The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Xix Part 40

And she told what she had purchased for her father, and what her sister-in-law had got for her husband, named the prices, and praised the quality of the goods. I gazed first at her eyes, then at the glowing coals within the flat-iron, listened to the tones of her dear, faithful voice and thought of my home of long ago, of brothers and sisters and friends, of a home of my own with wife and children in it, of things dear and compelling, for which I could stake my life; and I tasted the sweetness of one of those moments which do their best to broaden our hearts, to strengthen them and renew their allegiance.

All at once she stopped speaking, and when I did not notice this she cried out, "Senhor, are you again failing to listen to me!" "Oh, yes.

Henrique Bleyle has put up at auction a cargo of furnis.h.i.+ng goods--"

"_O no, senhor_, not at all! But you are a discourteous good-for-nothing; you think, 'Just let her talk!'"

"Missed by a mile, my child! I have been listening to you without hearing what you said. Look, when I sit down on the curb of a fountain and let myself be enveloped and captivated by its splas.h.i.+ng and tinkling, its silvery spraying, and forget everything, even the fountain, and think uncommonly pure and good thoughts--don't these thoughts come from the fountain? Do I not hear them in its plas.h.i.+ng, even though I no longer hear the sound of it, and am I, in this absentmindedness, not more the bondman of the fountain than if I had counted its drops of water? That is how it was just now. While I listened to your voice and felt your eye upon me, I learned something better from you than that Bleyle has socks for sale. Nevertheless, I shall buy the socks from him. But that you help me in my vanity and hastiness not merely to let serious thoughts enter my mind when they come like a stroke of lightning, but also quietly and modestly to admit them, to await them, and to attain to the inner core of their sweetness--that is to me more delightful and more important than all the cargoes of all the continents."

She looked at me with childlike confidence, put her little, warm hand on mine, and said, "You are not angry with me, Erwin?"

"How could I be angry with you for that? Is there a human being who could be angry with you? See, Mariandel, the only pain you cause me is the fact that I am not the only one who can take nothing ill of you!"

"Oh!" she cried, laughing down her shamefacedness like a school-girl, "just ask my brother and his wife whether they cannot take anything ill of me!"

"Then they are not human beings. There aren't so very many."

"No, my brother is good," she replied, "and Anna too."

"In any case, I shall prove to you that I am ready to help my fellow-man. I shall buy of Henrique Bleyle a complete new outfit from head to foot, and hope thereby to save him from bankruptcy."

"Not Henrique Bleyle, but George Bleyle at the _Mercadinho_, and there is no question of bankruptcy. For Heaven's sake don't say anything of the kind!" She looked at me in the utmost confusion and with guilty eyes; she had of course emphasized the fact that business was bad--as it was in general at that time--merely in order to induce me to buy of George Bleyle, since she feared she could not make me budge by speaking only of the cheapness of his wares.

Now I gave her great pleasure by inquiring at exactly what prices she had made her purchases, and by asking for advice of various sorts. I did not get much profit from this; the effort to distinguish between linen, cotton-warp linen, cotton, s.h.i.+rting, and _fil d'ecosse_ caused me something of a headache. But she was all joy and eagerness.

Then she had to use her iron while it was hot. She lifted one end of the ironing board, drew a light calico gown over it like a ring, put the board down again, and ironed, gradually letting the whole of the gown travel across the board.

The shade in which I stood grew smaller, the heat penetrated markedly nearer to me and awakened my daily desire to go to the city park and sit in the shade of its giant trees and bamboo bushes. I lighted a cigarette at one of the little glowing eyes of the charcoal flat-iron, and started away.

"_Ate logo, senhor!_" said she, using a phrase that corresponds exactly to the Rhenish "So long!" Since she did not know much Portuguese, she took pleasure in seizing all opportunities to use the most current expressions; but she used these with such perfect p.r.o.nunciation that you would suppose she had complete command of the language.

