he in the best humor in the world now approached the group. But
Kuengolt at the question broke into passionate tears, and exclaimed
before everybody: "He was a gift to me by the judges when he was really
nothing but a poor lifeless corpse, and I have reawakened him to life.
And therefore he has no right to sit in judgment on me, but rather I
alone am his judge. And he must do everything I want, and when I love
to kiss him it is his business to simply keep still and let me do it."
They all laughed at this odd statement, but the mother took Dietegen's
hand and led him to the child, saying: "Come, make up with her and let
her kiss you once more. Later on you, also, shall be her master, and
shall do as you see fit in such matters."
Blushing deeply because of the many onlookers, Dietegen offered his
mouth to the girl, and she seized him by his curls, quite in a frenzy,
and kissed him hard, more in wrath than in love, and then, having once
more thrown him a look that betrayed anger, she quickly turned on her
heels and dashed away in such haste that her golden ringlets fluttered
in the night air and in passing brushed his face.
But now the reluctant fire of love had also been kindled in his own
young soul, and soon after he left the throng and went in search of
rash Kuengolt, striding rapidly and gazing all about for her. At last
he discovered her on the other side of the house where she sat dreamily
at the well, and was playing with the amber beads of her necklace.
Advancing quickly he seized both her hands, compressed them in his
vigorous right, and then laid his left on her shoulder so that she
shuddered, and said: "Listen, child, I shall not permit you to trifle
with me. From to-day on you are just as much my own property as I am
yours, and no other man shall have you living. Keep that in mind when
some day you will be grown up."
"Oh, you big old man," she murmured slowly and smiled at him, but
pallor had overspread her features. "You indeed are mine, but not I
yours. However, you need not mind that, because I don't think I'll ever
let you go!"
So saying she rose and went, without first looking at her old
playfellow once more, over to the other side of the house.
But this was not all. The forester's wife caught a cold in the suddenly
chilled air of this very May night, and an insidious disease grew out
of it which carried her off within a few months. On her deathbed she
grieved much about her husband and her child, and expressed great
anxiety on their behalf. She also denied till her last breath the real
cause of her illness and death, deeming it scarcely a fit thing for a
housewife and a mother to thus go out of life merely because of a
surfeit of riotous pleasure.
But while she thus lay lifeless in the house, all that had loved her
mourned for her; indeed the whole town did so, for she had not had a
single enemy in the world. Her widowed husband wept at night in his
bed, and at daytime he spoke never a word, but only from time to time
stepped up to the coffin in which she lay so still and peaceful,
looking and looking at his sweet partner, and then, shaking his head,
slowly walking off again.
He had a heavy wreath of young pine twigs fashioned for her and placed
it on the bier. Kuengolt heaped a perfect mountain of wildflowers on
top of that, and thus the graceful form of the dead was borne down from
the hillside to the church below, followed by the bereaved family and a
crowd of relatives, friends and members of the household.
After the burial the chief forester took all the mourners to the
tavern, where he had caused a bounteous meal in honor of the dead to be
prepared, according to ancient custom. The roast venison for it, a
capital roebuck, and two fine grouse, he had shot himself, grieving all
the while at the loss he had sustained. And when the gorgeously
feathered birds now appeared on the long board he minded him again of
the dense grove of mighty oak and maple, high up on the mountain side,
in which she had sat awaiting his return from the chase, and in which
he, his heart full of love of her who now rested in the cool ground,
had many a time been stalking the deer. The image of her stood before
his thoughts like life itself. But yet he was not to be left long to
brooding, for strict laws of custom called for his active services as
host on this occasion. When the claret from France and the golden
malmsey had been uncorked and poured into capacious goblets, and the
heavy table been loaded with sweets and cakes that scented the precious
spices from the Indies, the guests grew lively and clamorous, and he
had to propose and answer many a toast, despite his sincere mourning,
and the noise soon drowned the still voice within him. Life and death
were twin brothers in those days of our forbears.
