Fairy Tales & Ghost Stories by Theodor Storm

by Robert Seidel Costic

Bulemann’s House

  In a seaside city in northern Germany, in the so-called gloomy street, stands an old dilapidated house. It is narrow, but three stories high; in the middle of it, from the ground almost to the top of the gable, the walls spring out in a bow-like extension, which is provided on each floor with windows on the front and sides, so that in the bright nights the moon can shine through them.

  Since time immemorial, no one has gone inside and no one out of this house, and the heavy brass knocker on the front door is almost black with tarnish, between the cracks of the stone steps grass grows year in, year out. If a stranger asks, “What kind of house is that?” he receives the answer, “It is Bulemann’s house,” but when he goes on to ask, “Who lives in it?” they say, just as surely, “No one lives there.” The children in the streets and the nurses at the cradle sing:

  In Bulemann’s house

  In Bulemann’s house

  There peeps a mouse

  Out the window.

  And the merry brothers who passed by there from nightly revelries would have heard a squeaking from a number of mice behind the dark windows. One who in high spirits claims to have heard the echo resounding through the barren rooms, and even claimed to clearly hear the bounding of large animals on the steps. “It almost,” he, in telling this, was accustomed to add, “sounded like the bounding of large predators which were shown in the animal pens in the town hall market.”

  The house standing opposite is one story lower, so that at nightfall the moonlight falls unobstructed through the upper windows of the old house. From such a night even the watchman has something to tell, but it’s just a little old man’s face with a colorful sleeping cap that he claimed to have seen up there behind the round bay windows. The neighbors in opposition were of the opinion that the watchman was drunk once again; they had never seen something on those windows that was like a human being.

  An old man living in a distant quarter of the city, who has for years been organist at St. Mary Magdalene Church, seems to be able to give the most particulars. "I remember," he said, when he was once asked about it, "very well the gaunt man who lived during my childhood alone with an old female in that house. With my father, who was a junk dealer, he was connected for a couple years in brisk commerce, and I would have at the time sometimes been sent to him with messages. I also remember that I did not gladly go in that direction and often thought of all sorts of excuses to seek escape, for even in the daytime I was afraid to climb the narrow stairs to Mr. Bulemann’s chamber on the third floor. One called him among the people the “slave trader,” and already this name gave me angst, especially since all sorts of scary talk about him was in vogue. He had, before he occupied the house from after his father’s death, moved many years as cargo master to the West Indies. There he is said to have married a black woman; but when he came home, one waited in vain to see any woman with associated dark children. And soon it was said that he had met a slave ship on his return journey and sold to its captain his own flesh and blood, together with their mother for vile gold. – What was true in such talk, I can not say,” the gay haired one was accustomed to add, “for I do not want to offend a dead man, but this much is certain, he was a miserly and misanthropic crank, and his eyes looked also as if they had witnessed evil deeds. No unfortunate or someone seeking help was allowed to enter his threshold, and whenever I was there at that time, there was always iron chain placed before the door on the inside. –If I then had to repeatedly strike the heavy knockers, I heard it from the top of the stairs down the scolding voice of the householder: Mrs. Anken! Mrs. Anken! Are you deaf? Don’t you hear the knocking!” Soon one could hear from the parlor and corridor of the back house the shuffling steps of the old woman. Before she opened, however, she asked, clearing her throat, “Who is it?” and only if I answered, “It is Leberecht,” the chain was unhooked. If I hastily gone up the seventy-seven steps – for I have counted once - Mr. Bulemann was accustomed to wait for me in the little dim vestibule outside his room, which he never allowed me to go inside. I can still see him in his yellow-flowered dressing gown with the cap’s pointed tip in front of me with one hand behind his back holding the latch of his door. While stating my business, he considered me impatiently with his piercing, round eyes and thereafter dismissed me severely and quickly. What most aroused my attention were a couple of monstrous cats, one yellow and one black, which sometimes pressed out of his room behind him and rubbed their thick heads on his knees. – After a few years, however, the business with my father stopped, and I was no longer there. – All this is now over seventy years ago, and Mr. Bulemann must have long since been carried to the place from whence no one returns.” – One is mistaken when he spoke. Mr. Bulemann has not been carried from his house; he still lives in it now.

