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Various - Famous Stories Every Child Should Know

V >> Various >> Famous Stories Every Child Should Know




To the children the stove was a household god. In summer they laid a
mat of fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up with green boughs
and the numberless beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol country. In
winter all their joys centred in it, and scampering home from school
over the ice and snow they were happy, knowing that they would soon be
cracking nuts or roasting chestnuts in the broad ardent glow of its
noble tower, which rose eight feet high above them with all its spires
and pinnacles and crowns.

Once a travelling peddler had told them that the letters on it meant
Augustin Hirschvogel, and that Hirschvogel had been a great German
potter and painter, like his father before him, in the art-sanctified
city of Nuernberg, and had made many such stoves, that were all
miracles of beauty and of workmanship, putting all his heart and his
soul and his faith into his labours, as the men of those earlier ages
did, and thinking but little of gold or praise.

An old trader, too, who sold curiosities not far from the church, had
told August a little more about the brave family of Hirschvogel, whose
houses can be seen in Nuernberg to this day; of old Veit, the first of
them, who painted the Gothic windows of St. Sebald with the marriage
of the Margravine; of his sons and of his grandsons, potters,
painters, engravers all, and chief of them great Augustin, the Luca
della Robbia of the North. And August's imagination, always quick,
had made a living personage out of these few records, and saw
Hirschvogel as though he were in the flesh walking up and down the
Maximilian-Strass in his visit to Innspruck, and maturing beautiful
things in his brain as he stood on the bridge and gazed on the
emerald-green flood of the Inn.

So the stove had got to be called Hirschvogel in the family, as if it
were a living creature, and little August was very proud because he
had been named after that famous old dead German who had had the
genius to make so glorious a thing. All the children loved the stove,
but with August the love of it was a passion; and in his secret heart
he used to say to himself, "When I am a man, I will make just such
things too, and then I will set Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a
house that I will build myself in Innspruck just outside the gates,
where the chestnuts are, by the river: that is what I will do when I
am a man."

For August, a salt-baker's son and a little cow-keeper when he was
anything, was a dreamer of dreams, and when he was upon the high Alps
with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky around him, was quite
certain that he would live for greater things than driving the herds
up when the springtide came among the blue sea of gentians, or toiling
down in the town with wood and with timber as his father and
grandfather did every day of their lives. He was a strong and healthy
little fellow, fed on the free mountain air, and he was very happy,
and loved his family devotedly, and was as active as a squirrel and as
playful as a hare; but he kept his thoughts to himself, and some of
them went a very long way for a little boy who was only one among
many, and to whom nobody had ever paid any attention except to teach
him his letters and tell him to fear God. August in winter was only a
little, hungry schoolboy, trotting to be catechised by the priest, or
to bring the loaves from the bake-house, or to carry his father's
boots to the cobbler; and in summer he was only one of hundreds of
cow-boys, who drove the poor, half-blind, blinking, stumbling cattle,
ringing their throat-bells, out into the sweet intoxication of the
sudden sunlight, and lived up with them in the heights among the
Alpine roses, with only the clouds and the snow-summits near. But he
was always thinking, thinking, thinking, for all that; and under his
little sheepskin winter coat and his rough hempen summer shirt his
heart had as much courage in it as Hofer's ever had--great Hofer, who
is a household word in all the Innthal, and whom August always
reverently remembered when he went to the city of Innspruck and ran
out by the foaming water-mill and under the wooded height of Berg
Isel.

August lay now in the warmth of the stove and told the children
stories, his own little brown face growing red with excitement as his
imagination glowed to fever heat. That human being on the panels, who
was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, as a boy playing among flowers,
as a lover sighing under a casement, as a soldier in the midst of
strife, as a father with children round him, as a weary, old, blind
man on crutches, and, lastly, as a ransomed soul raised up by angels,
had always had the most intense interest for August, and he had made,
not one history for him, but a thousand; he seldom told them the same
tale twice. He had never seen a story-book in his life; his primer and
his mass-book were all the volumes he had. But nature had given him
Fancy, and she is a good fairy that makes up for the want of very many
things! only, alas! her wings are so very soon broken, poor thing, and
then she is of no use at all.

"It is time for you all to go to bed, children," said Dorothea,
looking up from her spinning. "Father is very late to-night; you must
not sit up for him."

