Chapter Five
Like a hamster with its hoarded stores, Hans kept himself alive for a while longer on the learning he had acquired earlier. Then began a painful starving, interrupted by short and feeble new attempts whose hopelessness almost made him laugh at himself. He now gave up tormenting himself uselessly, threw Homer after the Pentateuch and algebra after Xenophon, and watched without agitation as his good reputation with the teachers sank step by step, from good to fair, from fair to mediocre, and finally to zero. When he did not have a headache, which was now the rule again, he thought of Hermann Heilner, dreamed his light, wide-eyed dreams, and drowsed for hours in half thoughts. To the mounting reproaches of all the teachers he lately answered with a good-natured, meek smile. Wiedrich the tutor, a friendly young teacher, was the only one whom this helpless smile hurt and who treated the boy who had gone off the track with a compassionate forbearance. The other teachers were indignant at him, punished him by contemptuously ignoring him, or tried now and then to wake his sleeping ambition by ironic tickling.
“In case you should happen not to be asleep, may I perhaps request you to read this sentence?”
The ephorus was nobly indignant. The vain man thought a great deal of the power of his gaze and was beside himself when Giebenrath met his majestically threatening rolling of the eyes again and again with his meekly submissive smile, which was gradually getting on his nerves.
“Don’t smile so abysmally stupidly; you would have more reason to howl.”
A letter from his father made more of an impression, imploring him in horror to mend his ways. The ephorus had written to Father Giebenrath, and the latter had been terribly frightened. His letter to Hans was a collection of all the encouraging and morally indignant phrases at the worthy man’s command, and yet, without his meaning it to, it let a tearful pitifulness show through, which hurt his son.
All these guides of youth so zealous in their duty, from the ephorus down to Papa Giebenrath, professors and tutors, saw in Hans a bad element, an obstacle to their wishes, something obstinate and sluggish that had to be compelled and brought back by force to the good path. None of them, except perhaps that compassionate tutor, saw behind the helpless smile of the narrow boyish face a sinking soul suffering and, as it drowned, looking about it in fear and despair. And it occurred to none of them that the school and the barbarous ambition of a father and a few teachers had brought this frail, fine creature to this pass by raging recklessly in the soul of the delicate child, spread out before them in innocence. Why had he had to work every day until late into the night in the most sensitive and dangerous years of boyhood? Why had they taken his rabbits away from him, deliberately estranged him from his schoolmates in the Latin school, forbidden him fishing and roaming, and inoculated him with the hollow, vulgar ideal of a shabby, wearing ambition? Why had they not granted him his well-earned holidays even after the examination?
Now the overdriven little horse lay by the roadside and was no use anymore.
Toward the beginning of summer the district physician declared once more that it was only a matter of a nervous state of weakness, coming mainly from growing. Hans should let himself be thoroughly nursed back to health in the holidays, eat enough, and go walking a lot in the woods, and then it would surely improve.
Unfortunately it did not come to that at all. It was still three weeks before the holidays when Hans was violently scolded by the professor in an afternoon lesson. While the teacher was still going on scolding, Hans sank back on the bench, began to tremble fearfully, and broke into a long fit of weeping that interrupted the whole lesson. After that he lay in bed for half a day.
The day after, in the mathematics lesson, he was told to draw a geometrical figure on the blackboard and give the proof of it. He stepped out, but in front of the board he grew dizzy; he moved the chalk and ruler senselessly about the surface, dropped them both, and when he bent down for them, he himself stayed kneeling on the floor and could not get up again.
The district physician was rather annoyed that his patient was allowing himself such tricks. He expressed himself cautiously, ordered immediate sick leave, and recommended calling in a specialist for nervous diseases.
“He’ll get Saint Vitus’ dance yet,” he whispered to the ephorus, who nodded his head and found it advisable to change the ungraciously annoyed expression of his face into one of fatherly regret, which came easily to him and suited him well.
