Chapter Four

Experience shows that in every class of seminarians one or more of the classmates are usually lost in the course of the four years in the monastery. Sometimes one dies and is buried with singing or taken back to his home town escorted by his friends. Sometimes one breaks loose by force or is removed for particular sins. Occasionally, though rarely and only in the upper class, it may also happen that some boy at his wits’ end finds a short, dark way out of the troubles of his youth with a shot or a leap into the water.

The class of Hans Giebenrath too was to lose several classmates, and by a strange chance it happened that all of them belonged to the Hellas room.

Among its inhabitants was a modest little blond fellow named Hindinger, nicknamed Hindu, the son of a master tailor somewhere among the scattered Protestants of the Catholic Allgäu. He was a quiet citizen and only got himself talked about a little by his departure, and not too much even then. As the desk neighbor of the thrifty Virtuoso to the Court Lucius, he had had, in a friendly and modest way, a little more to do with him than with the others, but otherwise he had had no friends. Only when he was missing did they notice in Hellas that they had been fond of him as an undemanding, good neighbor and as a point of rest in the often agitated life of the room.

One day in January he joined the skaters who were going out to the Horse Pond. He had no skates, but only wanted to watch for once. Soon, though, he felt cold, and stamped around the shore to warm himself. In doing so he began to run, strayed some way across the fields, and came to another small lake, which because of its warmer and stronger springs was only thinly frozen over. He stepped across through the reeds. There, small and light as he was, he broke through near the shore, struggled and cried out for a little while yet, and then sank unnoticed down into the dark coolness.

Only when the first afternoon lesson began at two o’clock was his absence noticed.

“Where is Hindinger?” called the tutor.

No one answered.

“Go and look in Hellas!”

But there was no trace of him there.

“He must be late; let us begin without him. We are at page seventy-four, verse seven. But I insist that this not happen again. You are to be punctual.”

When it struck three and Hindinger was still missing, the teacher grew frightened and sent for the ephorus. He appeared in the classroom at once in his own exalted person, held a great inquiry, and then sent ten pupils out to search, accompanied by the porter and a tutor. A written exercise was dictated to those who stayed behind.

At four o’clock the tutor came into the lecture room without knocking and made his report to the ephorus in a whisper.

“Silence!” the ephorus commanded, and the pupils sat motionless on their benches and looked at him expectantly.

“Your classmate Hindinger,” he went on softly, “appears to have drowned in a pond. You must now help to look for him. Professor Meyer will lead you; you are to follow him promptly and to the letter and take no steps whatever on your own.”

Frightened and whispering, they set out, the professor at their head. From the little town a few men with ropes, poles, and boards joined the hurrying procession. It was bitterly cold, and the sun was already standing at the edge of the woods.

And when at last the boy’s small, stiff body had been found and was laid on a stretcher among the snowy rushes, it was already deep dusk. The seminarians stood about anxiously like shy birds, stared at the corpse, and rubbed their blue fingers, which had gone stiff. And only when their drowned classmate was carried before them and they followed him in silence over the snowfields were their oppressed souls suddenly touched by a shudder, and they scented grim death as deer scent the enemy.

In the miserable, freezing little band Hans Giebenrath happened to be walking beside his former friend Heilner. Both noticed their nearness at the same moment, when they had stumbled over the same unevenness in the field. It may have been that the sight of death had overwhelmed Hans and for moments convinced him of the vanity of all selfishness; in any case, when he unexpectedly saw his friend’s pale face so close to him, felt an unexplained deep pain and in a sudden impulse reached for the other’s hand. Heilner pulled it away from him with annoyance and looked aside, offended, and at once sought another place and disappeared into the hindmost rows of the procession.

Then the heart of Hans the model pupil beat with pain and shame, and as he marched on, stumbling over the frozen field, he could not keep the tears from running one after another down his frost-blue cheeks. He understood that there are sins and omissions that one cannot forget and that no remorse makes good, and it seemed to him as though it were not the little tailor’s son but his friend Heilner who lay up there on the raised bier and was carrying the pain and anger over his faithlessness far away with him into another world, where accounts are reckoned not by marks and examinations and successes but solely by the purity or the stain of the conscience.

Meanwhile they had reached the highroad and quickly came the rest of the way into the monastery, where all the teachers, the ephorus at their head, received the dead Hindinger, who in life would have run away at the mere thought of such an honor. Teachers always look at a dead pupil with quite other eyes than at a living one; they are then convinced for a moment of the value and irretrievability of every life and every youth, against which they otherwise so often sin without a care.