As was always the case, I was in a peaceful frame of mind when I left her, I was filled with a sense of cosy comfort which gained all the more piquancy because flavored with an infinitely delicate bitterness that I could not understand. In a revery I strolled along through the streets which, because the diminutive houses cast so little shadow, became hotter every minute, and pa.s.sed slowly out of the city.

When I looked up again, I had already pa.s.sed through the great gate in the wall and felt as though immersed in the more expansive and, from the intermittent shade of shrubs and trees, more invigorating atmosphere of the great park. I stood still and peered into the depth of the garden through the silver-gray columns of two gigantic palms.

Thickly surrounded by dark shrubs with a silvery sheen, enormous hedges, and groves of bamboo, a fountain reared the fluttering banner of its spray from the midst of a black pool confined within a white curb; but the bubbling pillar did not attain to the height of its dark sylvan background. In the dim background, however, above the cold deep green of the park, rose a mighty erythrina like a rose-colored flame into the rich blue air, like a monstrous, fiery syringa. The light coursed hotly down the smooth trunks of the palms, golden white it curled about the gentle curve of their slender hips, like frozen silver it weighed upon the serrated palm-leaves, often seeming to slip down and fall, so that the liberated leaf gave a little leap upward into a new bath of silver; the rigid leaves of black-green bushes were sown with immobile, penetrating scintillations; above the ma.s.ses of dagger-sharp leaves in the grove of bamboo the light swarmed like a golden vapor rolling up, as it were, in itself; red and white and deep violet and yellow and iridescent blue flowers of gigantic size cowered in the dark green; the erythrina stood quietly there upright like a mountain of fire; everything rested voluptuously, or overwhelmed, in the glow of the higher-mounting sun--only the snowy importunity of the fountain wore itself out in impotent resistance to his sway. I too stood motionless in an unshaded opening; I no longer felt the glow as a burden; with rapture, with awe, with rapture I felt its untamable creative energy--just as years before, one cold winter night, I had felt its l.u.s.t of destruction at a conflagration in a village of my mountain home,--the one as wild, as inexorable as the other.

For a long while I stood thus absorbed in meditation, until suddenly I became conscious that something or other disturbed, disquieted, irritated me. I spied about, and found that at quite a distance away, near a low bosket of light green, a head covered by a yellow straw hat emerged and vanished again in rhythmical alternation. I recognized the chief gardner of the city park, a German with whom I was well acquainted. I went slowly up to him and was about to ask him what game he was playing--I had almost taken him for a ghost--when I observed in his hand a small basket nearly half filled with leaves. The handsome, well preserved old man with the shrewd, kindly, white-bearded face told me now that these bushes with the grayish green, lanciform little leaves were Chinese tea, and that he was picking the two or three outside leaves on each twig in order to dry them for his domestic consumption. I listened while he informed me of the details of tea culture and the curing of the crop; then, having at the moment to take off my hat and wipe the sweat from my brow, I said, "How would it be, do you think, if, just for a change, one could follow one's nose to Germany and bury it in snow or h.o.a.rfrost? At this instant perhaps the sleighs are jingling along and the skaters are on the ice, or the south wind is driving its blue-gray mist over the Alps--"

He interrupted me with a shake of his head, and added: "--and everybody is coughing and spitting and wiping his nose, while the rich are wrapped in furs like the Greenlanders and the poor are starving and freezing. That is no joke, especially for such old bones as mine. I no longer hanker for it. Not in this life! When you are as old as I am you will realize what a blessing the sun is. You complain of the heat; but I feel its benefit in the marrow of my bones and still deeper. I no longer run away from the sun. I have been more than forty years in Brazil, and I too often wonder how things look in the old town--whether they still loiter about the well, whether Hannah is still living, and how this one and that one is getting along. But--they have probably got along very much as I have myself, well and ill; they have grown old, if they are not dead already, and they are probably glad to be where it is warm. No, no! Not in this life!"

