity and wanted its rights. Then the dorment rang with lusty blows through the air and well-salted boyish curses.
For the director or teacher of such an institution it must be instructive and delightful to watch how, after the first weeks of living together, the band of boys resembles a chemical mixture settling, in which wavering clouds and flakes clump together, dissolve again, and form differently, until a number of firm structures are there. After the first shyness had been overcome and all of them had come to know one another well enough, there began a surging and a seeking about among one another; groups came together; friendships and antipathies came to light. Seldom did boys from the same district or former schoolmates join together; most turned to new acquaintances, town boys to farmers’ sons, boys from the Alb to lowlanders, following a secret urge toward variety and completion. The young creatures groped for one another uncertainly; beside the awareness of equality appeared the desire to stand apart; and in many a boy the budding formation of a personality woke for the first time out of the slumber of childhood. Indescribable little scenes of affection and jealousy were played out, grew into alliances of friendship and into declared, defiant enmities, and ended, as the case might be, in tender relationships and friendly walks or in sharp wrestling and fistfights.
Hans took no outward part in these goings-on. Karl Hamel had offered him his friendship plainly and impetuously, and he had shrunk back in alarm. Right afterward Hamel had made friends with an inhabitant of Sparta; Hans had remained alone. A strong feeling made the land of friendship appear to him blissfully on the horizon in longing colors and drew him toward it with a quiet urge. But a shyness held him back. In his strict, motherless boyhood the gift of drawing close had withered in him, and he had a horror of everything outwardly enthusiastic. Added to this was his boyish pride and, finally, his wretched ambition. He was not like Lucius; he really cared about knowledge; but like Lucius he tried to keep away from himself everything that could take him from his work. So he stayed diligently at his desk, but suffered envy and longing when he saw others enjoying their friendships. Karl Hamel had been the wrong one, but if anyone else had come and tried to draw him strongly to himself, he would gladly have followed. Like a shy girl he stayed sitting and waited to see whether someone would come to fetch him, someone stronger and bolder than he, who would carry him away and force him to be happy.
Since, besides these concerns, the lessons, especially in Hebrew, gave them a great deal to do, the first period passed very quickly for the youths. The many small lakes and ponds by which Maulbronn is surrounded mirrored pale late-autumn skies, withering ashes, birches, and oaks, and long twilights; through the beautiful forests the last wild dance before winter raged, groaning and exulting; and several times already a light frost had fallen.
The lyrical Hermann Heilner had tried in vain to win a kindred friend; now every day in the free hour he roamed alone through the woods, and he favored especially the forest lake, a melancholy brown pond, ringed with reeds and overhung by old, withering crowns of leaves. The sadly beautiful corner of the woods drew the enthusiast powerfully. Here he could draw circles in the still water with a dreamy switch, read Lenau’s reed songs, and, lying among the low rushes on the shore, muse on the autumnal theme of dying and passing away, while the fall of leaves and the rustling of bare treetops gave melancholy chords to it. Then he would often take a little black notebook out of his pocket to write a verse or two in it with a pencil.
He was doing this too at a half-bright noon hour late in October when Hans Giebenrath, out walking alone, came to the same place. He saw the young poet sitting on the plank walk of the little sluice gate, his notebook in his lap and the sharpened pencil stuck thoughtfully in his mouth. An open book lay beside him. Slowly Hans came up to him.
“Hello, Heilner. What are you up to?”
“Reading Homer. And you, little Giebenrath?”
“I don’t believe it. I know what you’re doing.”
“Oh?”
“Of course. You’ve been writing poetry.”
“You think so?”
“Sure.”
“Sit down here!”
Giebenrath sat down beside Heilner on the plank, let his legs dangle over the water, and watched how here and there one brown leaf and then another came turning down through the still, cool air and sank unheard onto the brownish surface of the water.
“It’s dreary here,” said Hans.
“Yes, yes.”
