Moreover, in good time our wanderer, patroller, and reconnaissance marcher got to know a country inn that resembled an aristocratic baronial villa more than what he would have imagined it might resemble. There there were God knows what kind of noble, in many ways probably misunderstood, melancholy-patrician, gentle, exacting goldfish shimmering and wagging their fins back and forth in an utterly strange and peculiar way in grottoes with fountains, which seemed entirely as it should be. Alongside them, of course, there were also other, not particularly interesting fishes, ordinary, banal, occasionally contemptible, astonishingly undistinguished, pathetic.
Elegant ornamental clocks of breathtaking age placed in wonderful rooms were to be found, which were able to make Hans quite simply go insane with wonder, swoon with rapture, and half lose his mind with admiration, which he promptly did, since he was easily amazed and enjoyed being so.
In addition, on the occasion of a nighttime railroad journey he saw sitting next to a happy husband an absolutely not happy, rather, so it seemed, utterly unhappy and thus pitiable wife. Hans might almost have become embroiled in an admittedly perhaps romantic but nonetheless obviously truly very stupid and unnecessary adventure out of sheer precipitous overwhelming pity. Luckily the thought occurred to him in time that in this particular case it might just as plausibly be a question of travel fatigue as inconsolability and marital drama, for which reason he thereupon laughed at himself as happily and heartily as could be.
In addition, he nosed out and discovered occasionally two to three pictures of student life that seemed intended to attest that no one in the world lived lives as jovially and lustily as students did. Furthermore, various effective colored images from the Franco-Prussian War of ’70 were amiably located and superlatively ferreted out by our fact finder, reconnoiterer, and nuncio in a country inn.
An exquisite baroque castle portal of skillfully wrought iron was happily both perceived and afterward attentively inspected again and again.
Additional especially remarkable curiosities included the sign for a pub, depicting a gracious deer, as well as another guesthouse sign, portraying in a style demonstrating certain similarities with Assyrian art a strange lion with its tongue stuck out.
A slender, proud lady dressed in black whom Hans encountered near a fashionable, exclusive grand hotel in the forest, thereby ascertaining that she had penetrating eyes, should also be mentioned.
Let us also tack on here several pieces of marble animal garden statuary, even though marble is harder and more monumental than it is dainty and suitable for tacking on.
On a bright little sunny expedition or gentle march that carried Hans past multiple charming gardens and all sorts of prospering orchards, he arrived at a village church with a weathercock flashing gold on the tip of the spire and magnificent Gothic windows whose merry glass paintings he found charming.
Everything around the church was bright and at the same time dark green; damp and at the same time shimmering in the sun. He entered the church- or graveyard, where he thoughtfully and deliberately read the pale, barely still legible inscriptions on the old gravestones that were darkly ensnared in boxwood and other unusual shrubbery whose leaves and needles were like slender quills and tender hands.
In this contemplative site of the unavoidable end of earthly life, it smelled of and was resplendent with the beauty and happiness of summer. Life and death, blossoming and decay, birdsongs and human graves, blue sky and memorial inscriptions seemed here to have grown deeply intertwined with each other. Hans stayed for a long time in the little village cemetery that contained such a sweet poetry.
Afterward, he saw a parsonage that could just as well have been a fancy gentleman’s house as a modest and pious clergyman’s. The merry sound of piano music poured out of the open window into the happy morning countryside.
“The pastor here seems to be a music-lover, unless by chance this person playing so prettily is a pastoress. Since those who love music are surely always also lovers of humankind, it is unquestionably very fitting for a preacher of God’s word to be a lover and faithful friend of melodies. I truly envy this unknown (to me) clergyman, who can live in such a beautiful, agreeable country house and ardently indulge in early-morning piano reveries. If I did not have to be afraid of coming at an extremely inopportune time, or of seeming to be shameless, impertinent, and cheeky to a clearly high degree, I would be truly happy to enter that stately house in order to pay a passing visit and painstakingly get to know all of the splendors and idiosyncrasies it might contain. Still, being permitted to observe and inspect such a fine building only from without can and should be enough to make me happy, and sincerely so.”
