by Unknown
So the stranger set off, and Christian agreed to hold the money. He took pains to keep it under lock and key, and every now and then, driven by an exaggerated sense of scrupulousness, he counted it again to make sure nothing was missing, and made a big to-do about it. ‘This much money could make us very happy,’ he once said to his father, ‘if the stranger were not to return, there’s enough here to take care of us and our children for life.’
‘Forget about that gold,’ the old man replied, ‘it won’t make us happy, we have never lacked for anything, thank God, put the thought of it out of your mind.’
Often Christian woke up at night to rouse the hired hands to get to work and to supervise everything himself. Concerned that his son would spoil his youth and his health from over-diligence, the father awakened one night to warn him to curtail his activities, when, to his great surprise, he found him seated under a little lamp at a table once again assiduously counting the gold pieces.
‘My son,’ the old man said with a heavy heart, ‘have you sunk to that level, did this damned metal find its way under our roof just to cause our misfortune? Pull yourself together, my dear boy, lest the evil one drain your blood and your life.’
‘Yes,’ said Christian, ‘I don’t understand myself any more, the thought of it won’t let me be, by day or by night; see how it gapes at me again, its red glimmer pierces deep in my heart! Listen how it jingles, this golden blood! It calls to me in my sleep, I hear it when music is playing, when the wind blows, when people chatter on the street; when the sun shines, all I see are these yellow eyes winking at me, whispering sweet, tender endearments in my ear: so I’m driven to rouse myself every night just to slake its thirst for love, and then I feel it thrill in inner exultation at the touch of my fingers, it grows ever redder and more radiant with pleasure; you can see for yourself the glow of ecstasy!’
Trembling and in tears, the old man took his son in his arms, prayed and said: ‘Christian, my boy, you must turn back to the word of God, you must go more regularly to church and be more diligent and devout in your worship, or else you’ll dry up inside and waste away in sad misery.’
The money was locked away again, Christian promised to mend his ways and to find his footing, and the old man felt reassured. More than a year had passed, and there had been no word from the stranger; the old man finally gave in to his son’s entreaties and the money left behind was invested in lands and in other ways. In the village people got talking of the young farmer’s wealth, and Christian seemed inordinately gratified and content, so much so that the father thanked his lucky stars to see him so hale and hearty: all his fears were allayed. So much the more was his surprise when one evening Elisabeth took him aside and told him in tears how she no longer understood her husband; he talked so strangely, especially at night, had dark dreams, often sleepwalked around the room without knowing it, and filled her ears with the oddest things that often made her shudder. But what dismayed her most was his gaiety during the day, as his laughter was wild and impudent, and the look in his eyes was mad – he was just not himself. The father was stunned, and the troubled wife continued: ‘He keeps talking about the stranger, and claims they’d already met, that this strange man was, in fact, a gorgeous woman. And he doesn’t want to go out to the fields or work in the garden any more, as he says he hears a terrible groaning underground, like the kind you hear when you pluck out a root. He shrinks back in terror and seems to tremble before all plants and herbs as if they were ghosts.’
‘Good God!’ cried the father, ‘has the awful craving already taken such deep root that it has come to this? Then his haunted heart isn’t human any more, it’s the stuff of cold metal. Anyone who has lost his love of flowers has forsaken all love and fear of God.’
The following day the father went for a walk with his son and repeated to him some of the things Elisabeth had told him; he warned him to embrace piety and that he had better turn his spirit to godly reflections.
To which Christian replied: ‘Gladly, father. I often feel such a sense of well-being, and everything seems to succeed; it’s the strangest thing, for a long while, for years on end, I’m inclined to lose sight completely of my true self, and to slip with ease, so it seems, into someone else’s life; but then all of a sudden it is as if my own ascendant star, the real me, rises in my heart like a new moon and defeats the strange force. I could be completely contented, but once on one wondrous night an arcane sign passed through my hands and was imprinted deep in my heart; often that magical figure is asleep, unnoticeable – I mean it’s absent from my spirit – but then, all of a sudden, it wells up again like a poison and invades my every move. And once it has got hold of me all my thoughts and feelings are ruled by it, everything else is transformed, or rather engulfed, by its force. Just as a lunatic shrinks back in terror at the sight of water and the poison intensifies in his veins, so I am affected by all sharp-angled shapes, by every line, by every glimmer; everything in me wants to be free of that immanent presence and to hasten its delivery like a baby, and my spirit and body are riddled with fear. Just as the heart received it from a feeling in response to external stimuli, that sentient muscle writhes and wrestles to retransform it into an externally directed feeling just to be rid of it and at peace.’
