The Bachelors Read online

  ADALBERT STIFTER

  THE BACHELORS

  Translated from the German by

  David Bryer

  Contents

  Title Page

  I: CHALK AND CHEESE

  II: HARMONY

  III: PARTING

  IV: THE JOURNEY

  V: ISLAND SOJOURN

  VI: RETURN

  VII: CONCLUSION

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  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  I

  CHALK AND CHEESE

  ON A BEAUTIFUL GREEN hill-slope, where trees grew and nightingales sang, several young men were frolicking and cavorting, as young men do who stand but barely on the threshold of their lives. A dazzling landscape spread out all around them. The shadows of clouds flitted across, and looking up from down below on the plain were the towers and clusters of houses of a large town.

  One of these youths cried out: “One thing is now absolutely certain, today and forever—I’ll never marry.”

  The one who said this was a slim lad with soft, wistful eyes. The others paid this scant attention; several laughed, broke off branches, hurled them at each other and continued on their way.

  “Hey, who’s going to get married, anyway,” one of them said, “tied to the stupid apron-strings of a woman and sitting perched like a bird in a cage?”

  “All right, you idiot, but what about dancing, falling in love, getting embarrassed and going red in the face, eh?” shouted another, and again laughter rang out.

  “No girl would have you anyway.”

  “Nor you.”

  “So what?”

  The next words could no longer be heard. Boisterous shouts came back from amidst the tree trunks and then nothing, for the young men were already going up the steep stretch that led away and up from the clearing, as could be seen from the swaying of the bushes. They strode energetically forwards in the dazzling sunlight; all around them the branches were coming into leaf, and on their cheeks and in their eyes shone a total and unshakable confidence in the world. Round about them lay Spring, as inexperienced and confident as they. The young man who had spoken of his decision not to wed had said nothing more on the subject and it had been forgotten.

  A fresh burst of chatter and lively exchange flowed from their ready tongues. They talked first about everything, and often all at the same time. Then they talked of the loftiest things, and next of the most profound, quickly exhausting both subjects. Then it’s the turn of state affairs. Boundless freedom, justice of the highest order and the most limitless tolerance are to reign in the land, such is the recommendation. Whoever is opposed to this will be struck down and brought to heel. The country’s foes must be annihilated and then round the brows of the heroes glory will shine forth. While they were speaking of—in their opinion—great things, around about them only little things—also in their opinion—were happening: everywhere the bushes were turning green, the brooding earth was germinating and beginning to play with her first little Spring creatures, as one might with jewels.

  After this they sing a song, then chase each other, push each other into the ditch or the bushes, cut switches and sticks, and in the process climb ever higher up the hillside and above the dwelling-places of men.

  We must remark at this point what a puzzling, indescribable, mysterious and fascinating thing the future is, before it becomes our present—and when it has, how quickly it rushes by, slipping through our fingers—and then how delineated it lies there as the past, spent and insubstantial! All these young men are storming their way into this future, seemingly unable to wait for it. One of them boasts of things and of pleasures above his years, the other affects an ennui, as if he had already drained life to the dregs, while the third parrots expressions heard at his father’s house from the lips of older men and greybeards. Then they snatch at a passing butterfly and find a brightly coloured stone on the path.

  They toil on up ever higher and higher. Up by the edge of the wood they look back down at the town. Of all the various houses and buildings they can see, they take bets as to which ones are which. Then they press on into the shadows of the beeches.

  The ground is almost level in the wood. Once out of it, however, bright meadows planted with fruit trees drop down into a valley that quietly and secretly winds around the overarching mountains, down from which tumble two sparkling, glassy streams. The waters ripple happily over the polished pebbles past thickly-growing orchards, garden fences and houses, and from there back into the vineyards. And all this is so quiet that often the crowing of the cock or the single stroke of the church tower bell can be heard carried on the clear afternoon breeze. The valley is seldom visited by townsfolk and none has yet erected their summer holiday house there.

  Our friends, however, run rather than walk across and down the meadow into this gently suspended cradle of a valley. Noisily they descend to the garden allotments, cross the first plank bridge, then the second, walk alongside the water’s edge and finally barge their way into a garden abounding in elder, nut and lime trees. It is the garden of an inn-house. Here they cluster round one of the tables, its legs like all the others hidden in grass, with their nailed-down tops on which are displayed carved hearts and the names of those who had sat at the table long before. Each of them ordered what he wanted for lunch. When they had downed this, they played for a while with a poodle that was in the garden, paid the bill and then headed off. They walked through the entrance of the valley and into a broader one where a river flowed. On reaching this, they took a small boat that was moored up and, in their naivety, rowed across to a spot known to be dangerous. Women who happened to be passing were horrified when they saw the young people rowing there. On the other side of the river they hired a man to row the boat back again and tie it up at the place from where they had taken it.

