Without Lifting A Finger

It was not until after midnight that my turn came again to take over the death watch now that we had strangely enough instituted it. This time I stayed in the room until morning; the hours passed by me quickly, like a moment of time, and I had no idea what I really was thinking and feeling. It was so quiet that through the stillness I seemed to be able to hear the murmur of Eternity; the pale and lifeless girl continued to lie motionless, but in the dim light, the coloured flowers of the rug appeared to be growing. Now the morning star rose and was reflected in the lake; I extinguished the lamp in its honour, so that it alone might be Anna’s funeral candle, then I sat in the dark, in my corner, and watched the room grow gradually light. With the dawn, which passed into the purest golden-red of morning, there seemed to be a stirring of life around the quiet figure until it lay there, clear in the bright daylight. I had got up and placed myself in front of the bed, and when her features ...

But the chief point was that he declared himself to be a scorner of women, and he waged continual war with them for trying, with their sensual allurement and their frivolity, to rob men of their virtue and their seriousness. As a Cynic, he was always pestering the women and girls with his unconventionalities; as an Epicurean, with erotic witticisms; and as a Stoic, he said rude things to them, but nevertheless, where three of them were gathered together, there he was always to be found.

Suddenly there was a sound of humming and piping overhead. Fiddle, bass viol, clarinet were being tuned, and a French horn was indulging in melancholy sounds. While the active portion of the assembly broke up and went upstairs to the spacious loft, the schoolmaster said: ‘Is there really to be dancing? I thought this custom had at last been done away with. Certainly this village is the only one for far and wide where it is ever practised! I honour age, but all that is old is not necessarily honourable and fitting! Meantime, you may as well look on, children, so that later on you can tell about it, for it is to be hoped that dancing at funeral rites will eventually be abolished!’

‘That’s not so,’ asserted Catherine. ‘You owe Henry a kiss, you witch!’ ‘Oh, for shame, Catherine! You shouldn’t tell such stories,’ said the embarrassed child, and the inexorable maid replied: ‘That’s as it may be, the hill fell down before you had turned round three times, and you owe Master Henry a kiss!’ ‘Then I will go on owing it,’ she cried laughing, and I, glad to have escaped the solemn ceremony, and yet turning the matter to my own advantage, said: ‘Good. Then promise me that you will always go on owing me a kiss!’ ‘Yes, I’ll do that!’ cried she, and gaily and mischievously, she gave the hand I proffered a resounding slap. She was now lively and boisterous, and as nimble as quicksilver, seemingly quite a different person from what she was by day. Midnight had transfigured her, her little face was quite rosy and her eyes shone with pleasure. She danced round the helpless Catherine, teased her and was pursued by her, there began a chase round the room in which I became involved...

Now we stood upon the brow of the hill which shimmered in the splendour of the setting sun; the glorified figure, light as down, of the young girl floated before my eyes, and near her I thought I saw the smiling countenance of the Almighty, the friend and protector of the landscape painter, as in my conversation today with the schoolmaster, I had claimed Him to be. When she was saying goodbye, Anna blushed deeper still in the light of the setting sun as she held out her hand to me, last of all. We barely touched fingertips, and addressed each other politely as ‘Sie’; but the boys laughed at us, and the girls gravely requested that we should say ‘Du’ to one another, for nothing else was tolerated among the young people in the country.

Another fruitful source of strange tales was Roman Catholicism, with its legacy of deserted cloisters and the still surviving monasteries which were to be found here and there in the region that was still Catholic. To these tales the members of the orders inhabiting these monasteries contributed much, especially the Capuchin monks who to this day work hand in hand with the executioners in the exorcizing of devils, and in other such arts, among the superstitious peasants of the reformed faith. In a few remote districts at that time, there prevailed a spiritless, decayed type of Protestantism; the inhabitants did not hold themselves above the Catholics, looking down on them as deluded folk, but they faithfully shared their belief in all the fables, though they held them to be in substance evil and deserving of repudiation, and they did not laugh at Catholicism, rather they feared it as something sinister and heathenish. It was impossible for them to recognize a free thinker as a man who ...

A man always sets a double value on what Fate has deprived him of, and so my mother’s long tales used to fill me more and more with longing for the father who died before I knew him. My clearest recollection of him goes back, curiously, a full year before his death, to a single lovely moment when he carried me on his arm, one Sunday evening in the fields, pulled a potato plant out of the earth and showed me the little swelling tubers, already trying to awaken in me the knowledge and love of the Creator. I still see the green coat and the bright metal buttons close to my cheek, and his shining eyes which attracted my wondering gaze away from the green plant that he was holding aloft.