Both of them had stretched out full length on their backs, so that of the autumnal surroundings hardly more than a few overhanging treetops remained visible to them, and instead the light-blue sky came forward with calmly floating islands of cloud.
“What beautiful clouds!” said Hans, gazing contentedly.
“Yes, little Giebenrath,” Heilner sighed, “if only one were a cloud like that!”
“What then?”
“Then we would sail along up there, away over woods and villages and districts and countries, like beautiful ships. Have you never seen a ship?”
“No, Heilner. But you have?”
“Oh yes. But good Lord, you don’t understand anything about such things. As long as you can study and strive and cram!”
“So you take me for a dunce?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m not nearly as stupid as you think. But go on telling about the ships.”
Heilner turned over, and in doing so very nearly fell into the water. He was lying on his stomach now, his chin dug into both hands, his elbows propped up.
“On the Rhine,” he went on, “I saw ships like that, in the holidays. Once on a Sunday there was music on the ship, at night, and colored lanterns. The lights were mirrored in the water, and we went downstream with music. People drank Rhine wine, and the girls had white dresses on.”
Hans listened and made no reply, but he had closed his eyes and saw the ship going through the summer night, with music and red lights and girls in white dresses. The other went on: “Yes, that was different from now. Who here knows anything about such things? Nothing but bores, nothing but sneaks! They toil and drudge and know nothing higher than the Hebrew alphabet. You’re no different yourself.”
Hans said nothing. This Heilner really was a strange fellow. An enthusiast, a poet. He had often wondered about him. Heilner did precious little work, as everyone knew, and in spite of that he knew a lot, knew how to give good answers, and yet despised this knowledge too.
“We read Homer,” he went on jeering, “as if the Odyssey were a cookbook. Two verses an hour, and then it’s chewed over and examined word for word until you’re sick of it. But at the end of the hour every time it’s: You see how finely the poet turned that, here you have had a glimpse into the secret of poetic creation! Just as a sauce around the particles and aorists, so that you don’t choke on them altogether. That way they can keep the whole of Homer, for all I care. Anyway, what does the old Greek stuff really have to do with us? If one of us ever wanted to try living a little bit like a Greek, he’d be thrown out. And our room is called Hellas, of all things! Pure mockery! Why isn’t it called ‘Wastebasket’ or ‘Slave Cage’ or ‘Fear Hole’? The whole classical business is humbug.”
He spat into the air.
“Say, were you writing verses just now?” Hans now asked.
“Yes.”
“What about?”
“About this place, about the lake and about the autumn.”
“Show me!”
“No, it isn’t finished yet.”
“But when it’s finished?”
“Yes, all right.”
The two of them got up and walked slowly back into the monastery.
“There, have you ever actually seen how beautiful that is?” said Heilner as they passed the Paradise. “Halls, arched windows, cloisters, refectories, Gothic and Romanesque, all rich and artful and the work of artists. And what is the magic for? For three dozen poor boys who want to be pastors. The state can afford it.”
Hans had to think about Heilner the whole afternoon. What sort of person was he? The worries and wishes Hans knew did not exist at all for the other. He had his own thoughts and words; he lived more warmly and freely, suffered strange sufferings, and seemed to despise everything around him. He understood the beauty of the old columns and walls. And he practiced the mysterious, strange art of mirroring his soul in verses and building himself a life of his own out of his imagination, a life that only seemed to be alive. He was lively and unruly and made more jokes every day than Hans did in a year. He was melancholy and seemed to enjoy his own sadness as a foreign, unusual, and precious thing.
