August lived in a little town called Hall. Hall is a favorite name
for several towns in Austria and in Germany; but this one especial
little Hall, in the Upper Innthal, is one of the most charming
Old-World places that I know, and August, for his part, did not
know any other. It has the green meadows and the great mountains
all about it, and the gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it.
It has paved streets and enchanting little shops that have all
latticed panes and iron gratings to them; it has a very grand old
Gothic church, that has the noblest blendings of light and shadow,
and marble tombs of dead knights, and a look of infinite strength
and repose as a church should have. Then there is the Muntze
Tower, black and white, rising out of greenery, and looking down
on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid river; and there is an
old schloss which has been made into a guardhouse, with
battlements and frescos and heraldic devices in gold and colors,
and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size in his niche
and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but close at hand,
is a cloister with beautiful marble columns and tombs, and a
colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very
rich chapel; indeed, so full is the little town of the undisturbed
past, that to walk in it is like opening a missal of the Middle
Ages, all emblazoned and illuminated with saints and warriors, and
it is so clean, and so still, and so noble, by reason of its
monuments and its historic color, that I marvel much no one has
ever cared to sing its praises. The old pious, heroic life of an
age at once more restful and more brave than ours still leaves its
spirit there, and then there is the girdle of the mountains all
around, and that alone means strength, peace, majesty.
In this little town a few years ago August Strehla lived with his
people in the stone-paved, irregular square where the grand church
stands.
He was a small boy of nine years at that time,--a chubby-faced
little man with rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of curls
the brown of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was poor,
and there were many mouths at home to feed. In this country the
winters are long and very cold; the whole land lies wrapped in
snow for many months; and this night that he was trotting home,
with a jug of beer in his numb red hands, was terribly cold and
dreary. The good burghers of Hall had shut their double shutters,
and the few lamps there were flickered dully behind their quaint,
old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains indeed were beautiful,
all snow-white under the stars that are so big in frost. Hardly
any one was astir; a few good souls wending home from vespers, a
tired post-boy, who blew a shrill blast from his tasseled horn as
he pulled up his sledge before a hostelry, and little August
hugging his jug of beer to his ragged sheepskin coat, were all who
were abroad, for the snow fell heavily and the good folks of Hall
go early to their beds. He could not run, or he would have spilled
the beer; he was half frozen and a little frightened, but he kept
up his courage by saying over and over again to himself, "I shall
soon be at home with dear Hirschvogel."
He went on through the streets, past the stone man-at-arms of the
guardhouse, and so into the place where the great church was, and
where near it stood his father Karl Strehla's house, with a
sculptured Bethlehem over the doorway, and the Pilgrimage of the
Three Kings painted on its wall. He had been sent on a long errand
outside the gates in the afternoon, over the frozen fields and the
broad white snow, and had been belated, and had thought he had
heard the wolves behind him at every step, and had reached the
town in a great state of terror, thankful with all his little
panting heart to see the oil lamp burning under the first house
shrine. But he had not forgotten to call for the beer, and he
carried it carefully now, though his hands were so numb that he
was afraid they would let the jug down every moment.
The snow outlined with white every gable and cornice of the
beautiful old wooden houses; the moonlight shone on the gilded
signs, the lambs, the grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint
devices that hung before the doors; covered lamps burned before
the Nativities and Crucifixions painted on the walls or let into
the woodwork; here and there, where a shutter had not been closed,
a ruddy fire-light lit up a homely interior, with a noisy band of
children clustering round the house-mother and a big brown loaf,
or some gossips spinning and listening to the cobbler's or the
barber's story of a neighbor, while the oil wicks glimmered, and
the hearth logs blazed, and the chestnuts sputtered in their iron
roasting pot. Little August saw all these things, as he saw
everything with his two big bright eyes, that had such curious
lights and shadows in them; but he went needfully on his way for
the sake of the beer which a single slip of the foot would make
him spill. At his knock and call the solid oak door, four
centuries old if one, flew open, and the boy darted in with his
beer and shouted with all the force of mirthful lungs: "Oh, dear
Hirschvogel, but for the thought of you I should have died!"