  This is how it went. Before him, from the time of pigtails and powdered hair, the last owner that lived in that house was a pawnbroker, a bent-over old male. There he had operated his business with care for over five decades, and with a woman who conducted his housekeeping after his wife’s death, and from living most sparsely he finally became a rich man. The wealth amounted to an almost incalculable number of valuables, gadgets, and the strangest junk, which he had received over the years in pawn from spendthrifts or the destitute and then, because the repayment of the loans did not ensue, remained in his possession. Because with the sale of these pawned items, which had to happen legally through the courts, he would have had to give out the surplus proceeds to the owner, he therefore preferred to pile them in large walnut cabinets, which for this purpose gradually occupied the rooms of the first and finally even the second story. At night, once Mrs. Anken snored in the back of the house in her little, lonely room, and the heavy chain hung at the front door, he often went with gentle steps up and down the steps. Buttoned his in his bluish-gray caped travel coat, in one hand a lamp and in the other a bunch of keys, he opened now in the first, now in the second floor of the parlor rooms and the cabinet doors, took here a golden, chiming pocket watch, there an enamel snuffbox from a hiding place and calculated for the years of his possession and whether the original owners of these things probably died or disappeared, or whether they would once again return with the money in hand to reclaim their pawns.

  The mortgage lender was in extreme old age finally taken by death away from his treasure and had left behind the house along with the full cabinets to his only son, who had during his life tried in every way to stay away from it.

  This son was for the little Leberecht the greatly feared cargo master, who had just returned from an overseas trip to his native town. After his father’s funeral he gave up his former business and moved into the room on the third floor of the old bay-windowed house, where now, instead of the stooped little man in the bluish-gray roquelaure, a long, lean figure in a yellow-flowered dressing gown and colorful stocking cap walked up and down or stood doing calculations at the deceased’s small desk. – Mr. Bulemann had not inherited, however, the delight of the old pawnbroker for the accumulated treasures. After he had studied the contents behind locked doors of the large walnut cabinets, he asked himself whether he should risk a clandestine sale of these things that were still the property of others and to whose value he had a claim only to the level of the inherited and extremely meager amount, as the books showed, of the loans given out at the time of pawning. But Mr. Bulemann was not one of the irresolute. In just a few days a deal was buttoned up with a secondhand dealer residing in one of the outer suburbs, and after some pawns from the later years had been set aside, the motley contents of the large walnut cabinets was secretly and carefully converted into solid silver coins. That was the time when the boy Leberecht came into the house. – Mr. Bulemann put this redeemed money in large, ironbound chests, which he put side-by-side in his bedroom; because of the illegality of his possessions he did not dare to execute mortgages from it or otherwise openly invest it.

  When everything was sold, he set out to calculate the to
tal conceivable expenses for his possible lifespan. He took initially an age of ninety years and divided the money into individual parcels, each for a week, and, for each quarter, he set aside a little roll for unforeseen expenses. This money was put in a box by itself which stood in the neighboring living room, and every Sunday morning the housekeeper Mrs. Anken, whom he had taken over from his father’s estate, appeared to receive a new package and to settle over the disbursement of the previous account.

  As already said, Mr. Bulemann had not brought a wife or children; there were however two particularly large cats, one yellow and one back, that were the day after the old pawnbroker’s burial carried by a sailor from on board a ship to the house strongly tied up in a sack. These animals were soon the only company of the gentleman. They received their own bowls in the afternoon, which Mrs. Anken, in sullen anger, had to prepare for them day in and day out; after they ate, as Mr. Bulemann finished his short noonday nap, they sat satiated next to him on the couch, letting a little flap of their tongues hang out and blinking sleepily at him with their green eyes. When they went on mouse hunts in the lower rooms of the house, they always earned a secret kick from the old woman, and so they first brought their captured mice dragging in their mouths to the old man to show them to him before they crawled under the couch to eat them. Then night came and Mr. Bulemann exchanged his colorful stocking cap with a white one, and buried himself with both his cats in the large curtained bed in the neighboring room, where he allowed himself to be brought to sleep by the steady purring of the animals burrowing at his feet.

