Beneath the Wheel (11 page)

Around four o'clock the tutor entered the hall without knocking and began whispering in the headmaster's ear.

“Quiet, everyone,” demanded the headmaster. The students sat stock-still in their benches and looked expectantly at him.

“Your friend Hindinger,” he went on more softly, “it appears has drowned in one of the ponds. Now you must go help find him. Professor Meyer will lead the way. Your orders are to follow and obey him and to do nothing on your own initiative.”

Shocked, whispering among themselves, they got underway with the professor in the lead. A couple of men from town with ropes, boards and wooden poles joined the hurried procession. It was bitter cold and the sun was just about to slip behind the woods.

Just as the small stiff body was recovered and placed on a stretcher in the snow-covered reeds, it became dusk. The students stood in disarray like frightened birds, staring at the corpse and rubbing their stiff, discolored fingers. Not until their drowned comrade was being carried before them on his stretcher were their numb hearts suddenly touched by dread. They smelled death as a deer smells hunters.

Hans Giebenrath found himself walking next to his former friend, the poet Heilner, in that pitiful and freezing little group. They became aware of each other's proximity when they both stumbled over the same unevenness in the field. Perhaps it was the sight of death that overwhelmed and convinced them momentarily of the futility of all selfishness. In any case, when Hans saw his friend's pale face so near, he suddenly felt a deep, inexplicable ache and reached impulsively for his hand. But Heilner drew back at once and cast an offended and angry look to the side. Then he dropped back to the very rear of the procession.

At that point the other boy's heart trembled with woe and shame. As he stumbled on across the frozen wastes, there was nothing Hans could do to keep his tears from trickling down his ice-cold cheeks. He realized that there are certain sins and omissions beyond forgiveness and repentance and it seemed to him that the stretcher bore not the tailor's little son but Heilner, who now took all the pain and anger caused by Hans' faithlessness with him far into another world where people were judged not by their grades and examination marks and scholastic success but solely in accord with the purity or impurity of their consciences.

When they reached the road, they proceeded swiftly to the main monastery, where the entire staff with the headmaster in the lead stood at attention for the dead Hindinger who, if he had been alive, would have quailed at the mere thought of such an honor. The teachers apparently regarded a dead student very differently from a living one. They realized for a fleeting moment how irrecoverable and unique is each life and youth, on whom they perpetrated so much thoughtless harm at other times.

During the evening and all next day, the presence of the unassuming corpse continued to exert its spell. It softened, muted and wreathed all activity and talk, so that for a brief time quarrels, anger, noise and laughter were invisible, like wood-nymphs who disappear briefly from a lake, leaving it tranquil and seemingly unpopulated. When two boys discussed their drowned comrade, they now used his full name, for Hindu seemed too undignified for a dead person. The quiet Hindu, who had always been lost in the crowd, now permeated the huge monastery with his name and the fact of his death.

The second day after his death his father came, stayed a few hours in the room where his son lay, was invited to tea by the headmaster, and spent the night in the Stag, a nearby inn.

Then came the burial. The coffin was given a place of honor in the dormitory and the tailor from Allgäu stood beside it, watching everything that was being done. He was a tailor from head to toe; skinny and angular, he wore a black dresscoat with a greenish sheen to it, and narrow, skimpy trousers. In his hand he held a shabby top hat. His small thin face looked grieved, sad and weak, like a penny-candle in the wind; he was both embarrassed and overawed by the headmaster and the professors.

At the last moment, just before the pallbearers picked up the coffin, the sorry little man stepped forward once more and touched the coffin lid with timid tenderness. He remained there, helplessly fighting his tears, standing in the large quiet room like a withered tree in the winter—it was sorrowful to behold how lost and hopeless and at the mercy of the elements he looked. The pastor took him by the hand and stayed at his side. The tailor put on his fantastically curved top hat and was the first to follow the coffin down the steps, across the cloister, through the old gate and across the white countryside toward the low churchyard wall. While singing hymns at the graveside the students annoyed the music-teacher by not watching his hand beating time. Instead they looked at the lonely, wind-blown figure of the little tailor who stood sad and freezing in the snow, listening with bowed head to the pastor's and headmaster's speeches, nodding to the students, and occasionally fishing with his left hand for a handkerchief in his coat without ever extracting it.

“I could not help imagining my own father standing there like that,” Otto Hartner said afterward. Then they all joined in: “Yes, I thought the same thing.”

Later on the headmaster brought Hindinger's father to Hellas. “Was one of you particularly close to the deceased?” the headmaster asked. At first no one volunteered and Hindu's father stared with misery and fear at the young faces. Then Lucius stepped forward and Hindinger took his hand, held it a while but did not know what to say and soon left again with a humble nod of the head. Thereupon he took leave of the monastery altogether. He had to travel a whole long day through the bright winter landscape before he reached his home where he could tell his wife in what sort of place their Karl lay buried.