The forester was seated at table between Kuengolt and Dietegen, and
these two because of his tall and broad-backed person were unable to
catch a look of one another save by bending over or behind him, and
this neither of them wished to do for decency's sake, for they were the
only ones who among this crowd of buzzing guests remained sad and
serious. Across the board from him sat a cousin, a lady of about thirty
named Violande.
This lady indeed could not well be overlooked, for she wore a singular
costume, one which did not seem fit for a person satisfied with her
lot, a person living in happy circumstances, but rather one who is
restless and hollow of heart. Yet she was handsome, and knew well how
to impress people with her charms, but ever and anon something selfish
and mendacious would flash out of her handsome eyes that destroyed all
these efforts at enforced amiability.
When but fourteen she had already been in love with the forester, her
cousin, merely because amongst those young men that came before her
vision he was the best-looking and the tallest and strongest. He,
however, had never noticed the preference shown for him. Indeed he had
not given a thought to this overyoung cousin of his, since his serious
choice lay altogether among the more adult persons of the other sex,
and wavered among several of these. Full of envy and jealousy, this
unmature cousin, though, was already so skilled in feminine intrigue as
to be able to destroy the chances of two or three young women that the
forester had looked upon with favor, using for that purpose that
poisonous weapon, gossip and backbiting. Always when he was on the
point of proposing to a beauty that had won his regard, this sly
half-woman skillfully understood how to spread rumors calculated to
entangle the two, fictitious words uttered by one or the other seeming
to show mutual dislike, or something equally efficacious in bringing
about a rupture. If her designs miscarried with him, why then she spun
her threads so as to make the other believe that the swain was false or
fickle, full of guile or not dependable. Thus it came to pass
repeatedly that without his ever discovering the author the lady of his
suit would suddenly swerve and leave him out in the cold, while
another, of whom he had never thought in that connection, would as
quickly show him her favor--all owing to the arts of this Macchiavell
in petticoats. And then impatiently and disgustedly he would turn his
back on both the willing and the unwilling and plunge once more for a
spell into his easy bachelordom. In this way it was that, one after the
other, all his wooings came to nought, until he at last happened to
meet the mild and amiable lady that subsequently became his spouse.
This one, though, kept hold of him, since she was just as guileless as
he himself, and all the artifices and stratagems of the little witch
were in vain. Yea, she never even noticed the other's cleverest
schemes, simply because she kept her eyes all the time fixed upon him
she loved. And indeed he too had been grateful to her for her
singlemindedness, and held her all the years of their happy union as a
jewel of rare price.
Violande, however, when she saw the man whose love she had aspired to
married, after all, to another had not given up the frequent use of her
talent for mischiefmaking, for fear she might get out of practice. The
older she grew the more artistic became her endeavors in that line, but
without success for herself, since she remained a spinster, and since
even the men themselves whom by her wiles she had alienated from other
women turned away from her as from a dangerous person, feeling in their
hearts only contempt and hatred for her. Then it was she turned her
face heavenwards, giving it out that she was on the point of entering a
convent and becoming a nun. But she changed her mind in the last hour,
and instead of a convent entered a house devoted to some holy order,
but such a one as would permit her, in case the chance of becoming a
wife should unexpectedly present itself to her, to leave it. Thus she
disappeared for years from view, since she was in the habit of going
from one town to another at short intervals, and nowhere feeling rested
or contented. Suddenly, when the forester's wife was lying sick to
death, she reappeared again, in Seldwyla, and in worldly dress, and so
it had come about that here she was as one of the guests at this
funeral celebration, seated opposite the widower.