He and the doctor each wrote a letter to Hans’s father, put them in the boy’s pocket, and sent him home. The ephorus’s annoyance had turned into grave concern—what would the school authorities, just now disturbed by the Heilner case, think of this new misfortune? To everyone’s astonishment he even refrained from giving a speech befitting the occasion, and in the last hours he was uncannily affable toward Hans. That Hans would not return from his sick leave was clear to him—even in the event of recovery, the pupil, already far behind, could not possibly have made up the months, or even only the weeks, he had missed. He did take leave of him with an encouragingly hearty “until we meet again,” but every time in the weeks that followed that he entered the Hellas room and saw the three empty desks, he felt uncomfortable and had trouble fighting down the thought that perhaps, after all, a part of the blame for the disappearance of two gifted pupils might fall on him. As a brave and morally strong man, however, he succeeded in banishing these useless and gloomy doubts from his soul.
Behind the seminarian traveling away with his little bag the monastery sank away with its churches, gate, gables, and towers; the woods and the ranges of hills sank away; in their place appeared the fertile orchard meadows of the Baden borderland; then came Pforzheim, and right behind it began the bluish-black fir-covered mountains of the Black Forest, cut through by numerous brook valleys and, in the hot summer glow, even bluer, cooler, and more full of the promise of shade than usual. The boy looked at the changing landscape, which grew more and more like home, not without pleasure, until, already near his home town, his father came into his mind and a painful fear of his reception thoroughly spoiled the little pleasure of the journey for him. The trip to the examination in Stuttgart and the journey to enter Maulbronn came back to him with their suspense and anxious joy. What had all that been for now? He knew as well as the ephorus that he would not come back, and that it was all over now with the seminary and studying and all ambitious hopes. But this did not make him sad now; only fear of his disappointed father, whose hopes he had betrayed, weighed on his heart. He had no other desire now than to rest, to sleep his fill, to cry his fill, to dream his fill, and after all the torment to be left in peace for once. And he feared that he would not find that at home with his father. At the end of the train ride he got a violent headache and no longer looked out of the window, although the train was now going through his favorite country, whose heights and forests he had once roamed with passion; and in spite of his fear he almost missed getting off at the familiar station at home.
Now he stood there with umbrella and bag and was looked at by Papa. The ephorus’s last report had turned the father’s disappointment and indignation over his son, who was going to the bad, into a bewildered terror. He had imagined Hans wasted and looking terrible, and now found him thin and frail, to be sure, but still whole and walking on his own legs. That comforted him a little; but the worst was his hidden fear, his horror of the nervous illness the doctor and the ephorus had written about. No one in his family had ever had nervous troubles up to now; people had always spoken of such sick people with uncomprehending mockery or with a contemptuous pity, as of inmates of a madhouse, and now his Hans was coming home to him with such stories.
On the first day the boy was glad not to be received with reproaches. Then he noticed the shy, anxious forbearance with which his father treated him and to which he visibly had to force himself. Now and then he also noticed that his father looked at him with strangely searching glances, with an uncanny curiosity, spoke to him in a muffled and false tone, and watched him without his being supposed to notice it. He grew only shyer, and a vague fear of his own condition began to torment him.
In good weather he lay out in the woods for hours, and it did him good. A faint reflection of his former boyish bliss sometimes passed over his damaged soul there: joy in flowers or beetles, in listening to the birds or following the track of an animal. But these were always only moments. Mostly he lay idly in the moss, had a heavy head, and tried in vain to think of something, until the dreams came to him again and took him far away into other spaces. He had a headache almost constantly, and when he thought back to the monastery or to the Latin school, the image of the many books and subjects and duties fell upon him like a grim nightmare, and in his aching skull Livy and Caesar, Xenophon and arithmetic problems performed confused, painful dances.
Once he had the following dream. He saw his friend Hermann Heilner lying dead on a stretcher and wanted to go to him, but the ephorus and the teachers pushed him back and dealt him painful blows at every new attempt to get through. Not only the seminary professors and tutors were there, but also the rector and the examiners from Stuttgart, all with embittered faces. Suddenly everything was different: on the stretcher lay the drowned Hindu, and his comical father with the tall top hat stood beside it, bowlegged and woeful.