It was a large barren room into which he rushed with so much
pleasure, and the bricks were bare and uneven. It had a walnut-
wood press, handsome and very old, a broad deal table, and several
wooden stools, for all its furniture; but at the top of the
chamber, sending out warmth and color together as the lamp shed
its rays upon it, was a tower of porcelain, burnished with all the
hues of a king's peacock and a queen's jewels, and surmounted with
armed figures, and shields, and flowers of heraldry, and a great
golden crown upon the highest summit of all.
It was a stove of 1532, and on it were the letters H. R. H., for
it was in every portion the handwork of the great potter of
Nurnberg, Augustin Hirschvogel, who put his mark thus, as all the
world knows.
The stove, no doubt, had stood in palaces and been made for
princes, had warmed the crimson stockings of cardinals and the
gold-broidered shoes of archduchesses, had glowed in presence-
chambers and lent its carbon to help kindle sharp brains in
anxious councils of state; no one knew what it had seen or done or
been fashioned for; but it was a right royal thing. Yet perhaps it
had never been more useful than it was now in this poor, desolate
room, sending down heat and comfort into the troop of children
tumbled together on a wolfskin at its feet, who received frozen
August among them with loud shouts of joy.
"Oh, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so cold!" said August,
kissing its gilded lion's claws. "Is father not in, Dorothea?"
"No, dear. He is late."
Dorothea was a girl of seventeen, dark-haired and serious, and
with a sweet sad face, for she had had many cares laid on her
shoulders, even whilst still a mere baby. She was the eldest of
the Strehla family; and there were ten of them in all. Next to her
there came Jan and Karl and Otho, big lads, gaining a little for
their own living; and then came August, who went up in the summer
to the high alps with the farmers' cattle, but in winter could do
nothing to fill his own little platter and pot; and then all the
little ones, who could only open their mouths to be fed like young
birds,--Albrecht and Hilda, and Waldo and Christof, and last of
all little three-year-old Ermengilda, with eyes like forget-me-
nots, whose birth had cost them the life of their mother.
They were of that mixed race, half Austrian, half Italian, so
common in the Tyrol; some of the children were white and golden as
lilies, others were brown and brilliant as fresh fallen chestnuts.
The father was a good man, but weak and weary with so many to find
for and so little to do it with. He worked at the salt furnaces,
and by that gained a few florins; people said he would have worked
better and kept his family more easily if he had not loved his
pipe and a draught of ale too well; but this had only been said of
him after his wife's death, when trouble and perplexity had begun
to dull a brain never too vigorous, and to enfeeble further a
character already too yielding. As it was, the wolf often bayed at
the door of the Strehla household, without a wolf from the
mountains coming down.
Dorothea was one of those maidens who almost work miracles, so far
can their industry and care and intelligence make a home sweet and
wholesome and a single loaf seem to swell into twenty. The
children were always clean and happy, and the table was seldom
without its big pot of soup once a day. Still, very poor they
were, and Dorothea's heart ached with shame, for she knew that
their father's debts were many for flour and meat and clothing. Of
fuel to feed the big stove they had always enough without cost,
for their mother's father was alive, and sold wood and fir cones
and coke, and never grudged them to his grandchildren, though he
grumbled at Strehla's improvidence and hapless, dreamy ways.
"Father says we are never to wait for him; we will have supper,
now you have come home, dear," said Dorothea, who, however she
might fret her soul in secret as she knitted their hose and mended
their shirts, never let her anxieties cast a gloom on the
children; only to August she did speak a little sometimes, because
he was so thoughtful and so tender of her always, and knew as well
as she did that there were troubles about money,--though these
troubles were vague to them both, and the debtors were patient and
kindly, being neighbors all in the old twisting streets between
the guardhouse and the river.
