The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 11

Autumn! – In the verses which stand at the head of this chapter Hans has really said everything that he could say about his vita nuova on the shores of the Baltic; but even if he now no longer "departed from a narrow circle," still, it was not a narrow life. He had longed so much for real, thorough work; now he had his full share of it and did his duty as a true man should. After the most reverend chief consistory and the government had approved his appointment as assistant pastor, the aged Tillenius smilingly loaded a good part of his official burden upon Hans' back and the latter had never taken any load upon himself more readily. Although he came from inland the sea-faring folk were satisfied with his sermons and grew to love him. He baptized the first child, laid the first body in the earth and married the first couple and it was very seldom that Pastor Josias Tillenius had to tell him that neither he, himself, nor the people of Grunzenow had understood him, their Assistant Pastor.

He had never experienced such a spring and such a summer as in this first blessed year of his life in Grunzenow. All the glories of a dream did not equal the reality of those golden days of love and hope on the shore of the Baltic. He looked into life clearly and courageously; whatever indecision and instability nature and fate had laid in his character he sought to thrust away from him with a manly will. All he had to thank fortune for he sought to deserve and more than deserve by faithful endeavor and earnest striving. The indefinite hunger of his youth had now become the quiet, deliberate, steady endeavor that, active in millions, keeps mankind in its course and leads it on. Johannes Unwirrsch had learnt to know life, both its good and its evil side. Now all the circles through which he had wandered with all their figures, charming and terrible, had sunk into the past; he stood in the middle of a sphere which his activity was to fill. It was not indifferent to him that no tie bound him to his home town any longer, that he could bring nothing with him from Kröppel Street into his new life but sweet, melancholy remembrance and the shining glass globe which had formerly hung above his father's table. This glass globe now threw its brilliance on the life which Master Anton Unwirrsch had built up in his dreams of the true life on earth; but no generation extends far enough into the coming generations to see fulfilled its ideals which by that time are seldom the only ones.

Autumn!

The days of spring and of summer were past; but the autumn sun shone as lovely as ever and land and sea rejoiced in it. Nevertheless the Assistant Pastor at the open window had the right to disregard it in spite of all its glory; it was the seventh of September and on the next day, the eighth, a Sunday, his wedding was to take place. He had not made those rhymes in the moment in which he scribbled them down among the other fragments of thought.

Pastor Tillenius had chosen and fixed the wedding day; with art and diplomacy Pastor Tillenius had cajoled Uncle Rudolf and Colonel von Bullau into giving their consent and had held them to their promise when the two old gentlemen had wanted to take it back and not give up "their girl." Pastor Tillenius, backed by the apostolic principle: a bishop must be the husband of one wife – had held the field against the two obstinate, stubborn old soldiers. It was settled that Fränzchen was to leave the Grunzenow mansion and move to the vicarage; – Fränzchen herself had also given her consent and after all that was the most important thing.

Autumn! What was all the rapture of spring and summer compared with the bliss that autumn promised to give? It seemed as if all the birds of passage must stay to join in the celebration of the wedding and the honeymoon.

After the Grunzenow household had once resigned itself to the inevitable, it took infinite pleasure in the necessity and threw itself into the preparations for the festive day with an eagerness that surpassed everything. The Colonel was in a mild fever day and night, the lieutenant in a similar condition; but great indeed was Grips, the man for everything.

Who can find praise enough for the man's dexterous hand? Now it boxed the ears of a too stupid stable-boy; now, with deliberation, it drove in a nail on which to hang a self-twined garland. Grips had learnt something during his campaigns.

The village was stirring too. Old and young wanted to do their part toward making the eighth of September a day to be remembered in the annals of Grunzenow. For weeks beforehand the women and girls were busy, for weeks the sexton, who was teaching the children the wedding cantata, slept badly with inward excitement and too vivid dreams of success and glory, of failure, disgrace and shame.

Pastor Josias Tillenius composed his wedding address and as he gave to it the most beautiful although the saddest memories of his own life, and all of his good, full, old heart, it turned out admirably without being written down or learnt by heart.

On the seventh of September all the preparations were ended: meat and drink were not lacking in the Grunzenow house; the columns and pillars were festooned, the doors stood open to let the wedding joy in and the bride out.

