Chapter Six
It was already well on into autumn. Out of the black fir woods the scattered leafy trees shone yellow and red like torches; the ravines already had heavy mists; and the river steamed in the cool of the mornings.
The pale former seminarian still roamed about outdoors day after day, listless and tired, and fled the little company he might have had. The doctor prescribed drops, cod-liver oil, eggs, and cold sponge baths.
It was no wonder that none of it would really help. Every healthy life must have a content and a goal, and young Giebenrath had lost these. Now his father was determined to have him either become a clerk or learn a trade. The boy was still weak, it was true, and was first to regain a little more strength, but now one could soon think of getting serious with him.
Since the first bewildering impressions had softened, and since he no longer believed even in the suicide itself, Hans had passed from the agitated and changeable states of fear into an even melancholy, into which he sank slowly and defenselessly as into soft mud.
Now he roamed about in the autumn fields and succumbed to the influence of the season. The ebbing of autumn, the quiet fall of leaves, the browning of the meadows, the thick early mist, the ripe, weary wish of all growing things to die, drove him, as they do all sick people, into heavy, hopeless moods and sad thoughts. He felt the wish to pass away with it all, to fall asleep with it, to die with it, and suffered because his youth contradicted this and clung to life with a quiet tenacity.
He watched the trees, how they turned yellow, turned brown, turned bare, and the milk-white mist that smoked out of the woods, and the gardens, in which life went out after the last fruit picking and no one looked any longer at the asters fading in their colors, and the river, in which swimming and fishing were over, which was covered with dry leaves and on whose frosty banks only the hardy tanners still held out. For some days the river had been carrying masses of cider pulp along with it, for at the pressing places and in all the mills they were now busily making cider, and the smell of fruit juice, gently fermenting, drifted through all the lanes of the town.
In the lower mill Flaig the shoemaker too had rented a small press, and he invited Hans to the cider making.
In the forecourt of the mill stood large and small cider presses, wagons, baskets and sacks full of fruit, tubs, vats, buckets, and barrels, whole mountains of brown pulp, wooden levers, wheelbarrows, empty carts. The presses worked, crunched, squealed, groaned, bleated. Most of them were painted green, and this green, together with the brownish yellow of the pulp, the colors of the apple baskets, the light-green river, the barefoot children, and the clear autumn sun, gave everyone who saw it an inviting impression of joy, zest for life, and abundance. The crunching of the crushed apples sounded tart and appetizing; whoever came up and heard it had to take an apple in his fist quickly and bite into it. From the spouts the sweet young cider flowed in a thick stream, reddish yellow and laughing in the sun; whoever came up and looked at it had to ask for a glass and quickly taste a sample; then he stood still, his eyes grew moist, and he felt a stream of sweetness and well-being go through him. And this sweet cider filled the air far around with its glad, strong, delicious smell. This fragrance is really the finest thing of the whole year, the essence of ripeness and harvest, and it is good to breathe it in like this before the coming winter, for with it one remembers with gratitude a great many good, wonderful things: gentle May rains, rushing summer rains, cool autumn morning dew, tender spring sunshine and glaring hot summer blaze, the white and rose-red shining blossom and the ripe, red-brown gleam of the fruit trees before the harvest, and, in between, everything beautiful and joyful that the course of a year has brought.
Those were splendid days for everyone. The rich and the show-offs, as far as they condescended to appear in person, weighed their fine, plump apples in their hands, counted their dozen sacks or more, tasted from a silver pocket cup, and let everyone hear that not a drop of water went into their cider. The poor had only a single sack of fruit, tasted from glasses or earthenware bowls, added water, and were no less proud and cheerful for it. Whoever for any reason could not make cider at all went around from press to press among his acquaintances and neighbors, had a glass poured for him everywhere and an apple put in his pocket, and proved by expert remarks that he too understood his share of the business. But the many children, poor or rich, ran about with little cups, each with a bitten apple and each with a piece of bread in hand, for there had been a baseless saying since olden times that if you ate plenty of bread at the cider making you would not get a bellyache afterward.
A hundred voices shouted all at once, not to speak of the children’s racket, and all these voices were busy, excited, and cheerful.
“Come on, Hannes, over here! Over to me! Just one glass!”
“Thanks kindly, I’ve already got the gripes.”
“What’d you pay for the hundredweight?”
“Four marks. But first-rate. Here, try it!”
