THE HUNTING-SONG
Scarcely had Joubert left me than a faint sound, stealing from below,
made me sit up in bed.
The sound of violins tuning up.
Ever since I could perceive the difference between musical sounds, music
has fascinated me, thrilled me, filled me with hauntings. Music can make
me drunk, music can make me everything but bad; but it is not in the
province of music to do that.
A band of wandering musicians had come to the schloss, and were
preparing to entertain the guests in the great hall.
Our rooms were quite close to the gallery surrounding the hall. I could
hear the complaint of the violin-strings protesting their readiness, and
the deep, gasping grunts of the 'cello saying as plainly as a 'cello
could speak, "Begin."
Then the music struck up.
A gay, dashing tune, vivid as a spring landscape with the daffodils
dancing in the wind; the high tremulous notes of a piccolo hovering over
the music of the strings as a skylark hovers in the air.
It was more than mortal child could stand, to hear all that and not to
be there.
I hopped out of bed, and made for the door. I had opened it, when the
thought came to me that Joubert might come back to the room, as he
sometimes did, to see if I were asleep; so I ran to the bed and propped
the pillow under the bedclothes. I often slept with the clothes over my
head, and the room was so dark that the protuberance of the pillow gave
quite a striking representation of a small boy curled up in slumber.
Then I came down the passage to the gallery overlooking the hall. Down
below the place was brilliantly lit.
The musicians--four men in long coats, with long hair, and two of them
bearded--were opposite to me.
Seated about were the guests: my father, the Countess Feliciani, Count
Feliciani, Major von der Goltz, General Hahn, and another gentleman
whose name I did not know. Baron von Lichtenberg was not there.
A servant was handing coffee, and the guests were chatting in two little
groups, and seemed quite oblivious of the music that was ravishing my
simple heart.
The spring song ceased, the daffodils danced no longer in the wind, the
skylark dropped from the sky, and the musicians fell chatting one to the
other in an undertone whilst they tuned up again. The one most directly
facing me--a man quite young, with oh, such a good, kind, sweet
face!--glanced up as he was raising his violin and caught sight of me in
my little nightshirt away up in the gallery peeping down at him and his
brethren. He evidently knew at once that I was one of the children of
the schloss, a truant from bed, and that my portion would be smacks if I
were discovered; for, though a momentary smile lit his face, he made no
sign or attempt to point me out to his fellows.
They broke into a hunting tune. I could tell, from the lilt of the
music, it was the chase that was speaking in the inarticulate language
of the strings. The piccolo had discarded his instrument for a horn; I
could hear the yapping of the dogs, and the pack bursting into full cry;
the horn, and the echoes of the horn from the rocks and woods, the
halalli. Gay, ghostly, beautiful, the music swept me along with it, the
very guests below forgot their chatter; I could see them keeping time
with their feet. Enchantment had seized upon the old schloss, the
green-coated jägers crowded, as if by permission, to the passage
entrance, and their harsh voices took up the song which now broke from
the lips of the magicians in the long coats to the accompaniment of the
violins and the hunting-horn, a song the words of which were not
translated for me till long, long afterwards:
Hound and horn give voice and tongue,
Fill the woods with echoes gay;
Let your music sweet be flung
To the Brocken far away.
Jägers with the horns ye wind,
Hounds whose tongues the chase shall bay;
Let your voice the echoes find
Of the Brocken old and grey.
Hark! amidst the bracken green
Bells the buck whose vigil keeps
Danger from the hind unseen,
Danger from the fawn that sleeps.
Hears he us, yet heeds us not,
Dreams he that we are the wind;
Phantoms we of hounds forgot,
Ghosts of huntmen long since blind.
Dreams we are the forest's breath
Waking to the touch of day;
Recks not 'tis the horn of Death
Dying in the distance grey.
Hound and horn give voice and tongue----
And through it all the horn, now clear and ringing, now caught and dying
in the echoes of the forest, now lost in the echoes of the Brocken, the
wild notes flying before the phantom of the flying stag; ever the horn
threading the gushing music of the violins, the voices of the musicians,
and the chorus of the jägers.
More music came after this, but nothing so beautiful; and as the
musicians put their instruments away, and prepared to go, I nodded to
the happy-faced one who had spied me. He smiled, and I trotted back to
bed. I had been there listening in the gallery for a full hour, and I
was cold as ice, but no one had seen me, or only the violin-player who
had the face of a good angel.
I shut the door cautiously, and crept back to bed. But there was
something on the bed, something on the protuberance caused by my pillow.
It was the handle of a knife. The blade of the knife was plunged into
the mound of the bedclothes just where my head would have been.
It was Joubert's knife--his "couteau de chasse," a thing he was
immensely proud of, a thing as keen as a razor.
That was just like one of Joubert's tricks. He had come in, found my
device, and left this, as much as to say, "You'll see what you'll get in
the morning."
I plucked the knife out and put it on the floor. Then I crawled into
bed.
As I lay thinking of the music, my restless fingers kept digging into
holes in the sheet. Half a dozen holes, or rather slits, there were. One
might have thought that the hunting-knife of Joubert had been furiously
plunged again and again into the heap of bedclothes before being left
sticking there. But I did not think of this: the knife was Joubert's.
Besides, my head was alive with those dreams that stand at the door of
sleep to welcome the innocent in.
The forms of the weather-beaten musicians, sent like good angels from
God to charm me and hold me with their music; the happy, innocent, and
friendly face of the one who had smiled at me, and the hunting-song:
Hark! amidst the bracken green
Bells the buck whose vigil keeps
Danger from the hind unseen,
Danger from the fawn that sleeps.
Then I, like a fawn, fell asleep, ignorant of Fate as the fawn, and of
the extreme wickedness of the heart of man.