"Soft veils of azureSank down from above.A magic circleOf heavenly loveNow is my life,"

these were the words that the bridegroom had written on the bescribbled page in his study in the vicarage. Everything was ready and Fränzchen softly laid her hand on Hans' shoulder, glanced smilingly at the paper in front of him and led him out of the house to her favorite spot on the seashore.

It was a height where, between stones and the shifting sands of the dunes, low bushes and a few taller trees, curiously torn by the wind, struggled with laborious persistency to wring their existence from the hard soil, to defend it against the drifting sand and the storms. It was a lonely spot where one could hold communion with land and sea, with the clouds and gulls, with one's own thoughts. There Grips had built Fränzchen a simple seat and there, on the eve of the wedding, sat Hans Unwirrsch and Franziska Götz and spoke of their own fate and of Kleophea and watched the sun go down.

They spoke much of Kleophea while they looked at the sea above which the fog had closed in after the beautiful brilliant day. Poor Kleophea had entirely disappeared; no answer had come to any of the letters that Fränzchen had written in the course of the year. They knew nothing of her – it was so strange that just on this evening her image should keep ever rising before them anew, that their thoughts would not remain centred on their own happiness. Hans and Franziska did not know that the ship that bore Kleophea Stein was gliding along behind the gray fog that was rising on the waves. They did not know that Kleophea was at sea when, on the following day Pastor Josias Tillenius joined their hands for time and eternity!

On the eighth of September the sun would not come out from behind the clouds all day. On the evening before it had gone down, as the sea-folk say, "in a bag" and that meant dull weather for the next few days. It was a sultry day on which not a breath of air stirred, on which the same sad gray covered heaven and earth, on which one might have wished for a heavy shower if it had not been a wedding day.

It did not rain on Fränzchen's bridal wreath, it did not rain on Pastor Tillenius's excellent words, it did not rain on the grim emotion of Uncle Rudolf and Colonel von Bullau, it did not rain on the jubilance of the mansion and the village of Grunzenow. Johannes Unwirrsch and Franziska Götz gave each other their hands as they had already given each other their hearts; after the pastor's address Lieutenant Götz made a speech at the table and, following the peal of the organ and the sexton's cantata, came the musicians from Freudenstadt whom Colonel von Bullau had had fetched in a farm wagon to play merry dance music. The Colonel entertained the whole village in his castle and as Major domus and arbiter elegantiarum Grips did not show himself as he was but as what he could be: amiable, obliging, tender toward the fair, courteous toward the strong sex.

They danced in the great hall and there was endless applause when the Colonel opened the ball with the young bride. It was a pleasure to look into the Lieutenant's radiant eyes; it was a pleasure to watch Pastor Josias Tillenius talking to Mother Jörenson; and it was a particular pleasure to see how the Assistant Pastor and bridegroom Hans Unwirrsch fell a victim to the dizzy goddess Terpsichore and to use an expression of the experienced seamen who were present, "lurched and pitched" through the room. The oldest people, even the great-grandmother Margarethe Jörenson could not remember another such day; the enjoyment rose from moment to moment and carried old and young with it; half confused the bridal couple that with difficulty had found refuge in a quiet corner, looked at the tumult.

"Fire at sea!" Who shouted that? Where had that cry come from?

"Fire at sea! Fire at sea!" – the words went through the festive throng like an electric shock. The music broke off, the dancers stopped as if spellbound; those who were at the refreshment tables sprang from their chairs and the Malayan song that the old one-armed first boatswain Stephen Groote was singing to a small appreciative circle, was smothered in his throat.

Hans and Fränzchen too had jumped up although at first they did not grasp the reason of the panic-like fear. The Colonel pushed his way through the room towards the door followed by the majority of his male guests. Those who remained behind ran about excitedly or to the windows that looked out on the sea. Franziska seized Pastor Tillenius's arm.

"Oh, for God's sake, what is it? What has happened?"

"There, there! Truly! Oh God have mercy on them!" cried the old man who had thrown open the window and was pointing to the water. "A ship on fire – there, there!"

The young couple's eyes followed the trembling hand; their hearts stood still with terrible fear —

"There! There!"