"You are quite right! Later! It will be much more convenient when we are spirits. But then you must come to see me sometime; promise me, and do not forget your promise! I shall be established somewhere in the Black Forest, high up in the snow, alone in a great house. The storm is raging and the old timbers and wainscoting are creaking and groaning. I am smoking my pipe on a bench by the stove and staring into the flame of the burning candle. All of a sudden I hear some one clapping his hands outside, and as I listen there comes a call, _O da casa! O da casa!_'

"'h.e.l.lo!' I say, standing up, 'the Brazilian! He has kept his word. And he is just as courteous and respectful as ever!' I open the door for you, prepare a fine place for you on the bench, so that you may warm your tropical astral body, and give you the fur robe to wrap your poor spiritual feet in. Then you shall have coffee and cigarettes and fruit-cakes and a gla.s.s of genuine cherry brandy--anything you want!

Then we will talk Portuguese, long for the Brazilian sun, and sing, I in a hoa.r.s.e ba.s.s and you in a sweet spiritual tenor,

_Minha terra tem palmeiras_, _onde canta o sabia_, _minha terra tem primores_, _que eu nunca encontro ca._"

He smilingly listened to me, smilingly shook his head and said, "You are an enviable youth! Every time I think of you I think that. As a child amuses himself at an annual fair, you scamper through the world, feast your eyes on what you like to look at, take your pleasure in what you see, and build air-castles out of these materials."

He continued to pluck his tea leaves; I stood silently by and marveled at his words, their truth and their error.

"Yes, there are such favorites of fortune," he continued. "As children build castles of sand, demolish them, and build them up again, so you build air-castles. When one of them has occupied you long enough, you turn your back upon it and build another; this is your pleasure, and you never tire of it. We others, when at the age of fifteen or sixteen we have come to our senses, we build a single air-castle: one sees himself as a prosperous farmer--as far as the eye can reach all the land is his; the other sees himself as a merchant, with a heavy golden chain on his paunch, standing at his shop-door; the third means to cultivate black roses and incidentally become a millionaire--and this castle in the air we cherish, and care for, and prop up, and support as long as we live, and for the most part we do not in the least notice that it has long since collapsed beyond repair. I have long thought I must tell you this some time, in order that you might know it and thank G.o.d!" He straightened up, looked me in the face, and nodded to me with kindly seriousness. With a smile I returned his nod.

He continued plucking leaves. In silence I watched him a while longer; for anything that I could have said in answer was no concern of his.

"Since my bones are as yet somewhat younger than yours," I remarked finally, "I will keep them fresh, and now take them into the shade."

We separated.

"Every one sees you in a different light from every one else," I said to myself as I walked along, "and even the wisest fails to see you as you are; for even the humblest human soul is like the sun, which one can gaze upon only through a dull medium."

Along shady paths I meandered toward the bamboo alley, which was like a grove, in that it formed a high vaulted way under closely interwoven branches, and its twilight was cool. Here I strode back and forth, sat down, wandered on again, in physical discomfort and mental instability.

The old man had excited and aroused me; I pondered this and that, I could not stick to any subject whatever, I hurried from the hundredth to the thousandth thing and took some hurt from every one.

I sat down again, and again walked back and forth.

All at once I found myself at a cross path; I stopped involuntarily and thought, "I have stood here before; what is there here?" So it was. Two days before, I had here been struck by the fact that just above the knot on the bamboo stem there was a broad ring of blue-white h.o.a.rfrost, which blended imperceptibly with the greenish-yellow of the stem. In this fine congealed breath, I had thought at that time, one ought to write a secret message to one's sweetheart, in dainty characters, with a feather from a humming-bird's wing! Since I could not find a hummingbird, I had sharpened the end of a twig of bamboo, and with that had scribbled in the fragrant circlet the words, "Where art thou, beloved?"