  This peaceful life was not, however, without disturbance. Over the first few years individual owners of the pawned items had come and, for the paying back of the little sums previously received for them, desired the surrender of their valuables. And Mr. Bulemann, for fear of litigation, which could make his proceedings become public, reached into his big chest and bought by larger or smaller sums of compensation the silence of those involved. This made him even more misanthropic and grim. The business with the secondhand dealer long since ceased, he sat in his lonely little room with the bay window, seeking the solution of an often sought problem, the calculation of a certain winning number through which he could increase his treasures into the immeasurable. Graps and Schnor, the two large cats, now also had to suffer under his whim. Had he in one moment stroked them with his long fingers, so could he in another, particularly if perhaps the calculations on the ledger did not want to agree, provide a toss of the sand pot or the paper scissors, so that they limped howling into the corner.

  Mr. Bulemann had a relative, a daughter from his mother's first marriage, who, however, was already compensated at the death for her inheritance rights and therefore had no claims on the treasures inherited by him. He did not trouble himself with this half-sister, although she lived in a suburb in the most wretched conditions, for even less than with other men loved Herr Bulemann communion with poor relatives. Only once, when after the death of her husband she bore at a late age a sickly child, did she come to him seeking help. Mrs. Anken, who let her in, had remained listening at the bottom of the stairs, and soon she heard from above the sharp voice of her master, until finally the door was ripped open and the woman came down the stairs crying. That same evening Mrs. Anken received strict orders not to draw the chain from the door in the future if Christine should, perhaps, come back again.

  The old one began to be afraid more and more before the hooknose and piercing owl eyes of her master. If he called her name from the upper staircase bannister, or, as he was accustomed to do from ships, only gave a shrill whistle with his fingers, so she came, to be sure, creeping forth from whatever corner she was sitting in as fast as possible, and climbed up the narrow stairs groaning and babbling forth words of insult and lamentation.

  Like in the third floor with Mr. Bulemann, so had Mrs. Anken also accumulated in the lower floors her not entirely legitimately acquired treasures.-Already in the first years of their life together she had been attacked by a kind of childish fear that her master might one day take over the business of the expenditure of the household money himself and she would, by the greed of him, have to suffer want even to her old days. To avert this, she lied to him; the price of wheat had risen, and soon demanded a corresponding additional sum for the bread ration. The cargo master, who had just begun his life expenses, scolding tore up his lifetime budget and then drew up anew his life time budget again and added to the weekly allowance the sum needed.– But Mrs. Anken, after she had achieved her purpose, had to protect her conscience and thought of the saying, “Licking is not stealing,” now embezzled not the excess shillings received, but rather, on a regular basis now, purchased the wheat rolls with them, with which she, since Mr. Bulemann never entered the lower rooms, little by little stuffed her precious contents in the large empty walnut cabinets.

  So about ten years elapsed. Mr. Bulemann became more gaunt and gray, his yellow-flowered dressing gown more threadbare. Days would often go by without his having to open his mouth to speak, for he saw no living creature other than his two cats and his old, half-childish housekeeper. Only on and then, when he heard the neighborhood kids ride down the curbstones in front of his home, would he stick his head out the window a little and scold down into the alley with his sharp voice, “Slave trader! Slave trader!” so the children screamed and scattered from each other. Mr. Bulemann cursed and swore but still more and more furiously, until he finally slammed the window shut and inside gave Graps and Schnorsuffer his anger.

  To avoid any contact with neighbors, Mrs. Anken had to do her household shopping in the outlying streets for quite some time. She was allowed to go out only with the onset of darkness and then had to shut the door behind her.

  It might have been eight days before Christmas, when the old woman had to leave the house again one evening for such a purpose. Despite her usual care, she had been guilty this time, however, of forgetfulness. For as Mr. Bulemann had just let a match burn his candle, he listened to his amazement a racket outside on the stairs, and when he came out with the light held before him into hallway, he saw his half-sister with a pale boy standing before him.