Silently saying this and similar things to himself, the walker walked peacefully on, casting his attentive eyes upon a homey rope-maker’s workshop situated under tall fruit trees. Diverse and sundry rural and rustic beauty and secrets of native intelligence and amicability were everywhere there, calmly and grandly strolling along. The farmland spreading far and wide resembled, in its beautiful, rich fecundity and with its many pleasant faces and things, a folk song or hymn, honest and profound and good in every sense, full of simplicity but nonetheless also full of grandeur.
Attractive houses turned up, sturdy and friendly. One shabby little house on a gently sloping meadow looked in its kindly negligibility like a proclamation of peace, an expression of the enjoyment of existence, an embodiment of unassuming joie de vivre.
Hans saw beehives as well as bees flying about in the bright air, likewise chicken coops as well as clucking chickens, likewise a pussycat luxuriously sunning itself and an additional adorable tiny black-and-white kitten.
Now here, now there he rambled around transfigured, silently enchanted, enraptured, and totally and completely entertained, found himself in a stretch of woods, walked nice and straight back out of it, reached meadows and fields, came upon a crowd of schoolboys, and emerged in a remote village lane where as punishment for his roving around he was extremely frighteningly barked and yapped at by a vigilant dog.
Everywhere he went and looked, he found always one and the same beauty, cheer, and heart. What would have been the point of any variations? Similar things, identical things, must again and again be good and beautiful and lovable enough anew. Without question, one and the same thing remains always the most beautiful and best. Why should it ever change? The same things were always highly surprising for him. Is not one year also like another, and every individual life likewise? Are not repetitions more welcome than oppositions? Calm, gentle, dear equanimity not more desirable than hard, chaotic mayhem and drastic differences? Must something that seems in some way right and just then be violently replaced by something different? Wouldn’t all this goodness and pleasurability be merely interrupted by novelty and change? Does not the reasonable person always heartily welcome the sight of that which was once pleasant and inspiriting in ever new sympathetic similar or very same forms?
On a narrow stone jetty that keenly impressed itself upon his memory and that led out a short way into the lake, Hans liked to strip down on warm and of course sometimes too on raw windy days, with a west no less than an east or mountain wind blowing, in sunny no less than rainy weather, to go swimming, which was flat-out unspeakably nice for him. One time, he wrote to a friend:
“Since I have a nice and charming and comfortable place to go swimming that doesn’t cost me one red cent, I may perhaps be justified in saying that I have the same entertainments at my disposal as a baron, or in other words that no prince has it better than I do.”
On the many glorious hours he spent swimming he thought back in the course of his later life with always the same great pleasure. The lake lay before him celestially blue, often entirely white, as ravishingly bright as a jewel, and the mountain cabin amid the towering forest soared up on the opposite shore in a wonderful, gentle motion.
One time, when Hans was swimming or had already been swimming, a boy who seemed to be spending (or to have already bee
n spending) his time fishing walked up to him out on the jetty, giving rise thereby to a pleasant little chitchat, equivalently amusing to them both.
“So, you’ve been fishing,” Hans said to the boy. “Did you catch anything?”
“No, not today,” came the answer in a cheerful voice. “But it looks like you’ve been swimming here.”
“That’s right,” said Hans.
After a while the boy asked, “You are who and you are doing what?”
“You want to know?” came the smiling reply from Hans. He found the question from this boy, who probably lived in a nearby village, extraordinarily funny.
The day was of a wonderful, bluish gentleness. The weather seemed good, like an extremely well brought up adorable little child. Life, which is so often anything but gentle, resembled in this moment a happy, carefree smile. A soft, dreamy morning breeze wafted and stroked caressingly from the west across the trees, whose leaves began to move, producing a lisping tinkle. The lake was like a swan enraptured by its own beauty. A few silent boats lay floating on the shimmering white surface of the water. A steamship hurried across the middle of the large lake.
