The Forest Farm: Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

by Peter Rosegger

  VIII

  Children of the World in the Forest

  Far more intelligent must he be, the peasant of the isolated mountainfarm, far more versatile and capable than the villager, and infinitelymore so than the townsman--_must_, or he could not exist!

  The townsman has an easy time of it: if he can write, or keep accounts;if, for instance, he has the knack of making leather, or keeps agrocer's shop; or even if he speculates and applies himself to cuttingoff his coupons, he has all that he requires; and all that a townsmanrequires everyone who is a townsman knows.

  The things which, in the towns, are produced by the divided toil ofthousands of heads, hands, and wheels, in other words, the necessariesof life, the peasant in the far-lying mountains must make for himself,in his narrow circle, with his small, unaided means. He is a providerof natural produce, manufacturer, middleman and consumer, all in one.The bread which he eats comes from the corn which he flung into theearth last year with his own hand; the bacon which he enjoys on its bedof cabbage is cut from the pig fattened with the turnips which he hasplanted in his own ground. The shoe which he wears is made of thecow-hide which he himself has stripped from the animal's body andhimself has tanned; the wool that forms his coat he has shorn from hisown sheep, spun, woven and milled. The shirt on his back he saw lastsummer shimmering in the sunny fields in the blue flax-blossom; and themilking-pail into which his cow sends her milk streaming was, but ayear ago, hiding in a fir-trunk in his woods. And I could in likemanner string out a long list of matters in which the farmer must behis own breeder, gardener, miller, baker, smith, saddler, carpenter,weaver, wheelwright and so on. And a household in which one and all ofthese trades are put in practice need not even be a very large one: itis the ordinary farmhouse in the mountain valleys to which the world ofexchange and barter has not yet fully made its way.

  Isn't it true, then, that such a peasant-farmer needs to have a head onhis shoulders? This head, again, is of home production, and a goodthing too; for the Jew pedlar, who is always prepared to bring anyrequisite from town for cash, could hardly be expected to supply that.

  But nowadays this, like most things, is changing; and, since gold andsilver have taken to rolling to and fro, in such a momentous fashion,between the houses of town and country, the peasant no longer has thesame joy in his farm, where he must always be labouring for others.Besides, he need not work out in the wilderness nowadays; he can domuch better, they tell him, on rented land or in the factories; hesells or lets his property and goes after money. And there at last youhave the stupid peasant!

  I only speak of these things because my father's house, concerningwhich I have something to tell, was one of those farms in which weourselves produced nearly everything that we wanted. And yet, even atthat time, money played us a trick. My father was particularly cleverat tanning hides, at weaving, at grinding corn and at pressinglinseed-oil. In the last case, I assisted him to brave purpose, as aboy of ten, by dipping a slice of white bread into the oil that ranfrom the gutter of the press and then transferring the bright yellowslice to my mouth.

  One day, while we were thus engaged, Clements, the timber-merchant,walked into the pressing-room. He had once been forest-ranger at Alpel;but he had made such a huge amount of money in the timber-trade that helost all interest in our mountains and went down into the broadM?rzthal, where he displayed a restless activity in acquiring more andyet more money. He had grown quite lean at this unedifying occupation;but otherwise he continued in fairly good fettle.

  Well, when Clements saw the oil bubbling in the wooden pail, he asked,was the cider sweet?

  My father invited him to taste it; but, when Clements lifted the pailbodily and took a draught from it, he fell back as though someone hadstruck him in the face and lost no time in spitting out what he hadswallowed.

  "It can't hurt you," said my father, to console him. "It is purelinseed oil."

  "Forest-farmer," said Clements, gradually recovering himself, "here Iam, bringing all sorts of good things to your house; and this is theway you treat me!"

  "You're the first I ever met that did not like flax-wine," replied myfather. "It's just like a wine, so golden and clear. And you couldn'tfind anything better for one's precious health. I am in the doctor'sdebt to the price of a couple of oxen; and even then I should be underthe sod to-day if Our Father in Heaven had not made linseed-oil togrow."

  "And, as you, forest-farmer, are still, thank God, above the sod,"drawled Clements, "you'll be needing money, I'm thinking. Look, it'syour guardian angel's brought me here: I'm bringing you some."

