Edelweiss Part 1

Edelweiss.

by Berthold Auerbach.

On the sunny slope of a mountain stands a house that is a joy to every eye; for it tells of happy inmates who have won their happiness by long and painful struggle,--who have stood in the valley of the shadow of death, and risen to new life.

The housewife comes to the door. Her face is young and fair, and of a bright complexion, but her hair is white as snow. She smiles to an old woman who is working in the garden, and calls to the children not to be so noisy.

"Come in, Franzl; and you too, children. William is starting on his journey," says the young white-haired mother. The bent old woman, as she approaches, raises a corner of her ap.r.o.n to her eyes, to stop the gathering tears.

Presently the father comes from the house, accompanied by a young fellow with a knapsack on his back. "Bid your mother good by, William,"

he says. "Be careful so to conduct yourself that you need never fear the eyes of father or mother on your actions. Then, G.o.d willing, you shall one day cross this threshold again with a happy heart."

The young woman with the snow-white hair embraces the st.u.r.dy boy, and says through her sobs: "I have nothing to add. Your father has said all. Remember and bring home an Edelweiss, if you find any on the Swiss mountains." The traveller sets off amid the shouts of his brothers and sisters.

"Good by, William; good by, good by." They play with the word "good by," and will not let it go.

"Mother," the father calls back, "I am only going with William and Lorenz as far as the cross-roads. Pilgrim will keep on with them to their first sleeping-place. I shall soon be back."

"All right; only do not hurry yourself, and do not take the parting too much to heart. Tell Faller's wife she must come to us at noon, and bring Lizzie with her. It is a great comfort," she continues, turning to the old woman as father and son depart, "that Faller's Lorenz goes abroad with our William."

Our story will tell why the young, white-haired mother asks the little plant Edelweiss of her boy when he is starting for foreign lands. It is a sad, a cruel history, but the sun of love breaks through at last.

CHAPTER I.

A GOOD NAME.

"She was an excellent woman."

"Yes, there are few such left."

"She was one of the old school."

"Go to her when you would, her help and counsel were always ready."

"And how much she went through! She buried her husband and four children, yet was always brave and cheerful."

"Ah, Lenz will miss her sorely. He will find out now what a mother he had."

"Nay, he knew that in her lifetime. His devotion to her was unbounded."

"He must be thinking of marrying soon."

"He can choose whom he will. Any house would be glad to receive such a capable, excellent fellow."

"A pretty property he must have too."

"Besides being the only heir of his rich uncle Petrovitsch."

"How beautiful the singing of the Liederkranz was! It thrilled me through and through."

"And how it must have affected Lenz! He has always before sung with them, and his voice was one of the best."

"Did you notice he did not shed a tear while the minister was preaching; but when his friends began to sing, he cried and sobbed as if his heart would break."

"This is the first funeral that has not driven old Petrovitsch out of the town. It would have been shameful in him not to have paid the last honors to his own brother's wife."

So the people talked as they went their several ways through the valley and up the mountains. All were dressed in sober clothes, for they were coming from a funeral. Near the church in the valley, where stand a few thinly scattered houses, the Lion Inn conspicuous among them, the widow of the clock-maker Lenz of the Morgenhalde had been buried. All had a good word for her; and their sad faces showed that each had met with a personal loss in the good woman's death. As every fresh grief reopens the old wounds, the villagers had turned from the newly covered grave to visit those of their own loved ones, and there had prayed and mourned for the departed.

We are in the clock-making district, among those wooded hills that send their streams to the Rhine on one side and the Danube on the other. The inhabitants are by nature quiet and thoughtful. The women far outnumber the men, many of whom are scattered through all parts of the world, engaged in the clock trade. Those who remain at home are pale from their close confinement at work. The women, on the contrary, who labor in the field are bright and rosy, while a pretty air of demureness is imparted to their faces by the broad black ribbons they wear tied under the chin.

Agriculture is practised on a small scale. With the exception of a few large farms, it is limited to a scanty tillage of the meadows. In some places a narrow belt of trees runs down to the brook at the very bottom of the valley; in others, again, a tall, bare pine, on the edge of a meadow, shows that field and garden-patch have been wrested from the forest. The ash-trees, whose branches are stripped every year to furnish food for the goats, look like elongated willows. The village, or rather the parish, stretches out miles in length. The houses are built of whole trunks of trees, dovetailed together, and are sprinkled over mountain and valley. Their fronts present an uninterrupted row of windows, arranged without intermediate s.p.a.ces, as the object is to admit all the light possible. The barn, when there is one, is approached from the hill behind the house by a pa.s.sage entering directly under the roof. A heavy covering of thatch projects over the front, and serves as a protection from the weather. The color of the buildings harmonizes with the background of mountain and forest, while narrow footpaths of a lighter shade lead through the green meadows to the dwellings of the villagers.

The greater number of the mourners to-day pursued the same road up the valley. Here and there, as a woman reached the path leading to her own house, she turned aside from the main group, and waved her hymn-book to the children, watching at the row of windows, or running down the meadow lane to meet her. Each, as she laid aside her Sunday clothes, heaved a sigh of mingled grief for the departed and thankfulness that she and hers were still alive, and living together in love. But it was hard to settle down at once to the every-day work. The world had been left behind for a while, and its labors could not be easily resumed.

