Hammer and Anvil Part 3

"He is mad," said the professor, taking a hasty step backwards, which brought him in contact with the table.

"Sirrah!" exclaimed my father, stepping quickly forward, as if to protect the professor from my violence.

"If I am mad," I said, turning my burning eyes from one to the other, "so much the greater reason for leaving us alone."

The professor looked round for his hat, which stood behind him on the table.

"No; remain, remain," said my father, his voice quivering with pa.s.sion.

"Is this audacious boy again to have his insolent way? I have too long been culpably negligent; it is high time to take other measures."

My father began to pace up and down the room, as he always did when violently agitated.

"Yes, to take other measures," he continued. "This has gone on far too long. I have done all I could; I have nothing to reproach myself with; but I will not become a public by-word for the sake of a perverse boy.

If he refuses to do what is his plain duty and obligation, then have I no further duty or obligation towards him; and let him see how he can get through the world without me."

He had not once looked at me while he uttered these words in a voice broken with pa.s.sion. Later in life I saw a painting representing the Roman holding his burning hand in the glowing coals, and looking sideways upon the ground with an expression of intensest agony. It brought at once into my mind the remembrance of my father at this fateful moment.

"Your father is right"--commenced for the third time the professor, who held it his duty to strike in while the iron was hot--"when was there ever a father who has done more for his children than your excellent parent, whose integrity, industry and virtue have become a proverb, and who through your fault is now deprived of the crowning ornament of a good citizen; that is, a well-disciplined son, to be the stay of his declining years. Is it not enough that inevitable fate has already hard smitten this excellent man--that he has lost a dear consort and a son in the bloom of youth? Shall he now lose the last, the Benjamin of his old age? Shall his unwearied solicitude, his daily and nightly prayers----"

My father was a man of strictest principles, but far from devout, in the ordinary acceptation of the word; an untruth was his abhorrence, and it was an untruth to say that he had prayed by night and day; and besides, he had an excessive, almost morbid modesty, and the professor's panegyric struck him as exaggerated and ill-timed.

"Let all that pa.s.s, Herr Professor"--he interrupted the learned man rather impatiently--"I say again, I have done my duty. Enough! let him do his. I want nothing of him--nothing--nothing whatever--not so much as"--and he brushed one hand over the other; "but this I will have, and if he refuses----"

My father had worked himself into a rage again, and my apparent composure only further exasperated him. Strange! Had I fallen to prayers and entreaties, I know that my father would have despised me, and yet, because I did what he himself would most a.s.suredly have done in my position, because I was silent and stubborn, he hated me at this moment as one hates anything that stands in one's way, and which yet cannot be spurned aside with contempt.

"You have been guilty of a heavy offence, George Hartwig"--the professor began again in a declamatory tone--"that of leaving the Gymnasium without the permission of your teachers. I will not speak of the boundless disrespect with which, as so often before, you rejected the precious opportunity offered you of acquiring knowledge: I will only speak of the terrible guilt of disobedience, of insolent defiance of orders, of the evil example that your disgraceful conduct has presented to your cla.s.s-mates. If Arthur von Zehren's facile temper has at last been warped into confirmed frivolity, this is the evil fruit of your bad example. Never would that misguided boy have dared to do what he has done to-day----"

As I knew the misguided boy so much better than he, I here broke into a loud, contemptuous laugh, which drove the professor completely beyond his self-control. He caught up his hat, and muttering some unintelligible words, apparently expressing his conviction that I was lost beyond all possibility of reformation, was about to leave the room, when he was detained by my father.

"One moment, Herr Professor," he said, and then turning to me--"You will instantly ask pardon of your teacher for this additional insolence--instantly!"

"I will not," I replied.

"Instantly!" thundered my father.

"I will not!" I repeated.

"Once more, will you, or will you not?"

He stood before me his whole frame quivering with anger. His naturally sallow complexion had turned of an ashy gray, the veins of his brow were swollen, his eyes flashed. His last words had been spoken in a hoa.r.s.e, hissing tone.

"I will not," I said for the third time.

My father raised his arm as if to strike me, but he did not strike; his arm slowly descended, and with outstretched hand he pointed to the door:

"Begone!" he said, slowly and firmly. "Leave house forever!"

I looked straight into his eyes; I was about to say something--perhaps "Forgive me, father; I will ask _your_ forgiveness;" but my heart lay like a stone in my breast; my teeth were clenched like a vice; I could not speak. I moved silently towards the door. The professor hurried after me and seized my arm, no doubt with the kindest intentions; but I saw in him only the cause of my disgrace. I thrust him roughly aside, flung the door to after me, ran past the old housekeeper--the good old creature had evidently been listening, for she stood there wringing her hands, the picture of despair--and out of the house into the street.

CHAPTER IV.

I ran for a short distance like a madman, when suddenly my limbs began to totter under me; the moonlit roofs, the lighted windows in some of the houses, danced wildly before my eyes; the fumes of the wine I had been drinking, repressed for a while by my mental excitement, now rose again to my brain; I had to lean against a wall to keep myself from falling.