It had grown to be half dusk and the transition from the gray light of the day had been so unnoticeable that not one of the joyful wedding guests had thought of it. There was still no breeze to stir the haze that hung above land and sea and completely veiled the horizon; only those who lived on the shore could know what the red glow out there meant; the hearts of the two children of the inland only beat the harder because of the unknown terror.

A burning ship! Hundreds of people in the most horrible danger of death! Their senses swam at the thought, at the hundred fearful scenes that passed through their minds.

The Grunzenow mansion was emptied of its guests; even the women rushed through the corridors and hurried down to the shore. When Pastor Josias Tillenius, Hans and Fränzchen arrived at the boat landing they found the fishermen as well as Colonel von Bullau, the Lieutenant and the farm hands hard at work getting ready to start, while the women ran hither and thither in feverish excitement pointing and gesticulating toward the glow in the northwest and screaming. Hans Unwirrsch took his place among the men and pulled and pushed with the others; the old pastor sought to bring the women to reason or at least to calm them, and his assistant's bride helped him to the best of her ability. In a happy moment the wind from the south, a true angel of God, unfolded its wings and filled the sails of the boats of Grunzenow; only the oldest men, the women and the children remained behind on the shore while the younger men sailed out to bring help. In the first boat to leave the shore were the Colonel and the Assistant Pastor; Lieutenant Rudolf Götz had sunk down completely exhausted and his niece knelt beside him and held his white head in her lap; – but the fearful brilliance in the distance grew more and more distinct.

"It's a steamer, or they couldn't make such headway against the wind," cried one of the old seamen who had had to stay behind.

"They are trying to run her ashore!" said another.

All sorts of guesses as to the course of the vessel were made. Some thought she was from Stettin on her way to Stockholm but there were many who were sure that was not so. Others thought it was the St. Petersburg packet on her trip from Lübeck to Kronstadt. This view was shared by the majority, among them Pastor Tillenius.

The boats of Grunzenow had long disappeared in the increasing darkness. Fuel was gathered on the shore and a tremendous fire kindled and on the shore itself as well as in the cottages preparations were made in case the people from the burning ship should be brought home by the men of Grunzenow.

"God bless you, my child, courageous little heart," said Pastor Josias pressing Fränzchen's hand. "Your wedding day is having a bad end but you are just made for the wife of a pastor of fishermen. You are fulfilling your first duties with honor; God bless you and give you a long, helpful, brave life!"

Lieutenant Götz was sitting on a boat that was turned upside down; his old enemy was at him again, he held his foot in both hands and clenched his teeth with pain.

"Yes, yes, old chap," he cried. "Here we cripples sit in the sand and gape. Take me in your cloak, Fränzchen, carry me home and give me some bread and sop! Sapperment, and Bullau is two years older than I!"

A scream from the crowd interrupted the Lieutenant's lamentations. The reflection of the fire on the sea lost its brilliance rather rapidly and suddenly went out altogether. A deep silence followed the cry of fright; all remarks that were made now were spoken in the lowest whisper. It was as if no one dared to breathe aloud any more.

"They are saved or – lost!" said the old pastor at length, took off his cap and folded his hands. He repeated the prayer for the shipwrecked, and men, women and children prayed fervently with him; and yet the fathers of these old men who were now praying had claimed the right of salvage in all its abominableness and had practised it.

An hour of deathly anxiety passed, then lights appeared again in the darkness on the sea. They were the torches of the returning boats and now everyone who still had any voice left cried out again. After half an hour of the most painful expectation the first boat, filled to overflowing, slid up to the landing.

"Saved! Saved! Sauvé! Sauvé!" rang the shout in German and French. In half-mad ecstasy the first of those saved sank down and laughing and crying convulsively, they kissed the earth, embraced and kissed the people of Grunzenow who came up to them busily offering them all possible refreshment and help.

Colonel von Bullau and the Assistant Pastor were not in this first boat; but it was now learnt that the burnt vessel was the "Adelaide" from Havre de Grâce bound for St. Petersburg with a cargo of French wines and a few passengers. The excitement was still too great, however, for details of the fire to be asked and given.