Supper was a huge bowl of soup, with big slices of brown bread
swimming in it and some onions bobbing up and down; the bowl was
soon emptied by ten wooden spoons, and then the three eldest boys
slipped off to bed, being tired with their rough bodily labor in
the snow all day, and Dorothea drew her spinning-wheel by the
stove and set it whirring, and the little ones got August down
upon the old worn wolfskin and clamored to him for a picture or a
story. For August was the artist of the family.
He had a piece of planed deal that his father had given him, and
some sticks of charcoal, and he would draw a hundred things he had
seen in the day, sweeping each out with his elbow when the
children had seen enough of it, and sketching another in its
stead,--faces and dogs' heads, and men in sledges, and old women
in their furs, and pine trees, and cocks and hens, and all sorts
of animals, and now and then--very reverently--a Madonna and
Child. It was all very rough, for there was no one to teach him
anything. But it was all lifelike, and kept the whole troop of
children shrieking with laughter, or watching breathless, with
wide open, wondering, awed eyes.
They were all so happy; what did they care for the snow outside?
Their little bodies were warm, and their hearts merry; even
Dorothea, troubled about the bread for the morrow, laughed as she
spun; and August, with all his soul in his work, and little rosy
Ermengilda's cheek on his shoulder, glowing after his frozen
afternoon, cried out loud, smiling, as he looked up at the stove
that was shedding its heat down on them all:--
"Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost as great and good as the
sun! No; you are greater and better, I think, because he goes away
nobody knows where all these long, dark, cold hours, and does not
care how people die for want of him; but you--you are always
ready; just a little bit of wood to feed you, and you will make a
summer for us all the winter through!"
The grand old stove seemed to smile through all its iridescent
surface at the praises of the child. No doubt the stove, though it
had known three centuries and more, had known but very little
gratitude.
It was one of those magnificent stoves in enameled faience which
so excited the jealousy of the other potters of Nurnberg that in a
body they demanded of the magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel
should be forbidden to make any more of them,--the magistracy,
happily, proving of a broader mind, and having no sympathy with
the wish of the artisans to cripple their greater fellow.
It was of great height and breadth, with all the majolica luster
which Hirschvogel learned to give to his enamels when he was
making love to the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards married.
There was the statue of a king at each corner, modeled with as
much force and splendor as his friend Albrecht Durer could have
given unto them on copperplate or canvas. The body of the stove
itself was divided into panels, which had the Ages of Man painted
on them in polychrome; the borders of the panels had roses and
holly and laurel and other foliage, and German mottoes in black
letter of odd Old World moralizing, such as the old Teutons, and
the Dutch after them, love to have on their chimney-places and
their drinking cups, their dishes and flagons. The whole was
burnished with gilding in many parts, and was radiant everywhere
with that brilliant coloring of which the Hirschvogel family,
painters on glass and great in chemistry, as they were, were all
masters.
The stove was a very grand thing, as I say; possibly Hirschvogel
had made it for some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when he
was an imperial guest at Innspruck, and fashioned so many things
for the Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine Welser, the
burgher's daughter, who gained an archduke's heart by her beauty
and the right to wear his honors by her wit. Nothing was known of
the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who
had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins where he
was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken it home,
and only thought it worth finding because it was such a good one
to burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever since then the
stove had stood in the big, desolate, empty room, warming three
generations of the Strehla family, and having seen nothing
prettier, perhaps, in all its many years than the children tumbled
now in a cluster like gathered flowers at its feet. For the
Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born with beauty;
white or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon, and when
they went into the church to Mass, with their curling locks and
their clasped hands, they stood under the grim statues like
cherubs flown down off some fresco.
"Tell us a story, August," they cried in chorus, when they had
seen charcoal pictures till they were tired; and August did as he
did every night pretty nearly--looked up at the stove and told
them what he imagined of the many adventures and joys and sorrows
of the human being who figured on the panels from his cradle to
his grave.
To the children the stove was a household god. In summer they laid
a mat of fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up with green
boughs and the numberless beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol
country. In winter all their joys centered in it, and scampering
home from school over the ice and snow they were happy, knowing
that they would soon be cracking nuts or roasting chestnuts in the
broad ardent glow of its noble tower, which rose eight feet high
above them with all its spires and pinnacles and crowns.