I had probably remained for a few minutes in a state of partial insensibility when the voices of some maids, who were bringing water from the adjacent fountain, recalled me to consciousness. I roused myself, and staggered down the street. Soon my strong natural const.i.tution began to a.s.sert itself; my steps grew firmer, and I began to consider what I should do, and first of all, whither I should go.

The idea of seeking lodgings at an inn I rejected at once; I had never yet pa.s.sed a night from home; and besides, my whole stock of money did not exceed one _thaler_--my father always kept me on a very meagre allowance of pocket-money--and I had an indistinct notion that I should have to make this slender sum go a long way. Had I not quarreled with Arthur and parted from him in anger, I should probably have gone to him; but as it was, I felt it impossible to present myself at his house as a supplicant; and, besides, by this time he was most likely sleeping off his intoxication, and his parents had never been friendly disposed towards me. The commerzienrath! He had embraced me, called me _thou_ and _brother_: he would a.s.suredly receive me with rapture, have me shown to a magnificent chamber, with a grand four-post curtained bed----

But while I was indulging in the picture of my brilliant reception at the commerzienrath's, I was hastening steadily in the opposite direction, towards the harbor. I pa.s.sed some low taverns in which sailors were roaring out coa.r.s.e songs. How if I went in and joined the drinkers, and to-morrow went out into the wide world a sailor, like my brother Fritz? That would be a way to be revenged upon my father! To lose two sons--both in the same way! And then to perish at sea, and my corpse to lie at the bottom of the ocean, where my brother's bones had long been lying! "Shame upon you, George!"--I said to myself--"shame!

The poor old man!"

How if I turned back? The professor had certainly long since left the house. My father was alone in his room. I would go to him and say--"Strike me if you will, father; I will not resist; I will not move an eyelid!"

But I did not return, nor even slacken my pace; I had already left the town behind, and was now in the wide street of the suburb, on both sides of which stood the little cottages which at this season were chiefly occupied by the bathing-guests. Here and there they shone through the dark trees; some of them had lamps burning in gla.s.s globes at the doors, and under trellises, and in the little gardens sat cheerful groups; song and laughter and the merry voices of children came up on the pleasant evening air; a light breeze just stirred the tops of the trees over my head, and fire-flies twinkled in the bushes.

The moist, warm breeze from the sea seemed to refresh me; how pleasant it must be, I thought, over there beyond the houses; and on the instant, Smith Pinnow's cottage came into my mind. The very thing!

there I was sure of a shelter. The old man would give me a bed, or at least a shake-down in the forge; or there was the old woman's great arm-chair--certainly she could not sit crouching in it all night as well as all day. Pity Klaus was not at home; but then the pretty Christel was there. Christel had always been a favorite of mine; indeed, at one time I had fancied myself really in love with her, and her charms had attracted me to the hut at least quite as often as the old man's four double-barrels and the long single-barrel, or the mulled wine which he used to sell in the winter to the skaters that thronged the beach.

Strange light-heartedness of youth! At this moment all the mischief I had done, my father's grief, my own serious position, were all forgotten; or, if not forgotten, they were only the dark background upon which shone brightly and cheerily the picture of the old ruinous hut with the glowing forge-fire, and above all the pretty figure of the brisk Christel moving lightly about. What was the school--what was my father's house and all the rest of my slavery to me now? At other times, when I had been out at this hour, I was haunted with anxiety how I should get in without the knowledge of my father, who went to bed punctually at half-past nine: now my father had himself driven me from his house. No need now to pull off my boots at the door, and creep softly up the creaking stair to my chamber; I was a free man and could do what I chose, and come and go at my pleasure.

The wide street and the suburbs were now behind me; I strode along the well-known path, on my left a little meadow, on my right a potato-field, here and there a solitary tree, blackly defined against the clear starlit sky, and on either side the water, whose hollow sound I heard plainer and plainer as the tongue of land narrowed, especially towards the west, the windward quarter, where lay the open sea. I noticed for the first time that I had no cap. I had either lost it or left it by the lamp on the hall-table; so much the better, the sea-breeze could play freely around my heated temples and in my loose hair.

A pair of wild swans flew high above me; I could not see them, but heard their peculiar wailing cry--two simple notes that rang strangely through the silence of the night. "Good speed!" I called out to them: "Good speed, my good comrades!"

A strangely happy feeling, mingled of sadness and joy, came over me, such as I had never known before. I could have thrown myself upon the earth and wept; I could have leaped and shouted in exultation. I could not then comprehend what it was that so singularly possessed me. Now I know well what it was: it was the sense of delight that must thrill through the fish when he darts like an arrow through the liquid crystal, the bird when he sweeps on expanded pinions through the air, the stag when he bounds over the wild plain; the rapture that thrills man's breast when in the full glow of youth and vigor he feels himself one with the great mother, Nature. The fore-feeling of this delight, the longing to taste it, are what drives the man from the narrow round of circ.u.mstances in which he was born, out into the wide world, across seas, into the desert, to the peaks of the Alps, anywhere where the winds blow free, where the heaven broadens grandly above, where he must risk his life to win it.