Now and then a small mishap occurred. A sack of apples came open too soon and everything rolled onto the ground.
“Damnation, my apples! Help, you people!”
Everybody helped pick them up, and only a few scamps tried to enrich themselves while they were at it.
“No pocketing, you rascals! Gobble all you can hold, but no pocketing. Just you wait, you little dope, you!”
“Hey, neighbor, don’t be so proud! Come try some of this!”
“Like honey! Just like honey. How much are you making?”
“Two little barrels, no more, but none of it bad.”
“Good thing we don’t make cider in midsummer, or we’d drink it all straight off.”
This year too the few grumpy old people are there who must not be missing. They have not made cider themselves for a long time, but they know everything better and tell about the good old days when you got fruit as good as free. Everything was so much cheaper and better; nobody had ever heard of putting sugar in; and altogether the trees bore quite differently in those days.
“Then you could talk about a harvest. I had one little apple tree, and it threw down its five hundredweight all by itself.”
But bad as the times have become, the grumpy old folk still help with the tasting abundantly this year too, and those who still have teeth each chew away at an apple. One of them has even forced down a couple of big pears and got the gripes miserably.
“I’m telling you,” he grumbles, “in the old days I ate ten of those.” And with unfeigned sighs he remembers the times when he could still gobble down ten pears before he got the gripes.
In the middle of the crowd Mr. Flaig had his press standing and let the older apprentice help him. He got his apples from Baden, and his cider was always of the best. He was quietly content and refused no one a “little taste.” Still more content were his children, who romped about all around and swam blissfully along in the swarm. But most content of all, if quietly, was his apprentice. It did him good in every bone to be able once again to stir about and work hard in the open air, for he came down from a poor farmhouse up in the forest, and the good sweet cider went down deliciously too. His healthy farm boy’s face grinned like a satyr mask, and his shoemaker’s hands were cleaner than they ever were on a Sunday.
When Hans Giebenrath came onto the square, he was quiet and anxious; he had not wanted to come. But at the very first press a cup was held out to him, and by Naschold’s Liese at that. He tasted, and as he swallowed, there came over him with the sweet, strong taste of the cider a host of laughing memories of earlier autumns, and at the same time a timid desire to join in a little for once and be merry. Acquaintances spoke to him, glasses were offered him, and by the time he reached Flaig’s press, the general merriment and the drink had already seized him and transformed him. Quite jolly, he greeted the shoemaker and made a few of the usual cider jokes. The master hid his astonishment and welcomed him cheerfully.
Half an hour had passed when a girl in a blue skirt came along, laughed at Flaig and his apprentice, and began to help.
“Oh yes,” said the shoemaker, “this is my niece from Heilbronn. Of course she’s used to a different kind of harvest, where there’s all that wine back home.”
She was perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old, lively and merry as the lowlanders are, not tall but well built and full in her figure. In her round face the dark, warmly gazing eyes and the pretty, kissable mouth were merry and clever, and all in all she looked like a healthy and cheerful girl from Heilbronn, but not at all like a relative of the devout master shoemaker. She was thoroughly of this world, and her eyes did not look like eyes accustomed to reading in the evening and at night in the Bible and in Goßner’s devotional Treasure Chest.
Hans suddenly looked troubled again and fervently wished that Emma would go away again soon. But she stayed and laughed and chattered and had a quick answer for every joke, and Hans was ashamed and grew quite silent. To associate with young girls to whom he had to say Sie was horrible to him in any case, and this one was so lively and so talkative and cared so little about his presence and his shyness that, awkward and a little offended, he drew in his feelers and crept into himself like a slug grazed by a cartwheel on the road. He kept quiet and tried to look like someone who is bored; but he did not succeed, and instead he made a face as if someone had just died on him.
No one had time to pay attention to it, Emma herself least of all. She had been visiting the Flaigs for two weeks, as Hans got to hear, but she already knew the whole town. She ran about among high and low, tasted the new cider, joked and laughed a little, came back again and acted as though she were busily working along, took the children up in her arms, gave away apples, and spread nothing but laughter and fun around her. She called out to every street boy, “Want an apple?” Then she took a fine, red-cheeked one, put her hands behind her back, and made them guess: “Right or left?” But the apple was never in the right hand, and only when the boys began to grumble did she give one away, but a smaller and green one. She seemed to have been told about Hans too, asked him whether he was the one who always had headaches, but before he could answer she was already caught up in another conversation with neighbors.
