above the door; and it was crowded, and had a strong smell in it
from the Russian hides and the hams that were in it. But August was
not frightened; he was close to Hirschvogel, and presently he meant
to be closer still; for he meant to do nothing less than get inside
Hirschvogel itself. Being a shrewd little boy, and having had by great
luck two silver groschen in his breeches-pocket, which he had earned
the day before by chopping wood, he had bought some bread and sausage
at the station of a woman there who knew him, and who thought he was
going out to his uncle Joachim’s chalet above Jenbach. This he had
with him, and this he ate in the darkness and the lumbering, pounding,
thundering noise which made him giddy, as never had he been in a train
of any kind before. Still he ate, having had no breakfast, and being a
child, and half a German, and not knowing at all how or when he ever
would eat again.
When he had eaten, not as much as he wanted, but as much as he thought
was prudent (for who could say when he would be able to buy anything
more?), he set to work like a little mouse to make a hole in the withes
of straw and hay which enveloped the stove. If it had been put in a
packing-case he would have been defeated at the onset. As it was, he
gnawed, and nibbled, and pulled, and pushed, just as a mouse would have
done, making his hole where he guessed that the opening of the stove
was,—the opening through which he had so often thrust the big oak logs
to feed it. No one disturbed him; the heavy train went lumbering on and
on, and he saw nothing at all of the beautiful mountains, and shining
waters, and great forests through which he was being carried. He was
hard at work getting through the straw and hay and twisted ropes; and
get through them at last he did, and found the door of the stove, which
he knew so well, and which was quite large enough for a child of his
age to slip through, and it was this which he had counted upon doing.
Slip through he did, as he had often done at home for fun, and curled
himself up there to see if he could anyhow remain during many hours.
He found that he could; air came in through the brass fret-work of the
stove; and with admirable caution in such a little fellow he leaned
out, drew the hay and straw together, and rearranged the ropes, so that
no one could ever have dreamed a little mouse had been at them. Then he
curled himself up again, this time more like a dormouse than anything
else; and, being safe inside his dear Hirschvogel and intensely cold,
he went fast asleep as if he were in his own bed at home with Albrecht
and Christof on either side of him. The train lumbered on, stopping
often and long, as the habit of goods-trains is, sweeping the snow
away with its cow-switcher, and rumbling through the deep heart of the
mountains, with its lamps aglow like the eyes of a dog in a night of
frost.
The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, and the child slept
soundly for a long while. When he did awake, it was quite dark outside
in the land; he could not see, and of course he was in absolute
darkness; and for a while he was sorely frightened, and trembled
terribly, and sobbed in a quiet heart-broken fashion, thinking of
them all at home. Poor Dorothea! how anxious she would be! How she
would run over the town and walk up to grandfather’s at Dorf Ampas,
and perhaps even send over to Jenbach, thinking he had taken refuge
with Uncle Joachim! His conscience smote him for the sorrow he must be
even then causing to his gentle sister; but it never occurred to him
to try and go back. If he once were to lose sight of Hirschvogel how
could he ever hope to find it again? how could he ever know whither
it had gone,—north, south, east, or west? The old neighbor had said
that the world was small; but August knew at least that it must have
a great many places in it: that he had seen himself on the maps on
his school-house walls. Almost any other little boy would, I think,
have been frightened out of his wits at the position in which he found
himself; but August was brave, and he had a firm belief that God and
Hirschvogel would take care of him. The master-potter of Nürnberg was
always present to his mind, a kindly, benign, and gracious spirit,
dwelling manifestly in that porcelain tower whereof he had been the
maker.
A droll fancy, you say? But every child with a soul in him has quite as
quaint fancies as this one was of August’s.
