ought to bear? Say on it:
"_In Memory of_
"PHILIP NOLAN,
"_Lieutenant in the Army of the United States._
"He loved his country as no other man has
loved her; but no man deserved less at
her hands."
IX
THE NÃœRNBERG STOVE
August lived in a little town called Hall. Hall is a favourite name
for several towns in Austria and in Germany; but this one especial
little Hall, in the Upper Innthal, is one of the most charming
Old-World places that I know, and August for his part did not know any
other. It has the green meadows and the great mountains all about it,
and the gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it. It has paved
streets and enchanting little shops that have all latticed panes and
iron gratings to them; it has a very grand old Gothic church, that has
the noblest blendings of light and shadow, and marble tombs of dead
knights, and a look of infinite strength and repose as a church should
have. Then there is the Muntze Tower, black and white, rising out of
greenery and looking down on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid
river; and there is an old schloss which has been made into a
guard-house, with battlements and frescoes and heraldic devices in
gold and colours, and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size
in his niche and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but close
at hand, is a cloister with beautiful marble columns and tombs, and a
colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very rich
chapel: indeed, so full is the little town of the undisturbed past,
that to walk in it is like opening a missal of the Middle Ages, all
emblazoned and illuminated with saints and warriors, and it is so
clean, and so still, and so noble, by reason of its monuments and its
historic colour, that I marvel much no one has ever cared to sing its
praises. The old pious heroic life of an age at once more restful and
more brave than ours still leaves its spirit there, and then there is
the girdle of the mountains all around, and that alone means strength,
peace, majesty.
In this little town a few years ago August Strehla lived with his
people in the stone-paved irregular square where the grand church
stands.
He was a small boy of nine years at that time - a chubby-faced little
man with rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of curls the brown
of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was poor, and there were
many mouths at home to feed. In this country the winters are long and
very cold, the whole land lies wrapped in snow for many months, and
this night that he was trotting home, with a jug of beer in his numb
red hands, was terribly cold and dreary. The good burghers of Hall had
shut their double shutters, and the few lamps there were flickered
dully behind their quaint, old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains
indeed were beautiful, all snow-white under the stars that are so big
in frost. Hardly anyone was astir; a few good souls wending home from
vespers, a tired post-boy who blew a shrill blast from his tasseled
horn as he pulled up his sledge before a hostelry, and little August
hugging his jug of beer to his ragged sheepskin coat, were all who
were abroad, for the snow fell heavily and the good folks of Hall go
early to their beds. He could not run, or he would have spilled the
beer; he was half frozen and a little frightened, but he kept up his
courage by saying over and over again to himself, "I shall soon be at
home with dear Hirschvogel."
He went on through the streets, past the stone man-at-arms of the
guard-house, and so into the place where the great church was, and
where near it stood his father Karl Strehla's house, with a sculptured
Bethlehem over the doorway, and the Pilgrimage of the Three Kings
painted on its wall. He had been sent on a long errand outside the
gates in the afternoon, over the frozen fields and broad white snow,
and had been belated, and had thought he had heard the wolves behind
him at every step, and had reached the town in a great state of
terror, thankful with all his little panting heart to see the oil-lamp
burning under the first house-shrine. But he had not forgotten to call
for the beer, and he carried it carefully now, though his hands were
so numb that he was afraid they would let the jug down every moment.
The snow outlined with white every gable and cornice of the beautiful
old wooden houses; the moonlight shone on the gilded signs, the lambs,
the grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint devices that hung before
the doors; covered lamps burned before the Nativities and Crucifixions
painted on the walls or let into the wood-work; here and there, where
a shutter had not been closed, a ruddy fire-light lit up a homely
interior, with the noisy band of children clustering round the
house-mother and a big brown loaf, or some gossips spinning and
listening to the cobbler's or the barber's story of a neighbour, while
the oil-wicks glimmered, and the hearth-logs blazed, and the chestnuts
sputtered in their iron roasting-pot. Little August saw all these
things as he saw everything with his two big bright eyes that had such
curious lights and shadows in them; but he went heedfully on his way
for the sake of the beer which a single slip of the foot would make
him spill. At his knock and call the solid oak door, four centuries
old if one, flew open, and the boy darted in with his beer, and
shouted, with all the force of mirthful lungs, "Oh, dear Hirschvogel,
but for the thought of you I should have died!"
