The morning was cold and grey. The black shining boughs, swept bare by
the storm, dripped in the fog. Little Johannes ran as fast as he could
over the wet, down-beaten grass, looking before him in the distance
where the wood was thinnest, as though he had some goal beyond. His eyes
were red with crying, and dazed with fear and grief. He had been
wandering about all night, seeking some light,--the feeling of being
safe and at home had vanished with Windekind. The spirit of loneliness
lurked in every dark corner; he dared not look round.
At last he came out of the wood; he looked over a meadowland, and fine
close rain was pouring steadily. A horse was standing out in the rain
close to a bare willow tree. It stood motionless, with bowed head, and
the water trickled slowly off its shining flanks and plaited mane.
Johannes ran on, along the skirt of the wood. He looked with dim, timid
eyes at the lonely beast, and the grey drizzle, and he softly groaned.
'Now it is all over,' thought he. 'Now the sun will never come again.
Now everything will always look the same to me as it does here.'
But he dared not stand still in his despair; something most dreadful
would befall him, he thought. Then he espied the high wall of a garden,
and a little house, under a lime-tree with faded yellow leaves. He went
into the enclosure and ran along broad paths where the brown and gold
lime-leaves thickly covered the ground. Purple asters and other gay
autumn flowers grew by the grass plots in wild abundance. Then he came
to a pond. By the side of it was a large house, with windows and doors
all opening down to the ground. Climbing roses and other creepers grew
against the walls. But it was all shut up and deserted. Half-stripped
chestnut trees stood about the house, and on the earth, among the fallen
leaves Johannes saw the shining brown chestnuts.
The cold, dead feeling about his heart disappeared. He thought of his
own home--there two chestnut-trees grew, and at this season he always
went out to pick up chestnuts. He suddenly longed to be there, as though
an inviting voice had called him. He sat down on a bench close to the
big house and cried himself to rest.
A peculiar smell made him look up. A man was standing by him, with a
white apron on and a pipe in his mouth. Round his waist he had a wisp of
bast with which he tied up the flowers. Johannes knew that smell so
well! It reminded him of his own garden, and the gardener who brought
him pretty caterpillars and showed him starling's eggs.
He was not frightened,--though it was a man who stood before him. He
told the man that he had got lost and did not know his way, and
thankfully followed him to the little cottage under the lime-tree.
Indoors, the gardener's wife sat knitting black stockings. A large
kettle of water was hung to boil over the turf-fire in the hearth-place.
On the mat by the fire lay a cat with her forepaws crossed, just as
Simon had been lying when Johannes left home.
Johannes was made to sit down by the fire to dry his feet. 'Tick-tick,
tick-tick,' said the great hanging clock. Johannes looked at the steam
which came singing out of the kettle, and at the little flames which
skipped and jumped fantastically about the peat blocks.
'Here I am among men,' thought he.
It was not alarming. He felt easy and safe. They were kind and friendly,
and asked him what he would like to do.
'I would rather stay here,' he replied.
Here he was at peace, and if he went home there would be scolding and
tears. He would have to listen in silence, and he would be told that he
had been very naughty. He would be obliged to look back on the past, and
think everything over once more.
He longed, to be sure, for his little room, for his father, for
Presto--but he could better endure the quiet longing for them here than
the painful, miserable meeting. And he felt as though here he could
still think of Windekind, while at home he could not. Windekind was now
certainly quite gone. Gone far away to the sunny land where palm-trees
bend over the blue sea. He would do penance here and await his friend's
return.
So he begged the two good folks to let him live with them. He would be
obedient and work for them. He would help to take care of the garden and
the flowers, at any rate through this winter; for he hoped in his heart
that Windekind would return with the Spring.
The gardener and his wife supposed that Johannes had run away from home
because he had been hardly treated. They pitied him, and promised to let
him stay. So he remained and helped to work in the garden and attend to
the flowers. They gave him a little room to sleep in with a bedstead
painted blue. Out of it, in the morning, he could see the wet yellow
lime-leaves flutter past the window, and at night the black boughs
waving to and fro, and the stars playing hide-and-seek between them. And
he gave names to the stars, and the brightest of them he called
Windekind.
He told his history only to the flowers, most of which he had known
before at home; to the large, solemn asters, the many-hued zinnias, and
the white chrysanthemums which bloom on so late into the blustering
autumn. When all the rest of the flowers were dead the chrysanthemums
still stood upright--even when one morning the first snow had fallen and
Johannes came to see how they were getting on, they held up their
cheerful faces and said: 'Yes, we are still here. You would never have
thought it!' And they looked very brave; but two days later they were
all dead.
But palms and tree-ferns were still thriving in the hot-house, and the
strange blossoms of orchids hung in the damp heat. Johannes peeped with
amazement into their gorgeous cups, and thought of Windekind. How cold
and colourless everything seemed then when he came out again--the sloppy
snow with black footmarks, and the sighing, dripping branches of the
trees!
But when the snow-flakes had been noiselessly falling hour after hour so
that the boughs bent under the growing burthen, Johannes ran off
gleefully into the purple twilight of the snow-laden wood. That was
silence--but not death. It was almost more lovely than summer verdure,
as the dazzling whiteness of the tangled twigs made lace-work against
the light-blue sky, or as one of the over-weighted boughs shook off its
load of snow, which fell in a cloud of glittering powder.
Once in the course of such a walk, when he had gone so far that all
round him there was nothing to be seen but snow and snow-wrapped woods,
half white and half black, and every sound of life seemed stifled under
the glistening downy shroud, it happened that he thought he saw a tiny
white creature running swiftly in front of him. He followed it--it
resembled no animal that he knew; but when he tried to catch it, it
promptly vanished into a hollow trunk. Johannes stared into the hole
where it had disappeared and thought to himself: 'I wonder if it was
Wistik?'
But he did not think much about him. He fancied it was wrong, and he
would not spoil his fit of repentance. And his life with these two kind
people left him little to ask for. In the evenings he had indeed to read
aloud out of a thick book in which a great deal was said about God; but
he was familiar with the book, and read unheeding.
That night, however, after his walk in the snow, he lay awake in his
bed, looking at the cold gleam of the moonlight on the floor. All at
once he saw two tiny hands which came out from below the bedstead and
firmly clutched the edge. Then the top of a little white fur cap came
into sight between the two hands, and at last he saw a pair of grave
eyes under uplifted eyebrows.
'Good-evening, Johannes!' said Wistik. 'I am come to remind you of your
promise. You cannot yet have found the Book, for it is not yet Spring
time. But do you ever think it over? What is that thick book which you
are made to read? But that cannot be the right book. Do not imagine
that.'
'I do not imagine that, Wistik,' said Johannes.
He turned over to go to sleep again; but he could not get the gold key
out of his head. Before now, when reading the big Book, he had thought
of that, and he saw plainly that it could not be the right Book.