  "How did you come into the house?" he addressed them imperiously, after which he stared surprised and furiously at them for a moment.

  "The door was open below," the woman said timidly.

  He muttered a curse upon his maid between his teeth. "What do you want?" He asked.

  "Do not be so hard, brother," asked the woman, "I may not have the courage to talk to you."

  "I do not know what you have to say to me. You've got your share. We're finished with each other."

  The sister stood silently before him and sought in vain for the right words. –Inside the repeated scratching at the door was audible. When Mr. Bulemann leaned back and opened the door, the two big cats jumped out into the hallway and ran purring around the pale boy, who retreated from them to the wall. Their master looked impatiently at the woman still standing silently before him. "Now, will it be soon?" he asked.

  "I wanted to ask you for something, Daniel," she began at last. "Your father had taken a few years before his death, when I was in dire need, a little silver cup as in pawn from me."

  "My father from you?" asked Mr. Bulemann.

  "Yes, Daniel, your father and the husband of both our mothers. Here is the pawn ticket. He did not give me much for it.”

  “Go on!” said Mr. Bulemann, who with a quick glance surveyed the empty hands of his sister.

  "Some time ago," she continued timidly, "I dreamt that I went with my sick child in the churchyard. When we arrived at the grave of our mother, she sat on her gravestone under a bush full of blooming white roses. She had in her hand that little cup that I once as a child received as a gift from her, but when we were closer, she placed it to her lips, and while knowingly smiling at the boy, I distinctly heard her say: 'To health.” - It was her gentle voice, Daniel, as in life, and this dream I dreamed three nig
hts in succession."

  "What is this?" asked Mr. Bulemann.

  "Give me the cup back, brother! The Christmas feast is near; put it on the empty Christmas plate of the sick child.

  The gaunt man in his yellow-flowered dressing gown stood motionless before her, and she looked round with his glaring eyes. "Do you have the money with you?" he asked. "With dreams you cannot redeem pawns."

  "O Daniel," she cried, "think of our mother! He will be healthy if he drinks from that small cup. Be merciful, he is after all of your blood!"

  She had her hands stretched out to him, but he took a step back. "Stay away from me," he said. Then he called to his cats. "Graps, old beast! Schnor, my little son!" And the big yellow cat leapt onto the arm of its master and clawed with its claws into the colorful stocking cap, while the black beast stretched itself up to his knees meowing.

  The sick boy had crept closer. "Mother," he said, tugging strenuously at her dress, "is that the evil uncle, who sold his black children?"

  But just at that moment Mr. Bulemann had thrown the cat off and seized the arm of the shrieking boy. "Damn brood of beggars," he cried, "So you also whistle that crazy song!"

  "Brother, brother," wailed the woman. - But the boy was lying down below there whimpering on the staircase landing. His mother sprang towards him and took him gently in her arms but then she straightened herself up, and with the bleeding head of the child at her breast, she raised her fist up towards her brother, who stood up there at the stair railing between his purring cats. "Wicked, wicked man," she said. "May you be ruined by your beasts!"

  "Curse as much as you want to," replied the brother, "but make sure you get out of the house.”

  Then, while the woman went down the dark stairs with the crying, he lured his cats and slammed the chamber door behind him. - He did not consider that the curses of the poor can be dangerous if the hardheartedness of the rich called them forth.

  A few days later Mrs.Anken brought lunch into the room of her master as usual. But she squeezed her thin lips now more than usual, and her silly little eyes shined with pleasure. Because she had not forgotten the harsh words she suffered for her negligence that night, and she thought now to repay him again with interest.

  "Did you hear St. Magdalene's ringing?" she asked.

  "No," replied curtly Mr. Bulemann, who sat over his ledger.

  "Do you know then what it has rung for?" asked the old woman again.

  "Stupid nonsense! I do not listen to the tinkling."

  "It was but for your sister's son!"

  Mr. Bulemann laid down his pen. "What are you chattering, old woman?"

  "I say," she replied, "that they have just buried the little Christopher."