That evening too, and the whole of the following day, the presence of the inconspicuous body worked like a spell, softened, muffled, and veiled all doing and speaking, so that for this short time quarreling, anger, noise, and laughter hid themselves like water nymphs that vanish for moments from the surface of a pool and leave it lying motionless and seemingly lifeless. When any two of them spoke about the drowned boy, they always called him by his full name, for in the face of the dead the nickname Hindu seemed unworthy to them. And quiet Hindu, who had otherwise disappeared unnoticed and unremarked in the crowd, now filled the whole great monastery with his name and his having died.

On the second day Hindinger’s father arrived, stayed a few hours alone in the little room where his boy lay, was then invited to tea by the ephorus, and spent the night at the Stag.

Then came the burial. The coffin had been set up in the dorment, and the tailor from the Allgäu stood beside it and watched everything. He was a real tailor’s figure, terribly thin and pointed, and wore a black Sunday coat with a greenish sheen and tight, shabby trousers, and in his hand an outmoded dress hat from the days of the old militia. His small, thin face looked troubled, sad, and feeble, like a penny candle in the wind, and he was in a constant state of embarrassment and deference before the ephorus and the professors.

At the last moment, before the bearers lifted the coffin, the sad little man stepped forward once more and touched the lid of the coffin with an embarrassed and timid gesture of tenderness. Then he stood there helplessly, struggling with his tears, and stood in the middle of the large, quiet room like a withered little tree in winter, so forsaken and hopeless and exposed that it was a pity to see. The pastor took him by the hand and stayed with him; then the little man put on his fantastically curved top hat and walked first behind the coffin, down the stairs, across the monastery courtyard, through the old gate, and over the white land toward the low wall of the churchyard. While the seminarians sang a hymn at the grave, most of them, to the vexation of the music teacher who was conducting, looked not at his hand beating time but at the lonely, windblown figure of the little master tailor, who stood sad and frozen in the snow and with bowed head listened to the speeches of the clergyman and the ephorus and the top boy, nodded absently to the singing pupils, and now and then fished with his left hand for the handkerchief hidden in the tail of his coat, without pulling it out, however.

“I couldn’t help imagining what it would be like if my own papa were standing there like that in his place,” Otto Hartner said afterward. And they all chimed in: “Yes, I thought exactly the same thing.”

Later the ephorus came to the Hellas room with Hindinger’s father. “Was any one of you particularly friends with the deceased?” the ephorus asked into the room. At first no one came forward, and Hindu’s father looked anxiously and wretchedly into the young faces. But then Lucius came forward, and the elder Hindinger took his hand and held it fast for a little while, but did not know what to say and soon went out again with a humble nod. Then he left, and had a whole long day of travel through the bright winter land before he got home and could tell his wife in what kind of little place their Karl now lay.

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In the monastery the spell was soon broken again. The teachers scolded again, doors were slammed again, and little thought was given to the vanished Hellene. Some had caught cold from the long standing at that sad pond and lay in the sickroom or went about in felt slippers with their throats bandaged. Hans Giebenrath had come through with throat and feet unharmed, but since the day of the accident he looked more serious and older. Something in him had become different, a youth out of a boy, and his soul had been moved, as it were, into another country, where it fluttered about anxiously and without a home and knew no resting places yet. This was due neither to the terror of death nor to grief for good Hindu, but solely to the suddenly awakened awareness of his guilt toward Heilner.

Heilner lay in the sickroom with two others, had to swallow hot tea, and had time to put in order the impressions he had received at Hindinger’s death and perhaps to lay them by for later poetic use. But he seemed to care little about that; rather, he looked miserable and suffering and hardly exchanged a word with his companions in illness. The isolation forced on him since his punishment in the lockup had wounded and embittered his sensitive temperament, which needed frequent communication. The teachers supervised him strictly as a discontented and revolutionary head; the pupils avoided him; the porter treated him with mocking good nature; and his friends Shakespeare, Schiller, and Lenau showed him another world, mightier and grander than the one that surrounded him, oppressive and humiliating. His “Monk’s Songs,” which at first had been tuned only to a hermitlike melancholy note, gradually turned into a collection of bitter and spiteful verses on the monastery, the teachers, and his schoolmates. In his isolation he found a sour martyr’s pleasure, felt with satisfaction that he was misunderstood, and in his mercilessly disrespectful monk’s verses saw himself as a little Juvenal.

A week after the burial, when the two other boys had recovered and Heilner alone was still lying in the sickroom, Hans visited him. He said hello shyly, carried a chair over to the bed, sat down, and reached for the hand of the sick boy, who turned toward the wall with annoyance and seemed quite inaccessible. But Hans would not be turned away. He held fast the hand he had taken and forced his former friend to look at him. Heilner twisted his lips in annoyance.

“What is it you want?”

Hans did not let go of his hand.