It was a large barren room into which he rushed with so much pleasure,
and the bricks were bare and uneven. It had a walnut-wood press,
handsome and very old, a broad deal table, and several wooden stools
for all its furniture; but at the top of the chamber, sending out
warmth and colour together as the lamp sheds its rays upon it, was a
tower of porcelain, burnished with all the hues of a king's peacock
and a queen's jewels, and surmounted with armed figures, and shields,
and flowers of heraldry, and a great golden crown upon the highest
summit of all.
It was a stove of 1532, and on it were the letters H.R.H., for it was
in every portion the handwork of the great potter of Nürnberg,
Augustin Hirschvogel, who put his mark thus, as all the world knows.
The stove no doubt had stood in palaces and been made for princes, had
warmed the crimson stockings of cardinals and the gold-broidered shoes
of archduchesses, had glowed in presence-chambers and lent its carbon
to help kindle sharp brains in anxious councils of state; no one knew
what it had been or done or been fashioned for; but it was a right
royal thing. Yet perhaps it had never been more useful than it was now
in this poor desolate room, sending down heat and comfort into the
troop of children tumbled together on a wolfskin at its feet, who
received frozen August among them with loud shouts of joy.
"O, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so cold!" said August, kissing its
gilded lion's claws. "Is father not in, Dorothea?"
"No, dear. He is late."
Dorothea was a girl of seventeen, dark-haired and serious, and with a
sweet, sad face, for she had had many cares laid on her shoulders,
even whilst still a mere baby. She was the eldest of the Strehla
family; and there were ten of them in all. Next to her there came Jan
and Karl and Otho, big lads, gaining a little for their own living;
and then came August, who went up in the summer to the high Alps with
the farmers' cattle, but in winter could do nothing to fill his own
little platter and pot; and then all the little ones, who could only
open their mouths to be fed like young birds - Albrecht and Hilda, and
Waldo and Christof, and last of all little three-year-old Ermengilda,
with eyes like forget-me-nots, whose birth had cost them the life of
their mother.
They were of that mixed race, half Austrian, half Italian, so common
in the Tyrol; some of the children were white and golden as lilies,
others were brown and brilliant as fresh-fallen chestnuts. The father
was a good man, but weak and weary with so many to find for and so
little to do it with. He worked at the salt-furnaces, and by that
gained a few florins; people said he would have worked better and kept
his family more easily if he had not loved his pipe and a draught of
ale too well; but this had only been said of him after his wife's
death, when trouble and perplexity had begun to dull a brain never too
vigorous, and to enfeeble further a character already too yielding. As
it was, the wolf often bayed at the door of the Strehla household,
without a wolf from the mountains coming down. Dorothea was one of
those maidens who almost work miracles, so far can their industry and
care and intelligence make a home sweet and wholesome and a single
loaf seem to swell into twenty. The children were always clean and
happy, and the table was seldom without its big pot of soup once a
day. Still, very poor they were, and Dorothea's heart ached with
shame, for she knew that their father's debts were many for flour and
meat and clothing. Or fuel to feed the big stove they had always
enough without cost, for their mother's father was alive, and sold
wood and fir cones and coke, and never grudged them to his
grandchildren, though he grumbled at Strehla's improvidence and
hapless, dreamy ways.
"Father says we are never to wait for him: we will have supper, now
you have come home, dear," said Dorothea, who, however she might fret
her soul in secret as she knitted their hose and mended their shirts,
never let her anxieties cast a gloom on the children; only to August
she did speak a little sometimes, because he was so thoughtful and so
tender of her always, and knew as well as she did that there were
troubles about money - though these troubles were vague to them both,
and the debtors were patient and kindly, being neighbours all in the
old twisting streets between the guard-house and the river.