  Mr. Bulemann had already started writing again. "Why are you telling me this? What is the boy to me?"

  "Well, I just thought, one talks about of course what news is happening in the city…”

  When she was gone, Mr. Bulemann he put his quill away again and stepped with his hands behind his back up and down his room for a long time. If there was a noise in the street below, he went hastily to the window, as if he expected to see enter the civil servant who would summon him before the Council, should they cite him on account of the mistreatment of the boy. The black Graps, who, meowing demand for his share of the dished up food, got a kick that flew it howling into the corner. But was it now the hunger, or had the otherwise so submissive nature of the animal been unexpectedly changed; he turned against his master and flew hissing and snorting at him. Mr. Bulemann gave him a second kick. "Eat," he said. "You do not need to wait for me."

  With one leap, the two cats were at the full bowl that he placed on the floor.

  But then something strange happened.

  As the yellow Schor, who had finished his meal first, stood now in the middle of the room, stretched himself, and arched his back, Mr. Bulemann suddenly stopped in front of him; then he walked around the animal and examined it from all sides. "Schnor, old scoundrel, what's that?" He said, stroking the tom cat’s head. "You're still growing in your old age!" - At that moment the other cat sprang thereto. She bristled her shiny fur and then stood up high on her black legs. Mr. Bulemann pushed the colorful stocking cap from his forehead. "She, too,” he muttered. "Strange, it must lie in the breed."

  Meanwhile, it had become dark and since no one came and disturbed him, he sat down to the dishes that were on the table. Finally, he even began inspect his big cats, who sat beside him on the sofa, with a certain pleasure. "A pair of splendid guys you are!" he said, nodding to them. “Now the old woman below will no longer have to poison the rats!”- After he went into his neighboring bedroom that evening he didn’t let them in as he otherwise had; and when that night he heard them with their paws falling against the chamber door and sliding them underneath it meowing, he pulled the comforter over his two ears and thought, “Meow on! I've seen your claws.”

  Then came the next day and when it became noon, the same thing happened that had happened the day before. From the emptied bowl the cats jumped up with a heavy leap into the middle of the room, extended themselves, and when Mr. Bulemann, who was back on his ledger, cast a glance at them, he pushed back his chair in horror and remained standing with a sprained neck. There, with a quiet whimper, as if something terrible would be done to them, Graps and Schnor stood trembling with curled tails, their hair bristling; he saw clearly that they became bigger and bigger.

  One more moment he stood, hands clasped on the table, and then suddenly he strode past the animals and threw open the parlor door. "Mrs. Anken, Mrs. Anken!” he cried, and since she seemed not to hear, he whistled with his fingers, and soon the old woman shuffled out of the back of the house below and panted up the stairs, one after another.

  "Look at the cats," he cried as she entered the room.

  "Which I've seen many times before, Mr. Bulemann."

  "So you see nothing?"

  "That I don’t know, Mr. Bulemann" she replied with her silly, blinking eyes.

  "What kind of animals are these? They are no longer cats!”- He grabbed the old woman's arms and crashed her against the wall. "Red-eyed witch," he cried, "confess what you've brewed up for my cats!"

  The woman clutched her bony hands together and began to babble forth with unintelligible prayers. But the terrible cats jumped from the right and left onto the shoulders of her master and licked him with their sharp tongues on his face. Therefore he had to let the old woman go.

  Continually chattering, and coughing, she slipped out of the room and crept down the stairs. She was afraid - whether more by her master or more by the large cats, she herself did not know. So she came back into her room. With trembling hands she pulled a woolen stocking stuffed with money out of her bed, then she took from a chest a load from a number of old skirts and rags and wrapped it around her treasure, so that finally it was a large bundle. At that point she wanted to go, to go at any price. She thought of the poor half-sister of her master out in the suburbs; she who had always been kind to her, to her she wished to go. Of course, it was a long way, through many streets, over many long and narrow bridges, crossed over dark canals and waterways, and outside dusk was already falling over the winter evening. Nevertheless, she continued. Without thinking of her thousands of bread rolls, which she had piled up in childish care in the large walnut cabinets, she stepped out of the house with a heavy bundle on her neck. She locked carefully the heavy oak door with the big, intricate key, put it in her leather bag, and then went out into the dark city. -

  Mrs. Anken never returned, and the door to Bulemann’s house has never again been unlocked.