  "Oh, my gracious!" replied my father, leaning his whole weight upon thelever, so that the oil-cake in the press had to yield its last drains,which, however, were received into a separate little pot, for thesedregs are not quite so clear and mild as the first stream. "Oh, mygracious!" said he. "I could do with the money well enough; but youcan just take it away again: I know what you want for it. You want thesix old fir-trees that stand outside my house. Things are a sight worsewith me than they were a year ago, when you came and asked to buy thetrees, but I have no other answer for you than I gave you then: the sixtrees outside the house are a memory of the old days; and, if I had tosell field and meadow and the cattle in the stable, those trees shallstay where they are; and, if they have to lay me in the grave without acoffin, those old trees shall stay where they are until God's lightningcracks them or the storm fells them."

  The last words were spoken with violence; and, with that, the last dropof oil left the press.

  But Clements said:

  "Forest-farmer, you shall not sell a field, nor a head of cattle fromyour stable; you shall have a coffin of good white ash-wood: God grantthat you may not need it for a long time to come! You shall have gooddays yet in this world. You shall not sell the old fir-trees, but youshall sell the larch in your wood that are fit for felling. Have youyour pocket-book on you? If so, just open it."

  I got a fright, when I saw the figure on the bank-note which thetempter had now drawn from his leather case and which, holding itbetween his finger-tips, he sent fluttering to and fro, like a littleflag, before my father's blinking eyes. Misfortune had cleared the wayin our house for the timber-merchant: we were no longer able to get allwe wanted for our ten heads and stomachs out of that eighty yoke ofmountain land; the doctor was sending us letters which I could not readsoft and low enough to make them bearable to my father:

  "The forest-farmer is hereby summoned within fourteen days to ...failing which...."

  "As my patience is at last exhausted, I have placed the matter in thehands of the imperial and royal courts, and if, within eight days ...execution and distraint...."

  Those were more or less the first sentences which I was given to readin our dear High-German language. And there was a certain book, too,with its "date of debt" and "date of payment," which gave me an idea ofthe force that lies concealed in the language of Schiller and Goethe.

  It was a real live "hundred" which the timber-merchant held by thecorner between his two fingers. Did not a chill shudder, at thatmoment, go over the tops of the larches that were dotted here and therein the pine-woods outside, I wonder? Nor any anxious foreboding troublethe hearts of the little birds that had built their nests there?

  My father did not put out his hand for the money, but neither didhe hide it in his pocket; he did not busy it with the lever ofthe oil-press; he just kept it, half-open, as nature had bent it,on his knee, while he sat exhausted with his labour. Clements droppedthe rare bit of paper into it; then the lank fingers closedsoftly--instinctively--and held it tight.

  The larch were sold.

  "I have only one condition to make," said the timber-merchant, when hesaw that the poor small farmer lay duly under the spell of the money."I shall have the trees felled late in the autumn, when the snow comes.You will be astonished, forest-farmer, when I tell you that the emperorwill ride over your larch-trees! Yes, yes, we shall use them forbuilding the railway. My condition is that my wood-cutter
s shall beallowed to cook their meals and sleep in your house as long as they areworking in the woods."

  "Why not?" said father. "That'll be all right, if it's good enough forthem under my roof."

  What mischief those good-natured words brought down upon our peacefulforest home!

  Clements went away happy and contented, after presenting me with abright new groschen for myself. I remember being surprised at this: itwas obviously for us to be contented, seeing that we had the money!Father took his up to the loft and hid it in the clothes-press: it wasvery soon to come out again. Then the days passed, as usual, and thelarch stood in the woods and rocked their long branches in the wind, asusual, and got ready their twigs for next spring, as usual.

  "They don't know how soon they are to die!" my father said to me once,as we were coming from the meadow through the woods.

  But I comforted myself with the hope that Clements the timber-merchant,who lived out in the merry M?rzthal and never came back to ourneighbourhood at all, would forget all about the larch. My mother, towhom I confided this view, said sharply:

  "Oh, child, that fellow forgets about his soul, but he'll never forgetthe larches!"

  And, one day, when the earth had frozen hard and the moss cracked andbroke underfoot, we heard the rasping of the saw in the woods. When welooked across the brown tops of the firs, we saw the yellow spire of atall larch-tree soar high above them. The rasping of the saw died away,the blows of the axe rang out; then slowly the spire bent over, dipped;and thunder echoed through the forest.