She put restraint on her restlessness, and now and then looked modest
and almost childlike, and when the women rose and walked about in
couples, the while the men remained seated at table drinking and
talking, she went up to Kuengolt, kissed her on both cheeks, and made
friends with her. The half-grown girl felt honored by these advances of
a semi-clerical woman, one who had apparently great knowledge of the
world and had been about a good deal, and so these two were at once
involved in a long and intimate conversation, as though they had known
each other all their lives. When the company broke up Kuengolt asked
her father to invite Violande to his house, in order to manage the big
household, a task for which she herself felt not equal and entirely too
young and inexperienced. The forester whose mood at that moment was a
curious compound of mourning and vinous elation, and whose thoughts
still belonged altogether to his departed wife, raised no objection to
this request, although he did not care much for his cousin and thought
her a queer sort of person.
Thus in a day or two Violande made her formal entrance into the
widower's house, and had sense enough to take the place of the dead
wife at the hearth with judicious modesty and not without a spice of
sentimentality, the reflection no doubt occurring to her that here she
was at last, after long wanderings, where the desires of her first
youth seemed at last on the point of being realized. Without undue
elation she opened the closets and presses of her predecessor,
examining in detail their contents: linen and homespun cloth piled up
in orderly rows, and provisions of every kind arranged for instant or
occasional use, such as preserved fruit, vegetables, mushrooms, stored
away in carefully tied-up pots; many flitches of bacon and salted beef
and pork, smoked hams and potted venison, and hundreds of bunches of
flax hung up to dry under the ceilings of the roof. Her heart beat at a
more lively gait when inspecting all these domestic riches speaking so
eloquently of the forester's easy circumstances, and almost tenderly
she handled these hundreds of vessels and receptacles, dreaming of a
near housewifely future. And in this peaceable frame of mind she
remained for a number of weeks. But then her old restlessness seized
her again. It had to find a vent. And so she began to turn everything
topsy-turvy, starting with the pots and kettles, each of which she
assigned to a new place, mingling the big and little, shoving about the
bolts of linen and cloth, entangling the flax carded and uncarded, and
when she finally had done all this she had also managed to seriously
interfere with human affairs in the house, upsetting them as much as
she dared.
Since it was her design to become, after all, the forester's wife, so
as to acquire a more dignified and assured position in life, it became
clear to her that what above all would be necessary was to part
permanently Kuengolt and Dietegen, as to whose inclination for each
other she had soon satisfied herself. For she argued quite correctly
that Dietegen, once he married Kuengolt, would doubtless become the
forester's successor, and thus not only remain permanently in the
house, but that in that case the forester himself, in view of his
strong affection for the memory of his departed wife, would never wed
again. But, she reasoned, if both the children in some way could be
made to shun the house, it would be much more likely that the forester
would marry again, feeling lonesome all by himself.
And as now, as she discovered, Kuengolt every day grew handsomer and
more womanly, she took care to make the girl constantly conscious both
of her own beauty and of the gifts of her mind, as well as to further
develop in her an inborn leaning towards coquetry. To do the latter she
skillfully manipulated Kuengolt's natural vanity, insinuating to her
that every young man with whom she came in contact was smitten with her
charms and a ready suitor for her hand and love, and this with such
success that Kuengolt actually learned to look upon all the youths of
her acquaintance solely from the point of view whether they readily
acknowledged her preeminence in beauty and intellectual gifts or not,
while by her shrewd maneuvers Violande on the other hand made every one
of all these young men think that the girl's affections were centered
wholly upon himself.
Another trick used by Violande with the same end in view was to
cultivate social intercourse with a number of other young girls of
marriageable age, who were frequently invited to the house for parties
to which young men were encouraged to come, and under her guidance and
leadership there was much courting and gallivanting going on at these
meetings. Thus it came about that Kuengolt, when less than sixteen, had
already assembled around her a circle of unquiet young people, each
more or less an expert in playing the love game as a species of
delightful sport.
