German Fiction · Theodor Fontane
THE BANNER OF THE UPRIGHT SEVEN
Kaspar Hediger, master tailor of Zurich, had reached the age at which an industrious craftsman begins to allow himself a brief hour of rest after dinner. So it happened that one beautiful March day he was sitting not in his manual but in his mental workshop, a small, separate room which for years he had reserved for himself. He was glad that the weather was warm enough for him to occupy it again. In winter neither the old customs of his class nor his income permitted him to have an extra room heated simply that he might sit there to read. And this was at a time when there were already tailors who went shooting and rode their horses daily, so closely do the gradations of culture dovetail into one another.
Master Hediger, however, might have been proud of the appearance he presented in his neatly kept little back room. He looked almost more like an American settler than a tailor. A strong and intelligent face with heavy whiskers, surmounted by a powerful, bald dome was bending over "The Swiss Republican," while he read the leading article with a critical expression. There were at least twenty-five well-bound folio volumes of this "Republican" in a little walnut bookcase with a glass door, and they contained scarcely anything that Hediger, for twenty-five years, had not lived and fought through. The case also held Rotteck's "Universal History," a Swiss history by Johannes Mueller, and a handful of political brochures and such like; a geographical atlas and a portfolio full of caricatures and pamphlets--mementoes of bitterly passionate days--lay on the lowest shelf. The wall of the little room was adorned with the portraits of Columbus, Zwingli, Hutten, Washington, and Robespierre; for Hediger was not to be trifled with and sanctioned the Reign of Terror, after it was over. Besides these world-famous heroes, there were portraits of several progressive Swiss to which were affixed in their own handwriting highly edifying and discursive inscriptions, regular little essays. Leaning against the bookcase was a well-kept, shining musket with a short side-arm hanging on it and a cartridge-pouch in which, at all times, there were thirty cartridges. That was his fowling-piece with which he went out, not for hares and partridges, but for aristocrats and Jesuits, for breakers of the constitution and traitors to the people. Until now his lucky star had kept him from shedding any blood, owing to lack of opportunity; nevertheless more than once he had seized his musket and hurried to the square. That was at the time of the riots, when he kept the gun standing between the bed and the wardrobe and would not allow it to be moved, "for," he used to say, "no government and no battalions can protect justice and liberty where a citizen is not able to step out of doors and see what is going on."
While the stout-hearted master was absorbed in his article, now nodding approvingly, now shaking his head, his youngest son Karl, a fledgling clerk in a government office, came in. "What do you want?" asked Master Hediger harshly, for he did not like to be disturbed in his little den. Karl, somewhat uncertain as to the success of his request, asked whether he might have his father's gun and cartridge-pouch for the afternoon as he had to go to the drill-ground. "No use to ask, I won't hear of it!" said Hediger shortly. "But why not? I won't hurt it," his son continued humbly and still insistently, because he simply had to have a gun if he did not want to be marched off to the detention room. But the old man only repeated in a louder tone: "Won't hear of it! I can only wonder at the persistence of these gentlemen sons of mine who show so little persistence in other things that not one of them has stuck to the occupation which I allowed him to learn of his own free choice. You know that your three older brothers, one after another, as soon as they had to begin to drill, wanted my gun and that they none of them got it. And yet now here you come slinking along after it. You have your own fair pay, no one to support--get your own weapons, as becomes a man of honor. This gun doesn't leave its place except when I need it myself."
"We'll put the thing together again this evening; now I will finish reading my paper." Disappointed and savage, Karl went out to complain to his mother. He stood in intense awe of the state authority whose school he was now to enter as a recruit. He had never been punished since he had outgrown school and not during his last years there either, and now the thing was to begin again on a higher plane, merely because he had depended upon his father's gun. His mother said: "Your father is really quite right. All you four boys earn more than he does, and that thanks to the education he gave you; but not only do you spend all your money on yourselves, you keep on coming all the time to annoy your father by borrowing all sorts of things: his dress-coat, field-glass, drawing instruments, razor, hat, gun, and sabre. The things that he takes such good care of you borrow and bring back ruined. It seems as if the whole year round you are busy thinking up something else to borrow from him; but he, on his part, never asks anything of you, although you owe him your life and everything else. Just this once more I will help you." Hereupon she went in to Master Hediger and said: "I forgot to tell you that Frymann the carpenter sent a message to say that the Band of Seven would meet this evening to discuss certain matters, something political, I think." He was at once pleasantly affected.