"Oh, five minutes more, dear Dorothea!" they pleaded; and little rosy
and golden Ermengilda climbed up into her lap. "Hirschvogel is so
warm, the beds are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell us another
tale, August?"

"No," cried August, whose face had lost its light, now that his story
had come to an end, and who sat serious, with his hands clasped on his
knees, gazing on to the luminous arabesques of the stove.

"It is only a week to Christmas," he said, suddenly.

"Grandmother's big cakes!" chuckled little Christof, who was five
years old, and thought Christmas meant a big cake and nothing else.

"What will Santa Claus find for 'Gilda if she be good?" murmured
Dorothea over the child's sunny head; for, however hard poverty might
pinch, it could never pinch so tightly that Dorothea would not find
some wooden toy and some rosy apples to put in her little sister's
socks.

"Father Max has promised me a big goose, because I saved the calf's
life in June," said August; it was the twentieth time he had told them
so that month, he was so proud of it.

"And Aunt Maila will be sure to send us wine and honey and a barrel of
flour; she always does," said Albrecht. Their aunt Maila had a chalet
and a little farm over on the green slopes toward Dorf Ampas.

"I shall go up into the woods and get Hirschvogel's crown," said
August; they always crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas with pine boughs
and ivy and mountain-berries. The heat soon withered the crown; but it
was part of the religion of the day to them, as much so as it was to
cross themselves in church and raise their voices in the "O Salutaris
Hostia."

And they fell chatting of all they would do on the Christmas night,
and one little voice piped loud against another's, and they were as
happy as though their stockings would be full of golden purses and
jewelled toys, and the big goose in the soup-pot seemed to them such a
meal as kings would envy.

In the midst of their chatter and laughter a blast of frozen air and a
spray of driven snow struck like ice through the room, and reached
them even in the warmth of the old wolfskins and the great stove. It
was the door which had opened and let in the cold; it was their father
who had come home.

The younger children ran joyous to meet him. Dorothea pushed the one
wooden arm-chair of the room to the stove, and August flew to set the
jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a long clay pipe; for
their father was good to them all, and seldom raised his voice in
anger, and they had been trained by the mother they had loved to
dutifulness and obedience and a watchful affection.

To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily to the young ones'
welcome, and came to the wooden chair with a tired step and sat down
heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer.

"Are you not well, dear father?" his daughter asked him.

"I am well enough," he answered, dully and sat there with his head
bent, letting the lighted pipe grow cold.

He was a fair, tall man, gray before his time, and bowed with labour.

"Take the children to bed," he said, suddenly, at last, and Dorothea
obeyed. August stayed behind, curled before the stove; at nine years
old, and when one earns money in the summer from the farmers, one is
not altogether a child any more, at least in one's own estimation.

August did not heed his father's silence: he was used to it. Karl
Strehla was a man of few words, and, being of weakly health, was
usually too tired at the end of the day to do more than drink his beer
and sleep. August lay on the wolfskin dreamy and comfortable, looking
up through his drooping eyelids at the golden coronets on the crest of
the great stove, and wondering for the millionth time whom it had been
made for, and what grand places and scenes it had known.

Dorothea came down from putting the little ones in their beds; the
cuckoo-clock in the corner struck eight; she looked to her father and
the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spinning, saying nothing. She
thought he had been drinking in some tavern; it had been often so with
him of late.

There was a long silence; the cuckoo called the quarter twice; August
dropped asleep, his curls falling over his face; Dorothea's wheel
hummed like a cat.

Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the table, sending the pipe
to the ground.

"I have sold Hirschvogel," he said; and his voice was husky and
ashamed in his throat. The spinning-wheel stopped. August sprang erect
out of his sleep.

"Sold Hirschvogel!" If their father had dashed the holy crucifix on
the floor at their feet and spat on it, they could not have shuddered
under the horror of a greater blasphemy.

"I have sold Hirschvogel!" said Karl Strehla, in the same husky,
dogged voice. "I have sold it to a travelling trader in such things
for two hundred florins. What would you?--I owe double that. He saw it
this morning when you were all out. He will pack it and take it to
Munich to-morrow."

Dorothea gave a low shrill cry:

"Oh, father?--the children--in midwinter!"