“You have to listen to me,” he said. “I was a coward that time and left you in the lurch. But you know how I am: it was my firm intention to stay at the top in the seminary and if possible to come out first outright. You called that grinding, and maybe you were right; but it just happened to be my kind of ideal, I didn’t know anything better.”

Heilner had closed his eyes, and Hans went on very softly: “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know if you’ll ever want to be my friend again, but you have to forgive me.”

Heilner said nothing and did not open his eyes. Everything good and glad in him laughed toward his friend, but he had grown used to the role of the harsh and lonely one now and kept at least the mask of it in front of his face for the time being. Hans did not let up.

“You have to, Heilner! I’d rather come out last than go on circling around you like this any longer. If you want, we’ll be friends again and show the others that we don’t need them.”

Then Heilner returned the pressure of his hand and opened his eyes.

After a few days he too left his bed and the sickroom, and there was no small stir in the monastery over the newly baked friendship. But for the two of them there now came wonderful weeks, without any real events, but full of a strangely happy feeling of belonging together and of a wordless, secret understanding. It was something different from before. The weeks of separation had changed them both. Hans had become more tender, warmer, more enthusiastic; Heilner had taken on a more vigorous, more manly nature; and both had missed each other so much lately that their reunion seemed to them a great event and a precious gift.

In their friendship both these precocious boys, with a shyness full of presentiment, unknowingly tasted in advance something of the tender secrets of a first love. Besides, their alliance had the harsh charm of ripening manhood and, as an equally harsh spice, the feeling of defiance toward the whole body of their classmates, to whom Heilner remained disagreeable and Hans incomprehensible, and whose numerous friendships were at that time all still harmless boyish games.

The more fervently and happily Hans clung to his friendship, the more foreign school became to him. The new feeling of happiness went roaring like a young wine through his blood and his thoughts; beside it Livy, as well as Homer, lost his importance and his luster. But the teachers saw with alarm the hitherto faultless pupil Giebenrath changed into a problematic creature and fallen under the bad influence of the suspect Heilner. There is nothing teachers dread so much as the strange phenomena that appear in the nature of precocious boys at the age, dangerous enough in any case, when the fermentation of youth begins. In Heilner a certain streak of genius had always been uncanny to them anyway—between genius and the guild of teachers a deep gulf has been fixed from of old, and whatever of that sort shows itself in schools is an abomination to the professors from the outset. For them geniuses are those bad ones who have no respect for them, who begin to smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, go to the taverns at sixteen, who read forbidden books, write impudent compositions, now and then stare at the teacher with scorn, and figure in the class register as rebels and candidates for the lockup. A schoolmaster would rather have ten notorious donkeys in his class than one genius, and looked at closely he is right, after all, for his task is not to train up extravagant minds but good Latinists, arithmeticians, and upright citizens. But who suffers more, and more grievously, from the other, the teacher from the boy or the other way around, which of the two is more the tyrant, more the tormentor, and which of the two it is that spoils and violates parts of the other’s soul and life, that one cannot examine without growing bitter and thinking of one’s own youth with anger and shame. But that is not our business, and we have the consolation that with those who are truly gifted the wounds almost always heal well, and that they become people who, in spite of school, create their good works and who later, when they are dead and bathed in the pleasant halo of distance, are held up by their schoolmasters to other generations as showpieces and noble examples. And so from school to school the spectacle of the struggle between law and spirit repeats itself, and again and again we see state and school breathlessly striving to strike dead and nip at the root the few deeper and more valuable minds that turn up every year. And again and again it is above all those hated by the schoolmasters, the often punished, the runaways, the ones chased out, who afterward enrich the treasure of our nation. But some—and who knows how many?—waste away in silent defiance and go under.

According to good old school principles, as soon as trouble was scented, it was not love but severity that was doubled toward the two young oddities too. Only the ephorus, who was proud of Hans as his most industrious Hebraist, made a clumsy attempt at rescue. He had him called to his office, the beautiful, picturesque bay-windowed room of the old abbot’s lodging, where according to legend Doctor Faust, whose home was nearby Knittlingen, enjoyed many a beaker of Elfinger wine. The ephorus was not a bad sort of man; he did not lack insight and practical sense; he even had a certain good-natured benevolence toward his pupils, whom he liked to address with the familiar du. His chief fault was a strong vanity, which often led him into boastful little feats on the lecturer’s platform and which would not let him see his power and authority doubted in the slightest. He could not stand any objection or admit any mistake. So spineless or even dishonest pupils got along splendidly with him, but precisely the strong and honest ones had a hard time, since even a merely hinted contradiction made him wild and unjust. The role of the fatherly friend, with an encouraging look and a moved tone, he commanded like a virtuoso, and he played it now as well.

“Take a seat, Giebenrath,” he said in a friendly way, after he had heartily shaken the hand of the boy who had come in shyly.

“I would like to talk with you a little. But may I say du to you?”