‘It was an unlucky star,’ said the old man, ‘that pulled you away from us; you were born for a quiet life, your spirit was inclined to peacefulness and plants, but your impatience led you astray into the society of stones. The cliffs, the crooked crags with their sharp-edged shapes shattered your spirit and instilled in you the devastating hunger for metal. You should always have averted and so preserved yourself from the sight of the mountains, and that’s how I thought to raise you, but it was not to be. Your humility, your peace of mind, your childlike innocence were overwhelmed by stubbornness, wild ways and arrogance.’
‘No,’ said the son, ‘I remember very clearly that it was a plant that first introduced me to the misfortunes of the whole world, it’s since then that I have become aware of the moans and groans evident in all of nature every way you turn your head, if only you give heed to it; the plants, herbs, flowers and trees are all squirming with pain, consumed by a great wound; the corpses of splendid stone worlds that prevailed before them, they treat our eyes to a spectacle of the most revolting state of decay. Now I understand that this is what that root was trying to tell me with its guttural groans, it forgot itself in its pain and revealed everything to me. That’s why I find all green things so irritating, so much at odds with my life; they try to erase the image of that beloved figure from my heart and to win over my soul every spring with their twisted cadaverous pose. It’s unheard of and cunning how they pulled the wool over your eyes, old man, why they’ve taken possession of your soul. Just ask the stones, you’ll be surprised to hear what they have to say.’
The father looked at him a long time and had nothing more to say. They walked back home in silence and, just like his daughter-in-law, the old man was now deeply disturbed by his son’s jovial manner, since it seemed altogether out of character – as if another being, turning his body into a machine, played him awkwardly and badly.
It was time again for the harvest festival. The entire community went to church, and Elisabeth and the children likewise put on their Sunday best to attend the service; her husband also got ready to accompany her, but inexplicably turned around before they reached the door of the church and left the village lost in thought. He sat himself down on a nearby hill and gazed again at the smoking chimneys, listened to the sound of singing and the organ tones emanating from the church, and watched dressed-up children dancing and playing on the village green. ‘I’ve lost my life in a dream!’ he said to himself. ‘Years have gone by since I descended from this hill, and went to join the children who played here then and now sit seriously in church. I too went into that building, but Elisabeth is no longer the bright-eyed young girl she was, her youth has faded, I no longer seek out her gaze with the same longing I felt before.
I wilfully forsook a lofty eternal bliss for a temporal, fleeting fling with happiness.’
Wistful, he walked into the nearby woods and pressed on into the darkest shade. A terrible silence surrounded him, no breeze stirred in the leaves. At that very moment he saw a man in the distance approach; recognizing him as the stranger, he took fright; his first thought was that he would ask for his money back. As the figure came closer, he realized how wrong he had been, for the approaching profile disintegrated as he gazed upon it; a hideously ugly old woman came up to him, hobbling on a crutch, dressed in filthy rags, with a torn kerchief holding a few grey hairs in place. In a grating voice she addressed Christian and asked after his name and station in life; he replied in detail, whereupon he said: ‘But who are you?’
‘They call me the Wench of the Woods, and every child has heard tell of me. Have we never met?’ With these last words she turned around, and Christian thought he recognized the golden veil flitting among the treetops, the proud gait, the mighty build of her limbs. He wanted to run after her but he could find her no more.
At that very moment something glittering drew his gaze down to the green grass. He picked it up and saw that it was the magic tablet inlaid with colourful precious stones and with the image of the marvellous figure which he had lost many years ago. With a sudden burst, the figure and the bright lights sparked all his senses. He took tight hold of it to convince himself that he once again had it in his hands and hurried back to the village. He met his father. ‘See,’ he called to him, ‘the thing I so often told you about that I thought existed only in my dreams is now definitely and truly mine.’
The old man studied the tablet a long time and said: ‘My son, my heart shudders when I look at the outline of these stones and, pondering, sense the meaning of this strange syntax; see how coldly it sparkles, what gruesome looks these stones give, bloodthirsty like the red eye of the tiger. Throw away this inscription that makes you grow cold and gruesome yourself, and turns your heart to stone’:
See, the gentle blossoms bursting,
How from their own heart they rear,
And like children roused, the first thing
They will greet you with good cheer.
Peek-a-boo, their life’s a pleasure,
Turn their faces to the sun,
For her warm kiss is a treasure,
And more precious there is none.
For her gentle lips they pine,
Love and longing takes its toll;
Smiling once, now lie supine,
Withered, willingly grown old.