Since then I had not again thought of the matter; but now I sought out the thick stem once more, and thought I ought to have written a poem on it, began to compose verses, and murmured:

_A saudade no coraco_ _mi e doce como o teu bejo--_

then I stood a long time with my head down, trying to formulate the following verses; and finally I added:

_vivrei d'esta consolaco_, _de ti, e se nunca te vejo!_

and once more looked for the stem bearing the inscription from the previous visit. I found it, and was almost terrified when underneath my words, "Where art thou, beloved," I read inscribed in the dainty hand of a woman, "Here I am."

I was amazed; then I smiled with joy, and my heart beat violently, as on the eve of an adventure. My Portuguese verses did not fit now, and I meditated a jolly, German answer; but I was too unskilful in my excitement and could not compose anything with any sense to it. I had to think too much of the writer. Who was she, and what did she look like?

Finally I took out my dagger, sharpened a twig of bamboo to the finest of points, and after I had a.s.sured myself that I was un.o.bserved, I wrote simply,

Whether there or here, Be with me, dear!

Once more I strode back and forth. Then it occurred to me that so long as I remained in the park I could observe from some hiding-place whether any one read the inscription.

My bamboo stood right at the intersection of a smaller path and the bamboo alley, and could be seen from a distance. I accordingly followed the cross path and came thus into the dark green bosket out of which the erythrina stood towering. From a distance it seemed as though the flowering giant were closely surrounded by the smaller trees and bushes; but if one stepped through the green hedge, one found in the centre of it a great open circle, like the hallowed precinct of a sacred tree; out of the ground rose ma.s.sively the mighty trunk, showing in clear outline its flower-laden branches, of which the lower ones were far extended and dipped their fiery burden deep in the surrounding thicket. Beneath the tree was a bench; from it I could, to the left, look back along the path and into the bamboo alley, while straight ahead an opening in the bushes afforded a view of the fountain and the middle of the garden.

I seated myself in the hedged-in sultry air, which seemed to have been very little cooled by the night, and dreamed of the expected sweetheart. I gazed to the left and saw the sunbathed stems and twigs of bamboo stand out clearly and prettily on the dark shady background; and looked straight ahead and saw the fountain spraying and foaming, and often in the tea plantation observed the old man bend forward and rise erect again.

What did she look like? Like this woman and that woman who had before now found favor in my sight? Hardly; in that case those other women would have held me captive. How must she be? Black, white, or red--that cannot matter. Her eyes will take me, her lips will intoxicate me, because they are hers! She will be such that my eye will no more estimate and compare, that my mind will no more dream and desire, that I shall feel she is she, and acknowledge her as the only power outside myself; so that my heart, my brain, and every fibre of my flesh will glow under the same compulsion to take from itself this body and spirit now subject to another will than mine, to transform it, to engraft it upon my being, whether for life or for death, to consume it, to drain it up as the sole valid increase of my existence! I shall feel myself to be a force nevermore divisible!

Her hair will be curly and of the soft brown of an old walnut, and, like the sh.e.l.l of a walnut, her twisted braids will surround the back of her head--and her eyes gray as a German lake in May, when clouds hover over it and the wind chases bright electric sparks over the waves ... her hair may also be black, and her eyes brown like snuff; but her heart must be strong, so that a man may succ.u.mb to it!

My eyes watched the bamboo alley and saw the littlest leaves and the tiniest twigs gently quiver in the heat. Nothing else. She did not come.

I peered into the park through the opening in the bushes: in the purest brightness the fountain waved its spray over the tops of the shrubs and palms up into the blue, vibrating air. And the old gardener continued his plucking of tea leaves, rising a little and bending again at every short step, almost unreal in this noiseless, torrid realm. I turned my eyes back to the bamboo. I was aglow with heat, perhaps also with expectation; my heart throbbed convulsively and irregularly--and reminded me of a telegraphic key in an empty, sun-heated railway station, which, left to itself, ticks incessantly.

For a long while I sat occupied with my thoughts and staring at the same spot. Suddenly I had a feeling as though there were a shaking of twigs in the upper part of my particular bamboo. I looked sharply; there was another gentle agitation, a quiver of the stems and leaves, as though some one had struck against the trunk below;--only at this one spot. Then all was calm again.