Hans already had a mind to slip away and go home when Flaig put the lever into his hand.
“There, now you can carry on a little; Emma will help you. I have to go to the workshop.”
The master went, the apprentice was told to carry the cider away with the master’s wife, and Hans was alone at the press with Emma. He clenched his teeth and worked with grim hostility.
Then he could not help wondering why the lever went so hard, and when he looked up, the girl broke into a bright laugh. She had braced herself against it for fun, and when Hans now pulled again furiously, she did it once more.
He did not say a word. But as he pushed the lever, which the girl’s body resisted on the other side, he suddenly felt bashful and oppressed, and gradually he stopped turning altogether. A sweet fear came over him, and when the young thing laughed boldly into his face, she suddenly seemed changed to him, friendlier and yet more strange, and now he too laughed a little, awkwardly confiding.
And then the lever came to a complete stop.
And Emma said, “Let’s not wear ourselves out like this,” and handed him the half-full glass she had just been drinking from herself.
This swallow of cider seemed to him very strong and sweeter than the one before, and when he had drunk it, he looked longingly into the empty glass and wondered how violently his heart was beating and how hard it was for him to breathe.
After that they worked again a little, and Hans did not know what he was doing when he tried to stand so that the girl’s skirt would have to brush against him and her hand touch his. But every time this happened, his heart stopped in fearful bliss, and a pleasantly sweet weakness came over him, so that his knees trembled a little and a dizzy roaring sounded in his head.
What he said he did not know, but he answered her back, laughed when she laughed, shook his finger at her a few times when she did something silly, and twice more drank a glass empty from her hand. At the same time a whole army of memories raced past him: servant girls he had seen standing in doorways with men in the evening, a few sentences from storybooks, the kiss Hermann Heilner had given him that time, and a host of words, stories, and dark schoolboy conversations about “the girls” and “what it’s like when you have a sweetheart.” And he breathed as hard as a horse pulling uphill.
Everything was transformed. The people and the bustle all around had dissolved into a colorful, laughing cloud of being. The separate voices, curses, and laughter went under in a general dull roar; the river and the old bridge looked far away and as if painted.
Emma too looked different. He no longer saw her face—only the dark, glad eyes and a red mouth with white pointed teeth behind it; her figure dissolved, and he saw only single parts of it—now a low shoe with a black stocking above it, now a stray little dangling curl on the nape of her neck, now a tanned, round throat vanishing into the blue cloth, now the firm shoulders and the breathing swell beneath them, now an ear with the red light shining through it.
And after another while she let the glass fall into the tub and bent down for it, and as she did so her knee pressed against his wrist at the edge of the tub. And he bent down too, but more slowly, and almost touched her hair with his face. Her hair had a faint fragrance, and beneath it, in the shadow of loose, crinkly little curls, the warm brown of a lovely nape gleamed and ran down into the blue bodice, whose tightly strained hooks let it show a little way farther through the gap.
When she straightened up again, and her knee slid along his arm as she did so, and her hair brushed his cheeks, and she had turned quite red from bending, a violent shudder ran through all of Hans’s limbs. He turned pale and for a moment had the feeling of a deep, deep weariness, so that he had to hold on to the screw of the press. His heart went jerking up and down, and his arms grew weak and hurt him in the shoulders.
From then on he hardly spoke another word and avoided the girl’s eyes. Instead, as soon as she looked away, he looked at her fixedly with a mixture of unknown desire and bad conscience. In that hour something tore in him, and a new, strangely alluring land with far blue coasts opened before his soul. He did not yet know, or only dimly guessed, what the anxiety and sweet torment in him meant, and did not know either which was greater in him, pain or desire.
But the desire meant the victory of his young power of love and the first intimation of mighty life, and the pain meant that the peace of morning was broken and that his soul had left the land of childhood, which one does not find again. His light little boat, barely escaped from its first shipwreck, had now come into the power of new storms and near to waiting shallows and breakneck reefs, through which even the best-guided youth has no pilot, but must find his way and his rescue by his own strength.
It was a good thing that the apprentice now came back and relieved him at the press. Hans stayed a while longer. He was still hoping for a touch or a friendly word from Emma. She was chattering around at other people’s presses again. And since Hans felt embarrassed in front of the apprentice, after a quarter of an hour he slipped away home without saying goodbye.