And another dream: he was running in the woods in search of the runaway Heilner, and he saw him again and again walking in the distance between the trunks, and saw him over and over again disappear just when he wanted to call to him. At last Heilner stopped, let him come up, and said, “Listen, I have a sweetheart.” Then he laughed excessively loud and disappeared into the bushes.
He saw a beautiful, lean man stepping out of a ship, with quiet, divine eyes and beautiful, peaceful hands, and he ran toward him. Everything melted away again, and he tried to remember what it was, until the passage in the Gospel came back to him where it said: euthus epignontes auton periedramon. And now he had to remember what form of conjugation periedramon was and what the present, infinitive, perfect, and future of the verb were; he had to conjugate it all the way through in the singular, dual, and plural, and fell into fear and sweat as soon as he stuck. When he then came to himself, he had a feeling as though his head were sore inside everywhere, and when his face twisted involuntarily into that sleepy smile of resignation and consciousness of guilt, he at once heard the ephorus: “What is the meaning of that stupid smile? You are the last one who has any business smiling!”
On the whole, in spite of a few better days, no progress would show in Hans’s condition; it seemed rather to go backward. The family doctor, who had treated his mother in her day and pronounced her dead, and who sometimes visited his father, who suffered a little from gout, made a long face and hesitated from day to day to give his opinion.
Only in those weeks did Hans notice that in the last two years of the Latin school he had had no friends anymore. His schoolmates of that time were partly gone; others he saw running about as apprentices; and nothing bound him to any of them; he had no business with any of them, and none of them cared about him. Twice the old rector spoke a few friendly words with him; the Latin teacher and the town pastor too nodded to him kindly in the street; but really Hans was no longer any concern of theirs. He was no longer a vessel into which all sorts of things could be stuffed, no longer a field for many kinds of seed; it was no longer worth spending time and care on him.
Perhaps it would have been good if the town pastor had taken him up a little. But what was he to do? What he could give, learning or at least the search for it, he had not withheld from the boy in his day, and more he simply did not have. He was not one of those pastors whose Latin one has well-founded doubts about and whose sermons are drawn from well-known sources, but to whom one gladly goes in bad times, because they have kind eyes and friendly words for every suffering. Nor was Father Giebenrath a friend or comforter, even though he took every pains to hide the vexation of his disappointment in Hans.
So Hans felt himself forsaken and unloved, sat in the sun in the little garden or lay in the woods and gave himself up to his reveries or to tormenting thoughts. He could not help himself with reading, since his head and eyes always soon hurt when he read, and because out of every one of his books, as soon as he opened it, the ghost of his time in the monastery and of the fear he had felt there rose up at once, drove him into airless, anxious corners of dream, and held him spellbound there with a burning gaze.
In this distress and forsakenness another ghost approached the sick boy as a deceptive comforter and gradually became familiar and necessary to him. That was the thought of death. It was easy, after all, to get hold of a firearm or to fix a noose somewhere in the woods. Almost every day these notions accompanied him on his walks; he looked over particular quiet little spots and finally found a place where one could die beautifully, and which he settled on for good as the place of his death. He went back to it again and again, sat there, and found a strange pleasure in imagining that one day soon he would be found dead there. The branch for the rope was chosen and tested for its strength; no more difficulties stood in the way; gradually, too, with long pauses, a short letter to his father and a very long one to Hermann Heilner were written, which were to be found with the body.
The preparations and the feeling of certainty had a beneficial effect on his spirits. Sitting under the fateful branch, he had many hours in which the pressure lifted from him and almost a joyful feeling of well-being came over him. His father too noticed the improvement in his condition, and Hans watched with ironic pleasure as his father rejoiced in a mood whose cause was, after all, only the certainty of his early end.
Why he was not long since hanging from that beautiful branch he did not really know himself. The thought had been conceived; his death was a settled matter; meanwhile he felt well for the time being and did not disdain to relish the beautiful sunshine and the lonely dreaming in these last days, as people like to do before long journeys. He could leave any day, after all; everything was in order. It was also a special bitter delight to him to stay on a little of his own free will in the old surroundings and to look into the faces of people who had no idea of his dangerous resolutions. Whenever he met the doctor, he had to think, “Just you wait and see!”