“To tell you who and what I am and what I am doing is actually rather difficult. From the manner and fashion in which I have been swimming and dreaming away the morning here you can tell that at present I am lazier than I am hardworking. Perhaps I look like an absolute layabout, no? And yet there have been times when I felt compelled to create, felt driven to do things, felt as though it were imperative to do the work of four or six. And it certainly seemed to me that this made me unbelievably happy. To achieve, to solve, everything that goes along and together with that is truly a joy, and I believe that such a stern, demanding period will surely return for me someday. I feel full well that I am meant to create, to move with the power and speed of lightning, and to enjoy fatiguing activity. And yet I tell myself that a person has to take things as they come. When you are faced with a happiness that is not forbidden, you must seize and enjoy it. We convince ourselves that there are sorrows as well as joys in this world and that when unavoidable difficulties are hurled upon us and harsh realities hurtle toward us, we have to endure them and patiently let them afflict us. In the meantime, it does me good down to the depths of my soul to sit here and look out at the water in the knowledge that it is divinely beautiful to be permitted to pass such hours in so doing. But while I have been telling you these things, which you probably barely understand, the time will have come to leave.”
With a smile the boy said, “I have to go home too. Farewell.” And with that, they parted.
Yes, along with many other happy harmless hours in the bosom of nature, this was a lovely hour for Hans. The summer passed like a dream. Then came fall. The green turned to brown, yellow, and red. The green summer forest was transformed into a many-colored Indian woods. A fantastic fog crept through the gardens, parks, forests, and buildings in the mornings and evenings. In the fall, too, he experienced beautiful day after beautiful day. Time passed amiably. The weather stayed mild deep into November. On December 20th, the first snow fell. Hans thought he would have to start heating his room soon, otherwise it would be unpleasant to live there.
The winter was beautiful too. The middle of the cold season is a magnificent time to think about summer warmth. Hans did so with great pleasure. Warming thoughts of summer stayed vital and alive within him through the whole winter. Gradually spring returned again, after which came the summer, resembling the previous year’s practically down to a hair’s breadth. Groves and forests once more took on their delicious, darling green color. In August the war broke out.
Now things got serious for Hans.
The Executive Federal Council ordered a general mobilization. There were anxiously talking and listening people in all the streets. Every segment of the population was seized with the gravest consternation. Women and men went around in a state of excitement, looking each other in the eye with earnest questioning gazes. What everyone would have liked to think was impossible was suddenly naked, hard, shocking reality. Everywhere it looked like something was lurking; the otherwise so gentle air resounded with what was like the roaring of tigers.
All at once there rose up before Hans a tall and imperious figure: Duty. Up until that point he had known no obligations. It had hitherto barely ever occurred to him to think about military service. Now, though, he knew what he had to do. He made the decision quickly, since there was nothing to take into consideration. All his previous thoughts fell away. What had just a moment before seemed essential trickled away at once into vanishing unessentiality.
The general’s name was in everyone’s mouth.
Hans went to the woods one more time, to say goodbye.
“Am I now supposed to leave behind all good, beloved, and beautiful dreams?” he said, “and cast aside ineluctably everything that was once precious to me? Is what was valuable to me now to be valueless, what was intimately familiar and closely related to be alien and strange, the significant utterly insignificant, the known unknown, the important unimportant, and everything I used to keenly observe from now on invisible? Must beauty fade and everything that was once recognizable be henceforth entirely unrecognizable? Can for that which is worthy of yearning never again be yearned and that which is desirable never again be desired? Shall all this be as though it had never been noticed at all?
“Well, so be it. Onwards, then, to do one’s duty as a brave soldier, to salute the flag I already see fluttering in the wind. Now let the land among whose sons I number be served and my soul be a soul that loves its fatherland.”
He took the train to Bern to enlist.
1920
A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories Page 16