"Is that so?" he said, rose, and began to walk up and down; "I am surprised that Frymann didn't come himself to speak with me first about it, to consult me." After a few minutes he dressed quickly, put on his hat, and left with the words, "Wife, I am going out now at once, I must find out what it's about. I haven't been out of the house this spring anyway, and it's such a beautiful day to-day. Good-bye!" "There! Now he won't be home before ten o'clock tonight," said Mrs. Hediger laughing, and she bade Karl take the gun, be careful of it and bring it home early. "Take it!" lamented her son, "why he's got the lock all apart and I can't put it together again." "Well, I can," answered his mother and went into the little room with her son. She turned the parts of the lock out of the cover, sorted out the springs and screws and very skilfully began to put them together. "Where the devil did you learn that, mother?" cried Karl, amazed. "I learnt it in my father's house," she replied. "My father and my seven brothers used to make me clean all their guns and rifles when they had been shooting. I often cried as I did it, but I was finally able to handle them like a gunsmith's apprentice. The whole village called me 'Gunsmithy,' and I nearly always had dirty hands and a black smudge on the tip of my nose. My brothers shot and drank us out of house and home, so that I, poor child, was glad enough that your father, the tailor, married me."
While she talked her dexterous fingers had really put the lock together and fastened it to the stock. Karl hung the shining cartridge-pouch over his shoulder, took the gun and hurried off as fast as he could go to the drill-ground, where he arrived only just in time. Soon after six o'clock he brought the things back again, succeeded to taking the lock apart himself, and mixed the parts together in the box-cover. By the time he had finished supper it had grown dark. He went to the boat-landing, hired a boat and rowed along the shore till he came to that part of the lake where carpenters and stone-cutters had their yards. It was a glorious evening; a mild south wind gently rippled the water, the full moon shone on the distant stretches of the lake and sparkled brightly on the little waves near by, and the stars burned brilliantly in the sky. The snow mountains, their presence felt rather than seen, looked down on the lake like pale spectres. All industrial litter, the petty and restless outline of the buildings, disappeared in the darkness and were transformed by the moonlight into great calm masses--in short, the landscape was appropriately set for the coming scene.
Karl Hediger rowed rapidly on until he was close to a large lumber-yard; there he softly sang the first verse of a little song a couple of times, and then rowed slowly and easily out from the shore. A slender girl rose from where she had been sitting among the piles of lumber, untied a skiff, stepped into it and rowed deliberately, making a few turns as she went, after the soft-voiced boatman. When she caught up with him the young people greeted each other and rowed on without stopping, gunwale to gunwale, far out into the liquid silver of the lake. With youthful vigor they described a wide curve with several spirals, the girl leading and the boy following with gentle strokes of his oar, without leaving her side, and one could see that the couple were not unpractised in rowing together. When they found themselves in absolute silence and solitude, the young woman pulled in her oars and stopped. That is, she shipped only one oar and continued to hold the other over the gunwale as if playing with it, but not without a purpose, for when Karl, who had also stopped, tried to approach quite close to her, to board her skiff in fact, she was most skilful in keeping his boat off by giving it a single push with her oar every now and then. Nor did this man[oe]uvre seem to be new, for the young man soon resigned himself and sat still in his little boat.
Now they began to chat, and Karl said: "Dear Hermine! Now I can really turn the proverb about and say: what I had in abundance in my youth I wish for in old age, but in vain. How often we used to kiss when I was ten and you were seven, and now that I am twenty I mayn't even kiss your finger-tips." "Once for all, I never want to hear another word of those impudent lies!" cried the girl half angrily, half laughing. "You've made it all up and it's false, I certainly don't remember any such familiarity." "Unfortunately!" cried Karl; "but I remember it so much the better. And I remember too that it was you who began it and were the temptress." "Karl, how horrid of you!" interrupted Hermine, but he went on unrelentingly: "You must remember how often, when we were tired helping the poor children fill their broken baskets with shavings--and how cross it always made your carpenters--I used to have to build a little hut out of ends of boards, hidden away in among the big piles of lumber, a little hut with a roof and a door and a bench in it. And then when we sat on the little bench, with the door shut, and I might at last sit idle a minute, who was it that used to throw her arms around my neck and kiss me more times than I could count?"