Does this after-thought excuse the insolent obstinacy of which I had been guilty towards my father; and the terrible rashness with which I staked my whole future on a cast of the die? a.s.suredly not. I will excuse nothing, extenuate nothing; but simply narrate what happened to me and within me during these events and those that followed; only giving an explanation here and there when circ.u.mstances seem to require it. Let the story tell its own moral; only this will I add, for the consolation of thoughtful souls, that if, as cannot be gainsaid, my conduct deserved punishment, this punishment was dealt out to me speedily, and that in no stinted measure.

But at the time the haggard form with the lame foot was still too far behind to cast the shade of her terrors upon me; two other figures, however, as I hastened with a quickened pace over the heath, appeared in sight, who had a.s.suredly nothing spectral about them, for they were standing in a close embrace. They sprang apart, with a cry of alarm from a female voice, as, turning sharply around a hillock, I came directly upon them. The maiden caught up a great basket, which she had set upon the ground, having just had other employment for her arms, and her companion gave an "Ahem!" which was so loud and so confused that it could only have proceeded from a very innocent breast.

"Good evening," I said; "I trust----"

"Good Lord! is it really you?" said the man. "Why, Christel, only think it's him!"--and Klaus caught Christel Mowe, who was about taking to flight, by her dress, and detained her.

"Oh! I thought it was _him_!" stammered Christel, whose mind did not seem entirely relieved by the discovery that if they had been espied it was by a good friend.

Although the position in which Klaus and Christel evidently stood to each other did not exactly require an explanation, still I was somewhat astonished. As long as Klaus lived with his father, from the commencement of our friends.h.i.+p, I had never detected in the good fellow's heart anything more than brotherly affection for his pretty adopted sister; but then that was four years ago. Klaus was but sixteen when he went to work with locksmith w.a.n.gerow; and perhaps this temporary separation had aroused the love which otherwise would have calmly slumbered on, and possibly never awakened of itself. This was confirmed by what the lovers themselves told me, as we walked slowly on together towards the forge, often stopping for a minute at a time when the story reached a point of particularly critical interest. One of these points--and indeed the most serious--was the strongly and even violently expressed aversion of old Pinnow to the engagement. Klaus did not say so, but from all that I gathered I surmised that it was not altogether impossible that the old man himself had cast an eye upon his pretty adopted daughter; at least I could see no other reasonable explanation of the fact that year by year, and day by day, he had grown more morose and rancorous towards Klaus, and at last, after much snarling and storming over his gadding about, and his shameful waste of time, had ended by forbidding him the house, without the good fellow--as he solemnly a.s.severated, and I believed him--having ever given him the slightest cause of complaint. Therefore they--the lovers--were under the necessity of keeping their meetings secret, a proceeding not without considerable difficulties, as the old man was extraordinarily watchful and cunning. For instance, he would send the deaf and dumb apprentice, Jacob, to the town to make the necessary purchases, although he was certain to make some blunder or other; and to-day he would not have sent Christel, had he not heard that Klaus had some late work to do on board the steamer, that would prevent his coming ash.o.r.e.

As I had a sincere affection for the good Klaus, who had been my comrade in many a merry frolic by land and water, and was no less fond of the rosy, soft-voiced Christel Mowe, I felt the liveliest sympathy with them; and improbable though it may seem, their love, with its sorrows and its joys, and the possibility of its happy termination, lay at this moment nearer my heart than the thought of my own fortune. My mind, however, recurred to my own situation, when, as we reached a slight elevation in the path, the forge, with the light of the kitchen-fire s.h.i.+ning through its low window, appeared close at hand, and Klaus asked if we should now turn back. He then for the first time learned that it was no mere evening stroll that had brought me so far from the town across the heath, and that my intention was to ask his father for shelter for a day at least, or perhaps for several days. At the same time I briefly explained to him the cause that compelled me to so singular a step.

Klaus seemed greatly affected by what he heard; he grasped me by the hand, and taking me a little aside, asked in an agitated whisper if I had well considered what I was about? My father, he said, could not mean to deal so harshly with me, and would certainly forgive me if I returned at once. He himself would go and prepare the way, and let the storm spend its first wrath upon him.

"But, Klaus, old fellow," I said, "you are no better off than I. We are comrades in misery: your father has forbidden you his house, just as mine has done with me. What difference is there between us?"

"This difference," Klaus answered, "that I have done nothing to give my father the right to be angry with me, while you tell me yourself that you--don't take it hard of me--have been playing a very ugly trick."

I answered that, be that as it might, home I would never go. What further I should do, I did not know: I would come on board the steamer to-morrow and talk the matter over with him; it was very likely that I would need his a.s.sistance.