up the reins and the whip and drove on. When they had been driving for a while the master said, ‘What did you say to him, Christoph?’
“ ‘I said to him “For Christ’s sake, brother,” Herr Baron.’
“ ‘Drive back, Christoph,’ commanded the master.
“And they turned around and found the beggar by the roadside, and the master poured all the gold he had won in the night into the beggar’s cap. It was so much that some of it fell over the rim into the snow.
“Yes, the old families,” concluded Christoph, and gazed into the fire, which was burning down on the hearth with a sighing note.
Christoph never said anything to show that he was worried about Baron Amadeus, and that his anxiety determined the choice of his stories. But when he got up and put the chips of pinewood on the hearth he sometimes said, “So it went with the masters formerly, Herr Baron. They could be aroused – and sometimes our Heavenly Father chose a simple hand . . .”
Amadeus liked to listen to him.
It was as if Christoph’s hands turned the globe and this continent sank down, so that others, strange ones, might rise above the horizon. And with this continent that sank down, the last years sank down too, yes, perhaps all his own life, and it seemed as if nothing were left but the long line of the generations, all that was common to them and encompassed them. As if the baron Amadeus were only an unnumbered page in the great book which gently opened by itself, and that the triptych was something nameless, just as the father who had suffered himself to be deceived. Nothing was left but the character of the family, and God leaned down over the old roof, now long fallen in, and looked at it. This family, the members of which could in bygone times be “aroused.”
Then Baron Amadeus remained sitting at the other side of the fire, his elbows propped on his knees while the last gleam from low flames fell on his idle hands, which he tried to warm at the golden embers. Only once before Christoph said goodbye he stopped by the baron, lost in thought, as if he were about to pluck his sleeve or to grasp his belt, and with his deep, kind old voice he said, “You poor, frozen master.”
But Amadeus did not answer.
Nor did he ask much; he only sat there waiting. Old people like to talk. Christoph had had neither wife nor child, but only the horses and his masters. The horses were lost, but the masters still existed, as well as the whip which he had saved. There was no other token of office for a coachman of the nobility. The whip was for him like the scepter in the hand of a king.
Even without his horses he was still indispensable to these “young masters” whose hair was gray or already white, but who sometimes were as children at his knees, just as in times gone by, when he had sat on the oat bin and had given them the fruits of his life’s experience: a serving life, poor and within narrow limits, but through serving his life had become so rich that there was not its equal in the manor house.
Now the two “young masters” lived up here, and they were as poor as he was. But Christoph saw very well that poverty did not oppress them. For the real aristocrat, poverty was neither a burden nor a disgrace. But he saw very well, too, that they were sometimes afraid. He did not know how great or how small this fear was, nor what they were afraid of – his eyes were too simple for that. But he realized that they were afraid like children. No wisdom was needed to console children. They only needed a pair of old hands which put the glowing cinder on the tobacco in the pipe, quietly and without trembling, even if the outside world came to an end.
He felt, too, that they were not afraid of the things that humble people feared. They were too noble, too high-born, and he knew well what that meant. They were afraid because their door was no longer locked, the door to the room where they could be apart. Because the door was forced, and because everybody could step over the threshold: the military police or a cattle dealer or a farm hand who asked for higher wages; afraid because they were still living in an aristocratic world and now suddenly nobody was obliged to wipe his shoes before stepping over their threshold. Not that they had ever asked anybody to wipe his shoes before entering their door, but they expected that this should be done in honor of the world in which they lived; a stately room perhaps, furnished with books and pictures. Or in face, their narrow, reserved features which were only in part their own, the other part belonging to the noble family whose name they bore and whose honor they had always upheld.
So Christoph was not surprised when Baron Amadeus asked him one evening by the fire whether he was afraid.
Christoph took the pipe from his mouth and bent down a little to the fire.
“When I was a small child, Herr Baron,” he said, “so small” – and he held his hand with the pipe a little above the floor – “I was afraid as children are afraid. At that time we were still told of the Man in Black, the Corn Woman, and the Moor Witch. At that time the wood owl hooting in the oak tree predicted somebody’s death. At that time little lights were to be seen on the peat bogs, and Queen Mab made plaits of elflocks in the manes of the horses. Perhaps it is still so today, and I believe it is so. But my eyes see it in a different way, Herr Baron, do you understand? My eyes are full of faith now, and he who is full of faith is not afraid. Our Heavenly Father can send the Man in Black to you, for he can send everything, but the Man in Black does not exist for his own sake, do you understand? Our Heavenly Father holds him on a thin thread and pulls him back, when it is enough.”
“And our Heavenly Father?” asked Amadeus. “Would you not be afraid of him, if he were standing at the threshold?”
“Why should I be afraid, Herr Baron? If he should say: ‘Are you there, Christoph?’ I would put my pipe down on the hearth and answer: ‘Come in, O Lord, here I am. But stoop a little, because the door is so low.’ Do you think that it can give him pleasure to frighten me, Herr Baron? An old man with white hair? Who never stole any oats from the oat bin and has never lost his whip?”
“But if it were not our Heavenly Father who stood on the threshold, Christoph, but a human being? A friendly-looking man, but one whose clothes were transparent and you could see the knife around which his hand had closed in his pocket? Or you could read on his lips the words which he would speak before the court, lying words and words of betrayal? Or if you knew or believed that any man whom you know, everyone indeed, could stand before your threshold like that?”
Then Christoph raised his left hand which trembled a little and put his finger tips cautiously and gently on the folded hands of Baron Amadeus. And with a kind, quite beautiful smile he said, “Can you believe, Herr Baron, that Christoph could stand like that before your threshold?”
“No, not you, Christoph, not you. But . . .”
“And even if it is only your old coachman who would not stand there, sir,” said Christoph, “is it not always true that our Heavenly Father would have room to stand there? You see, sir,” he went on gently after a while, “we, too, have had fathers, grandfathers, and forefathers. Many of them in far-off days were fettered and were whipped and some were whipped to death. But we do not carry it as a burden anymore, sir. Our Heavenly Father has taken the load from us. He has even taken to himself those who used the whip. I believe that he was more grieved about them than about those who shrieked in pain. Do you think, sir, that his hand is so small that there is no room for you in it – even though you are a baron?”
He sat quietly thinking for a time, then he took a cinder from the hearth and put it on his pipe.
“If God crucifies,” he said gently, “he must take into his hand the one who is crucified. He does not stretch out his hand in vain, sir. He does not trifle, not he.”
The