Fate let him take pleasure in his dark intentions and watched as every day he enjoyed from the cup of death a few drops of delight and vital strength. There might be little at stake in this mutilated young creature, but it was to complete its circle first all the same and not vanish from the scene before it had tasted a little more of the bitter sweetness of life.
The inescapable tormenting notions grew rarer and gave way to a weary letting go of himself, a painlessly sluggish mood in which Hans watched the hours and days drift by without thinking, gazed indifferently into the blue, and at times seemed to be sleepwalking or childish. Once, in a sluggish twilight mood, he sat in the little garden under the fir and hummed over and over to himself, without really knowing it, an old verse that had just come into his head from the Latin school days:
Oh, I am so tired,
Oh, I am so weary,
Not a penny in my purse,
And my pocket’s empty.
He hummed it to the old tune and thought nothing of it as he struck it up for the twentieth time. But his father was standing near the window, listened, and had a great fright. To his dry nature this thoughtless, comfortably dull singsong was entirely incomprehensible, and with a sigh he interpreted it as a sign of hopeless feeble-mindedness. From then on he watched the boy still more anxiously; Hans noticed it, of course, and suffered from it; but still he did not get around to taking the rope along and making use of that strong branch.
Meanwhile the hot season had come, and a year had already passed since the state examination and the summer holidays of that time. Hans thought of it now and then, but without any particular emotion; he had become rather dull. He would gladly have begun fishing again, but he did not dare to ask his father for permission. It tormented him every time he stood by the water, and sometimes he lingered for a long time on the bank where no one saw him and followed with burning eyes the movements of the dark, silently swimming fish. Toward evening he went a stretch upstream every day to swim, and since he always had to pass the little house of Inspector Geßler on the way, he discovered by chance that Emma Geßler, whom he had worshiped three years before, was home again. Curious, he looked after her a few times, but he did not like her nearly as well as before. In those days she had been a delicately built, very dainty little girl; now she had grown, had angular movements, and wore an unchildlike, modern hairdo that disfigured her completely. The long dresses did not suit her either, and her attempts to look like a lady were decidedly unfortunate. Hans found her ridiculous, but at the same time he was sorry when he thought how strangely sweet and dark and warm he had felt in those days every time he saw her. Altogether—in those days everything had been different, after all, so much more beautiful, so much more cheerful, so much more alive! For a long time now he had known of nothing but Latin, history, Greek, examinations, seminary, and headaches. But in those days there had been books of fairy tales and books of robber stories; then he had had a little hammer mill he made himself running in the garden, and in the evenings had listened to Liese’s adventurous stories in the Naschold gateway; then for a while he had taken old Großjohann the neighbor, called Garibaldi, for a robber and murderer and had dreamed of him; and all year round he had looked forward every month to something, now to haymaking, now to cutting the clover, then again to the first fishing or crayfishing, to the hop harvest, to shaking down the plums, to potato fires, to the beginning of threshing, and in between, in addition, to every dear Sunday and holiday. Then there had still been a great many things that drew him with a mysterious magic: houses, lanes, stairs, haylofts, fountains, fences, people and animals of every kind had been dear and familiar to him or mysteriously alluring. He had helped with the hop picking and listened to the big girls singing, and had remembered verses from their songs, most of them droll enough to make you laugh, but some of them strangely plaintive too, so that something choked you in the throat as you listened.
All that had sunk away and come to an end, without his noticing it at the time. First the evenings at Liese’s had stopped, then catching goldfins on Sunday mornings, then reading fairy tales, and so one thing after another, down to the hop picking and the hammer mill in the garden. Oh, where had all that gone?
And it happened that the precocious youth now, in his days of sickness, lived through an unreal second childhood. His heart, robbed of its childhood by the schoolmen, now fled back with suddenly bursting longing into those beautiful twilit years and wandered enchanted in a forest of memories whose strength and clarity were perhaps morbid. He lived through them all with no less warmth and passion than he had once lived through them in reality; his cheated and violated childhood broke open in him like a long-dammed spring.