The men of Grunzenow had brought sixty-four unfortunate people ashore, some of them injured; only the last fishing boat was still to come with the Colonel and Hans Unwirrsch.

"They are bringing the captain and the women" was the answer Fränzchen received to her anxious questions. "They must be here soon now, nothing has happened to them."

Franziska Unwirrsch pressed her hand to her heart and turned back to her duties. She had to act as interpreter for the French crew and the village of Grunzenow. She moved about in the confused, wild tumult like an angel bringing help and comfort; Uncle Rudolf, who had also not quite forgotten his French, had lost his head to a much greater extent than had his niece.

She was just kneeling beside a bearded, half-naked Provençal sailor who had broken both legs when renewed shouting announced the arrival of the last boat. In his pain the Provençal held her hands so tightly that she could not have freed herself even if she had tried. She could not even turn round to look at her husband; but between the words of comfort that she was speaking to the poor injured man all her thoughts turned to the landing where it had suddenly grown perfectly quiet.

She was listening with all her soul when a stir went through the people. The high voice of a woman cried with a foreign accent:

"Where is she? O ciel, where is she?"

The Provençal let go of the gentle, merciful hand that he had held so tightly till now; a woman threw herself on her knees beside Fränzchen, seized her wildly with her arms, kissed her gown, her hand, sobbed and screamed. The burning pile of wood and the torches threw their flickering light on the excited stranger; Hans, too, bent down to his wife, – it was a dream, only a dream! How did Henriette Trublet come to be on the shore of Grunzenow?

"It's she! It's she! Oh, all Saints! Oh, Mademoiselle! Oh, Madame! ma mignonne, blessings on your sweet face! Praise God! Oh, what a miracle! It is she!"

"Henriette! Henriette Trublet!" murmured Fränzchen, looking at the French girl with fixed, doubting eyes.

"Yes, yes, la pauvre Henriette! And the other! The other!"

Hans Unwirrsch held his wife in his arms and drew her head to his breast.

"Oh, love, love, whom do you think we have brought ashore out of the fire and the raging sea?"

He led her gently down to the shore; she trembled violently; speechless, she swayed between her husband and the French girl as she walked through the crowd of natives and foreigners who respectfully made way for her.

The captain of the "Adelaide" was sitting on a stone with his head in his hands. Beside him stood Colonel von Bullau as if he were again on one of his battlefields. Lieutenant Rudolf Götz was on his knees in the sand and in his lap he held the head of an unconscious woman —

"Kleophea! Kleophea!" cried Franziska, sinking down with folded hands beside the unconscious form.

"Yes, Kleophea!" said the Lieutenant, and gnashing his teeth he added: "And she is alone! Praise God!"

Chapter XXXVI

Thus destiny had been fulfilled and, incomprehensibly strange as it all seemed at first, it had yet been quite simple and natural. We do not understand, either, the fate of the little bird that suddenly drops out of the air dead at our feet until we have held the little body in our hand for a while; – and then we do understand it.

They carried poor Kleophea to the vicarage and first prepared a bed for her in a room that looked out on the sea; but she could not bear the sound of the water and, shudderingly, in the delirium of fever, demanded to be taken from that place and they had to put her in another room where the beat of the waves could not be heard so clearly.

There she lay for more than a week, stupefied and unconscious, without suspecting that the friends whom she called in her fever were so near to her. It was only very gradually that she came back to consciousness and for days Franziska, Lieutenant Rudolf and Hans Unwirrsch were only phantoms of her dream in whose reality she could not believe.

Franziska Unwirrsch did not leave the sick woman's bedside and she, she alone, succeeded in keeping alive for a time, though only a short one, the dying flame of life in the Kleophea who had once been so full of life, so beautiful and vivacious. The time of delusion had passed, the sand had run through, in her naked helplessness the once so proud being lay there, trembling and bleeding and, in expectation of the last dark hour, Kleophea Stein freed her heart as far as possible from all that was earthly. She had nothing more to conceal. All the gay-colored veils that she had formerly drawn over her graceful head, her laughing life, all the veils from under which she had formerly peeped out so teasingly, so light-heartedly, were torn and tattered; the merciless storm of life had whirled them about and away. Kleophea told of the year that had passed since she left her parents' house so dispiritedly, hopelessly, wearily, that it was terrible to hear. But her head lay on Fränzchen's breast while she spoke and she had given her hand to the Assistant Pastor; – it was only to Hans and his wife that she told everything.