Once a traveling peddler had told them that the letters on it
meant Augustin Hirschvogel, and that Hirschvogel had been a great
German potter and painter, like his father before him, in the art-
sanctified city of Nurnberg, and had made many such stoves, that
were all miracles of beauty and of workmanship, putting all his
heart and his soul and his faith into his labors, as the men of
those earlier ages did, and thinking but little of gold or praise.
An old trader, too, who sold curiosities not far from the church,
had told August a little more about the brave family of
Hirschvogel, whose houses can be seen in Nuremberg to this day; of
old Veit, the first of them, who painted the Gothic windows of St.
Sebald with the marriage of the margravine; of his sons and of his
grand-sons, potters, painters, engravers all, and chief of them
great Augustin, the Luca della Robbia of the North. And August's
imagination, always quick, had made a living personage out of
these few records, and saw Hirschvogel as though he were in the
flesh walking up and down the Maximilian-Strass in his visit to
Innspruck, and maturing beautiful things in his brain as he stood
on the bridge and gazed on the emerald green flood of the Inn.
So the stove had got to be called Hirschvogel in the family, as if
it were a living creature, and little August was very proud
because he had been named after that famous old dead German who
had had the genius to make so glorious a thing. All the children
loved the stove, but with August the love of it was a passion;
and in his secret heart he used to say to himself, "When I am a
man, I will make just such things too, and then I will set
Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a house that I will build
myself in Innspruck just outside the gates, where the chestnuts
are, by the river; that is what I will do when I am a man."
For August, a salt baker's son and a little cow-keeper when he was
anything, was a dreamer of dreams, and when he was upon the high
alps with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky around him,
was quite certain that he would live for greater things than
driving the herds up when the springtide came among the blue sea
of gentians, or toiling down in the town with wood and with timber
as his father and grandfather did every day of their lives. He was
a strong and healthy little fellow, fed on the free mountain air,
and he was very happy, and loved his family devotedly, and was as
active as a squirrel and as playful as a hare; but he kept his
thoughts to himself, and some of them went a very long way for a
little boy who was only one among many, and to whom nobody had
ever paid any attention except to teach him his letters and tell
him to fear God. August in winter was only a little, hungry
schoolboy, trotting to be catechised by the priest, or to bring
the loaves from the bakehouse, or to carry his father's boots to
the cobbler; and in summer he was only one of hundreds of cowboys,
who drove the poor, half-blind, blinking, stumbling cattle,
ringing their throat bells, out into the sweet intoxication of the
sudden sunlight, and lived up with them in the heights among the
Alpine roses, with only the clouds and the snow summits near. But
he was always thinking, thinking, thinking, for all that; and
under his little sheepskin winter coat and his rough hempen summer
shirt his heart had as much courage in it as Hofer's ever had,--
great Hofer, who is a household word in all the Innthal, and whom
August always reverently remembered when he went to the city of
Innspruck and ran out by the foaming water mill and under the
wooded height of Berg Isel.
August lay now in the warmth of the stove and told the children
stories, his own little brown face growing red with excitement as
his imagination glowed to fever heat. That human being on the
panels, who was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, as a boy
playing among flowers, as a lover sighing under a casement, as a
soldier in the midst of strife, as a father with children round
him, as a weary, old, blind man on crutches, and, lastly, as a
ransomed soul raised up by angels, had always had the most intense
interest for August, and he had made, not one history for him, but
a thousand; he seldom told them the same tale twice. He had never
seen a storybook in his life; his primer and his Mass book were
all the volumes he had. But nature had given him Fancy, and she is
a good fairy that makes up for the want of very many things!
only, alas! her wings are so very soon broken, poor thing! and
then she is of no use at all.
"It is time for you all to go to bed, children," said Dorothea,
looking up from her spinning. "Father is very late to-night; you
must not sit up for him."
"Oh, five minutes more, dear Dorothea!" they pleaded; and little
rosy and golden Ermengilda climbed up into her lap. "Hirschvogel
is so warm, the beds are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell us
another tale, August?"
