The Wine-ghosts of Bremen. Вильгельм Гауф
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for Roland, he is still in the marketplace, a wonderful fourteenth-century stone figure, nearly twenty feet high, not standing on a pillar, but simply on a pedestal about two feet from the ground. He would certainly find it remarkably difficult to sit down, even on a cask, for he has iron spikes to his knees, which would make him extremely uncomfortable if he bent them. He did not bow his head to me as I went away as he did to Hauff, which I felt deeply. It is generally believed that he only bows his head to those departing visitors who have had enough Nierstein to appreciate the compliment.
THE WINE-GHOSTS OF BREMEN
'Come, come, good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used.'–Othello, ii. 3.
'There's nothing to be done with the fellow,' I heard them say, as they stumped down the stairs; 'nine o'clock and he is going to doze away his evening like a dormouse. He wouldn't have been like that four years ago.' They were not far wrong from their point of view, good fellows; for this evening there was to be a most brilliant musical tea and muffin fight with dancing and recitation, and these gentlemen had come to invite me (who was a stranger to the High Life of Bremen) to go with them. But I did not feel up to it. Some one, whom I had come to Bremen on purpose to visit, was not to be there, and what's the use of going anywhere where Some one isn't? Besides, I knew I should have to sing if I went, and I didn't choose to sing if she wasn't to be there to hear me. I should only spoil all their fun by looking sulky. I preferred to let them curse me for a dull dog for a few minutes on the steps, rather than let them bore themselves from nine to one in talking to my body only, while my soul would be whole streets off wandering about in the neighbourhood of the Frauenkirche.
It wasn't sleepiness though. I am not a habitual dormouse, and don't like being called one. No, I meant to be thoroughly awake that night, and one of my friends–it was you, Hermann–said as much when he got outside. 'He didn't look sleepy,' I heard him say, 'with those bright eyes of his. But he looked like a man who had been drinking either too much or too little, which probably means that he is going to make a night of it with the bottle, and alone.'
Prophetic soul! Did you know that my eyes were sparkling yet proleptically with the thought of old Rhenish? You didn't know that I had a permit from their High Mightinesses to greet my Lady Rose and the Twelve Apostles. And you certainly didn't know that it was my 'Retreat.'1
In my opinion the habit which I inherit from my grandfather of blazing, so to speak, the tree of life here and there with a notch, and spending a quiet day of meditation over each notch, is not a bad one. To keep the ordinary festivals of the Church only is hardly sufficient; one becomes commonplace, and one's thoughts are too apt to become commonplace on such days. But let the soul that keeps an anniversary of its own making keep it alone; look inwards for a few hours in the year instead of always outwards; sit down at the long table d'hôte of memory, people it with the shadows of the past, and then set to and make out the bill conscientiously. Such days as these my grandfather always kept, and called his 'retreats.' He didn't prepare a banquet for his friends, or pass the time in festivity at all; he simply sat down and feasted his own soul and talked to her in that inner chamber which she had occupied for five-and-seventy years. Even now I can trace, long as it is since the dear old man was laid in the churchyard, the marked passages in his Elzevir Horace which he always read on such days; and as I read, I can see his large blue eyes wandering thoughtfully over the yellow leaves of memory's book. He takes up his pen. Slowly and hesitatingly he draws the black cross beneath the name of some dear departed friend. 'The master is keeping his Retreat,' whispered the servants to us, as we grandchildren were running gaily and noisily up the stairs; and we repeated the words to each other, and imagined that he was making himself Christmas presents, and wondered how he managed to light up his own Christmas tree. And we were not far wrong. They were the tapers of affection that he was kindling upon the tree of Unforgetfulness, each taper the symbol of happy hours of a long life. And when his hours of solitude were passed, and we were admitted in the evening, he sat still and quiet in his chair as if he rejoiced like a child in the Heaven-sent Christmas gifts of the past.
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