So he got over his terror and his sobbing both, though he was so
utterly in the dark. He did not feel cramped at all, because the
stove was so large, and air he had in plenty, as it came through the
fret-work running round the top. He was hungry again, and again nibbled
with prudence at his loaf and his sausage. He could not at all tell the
hour. Every time the train stopped and he heard the banging, stamping,
shouting, and jangling of chains that went on, his heart seemed to
jump up into his mouth. If they should find him out! Sometimes porters
came and took away this case and the other, a sack here, a bale there,
now a big bag, now a dead chamois. Every time the men trampled near
him, and swore at each other, and banged this and that to and fro, he
was so frightened that his very breath seemed to stop. When they came
to lift the stove out, would they find him? and if they did find him,
would they kill him? That was what he kept thinking of all the way, all
through the dark hours, which seemed without end. The goods-trains are
usually very slow, and are many days doing what a quick train does in a
few hours. This one was quicker than most, because it was bearing goods
to the King of Bavaria; still it took all the short winter’s day and
the long winter’s night and half another day to go over ground that
the mail-trains cover in a forenoon. It passed great armored Kuffstein
standing across the beautiful and solemn gorge, denying the right of
way to all the foes of Austria. It passed twelve hours later, after
lying by in out-of-the-way stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marks the
border of Bavaria. And here the Nürnberg stove, with August inside
it, was lifted out heedfully and set under a covered way. When it was
lifted out, the boy had hard work to keep in his screams; he was tossed
to and fro as the men lifted the huge thing, and the earthenware walls
of his beloved fire-king were not cushions of down. However, though
they swore and grumbled at the weight of it, they never suspected
that a living child was inside it, and they carried it out on to the
platform and set it down under the roof of the goods-shed. There it
passed the rest of the night and all the next morning, and August was
all the while within it.
The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all the
vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow. If there had not been
whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron rails of the
snow, no trains could ever have run at all. Happily for August, the
thick wrappings in which the stove was enveloped and the stoutness
of its own make screened him from the cold, of which, else, he must
have died,—frozen. He had still some of his loaf, and a little—a very
little—of his sausage. What he did begin to suffer from was thirst; and
this frightened him almost mere than anything else, for Dorothea had
read aloud to them one night a story of the tortures some wrecked men
had endured because they could not find any water but the salt sea. It
was many hours since he had last taken a drink from the wooden spout of
their old pump, which brought them the sparkling, ice-cold water of the
hills.
But, fortunately for him, the stove, having been marked and registered
as “fragile and valuable,” was not treated quite like a mere bale of
goods, and the Rosenheim station-master, who knew its consignees,
resolved to send it on by a passenger-train that would leave there at
daybreak. And when this train went out, in it, among piles of luggage
belonging to other travellers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pest, Salzburg,
was August, still undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole in the
winter under the grass. Those words, “fragile and valuable,” had made
the men lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He had begun to get
used to his prison, and a little used to the incessant pounding and
jumbling and rattling and shaking with which modern travel is always
accompanied, though modern invention does deem itself so mightily
clever. All in the dark he was, and he was terribly thirsty; but he
kept feeling the earthenware sides of the Nürnberg giant and saying,
softly, “Take care of me; oh, take care of me, dear Hirschvogel!”
He did not say, “Take me back;” for, now that he was fairly out in the
world, he wished to see a little of it. He began to think that they
must have been all over the world in all this time that the rolling and
roaring and hissing and jangling had been about his ears shut up in the
dark, he began to remember all the tales that had been told in Yule
round the fire at his grandfather’s good house at Dorf, of gnomes and
elves and subterranean terrors, and the Erl King riding on the black
horse of night, and—and—and he began to sob and to tremble again, and
this time did scream outright. But the steam was screaming itself so
loudly that no one, had there been any one nigh, would have heard him;
and in another minute or so the train stopped with a jar and a jerk,
and he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, “München! München!”
Then he knew enough of geography to know that he was in the heart of
Bavaria. He had had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by the
Bavarian forest guards, when in the excitement of hunting a black bear
he had overpassed the limits of the Tyrol frontier.
That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young chamois-hunter who had taught
him to handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very name of
Bavaria a terror to August.
“It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!” he sobbed to the stove; but the stove
said nothing to him; it had no fire in it. A stove can no more speak
without fire than a man can see without light. Give it fire, and it
will sing to you, tell tales to you, offer you in return all the
sympathy you ask.
“It is Bavaria!” sobbed August; for it is always a name of dread augury
to the Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter struggles and midnight
shots and untimely deaths which come from those meetings of jäger
and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But the train stopped; Munich was
reached, and August, hot and cold by turns, and shaking like a little
aspen-leaf, felt himself once more carried out on the shoulders of
men, rolled along on a truck, and finally set down, where he knew not,
only he knew he was thirsty,—so thirsty! If only he could have reached
his hand out and scooped up a little snow!
