Black Forest Village Stories Part 24

The secret league, however, could not long remain concealed from their companions; for, as lovers often think themselves unperceived while giving the most unmistakable signs of affection, so fared our friends.

Nevertheless, Ivo's high position soon put a period to the bantering which was at first attempted, and it was not long before others endeavored to thrust themselves into the league of friends.h.i.+p. But the gates were closed against them: Clement was particularly vigilant, and the advances ceased. Only when Bart persisted, with great submissiveness, in frequenting their company, did Ivo make an exception. He was favored to walk by their side after dinner, and to be near them when they were playing in the yard. When Bart had eaten his fill he was quite a bright lad and anxious to learn. He was ready to do any thing which could bring him near the head of the cla.s.s, too. Fond as he was of Ivo and Clement, therefore, their high position in the cla.s.s was one of the causes of his attachment; nor, by a special stipulation of Clement's, was he ever admitted into the inmost sanctuary of their friends.h.i.+p.

Leaving fairy-tales behind them, our friends entered upon another field, somewhat nearer the domain of reality: they began to look for historic examples to strive after for ideals. Once, on a long walk in the direction of Blaubeuren, they found themselves on a lofty hill on the edge of a rooky precipice, with the lovely valley of the Blau before them, and the cathedral of Ulm and the Danube visible in the distance. This spot Clement had specially ordained as the one where they were to disclose their aspirations to each other.

"Who is your ideal, Ivo?" asked Clement.

"Sixtus. My mother always says any thing can be achieved if you really will it. Sixtus showed that in his own example."

"So you want to be a pope?"

"If it should come about, why not? No harm trying."

"I have a much less saintly personage: my ideal is Alexander the Great." He did not explain in what respect he desired to emulate him; for Bart fell in, in a whimpering tone,--

"And whom shall I take for my ideal?"

"Ask the princ.i.p.al," said Clement, solemnly, tipping the wink to Ivo.

The moment they returned home, Bart knocked at the princ.i.p.al's door; and, on being invited to come in, he said, trembling and stammering,--

"I beg your pardon, sir; but I wished to ask you,--I wished to choose an ideal, and I don't know whom to take."

The princ.i.p.al stood still a while, and then said, with uplifted finger, "G.o.d."

"I am very much obliged to you, sir," said Bart, bowing and sc.r.a.ping himself out. He ran to his friends and told them, joyfully, "I've got one: I've got an ideal now."

"Whom?"

"G.o.d," said Bart, holding up his finger.

"Who told you so?" asked Clement, pulling Ivo by the sleeve.

"The princ.i.p.al."

Ivo, disregarding the stolen hints of his friend, explained to Bart that G.o.d could never be an ideal to any man except in a figurative sense, because it is impossible for any man to become almighty or omniscient: G.o.d must be the highest and final goal, of course; but the saints were to be found on the way to him, and were nearer to us and more accessible to our prayers, and perhaps we might come in some degree to resemble them.

"Saintly Ivo, I'll have nothing to do with you," said Clement, angrily, turning away. He was vexed to have his good jokes spoiled in this way, and did not speak a word to Ivo all that night and the next morning.

In many other respects Bart was the occasion of disagreements between his friends. Clement had taken it into his head that the interloper deprived him of a part of the friends.h.i.+p of his Ivo. He now seized various opportunities of feeding this jealousy. Once he did not exchange a word with Ivo for a whole week; while his eyes followed him everywhere as with a pa.s.sion bordering on insanity. On the last evening he threw a bit of paper on the book Ivo was reading, on which he had written, "Come to the top of the church-steeple at the stroke of twelve to-night, or we part forever."

Ivo tossed about his bed in an agony of fear lest he should oversleep the time. When the first stroke of twelve was heard, he stole from his chamber; Clement came out of the one in which he slept at the same instant. They went up the turret-stairs in silence, and, when the last stroke had sounded and died away, Clement began:--

"Give me your hand and promise me to have nothing more to do with Bart, or I'll throw myself down this instant."

Ivo took his friend's hand, shuddering.

"Not a word! Yes or no!" muttered Clement.

"Yes, yes. But I pity the poor fellow. You've grown very strange this last week."

Clement embraced and kissed him, descended the steps in silence, and returned to his chamber.

Next day Clement was, as he had always been, cheerful and warm. He never permitted Ivo to speak by daylight of their nightly meeting.

Bart's grief at his dismissal was not of long duration.

While Clement's restless spirit thus flitted about in search of adventure, Ivo experienced a different sort of disquietude. His body had grown with almost greater rapidity than his mind, and he was tall and broad-shouldered; but, when he sat at the desk with his books, the blood seemed to foam through his veins in torrents, often obliging him to get up and restore his internal balance by violent motions. He would fain have carried a heavy load suspended in his arms; but nothing offered resistance to his powers except sometimes a knotty construction in a cla.s.sic author. Gymnastic exercises were not very a.s.siduously cultivated, nor did Ivo take much interest in them: he longed to accomplish some real task with a definite object. In walking with his friend he would often complain that he was not allowed to plough or to reap. Inured from his childhood to bodily activity, during his visit to the grammar-school the long daily walk had compensated for the inaction of his arms: now he felt like a giant whose club has been taken from him and a sewing-needle thrust into his fingers.

Once he said to Clement, "Do you know I am so much troubled at having a scruple in regard to the Bible? it says that the great chastis.e.m.e.nt for original sin is that in the sweat of his brow shall man earn his bread: now, to my mind hard work, instead of a punishment, is the greatest delight."