That very evening Heilner gave the whole room a sample of his motley and striking nature. One of his classmates, a braggart and small mind named Otto Wenger, started a quarrel with him. For a while Heilner stayed calm, witty, and superior; then he let himself be carried away into dealing a box on the ear, and at once the two opponents were passionately and inextricably tangled together and locked in each other and drifted like a rudderless ship, in lurches and half circles and convulsions, through Hellas, along the walls, over chairs, on the floor, both without a word, panting, spluttering, and foaming. Their classmates stood by watching with critical faces, got out of the way of the tangle, saved their legs, desks, and lamps, and awaited the outcome in happy suspense. After a few minutes Heilner struggled up, freed himself, and stood there breathing hard. He looked battered, had red eyes, a torn shirt collar, and a hole in the knee of his trousers. His opponent wanted to attack him again, but he stood there with folded arms and said haughtily, “I’m not going on—if you want, go ahead and hit me.” Otto Wenger went away cursing. Heilner leaned against his desk, turned the standing lamp, put his hands in his trouser pockets, and seemed to be trying to remember something. Suddenly tears broke from his eyes, one after another and more and more. That was unheard of, for crying was without doubt considered the most disgraceful thing a seminarian could do. And he did nothing at all to hide it. He did not leave the room; he stood still, his face, which had turned pale, toward the lamp; he did not wipe away the tears and did not even take his hands out of his pockets. The others stood around him, watching curiously and maliciously, until Hartner planted himself in front of him and said to him, “Say, Heilner, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
The weeping boy looked slowly around him, like someone just waking from a deep sleep.
“Ashamed—in front of you?” he then said loudly and contemptuously. “No, my good fellow.”
He wiped his face, smiled with annoyance, blew out his lamp, and went out of the room.
Hans Giebenrath had stayed at his place during the whole scene and had only peered over at Heilner in astonishment and alarm. A quarter of an hour later he ventured to go after the one who had vanished. He saw him sitting in the dark, frosty dorment on one of the deep window seats, motionless, looking down into the cloister. From behind, his shoulders and his narrow, sharp head looked peculiarly serious and unboyish. He did not stir when Hans came up to him and stopped at the window, and only after a while, without turning his face, did he ask in a hoarse voice, “What is it?”
“It’s me,” said Hans shyly.
“What do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh? Then you can go away again.”
Hans was hurt and really did want to go away. Then Heilner held him back.
“Wait,” he said in an artificially joking tone, “I didn’t mean it like that.”
Now they both looked each other in the face, and probably each of them at that moment looked seriously at the other’s face for the first time and tried to imagine that behind these youthfully smooth features there dwelt a particular human life with its own peculiarities and a particular soul, marked in its own way.
Slowly Hermann Heilner stretched out his arm, took Hans by the shoulder, and drew him toward himself until their faces were quite close to each other. Then Hans suddenly felt, with a strange shock, the other’s lips touch his mouth.
His heart beat with a quite unaccustomed tightness. This being together in the dark dorment and this sudden kiss were something adventurous, new, perhaps dangerous; it occurred to him how horrible it would have been to be caught at it, for a sure feeling told him that this kissing would seem to the others far more ridiculous and shameful than the crying before. He could not say anything, but the blood rose powerfully to his head, and he would have liked best to run away.
A grown-up who had seen the little scene might perhaps have taken a quiet pleasure in it, in the awkward, shy tenderness of a bashful declaration of friendship and in the two serious, narrow boys’ faces, both of them handsome and full of promise, still half sharing in the grace of childhood and already half shadowed by the shy, lovely defiance of youth.
Gradually the young folk had grown used to living together. They knew one another; each had a certain knowledge and idea of each, and a great many friendships had been formed. There were pairs of friends who learned Hebrew vocabulary together, pairs of friends who drew together or went walking or read Schiller. There were good Latinists and poor mathematicians who had joined up with poor Latinists and good mathematicians in order to enjoy the fruits of cooperative work. There were also friendships whose foundation was formed by another kind of contract and community of goods. Thus the much-envied owner of the ham had found his other half in a gardener’s son from Stammheim, who had the bottom of his cupboard full of beautiful apples. Once, while eating ham, he grew thirsty and asked the other for an apple and offered him some of the ham in return. They sat down together; a cautious conversation brought to light that the ham, when it was finished, would at once be replaced, and that the owner of the apples too would be able to live on his father’s stores far into the spring; and so a solid relationship came about that long outlasted many a more idealistic and more stormily concluded alliance.