"Oh, it was only the maddest longing that drove me out of my parents' house; I have no excuse whatever. My heart was so cold, so empty; it makes me shudder to remember in what a bad, wicked mood I followed that – that man. Oh, what have I been, and how shall I die! You are good, and you know what I was in my mother's house. Did I know anything of love? I did not go away for love's sake! You see, I was suited all too well to Dr. Théophile Stein – I can reproach him with nothing, nothing. It had to be so, I wanted it so. In his dismal hunger the demon that was in me sought for one like himself and when he found what he sought the two beasts seized each other with their teeth. Ah, poverina, it was I who got the worst of it after all!"

Hans and Franziska shuddered at this dreadful lament; but at the same moment it seemed as if some of her former vivacious grace came back to the poor sick girl. She raised herself smiling, took tighter hold of the Assistant's hand and said:

"How I did torment you! How I did laugh at you! Oh, Fränzchen, Fränzchen, it was only yesterday that we were sitting in Park Street together —l'eau dormante– the hunger pastor – poor little Aimé. How I tormented you, how I sinned against you, – it was so funny, and everybody made such faces, it would have made a tombstone laugh."

Kleophea's smile faded, she hid her face in the pillows and sobbed softly. When Franziska bent over her with gentle, soothing words, she pushed her away and cried:

"Leave me alone, go away! Let me die alone, I have deserved love from no one, no one, and I have killed my father! Don't you know that I have killed my father? Why don't you leave me alone with my thoughts? They're enough to torment me to my dying hour – "

The next day Hans and Fränzchen learnt more about the unhappy woman's life in Paris. The more clearly Dr. Théophile Stein realized that he had erred in his calculations, the more miserably did he treat his wife. The certainty that Kleophea's mother would never forgive the step her daughter had taken relieved a character like Dr. Stein's from any obligation to keep up his smiling disguise. He had wanted money, much money and had received not it but only a burden that would make every step that he took through life, the way he looked upon life, infinitely more difficult. The ground that he had so cleverly won in the big German city, on which he might have built so firmly and well, he had lost entirely by this false move. He gnashed his teeth when he thought how his game had turned out. And yet he had considered all the probabilities so carefully, he knew how to calculer les chances so thoroughly. Nothing, nothing! There he sat in Paris and his wife had brought him nothing but a letter from her father telling her of his forgiveness. It was absurd, but it was also enough to drive one mad.

"He tore the letter up and threw the pieces at my feet," related Kleophea in the vicarage in Grunzenow, "and I – I had thought I was his master, I had the strength, I had the will, I had the brains! Because at home I went out unpunished, because no one at home had the power to control me, I thought the world was like my mother's house, to be moved by a laugh, a pout, a shrug of the shoulders. I had to try to move it by tears, and I tried my best, you may believe; but even that did not succeed and I often told myself that such a miserable, stupid, foolish little thing as I was had never yet sat five flights high in the quartier du Marais and looked at her misery in the glass. I learnt much, much, Mrs. Fränzchen Unwirrsch, but when I was in my mother's house I should never have believed that I should forget how to yawn. I was not bored in Paris, I had to make my black mourning dress for my dead father and to defend it against – against my husband. Oh, he had a large circle of acquaintance; many people came to the house and they all hated black. Oh, it was a mad life and if it had not been for my stupid, confused, aching head I think I might have played a very charming part. I think that we weren't any too particular about our honor, we needed money altogether too much to bother about ridiculous prejudices. We entered into correspondence with all sorts of curious persons of high position in Germany and wrote letters for which we were very well paid. I think that, at the request of different governments, we paid attention to the health of some of our countrymen who were not trusted at home. We made ourselves very useful for we were very hungry; – I had to be ashamed for two. We entertained too and played for high stakes and people liked to come to our house very much, – the disgrace threatened to drown us and it was a pity that I did not know how to swim as well as monsieur mon époux. – Leave me alone, Oh, leave me alone!"