An Old Heart Goes A-Journeying (3 page)

“For Herr Professor Gotthold Kittguss,” as large as life. The Professor forgot the precious manuscript beneath; he opened the letter, which was no more than a folded sheet of paper, read the opening words, started, read them again, looked toward the door (where the boy still stood), and then went on with the letter.

“Dear Godfather,” it ran. “There’s a saying in Unsadel that a Gau is a brute, but a Schlieker’s a crook. First I was beaten by the Gaus, and now the Schliekers are trying to rob me of my inheritance. You promised my dear father that I was going to be born at a wonderful time—won’t you come and look after me? Come quickly. Matthew vii, 7. Yours, Rosemarie.”

A postscript: “Whether you come or not, give Philip some money for food; it will take him two days to get back.”

Second postscript: “He won’t give you the letter unless you are the sort of person we want.”

“Good God!” cried Professor Kittguss, when he had grasped this incredible epistle, and he clapped his hands to his forehead with a truly dramatic gesture. “What on earth is all this? And what has it got to do with me?” He stared at the letter. He felt like a sleeper awakened from a pleasant dream only to find himself involved in
a worse one, and quite unaware whether he was asleep or awake.

“A Gau is a brute, but a Schlieker’s a crook,” he muttered. “Rosemarie—Philip—two days getting back—what is all this rigmarole? Philip, indeed!”

There was a sound near the door; he looked up, but the visitor had fled. The Professor jumped up as nimbly as a boy, ran to the door and shouted into the passage: “Frau Müller! Frau Müller!”

The door on to the staircase was open, and he thought he could hear footsteps clattering down. “That poor silly lad—I’ve got to give him some money!” he shouted excitedly to Frau Müller. His housekeeper eyed him in silence.

He controlled himself. “Philip!” he shouted down the stairs. “Philip! Wait till I get you some money. . . .”

The Professor blushed a little under Frau Müller’s gaze. “It will take him two days to get back,” he tried to explain, “and he’s starving. I noticed it when he was eating my barley sugar.”

“Your Bavarian maltose, Herr Professor!” said Frau Müller indignantly. “People like that,” she said, with all the contempt of the poor for those poorer still, “never starve.”

“Frau Müller,” said the Professor, raising his voice, “do you remember what is written in the seventh verse of the seventh chapter of St. Matthew?”

She made no reply, but gradually edged the agitated old gentleman back into his room.

“Ask, and it shall be given you: seek, and ye shall find: knock, and it shall be opened to you.”

He stood by his writing table, in that quiet and secluded
study, an old but still handsome man, at the moment a little excited.

And he said softly: “Someone has asked me: someone has sought me: and someone has knocked at my door. Frau Müller, tomorrow I leave for Unsadel.”

“Unsadel?” asked Frau Müller. “And where on earth is that?”

“I don’t know,” said the Professor. “But the people at the railway station will know. It is their business to know a thing like that.”

“The railway!” exclaimed Frau Müller, on the verge of tears. “Herr Professor, I have been with you for twenty-seven years and you have never traveled by railway.”

“That is of no consequence now,” said the Professor mildly. “You must not take too feminine a view of the case.”

“And your work,” cried Frau Müller, with a glance at the writing and now beginning to sob. “Your work, Herr Professor? I was so pleased—you were making such good progress lately.”

“My work,” said the Professor, rather taken aback, and followed her look toward the littered table. “Ah, yes, my work—have you been reading it? Do you think it’s good?”

“Good!” cried the too feminine Frau Müller. “You wrote a whole page every day last week!”

“My work . . .” said the Professor, a little mournfully. He wavered. But there lay the letter—no amount of thinking could get rid of that. He picked it up. “Yes,” he said firmly, “here we have it—Matthew vii, 7. I am called, and I must go.”

“But such a rapscallion, Herr Professor!” protested Frau Müller.

“My dear Widow Müller,” said Professor Gotthold Kittguss, once more his amiable and abstracted self, “it is generally recognized, and is moreover supported by many passages in Scripture, that God’s messengers and angels do not always appear on earth quite as we pictured them when we were children.”

And as Frau Müller was about to protest once more: “That will do, the matter is settled; I shall obey the call and start for Unsadel tomorrow morning.”

In which Professor Kittguss sees a fat farmer hanging from a tree, and a girl crying under a hedge

I
T WAS AN AFTERNOON
in early October, sunny and very still. From time to time the sound of the Professor’s footsteps on the sandy road scared a bird in the branches above his head, and as it fluttered off, a shower of red and yellow leaves floated noiselessly to the ground.

The old schoolmaster went on his way slowly, deep in thought. Now and again he stopped, put down his bag, wiped the sweat of this unwonted exertion off his forehead, and looked at his watch. He had been walking for nearly two hours, and at the station they had told him that it was a bare hour to Unsadel. And whenever he looked about him for any sign of habitation, he could see nothing but hedges, and through the occasional gates, nothing but an expanse of silent autumn fields. “Dear me,” sighed the Professor; but he was not ill-content. The still countryside and the remote blue heaven warmed his heart. “I certainly shan’t catch the evening train now. Well, well, no doubt I shall find somewhere
to spend the night in the village. And then I shall have the whole day tomorrow to settle all these matters properly.”

In what this process of “settlement” consisted, he had only the vaguest possible idea; indeed he had no idea at all—“But Rosemarie will tell me what to do. It must be something about her inheritance.”