Only a few had remained loners, among them Lucius, whose avaricious love of art was then still in full bloom.
There were also ill-matched pairs. The most ill-matched were held to be Hermann Heilner and Hans Giebenrath, the frivolous one and the conscientious one, the poet and the grind. Both were counted, to be sure, among the clever and most gifted, but Heilner enjoyed the half-mocking reputation of a genius, while the other had the odor of the model pupil about him. But people left them pretty much alone, since each was taken up by his own friendship and liked to keep to himself.
Over these personal interests and experiences, though, school did not get short shrift. It was, rather, the great movement and rhythm beside which Lucius’s music, Heilner’s poetizing, and all the alliances, quarrels, and occasional brawls only ran along, trifling, as unimportant variations and little private amusements. Above all, Hebrew gave them work. The strange, ancient language of Jehovah, a brittle, withered, and yet still mysteriously living tree, grew up before the youths’ eyes, strange, gnarled, and enigmatic, striking for its curious branchings and surprising with its remarkably colored and fragrant blossoms. In its branches, hollows, and roots dwelt, gruesome or friendly, thousand-year-old spirits: fantastically terrifying dragons, naive and lovely fairy tales, wrinkled, grave, dry old men’s heads beside beautiful boys and quiet-eyed girls or warlike women. What had sounded remote and dreamlike in the comfortable Luther Bible, gently veiled in Old Testament mists, now gained in the rough, genuine language blood and voice and an antiquated, ponderous, but tough and uncanny life. So at least it seemed to Heilner, who cursed the whole Pentateuch daily and hourly and yet found more life and soul in it and drew more out of it than many a patient learner who knew all the vocabulary and no longer made any mistakes in reading.
Beside it was the New Testament, where things went more tenderly, brightly, and inwardly, and whose language, though less ancient and deep and rich, was finer and filled with a young, eager, and dreamy spirit as well.
And the Odyssey, out of whose powerful, sonorous verses, flowing strongly and evenly along, there rose up like the white, rounded arm of a water nymph the tidings and the intimation of a vanished life, clear in form and happy, now firm and tangible in some powerfully outlined, robust stroke, now only shimmering out of a few words and verses as a dream and a lovely intimation.
Beside these the historians Xenophon and Livy disappeared, or at least stood aside modestly and almost without luster, as lesser lights.
Hans noticed with astonishment how all things looked different to his friend than to him. For Heilner there was nothing abstract, nothing he could not have imagined and painted with the colors of his fancy. Where that would not work, he left everything lying with distaste. Mathematics was to him a sphinx laden with treacherous riddles, whose cold, evil gaze held its victims spellbound, and he gave the monster a wide berth.
The friendship of the two was a strange relationship. For Heilner it was a pleasure and a luxury, a convenience or even a whim; but for Hans it was now a treasure guarded with pride, now a great burden, hard to bear. Until then Hans had always used the evening hours for work. Now it happened almost every day that Hermann, when he had had enough of cramming, came over to him, pulled his book away, and claimed him. In the end Hans, dear as his friend was to him, trembled every evening before he came and worked twice as zealously and hastily in the compulsory study hours so as to fall behind in nothing. It was even more painful for him when Heilner began to combat his industry in theory as well.
“That’s day laborer’s work,” he would say. “You don’t do all that work gladly and of your own free will anyway, but only out of fear of the teachers or of your old man. What do you get out of it if you come out first or second? I’m twentieth, and I’m not any stupider than you grinds for that.”
Hans was horrified too when he saw for the first time how Heilner treated his schoolbooks. He had once left his books in the lecture room, and since he wanted to prepare for the next geography lesson, he borrowed Heilner’s atlas. To his horror he saw that Heilner had smeared whole pages with pencil. The west coast of the Iberian Peninsula had been drawn out into a grotesque profile in which the nose reached from Oporto to Lisbon and the region around Cape Finisterre was stylized into a curly ornament of locks, while Cape St. Vincent formed the handsomely twirled point of a full beard. So it went from page to page; caricatures were drawn and impudent joking verses written on the white backs of the maps, and there was no lack of ink blots either. Hans was used to treating his books as sacred objects and jewels, and he felt these audacities half as desecrations of a temple, half as heroic deeds, criminal, but heroic all the same.