[Illustration: AUGUST OPENED THE WINDOW, CRAMMED THE SNOW INTO HIS
MOUTH AGAIN AND AGAIN]
He thought he had been moved on this truck many miles, but in truth the
stove had been only taken from the railway-station to a shop in the
Marienplatz. Fortunately, the stove was always set upright on its four
gilded feet, an injunction to that effect having been affixed to its
written label, and on its gilded feet it stood now in the small dark
curiosity-shop of one Hans Rhilfer.
“I shall not unpack it till Anton comes,” he heard a man’s voice say;
and then he heard a key grate in a lock, and by the unbroken stillness
that ensued he concluded he was alone, and ventured to peep through
the straw and hay. What he saw was a small square room filled with
pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue jugs, old steel armor,
shields, daggers, Chinese idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs, and all
the art lumber and fabricated rubbish of a _bric-à-brac_ dealer’s. It
seemed a wonderful place to him; but, oh! was there one drop of water
in it all? That was his single thought; for his tongue was parching,
and his throat felt on fire, and his chest began to be dry and choked
as with dust. There was not a drop of water, but there was a lattice
window grated, and beyond the window was a wide stone ledge covered
with snow. August cast one look at the locked door, darted out of his
hiding-place, ran and opened the window, crammed the snow into his
mouth again and again, and then flew back into the stove, drew the
hay and straw over the place he entered by, tied the cords, and shut
the brass door down on himself. He had brought some big icicles in with
him, and by them his thirst was finally, if only temporarily, quenched.
Then he sat still in the bottom of the stove, listening intently, wide
awake, and once more recovering his natural boldness.
The thought of Dorothea kept nipping his heart and his conscience with
a hard squeeze now and then; but he thought to himself, “If I can take
her back Hirschvogel, then how pleased she will be, and how little
’Gilda will clap her hands!” He was not at all selfish in his love for
Hirschvogel: he wanted it for them all at home quite as much as for
himself. There was at the bottom of his mind a kind of ache of shame
that his father—his own father—should have stripped their hearth and
sold their honor thus.
A robin had been perched upon a stone griffin sculptured on a
house-eave near. August had felt for the crumbs of his loaf in his
pocket, and had thrown them to the little bird sitting so easily on the
frozen snow.
In the darkness where he was he now heard a little song, made faint
by the stove-wall and the window-glass that was between him and it,
but still distinct and exquisitely sweet. It was the robin, singing
after feeding on the crumbs. August, as he heard, burst into tears. He
thought of Dorothea, who every morning threw out some grain or some
bread on the snow before the church. “What use is it going _there_,”
she said, “if we forget the sweetest creatures God has made?” Poor
Dorothea! Poor, good, tender, much-burdened little soul! He thought of
her till his tears ran like rain.
Yet it never once occurred to him to dream of going home. Hirschvogel
was here.
Presently the key turned in the lock of the door; he heard heavy
footsteps and the voice of the man who had said to his father, “You
have a little mad dog; muzzle him!” The voice said, “Ay, ay, you have
called me a fool many times. Now you shall see what I have gotten for
two hundred dirty florins. _Potztausend!_ never did _you_ do such a
stroke of work.”
Then the other voice grumbled and swore, and the steps of the two men
approached more closely, and the heart of the child went pit-a-pat,
pit-a-pat, as a mouse’s does when it is on the top of a cheese and
hears a housemaid’s broom sweeping near. They began to strip the stove
of its wrappings: that he could tell by the noise they made with the
hay and the straw. Soon they had stripped it wholly: that, too, he knew
by the oaths and exclamations of wonder and surprise and rapture which
broke from the man who had not seen it before.
“A right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be-rivalled thing!
Grander than the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! Sublime! magnificent!
matchless!”
So the epithets ran on in thick guttural voices, diffusing a smell of
lager-beer so strong as they spoke that it reached August crouching in
his stronghold. If they should open the door of the stove! That was his
frantic fear. If they should open it, it would be all over with him.
They would drag him out; most likely they would kill him, he thought,
as his mother’s young brother had been killed in the Wald.
