Tidings. Ernst Wiechert
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of the sheepfold was empty. Something colored was lying among the stones, and he picked it up. It was a child’s doll, or the remains of one. It was made of some coarse material, even the face. It had yellow eyes and one was torn. A tiny, yellow rag hung down from it. It looked as if a stone had hit it and as if it was running out.
Amadeus held the doll long in his hand, pondering what its name might be. Children always saved the most important items, he thought, in a fire or in any other emergency, while grown people always snatch up the most unimportant things.
He took the doll and put it in the farthest corner of the hearth, where the clay did not get warm. Its half-torn, yellow eyes, which the child was sure to have called golden, followed him now when he walked about in the room or picked anything up. So little could make up a home.
They had to carry on their backs everything with which the van was loaded, and it took them two days to do it. They also led up the lean horses. The gay, clear voice of Baron Erasmus was to be heard until late in the evening.
Then all became as quiet as it had been before. Christoph came in the morning and in the evening to the sheepfold to light a fire and to be at hand. Sometimes he was allowed to sit by the fire and Amadeus listened to him. Amadeus was not afraid of him. He seemed not to belong to this life anymore. He asked and required nothing. He was as one who got leave now and again from the underworld to sit with men and hold a chip of pinewood in his hand which he split with a big, old-fashioned knife. Even the knife looked as if it had been lost in the sand in pagan times.
Christoph did not speak of the days when they had been happy together. In his tales he went much further back, to the times of his father and grandfather, when something like serfdom still existed and when at the age of six he had started to polish the head harness of the carriage horses. His round Slav face became more and more absorbed in himself, and his bright blue eyes beamed with a light that did not come from the things of this earth but from the visions which were behind these things. His mouth had become a little twisted in his old age, and his lips drooped to the right where for a lifetime he had held his short pipe.
“Yes, the old families, Herr Baron,” he said, taking the pipe from his mouth to press the glowing tobacco down with his forefinger. “Where the pictures hung on the walls and the children grew up with the dead. So much happens in these old families, Herr Baron – and in those times, you know, everything was different from today. Life was not as nowadays when everything can happen in one way just as well as in another; no, what happened then had to happen just as it did. Our Heavenly Father still looked at it, you know. He stood above the roof at night and looked on, and then everything happened as he willed. Do you understand, Herr Baron?”
Amadeus understood very well.
“The masters were not always quiet, Herr Baron,” Christoph went on, lost in thought. “Some were wild and some were also hard. It is long ago, but my grandfather still remembered it. All of them, however wild, could be stirred.
“One of them gambled, you know. He gambled for ten years. And when the father of my grandfather stood with his sleigh and six horses in front of the house where the master was gambling, he did not know whether in that night the horses and he himself would be the stakes. At that time the masters even gambled away their men. At midnight, when inside the house the gamblers shouted and made a great noise, my great-grandfather peeled off one after another the rugs in which he had wrapped himself and went upstairs, whip in hand, as the baroness had ordered him to do. Then he stood behind the master in the golden hall, pulled him by the sleeve, and said, ‘Pray excuse me, sir, but the mistress is waiting.’
“The master did not look up from his cards and his gold. ‘Let her wait, Christoph,’ he said. ‘Back to the horses with you!’
“Then my great-grandfather went back to the horses.
“But after an hour he stood again in the hall, pulled his master by the sleeve, and said, ‘Pray excuse me, sir, the fields and the cattle are waiting.’
“The master did not look up. ‘Let them wait, Christoph,’ he said. ‘Back to the horses with you!’
“Then my great-grandfather went back to the horses.
“But after an hour he stood again in the hall, pulled his master by the gold-embroidered sleeve and said: ‘Pray excuse me, sir, but our Heavenly Father is waiting.’
“Then the master laid the cards down, stuffed his gold into his pocket, and got up. ‘Hold me by the belt, Christoph,’ he said, for at that time the masters wore belts round their coats, ‘and hold me fast so that I do not turn back.’
“Then they went out. My great-grandfather held his whip in his left hand, and with his right he led his master by the belt downstairs to the sleigh. That’s what they were like at that time, Herr Baron, do you understand?”
Amadeus understood that too.
Christoph took a glowing cinder out of the hearth with his fingers and put it on the tobacco in his pipe.
“And once,” Christoph went on, “it was in the early dawn, they saw a beggar standing on crutches at the roadside. He stretched out his hand. ‘Drive on, Christoph,’ called the master.
“But my great-grandfather stopped the six horses and waited.
“ ‘Drive on, Christoph,’ shouted the master and stood up in the sleigh.
“But my great-grandfather undid his leather belt, unbuttoned his wolfskin coat and took a coin out of his pocket and gave it to the beggar; ‘For Christ’s sake, brother,’ he said. Then he buttoned his coat again, buckled his belt, took up the reins and the whip and drove on. When they had been driving for a while the master said, ‘What did you say to him, Christoph?’
“ ‘I said to him “For Christ’s sake, brother,” Herr Baron.’
“ ‘Drive back, Christoph,’ commanded the master.
“And they turned around and found the beggar by the roadside, and the master poured all the gold he had won in the night into the beggar’s cap. It was so much that some of it fell over the rim into the snow.
“Yes, the old families,” concluded Christoph, and gazed into the fire, which was burning down on the hearth with a sighing note.
Christoph never said anything to show that he was worried about Baron Amadeus, and that his anxiety determined the choice of his stories. But when he got up and put the chips of pinewood on the hearth he sometimes said, “So it went with the masters formerly, Herr Baron. They could be aroused – and sometimes our Heavenly Father chose a simple hand . . .”
Amadeus liked to listen to him.
It was as if Christoph’s hands turned the globe and this continent sank down, so that others, strange ones, might rise above the horizon. And with this continent that sank down, the last years sank down too, yes, perhaps all his own life, and it seemed as if nothing were left but the long line of the generations, all that was common to them and encompassed them. As if the baron Amadeus were only an unnumbered page in the great book which gently opened by itself, and that the triptych was something nameless, just as the father who had suffered himself to be deceived. Nothing was left but the character of the family, and God leaned down over the old roof, now long fallen in, and looked at it. This family, the members of which could in bygone times be “aroused.”
Then Baron Amadeus remained sitting at the other side of the fire, his elbows propped on his knees while the last gleam from low flames fell on his idle hands, which he tried to warm at the golden embers. Only once before Christoph said goodbye he stopped by the baron, lost in thought, as if he were about to pluck his sleeve or to grasp his belt, and with his deep, kind old voice he said, “You poor, frozen master.”
But Amadeus did not answer.
Nor did he ask much; he only sat there waiting. Old people like to talk. Christoph had had neither wife nor child, but only the horses and his masters. The horses were lost, but the masters still existed, as well as the whip which he had saved. There was no other token of office for a coachman