“Please do, sir.”

“You will have felt yourself, my dear Giebenrath, that your work has fallen off somewhat lately, at least in Hebrew. Until now you were perhaps our best Hebraist; that is why I am sorry to notice a sudden decline. Perhaps you no longer take any real pleasure in Hebrew?”

“Oh yes, sir.”

“Just think it over! Such things happen. Perhaps you have turned especially to another subject?”

“No, sir.”

“Really not? Well, then we must look for other causes. Can you help me get on the track?”

“I don’t know… I’ve always done my assignments…”

“Certainly, my dear boy, certainly. But differendum est inter et inter: there are differences and differences. You have done your assignments, of course; that was your duty, after all. But you used to accomplish more. Perhaps you were more industrious; in any case you were more interested in the work. Now I ask myself where this sudden slackening of your zeal comes from. You are not ill, are you?”

“No.”

“Or do you have headaches? You certainly don’t look excessively blooming.”

“Yes, I have headaches sometimes.”

“Is the daily work too much for you?”

“Oh no, not at all.”

“Or are you doing a lot of private reading? Be honest now!”

“No, I read almost nothing, sir.”

“Then I don’t quite understand it, my dear young friend. Something must be wrong somewhere. Will you promise me to make a real effort?”

Hans laid his hand in the outstretched right hand of the mighty man, who looked at him with grave gentleness.

“That’s good, that’s right, my dear boy. Just don’t let yourself grow weary, or you’ll end up beneath the wheel.”

He pressed Hans’s hand, and Hans went to the door, breathing more freely. Then he was called back.

“One more thing, Giebenrath. You spend a lot of time with Heilner, don’t you?”

“Yes, quite a lot.”

“More than with others, I believe. Or not?”

“Yes, I do. He’s my friend.”

“How did that come about? You are really quite different natures, after all.”

“I don’t know, he just is my friend.”

“You know that I am not especially fond of your friend. He is a discontented, restless spirit; he may be gifted, but he accomplishes nothing and has no good influence on you. I should very much like to see you keep farther away from him.—Well?”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

“You can’t? Why not?”

“Because he’s my friend, after all. I can’t just leave him in the lurch.”

“Hm. But you could attach yourself a little more to others, surely? You are the only one who gives himself up so to the bad influence of this Heilner, and we can already see the consequences. What is it that binds you to him in particular?”

“I don’t know myself. But we’re fond of each other, and it would be cowardly of me to leave him.”

“I see, I see. Well, I won’t force you. But I hope you will gradually get free of him. I would like that. I would like that very much.”

The last words had nothing left of the earlier gentleness. Hans could go now.

From then on he toiled at his work anew. It was no longer, to be sure, the brisk progress of before, but more a laborious keeping up, so as at least not to fall too far behind. He too knew that this came partly from his friendship, but he saw in it not a loss and a hindrance but rather a treasure that outweighed everything he had neglected—a heightened, warmer life, with which his former sober existence of duty could not be compared. It was with him as with young people in love: he felt himself capable of great heroic deeds, but not of the daily, boring, and petty work. And so again and again, with a desperate sigh, he harnessed himself to the yoke. He did not know how to do as Heilner did, who worked superficially and took in the bare necessities quickly, in an almost violent hurry. Since his friend claimed him pretty much every evening in the free hours, he forced himself to get up an hour earlier in the mornings and wrestled especially with the Hebrew grammar as with an enemy. Really he took pleasure now only in Homer and in the history lesson. With a dimly groping feeling he came closer to an understanding of the Homeric world; and in history the heroes gradually stopped being names and numbers and looked out of near, glowing eyes and had living red lips and each his own face and hands—one red, thick, coarse hands, one quiet, cool, stony ones, and another narrow, hot, finely veined ones.

In reading the Gospels in the Greek text, too, he sometimes found himself surprised, even overwhelmed, by the clarity and nearness of the figures. Especially once, at the sixth chapter of Mark, where Jesus leaves the ship with his disciples and it says: euthus epignontes auton periedramon, “they knew him at once and ran to him.” Then he too saw the Son of Man leave the ship and knew him at once, neither by his figure nor by his face, but by the great, radiant depth of his loving eyes and by a gently beckoning, or rather inviting, welcoming gesture of his slender, beautiful, brownish hand, which seemed to be formed and inhabited by a fine and yet strong soul. The edge of a stirred-up stretch of water and the prow of a heavy boat appeared with it for a moment; then the whole picture was gone like a smoking breath in winter.

Now and then something of this kind came again, so that some figure or piece of history broke forth out of the books, greedily as it were, longing to live once more and to mirror its gaze in a living eye. Hans accepted it, wondered at it, and with these swift appearances, always already in flight again, felt himself deeply and strangely transformed, as though he had looked through the black earth as through glass, or as though God had looked at him. These precious moments came unbidden and vanished unlamented, like pilgrims and friendly guests whom one does not dare to speak to and press to stay, because they have something strange and divine about them.