Nothing’s sweeter than to yield
To the lure of the loved one,
And in dying to reveal
That in fading we become.
Pressed and drained, it’s not yet spent:
The flower’s love still fills the air,
Thrilling others with its scent,
Though it isn’t even there.
Love’s a minstrel to man’s spirit,
Makes the heartstrings softly quaver,
And the soul says: Yes, I hear it,
All in life that there’s to savour:
Aching, longing to be near it.
‘There must still be marvellous, immeasurable treasures left to be dug out of the depths of the earth,’ the son replied. ‘Just to locate them, lift them out and make them mine! Just to press the earth to me like a beloved bride so that, her heart throbbing with love, she would gladly give up her most precious possession! The Wench of the Woods called out to me, I’m going to search for her. There’s an abandoned old mine shaft nearby dug centuries ago by a miner; maybe I’ll find her there!’
He rushed away. The old man tried in vain to hold him back, but his son soon disappeared from view. Several hours later, with considerable effort, the father reached the old mine; he saw the footprints pressed in the sand at the entrance and turned around in tears, convinced that his son made a mad dash in and drowned in the depth of the water that had seeped in over time.
From then on the father was despondent and in tears. The whole village mourned the passing of the young farmer, Elisabeth was inconsolable, the children wept and wailed. Six months later the old father died; Elisabeth’s parents followed soon thereafter, and she was obliged to manage the household alone. All the chores took her mind off her misery, raising the children and running the estate left her no time for worry and grief. After two years she decided to marry again; she exchanged vows with a spirited young man who had loved her since childhood. But soon things changed for the worse. Cattle died, hired hands and maids were derelict in their duty, barns filled with fruit burned to the ground, people who owed considerable debts disappeared with the money. Soon the landowner felt compelled to sell several fields and meadows; but a bad harvest and heavy overheads made matters even worse. There was little doubt but that the wondrously acquired money seemed to fly out of the window; in the meantime the family grew, and in their despair Elisabeth and her new husband became careless and negligent; he tried to distract himself with strong wine that made him sulky and irritable, and so Elisabeth often bemoaned her fate with bitter tears. And as their fortunes declined their friends in the village withdrew, such that within a few years she felt herself abandoned and only scraped by from week to week with the greatest effort.
All they had left were a few sheep and a cow that Elisabeth and the children often watched over themselves. So one day, as she sat in the pasture tending to her work, with Leanore at her side and a newborn baby nursing at her breast, she spotted in the distance a strange figure advancing towards her. It was a barefoot man in a torn coat, his face burnt dark brown from the sun and all but hidden by a long dishevelled beard; he wore no hat on his head, but had a wreath of green leaves woven in his hair that only added to the wildness and strangeness of his appearance. Bearing a heavy load in a tightly bound sack on his back, he walked leaning on the bough of a young fir tree.
Stepping closer, he set down his heavy load and gasped for air. He bid good day to the woman, who shrank back at his appearance; the girl clung to her mother. Once he had caught his breath he said: ‘I’ve come from an arduous trek through the bleakest mountains on earth, but it paid off, as I brought back the most precious treasures you could imagine or ever wish for. Look here and be amazed!’ Hereupon he opened the sack and emptied its contents; it was full of pebbles, as well as big hunks of quartz and other stones. ‘It’s just that these jewels haven’t yet been polished and filed down,’ he added, ‘that’s why they don’t dazzle the eye; the sparkling fire is still buried in their hearts, but all you’ve got to do is beat it out of them, scare them into letting down their guard, then you’ll see what stuff they’re made of.’ At these words, he picked up a hunk of rock and struck it hard against another, so that the sparks flew. ‘Did you see that sparkle?’ he cried out. ‘They’re all fire and flicker inside lightening the darkness with their laughter, but they won’t yet do it willingly.’ He painstakingly swept everything back into his sack and tied its cord tightly. ‘I know you, woman,’ he said wistfully, ‘you’re Elisabeth.’
The woman took fright. ‘How do you know my name?’ she asked with portentous trembling.
‘Dear God!’ said the poor unfortunate, ‘I’m Christian, who once came to you as a hunter, don’t you recognize me?’
Overcome by fear and profound pity, she did not know what to say. He fell into her arms and kissed her.
Elisabeth cried out: ‘God in heaven, my husband’s coming!’
‘Be still,’ he said, ‘I’m as good as dead to you; there in the forest my beauty, the mighty wench in the golden veil, is waiting for me. That’s my beloved child, Leanore. Come here, my dear little one, and give me a kiss, just one, so that I may once again feel your lips on mine, then I’ll be on my way.’