Everything had become strangely different, beautiful and exciting. The sparrows, grown fat on the pulp, shot noisily through the sky, which had never been so high and beautiful and so longingly blue. Never had the river had so pure, green-blue, laughing a surface, nor so dazzling white and roaring a weir. Everything seemed to stand newly painted, like dainty pictures, behind clear, fresh panes of glass. Everything seemed to be waiting for the beginning of a great festival. In his own breast too he felt a constricting, strong, anxious, and sweet surging of strangely daring feelings and unusual, glaring hopes, together with a shyly doubting fear that it was only a dream and could never come true. Swelling, these conflicting feelings became a darkly welling spring, a feeling as though something all too strong wanted to break loose in him and get air—perhaps a sob, perhaps a song, a shout, or loud laughter. Only at home did this excitement calm down a little. There, of course, everything was as always.
“Where have you been, then?” asked Mr. Giebenrath.
“At Flaig’s, at the mill.”
“How much has he pressed?”
“Two barrels, I think.”
He asked whether he might invite the Flaig children when his father came to do his cider making.
“Of course,” Papa growled. “I’ll do it next week. Just go and fetch them then!”
There was still an hour until supper. Hans went out into the garden. Apart from the two firs there was little green left. He tore off a hazel switch, let it whistle through the air, and stirred about with it in the withered leaves. The sun was already behind the mountain, whose black outline, with the tips of the firs drawn hair-fine, cut into the greenish-blue, moist, clear evening sky. A gray, long-drawn-out cloud, glowing yellow and brownish, floated slowly and comfortably up the valley through the thin, golden air like a ship coming home.
Moved in a strange way, unknown to him, by the ripe, richly colored beauty of the evening, Hans strolled through the garden. Now and then he stopped, closed his eyes, and tried to picture Emma, how she had stood across from him at the press, how she had let him drink from her cup, how she had bent over the tub and straightened up again blushing. He saw her hair, her figure in the tight blue dress, her throat and her nape shadowed brown with dark little hairs, and everything filled him with desire and trembling; only her face he could no longer picture at all.
When the sun was down, he did not feel the coolness, and he felt the advancing dusk like a veil full of secrets for which he knew no names. For he understood, to be sure, that he had fallen in love with the girl from Heilbronn, but the working of awakening manhood in his blood he understood only dimly, as an unaccustomed, irritable, and tiring condition.
At supper it seemed strange to him to be sitting with his transformed self in the midst of the long-familiar surroundings. His father, the old maid, the table and dishes, and the whole room suddenly seemed to him to have grown old, and he looked at everything with a feeling of astonishment, strangeness, and tenderness, as if he had just come home from a long journey. That time, when he was making eyes at his deadly branch, he had looked at the same people and things with the wistfully superior feeling of one taking leave; now it was a returning, a wondering, a smiling, a possessing again.
They had eaten, and Hans was about to get up, when his father said in his curt way, “Would you like to be a mechanic, Hans, or a clerk instead?”
“What do you mean?” Hans asked back in astonishment.
“You could start with Schuler the mechanic at the end of next week, or the week after as an apprentice at the town hall. Think it over properly! We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Hans got up and went out. The sudden question had confused and dazzled him. Unexpectedly, everyday, active, brisk life stood before him, from which he had been estranged for months, and it had an alluring face and a threatening face, promised and demanded. He had no real desire to be either a mechanic or a clerk. The hard bodily work of a trade frightened him a little. Then his school friend August came to his mind, who had become a mechanic, after all, and whom he could ask.
While he thought the matter over, his ideas grew dimmer and paler; the business did not seem so very urgent and important to him after all. Something else drove and occupied him; he paced restlessly up and down the front hall, and suddenly he took his hat, left the house, and went slowly out into the lane. It had occurred to him that he must see Emma once more today.
It was already getting dark. From a nearby tavern shouting and hoarse singing came across. Many windows were lit; here and there one was kindled and then another, and laid a faint red glow into the dark air. A long row of young girls, arm in arm, sauntered merrily down the lane with loud laughter and talk, swayed in the uncertain light, and ran like a warm wave of youth and pleasure through the drowsing lanes. Hans looked after them for a long time; his heart was beating up into his throat. Behind a curtained window someone could be heard playing the violin. At the fountain a woman was washing lettuce. On the bridge two young fellows were strolling with their sweethearts. One held his girl loosely by the hand, swung her arm, and smoked his cigar. The second couple walked on slowly, closely entwined; the fellow had his arm around the girl’s hip, and she pressed her shoulder and head firmly against his chest. Hans had seen this a hundred times and paid no attention. Now it had a secret sense, an unclear but lustfully sweet meaning; his gaze rested on the couple, and his imagination pressed, foreboding, toward a near understanding. Oppressed and shaken to his depths, he felt himself near a great secret of which he did not know whether it would be delicious or terrible, but trembling, he felt something of both in advance.