  That evening the wood-cutters came to our house. There were only two ofthem; and, at first sight, we were all pleased with them. One of themwas already well on in years and had a long red beard, a bald pate anda sharp, crooked nose. The man's little eyes looked smaller stillbecause the red eyelashes and eyebrows were hardly visible against thecolour of his skin; but the eyes were full of fun and devilment. Theother was quite twenty years or so younger, had a little brown beard,but otherwise was rather pale and thin in the face. Anyone, however,seeing his powerful neck and his broad chest would take him to be muchmore of a wood-cutter than the red one, who only looked such a warriorbecause of his beard, but, in other respects, was much slighter inbuild than the pale one. Both wore stiff leather aprons and smelt ofrosin and shavings.

  Our cooking was soon done; so mother left the hearth to them. And, uponmy word, they knew how to make use of it! What they cooked was not theregular wood-cutter's game, such as stray foxes, sparrows and such-likedumplings as are prepared with flour and fat, but real meat and baconand grill; and it all simmered and frizzled in the pans until ourstomachs, which had to be satisfied with bread-soup and potatoes, weredriven frantic. But the red one tore off a whole piece of bacon for usto taste. They had a wooden jar with them, wound round with straw, outof which one and the other took long draughts. The red one invited myfather to try their wine. He did; and his experience was worse thanthat of Clements with the linseed-oil: the jar contained that hellishstuff, brandy.

  The wood-cutters now feasted in our house day after day. We childrenlost all liking for our daily food, at the sight of luxury andabundance. We became discontented; and our household, consisting of twohalf-grown servant-girls and a half-blind woman, heaved many a deepsigh. But the red one knew how to amuse us. He talked of towns andother countries; for the two men had been about a good deal and hadworked in large factories. Then he regaled us with funny stories andtricks; in the early days also with riddles and droll plays upon words,at which the maids tittered a good deal, while father and mother satsilent and I did not rightly know what to make of it all. Then camesongs, in which, to the great delight of our household, countrycourtship in all its forms found full expression. When this began, itwas high time for us children to go to bed; but our straw bundleshappened to be in the very room in which these merry things were goingon. True, we closed our eyes, and I really had the firm intention to goto sleep; but my ears remained open, and the tighter I closed my eyes,the more I saw in my mind's eye.

  The pale wood-cutter was quiet and proper in his behaviour and did notremain so long in the parlour, but always went betimes to hissleeping-place, which was outside in the hay-loft. But even the girlscould not follow this decent example: they let the red one go on andwere wholly absorbed in his chattering. My father once observed to thered fellow that the younger was more serious than the old one,whereupon the red one asked if the farmer disliked jolly songs: in thatcase, he would be pious and pray. And he began to recite comicsentences in the tone of the Lord's Prayer; got on to the hearth and,mimicking the preaching of a Capuchin, mocked at the holy apostles,martyrs, and virgins, until my mother went to my father with upliftedhands.

  "I do beg and beseech you, Lenzel--throw that godless being out of thedoor, or I shall have to do it myself!"

  "Do it yourself, little woman!" cried the red man and jumped off thehearthstone and tried to catch hold of mother and fondle her.

  This was something unheard of. That this should suddenly happen in ourhouse, where, year in, year out, no unseemly word was ever spoken! Myfather was downright paralysed with astonishment; but my mother seizedthe frivolous wood-cutter by the arm and cried:

  "Now you get out of this, foul-mouth, and never enter my house again!"

  The wood-cutter refused to budge an inch.

  "If forest-farmer folk are so pious," he continued, still in hispreaching tone, "as to forget what they have promised our employer, Ishan't leave this roof for all that. Women and wet rags shan't drive meout."

  "Perhaps men and dry logs will!" cried my father. And with a swiftnessand determination which I had never before beheld in this mild-manneredman, he snatched a log of wood from the stack. The red one made afurious rush at his arms; and they wrestled. Mother tried to protectfather; my brothers and sisters in their straw set up a cry of murder;I flew to the door, with nothing on me but my shirt, and called to themaids, who were already sleeping peacefully in their beds, to come andhelp. The blind one was the first to come hobbling safely across theyard, while one of the two who had the use of their eyes stumbled overthe pigs' trough. And the youngest girl, terrified by my cries and theuproar in the house, came clattering down the step-ladder that led fromthe hay-loft to the yard. Without considering, at the time, thefar-reaching effects of this last incident, I rushed back into thehouse, where the two men were engaged in a violent struggle, pantingand groaning and going from one wall of the room to the other. Thewood-cutter's long beard was flung in wild strands around my father'shead; but father seemed to be gaining the upper hand; then came theyounger wood-cutter, clad, it is true, in nothing but his shirt and hisblue drawers, but with the full weight of his body. The women did whatis their office on such occasions: they wrung their hands and wailed.Only, my mother, when she saw that all was lost, snatched a blazingfire-brand from the hearth.