  That same day, however, after she went away, a young hooligan who had been running about the houses playing Knecht Ruprecht, he told his comrades with laughter, because, as he was going in his rough fur coat over the Krezentius Bridge, he had an old woman so frightened that she leaped as if insane into the dark water with her bundle. - Also, in the morning the next morning the corpse o
f an old woman who was tied firmly with a large bundle was fished up by the watchmen in the outermost suburbs and thereafter, because no one knew her, she was buried in a plain coffin in the pauper section of the local cemetery.

  This next morning was the morning of Christmas Eve. - Mr. Bulemann had had a bad night, the scratching and working of the animals against his chamber door this time gave him now no rest; only towards dawn did he fall into a long, leaden sleep. When he finally stuck his head with the pointed cap into the living room, he saw the two cats purring loudly and walking with restless steps around each other. It was already after noon, the clock pointed to one. “They have gotten hungry, those beasts,” he muttered.

  Then he opened the door to the hallway and whistled for the old woman. At the same time the cats thrust out and ran down the stairs, and soon he heard from the kitchen below jumping and dish rattling. They must have jumped on the cupboard where Mrs. Anken kept the food for the next day.

  Mr. Bulemann stood on top of the stairs and cried loudly and scoldingly after Mrs. Anken, but only silence answered him from below or a weak echo below upward from the corners of the old house. He had already clapped the sides of his flowered dressing gown over each other and wanted to go down himself, but then there was a rumble down there on the stairs, and the two cats came running up again. But these were no more cats; they were two terrible, nameless predators. They positioned themselves towards him, looked at him with their smoldering eyes and let out a hoarse yell. He wanted to walk by them, but a strike with a claw that ripped a shred from his dressing gown drove him back. He ran into the room; he wanted to tear open a window to call the people on the street, but the cat jumped after him and got in front of him first. Ferociously purring, with tails held high, they walked up and down in front of the windows. Mr. Bulemann ran out into the hallway and slammed the door behind him, but the cats fought with their paws on the door handle and stood before him on the stairs. - Again, he fled back into the room, and again there were the cats.

  The day already disappeared, and darkness crept into all corners. Deep below from the street he heard singing; boys and girls went from house to house singing Christmas carols. They went to every door; he stood and listened. Would no one come to his door? – But he knew the answer was yes, he had driven them all away himself; nobody knocked, no one shook the locked door as they passed by, and gradually it was quiet, deathly quiet in the street. And again he tried to escape, he wanted to use force, he wrestled with the animals, and he let his face and hands get torn bloody.

  Then he turned to trickery; he called them with the old pet names, he stroke sparks out of their fur and even dared to stroke their flat heads with the big white teeth. They thus threw themselves in front of him and rolled purring at his feet, but when he thought that the right moment had come, he slipped out the door, and they jumped up and stood before him, uttering their hoarse cry. Thus passed the night, so the day came, and still he ran between the stairs and the windows of his room to and fro, wringing his hands, panting, his gray hair disheveled.

  And twice the day and night alternated, when at last he threw himself, completely exhausted, quivering in every limb, on the sofa. The cats sat down opposite him and blinked sleepily at him through half-closed eyes. Gradually the functioning of his body lessened, and finally it stopped completely. Pallor appeared on his face under the stubble of the gray beard, breathing out one more time he stretched his arms and spread his long fingers over his knees, and then never moved again.

  Downstairs in the deserted rooms, however, it was not quiet. Outside the door in the back of the house, which also leads out to the narrow courtyard, there was an industrious gnawing and eating. Finally emerged over the threshold of an opening, which became larger and larger, a gray mouse head, pushed its way through, then another, and soon a whole swarm of mice scurried down the vestibule and up the stairs to the first floor. Here the work was started again at the door to the room, and when this was gnawed through, they came to the big cabinets in which lay hoarded up Mrs. Ankens’ left-behind treasures. There was life like in paradise; whoever wanted only had to eat it.