It might seem as though good Giebenrath were merely a pleasant plaything for his friend, a sort of house cat, let us say, and Hans himself sometimes thought so. But Heilner was attached to him all the same, because he needed him. He had to have someone in whom he could confide, who listened to him, who admired him. He needed someone who would listen quietly and avidly when he made his revolutionary speeches about school and life. And he also needed someone who would comfort him and in whose lap he could lay his head when he had melancholy hours. Like all such natures, the young poet suffered from fits of a groundless, slightly coquettish melancholy, whose causes are partly the quiet leave-taking of the child’s soul, partly the still aimless superabundance of powers, intimations, and desires, partly the dark, uncomprehended urging of coming to manhood. Then he had a morbid need to be pitied and coddled. He had been his mother’s darling, and now, as long as he was not yet ripe for the love of women, his compliant friend served him as comforter.
Often he came to Hans in the evening utterly miserable, carried him off from his work, and asked him to go out into the dorment with him. There in the cold hall or in the high, dim oratory they walked up and down side by side or sat down shivering in a window. Heilner then uttered all sorts of woeful laments, in the manner of lyrical youths who read Heine, and was wrapped in clouds of a somewhat childish sadness, which Hans could not really understand, it was true, but which made an impression on him all the same and sometimes even infected him. The sensitive aesthete was subject to his fits especially in gloomy weather, and usually the wailing and moaning reached its climax on evenings when late-autumn rain clouds darkened the sky and behind them, peering through murky veils and rifts, the sentimental moon described its course. Then he wallowed in Ossianic moods and dissolved in a misty wistfulness that poured itself out in sighs, speeches, and verses over the innocent Hans.
Oppressed and tormented by these piteous scenes of suffering, Hans threw himself with hasty zeal, in the hours left to him, into his work, which nonetheless came harder and harder to him. That the old headache came back did not surprise him much; but that he more and more often had idle, tired hours and had to goad himself to do even what was necessary, that worried him gravely. He felt dimly, it is true, that the friendship with the odd fellow was exhausting him and making some hitherto untouched part of his nature sick; but the gloomier and more tearful the other was, the sorrier Hans felt for him, and the more tender and proud the awareness of being indispensable to his friend made him.
Besides, he sensed well enough that this sickly, wistful manner was only a venting of superfluous and unhealthy impulses and did not really belong to the nature of Heilner, whom he admired loyally and sincerely. When his friend read his verses aloud or talked about his ideals as a poet or recited monologues from Schiller and Shakespeare with passion and great play of gesture, it seemed to Hans as though the other walked in the air by virtue of a magic gift that he himself lacked, moved in a divine freedom and fiery passion, and floated away from him and his kind on winged soles like a Homeric messenger of the gods. Until then the world of poets had been little known to him and unimportant; now for the first time he felt, without resistance, the deceptive power of beautifully flowing words, illusory images, and flattering rhymes, and his veneration for this world newly opened to him had grown together with his admiration for his friend into a single undivided feeling.
Meanwhile came stormy, dark November days on which one could work only a few hours without a lamp, and black nights in which the storm drove great rolling mountains of cloud through the dark heights and buffeted the old, solid monastery buildings, moaning or quarreling. The trees were completely bare now; only the mighty oaks with their gnarled branches, the kings of that tree-rich landscape, still rustled with their withered crowns of leaves, louder and more sullenly than all the other trees. Heilner was quite gloomy and lately, instead of sitting with Hans, liked to storm away alone on the violin in a remote practice room or to pick quarrels with his classmates.
