While the boy flung the damp bundles of brushwood on the floor beside
the hearth in the doctor’s kitchen, a servant from the monastery was
leading three horses under the rude shed in front of the smith Adam’s
work-shop The stately grey-haired monk, who had ridden the strong
cream-colored steed, was already standing beside the embers of the fire,
pressing his hands upon the warm chimney.
The forge stood open, but spite of knocking and shouting, neither the
master of the place, nor any other living soul appeared. Adam had gone
out, but could not be far away, for the door leading from the shop into
the sitting-room, was also unlocked.
The time was growing long to Father Benedict, so for occupation he tried
to lift the heavy hammer. It was a difficult task, though he was no
weakling, yet it was not hard for Adam’s arm to swing and guide the
burden. If only the man had understood how to govern his life as well as
he managed his ponderous tool!
He did not belong to Richtberg. What would his father have said, had he
lived to see his son dwell here?
The monk had known the old smith well, and he also knew many things
about the son and his destiny, yet no more than rumor entrusts to one
person concerning another’s life. Even this was enough to explain why
Adam had become so reserved, misanthropic and silent a man, though even
in his youth he certainly had not been what is termed a gay fellow.
The forge where he grew up, was still standing in the market-place
of the little city below; it had belonged to his grandfather and
great-grandfather. There had never been any lack of custom, to the
annoyance of the wise magistrates, whose discussions were disturbed by
the hammering that rang across the ill-paved square to the windows
of the council-chamber; but, on the other hand, the idle hours of the
watchmen under the arches of the ground-floor of the town-hall were
sweetened by the bustle before the smithy.
How Adam had come from the market-place to the Richtberg, is a story
speedily told.
He was the only child of his dead parents, and early learned his
father’s trade. When his mother died, the old man gave his son and
partner his blessing, and some florins to pay his expenses, and sent him
away. He went directly to Nuremberg, which the old man praised as the
high-school of the smith’s art, and there remained twelve years. When,
at the end of that time, news came to Adam that his father was dead, and
he had inherited the forge on the market-place, he wondered to find that
he was thirty years old, and had gone no farther than Nuremberg. True,
everything that the rest of the world could do in the art of forging
might be learned there.
He was a large, heavy man, and from childhood had moved slowly and
reluctantly from the place where he chanced to be.
If work was pressing, he could not be induced to leave the anvil, even
when evening had closed in; if it was pleasant to sit over the beer, he
remained till after the last man had gone. While working, he was as mute
as the dead to everything that was passing around him; in the tavern
he rarely spoke, and then said only a few words, yet the young artists,
sculptors, workers in gold and students liked to see the stout drinker
and good listener at the table, and the members of his guild only
marvelled how the sensible fellow, who joined in no foolish pranks, and
worked in such good earnest, held aloof from them to keep company with
these hairbrained folk, and remained a Papist.
He might have taken possession of the shop on the market-place directly
after his father’s death, but could not arrange his departure so
quickly, and it was fully eight months before he left Nuremberg.
On the high-road before Schwabach a wagon, occupied by some strolling
performers, overtook the traveller. They belonged to the better class,
for they appeared before counts and princes, and were seven in number.
The father and four sons played the violin, viola and reboc, and the two
daughters sang to the lute and harp. The old man invited Adam to take
the eighth place in the vehicle, so he counted his pennies, and room
was made for him opposite Flora, called by her family Florette. The
musicians were going to the fair at Nordlingen, and the smith enjoyed
himself so well with them, that he remained several days after reaching
the goal of the journey. When he at last went away Florette wept, but
he walked straight on until noon, without looking back. Then he lay down
under a blossoming apple-tree, to rest and eat some lunch, but the lunch
did not taste well; and when he shut his eyes he could not sleep, for
he thought constantly of Florette. Of course! He had parted from her far
too soon, and an eager longing seized upon him for the young girl, with
her red lips and luxuriant hair. This hair was a perfect golden-yellow;
he knew it well, for she had often combed and braided it in the
tavern-room beside the straw where they all slept.
He yearned to hear her laugh too, and would have liked to see her weep
again.
Then he remembered the desolate smithy in the narrow market-place and
the dreary home, recollected that he was thirty years old, and still had
no wife.
A little wife of his own! A wife like Florette! Seventeen years old,
a complexion like milk and blood, a creature full of gayety and joyous
life! True, he was no light-hearted lad, but, lying under the apple-tree
in the month of May, he saw himself in imagination living happily and
merrily in the smithy by the market-place, with the fair-haired girl who
had already shed tears for him. At last he started up, and because he
had determined to go still farther on this day, did so, though for no
other reason than to carry out the plan formed the day before. The next
morning, before sunrise, he was again marching along the highway, this
time not forward towards the Black Forest, but back to Nordlingen.