When a tree has its top cut off, it likes to send out new shoots near its roots, and so too a soul that fell sick and was spoiled in its blossoming often returns to the springlike time of beginnings and of childhood full of presentiment, as though it could discover new hopes there and tie the broken thread of life together anew. The root shoots spring up lush and quick, but it is only a semblance of life, and a tree never grows out of them again.
So it went with Hans Giebenrath too, and that is why it is necessary to follow him a little on his dream paths in the land of childhood.
The Giebenrath house stood near the old stone bridge and formed the corner between two very different lanes. The one to which the house was reckoned and belonged was the longest, broadest, and most distinguished in the town and was called Tanners’ Lane. The second climbed steeply uphill, was short, narrow, and wretched, and was called the Falcon, after an ancient inn, long since closed, whose sign had been a falcon.
In Tanners’ Lane lived, house after house, nothing but good, solid old citizens, people with their own houses, their own pews in church, and their own gardens, which rose steeply up the hill behind in terraces and whose fences bordered on the railway embankment built in the year seventy, overgrown with yellow broom. In distinction only the market square could compete with Tanners’ Lane, where church, district office, court, town hall, and deanery stood and in their clean dignity made a thoroughly urban and noble impression. Tanners’ Lane did not have any official buildings, it is true, but it had old and new citizens’ dwellings with stately front doors, pretty, old-fashioned little half-timbered houses, neat bright gables; and it gained a wealth of friendliness, comfort, and light from having only one row of houses, for on the other side of the street the river ran along at the foot of a wall fitted with timber railings.
If Tanners’ Lane was long, broad, bright, roomy, and distinguished, the Falcon was the opposite. Here stood crooked, dark houses with stained and crumbling plaster, overhanging gables that recalled hats knocked in, doors and windows cracked and patched in many places, crooked chimneys, and leaky gutters. The houses robbed one another of space and light, and the lane was narrow, strangely bent, and wrapped in an eternal twilight that in rainy weather or after sunset turned into a damp, malignant darkness. In front of all the windows a mass of washing always hung on poles and lines; for small and wretched as the lane was, a great many families lived in it, not to speak of all the subtenants and lodgers who rented a bed for the night. Every corner of the crooked, aging houses was densely inhabited, and poverty, vice, and sickness had their residence there. The police and the hospital had not as much to do with the whole rest of the town as with the few houses of the Falcon. When typhoid broke out, it was there; when there was a killing for once, it was there too; and when a theft happened in the town, they looked in the Falcon first. Traveling peddlers had their lodgings there, among them the droll seller of polishing powder, Hottehotte, and the scissors grinder Adam Hittel, to whom every crime and vice was attributed.
In his first school years Hans had been a frequent guest in the Falcon. Together with a dubious band of straw-blond, ragged boys he had listened to the murder stories of the notorious Lotte Frohmüller. She was the divorced wife of a small innkeeper and had five years of prison behind her; in her day she had been a well-known beauty, had had a great number of sweethearts among the factory hands, and had given occasion to frequent scandals and knife fights. Now she lived alone and spent her evenings after the factories closed making coffee and telling stories; while she did so her door stood wide open, and besides the women and the young workers a troop of neighbors’ children always listened to her from the threshold with delight and horror. On the little black stone stove the water boiled in the kettle; a tallow candle burned beside it and, together with the little blue coal fire, lit the overcrowded, dark room with an adventurous flickering, throwing the shadows of the listeners in enormous sizes on the wall and ceiling and filling them with ghostly movement.
There the eight-year-old boy made the acquaintance of the two Finkenbein brothers and kept up a friendship with them for about a year, in defiance of a strict paternal prohibition. Their names were Dolf and Emil, and they were the craftiest street boys in town, famous for stealing fruit and small offenses in the woods, and consummate masters of countless skills and pranks. On the side they dealt in birds’ eggs, lead shot, young ravens, starlings, and rabbits, set night lines where it was forbidden, and felt at home in all the gardens of the town, for no fence was so spiky and no wall so thickly studded with broken glass that they could not easily get over it.