“Dear me,” he sighed once again, picked up his bag and trudged on. The hedges seemed endless, and the lonely sandy road went on and on, sometimes turning to the right, and sometimes to the left. Now and again he came to a tall poplar or a willow; then the Professor would stop, observe the tree with a nod of approval, and slowly set himself in motion once more.

He had just realized that he had now been walking for two and a half hours, when a face suddenly appeared like a large round fruit through the hedge above his head, a rough red face with a shock of fair disheveled hair above it. The face glared at the Professor.

“My boy,” he asked, “how far is it to Unsadel?”

“You’re not to ask for Rosemarie, you’re to take a room at Paul Schlieker’s,” whispered the boy eagerly.

“My good boy!” cried the Professor, “do please wait. . . .”

But with a crackle of twigs the face had vanished.

The boy, good or not, had gone. The Professor trotted along to the next gate, but on the common behind the hedge he could see nothing but cattle, and a woolly sheepdog, that burst into a volley of barking. Not a sign of a boy—though the Professor would have welcomed some protection against the dog.

So he went on, in dull bewilderment. “I’m not to ask for anyone, but simply to take a room at Paul Schlieker’s. . . . But Schlieker’s a crook . . . what slanderous rubbish, it ought not to be said even in fun. . . .”

Suddenly the hedges came to an end. The countryside stretched away into the distance, and fields and meadows sloped gently down to a green lake. The farther shore was fringed with woods, now blazing in all the varied hues of autumn, and on this side lay the village, with roofs of red tiles or blackened thatch.

The Professor stepped out more briskly.

Just inside the village stood a tall and stately windmill, with its wings at rest. Stray chickens were pecking in the roadway, oblivious of the wayfarer; a flock of geese flapped across his path, cackling frantically; a cat, crouching motionless on the top of a fence, gazed spellbound at the Professor.

But not a single human being—Professor Kittguss peered through every window and into every yard—no, not one. . . . He could hear the horses shuffling in their stalls and the rattle of the cow-chains: but on that blessed weekday afternoon, not a human being was visible in house or yard or street or village.

He soon reached a substantial sort of house, with a broad and inviting flagged pathway leading up to the door, over which was written: “Otto Beier. Inn.”

With a sense of relief Professor Kittguss stepped into the dim passage, deciphered the inscription “Taproom” on one of the doors, knocked, and went in. A few tables, a counter, bottles behind it and glasses on it, a half-knitted stocking with a ball of wool on a green plush sofa—but not one human being.

Professor Kittguss waited, he walked up and down, he shuffled his feet, he cleared his throat, he called out, first gently and then in louder tones: “Er—if you please!—”

Nobody home.

He knocked at a door, he knocked again, he opened it cautiously, and peered into a large empty dance hall. Garlands of green paper, torn and dusty, hung from the ceiling, and on the stage stood a few derelict chairs—but not a single human being.

Shaking his head, the Professor knocked at a second door and entered a small gloomy room. On the bare stained wooden table stood a tureen with some dirty plates and spoons, as though they had been hurriedly laid down after a meal. Professor Kittguss looked round him, looked again, and called out; no one came. He bent over the tureen, and the smell of soup reminded him that since the early morning—since he had said good-by to Frau Müller in fact—he had eaten nothing. He was beginning to feel a little faint.

At the fourth door he knocked more briskly and went in. As he did so, an army of cockroaches scurried over the hearth and the dirty brick floor into their sheltering cracks.

One more door—and from its stone threshold the Professor surveyed a melancholy autumn garden, its grass trampled and unmown, iron tables piled together, and trees half-bare of foliage. But at the far end of it gleamed the great, green, lovely lake, with the beeches standing in golden glory and stately stillness along the farther shore. For a while the Professor looked on the scene, sighed and walked through the deserted village.

For the first time on his adventurous journey, for the first time for many, many years, a strange emotion stirred within him, a memory of his long-dead youth. At the sight of the silent countryside, with the desolate inn behind him, he had said to himself: “By what marvelous ways dost Thou lead Thy children, Lord.” And he thought of the silent study which he, now on the threshold of old age, had left at the bidding of so strange an angel, to visit an uncertain world on which, he believed, he had long ago turned his back.

Suddenly, with a gasp of relief, he heard a confused sound of voices: laughter, shouts, and cries. He stepped out more briskly, came to an open gate, and turned through it into a large farmyard in which the whole village appeared to be assembled. Everyone who could walk, or even crawl, stood there laughing, chattering, or waiting in expectant silence; old farmers and young farmhands, women with their arms akimbo under their blue chintz aprons, and sturdy lads in high boots. School children kept darting through the throng, and the girls clustered in little groups, with their heads together, and whispered. And all of them were looking so intently up at an ancient spreading lime tree in the center of the field that they did not notice the approaching stranger.

He looked up too, and was astonished to observe a thick beam like a seesaw attached to one of the topmost boughs of the tree. And from the seesaw dangled two large and ponderous wooden bowls. In one of the bowls swung a vast and corpulent farmer with a ruddy, genial countenance; the other and still lighter bowl was piled high with smoked brown sausages, rich black hams and long golden-brown sides of bacon.

“There you are—it’s not enough, it’s still not enough,” roared the fat farmer, choking and chuckling with glee. “I told you long ago, Lowising, that you’d have to clear the curing room this year.” He looked about him in triumph. “Aha, my boys and girls, you said last year I couldn’t get any fatter—but I have!—Lowising, run and get the ham off the five-hundred-pound sow; that’ll do the trick. Maxe, my boy, you go along with her and help.”