That very evening Florette became his betrothed bride, and the following
Tuesday his wife.
The wedding was celebrated in the midst of the turmoil of the fair.
Strolling players, jugglers and buffoons were the witnesses, and there
was no lack of music and tinsel.
A quieter ceremony would have been more agreeable to the plain citizen
and sensible blacksmith, but this purgatory had to be passed to reach
Paradise.
On Wednesday he went off in a fair wagon with his young wife, and
in Stuttgart bought with a portion of his savings many articles of
household furniture, less to stop the gossips’ tongues, of which he took
no heed, than to do her honor in his own eyes. These things, piled high
in a wagon of his own, he had sent into his native town as Florette’s
dowry, for her whole outfit consisted of one pink and one grass-green
gown, a lute and a little white dog.
A delightful life now began in the smithy for Adam. The gossips avoided
his wife, but they stared at her in church, and among them she seemed to
him, not unjustly, like a rose amid vegetables. The marriage he had made
was an abomination to respectable citizens, but Adam did not heed them,
and Flora appeared to feel equally happy with him. When, before the
close of the first twelvemonth after their wedding, Ulrich was born,
the smith reached the summit of happiness and remained there for a whole
year.
When, during that time, he stood in the bow-window amid the fresh
balsam, auricular and yellow wallflowers holding his boy on his
shoulder, while his wife leaned on his arm, and the pungent odor of
scorched hoofs reached his nostrils, and he saw his journeyman and
apprentice shoeing a horse below, he often thought how pleasant it had
been pursuing the finer branches of his craft in Nuremberg, and that he
should like to forge a flower again; but the blacksmith’s trade was not
to be despised either, and surely life with one’s wife and child was
best.
In the evening he drank his beer at the Lamb, and once, when the surgeon
Siedler called life a miserable vale of tears, he laughed in his face
and answered: “To him who knows how to take it right, it is a delightful
garden.”
Florette was kind to her husband, and devoted herself to her child,
so long as he was an infant, with the most self-sacrificing love. Adam
often spoke of a little daughter, who must look exactly like its mother;
but it did not come.
When little Ulrich at last began to run about in the street, the
mother’s nomadic blood stirred, and she was constantly dinning it into
her husband’s ears that he ought to leave this miserable place and go to
Augsburg or Cologne, where it would be pleasant; but he remained firm,
and though her power over him was great, she could not move his resolute
will.
Often she would not cease her entreaties and representations, and when
she even complained that she was dying of solitude and weariness, his
veins swelled with wrath, and then she was frightened, fled to her room
and wept. If she happened to have a bold day, she threatened to go away
and seek her own relatives. This displeased him, and he made her feel
it bitterly, for he was steadfast in everything, even anger, and when he
bore ill-will it was not for hours, but months, nor at such times could
he be conciliated by coaxing or tears.
By degrees Florette learned to meet his discontent with a shrug of
her shoulders, and to arrange her life in her own way. Ulrich was her
comfort, pride and plaything, but sporting with him did not satisfy her.
While Adam was standing behind the anvil, she sat among the flowers in
the bow-window, and the watchmen now looked higher up than the forge,
the worthy magistrates no longer cast unfriendly glances at the smith’s
house, for Florette grew more and more beautiful in the quiet life she
now enjoyed, and many a neighboring noble brought his horse to Adam to
be shod, merely to look into the eyes of the artisan’s beautiful wife.
Count von Frohlingen came most frequently of all, and Florette soon
learned to distinguish the hoof-beats of his horse from those of the
other steeds, and when he entered the shop, willingly found some pretext
for going there too. In the afternoons she often went with her child
outside the gate, and then always chose the road leading to the count’s
castle. There was no lack of careful friends, who warned Adam, but he
answered them angrily, so they learned to be silent.
Florette had now grown gay again, and sometimes sang like a joyous bird.
Seven years elapsed, and during the summer of the eighth a scattered
troop of soldiers came to the city and obtained admission. They were
quartered under the arches of the town-hall, but many also lay in the
smithy, for their helmets, breast-plates and other pieces of armor
required plenty of mending. The ensign, a handsome, proud young fellow,
with a dainty moustache, was Adam’s most constant customer, and played
very kindly with Ulrich, when Florette appeared with him. At last the
young soldier departed, and the very same day Adam was summoned to the
monastery, to mend something in the grating before the treasury.
When he returned, Florette had vanished; “run after the ensign,” people
said, and they were right. Adam did not attempt to wrest her from the
seducer; but a great love cannot be torn from the heart like a staff
that is thrust into the ground; it is intertwined with a thousand
fibres, and to destroy it utterly is to destroy the heart in which it
has taken root, and with it life itself. When he secretly cursed her
and called her a viper, he doubtless remembered how innocent, dear and
joyous she had been, and then the roots of the destroyed affection put
forth new shoots, and he saw before his mental vision ensnaring images,
of which he felt ashamed as soon as they had vanished.