In the pursuance of her one aim Violande, too, arranged all sorts of
festivities, great and small, at the house, and there was mongering in
scandal, stories more or less compromising this or that couple or
individual, many quarrels and much noise and singing and music or
dancing, and it was usually the most objectionable of the customary
guests on these occasions that were also the boldest and most foolish,
and at the same time the most difficult to get rid of.
All these things were not to Dietegen's taste. At first he was a mere
onlooker, indifferent and still in the grasp of his sincere and deep
mourning for the death of his fostermother, making a melancholy face
which to a growing youth is not the most becoming. But when all these
pleasure-mad young people were rather amused by a seriousness which
seemed unsuitable to his age, and as Kuengolt herself took the same
attitude towards him, the youth tried to revenge himself by awkward
attempts at dignified silence. But these tactics were even less
successful, and ended one day with Dietegen's clearly perceiving that
he among them all was out of tune. In fact, on one occasion he observed
Kuengolt seated in the midst of a group of scornful youths all of whom
were deriding him and she, instead of disapproving, evidently siding
with them against him.
When Dietegen had experienced this, he turned silently away, and from
that day on avoided the whole company. Anyway, he had now attained the
age when vigorous youths begin to think of making strong men of
themselves. Upon the holding upon which stood the forester's house
there was, from time immemorial laid the duty of maintaining three or
four fully equipped fighting men, and this obligation the forester
himself had always carried out most scrupulously. With great pleasure
he found that Dietegen, shot up straight and nimble, would soon fill
the same fine armor in which he had once hoped to see his own son.
Thus Dietegen with other young gamekeepers and helpers on lengthy
winter evenings went to fencing school, where he learned to make proper
use of the shorter weapons, according to the methods of his home, and
during the spring and summer seasons he spent many a Sunday or holiday
upon spacious fields or forest clearings where the youths of the
district learned to march in closed formations for hours at a stretch,
and to attack, leaping broad trenches by the aid of their long spears,
and in every other way to render their bodies supple, active and
strong, or else, perhaps, to practice the new art of the musketeer
whose weapon is loaded with powder and shot.
Since by all these changes mentioned above life in the forester's house
altered greatly, and since particularly the feminine doings there
disturbed him sadly, although he paid scant attention to the latter, it
happened that he little by little acquired the habit of frequenting the
taverns where his townsfellows met much oftener than had been the case
during his married life. And while absenting himself from the childish
folly practiced at his own house, he succumbed to the maturer folly of
men, and it would happen now and then that he would carry his head like
a heavy burden, but always upright, to his forest home as late as
midnight or more.
Things went on in this way until, on a sunny St. John's Day, a network
of events began to close in.
The forester himself went to town to the headquarters of his guild,
where on that festive day all were summoned to attend the settlement of
important affairs concerning the craft, to conclude with a great annual
feast, and he intended to remain and join there in the carousal until
the advance of night.
Dietegen on his part went to the sharpshooter's meeting place,
intending to spend the whole long midsummer's day in perfecting himself
as a marksman. The other assistants of the forester and his servants of
the household also went their own way, the one to visit his relatives
some distance across the country, another to the dance with his
sweetheart, and the third to the holiday fair to buy himself cloth for
a new coat and a pair of shoes.
So the women were sitting all by themselves in the house, not at all
delighted with the rude manner in which the men had left them to their
own devices, but yet eyeing every passer-by and peering out at the
sunny landscape in the hope that some guests would show up and with
their help a festivity of their own might be arranged.
As a suitable preparation for that or any contingency they began to
bake spice cakes and prepare all sorts of sweets, and they brewed a
huge bowlful of heady May wine flavored with honey and herbs, so as to
be ready for either chance comers or to offer a night cup to the men
returning home. Next they decked themselves in holiday finery, and
ornamented head and bosom with flowers, while other young maidens,
bidden to join them in a feminine festival time, one after the other
also came from town, and even the very last and least of the serving
maids belonging to the household was freshly attired to look her best.