At these words he nearly pitched into the water, for as he had tried again to approach unnoticed as he talked, she suddenly gave his little boat such a violent push that it almost upset. Her clear laugh rang out as his left arm slipped into the water to the elbow and he swore. "Just you wait," he said; "I'll pay you out for this some day!" "There's time enough ahead," she replied, "you needn't be in too much of a hurry, my dear sir." Then she continued somewhat more seriously, "Father has found out about our intentions; I didn't deny them, in the main; he won't hear of such a thing, and forbids us ever to think of it again. So that is how we stand now." "And do you intend to bow to your father's decree as dutifully and unresistingly as you seem to?"
"At least I shall never do the exact opposite of his wishes, and still less would I dare to stand in open hostility to him, for you know that he bears a grudge a long time, and is capable of a deep, slow-consuming anger. You know too, that, although he has been a widower for five years, he has not married again on my account; that is something that a daughter ought certainly to consider. And, now that we are on this subject, I must tell you too, that, under these circumstances, I don't think it proper for us to see each other so often. It's bad enough for a child to be disobedient in her heart; but there would be something hateful in our actually doing things every day that would displease our parents if they knew about them, and so I don't want to meet you alone oftener than once a month at the most, instead of nearly every day as we have been doing. And for the rest just let time go on." "Let time go on! And you really can and will let things go like this?" "Why not? Are they so important? It is possible that we may have each other after all, it is also possible that we may not. But the world will go on just the same, perhaps we will forget each other of our own accord, for we are still young; in any case, it doesn't seem to me that we've any reason to make a great to-do."
The seventeen-year-old beauty delivered this speech in an apparently cold and matter-of-fact tone, at the same time picking up her oars and heading for the shore. Karl rowed beside her full of anxiety and apprehension, and no less full of vexation at Hermine's words. She was half glad to know that the hot-headed fellow had something to worry about, but at the same time, the conversation had made her, too, pensive, and particularly the separation of four weeks which she had imposed on herself. Thus Karl finally succeeded in taking her by surprise and bringing his boat up against hers with a sudden pull. In an instant he held her slender body in his arms, and drew her part way towards him, so that they both leaned over the deep water, their boats tipped away over threatening to overturn at the slightest movement. Hence the girl was helpless and had to submit when Karl pressed seven or eight passionate kisses on her lips. Then gently and carefully he righted her and her boat. She stroked her hair back out of her face, seized her oars, panted, and, with tears in her eyes, cried angrily and threateningly: "Just wait, you scamp, till I hold the reins! Heaven knows, I'll make you feel that you've got a wife!" With that she rowed rapidly, without looking round at him again, towards her father's yard and home.
Karl, however, filled with triumph and bliss, called after her, "Good night, Miss Hermine Frymann; that tasted good." Mrs. Hediger had told her husband nothing but the truth when she caused him to go out. She had merely saved up the message to use when she thought best, and then had done so at the right moment. A meeting really was held, a meeting of the Band of Seven, or of the Staunch, or of the Upright, or of the Lovers of Liberty, as they interchangeably called themselves. They were simply a circle of seven old and tried friends, all master-craftsmen, patriots, arch-politicians and stern domestic tyrants after the pattern of Master Hediger. Born, one and all, in the previous century, they, as children, had seen the downfall of the old regime, and then for many years had lived through the storms and birth-pangs of the new period, until, with the clearing of the political atmosphere in the late forties, Switzerland once more came into power and unity. Several of them came from the common domains, the former subject-land of the Swiss Confederates, and they remembered how, as peasant children, they had been obliged to kneel by the roadside when a coach with Confederate barons and the court-usher came driving by. Others were distant relatives or connections of captive or executed revolutionaries; in short, they were all filled with an unquenchable hatred of all aristocracy, which, since the downfall of the latter, had merely turned to bitter scorn. But when later the same thing reappeared in democratic garb, and, combined with the old usurpers of power, the priests, stirred up a struggle that lasted for several years, there was added to their hatred of the aristocracy a hatred of the "blackcoats"; indeed their belligerent temper now turned not only against lords and priests, but even against their own kind, against entire masses of the excited populace. This demanded of them in their old age an unexpected, composite expenditure of power, which test, however, they stood bravely.
These seven men were anything but insignificant. In all popular assemblies, meetings and such like, they helped to form a solid centre, stuck to their posts indefatigably, and were ready day and night to do for their party errands and business which could not be trusted to paid workers, but only to those who were absolutely reliable. The party leaders often consulted them and took them into their confidence, and if a sacrifice was required, the seven men were always the first to contribute their mite. For all this they desired no other reward but the triumph of their cause, and their clear conscience; never did one of them put himself forward, or strive for his own advantage or aspire to an office, and their greatest honor was, on occasion, to shake the hand of this or that "famous Confederate"; but he must be the right sort and "clean above the loins" as they put it.