She turned white as the snow without; her words died away in her
throat.

August stood, half blind with sleep, staring with dazed eyes as his
cattle stared at the sun when they came out from their winter's
prison.

"It is not true. It is not true!" he muttered. "You are jesting,
father?"

Strehla broke into a dreary laugh.

"It is true. Would you like to know what is true too? that the bread
you eat, and the meat you put in this pot, and the roof you have over
your heads, are none of them paid for, have been none of them paid
for, for months and months; if it had not been for your grandfather I
should have been in prison all summer and autumn, and he is out of
patience and will do no more now. There is no work to be had; the
masters go to younger men: they say I work ill; it may be so. Who can
keep his head above water with ten hungry children dragging him down?
When your mother lived it was different. Boy, you stare at me as if I
were a mad dog. You have made a god of yon china thing. Well--it goes,
goes to-morrow. Two hundred florins, that is something. It will keep
me out of prison for a little and with the spring things may turn--"

August stood like a creature paralysed. His eyes were wide open,
fastened on his father's with terror and incredulous horror; his face
had grown as white as his sister's; his chest heaved with tearless
sobs.

"It is not true! It is not true!" he echoed stupidly. It seemed to him
that the very skies must fall, and the earth perish, if they could
take away Hirschvogel. They might as soon talk of tearing down God's
sun out of the heavens.

"You will find it true," said his father, doggedly, and angered
because he was in his own soul bitterly ashamed to have bartered away
the heirloom and treasure of his race, and the comfort and healthgiver
of his young children. "You will find it true. The dealer has paid me
half the money to-night, and will pay me the other half to-morrow when
he packs it up and takes it away to Munich. No doubt it is worth a
great deal more--at least I suppose so, as he gives that--but beggars
cannot be choosers. The little black stove in the kitchen will warm
you all just as well. Who would keep a gilded, painted thing in a poor
house like this, when one can make two hundred florins by it?
Dorothea, you never sobbed more when your mother died. What is it,
when all is said?--a bit of hardware, much too grand-looking for such
a room as this. If all the Strehlas had not been born fools it would
have been sold a century ago, when it was dug up out of the ground.
'It is a stove for a museum,' the trader said when he saw it. 'To a
museum let it go.'"

August gave a shrill shriek like a hare's when it is caught for its
death, and threw himself on his knees at his father's feet.

"Oh, father, father!" he cried, convulsively, his hands closing on
Strehla's knees, and his uplifted face blanched and distorted with
terror. "Oh, father, dear father, you cannot mean what you say? Send
_it_ away--our life, our sun, our joy, our comfort? we shall all die
in the dark and the cold. Sell _me_ rather. Sell me to any trade or
any pain you like; I will not mind. But Hirschvogel! it is like
selling the very cross off the altar! You must be in jest. You could
not do such a thing--you could not--you who have always been gentle
and good, and who have sat in the warmth here year after year with our
mother. It is not a piece of hardware, as you say; it is a living
thing, for a great man's thoughts and fancies have put life into it,
and it loves us, though we are only poor little children, and we love
it with all our hearts and souls, and up in heaven I am sure the dead
Hirschvogel knows! Oh, listen; I will go and try and get work
to-morrow; I will ask them to let me cut ice or make the paths through
the snow. There must be something I could do, and I will beg the
people we owe money to, to wait; they are all neighbours, they will be
patient. But sell Hirschvogel! oh, never! never! never! Give the
florins back to the vile man. Tell him it would be like selling the
shroud out of mother's coffin, or the golden curls off Ermengilda's
head! Oh, father, dear father! do hear me, for pity's sake!"

Strehla was moved by the boy's anguish. He loved his children, though
he was often weary of them, and their pain was pain to him. But beside
emotion, and stronger than emotion, was the anger that August roused
in him: he hated and despised himself for the barter of the heirloom
of his race, and every word of the child stung him with a stinging
sense of shame.

And he spoke in his wrath rather than in his sorrow.

"You are a little fool," he said, harshly, as they had never heard him
speak. "You rave like a play-actor. Get up and go to bed. The stove is
sold. There is no more to be said. Children like you have nothing to
do with such matters. The stove is sold, and goes to Munich to-morrow.
What is it to you? Be thankful I can get bread for you. Get on your
legs, I say, and go to bed."