He kept these experiences to himself and said nothing about them even to Heilner. In Heilner the earlier melancholy had changed into a restless, sharp spirit, which criticized the monastery, teachers and classmates, the weather, human life, and the existence of God, and now and then led to quarrelsomeness or sudden stupid pranks too. Since he stood apart once and for all and in opposition to the rest, in thoughtless pride he tried to sharpen this opposition completely into a defiant and hostile relationship, into which Giebenrath, without wanting to prevent it, was drawn along, so that the two friends lay cut off from the crowd like a conspicuous island regarded with ill will. Little by little Hans felt less uncomfortable about this. If only it had not been for the ephorus, of whom he felt a dark fear. Hans had once been his favorite pupil; now the ephorus treated him coolly and neglected him with obvious intent. And precisely in Hebrew, the ephorus’s special subject, he had gradually lost all desire.

It was amusing to see how much the forty seminarians had changed in body and soul in only a few months, apart from a few who stood still. Many had shot up mightily in length, very much at the expense of breadth, and hopefully stretched their wrists and ankles out of clothes that had not grown with them. The faces showed every shade between dying childishness and a manhood timidly beginning to give itself airs, and anyone whose body was still free of the angular forms of the years of growth had at least been given a provisional manly seriousness on his smooth forehead by the study of the books of Moses. Chubby cheeks had become positive rarities.

Hans too had changed. In height and thinness he was now Heilner’s equal; indeed, he now looked almost older than the other. The edges of his forehead, which had formerly shown delicately through, had worked themselves out, and his eyes lay deeper; his face had an unhealthy color; his limbs and shoulders were bony and gaunt.

The less satisfied he himself was with his work at school, the more harshly he shut himself off from his classmates under Heilner’s influence. Since he no longer had any reason to look down on them as a model pupil and future top boy, arrogance suited him very badly. But that they let him notice it, and that he felt it painfully in himself, he did not forgive them. With the faultless Hartner especially, and with that forward Otto Wenger, there were quarrels several times. When the latter mocked and provoked him again one day, Hans forgot himself and answered with a blow of his fist. There was a nasty fight. Wenger was a coward, but it was easy to deal with his frail opponent, and he hit him without mercy. Heilner was not present; the others looked on idly and did not grudge Hans the thrashing. He was thoroughly beaten black and blue, bled from the nose, and all his ribs hurt. All night shame, pain, and anger kept him awake. He kept the experience from his friend, but from now on he shut himself off strictly and hardly exchanged another word with his roommates.

Toward spring, under the influence of rainy noons, rainy Sundays, and long twilights, new formations and movements appeared in the life of the monastery. The Acropolis room, whose inhabitants included a good pianist and two flute players, founded two regular music evenings; in the Germania room a society for reading plays was opened; and a few young Pietists established a Bible circle that every evening read a chapter of the Bible along with the notes of the Calw Bible.

Heilner applied for membership in the reading society of the Germania room and was not accepted. He boiled with rage. For revenge he now went to the Bible circle. They did not want him there either, but he pushed his way in and brought strife and quarreling into the devout conversations of the modest little brotherhood with his bold speeches and godless allusions. Soon he tired of this sport too, but kept up an ironic biblical tone in his speech for some time longer. This time, however, he was hardly paid attention, since the class was now entirely possessed by a spirit of enterprise and founding.

The one who made the most talk about himself was a gifted and witty Spartan. Next to personal fame, his only concern was to bring some life into the den and to procure himself frequent relief from the monotonous working life by all sorts of witty pranks. His nickname was Dunstan, and he found an original way to make a sensation and to swing himself up to a certain fame.

One morning, when the pupils came out of the dormitories, they found a paper pasted on the washroom door on which, under the title “Six Epigrams from Sparta,” a select number of the more conspicuous classmates, their follies, pranks, and friendships, were wittily mocked in distichs. The pair Giebenrath and Heilner too had received their blow. An enormous excitement arose in the little commonwealth; they crowded before that door as at the entrance of a theater, and the whole swarm buzzed, pushed, and hummed about like a hive of bees whose queen is getting ready to fly.

By the next morning the whole door was studded with epigrams and satirical couplets, with replies, assents, new attacks, without the author of the scandal, however, being so unwise as to take part in it again. He had achieved his purpose of throwing the tinder into the barn, and he rubbed his hands. For a few days almost all the pupils now took part in the war of couplets; everyone went about pensively, intent on a distich; and perhaps Lucius was the only one who went about his work unconcerned, as usual. In the end a teacher took notice of it and forbade the continuation of the exciting game.