These stout-hearted citizens had grown accustomed to one another through decades of intimacy, called one another by their Christian names, and finally came to form a strong private society, but without any other statutes than those they bore in their hearts. They met twice a week, and as, even in this small band, there were two inn-keepers, the meetings were held alternately at their houses. Those were very pleasant and informal times; quiet and grave as the Seven were in larger assemblies, they were equally noisy and merry among themselves; none of them made any pretences, and none beat round the bush; sometimes they all talked at once, sometimes they listened attentively to one of their number, according to their humor and mood. Not only politics was the subject of their conversations, but also their domestic life. If one of them was in trouble and anxiety, he laid before the others whatever oppressed him; the cause was discussed, and its remedy was made a common matter; if one of them felt himself injured by another, he would bring his complaint to the Seven, who would sit in judgment and admonish the offender. During these proceedings they were alternately very passionate, or very quiet and dignified, or even ironical. Twice, traitors, crooked fellows, had sneaked in among them, been recognized and in solemn assembly condemned and turned out, that is, beaten black and blue by the fists of the doughty greybeards. If a real misfortune overtook the party to which they were attached that entirely eclipsed any domestic misfortune, they would hide singly in the darkness and shed bitter tears.
The most eloquent and prosperous among them was Frymann, the carpenter, a veritable Croesus with an imposing establishment. The most impecunious was Hediger, the tailor; but his opinion was only second in importance to Frymann's. His political fanaticism had long since lost him his best customers; nevertheless he had educated his sons well, and so had no means left. The other five men were well situated; they listened more than they talked when important matters were under discussion by the Band of Seven, but made up for that by the weightiness of their words at home, and among their neighbors. To-day there were really important transactions on hand, which Frymann and Hediger had already discussed. The period of unrest, of struggle and of political effort, was past for these stout-hearted citizens, and their long experiences seemed for once to have come to an end with the conditions that they had attained. "All's well that ends well," they might say, and they felt themselves to be victorious and content. And so, as the shades of evening were falling on their political life, they felt that they might indulge in a crowning festivity, and, as the Band of Seven, attend in a body the first national shooting match to be held since the adoption of the new constitution of 1848, which was to take place at Aarau the following summer.
Now most of them had long since become members of the Swiss Shooting Association, and they all, except Hediger, who contented himself with his musket, possessed good rifles, with which in former years they had sometimes gone shooting on Sunday. Singly, they had also already attended other festivals, so that there seemed to be nothing so very unusual in their present purpose. But a spirit of outward pomp had taken possession of some of them, and the proposal made was really nothing less than that they should appear in Aarau with their own banner, bringing a handsome trophy as a gift. When the little company had drunk a few glasses of wine and were in good spirits, Frymann and Hediger came out with the proposal, which somewhat surprised their modest fellow-members nevertheless, so that they wavered irresolutely for some minutes. For the idea of attracting so much attention and marching out with a banner did not quite appeal to them. But as they had long since forgotten how to refuse their support to any bold stroke or undertaking with a real meaning, they resisted only long enough for the speakers to paint to them in glowing colors the banner as a symbol, and their procession as a triumph of true and tried friendship, and to show them that the appearance of seven old greybeards such as they, with a banner of friendship, would certainly make good sport. Only a little banner should be made, of green silk, with the Swiss coat of arms and a fitting inscription.
Once the question of the banner was settled, the trophy was taken up; its value was fixed fairly easily at about two hundred francs, old style. But the choice of the object itself caused a lengthier and almost heated discussion. Frymann opened the general inquiry and invited Kuser, the silversmith, as a man of taste, to give his opinion. Kuser gravely drank a good draught, coughed, thought a while, and said it was fortunate that he just happened to have a beautiful silver cup in his shop, which, if that were agreeable to the others, he could thoroughly recommend, and would let them have at the very lowest price. Hereupon followed a general silence broken only by brief remarks such as "That might do!" or "Why not?" Then Hediger asked whether anyone else wished to propose anything. Whereupon Syfrig, the skilful smith, took a swallow, plucked up courage, and said: "If it is agreeable to you all, I will also express an idea now. I have forged a very practical plough of solid iron, which, as you know, won praise at the agricultural exhibition. I am prepared to part with this fine piece of work for two hundred francs, although that would not pay for the labor of making it; but it is my opinion that this tool and symbol of agriculture would be the kind of prize that would most suitably represent the common people. Not that I wish to reflect on other proposals."
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.