"No," cried August, whose face had lost its light, now that his
story had come to an end, and who sat serious, with his hands
clasped on his knees, gazing on to the luminous arabesques of the
stove.
"It is only a week to Christmas," he said suddenly.
"Grandmother's big cakes!" chuckled little Christof, who was five
years old, and thought Christmas meant a big cake and nothing
else.
"What will Santa Claus find for 'Gilda if she be good?" murmured
Dorothea over the child's sunny head; for, however hard poverty
might pinch, it could never pinch so tightly that Dorothea would
not find some wooden toy and some rosy apples to put in her little
sister's socks.
"Father Max has promised me a big goose, because I saved the
calf's life in June," said August; it was the twentieth time he
had told them so that month, he was so proud of it.
"And Aunt Maila will be sure to send us wine and honey and a
barrel of flour; she always does," said Albrecht. Their Aunt Maila
had a chalet and a little farm over on the green slopes towards
Dorp Ampas.
"I shall go up into the woods and get Hirschvogel's crown," said
August; they always crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas with pine
boughs and ivy and mountain berries. The heat soon withered the
crown; but it was part of the religion of the day to them, as much
so as it was to cross themselves in church and raise their voices
in the "O Salutaris Hostia."
And they fell chatting of all they would do on the Christ-night,
and one little voice piped loud against another's, and they were
as happy as though their stockings would be full of golden purses
and jeweled toys, and the big goose in the soup pot seemed to them
such a meal as kings would envy.
In the midst of their chatter and laughter a blast of frozen air
and a spray of driven snow struck like ice through the room, and
reached them even in the warmth of the old wolfskins and the great
stove. It was the door which had opened and let in the cold; it
was their father who had come home.
The younger children ran joyous to meet him. Dorothea pushed the
one wooden armchair of the room to the stove, and August flew to
set the jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a long clay
pipe; for their father was good to them all, and seldom raised his
voice in anger, and they had been trained by the mother they had
loved to dutifulness and obedience and a watchful affection.
To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily to the young ones'
welcome, and came to the wooden chair with a tired step and sat
down heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer.
"Are you not well, dear father?" his daughter asked him.
"I am well enough," he answered dully, and sat there with his head
bent, letting the lighted pipe grow cold.
He was a fair, tall man, gray before his time, and bowed with
labor.
"Take the children to bed," he said suddenly, at last, and
Dorothea obeyed. August stayed behind, curled before the stove; at
nine years old, and when one earns money in the summer from the
farmers, one is not altogether a child any more, at least in one's
own estimation.
August did not heed his father's silence; he was used to it. Karl
Strehla was a man of few words, and, being of weakly health, was
usually too tired at the end of the day to do more than drink his
beer and sleep. August lay on the wolfskin, dreamy and comfortable,
looking up through his drooping eyelids at the golden coronets on
the crest of the great stove, and wondering for the millionth time
whom it had been made for, and what grand places and scenes it had
known.
Dorothea came down from putting the little ones in their beds; the
cuckoo clock in the corner struck eight; she looked to her father
and the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spinning, saying
nothing. She thought he had been drinking in some tavern; it had
been often so with him of late.
There was a long silence; the cuckoo called the quarter twice;
August dropped to sleep, his curls falling over his face;
Dorothea's wheel hummed like a cat.
Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the table, sending the
pipe on the ground.
"I have sold Hirschvogel," he said; and his voice was husky and
ashamed in his throat. The spinning wheel stopped. August sprang
erect out of his sleep.
"Sold Hirschvogel!" If their father had dashed the holy crucifix
on the floor at their feet and spat on it, they could not have
shuddered under the horror of a greater blasphemy.
"I have sold Hirschvogel!" said Karl Strehla in the same husky,
dogged voice. "I have sold it to a traveling trader in such things
for two hundred florins. What would you?--I owe double that. He
saw it this morning when you were all out. He will pack it and
take it to Munich to-morrow."