Strehla took up the jug of ale as he paused, and drained it slowly as
a man who had no cares.

August sprang to his feet and threw his hair back off his face; the
blood rushed into his cheeks, making them scarlet: his great soft eyes
flamed alight with furious passion.

"You _dare_ not!" he cried, aloud, "you dare not sell it, I say! It
is not yours alone; it is ours--"

Strehla flung the emptied jug on the bricks with a force that shivered
it to atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his son a blow that
felled him to the floor. It was the first time in all his life that he
had ever raised his hand against any one of his children.

Then he took the oil-lamp that stood at his elbow and stumbled off to
his own chamber with a cloud before his eyes.

"What has happened?" said August, a little while later, as he opened
his eyes and saw Dorothea weeping above him on the wolfskin before the
stove. He had been struck backward, and his head had fallen on the
hard bricks where the wolfskin did not reach. He sat up a moment, with
his face bent upon his hands.

"I remember now," he said, very low, under his breath.

Dorothea showered kisses on him, while her tears fell like rain.

"But, oh, dear, how could you speak so to father?" she murmured. "It
was very wrong."

"No, I was right," said August, and his little mouth, that hitherto
had only curled in laughter, curved downward with a fixed and bitter
seriousness. "How dare he? How dare he?" he muttered, with his head
sunk in his hands. "It is not his alone. It belongs to us all. It is
as much yours and mine as it is his."

Dorothea could only sob in answer. She was too frightened to speak.
The authority of their parents in the house had never in her
remembrance been questioned.

"Are you hurt by the fall dear August?" she murmured, at length, for
he looked to her so pale and strange.

"Yes--no. I do not know. What does it matter?"

He sat up upon the wolfskin with passionate pain upon his face; all
his soul was in rebellion, and he was only a child and was powerless.

"It is a sin; it is a theft; it is an infamy," he said slowly, his
eyes fastened on the gilded feet of Hirschvogel.

"Oh, August, do not say such things of father!" sobbed his sister.
"Whatever he does, _we_ ought to think it right."

August laughed aloud.

"Is it right that he should spend his money in drink?--that he should
let orders lie unexecuted?--that he should do his work so ill that no
one cares to employ him?--that he should live on grandfather's
charity, and then dare sell a thing that is ours every whit as much as
it is his? To sell Hirschvogel! Oh, dear God! I would sooner sell my
soul!"

"August!" cried Dorothea, with piteous entreaty. He terrified her, she
could not recognise her little, gay, gentle brother in those fierce
and blasphemous words.

August laughed aloud again; then all at once his laughter broke down
into bitterest weeping. He threw himself forward on the stove,
covering it with kisses, and sobbing as though his heart would burst
from his bosom.

What could he do? Nothing, nothing, nothing!

"August, dear August," whispered Dorothea piteously, and trembling all
over--for she was a very gentle girl, and fierce feeling terrified
her--"August, do not lie there. Come to bed: it is quite late. In the
morning you will be calmer. It is horrible indeed, and we shall die of
cold, at least the little ones; but if it be father's will--"

"Let me alone," said August, through his teeth, striving to still the
storm of sobs that shook him from head to foot. "Let me alone. In the
morning!--how can you speak of the morning?"

"Come to bed, dear," sighed his sister. "Oh, August, do not lie and
look like that! you frighten me. Do come to bed."

"I shall stay here."

"Here! all night!"

"They might take it in the night. Besides, to leave it _now_."

"But it is cold! the fire is out."

"It will never be warm any more, nor shall we."

All his childhood had gone out of him, all his gleeful, careless,
sunny temper had gone with it; he spoke sullenly and wearily, choking
down the great sobs in his chest. To him it was as if the end of the
world had come.

His sister lingered by him while striving to persuade him to go to his
place in the little crowded bedchamber with Albrecht and Waldo and
Christof. But it was in vain. "I shall stay here," was all he answered
her. And he stayed--all the night long.

The lamps went out; the rats came and ran across the floor; as the
hours crept on through midnight and past, the cold intensified and the
air of the room grew like ice. August did not move; he lay with his
face downward on the golden and rainbow hued pedestal of the household
treasure, which henceforth was to be cold for evermore, an exiled
thing in a foreign city in a far-off land.