The perspiration rolled off his forehead in his agony; but he had
control enough over himself to keep quiet, and after standing by
the Nürnberg master’s work for nigh an hour, praising, marvelling,
expatiating in the lengthy German tongue, the men moved to a little
distance and began talking of sums of money and divided profits, of
which discourse he could make out no meaning. All he could make out was
that the name of the king—the king—the king came over very often in
their arguments. He fancied at times they quarrelled, for they swore
lustily and their voices rose hoarse and high; but after a while they
seemed to pacify each other and agree to something, and were in great
glee, and so in these merry spirits came and slapped the luminous sides
of stately Hirschvogel, and shouted to it,—
“Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare good luck! To think you were
smoking in a silly fool of a salt-baker’s kitchen all these years!”
Then inside the stove August jumped up, with flaming cheeks and
clinching hands, and was almost on the point of shouting out to them
that they were the thieves and should say no evil of his father, when
he remembered, just in time, that to breathe a word or make a sound was
to bring ruin on himself and sever him forever from Hirschvogel. So he
kept quite still, and the men barred the shutters of the little lattice
and went out by the door, double-locking it after them. He had made out
from their talk that they were going to show Hirschvogel to some great
person: therefore he kept quite still and dared not move.
Muffled sounds came to him through the shutters from the streets
below,—the rolling of wheels, the clanging of church-bells, and bursts
of that military music which is so seldom silent in the streets of
Munich. An hour perhaps passed by; sounds of steps on the stairs kept
him in perpetual apprehension. In the intensity of his anxiety, he
forgot that he was hungry and many miles away from cheerful, Old World
little Hall, lying by the clear gray river-water, with the ramparts of
the mountains all around.
Presently the door opened again sharply. He could hear the two dealers’
voices murmuring unctuous words, in which “honor,” “gratitude,” and
many fine long noble titles played the chief parts. The voice of
another person, more clear and refined than theirs, answered them
curtly, and then, close by the Nürnberg stove and the boy’s ear,
ejaculated a single “_Wunderschön!_” August almost lost his terror for
himself in his thrill of pride at his beloved Hirschvogel being thus
admired in the great city. He thought the master-potter must be glad
too.
“_Wunderschön!_” ejaculated the stranger a second time, and then
examined the stove in all its parts, read all its mottoes, gazed long
on all its devices.
“It must have been made for the Emperor Maximilian,” he said at last;
and the poor little boy, meanwhile, within, was “hugged up into
nothing,” as you children say, dreading that every moment he would open
the stove. And open it truly he did, and examined the brass-work of the
door; but inside it was so dark that crouching August passed unnoticed,
screwed up into a ball like a hedgehog as he was. The gentleman shut
to the door at length, without having seen anything strange inside it;
and then he talked long and low with the tradesmen, and, as his accent
was different from that which August was used to, the child could
distinguish little that he said, except the name of the king and the
word “gulden” again and again. After a while he went away, one of the
dealers accompanying him, one of them lingering behind to bar up the
shutters. Then this one also withdrew again, double-locking the door.
The poor little hedgehog uncurled itself and dared to breathe aloud.
What time was it?
Late in the day, he thought, for to accompany the stranger they had
lighted a lamp; he had heard the scratch of the match, and through the
brass fret-work had seen the lines of light.
He would have to pass the night here, that was certain. He and
Hirschvogel were locked in, but at least they were together. If only
he could have had something to eat! He thought with a pang of how at
this hour at home they ate the sweet soup, sometimes with apples in
it from Aunt Maïla’s farm orchard, and sang together, and listened to
Dorothea’s reading of little tales, and basked in the glow and delight
that had beamed on them from the great Nürnberg fire-king.
“Oh, poor, poor little ’Gilda! What is she doing without the dear
Hirschvogel?” he thought. Poor little ’Gilda! she had only now the
black iron stove of the ugly little kitchen. Oh, how cruel of father!
