I
The landscape shows many shades of green; deep forests, mostly
coniferous, extend from the valley of the Rednitz to that of the Tauber.
Yet the villages lie in the midst of great circles of cultivated land,
for the tillage of man is immemorial here. Around the many weirs the
grass grows higher, so high often that you can see only the beaks of the
droves of geese, and were it not for their cackle you might take these
beaks to be strangely mobile flowers.
The little town of Eschenbach lies quite flat on the plain. In it a
fragment of the Middle Ages has survived, but no strangers know it,
since hours of travel divide it from any railway. Ansbach is the nearest
point in the great system of modern traffic; to get there you must use a
stage-coach. And that is as true to-day as it was in the days when
Gottfried Nothafft, the weaver, lived there.
The town walls are overgrown with moss and ivy; the old drawbridges
still cross the moats and take you through the round, ruined gates into
the streets. The houses have bay-windows and far-projecting overhangs,
and their interlacing beams look like the criss-cross of muscles on an
anatomical chart.
Concerning the poet who was once born here and who sang the song of
Parsifal, all living memory has faded. Perhaps the fountains whisper of
him by night; perhaps sometimes when the moon is up, his shadow hovers
about the church or the town-hall. The men and women know nothing of him
any more.
The little house of the weaver, withdrawn by a short distance from the
street, stood not far from the inn at the sign of the Ox. Three worn
steps took you to its door, and six windows looked out upon the quiet
square. It is strange to reflect that the spirit of modern
industrialism hewed its destructive path even to this forgotten nook of
the world.
In 1849, at the time of Gottfried Nothafft's marriage--his wife, Marian,
was one of the two Hoellriegel sisters of Nuremberg--he had still been
able to earn a tolerable living. So the couple desired a child, but
desired it for years in vain. Often, at the end of the day's work, when
Gottfried sat on the bench in front of his house and smoked his pipe, he
would say: "How good it would be if we had a son." Marian would fall
silent and lower her eyes.
As time passed, he stopped saying that, because he would not put the
woman to shame. But his expression betrayed his desire all the more
clearly.