Supper was a huge bowl of soup, with big slices of brown bread
swimming in it and some onions bobbing up and down: the bowl was soon
emptied by ten wooden spoons, and then the three eldest boys slipped
off to bed, being tired with their rough bodily labour in the snow all
day, and Dorothea drew her spinning-wheel by the stove and set it
whirring, and the little ones got August down upon the old worn
wolfskin and clamoured to him for a picture or a story. For August was
the artist of the family.
He had a piece of planed deal that his father had given him, and some
sticks of charcoal, and he would draw a hundred things he had seen in
the day, sweeping each out with his elbow when the children had seen
enough of it and sketching another in its stead - faces and dogs'
heads, and men in sledges, and old women in their furs, and
pine-trees, and cocks and hens, and all sorts of animals, and now and
then - very reverently - a Madonna and Child. It was all very rough, for
there was no one to teach him anything But it was all life-like, and
kept the whole troop of children shrieking with laughter, or watching
breathless, with wide open, wondering, awed eyes.
They were all so happy: what did they care for the snow outside? Their
little bodies were warm, and their hearts merry; even Dorothea,
troubled about the bread for the morrow, laughed as she spun; and
August, with all his soul in his work, and little rosy Ermengilda's
cheek on his shoulder, glowing after his frozen afternoon, cried out
loud, smiling, as he looked up at the stove that was shedding its head
down on them all:
"Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost as great and good as the sun!
No; you are greater and better, I think, because he goes away nobody
knows where all these long, dark, cold hours, and does not care how
people die for want of him; but you - you are always ready: just a
little bit of wood to feed you, and you will make a summer for us all
the winter through!"
The grand old stove seemed to smile through all its iridescent surface
at the praises of the child. No doubt the stove, though it had known
three centuries and more, had known but very little gratitude.
It was one of those magnificent stoves in enamelled faïence which so
excited the jealousy of the other potters of Nürnberg that in a body
they demanded of the magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel should be
forbidden to make any more of them - the magistracy, happily, proving
of a broader mind, and having no sympathy with the wish of the
artisans to cripple their greater fellow.
It was of great height and breadth, with all the majolica lustre which
Hirschvogel learned to give to his enamels when he was making love to
the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards married. There was the
statue of a king at each corner, modelled with as much force and
splendour as his friend Albrecht Dürer could have given unto them on
copperplate or canvas. The body of the stove itself was divided into
panels, which had the Ages of Man painted on them in polychrome; the
borders of the panels had roses and holly and laurel and other
foliage, and German mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World
moralising, such as the old Teutons, and the Dutch after them, love to
have on their chimney-places and their drinking cups, their dishes and
flagons. The whole was burnished with gilding in many parts, and was
radiant everywhere with that brilliant colouring of which the
Hirschvogel family, painters on glass and great in chemistry as they
were, were all masters.
The stove was a very grand thing, as I say: possibly Hirschvogel had
made it for some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when he was an
imperial guest at Innspruck and fashioned so many things for the
Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine Welser, the Burgher's daughter,
who gained an Archduke's heart by her beauty and the right to wear his
honors by her wit. Nothing was known of the stove at this latter day
in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who had been a master-mason, had dug
it up out of some ruins where he was building, and, finding it without
a flaw, had taken it home, and only thought it worth finding because
it was such a good one to burn. That was now sixty years past, and
ever since then the stove had stood in the big desolate empty room,
warming three generations of the Strehla family, and having seen
nothing prettier perhaps in all its many years than the children
tumbled now in a cluster like gathered flowers at its feet. For the
Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born to beauty; white
or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon, and when they went
into the church to mass, with their curling locks and their clasped
hands, they stood under the grim statues like cherubs flown down off
some fresco.
"Tell us a story, August," they cried, in chorus, when they had seen
charcoal pictures till they were tired; and August did as he did every
night, pretty nearly, looked up at the stove and told them what he
imagined of the many adventures and joys and sorrows of the human
being who figured on the panels from his cradle to his grave.
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 Nürnberg, 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 Nürnberg 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 Maïla will be sure to send us wine and honey and a barrel of
flour; she always does," said Albrecht. Their aunt Maïla had a châlet
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