Page:The Masses, Volume 1, Number 2.pdf/5

 

TELL you, gentlemen, it's beastly, it's disgusting to stand beside an old friend's grave, his open grave.

You stand there with your feet deep in the freshly dug earth, twirling your mustache and looking stupid, while you feel like howling the soul out of your body.

He was dead—there was no helping that.

In him was lost the greatest genius for concocting and mixing punches, grogs, cobblers and hot and cold bowls. I tell you, gentlemen, when you went walking in the country with him and he began to draw the air in through his nose in his peculiar fashion, you might feel sure he had just gotten a new idea for a bowl. From the mere smell of some weed or other, he knew the sorts of wine that had to be poured over it to bring into being something that had never before existed.

Altogether he was a good fellow, and in all the years we sat opposite each other, evening after evening—either he came to me at Ilgenstein, or I rode over to him at Döbeln—time never hung heavy.

If only it hadn't been for his eternal marriage schemes. That was his weak side. I mean so far as I was concerned. Because for himself—"Good Lord," he'd say, "I'm just waiting for that vile water to creep up to my heart, then I'll slide off into eternity."

And now it had come to that—he was gone—he lay there in his black coffin, and I felt like tapping on the lid and saying:

"Pütz, don't play dirty tricks—come out—why, what'll become of our piquet to-day?"

Nothing to laugh at, gentlemen. Habit is the most violent passion. And the number of persons ruined every year by having their habits interrupted are never sung in song or epic, to quote my old friend Uhland.

Such weather! I wouldn't send a clog out in such weather. It rained and hailed and blew all at once. Some of the gentlemen wore mackintoshes, and the water ran down them in rivulets. And it ran down their cheeks and into their beards—perhaps a few tears, too—because he left no enemies, not he.

There was only one chief mourner—what the world calls chief mourner—his son, a dragoon of the Guards in Berlin. Lothar was his name. He had come from Berlin on the day of his father's death, and he behaved like a good son, kissed his father's hands, wept much, thanked me gratefully, and did a dreadful lot of ordering about—a lieutenant, you know—when all of a sudden—well, I was there—and we had arranged everything.

As I looked from the corner of my eyes at the handsome fellow standing there, manfully choking down his tears, my old friend's words occurred to me, what he had said the day before he died.

"Hanckel," he said, "take pity on me in my grave. Don't forsake my boy."

As I said, those words of his occurred to me, and when the pastor beckoned to me to come throw the three handfuls of earth in the grave, I silently sent a vow along with them: "I will not forsake him, old fellow. Amen."

Everything has an end. The gravediggers had made a sort of mound of the mud, and laid the wreaths on top, since there were no women at the funeral—the neighbors took leave, and the only ones that remained were the pastor, Lothar, and myself.

The boy stood there like a block of stone, staring at the mound as if to dig it up again with his eyes, and the wind blew the collar of his riding coat about his ears.

The pastor tapped him gently on his shoulder, and said:

"Baron, will you pardon an old man one word more"

But I beckoned to him to step aside.

"Just go home, little minister," I said, "and get your wife to give you a glass of good hot punch. I fancy it's a bit draughty in that silk vestment of yours."

"Hee, hee!" he said, and grinned quite slyly. "That's the way it looks, but I wear my overcoat underneath."

"Never mind," I said. "Go home. I'll look out for the boy. I know better than you where the shoe pinches him."

So then he left us alone.

"Well, my boy," I said "that won't make him come back to life again. Come home, and if you want I'll sleep at your house to-night."

"Never mind, uncle," he said—he called me uncle because I had once been called uncle in a joke. His face was hard and dogged and his looks seemed to say, "Why do you bother me in my grief?"

"But maybe we can talk over business?" I asked.

That silenced him.

You know what an empty house after a funeral is, gentlemen. When you come back from the cemetery, the smell of the coffin still clings, and the smell of fading flowers.

Ghastly!

My sister, to be sure, who kept house for me then—the dear good soul has been dead, too, these many years—had had things put into some order, the bier removed, and so on—but not much could be done in such a hurry. 