  "I'll drive you out, you ruffians, that I do know!" she cried and flew,with the brand, to the wooden inner wall.

  "The fury means to set fire to us! And to the house with us!" yelledthe wood-cutters and rushed out at the door, through the curling smoke.

  We were rid of the nasty fellows, but the flames were leaping merrilyalong the wall. In hot haste, we succeeded--I no longer remember bywhat means--in smothering the fire.

  That evening--the most terrible in my life--passed into a still andfearsome night. We had barred and bolted the door of the house; and,when we put out the rushlight, father took a last look at the window,to see if they were still outside.

  It remained quiet; and not till the next morning did the youngwood-cutter come to fetch his tools and his mate's. Then they builtthemselves a hut in the woods out of planks and bark; and here theylived half through the winter, until they had finished their work onthe larch-trunks.

  We felt convinced, however, that they must be plotting some mischiefagainst us, whereupon the youngest of the maids remarked, with an airof great wisdom, that it might be best always to keep on good termswith that kind of people.


  "It's easy for you to talk, wench," retorted my father. "What do youknow?"

  After that ... she said no more.

  I had a fresh fright at that time. Prompted by curiosity to see thegodless fellows once more and to spy out whether the devil, in theguise of a wood-cutter, was helping them with their work, I peeped oneday from the forest path and through the thicket at their work-place.Then I saw that they were making coffins.

  I announced the fact at home and caused the greatest excitement inconsequence.

  "As I said, they have some fresh thing in their minds!" said my mother.

  Father suggested:

  "Boy, you have been dreaming again, in broad daylight. Still, I will goand see."

  We went into the woods. My father peered through the thicket at thewood-cutters; and then I saw him turn pale.

  "You half-wit!"[8] he said; and then he groaned. "They're burying everypeasant of us at Alpel!"

  The coffins were stacked in great piles; and the men were stillchopping and trimming new ones with their axes. We rushed away toinform the local magistrate, who, at that time, lived on the mountainon the other side of the Engthal, and tell him what we had seen. On theroad to his house we met Michel the carpenter, to whom my father saidthat he had better have all his knives and choppers ready, for itlooked as if we were in for bad times. The strangers who were workingin his wood did nothing but make coffins.

  "Yes," said Michel, "I've noticed that too: it's a good thing thecoffins are not hollow!"

  And the man of experience told us of the shape of the railway-sleepers,which were usually cut from the block in pairs, before being sawnasunder, and which, with their six corners, looked not unlike a coffin.

  We turned back then and there, and as we went along the edge of thefield, where the grass was nice and smooth, my father said to me:

  "This gives us a good chance of laughing at ourselves, lest othersshould. That's the way things go: when we've fallen out with a man, weput down everything that's bad to him and are as blind as if Satan hadstuck his horns into our eyes. When all is said, even those twowood-cutters are not so black as they appear to be. Still, I shall beglad when they have cleared out. And this much I do know: Clements buysno more larch of me."

  "Because you have none left," was my wise comment on that.

  Father did not seem to hear.

  The wood-cutters went at last and the larch-wood sleepers with them.The red-brown stumps remained behind; and in their pores stood brightdrops of rosin.

  "It shows that they were not Christians," I remember my father saying,"that they did not cut a cross in a single stump."

  For, at that time, it was still the custom, in the forest, for thewood-cutters to carve a little cross with the axe into each stump assoon as the tree had fallen. Why, I was never quite able to discover:it was probably for the same reason that makes the blacksmith give twotaps with his hammer on the anvil, after the red-hot iron is removed.These things are intended to thwart the devil, who, as everybody knows,is never idle and interferes in all the works of man.

  My father, whose whole life was bound up with the cross, wentafterwards and cut crosses in the larch-stumps. And so things in theforest were once more in order and peaceful, as they used to be.

  And that is the story of the strange wood-cutters, the children of theworld, who had penetrated into our far-away forest-nook like the firstwave of the turbulent sea of the world. How small this wave was andwhat an amount of unrest, discontent, and vexation was washed up withit! Gradually, the strange elements were forgotten: even mother endedby overcoming her indignation. Only our little serving-maid remainedrestless and wistful, even after the wave had flowed back again, andher eyes were often red with crying.

  FOOTNOTE:

  [8] _Halbnarr_: half-fool. According to German folk-lore, it is onlythe half-idiots who are really dangerous.--_Translator's Note._