“No!” said something inside me, “I stay here!”
And I stayed.
I shoved a box under the dormer-window, I pushed open the wooden shutter … and there! Before me lay the wide stretch in the blazing sunlight! My eyes were quite blind with it.
’Twas good up here and funny to see everything from so high up, so endlessly far! And the people were no bigger than tiny tadpoles!
Just under my dormer-window came a path, a white sand-path winding from behind the house and then running forwards to the horizon in a line straight as an arrow. It looked like a naked strip of ground, powdered white and showing up sharply, like a flat snake, in the middle of the green fields which, broken into their many-coloured squares, lay blinking in the sun.
This path was deserted, lonely, as though nor man nor beast had ever trodden it. It lay very near the house and I did not know it from up here; it looked now like a long strip of drab linen, which lay bleaching in a boundless meadow. And that again suited my loneliness so well! At last, I looked and saw nothing more. And that path! …
Slowly, overcome by that silent, restful idleness, I fell a-dreaming; and that path, that long, white path seemed to me to have become a part of my own being, something like a life that began over there, far away yonder in the clear blue, to end in the unknown, here, behind the gable-end, cut off at that fatal bend.
After long looking, I saw something, very far off; it came so slowly, so softly, like a thing that grows, and those two little black patches grew into two romping schoolboys, who, rolling and leaping along, came running down the white sand-path and, at last, disappeared in the bend behind the gable-end.
Then, for another long while, nothing more, nothing but sand, green and sunshine.
Later, ’twas three labourers, who came stepping up briskly, with their gear over their shoulders. Half-way up the path, they jumped across the ditch and went to work in the field. They toiled on, without looking up or round, toiled on till I got tired of watching and tired of those three stooping men and of seeing that gleaming steel flicker in the sun and go in and out of the earth.
When now ’twas mid-day and fiercely hot in my loft, my three labourers sat down behind a tree and ate their noonday meal.
I went to the loft-door and devoured my second crust of bread and took a fresh gulp of water.
Very calmly, without thinking, lame with the heat and with that old-man’s feeling still inside me, I went and sat at the window.
The three men worked on, always, without stopping.
And that went on, went on, until the evening! When ’twas nearly dark, they gathered up their tools, jumped over the ditch, walked down the path the way they had come and disappeared behind the gable-end.
Now it became deadly.
In the distance appeared a great black patch, which came slowly nearer and nearer. The patch turned into a lazy, slow-stepping ox, with a jolting, creaking waggon, in which sat a little old man who gazed stupidly in front of him into the dark distance. The cart dragged along wearily, creeping through the sand, and first the ox, then the little fellow, then the waggon disappeared behind the gable-end.
Now I felt something like fear and I shivered: the evening was coming so slowly, so sadly; and I dared not think of the night that was to follow. ’Twas the first time in my life that I fell earnestly a-thinking. So that path there became a life, a long-drawn-out, earnest life. … That was quite plain in my head; and those boys had rolled and tumbled along that path; next, those big men had burdensomely, most burdensomely turned over their bit of earth; and the ox and the little old fellow had joggled along it so piteously. … That life was so earnest and I had seen it all from so far, from the outside of it: I did nothing, I took no part in it and yet I lived … and must also one day go along that path!
And how?
Getting up in the morning, eating, playing, going to school, misbehaving, playing, eating, sleeping. …
The mist rose out of the fields and I saw nothing more.
I jumped off my box, begged father’s pardon and crept into bed.
Never again was I shut up in the loft.
II. IN EARLY WINTER
First the leaves had become pale, deathly pale; later they turned yellow-brown; and then they went fluttering and flickering, so wearily, so slackly, like the wings of dying birds; and, one after the other, they began to fall, dancing gently downwards, in eddies. They whirled in the air, were carried on by the wind and at last fell dead and settled somewhere in the mud.
Not a living thing was to be seen and the cottages that sat huddled close to the ground remained fast shut; the smoke from the chimneys alone still gave a sign of life.
The green drove now stood bare and bleak: two rows of straight trunks which grew less and faded away in the blue mist.
Yonder comes something creeping up: a shapeless thing, like two little black stripes, with something else; and it approaches. …
At last and at length, out of those little stripes, appear a man and a wife; and, out of the other thing, a barrel-organ on a cart, with a dog between the wheels.
It all looked the worse for wear. The little fellow went bent between the shafts and tugged; the little old woman’s lean arms pushed against the organ-case; and the wheeled thing jolted on like that over the cart-ruts, along the drove and through the wide gate of an honest homestead.
A flight of black crows sailed across the sky. The wind soughed through the naked tree-tops; the mist rose and the world thinned away in a bluey haze; this all vanished and slowly it became dark black night.
Man, woman and dog, they crept, all three, high into the loft and deep into the hay; and they dozed away, like all else outside them and around. Warm they lay there! And dream they did, of the cold, of the dark and of the sad moaning wind!
At early morning, before it was bright day, they were on the tramp, over the fallow fields, and drowned in a huge sea of thick blue mist. They pulled for all they could: the little fellow in the shafts, the little old woman behind the cart and the dog, with his head to the ground, for the road’s sake.
A red glow broke in the east and a new day brightened. ’Twas all white, snow-white, as if the blue mist had bleached, melted and stuck fast on the black fields, on the half-withered autumn fruits and on the dark fretwork of the trees. Great drops dripped from the boughs.
From under the peak of his cap, the fellow peered into the distance with his one eye, and he saw a church and houses. They went that way.
’Twas low-roofed cottages they saw, all covered with hoar-frost; here and there stood one alone and then a whole little row, crowded close together: a street.
They were in the village.
It was lone and still, like a cloister, with here a little woman who, tucked into her hooded cloak, crept along the houses to the church; there a smith who hammered … and the little church-bell, which tinkled over the house-tops.
They stopped. The dog sat down to look. The little fellow threw off his shoulder-strap, pulled his cap down lower and felt under the red-brown organ-cloth for the handle. He gave a look at the houses that stood before him, pinched his sunken mouth, wiped the seam of his sleeve over his face and started grinding. Half-numbed sounds came trickling into the chill street from under the organ-cloth: a sad—once, perhaps, dance-provoking—tune, which now, false, dragging and twisted out of shape, was like a muddled crawling of sounds all jumbled up together; some came too soon, the others too