"Oh," said Clement, "that's in the Old Testament. It's meant for the Jews, and it just suits them; for hard work is their favorite aversion."

Thus early did he stumble on the familiar device of the theologians when hard pushed in regard to some pa.s.sage in the Old Testament.

Clement did not suffer the matter to rest here, however. He confessed his own longing to incur dangers and to wander through distant countries. They even talked frequently of a flight from the convent.

They pictured to themselves the romance of arriving on a distant island, struggling with wild beasts and subjugating the virgin soil. Of course the project was never executed. The laws of the convent and the ties of home were too strong for them.

The warmth of their friends.h.i.+p increased from day to day and bridged over all the chasms which the difference of their dispositions might have caused. Ivo forfeited his place at the head of the cla.s.s without regret, and allowed even Bart to rise above him. This external abas.e.m.e.nt almost pleased him, for it marked his distaste for his studies. The consciousness of being better than he seemed was grateful to him and gave him a certain independence of the outward world. He formed a secret league with the wood-cutters, the lowest servants of the convent. He swung the axe with a vigor as if he would have cleft the globe. At length one of the professors detected these irregularities; and Ivo atoned for them in the lock-up of the establishment.

Thus, from having been one of the best and most diligent of the pupils, Ivo had sunk to be the lowest in the cla.s.s and the most obstreperous.

At the arrival of the holidays the friends would part with almost feverish sorrow, consoling themselves with the hope of meeting again, and yet wis.h.i.+ng never to return to the convent. On the way home, the world without had lost its l.u.s.tre in Ivo's eyes, and the people he met no longer appeared so good and kind: the world within him had altered.

At home he was not so shy of Constantine as formerly, and the state of things in his father's house had ceased to weigh upon his spirits: having learned that no man on earth is entirely happy within himself, he had no more reason to wonder at the marks of unhappiness which characterized the social relations of life and of men.

The gorgeous fabric of the ideal had sunk into ashes before him.

Occasionally a fervent prayer would lift him above the jars and discords of earthly being; but even into these heavenly arcana would the misgiving of an insufficiency pursue him: he was very unhappy.

People took his disordered air for a mark of over-application. It stung him to the soul when his mother begged him not to study too hard: he could not explain to her what troubled him; it was not even clear to himself. Thus, in the fulness of youth and health, he felt tired of life and weary of the earth: he had not mastered the riddle of existence, and fancied that death was the only solution.

In his last vacation before going to Tuebingen, he experienced a heavy loss: he no longer found Nat in the house. Mag, having overcome the opposition of her father, had married Xavier and gone with him to America. There was thus a lack of female help about the house, and Valentine's sons were old enough to do the field-work themselves. Nat was discharged: no one knew whither he had gone: the pigeon-cote was empty, and the beasts in the stable seemed to share Ivo's sorrow for his departed friend.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Emmerence had grown up to be a strong, hearty girl.]

On the other hand, Emmerence now lived in the house as maid-of-all-work. She had grown up to be a strong, hearty girl, a little short and square in figure,--what is usually called "buxom:" she would have been cla.s.sed with the comelier half of the village girls. It was long since Ivo had bestowed any attention upon her, so entirely had Clement occupied his heart. Whole vacations had pa.s.sed without his even exchanging a word with her. Now he sometimes eyed her askance, but always turned away the moment she detected him. Once only, when he found her so cheerfully engaged in the stable, he said, "That's right in you, Emmerence, to take good care of the cattle: only don't forget the dun and the cow."

"I know they're your favorites," she replied; "I'm so glad you haven't given up liking them." And, as if to wake a reminiscence of his childhood, she sang, while filling the cow's manger,--

"Far up on the hill is a white, white horse, A horse as white as snow; He'll take the little boys that are good little boys To where they want to go.

"The little boys and the good little boys Sha'n't go too far away; The little girls that are good little girls Must go as far as they."

Ivo went silently to the field in which he had once spent a whole day ploughing with Nat: it seemed as if some clue to his whereabouts must be hidden among the stones. He envied his brothers who were at work here, who shared their joys and sorrows at a common board, who had no one to obey but their natural superiors.

On his return to the convent he attached himself still more closely to Clement, as if to indemnify himself for the loss of his earlier friend.

The last summer spent in Ehingen was a little less monotonous than the others. Clement, whose home was in a largely Protestant town, had acquaintances among the pupils of the neighboring Protestant convent, (for by that name the cla.s.sical school was still called,) of Blaubeuren, who were a little less rigidly restrained than those of Ehingen. They sometimes came to Ehingen and went to the princ.i.p.al, one of them saying that he was a "fellow-countryman" of Clement's, and the other that he sustained the same mysterious relation to Ivo, and so on: the princ.i.p.al allowed the "countrymen" to make a half-holiday of it: they would saunter to the next village, and there, with festive songs and over the social gla.s.s, Ivo exchanged many a pledge of good-fellows.h.i.+p with the Protestant conventuaries. Neither they nor he were free,--although the Blaubeuren men had one or two immunities more than the others.

The time of student-life stood before the eyes of all these youths much like a taper-girt Christmas-tree before the visions of a German baby: they stretched out their hands impatiently to grasp the gilded nuts suspended from the boughs; and, though their clerical vocation was destined to cut down much of the liberties to which they looked forward, yet even what remained was far too slow in coming.

At last autumn set in. On the eve of their departure, Ivo and Clement went to the hawthorn where their friends.h.i.+p took its rise, and each of them broke off a twig and set it in his cap: then, taking each other's hand, they renewed their vow of eternal devotion. Ivo also promised to pay Clement a visit at Crailsheim during the holidays.