August could not bear to hear the dealers blame or laugh at his father,
but he did feel that it had been so, so cruel to sell Hirschvogel. The
mere memory of all those long winter evenings, when they had all closed
round it, and roasted chestnuts or crab-apples in it, and listened
to the howling of the wind and the deep sound of the church-bells,
and tried very much to make each other believe that the wolves still
came down from the mountains into the streets of Hall, and were that
very minute growling at the house door,—all this memory coming on
him with the sound of the city bells, and the knowledge that night
drew near upon him so completely, being added to his hunger and his
fear, so overcame him that he burst out crying for the fiftieth time
since he had been inside the stove, and felt that he would starve to
death, and wondered dreamily if Hirschvogel would care. Yes, he was
sure Hirschvogel would care. Had he not decked it all summer long with
alpine roses and edelweiss and heaths and made it sweet with thyme and
honeysuckle and great garden-lilies? Had he ever forgotten when Santa
Claus came to make it its crown of holly and ivy and wreathe it all
around?
“Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of me!” he prayed to the old
fire-king, and forgot, poor little man, that he had come on this
wild-goose chase northward to save and take care of Hirschvogel!
After a time he dropped asleep, as children can do when they weep, and
little robust hill-born boys most surely do, be they where they may. It
was not very cold in this lumber-room; it was tightly shut up, and very
full of things, and at the back of it were the hot pipes of an adjacent
house, where a great deal of fuel was burnt. Moreover, August’s clothes
were warm ones, and his blood was young. So he was not cold, though
Munich is terribly cold in the nights of December; and he slept on and
on,—which was a comfort to him, for he forgot his woes, and his perils,
and his hunger, for a time.
Midnight was once more chiming from all the brazen tongues of the
city when he awoke, and, all being still around him, ventured to put
his head out of the brass door of the stove to see why such a strange
bright light was round him.
It was a very strange and brilliant light indeed; and yet, what is
perhaps still stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him, nor did what
he saw alarm him either, and yet I think it would have done you or me.
For what he saw was nothing less than all the _bric-à-brac_ in motion.
A big jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen, was solemnly dancing a minuet
with a plump Faenza jar; a tall Dutch clock was going through a gavotte
with a spindle-legged ancient chair; a very droll porcelain figure of
Littenhausen was bowing to a very stiff soldier in _terre cuite_ of
Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was playing itself, and a queer little
shrill plaintive music that thought itself merry came from a painted
spinnet covered with faded roses; some gilt Spanish leather had got up
on the wall and laughed; a Dresden mirror was tripping about, crowned
with flowers, and a Japanese bonze was riding along on a griffin; a
slim Venetian rapier had come to blows with a stout Ferrara sabre,
all about a little pale-faced chit of a damsel in white Nymphenburg
china; and a portly Franconian pitcher in _grès gris_ was calling
aloud, “Oh, these Italians! always at feud!” But nobody listened to
him at all. A great number of little Dresden cups and saucers were all
skipping and waltzing; the teapots, with their broad round faces, were
spinning their own lids like teetotums; the high-backed gilded chairs
were having a game of cards together; and a little Saxe poodle, with
a blue ribbon at its throat, was running from one to another, whilst
a yellow cat of Cornelis Lachtleven’s rode about on a Delft horse in
blue pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the brilliant light shed on the scene
came from three silver candelabra, though they had no candles set up
in them; and, what is the greatest miracle of all, August looked on at
these mad freaks and felt no sensation of wonder! He only, as he heard
the violin and the spinnet playing, felt an irresistible desire to
dance too.
No doubt his face said what he wished; for a lovely little lady, all
in pink and gold and white, with powdered hair, and high-heeled shoes,
and all made of the very finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped up
to him, and smiled, and gave him her hand, and led him out to a minuet.
And he danced it perfectly,—poor little August in his thick, clumsy
shoes, and his thick, clumsy sheepskin jacket, and his rough home-spun
linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He must have danced it perfectly,
this dance of kings and queens in days when crowns were duly honored,
for the lovely lady always smiled benignly and never scolded him at
all, and danced so divinely herself to the stately measures the spinnet
was playing that August could not take his eyes off her till, their
minuet ended, she sat down on her own white-and-gold bracket.
“I am the Princess of Saxe-Royale,” she said to him, with a benignant
smile; “and you have got through that minuet very fairly.”
Then he ventured to say to her,—
“Madame my princess, could you tell me kindly why some of the figures
and furniture dance and speak, and some lie up in a corner like lumber?
It does make me curious. Is it rude to ask?”