One of the group, whose way led him with the others as far as the next cross-road, was the weight-manufacturer from Knuslingen, the man who made the most exact lead and copper weights in the country. "A sorry thing, this dying," said he; "here is all the wisdom and experience that Mother Lenz had gathered together laid away in the ground, and the world none the better for it."

"Her son has, at least, inherited her goodness," replied a young woman.

"And experience and judgment every one must get for himself," said a little old man, with keen, inquiring eyes, who always went by the name of Probler, the experimenter, from having ruined himself in inventions and experiments, instead of keeping to the regular routine of clock-making.

"The old times were much wiser and better," said old David, the case-maker, who lived in the adjacent valley. "In those days a funeral feast was spread, at which we could refresh ourselves after our long journey and hard crying,--for crying is hungry and thirsty work,--and after that the minister preached his sermon. If we did rather overdo the matter sometimes, no one was the worse for it. But all that sort of thing is forbidden now, and I am so hungry and faint I feel ready to sink."

"So am I, and I," cried out several voices. "What are we to do when we get home?" continued old David; "the day is lost. We are very glad to give it to a good friend, to be sure; but the old way was better. Then we didn't get home till night, and had nothing more to think of."

"And could not have thought of it, if you had," interrupted the deep voice of young Faller, the clockmaker. He was second ba.s.s in the Liederkranz, and carried his music-book under his arm. His walk and bearing showed him to have been a soldier. "A funeral feast," he continued, "is a thing Mother Lenz would by no means have allowed.

Everything in its time, she used to say; mourning and merry-making, each in its turn. I worked under old Lenz five years and three quarters; young Lenz and I were fellow-apprentices, and set up as journeymen together."

"You had better turn schoolmaster and preach the sermon," said old David angrily, muttering something further about those conceited Liederkranz fellows, who think the world didn't begin till they learned to sing their notes.

"That I can do too," said the young man, who either had not heard the last words, or pretended he had not. "I can make a eulogy; and a good thing it would be to talk of something besides our own appet.i.tes and pleasures after laying such a n.o.ble heart in the grave. What a man our old master was! Ah, if all the world were like him, we should need no more judges or soldiers or barracks or prisons! He was a right strict old fellow. No apprentice was allowed to give up the file for the lathe till he could cut by hand as perfect an octagon as any machinery could make, and no one of us was considered a finished workman till he could make the smallest clock; for, as the old master used to say, the man who can make small things will be most exact in great ones. No wheel nor weight that had the least flaw in it ever left his shop. 'My credit is at stake, and that of the whole district,' he would say. 'We must keep up our good name.' Let me tell you one little anecdote, to show what an influence he had over us young men. Young Lenz and I took up smoking when we became journeymen. 'Very well,' said the old man, 'if you will smoke, I cannot prevent it, and I don't want you to do it secretly. I am sorry to say I have the same bad habit myself,--I must smoke. But one thing let me tell you,--if you smoke, I shall give it up, hard as it will be for me. It will never do for us all to smoke.'

Of course we did not contract the habit. Rather would we have lost the use of our mouths altogether than have required such a sacrifice of our master.

"And the mistress,--she stands this moment before G.o.d, and G.o.d will say to her, 'You have been upright above most women on the earth. You have had your faults, to be sure. You have spoiled your son; you might have made a man of him by letting him seek his fortune in the world, and you would not. But your thousands and thousands of good deeds known to none but me, your allowing none to be evil spoken of, your making the best of everything and everybody, even to speaking a good word for Petrovitsch,--not one shall be forgotten. Come, and receive your reward.' And do you know what she will say when G.o.d offers her a reward? 'Give it to my son,' she will say; 'and, if there is any over, there is such a one and such a one in bitter need, help him; I am content to look on.' You would hardly believe how little she ate. The old master often laughed at her for it, but really she was best satisfied by seeing others eat; and her son is just as good, heart and soul, as the mother was. I would lay down my life for him gladly."

Such was Faller's eulogy, and his deep voice often trembled with emotion as he delivered it. The others, however, did not let him monopolize young Lenz's praises.

Probler maintained that he was the only one in the whole country round who knew any more than the generation before him. "If people were not so obstinate and jealous, they would long ago have accepted that standard regulator we made together; I say we made, but must honestly confess he did the greater part of it."

n.o.body paid much attention to what Probler said, especially as he spoke so unintelligibly--hardly above a mutter--that little could be made out except the words "standard regulator."

With more interest did they turn to old David, who next took up the word. "Lenz never pa.s.ses a man without doing him a good turn. Every year he takes some of his leisure Sundays for tuning the organ of the blind old organist of Fuchsberg, and charges nothing for it. That is a labor of love that must please our Father in heaven. I too have profited by his help. He found me once in trouble over my barrel, that would not turn easily. So off he started to the mill, fitted me up a workshop in the loft, put my barrel in communication with the wheel, and now I can accomplish three times the work with half the labor."

Every one hastened to throw in a good word for young Lenz, as if it were a copper into the poor's box.