  And the vermin began to fill their bellies, and when they no longer wanted to continue eating, they curled up their tails and napped in the holes eaten into the bread rolls. At night they came, scurrying across the planks, or sat before the window and looked, if the moon was shining, down into the street with their little shiny eyes.

  But this cozy business soon had to reach its end. On the third night, just as Mr. Bulemann had closed his eyes above, there was a racket on the stairs outside. The big cats came leaping towards it, opened with a blow of their paws the door of the room and began their hunt. Then the majesty came to an end. The fat mice ran around squeaking and wheezing, striving helplessly to get up the walls. It was in vain; they died one after another between the crushing teeth of the two predators.

  Then it grew silent, and soon in the whole house nothing was audible but the quiet purring of the big cats, which with outstretched paws lay before their master’s room and licked the blood from their whiskers.

  Below on the house door the lock rusted, tarnish covered the brass knocker, and grass began to grow between the stone stairs.

  But outside the world went its course unconcerned. When summer came, a little white rosebush appeared on the grave of little Christopher at the churchyard of St. Mary Magdalene, and soon a small memorial stone lay under it. His mother had planted the rose bush for him; she of course had not procured the stone. But Christopher had a friend, a young musician and the son of a pawnbroker, who lived in the house opposite of him. At first he would slip under the window whenever the musician sat inside at the piano; later he would take him occasionally to the Church of Magdalene, where he used to practice playing the organ in the afternoon. – There the pale boy sat on a little stool at his feet, he leaned his head on the organ bench listening to the organ and watched as the sunlight played through the church window. If the young musician got carried away by the development of his themes, letting the deep powerful organ stops to sound through the vaults, or if he sometimes drew the tremolo-stops and the tones flooded out as if trembling before the majesty of God, so it could well happen that the boy broke out in quiet sobs and his friend was only able with great difficulty to calm him down. Once he said pleadingly, "It hurts me, Leberecht. Do not play so loud!"

  The organ player shoved in immediately again the large organ stops and laid hold of the flutes and other soft voices, and the boy’s favorite song “Entrust Your Way” swelled sweetly and touchingly through the still church. – With his ailing voice he began to sing softly along. “I also want to learn to play,” he said when the organ was silent. “Will you teach me, Leberecht?’

  The young musician dropped his hand on the boy's head, and stroking the blond hair, he replied: "First get really healthy, Christopher, and I will gladly teach you."

  But Christopher did not get healthy. - The young musician, at the side of his mother, followed his little coffin. They spoke together for the first time here, and the mother told him about the dream she dreamed three times about the small sliver heirloom cup.

  "The cup," Leberecht said, "I could have given to you; my father, who many years ago made a deal for it, along with many other things, from your brother, gave me the dainty piece once as a Christmas present.”

  The woman burst into the most bitter laments. "Oh," she cried again, "he would have certainly become healthy!"

  The young man walked a while in silence by her side. "Our Christopher should still have the cup yet,” he said finally.

  And so it happened. After a few days he had negotiated a very good price from a collector of such valuables for the cup; from the money he let be made the monument for the grave of little Christopher. On it he inserted a little marble plague that was chiseled with the image of the cup. Underneath were words engraved, “To good health!”

  Throughout the many years, whether the snow might lie over
the grave or whether the bush might be, in the June sun, overflowing with roses, a pale woman often came and read attentively and thoughtfully the two words on the gravestone. Then one summer she did not come again, but the world went unconcerned on its course.

  Only once, after many years, did a very old man visit the grave, he had looked at the small memorial stone and broken off a white rose from the old rose bush. That was the organist emeritus of St. Mary Magdalene.