One evening, when he went to look for that room, he found the aspiring Lucius there, busy practicing at a music stand. Annoyed, he went away and came back after half an hour. The other was still practicing.
“You could stop now,” Heilner snapped. “There are other people who want to practice too. Your scraping is a public nuisance anyway.”
Lucius would not give way; Heilner grew rude; and when the other calmly took up his scraping again, he kicked the music stand over, so that the sheets flew about the room and the stand struck the fiddler in the face. Lucius bent down for his music.
“I’ll tell the ephorus about this,” he said firmly.
“Good,” Heilner shouted furiously, “then tell him right away too that I threw in a kick in the pants for free.” And he was about to act on it at once.
Lucius jumped aside in flight and reached the door. His pursuer went after him, and there followed a hot and noisy chase through corridors and halls, over stairs and landings, as far as the most remote wing of the monastery, where the ephorus’s lodging lay in quiet distinction. Heilner caught up with the fugitive only just before the door of the ephorus’s study, and when the latter had already knocked and was standing in the open door, he received the promised kick at the last moment and flew, without being able to close the door behind him anymore, like a bomb into the ruler’s holy of holies.
It was an unheard-of case. The next morning the ephorus gave a brilliant speech on the degeneracy of youth; Lucius listened profoundly and approvingly; and Heilner was sentenced to a severe term of detention in the lockup.
“For several years now,” the ephorus thundered at him, “no such punishment has been given here. I shall see to it that you are still thinking of it ten years from now. To the rest of you I hold up this Heilner as a deterrent example.”
The whole class peered over shyly at him as he stood there pale and defiant and did not avoid the ephorus’s gaze. In secret many admired him; nevertheless, at the end of the lesson, when everyone was filling the corridors noisily, he remained alone and shunned like a leper. It took courage to stand by him now.
Hans Giebenrath did not do it either. It would have been his duty, he felt that well enough, and he suffered from the feeling of his cowardice. Unhappy and ashamed, he pressed himself into a window and did not dare to look up. He felt the urge to go to his friend, and he would have given a great deal to be able to do it unnoticed. But one who has been punished with a severe term in the lockup is as good as branded in the monastery for a long time. It is known that from now on he will be specially watched, and that it is dangerous and brings one a bad reputation to have dealings with him. To the benefits the state bestows on its pupils there must correspond a sharp, strict discipline; that had already come up in the great speech at the ceremony of admission. Hans knew it too. And he succumbed in the struggle between the duty of friendship and ambition. His ideal, after all, was to get ahead, to pass famous examinations, and to play a part, but not a romantic and dangerous one. So he stayed fearfully in his corner. He could still step forward and be brave, but from moment to moment it grew harder, and before he knew it his betrayal had become a deed. Heilner noticed it well enough. The passionate boy felt how people avoided him, and understood it, but on Hans he had relied. Beside the pain and indignation he felt now, his own former empty feelings of woe seemed hollow and ridiculous to him. For a moment he stopped beside Giebenrath. He looked pale and haughty and said softly, “You’re a low coward, Giebenrath—to hell with you!” And with that he walked away, whistling under his breath, his hands in his trouser pockets.
It was a good thing that other thoughts and occupations claimed the young people’s attention. A few days after that event snow suddenly fell, then came clear, frosty winter weather; one could throw snowballs and skate, and now everyone suddenly noticed too, and talked about it, that Christmas and the holidays were at the door. Heilner was paid less attention. He went about quietly and defiantly with his head held high and a haughty face, spoke to no one, and often wrote verses in a notebook that had a cover of black oilcloth and bore the title “Songs of a Monk.”
On the oaks, alders, beeches, and willows hung hoarfrost and frozen snow in delicate, fantastic shapes. On the ponds the clear ice crackled in the frost. The cloister court looked like a quiet garden of marble. A happy, festive excitement went through the rooms, and the anticipation of Christmas even gave the two faultless, measured professors a slight gleam of mildness and cheerful excitement. Among teachers and pupils there was no one whom Christmas left indifferent; Heilner too began to look less dogged and miserable, and Lucius considered which books and which pair of shoes he should take with him for the holidays. In the letters that came from home stood lovely, promising things: questions about favorite wishes, reports of baking days, hints of surprises to come, and joy at the coming reunion.