  Then they pressed on through reed-covered water-meadows until they reached a causeway over which a road ran and where a tavern stood. They hired an open carriage from the landlord in order to drive back into town along what was now the opposite side of the river. They flew past meadows, thickets, fields, public parks, gardens and houses until they reached the fringes of town, where they got out. On their arrival the sun, which had been such a friendly companion to them the whole day, was hanging like a glowing, fading ball on the far horizon. When it had set, the hills on which they had sported in the morning looked to the friends like a plain blue band rising up against the yellow evening sky.

  They then walked towards the town and its dusty streets now fading into dusk. At a certain place they went their separate ways, bidding each other loud and cheerful farewells.

  “Goodbye,” said one.

  “Goodbye,” replied the other.

  “Goodnight—my greetings to Rosina.”

  “Goodnight—my greetings to August and Theobald tomorrow.”

  “And mine to Karl and Lothar.”

  More names were mentioned, for the young have many friends and every day new ones knock on the door. They parted. Two of them took the selfsame way and the one said to the other: “Now you can stay the night at my place, Victor, and leave tomorrow as early as you like—Is it really true that you don’t want to marry?”

  “I tell you straight,” replied the young man he had addressed, “I most definitely won’t marry and that I’m very unhappy.”

  But his eyes were so bright when he said this and the lips so young over which these words lightly passed.

  The two friends walked along the street a little further and then turned into a familiar house, up two floors and past rooms filled with lights and people.

  They came into a solitary room.

  “There, Victor,” said the other, “I’ve had a bed set up next to mine, so that you can
have a good night’s rest. My sister Rosina will send us up some food—we can stay here and enjoy ourselves. That was a heavenly day and I really don’t want to spend the last part of it in company. I’ve already told Mother that—is that all right with you, Victor?”

  “Of course,” he answered, “it’s very boring at your father’s table when there’s such a long delay between courses, during which he holds forth so much. But tomorrow, Ferdinand, there’s no two ways about it but I must be off at first light.”

  “As soon as you want,” replied Ferdinand. “You know where the house-key is kept, hung up inside that recess in the entrance.”

  During this conversation they began to undress and take off their cumbersome, dirty boots. One item of clothing was put here, another there. A servant brought lights and a maid a dinner tray generously laden with food. They bolted it all down indiscriminately. Then they looked out first of the one then the other window, walked around the room, examined the presents that Ferdinand had received only the day before, counted the red sunset clouds, undressed fully and got into bed, where they continued talking, but before long neither of them was capable either of talking or thinking, as they were both fast asleep.

  The same may have been the case with the others who had shared with them the day’s same pleasures.

  While these young lads had been enjoying this day in such a way, something different had been happening in another place. An old man had spent the day sitting in the sun on the bench in front of his house. Far from the green, wooded spot where the nightingales sang and where the young men had laughed so happily, and behind the shining blue mountains that bordered the view, there lay an island on which this house stood. The old man sat by the house and trembled at the thought of dying. You might have been able to see him sitting there for many years now, in the unlikely event of his granting anyone permission to look at him there. Since he had never married, no old female companion had sat with him that day on the bench, nor in all the other places he may have been before he acquired his island house; never had he had the company of a wife. He had never had children, never been pestered or delighted by them, and so none hovered there in the shadow he cast from the bench onto the sand. It was very silent in the house and, whenever he chanced to go in, he locked the door himself, and whenever he came out, it was he again who opened it. While the youngsters had been toiling up their hillside surrounded by teeming life and intense happiness, he had been sitting on his bench, looking at the spring flowers tied to their stakes, and the barren air and the sunlight had played vainly about him. When, at the end of the day, the youngsters had collapsed into bed and were sunk in slumber, he, too, was lying in bed in a well-guarded room and squeezing his eyes shut in order to get to sleep.

  And so it was that, under its cool mantle of stars, this same night descended, indifferent as to whether there were young hearts who rejoiced at the day gone by, without having ever given one thought to death as if it didn’t exist, or as to whether there was an old man who lived in fear of a violent shortening of his life and who, however, was once again one day nearer that moment.

  II

  HARMONY

  WHEN THE NEXT DAY’S first pale light began to dawn, Victor was already on his way, his footsteps echoing in the still deserted streets of the town. There was not a soul to be seen at first; then he started to encounter many a grumpy, half-asleep figure, obliged to begin work early, while the distant but growing rattle of carts signalled the first deliveries of provisions to the large and needy town. He made his way to the town gates. Once through these he was greeted by the cool and damp green of the fields. The first sliver of the sun was showing at the edge of the world and the tips of the wet grass were afire with green and red. The larks were warbling joyfully in the air, while the nearby town, normally so noisy, was still almost completely silent.

  When he felt he was well beyond the walls of the town, he immediately struck a course through the fields towards that green and wooded spot of which we have already spoken, where the day before the nightingales had been singing and the young men had been gallivanting about. This he reached after walking for nearly two hours. From there he took the same route as he had the day before with his friends. He climbed the steep hillside with the bushes, without looking about him, pressed on under the trees, hurried on and then climbed down through the meadow with the fruit trees into the valley earlier described as so quiet and where the two sparkling streams flowed.