*   *   *

The spell that death had cast over the monastery was soon broken. The teachers were giving reprimands again, the doors were again being slammed and little thought if any was devoted to the former occupant of Hellas. Several boys had contracted colds while standing around that melancholy pond and lay in the infirmary or ran about in felt slippers with shawls wrapped around their throats. Hans Giebenrath had withstood the ordeal intact in health, but he looked older and more serious since the day of misfortune. Something inside him had changed. The boy had become an adolescent, and his soul seemed to have been transferred to another country, where it fluttered about anxiously, knowing no rest. This change was due not so much to shock or sorrow over Hindu's death but to his having suddenly become aware of what he had done to Heilner.

Heilner lay with two other boys in the infirmary. He had to swallow hot tea, and there was ample time to arrange his impressions of Hindinger's death for possible future use in his poetry. Still, he did not seem overly intent on writing poetry at the moment, for he was languishing and said hardly a word to his fellow patients. His isolation, a consequence of his prolonged room-arrest, had wounded and embittered his sensitive spirit. He could not go long without communicating his feelings and thoughts. The teachers kept a sharp eye on him as a dissatisfied troublemaker; the students avoided him; the tutors treated him with mocking goodwill, and his friends Shakespeare, Lenau and Schiller showed him a different, mightier and more spectacular world than his present oppressive and humiliating surroundings. His
Monk Songs,
which at first had struck only a melancholy note of isolation, gradually turned into a collection of bitter and hate-filled verses about the monastery, his teachers and fellow students. He took sour pleasure in his martyrdom, derived satisfaction from being misunderstood, and felt like a young Juvenal with his ruthlessly irreverent monk's verses.

Eight days after the burial, when the two others had recuperated and Heilner was alone in the infirmary, Hans paid him a visit. His greeting sounded timid as he pulled a chair to the bedside and reached for Heilner's hand. Heilner turned morosely toward the wall and seemed quite unapproachable. But Hans refused to be put off. He held on to the hand he had grasped and forced his former friend to look at him. Heilner looked at him with a sneer.

“What are you after anyway?”

Hans did not let his hand go.

“You've got to listen to me,” he said. “I was a coward at that time and I let you down. But you know what I'm like. I had made up my mind to stay at the top of the class and if possible to graduate at the head of it. You call me a grind; all right, perhaps that's true. But that was my kind of ideal. I just didn't know any better.”

Heilner closed his eyes, and Hans continued in a very soft voice: “You see, I am sorry. I don't know whether you want to become my friend again but you have to forgive me.”

Heilner said nothing and did not open his eyes. Everything that was good and glad in him wanted to greet his friend with happy laughter; but he had become so used to playing a harsh and lonely role that he kept the appropriate mask on his face a while longer. Hans persisted.

“You absolutely have to, Heilner! I'd rather end up at the bottom of the class than have things go on like this. If you want, we can become friends again and show the others that we don't need them.”

At that point Heilner returned the pressure of Hans' hand and opened his eyes.

After a few days, he too left the infirmary. The newly fashioned friendship caused considerable excitement in the monastery. The two friends were to experience some very unusual weeks together, weeks during which they did not actually have any significant experiences but were filled with a strangely happy feeling of belonging together and being of one mind. This was different from their old friendship. The long separation had changed both of them. Hans had become gentler, warmer, more enthusiastic; Heilner had grown more vigorous and masculine, and both had missed each other so much that their reunion seemed to them like a great experience and a delicious gift.

Both of these precocious boys shyly, though unconsciously, tasted in their friendship the intimation of the delicate secrets of a first love affair. In addition, their pact had the harsh charm of their growing masculinity and the equally harsh spice of defying the entire student body, whose numerous friendships were still harmless games. The students disliked Heilner and could not understand Hans.

The more intimate and happier Hans became with his friend, the more alienated he became from school. The new sensation of happiness rushed through his blood and thoughts like young wine, and Livy and Homer lost all importance and attraction by comparison. The teachers watched in horror as their model student turned into a problem child and succumbed to the bad influence of the dubious Heilner. Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands—the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa—who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. Yet that is not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus the struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers and frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some—and who knows how many?—waste away with quiet obstinacy and finally go under.

According to the good old school precept, as soon as these two strange young boys, Hans and Heilner, came under suspicion, they were treated with redoubled harshness. Only the headmaster, who was proud of Hans as his most zealous student of Hebrew, made an awkward attempt to save him. He invited Hans to his study, the handsome and picturesque belvedere that had been the prior's quarters where, legend has it, Doctor Faustus, who came from the nearby town of Knittlingen, long ago enjoyed his share of Elffinger wine. The headmaster was not a one-sided man, he did not lack insight and practical wisdom, and even possessed a certain measure of goodwill toward his charges whom he liked to call by their first names. His chief failing was a strong streak of vanity, which often let him give in to the temptation of performing little bravura acts on the lectern and did not permit him to suffer to see his own power and authority questioned. He could brook no interference, admit no mistakes. Thus boys who had no wills of their own, and those who were dishonest, got along famously with him. For the same reason, the strong-minded and honest ones had a very hard time of it because the merest hint of disagreement irritated him. He was a virtuoso in the role of fatherly friend with an encouraging look and a deeply moving tone of voice, and it was this role he was playing now.

“Have a seat, Giebenrath,” he said in a man-to-man tone, once he had given a vigorous handshake to the boy who had entered so timidly. “I'd like to have a word with you. But I can call you Hans, can't I?”