In front of Flaig’s little house he stopped and could not find the courage to go in. What was he to do and say inside? He could not help thinking how, as a boy of eleven and twelve, he had often come here; then Flaig had told him Bible stories and stood up to his stormy, curious questions about hell, the devil, and spirits. These memories were uncomfortable and gave him a bad conscience. He did not know what he meant to do; he did not even know what he really wanted; but it seemed to him that he stood before something secret and forbidden. It seemed to him a wrong against the shoemaker that he was standing in the dark before his door without going in. And if the shoemaker saw him standing there, or came out of the door now, he would probably not even scold him but laugh at him, and that he dreaded most of all.
He crept around behind the house and could now see from the garden fence into the lighted living room. He did not see the master. The wife seemed to be sewing or knitting something; the oldest boy was still up and sat reading at the table. Emma went back and forth, evidently busy tidying up, so that he got to see her only for moments at a time. It was so still that one could clearly hear the most distant step in the lane and, beyond the garden, the soft flowing of the river. Darkness and the cool of the night grew quickly.
Beside the living room windows a smaller hall window lay dark. After a long while an indistinct figure appeared at this little window, leaned out, and looked into the darkness. Hans recognized by the figure that it was Emma, and his heart stood still with anxious expectation. She stayed standing in the window, looking across long and calmly, but he did not know whether she saw and recognized him. He did not move a limb and stared fixedly across at her, in uncertain trepidation both hoping and fearing that she might recognize him.
And the indistinct figure disappeared from the window again; right afterward the little garden door clicked, and Emma came out of the house. In his first fright Hans wanted to take to his heels, but stayed leaning against the fence without a will of his own and watched the girl walk slowly toward him through the dark garden, and at each of her steps something drove him to run away, and something stronger held him back.
Now Emma stood right in front of him, not half a step away, only the low fence between them, and she looked at him attentively and strangely. For quite a while neither said a word. Then she asked softly:
“What do you want?”
“Nothing,” he said, and it went over his skin like a caress that she had said du to him.
She held out her hand to him over the fence. He took it shyly and tenderly and pressed it a little; then he noticed that it was not withdrawn, took courage, and stroked the warm girl’s hand finely and carefully. And when it was still willingly left to him, he laid it against his cheek. A flood of piercing pleasure, of strange warmth and blissful weariness ran through his being; the air around him seemed mild and damp, as when the warm south wind blows; he no longer saw lane or garden, only a near, bright face and a tangle of dark hair.
And it seemed to him to sound from a great distance of night when the girl asked very softly:
“Do you want to give me a kiss?”
The bright face came nearer, the weight of a body bent the slats outward a little, loose, faintly fragrant hair brushed Hans’s forehead, and closed eyes, covered by white, broad lids and dark lashes, were close in front of his. A violent shudder ran over his body when he touched the girl’s mouth with shy lips. At once he shrank back trembling, but she had taken his head in her hands, pressed her face into his, and would not let go of his lips. He felt her mouth burning; he felt it press against him and suck greedily fast, as though it wanted to drink the life out of him. A deep weakness came over him; even before the strange lips let go of him, the trembling pleasure turned into deathly weariness and pain, and when Emma released him he swayed and held on to the fence with convulsively clutching fingers.
“Listen, be here again tomorrow evening,” said Emma, and went quickly back into the house. She had not been gone five minutes, but to Hans it seemed that long ages had passed. He looked after her with empty eyes, still held on to the boards, and felt too tired to take a step. Dreaming, he listened to his blood, which hammered in his head, flooded from his heart and back in uneven, painful waves, and stopped his breath.
Now he saw the door open inside the room and the master, who had probably still been in the workshop, come in. A fear that he might be noticed fell upon him and drove him away. He walked slowly, reluctantly, and unsteadily like someone slightly drunk, and at every step had the feeling that he must sink to his knees. The dark lanes with sleepy gables and dim red window eyes flowed past him like pale stage sets, and bridge, river, courtyards, and gardens. The fountain in Tanners’ Lane splashed strangely loud and resounding. Lost in a dream, Hans opened a gate, came through a pitch-dark passage, climbed stairs, opened and closed a door and then another, sat down on a table that stood there, and only after a long time woke to the sensation of being at home in his room. Again it was a while before he came to the decision to undress. He did it absently and stayed sitting undressed at the window until the autumn night suddenly chilled him through and drove him into the pillows.