The sly Dunstan did not rest on his laurels, but had meanwhile prepared his main stroke. He now brought out the first number of a newspaper, hectographed on scrap paper in a tiny format, for which he had been collecting material for weeks. It bore the title The Porcupine and was chiefly a comic paper. A jolly conversation between the author of the Book of Joshua and a Maulbronn seminarian was the showpiece of the first number. The paper was handed out free, two copies to each room, and was to appear in future twice a week and cost five pfennigs. The proceeds were intended for an entertainment fund.

The success was resounding, and Dunstan, who now took on the air and manners of a very busy editor and publisher, enjoyed in the monastery roughly the same ticklish reputation as the notorious satirist Aretino did in his day in the Republic of Venice.

It caused general astonishment when Hermann Heilner took a passionate part in the editing and now, together with Dunstan, exercised a sharp satirical censorship, for which he lacked neither wit nor venom. For some four weeks the little paper kept the whole monastery breathless.

Giebenrath let his friend have his way; he himself had neither the desire nor the gift to join in. At first he hardly even noticed that Heilner lately spent his evenings so often in Sparta, for other things had been occupying him for a short while. By day he went about sluggish and inattentive, worked slowly and without desire, and once something strange happened to him in the Livy lesson.

The professor called on him to translate. He stayed sitting.

“What is the meaning of this? Why don’t you stand up?” the professor cried angrily.

Hans did not stir. He sat upright on the bench, his head bowed a little and his eyes half closed. Being called on had half roused him from a dream, but he heard the teacher’s voice only as if from a great distance. He also felt his neighbor on the bench nudging him violently. It was no concern of his. He was surrounded by other people; other hands touched him and other voices spoke to him, near, soft, deep voices that spoke no words but only murmured deeply and gently like the sound of a fountain. And many eyes looked at him—strange, foreboding, large, radiant eyes. Perhaps the eyes of a Roman crowd, of which he had just been reading in Livy, perhaps the eyes of unknown people he had dreamed of or had seen at some time in pictures.

“Giebenrath!” the professor shouted. “Are you asleep?”

The pupil slowly opened his eyes, fixed them in astonishment on the teacher, and shook his head.

“You were asleep! Or can you tell me what sentence we are at? Well?”

Hans pointed with his finger into the book; he knew well where they were.

“Would you perhaps care to stand up now as well?” the professor asked scornfully. And Hans stood up.

“What are you up to? Look at me!”

He looked at the professor. But the professor did not like the look, for he shook his head in wonder.

“Are you unwell, Giebenrath?”

“No, Professor.”

“Sit down again and come to my room after the lesson.”

Hans sat down and bent over his Livy. He was wide awake and understood everything, but at the same time his inner eye followed the many strange figures, who slowly withdrew into great distances and kept their radiant eyes turned on him all the while, until far in the distance they sank into a mist. At the same time the teacher’s voice and that of the pupil translating and all the small noises of the classroom came nearer and nearer and were at last as real and present again as usual. Benches, lectern, and blackboard stood there as always; on the wall hung the big wooden compass and the T square; all around sat his classmates, and many of them were peering over at him curiously and insolently. Then Hans was violently startled.

“Come to my room after the lesson,” he had heard him say. Good God, what had happened?

At the end of the hour the professor beckoned him over and took him along through the gaping classmates.

“Now tell me what was really the matter with you. You were not asleep, then?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you stand up when I called on you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or didn’t you hear me? Are you hard of hearing?”

“No. I heard you.”

“And didn’t stand up? Afterward you had such strange eyes, too. What were you thinking of?”

“Of nothing. I was going to stand up.”

“Why didn’t you do it? So you were unwell after all?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know what it was.”

“Did you have a headache?”

“No.”

“Very well. Go.”

Before the noon meal he was called out again and taken to the dormitory. There the ephorus was waiting for him with the district physician. He was examined and questioned, but nothing clear came to light. The doctor laughed good-naturedly and took the matter lightly.

“Those are little nervous troubles, sir,” he chuckled softly. “A passing state of weakness—a kind of slight dizziness. We must see to it that the young man gets out into the air every day. For the headaches I can prescribe him a few drops.”

From then on Hans had to go outdoors for an hour every day after the noon meal. He had no objection to that. What was worse was that the ephorus expressly forbade him Heilner’s company on these walks. Heilner raged and cursed, but had to give in. So Hans always went alone and found a certain pleasure in it. It was the beginning of spring. Over the round, beautifully arched hills the budding green ran like a thin, bright wave; the trees laid aside their winter shape, the brown network with its sharp outlines, and lost themselves with the play of young leaves in one another and in the colors of the landscape, as one boundless, flowing wave of living green.