Lightning and hail had entered the “delightful garden” of Adam’s life
also, and he had been thrust forth from the little circle of the happy
into the great army of the wretched.
Purifying powers dwell in undeserved suffering, but no one is made
better by unmerited disgrace, least of all a man like Adam. He had done
what seemed to him his duty, without looking to the right or the left,
but now the stainless man felt himself dishonored, and with morbid
sensitiveness referred everything he saw and heard to his own disgrace,
while the inhabitants of the little town made him feel that he had been
ill-advised, when he ventured to make a fiddler’s daughter a citizen.
When he went out, it seemed to him--and usually unjustly--as if people
were nudging each other; hands, pointing out-stretched fingers at
him, appeared to grow from every eye. At home he found nothing but
desolation, vacuity, sorrow, and a child, who constantly tore open the
burning, gnawing wounds in his heart. Ulrich must forget “the viper,”
and he sternly forbade him to speak of his mother; but not a day passed
on which he would not fain have done so himself.
The smith did not stay long in the house on the market-place. He wished
to go to Freiburg or Ulm, any place where he had not been with her. A
purchaser for the dwelling, with its lucrative business, was speedily
found, the furniture was packed, and the new owner was to move in on
Wednesday, when on Monday Bolz, the jockey, came to Adam’s workshop
from Richtberg. The man had been a good customer for years, and bought
hundreds of shoes, which he put on the horses at his own forge, for he
knew something about the trade. He came to say farewell; he had his own
nest to feather, and could do a more profitable business in the lowlands
than up here in the forest. Finally he offered Adam his property at a
very low price.
The smith had smiled at the jockey’s proposal, still he went to
the Richtberg the very next day to see the place. There stood the
executioner’s house, from which the whole street was probably named.
One wretched hovel succeeded another. Yonder before a door, Wilhelm the
idiot, on whom the city boys played their pranks, smiled into vacancy
just as foolishly as he had done twenty years ago, here lodged Kathrin,
with the big goitre, who swept the gutters; in the three grey huts, from
which hung numerous articles of ragged clothing, lived two families of
charcoal-burners, and Caspar, the juggler, a strange man, whom as a boy
he had seen in the pillory, with his deformed daughters, who in winter
washed laces and in summer went with him to the fairs.
In the hovels, before which numerous children were playing, lived
honest, but poor foresters. It was the home of want and misery. Only
the jockey’s house and one other would have been allowed to exist in the
city. The latter was occupied by the Jew, Costa, who ten years before
had come from a distant country to the city with his aged father and a
dumb wife, and remained there, for a little daughter was born and the
old man was afterwards seized with a fatal illness. But the inhabitants
would tolerate no Jews among them, so the stranger moved into the
forester’s house on the Richtberg which had stood empty because a better
one had been built deeper in the woods. The city treasury could use the
rent and tax exacted from Jews and demanded of the stranger. The Jew
consented to the magistrate’s requirement, but as it soon became known
that he pored over huge volumes all day long and pursued no business,
yet paid for everything in good money, he was believed to be an
alchemist and sorcerer.
All who lived here were miserable or despised, and when Adam had left
the Richtberg he told himself that he no longer belonged among the proud
and unblemished and since he felt dishonored and took disgrace in the
same dogged earnest, that he did everything else, he believed the people
in the Richtberg were just the right neighbors for him. All knew what
it is to be wretched, and many had still heavier disgrace to bear. And
then! If want drove his miserable wife back to him, this was the right
place for her and those of her stamp.
So he bought the jockey’s house and well-supplied forge. There would be
customers enough for all he could do there in obscurity.
He had no cause to repent his bargain.
The old nurse remained with him and took care of Ulrich, who throve
admirably. His own heart too grew lighter while engaged in designing or
executing many an artistic piece of work. He sometimes went to the
city to buy iron or coals, but usually avoided any intercourse with the
citizens, who shrugged their shoulders or pointed to their foreheads,
when they spoke of him.
About a year after his removal he had occasion to speak to the
file-cutter, and sought him at the Lamb, where a number of Count
Frolinger’s retainers were sitting. Adam took no notice of them,
but they began to jeer and mock at him. For a time he succeeded in
controlling himself, but when red-haired Valentine went too far, a
sudden fit of rage overpowered him and he felled him to the floor. The
others now attacked him and dragged him to their master’s castle, where
he lay imprisoned for six months. At last he was brought before the
count, who restored him to liberty “for the sake of Florette’s beautiful
eyes.”
Years had passed since then, during which Adam had lived a quiet,
industrious life in the Richtberg with his son. He associated with
no one, except Doctor Costa, in whom he found the first and only real
friend fate had ever bestowed upon him.