He thought he must fall asleep at once. But hardly was he lying down and a little warm when the pounding of his heart came back, and the uneven, violent surging of his blood. As soon as he closed his eyes, it seemed to him as if the girl’s mouth still hung on his, sucked the soul out of him, and filled him with tormenting heat.
He fell asleep late and plunged in harried flight from dream to dream. He stood in an anxiously deep darkness; groping about him, he seized Emma’s arm; she embraced him, and together they sank in a slow fall into a warm, deep flood. The shoemaker was suddenly standing there and asked why he no longer wanted to visit him; then Hans had to laugh and noticed that it was not Flaig but Hermann Heilner, who sat beside him in a window in the Maulbronn oratory and made jokes. But that too vanished at once, and he stood at the cider press, Emma braced herself against the lever, and he fought against it with all his strength. She leaned across and sought his mouth; it grew still and pitch-dark, and now he sank again into a warm, black depth and was lost in dizziness and mortal fear. At the same time he heard the ephorus giving a speech of which he did not know whether it was meant for him.
Then he slept until late in the morning. It was a bright, golden day. He walked up and down in the garden for a long time, trying hard to wake up and get clear, but he was surrounded by a thick, sleepy mist. He saw violet asters, the very last flowers in the garden, standing lovely and laughing in the sun as though it were still August, and saw the warm, dear light flood tenderly and coaxingly around the withered twigs and branches and bare tendrils, as though it were early spring. But he only saw it; he did not live it; it was no concern of his. Suddenly a clear, strong memory seized him from the time when his rabbits still hopped about here in the garden and his waterwheel and little hammer mill were running. He could not help thinking of a September day three years ago. It was the eve of Sedan Day, the national holiday; August had come to see him and had brought ivy, and now they were washing their flagpoles clean and fastening the ivy to the golden tips, talking about tomorrow and looking forward to tomorrow. Nothing else was there and nothing happened, but they had both been so full of the sense of the holiday and of great joy; the flags had gleamed in the sun; Anna had baked plum cake; and at night the Sedan bonfire was to be lit on the high rock.
Hans did not know why he had to think of that evening today of all days, nor why this memory was so beautiful and powerful, nor why it made him so miserable and sad. He did not know that in the dress of this memory his childhood and boyhood rose up before him once more, merry and laughing, to take leave and to leave behind the sting of a great happiness that had been and would never come again. He felt only that this memory did not agree with his thoughts of Emma and of last evening, and that something had risen up in him that was not compatible with the happiness of that time. He thought he saw the golden tips of the flagpoles gleam again, heard his friend August laugh, and smelled the fragrance of the fresh cake, and all that was so cheerful and blissful and had moved so far away from him and become so strange that he leaned against the rough trunk of the big spruce and broke into a hopeless sobbing, which for the moment brought him comfort and granted him release.
At noon he ran over to August, who had become first apprentice now and had filled out and grown mightily. He told him what he had in mind about becoming a mechanic.
“That’s a tricky business,” the other said, putting on a worldly-wise face. “That’s a tricky business. Because you’re such a weakling, see. The first year you always have the damned hammering at the forge, and a sledgehammer like that’s no soup spoon. And you have to carry the iron around and clean up in the evening, and filing takes strength too, and at the beginning, till you’ve got the hang of it, you get nothing but old files that don’t cut anything and are smooth as a monkey’s behind.”
Hans at once grew dispirited.
“Well, then should I give it up?” he asked timidly.
“Good Lord, I didn’t say that! Don’t be such a slowpoke! Only it isn’t a dance floor at the beginning. But otherwise, sure—a mechanic like that is a fine thing, you know, and a fellow has to have a good head too, or else he can become a blacksmith. Here, take a look at this!”
He brought over a few small, finely worked machine parts of bright steel and showed them to Hans.
“See, not half a millimeter can be off on those. All done by hand, except the screws. There you have to keep your eyes open! Now they get polished and hardened, and that’s it.”
“Yes, that’s fine. If only I knew—”
August laughed.