  But we must leave the child's peaceful grave and, if the report should be completed, must cast another glance over there in the city into the old bay-windowed house of the dismal street. –It still stood there silent and closed. While outside life flooded over incessantly, inside the enclosed spaces mushrooms had grown luxuriously out of the floorboard cracks, and the plaster on the ceiling loosened and fell down, and rushing eerie echoes over the hallways and stairs on lonely nights. The children, who had sung on that Christmas night in the street, lived now as old people in their homes, or they had already finished with their lives and had died, the people who were now walking in the street wore different clothing, and out on the suburban churchyard was the black numbered stake on Frau Ankens’ nameless grave long ago rotted away. And then one night, as had happened so often, the full moon shined over the neighbor’s house across into the bay window on the third floor and delineated with its bluish light the small round panes onto the floor.

  The room was empty; curled only on the sofa sat a small figure crouched together the size of a year-old child, but the face was old and bearded and the skinny nose disproportionately large; it wore also a stocking cap falling far over the ears and a certain, long dressing obviously intended for a grown man, on which he had drawn up his feet to the area for the lap.

  This figure was Mr. Bulemann. - The hunger had not killed him, but by the lack of food, his body dried up and shriveled, so he had over the years become smaller and smaller. He was awaken sometimes on full moon nights like this and had, if also with weakening strength, tried to escape from his guards. Had he sunk exhausted from the fruitless efforts onto the couch, or finally crept up there, and then had the leaden sleep seize him, Graps and Schnor would stretch on the stairs outside, whipping their tails on the floor and listening to whether Mrs. Anken’s treasures had attracted new migrations of mice into the house.

  Today it was different; the cats were neither in the room nor even outside in the hallway. When the moonlight, falling through the window, rose up across the floor and gradually to the little figure, it began to stir; the big, round eyes opened, and Mr. Bulemann stared into the empty room. After a while he slip down from the sofa, throwing back the long sleeves and laboriously and slowly stepped to the door, while the broad back of his dressing gown swept behind him. Drawing on his tiptoes for the door handle, he was able to open the room door and to stride forth up to the railing of the stairs. For a while he remained standing, panting; then he stretched out his head and struggled to shout: "Mrs. Anken, Mrs. Anken!" but his voice was like the whisper of a sick child. "Mrs. Anken, I am hungry. Hear me!”

  Everything was quiet; only the mice squeaked vigorously now in the lower rooms.

  This made him angry. "Cursed witch, what do you whistle, then?” and a torrent of incomprehensible whispered insults flowed from his mouth, until a cough seized him and paralyzed his tongue.

  Outside, down at the front door, the heavy brass knocker was struck so the sound pressed upwards to the top of the house. It might have been that nocturnal fellow, who was mentioned in the beginning of this story.

  Mr. Bulemann had recovered. "So but open it,” he whispered; "It is the boy Christopher. He wants to take the cup."

  Suddenly from below upward became audible, amongst the squealing of the mice, the leaping and snarling of the two big cats. He seemed to recollect himself; for the first time at his awakening they had left the top floor and had left him alone. - Hastily, the long dressing gown dragging after him, he trudged back into the room.

  Outside, from the depths of the street he heard the watchman calling. "A man, a man!" he muttered, "The night is so long, so many times have I awoken, and yet the moon is always shining."

  He climbed up onto the upholstered chair that stood in the bay window. He worked diligently with his small withered hands on the hooks of the window, because down there on the moonlit street he had seen the guard stand. But the hinges were rusted shut, and he struggled in vain to open them. Then he saw the man who had stared up a while step back into the shadows of the houses.

  A faint cry broke from his mouth, trembling, with clenched fists he beat against the windowpanes, but his strength was not enough to shatter it. Now whispering to the other he began to beg and promise indiscriminately; gradually, while the figure of the man walking below became more and more distant, his hoarse whisper became a hoarse croak; he wanted to share his treasure with him; if he would only have heard, he could have it all, since he himself wanted nothing, absolutely nothing to keep to himself; only the cup, which was the property of little Christopher.

  But the man below went his way unconcerned, and soon he vanished in the next street. - Of all the words spoken by Mr. Bulemann that night, none had been heard by a human soul.

  Finally, after all the futile efforts of the small figure crouched up together on the upholstered chair, he straightened his pointed cap and looked up into the empty night sky, muttering unintelligible words.

  So he sits even now and awaits God’s mercy.