But above all it was Hermann Rechtenheil, who lived in the Falcon, to whom Hans attached himself. He was an orphan and a sick, precocious, unusual child. Because one of his legs was much too short, he always had to walk with a stick and could not take part in the games in the lane. He was thin and had a colorless face full of suffering, with a prematurely bitter mouth and too pointed a chin. He was uncommonly skillful at all sorts of handiwork, and above all he had a tremendous passion for fishing, which he passed on to Hans. Hans did not yet have a fishing permit then, but they fished in secret all the same at hidden spots, and if hunting is a pleasure, poaching, as everyone knows, is a delight. Crooked Rechtenheil taught Hans to cut the right rods, plait horsehair, dye lines, twist loops of thread, sharpen hooks. He also taught him to watch the weather, to observe the water and cloud it with bran, to choose the right bait and fasten it correctly; he taught him to tell the kinds of fish apart, to spy on the fish while fishing, to keep the line at the right depth. Without words, only by his example and his presence, he passed on to him the knacks and the fine feeling for the moment of striking or giving line, and that strange sensitivity of the hand without which no fine fishing is possible. The handsome rods, corks, and gut lines that could be bought in shops, and all artificial tackle, he despised and scorned with zeal, and he convinced Hans that one could not possibly fish with a line one had not made and put together oneself in every part.
With the Finkenbein brothers Hans parted in anger; quiet, lame Rechtenheil left him without any quarrel. One February day he stretched out in his poor little bed, laid his crutch over his clothes on the chair, began to run a fever, and died quickly and quietly away; the Falcon forgot him at once, and only Hans kept him in good memory for a long time.
But with him the number of remarkable inhabitants of the Falcon was far from exhausted. Who did not know Rötteler the mailman, dismissed for drunkenness, who every two weeks lay drunk in the street or made scandals at night, but otherwise was good as a child and constantly smiled full of goodwill? He let Hans take snuff from his oval box, now and then let Hans make him a present of fish, fried them in butter, and invited Hans to share the meal. He owned a stuffed buzzard with glass eyes and an old music box that played old-fashioned dance tunes in thin, fine little notes. And who did not know the ancient mechanic Porsch, who always wore cuffs, even when he went barefoot? As the son of a strict village schoolteacher of the old school, he knew half the Bible and a few earfuls of proverbs and moral maxims by heart; but neither this nor his snow-white hair prevented him from playing the lady-killer before all the women and often getting drunk. When he had taken on a bit of a load, he liked to sit on the curbstone at the corner of the Giebenrath house, called all the passersby by name, and served them abundantly with sayings.
“Hans Giebenrath junior, my dear son, hear what I tell you! What saith Sirach? Blessed is he that giveth no evil counsel and hath no evil conscience thereof! As the green leaves on a fair tree, some fall and some grow again, so it is with men too: some die and some are born. So, now you can go home, you young sea dog.”
This old Porsch, in spite of his pious sayings, was full of dark and legendary accounts of ghosts and the like. He knew the places where they walked and always wavered between belief and unbelief in his own stories. Usually he began them in a doubting, boastful, dismissive tone, as though he were making fun of the story and of his listeners, but gradually, as he told it, he hunched himself up fearfully, lowered his voice more and more, and ended in a soft, urgent, creepy whisper.
How much that was uncanny, impenetrable, darkly alluring the poor little lane held! In it too, after his business had failed and his neglected workshop had gone completely to ruin, Brendle the locksmith had lived. He had sat at his little window for half the day and looked darkly out into the lively lane, and sometimes, when one of the ragged, unwashed children from the neighboring houses fell into his hands, he had tormented it with savage malice, pulled its ears and hair, and pinched its whole body black and blue. But one day he hung on his staircase, hanged on a piece of zinc wire, and looked so hideous that no one dared go near him, until old Porsch the mechanic cut the wire from behind with tin snips, whereupon the corpse, its tongue hanging out, fell forward and went tumbling down the stairs, right into the midst of the horrified onlookers.