“Scared? Well, an apprentice gets pushed around, that’s just the way it is. But I’m here too, and I’ll help you all right. And if you start next Friday, I’ll just have finished my second year of apprenticeship and on Saturday I get my first week’s wages. And on Sunday we celebrate, with beer, and cake, and everybody there, you too, then you’ll see how things go with us. Yes, you’ll be surprised! And anyway, we used to be such good friends before.”
At dinner Hans told his father he would like to become a mechanic and asked whether he might begin in a week.
“All right,” said Papa, and in the afternoon he went with Hans to Schuler’s workshop and signed him up.
But when it began to grow dusky, Hans had as good as forgotten all that again and thought only that Emma would be expecting him in the evening. Even now it took his breath away; the hours seemed now too long to him and now too short, and he drifted toward the meeting like a boatman toward a rapid. There was no question of eating that evening; he could hardly get down a cup of milk. Then he went.
Everything was as it had been yesterday—dark, sleepy lanes, red windows, lamplit twilight, and slowly strolling pairs of lovers.
At the fence of the shoemaker’s garden a great anxiety fell upon him; he started at every sound, and standing and listening there in the dark he felt like a thief. He had not waited a minute when Emma stood before him, ran her hands over his hair, and opened the garden gate for him. He stepped in cautiously, and she drew him along with her, quietly along the path lined with bushes, through the back door into the dark passage of the house.
There they sat down side by side on the top step of the cellar stairs, and it was quite a while before they could see each other, barely, in the blackness. The girl was in good spirits and chattered away in a whisper. She had tasted many a kiss already and knew her way around in matters of love; the shy, tender boy was just right for her. She took his narrow face between her hands and kissed his forehead, eyes, and cheeks, and when it was his mouth’s turn and she kissed it again so long and sucking, the boy was seized with dizziness and lay limp and without a will of his own leaning against her. She laughed softly and tugged at his ear.
She chattered on and on, and he listened and did not know what he heard. She stroked his arm with her hand, his hair, his neck and his hands; she leaned her cheek against his and her head on his shoulder. He kept quite still and let everything happen, filled with a sweet dread and a deep, happy anxiety, now and then starting briefly and softly like someone in a fever.
“What kind of sweetheart are you!” she laughed. “Why, you don’t dare anything at all.”
And she took his hand, ran it over her nape and through her hair, and laid it on her breast and pressed herself against it. He felt the soft form and the sweet strange surging, closed his eyes, and felt himself sinking into endless depths.
“Don’t! No more!” he said, fending her off, when she wanted to kiss him again. She laughed.
And she drew him close to her and pressed his side against her side, wrapping her arm around him, so that in feeling her body he lost his head entirely and could not say anything more at all.
“Do you love me, then?” she asked.
He wanted to say yes, but he could only nod, and he kept on nodding for quite a while.
She took his hand once more and, joking, slipped it under her bodice. As he felt so hot and close the pulse and breath of the other life, his heartbeat stopped and he thought he must die, so hard did his breath come. He drew his hand back and groaned, “I have to go home now.”
When he tried to get up, he began to sway and very nearly fell down the cellar stairs.
“What’s the matter with you?” Emma asked in astonishment.
“I don’t know. I’m so tired.”
He did not feel that on the way to the garden fence she held him up and pressed herself against him, and did not hear her say good night and close the little door behind him. He got home through the lanes, he did not know how, as though a great storm were tearing him along or a mighty flood were carrying him, rocking.
He saw pale houses to the left and right, and above them, high up, mountain ridges, tips of firs, the blackness of night, and great, resting stars. He felt the wind blowing, heard the river streaming past the piers of the bridge, and saw in the water gardens, pale houses, the blackness of night, lanterns, and stars mirrored.
On the bridge he had to sit down; he was so tired and thought he would never get home. He sat on the parapet; he listened to the water rubbing against the piers and roaring at the weir and booming like an organ at the mill grate. His hands were cold; in his chest and throat the blood labored, faltering and rushing headlong, darkened his eyes, and ran back in a sudden wave to his heart, leaving his head full of dizziness.
He got home, found his room, lay down, and fell asleep at once, plunging in his dreams from depth to depth through immense spaces. At midnight he woke tormented and exhausted and lay until morning between sleep and waking, filled with a parched longing, tossed back and forth by uncontrolled forces, until in the first light of early morning his whole torment and distress broke out in a long weeping, and he fell asleep once more on pillows wet with tears.