Before the trip home for the holidays the class, and the Hellas room in particular, had one more little comic episode. It had been decided to invite the teaching staff to an evening Christmas celebration, which was to take place in Hellas, as the largest room. A formal speech, two recitations, a flute solo, and a violin duet had been prepared. But now by all means a humorous number was wanted on the program too. They deliberated and negotiated, made and rejected suggestions, without coming to agreement. Then Karl Hamel said casually that the funniest thing, really, would be a violin solo by Emil Lucius. That caught on. By pleas, promises, and threats they brought the unhappy musician to lend himself to it. And now the program, which was sent to the teachers with a polite invitation, carried as a special number: “Silent Night, song for violin, performed by Emil Lucius, Virtuoso to the Court.” He owed this last title to his diligent practicing in that remote music room.
The ephorus, the professors, the tutors, the music teacher, and the head porter were invited and appeared for the celebration. Sweat broke out on the music teacher’s forehead when Lucius stepped up in a black tailcoat borrowed from Hartner, combed and pressed, with his gently modest smile. His very bow had the effect of an invitation to merriment. Under his fingers the song “Silent Night” became a moving lament, a groaning, painful song of sorrow; he began twice, tore and hacked the melody to pieces, beat time with his foot, and labored like a woodcutter in frosty weather.
The ephorus nodded cheerfully to the music teacher, who had turned pale with indignation.
When Lucius had begun the song for the third time and had got stuck this time too, he let the violin sink, turned to the listeners, and apologized: “It won’t go. But I only been fiddling since last fall.”
“That’s fine, Lucius,” cried the ephorus, “we thank you for your efforts. Just go on learning like this. Per aspera ad astra!”
On the twenty-fourth of December there was life and uproar in all the dormitories from three o’clock in the morning on. On the windows bloomed thick layers of finely leaved frost flowers; the washing water was frozen; and a cutting, thin frosty wind swept over the monastery courtyard, but no one paid any attention to it. In the refectory the big coffee pots steamed, and soon afterward the pupils, bundled in coats and shawls, were walking in dark groups over the white, faintly gleaming fields and through the silent woods toward the distant railway station. They all chattered, made jokes, and laughed loudly, and yet each of them was full besides of his secret wishes, joys, and expectations. Far and wide over the whole land, in towns and villages and on lonely farms, they knew that parents and brothers and sisters were waiting for them in warm, festively decorated rooms. For most of them it was the first Christmas for which they were traveling home from a distance, and most of them knew that they were awaited with love and with pride.
At the little railway station in the middle of the snowy woods they waited for the train in bitter cold, and they had never been together in such harmony, so agreeable and so merry. Only Heilner stayed alone and silent, and when the train came, he waited until his classmates had gotten on and then went alone into another car. When they changed trains at the next station Hans saw him once more, but the fleeting feeling of shame and remorse soon went under again in the excitement and joy of the trip home.
At home he found Papa smirking and contented, and a well-loaded table of presents awaited him. There was not a real Christmas in the Giebenrath house, to be sure. There was no singing and no festive enthusiasm; there was no mother; there was no Christmas tree. Mr. Giebenrath did not understand the art of celebrating feasts. But he was proud of his boy and had not stinted on the presents this time. And Hans was not used to anything different; he missed nothing.
People found that he looked poorly, too thin and too pale, and asked him whether the fare at the monastery was so meager. He denied it eagerly and assured them that he was fine, only he had headaches so often. On this score the town pastor comforted him, having suffered from them himself in his younger years, and so everything was all right.
The river was frozen smooth and on the holidays full of skaters. Hans was outdoors almost the whole day, in a new suit, the green seminarian’s cap on his head, grown far beyond his former schoolmates into an envied higher world.