Before, in his years at the Latin school, Hans had looked at the spring differently from this time, more keenly and curiously and more in detail. He had watched the returning birds, one kind after another, and the order in which the trees blossomed, and then, as soon as it was May, he had begun to fish. Now he took no trouble to distinguish the kinds of birds or to recognize the bushes by their buds. He saw only the general stirring, the colors sprouting everywhere, breathed the smell of the young leaves, felt the softer and fermenting air, and walked through the fields in wonder. He tired soon, always had an inclination to lie down and fall asleep, and almost constantly saw all sorts of things other than those that really surrounded him. What sort of things they really were he did not know himself, and he did not think about it. They were bright, delicate, unusual dreams, which stood around him like portraits or like avenues of strange trees, without anything happening in them. Pure pictures, only to be looked at, but looking at them was an experience too, after all. It was a being carried away into other regions and to other people. It was a walking on foreign ground, on a soft soil pleasant to tread, and it was a breathing of foreign air, an air full of lightness and of a fine, dreamy spice. In place of these pictures there came at times a feeling, too, dark, warm, and exciting, as though a light hand glided over his body with a soft touch.

In reading and working Hans had great trouble paying attention. What did not interest him slipped away from under his hands like a shadow, and if he wanted to know the Hebrew vocabulary in the lesson, he had to learn it in the last half hour before. But often there came those moments of bodily vision when, as he read, he suddenly saw everything described standing there, living and moving, far more bodily and real than his immediate surroundings. And while he noticed with despair that his memory would no longer take anything in and grew lamer and more uncertain almost daily, older memories sometimes assailed him with an uncanny clarity that seemed strange and frightening to him. In the middle of a lesson or while reading, his father or old Anna or one of his former teachers or schoolmates would sometimes come into his mind, stand visibly before him, and hold his whole attention captive for a while. He also lived through scenes from his stay in Stuttgart, from the state examination, and from the holidays again and again, or he saw himself sitting by the river with his rod, smelled the haze of the sunny water, and at the same time it seemed to him as though the time he was dreaming of lay whole long years behind him.

On a mild, damp, dark evening he strolled up and down the dorment with Heilner and told him about home, about Papa, about fishing, and about school. His friend was strikingly quiet; he let him talk, nodded now and then, or made a few thoughtful slashes in the air with his little ruler, which he had to play with the livelong day. Gradually Hans too fell silent; night had come, and they sat down on the sill of a window.

“Say, Hans?” Heilner finally began. His voice was unsteady and excited.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“No, go on, say it!”

“I only thought—because you told me all sorts of things—”

“What, then?”

“Tell me, Hans, have you really never run after a girl?”

A silence fell. They had never yet talked about that. Hans was afraid of it, and yet this mysterious territory drew him like an enchanted garden. He felt himself turn red, and his fingers trembled.

“Only once,” he said in a whisper. “I was still a stupid kid.”

Silence again.

“—And you, Heilner?”

Heilner sighed.

“Oh, never mind!—You know, a person shouldn’t talk about it at all; there’s no point.”

“Yes there is, yes there is.”

“—I have a sweetheart.”

“You? Is it true?”

“At home. The neighbors’ girl. And this winter I gave her a kiss.”

“A kiss—?”

“Yes.—You know, it was already dark. In the evening, on the ice, and I was allowed to help her take off her skates. Then I gave her a kiss.”

“Didn’t she say anything?”

“Say anything, no. She just ran away.”

“And then?”

“And then!—Nothing.”

He sighed again, and Hans looked at him like a hero coming out of forbidden gardens.

Then the bell rang; they had to go to bed. There Hans lay, after the lantern had been put out and everything had grown still, awake for more than an hour longer, thinking of the kiss Heilner had given his sweetheart.

The next day he wanted to ask more, but was ashamed, and the other, since Hans did not ask him, shied from starting on it again of his own accord.

At school things went worse and worse for Hans. The teachers began to make angry faces and shoot strange glances; the ephorus was gloomy and annoyed; and his schoolmates too had long since noticed that Giebenrath was sinking from his height and had stopped aiming at first place. Only Heilner noticed nothing, since school itself was not especially important to him, and Hans himself watched everything happen and change without paying attention to it.

Heilner had meanwhile grown tired of editing the paper and returned wholly to his friend. In defiance of the prohibition he went along with Hans several times on his daily walk, lay in the sun with him and dreamed, read poems aloud, or made jokes about the ephorus. Hans hoped from day to day that he would go on with the revelations of his love adventures, but the longer it went on, the less he could bring himself to ask about them. With their classmates they were both as unpopular as ever, for Heilner had won no one’s trust with his malicious jokes in The Porcupine.