  When he reached the bottom of the valley, he crossed the first bridge; only today, as if in greeting, he looked down for a while at the shiny pebbles over which the water was rippling. Then he crossed the second bridge and walked along by the water. But today he didn’t go as far as the inn-house garden where they had eaten the day before but turned off much earlier at a place where a large elder bush stood dangling its branches and roots in the water. There he left the path and walked in among the elders and bushes. There was a garden fence, which had acquired its ash-grey colour from countless bouts of rain and sunshine, and in this fence there was a little gate. Victor opened this and went in. Here there was a garden and, a little way off, the long white wall of a low house, against which elder bushes and fruit trees stood out in relief. The house had sparkling clean windows and, behind these, white curtains were hanging peacefully.

  Victor walked along the edge of the bushes towards the house. When he had reached the sandy clearing in front of the house, on which stood the well and an ancient apple tree, against which stakes and a variety of other things were leaning, he was greeted with lots of tail-wagging by an old Pomeranian dog. The house’s other neighbours, some equally cheerful chickens, continued scratching unperturbed under the apple-tree. He entered the house, crunching across the sand of the entrance hall and into the living-room, in which there was a clean, polished floor.

  Alone in the room was an old woman, who had just opened a window and was busy wiping down the white-washed tables, chairs and cupboards, and rearranging things that had probably got out of place the evening before. Distracted from her work by the sound of the young man coming in, she turned her face towards him, the face of an old but beautiful woman, something so rarely seen. Its various pastel shades of colour were soft and each one of the countless little wrinkles bespoke kindliness and warmth. Around all these wrinkles were the further innumerable wrinkles of a snow-white, crimped bonnet. On each cheek there was a delicate blush of red.

  “There you are already, Victor,” she said. “I’ve forgotten to keep the milk warm again. Everything’s by the fire, but that will have gone out. If you wait, I’ll get it going again with the billows.”

  “I’m not hungry, Mother,” said Victor. “Before I set off from Ferdinand’s, I ate two cold slices of what was left over from supper last night.”

  “But you must be hungry,” replied the woman. “You’ve been walking for four hours in the morning air and then through the damp woods.”

  “It’s not that far over the meadows.”

  “Yes, because you always think while you’re walking that your feet will hold out forever—but they don’t—and you don’t notice how tired you’re getting—but once you’ve sat down for a while, then your feet will hurt.”

  She didn’t say anything further but went out into the kitchen. Victor, meanwhile, sat down on a chair.

  When she came in again she said, “Are you tired?”

  “No,” he replied.

  “You soon will be. Dog-tired. Wait a bit—everything will be warmed through in a moment.”

  Victor gave no reply but, bending down low towards the dog, which had come in with him, he stroked its soft, long fur with the flat of his hand. The animal responded equally affectionately by sitting upright and was now fixedly gazing into his eyes. He was stroking it in the same place and looking at this same place all the time, as if his heart was deeply moved.

  The old woman continued meanwhile with her housework. She was very diligent. Whenever she couldn’t reach the dust, she wou
ld go on tiptoe in order to remove the unwelcome visitor. In so doing she took good care of the oldest and most useless of things: on one of the cupboards lay an old child’s toy that hadn’t been used for a long while now and perhaps never would be again—it was a little whistle, part of which was round and hollow, and in this were things that rattled; she wiped it clean all over and put it back.

  “But why don’t you say anything?” she said suddenly, appearing to notice the silence that reigned all around.

  “Because all the enjoyment’s gone out of my life,” Victor replied.

  At this the woman didn’t say a word, not one syllable, but continued with her wiping down and her periodic shaking out of the cloth at the open window.

  After a while she said, “I’ve put out the suitcase and boxes upstairs for you. As you were out and about yesterday, I spent the whole day at it. I’ve laid out your clothes all together as they should be packed in the suitcase. The linen, too, which has been mended, is lying next to them. You’ll have to attend to the books yourself, and also to what you’re thinking of putting in the knapsack. I’ve bought you a suitcase of fine soft leather, the sort you once said you liked so much. But where are you going, Victor?”

  “To pack.”

  “Good heavens, child, you haven’t eaten yet. Wait a moment. It’ll certainly be warm by now.”

  Victor waited. She went out and returned with two saucepans, a bowl, and cup and a white roll, all on a round, clean, brass-rimmed tray. She set this down, poured out the milk, tasted it to see that it was good and properly warm and then pushed the whole tray in front of the boy, leaving it to the aroma of all this to entice him or not. And in fact her experience didn’t let her down, for the boy, who began to taste only a little at first, finally sat down again and ate with all the pleasure and gusto so characteristic of youth.

  Meanwhile she slowly brought her work to an end and, putting away her cleaning cloths, cast the occasional glance towards him, smiling warmly. When he had eventually polished off everything she had brought him, she gave what little remained to the dog and carried the crockery back into the kitchen for it to be washed up by the maid when she got back home, for the girl had gone down to the church square in the valley to buy the various things needed for that day.