Every time Hans stepped out of the bright, broad Tanners’ Lane into the dark, damp Falcon, a delightfully gruesome oppression came over him with the strange stifling air, a mixture of curiosity, fear, bad conscience, and a blissful intimation of adventure. The Falcon was the only place where a fairy tale, a miracle, an unheard-of horror might still happen, where magic and ghostly doings were believable and probable, and where one could feel the same painfully delicious shudders as in reading the legends and the scandalous chapbooks from Reutlingen, which the teachers confiscated and which told of the infamous deeds and punishments of the Sonnenwirtle, of Schinderhannes, of Messerkarle, of Postmichel, and of similar dark heroes, desperate criminals, and adventurers.
But besides the Falcon there was one more place where things were different from everywhere else, where one could experience and hear things and lose oneself in dark lofts and unusual rooms. That was the big tannery nearby, the huge old house where the great hides hung in half-dark lofts, where in the cellar there were covered pits and forbidden passages, and where in the evenings Liese told all the children her beautiful fairy tales. Things went on there more quietly, kindly, and humanly than over in the Falcon, but no less mysteriously. The doings of the tanners’ journeymen in the pits, in the cellar, in the bark yard, and in the drying lofts were strange and peculiar; the great yawning rooms were still and as attractive as they were uncanny; the mighty and surly master of the house was feared and shunned like an ogre; and Liese went about the remarkable house like a fairy, a protector and mother to all children, birds, cats, and little dogs, full of goodness and full of wondrously strange fairy tales and verses of songs.
In this world, long since estranged from him, the boy’s thoughts and dreams now moved. Out of his great disappointment and hopelessness he fled back into the good time that was past, when he had still been full of hopes and had seen the world standing before him like a gigantic enchanted forest that hid gruesome dangers, bewitched treasures, and emerald castles in its impenetrable depths. He had made his way a little distance into this wilderness, but he had grown tired before the wonders came, and now he stood again at the mysteriously dusky entrance, this time as one shut out, in idle curiosity.
A few times Hans went to the Falcon again. He found there the old dusk and the old bad smell, the old corners and lightless stairwells; again old men and women sat in front of the doors, and unwashed, straw-blond children ran about shouting. Porsch the mechanic had grown older still and no longer knew Hans and answered his shy greeting only with a scornful bleat. Großjohann, called Garibaldi, had died, and so had Lotte Frohmüller. Rötteler the mailman was still there. He complained that the boys had broken his music box, offered him snuff, and then tried to beg from him; finally he told about the Finkenbein brothers: one of them was in the cigar factory now and already drank like a grown man; the other had run off after a knifing at a church fair and had been missing for a year now. Everything made a pitiful and wretched impression.
And once in the evening he went over to the tannery. Something drew him through the gateway and across the damp courtyard, as though his childhood lay hidden in the big old house with all its lost joys.
Over the crooked steps and the paved front hall he came to the dark staircase, groped his way up to the loft where the hides hung stretched out, and there, with the sharp smell of leather, breathed in a whole cloud of suddenly rushing memories. He came down again and looked for the back courtyard, where the tanning pits were and the tall, narrowly roofed racks for drying the cakes of spent bark. Sure enough, Liese was sitting on the bench by the wall with a basket of potatoes to peel in front of her and a few listening children around her.
Hans stopped in the dark doorway and listened over toward them. A great peace filled the darkening tanner’s yard, and apart from the faint rushing of the river that flowed past behind the courtyard wall, one heard only Liese’s knife scraping as she peeled the potatoes, and her voice telling the story. The children sat crouched quite still and hardly stirred. She was telling the story of Saint Christopher, how in the night a child’s voice calls him across the river.
Hans listened for a while; then he went quietly back through the black front hall and home. He felt that he could not become a child again after all and sit with Liese in the tanner’s yard in the evenings, and now he avoided the tannery as much as the Falcon.