The paper folded at this time in any case; it had outlived itself and had been meant only for the boring weeks between winter and spring. Now the beginning of the fine season offered entertainment enough with botanizing, walks, and games outdoors. Every noon gymnasts, wrestlers, runners, and ball players filled the monastery forecourt with shouting and life.

To this was now added a new great sensation, whose author and center was once again the universal stumbling block, Hermann Heilner.

The ephorus had learned from loving schoolmates that Heilner was making fun of his prohibition and went along with Giebenrath on his walk almost every day. This time he left Hans in peace and summoned only the chief sinner, his old enemy, to his office. He addressed him as du, which Heilner at once forbade him. He reproached him with his disobedience. Heilner declared that he was Giebenrath’s friend and that no one had the right to forbid them to associate with each other. There was an ugly scene, whose result was that Heilner got a few hours’ detention, together with the strict prohibition against going out with Giebenrath in the near future.

So the next day Hans took his official walk alone again. He came back at two o’clock and joined the others in the classroom. At the beginning of the lesson it turned out that Heilner was missing. Everything was exactly as it had been that time when Hindu disappeared, only this time no one thought of lateness. At three o’clock the whole class, along with three teachers, went out on a search for the missing boy. They spread out, ran and shouted through the woods, and some, two of the teachers among them, did not think it impossible that he had done himself harm.

At five o’clock telegrams were sent to all the police stations in the region, and in the evening an express letter was sent off to Heilner’s father. By late evening no trace of any kind had been found yet, and until far into the night there was whispering and murmuring in all the dormitories. Among the pupils the assumption that he had jumped into the water found the most belief. Others thought he had simply gone home. But it had been established that the runaway could have had almost no money on him.

Hans was looked at as if he must know about the matter. But that was not so; rather, he was the most frightened and troubled of them all, and at night in the dormitory, when he heard the others asking, guessing, inventing, and joking, he crept deep under his blanket and lay for long, bad hours in grief and fear for his friend. A foreboding that he would not come back seized his anxious heart and filled him with a fearful sense of woe, until he fell asleep weary and troubled.

At the same hours Heilner lay a few miles away in a copse. He was freezing and could not sleep, but he breathed deeply in a profound feeling of freedom and stretched his limbs as if he had escaped from a narrow cage. He had been walking since noon, had bought bread in Knittlingen, and now took a bite of it now and then while he gazed through the branches, still bare and bright with spring, at the blackness of the night, the stars, and the swiftly sailing clouds. Where he would end up in the end did not matter to him; at least he had now escaped the hated monastery and shown the ephorus that his will was stronger than orders and prohibitions.

The whole of the following day they looked for him in vain. He spent the second night near a village among bundles of straw in the fields; in the morning he struck into the woods again, and only toward evening, when he meant to go into a village again, did he fall into the hands of a rural policeman. The policeman received him with friendly mockery and brought him to the town hall, where by wit and flattery he won the heart of the mayor, who took him home with him for the night and fed him plentifully with ham and eggs before bedtime. The next day his father, who had meanwhile arrived, fetched him.

The excitement in the monastery was great when the runaway was brought in. But he carried his head high and seemed not to regret his little trip of genius at all. He was required to beg pardon, but he refused and faced the secret tribunal of the teachers’ council by no means timidly or respectfully. They had wanted to keep him, but now the measure was full. He was dismissed in disgrace and left in the evening with his father, never to return. From his friend Giebenrath he had been able to take leave only with a handshake.

Fine and stirring was the great speech the ephorus gave on this extraordinary case of insubordination and degeneracy. His report to the higher authorities in Stuttgart sounded much tamer, more matter-of-fact, and feebler. The seminarians were forbidden to correspond with the departed monster, at which Hans Giebenrath, to be sure, only smiled. For weeks nothing was talked about so much as Heilner and his flight. Distance and the passing of time changed the general judgment, and some later looked after the fugitive, so anxiously avoided in his day, as after an eagle that had flown away.

The Hellas room now showed two empty desks, and the one lost last was not forgotten as quickly as the one before. Only the ephorus would have preferred to know that the second too was quiet and provided for. But Heilner did nothing to disturb the peace of the monastery. His friend waited and waited, but no letter ever came from him. He was gone and vanished; his figure and his flight gradually became history and at last legend. Later, after many further strokes of genius and many errors, the sorrow of life took the passionate boy under a strict discipline, and if not a hero, he has at any rate become an upright and stalwart man.

On Hans, who stayed behind, rested the suspicion of having known about Heilner’s flight, and it robbed him completely of the teachers’ goodwill. One of them said to him, when he failed to answer several questions in the lesson, “Why didn’t you go along with your fine friend Heilner?”

The ephorus ignored him, and looked at him sidelong with contemptuous pity, as the Pharisee looked at the publican. This Giebenrath no longer counted; he belonged among the lepers.