Whilst yet it was dark his three elder brothers came down the stairs
and let themselves out, each bearing his lantern and going to his work
in stone-yard and timber-yard and at the salt-works. They did not
notice him; they did not know what had happened.

A little later his sister came down with a light in her hand to make
ready the house ere morning should break.

She stole up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder timidly.

"Dear August, you must be frozen. August, do look up! do speak!"

August raised his eyes with a wild, feverish, sullen look in them that
she had never seen there. His face was ashen white: his lips were like
fire. He had not slept all night; but his passionate sobs had given
way to delirious waking dreams and numb senseless trances, which had
alternated one on another all through the freezing, lonely, horrible
hours.

"It will never be warm again," he muttered, "never again!"

Dorothea clasped him with trembling hands.

"August! do you not know me!" she cried, in an agony. "I am Dorothea.
Wake up, dear--wake up! It is morning, only so dark!"

August shuddered all over.

"The morning!" he echoed.

He slowly rose up on to his feet.

"I will go to grandfather," he said, very low. "He is always good:
perhaps he could save it."

Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker of the house-door drowned his
words. A strange voice called aloud through the keyhole:

"Let me in! Quick!--there is no time to lose! More snow like this, and
the roads will be all blocked. Let me in. Do you hear? I am come to
take the great stove."

August sprang erect, his fists doubled, his eyes blazing.

"You shall never touch it!" he screamed; "you shall never touch it!"

"Who shall prevent us?" laughed a big man, who was a Bavarian, amused
at the fierce little figure fronting him.

"I!" said August "You shall never have it! you shall kill me first!"

"Strehla," said the big man, as August's father entered the room,
"you have got a little mad dog here: muzzle him."

One way and another they did muzzle him. He fought like a little
demon, and hit out right and left, and one of his blows gave the
Bavarian a black eye. But he was soon mastered by four grown men, and
his father flung him with no light hand out from the door of the back
entrance, and the buyers of the stately and beautiful stove set to
work to pack it heedfully and carry it away.

When Dorothea stole out to look for August, he was nowhere in sight.
She went back to little 'Gilda, who was ailing, and sobbed over the
child, whilst the others stood looking on, dimly understanding that
with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth of their bodies, all the
light of their hearth.

Even their father now was very sorry and ashamed; but two hundred
florins seemed a big sum to him, and, after all, he thought the
children could warm themselves quite as well at the black iron stove
in the kitchen. Besides, whether he regretted it now or not, the work
of the Nuernberg potter was sold irrevocably, and he had to stand still
and see the men from Munich wrap it in manifold wrappings and bear it
out into the snowy air to where an ox-cart stood in waiting for it.

In another moment Hirschvogel was gone--gone forever and aye.

August stood still for a time, leaning, sick and faint from the
violence that had been used to him, against the back wall of the
house. The wall looked on a court where a well was, and the backs of
other houses, and beyond them the spire of the Muntze Tower and the
peaks of the mountains.

Into the court an old neighbour hobbled for water, and, seeing the
boy, said to him:

"Child, is it true your father is selling the big painted stove?"

August nodded his head, then burst into a passion of tears.

"Well, for sure he is a fool," said the neighbour. "Heaven forgive me
for calling him so before his own child! but the stove was worth a
mint of money. I do remember in my young days, in old Anton's time
(that was your great-grandfather, my lad), a stranger from Vienna saw
it, and said that it was worth its weight in gold."

August's sobs went on their broken, impetuous course.

"I loved it! I loved it!" he moaned. "I do not care what its value
was. I loved it! _I loved it_!"

"You little simpleton!" said the old man, kindly. "But you are wiser
than your father, when all's said. If sell it he must, he should have
taken it to good Herr Steiner over at Spruez, who would have given him
honest value. But no doubt they took him over his beer, ay, ay! but if
I were you I would do better than cry. I would go after it."

August raised his head, the tears raining down his cheeks.

"Go after it when you are bigger," said the neighbour, with a
good-natured wish to cheer him up a little. "The world is a small
thing after all: I was a travelling clockmaker once upon a time, and I
know that your stove will be safe enough whoever gets it; anything
that can be sold for a round sum is always wrapped up in cotton wool
by everybody. Ay, ay, don't cry so much; you will see your stove again
some day."

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