Under broadspreading linden trees, right in front of the house, the
table was set for a dainty meal, the westering sun sending his last
golden rays like a benediction abroad over town and valley.
There the women now were seated about the table, relishing all the good
things prepared for them, and soon the chorus of them were intoning
folk-songs with melodious voices, songs telling in many stanzas of the
delights and despair of love, songs like that of the two royal
children, or "There dallied a knight with his maiden dear," and similar
ones. All the tunes sounded the longing of love-lorn hearts, the faith
kept or broken, the eternal drama of passion. Far out into the evening
the sweet voices were carrying, alluring, inviting. The birds nesting
up in the dense foliage of the linden trees, after being silenced for a
spell, now joined in, rivaling their human competitors, and from over
in the forest other feathered songsters assisted. But suddenly another
band of choristers could be heard above the din. That new volume of
sound came floating down the mountain side, a mingling of male voices
with the more strident notes of fiddle and tabor pipes. A troop of
youths had come from Ruechenstein, and this instant issued from the
edge of the woods. Thus they came, striding along the path that led
past the forester's home down to the valley, a number of musicians at
their head. There was the son of the burgomaster of Ruechenstein,
rather a madcap and therefore a great exception to the overwhelming
majority of his townsfolk, who clearly dominated the noisy throng.
Having left the university abroad, he had brought with him a few
fellow-students after his own heart, among them being a couple of
divinity students and a young and jolly monk, as well as Hans
Schafuerli, the council scribe, or secretary, of Ruechenstein, who was
a scrawny, bent figure of a man, with a mighty hunchback and a long
rapier. He was the last of the train, all walking singly because of the
narrow path.
But when they set eyes on the row of singing ladies, their own music
ceased, and they stood all there, listening attentively to the charming
tune. However, the ladies likewise became mute, being surprised and
wishful to see what now was going to happen. Violande alone retained
her presence of mind, and stepped to the burgomaster's son, who in turn
saluted her with elaborate courtesy, and telling her that he with his
friends purposed to pay a flying and amusing visit to the merry
neighboring town, in order to spend St. John's Day in a manner
agreeable to them all. But, he continued, having had the good fortune
to meet with these ladies in this unhoped-for way, they counted on the
pleasure of a dance with them, if they might make so bold as to offer
themselves as partners, in all honor and decency.
Within the space of a few minutes these formalities had been complied
with, and the dance was in full swing on the floor of the big
banqueting hall of the forester's house. Kuengolt led with the
burgomaster's son, Violande with the jolly monk, and the other ladies
with the young scholars. But the most expert and ardent dancer proved
to be the hunchback scribe. And despite his crooked back this valiant
devotee of the terpsichorean art understood marvelously well how to
advance and retreat with his long shanks in the maze, these legs of his
seeming to begin right below his chin.
But Kuengolt's humor was no joyous one, and when Violande whispered to
her to aim at the conquest of the burgomaster's son, in order to become
herself one day the mistress of Ruechenstein, she remained frigid and
indifferent. But suddenly she perceived the herculean efforts of the
artful hunchback, and this extraordinary sight restored her spirits, so
that she laughed with all her heart. And she instantly demanded to
dance with the crooked monster. Indeed it looked like a scene in a
curious fairy tale, to see her graceful figure, clad in green and the
head set off by a wreath of ruby roses, flitting to and fro in the arms
of the ghastly scribe, his hump covered with vivid scarlet.
But swiftly her mind altered. From the scribe she flew into the arms of
the monk, and from those into the keeping of the young students, so
that within less than half an hour she had taken a turn or two with
each one of the young strangers. All of these now centered their gaze
upon the beautiful damsel, while the other young women present
attempted in vain to recapture their partners.
Violande seeing the state of the case, quickly summoned all the couples
to the table beneath the lindens, to rest there for a while and to be
hospitably entertained. She placed the whole company most judiciously,
each young man next a damsel, and Kuengolt beside the burgomaster's
son.