Leanore cried and clung to her mother, who, shaking with tears, half nudged her towards the wanderer, half held her back, and finally took her in her arms and pressed her to her breast. Then he quietly walked away,
and at the edge of the forest they saw him talking to the terrible Wench of the Woods.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked the husband upon finding mother and daughter both white in the face and trembling with tears. Neither could bring herself to reply.
But the poor unfortunate wanderer was never seen again.
St Cecilia or the Power of Music (A legend)
1810
Heinrich von Kleist
At the end of the sixteenth century, as the iconoclastic storm of destruction raged in the Netherlands, three brothers, young students in Wittenberg, met up in the city of Aachen with a fourth brother, himself engaged as a preacher in Antwerp. They sought to lay claim to an inheritance left them by an old uncle whom none of them knew, and since no one was there to meet them at the place where they were supposed to apply, they retired to an inn in town. After several days, which they spent sounding out the preacher on the curious incidents that had occurred in the Netherlands, it so happened that Corpus Christi Day was soon to be celebrated by the nuns in the Cloister of St Cecilia, which, at the time, was located just outside the gates of the city; so that, fired up by the revelry, their youth and the example of the Netherlanders, the four brothers decided to treat the city of Aachen to its own spectacle of destruction. That evening, the preacher, who had already led several such initiatives, gathered together a group of young merchants’ sons and students committed to the new religious teachings, all of whom spent the night at the inn carousing over wine and food, heaping curses on the papacy; and as soon as day broke over the ramparts of the city, they equipped themselves with pickaxes and other tools of destruction to carry out their business. They triumphantly agreed upon a signal, at the sounding of which they would start smashing the stained-glass windows decorated with biblical tales; and, certain of the large following they would find among the people, they resolved at the hour when the bells sounded in the cathedral not to leave a stone of the sanctuary intact. The abbess, who had, come daybreak, been warned by a friend of the impending danger to the cloister, sent word several times in vain to the imperial bailiff in charge of keeping the peace in the city, requesting a guard detail to protect the cloister; the officer – who was himself hostile to the papacy and, as such, at the very least a clandestine sympathizer with the new religious teachings – denied her request under the pretext that she was imagining things and that there was not the slightest risk of danger to the cloister. Meanwhile, the hour struck at which the service was to begin, and amidst fear and prayer, and with a dark foreboding of things to come, the nuns prepared themselves for mass. Their only protectors were a seventy-year-old cloister caretaker and a few armed porters who stood watch at the gates of the church. In such cloisters, as is common knowledge, the nuns, who are well trained in all sorts of instruments, play their own music; often – perhaps precisely on account of the feminine feel of this mysterious art form – with a precision, a mastery and a sensitivity not to be found in male orchestras. And, to the sisters’ twofold distress, their Kapellmeisterin, Sister Antonia, who usually conducted the orchestra, had fallen ill with a nervous fever several days before; such that, in addition to the danger posed by the four blasphemous brothers who had already been spotted, cloaked and ready, beside the columns outside the church, the cloister was all abuzz, worrying how the performance of a sacred musical work would come off in a seemly manner. The abbess, who on the previous evening had ordered that a stirring, age-old Italian mass composed by an anonymous master be presented – a work which the cloister orchestra had already performed on several occasions and to the finest effect, on account of its exceptional holiness and loveliness – was now more adamant than ever in her command, and once again sent word to Sister Antonia to find out how she was; but the nun who transmitted the message returned with the news that Sister Antonia lay unconscious in her bed and that it was altogether out of the question to think that she might direct the aforementioned work. Meanwhile, in the cathedral, where more than a hundred evil-doers of all classes and ages armed with hatchets and crowbars had assembled, the most unthinkable incidents had occurred; some of the porters stationed at the gates of the sanctuary had been rudely shoved around and the lone nuns who every now and then passed through the aisles engaged in some pious matter were treated to the sauciest and most shameless remarks; as a consequence of which the old caretaker hastened to the sacristy and, falling to his knees, begged the abbess to cancel the service and put herself under the protection of the commandant in the city. But the abbess was unwavering in her resolve that the prescribed service be celebrated in honour of God Almighty; she reminded him of his sworn duty to stand guard over the mass and the sacred festivities conducted in the cathedral; and since the bell had just tolled, she commanded the nuns, who stood trembling around her, to pick an oratorio, no matter which and of what quality, and to begin the service with it immediately.