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Read Ebook: Folksångerna om Robin Hood: Akademisk afhandling by Estlander Carl Gustaf
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Ebook has 334 lines and 33598 words, and 7 pages
Translator: A. L. Wister
MRS. A. L. WISTER'S
Popular Translations from the German.
COUNTESS ERIKA'S
APPRENTICESHIP
BY MRS. A. L. WISTER
PHILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1891
A friend returning from a stroll round the globe brought back an odd volume of my work picked up in San Francisco, translated without my leave, but proving by its very existence that the American reading world take a certain interest in my show and its puppets.
Though in a certain sense these unauthorized editions are a picking of the author's pocket, yet I must confess that I felt rather flattered.
Every one possessing any feeling for modernism must highly prize what American art and American literature have done and are doing for the directness, vividness, and intensity of presentation to our eyes or our imagination either of outward objects or the silent workings of character and inner sensations.
The rapidity and intensity of picturing frequently remind us of an electric shock.
We Old World folk take life, to a certain degree, more at our leisure, but nevertheless every real artist follows the great direction that has seized all our contemporary being.
Directness of truth, vividness and intensity of presentation, exact rendering of impression, are the means by which we seek to produce life; life itself is the object, but I am afraid that to the end the life-giving spark will defy analysis.
Let me hope that the figures whose woes and weal my reader will follow through these pages may be half as alive to him as they have been to me; and let me hope, likewise, that when he closes the volume we may have become fast friends.
I cannot let this opportunity pass without thanking Mrs. Wister most heartily for her faithful and picturesque rendering of my story.
What a rare delight it is to an author to find himself so admirably rendered and so perfectly understood only those can feel that have undergone the acute misery of seeing their every thought mangled, their every sentence massacred, as common translations will mangle and massacre word and thought.
Therefore let every writer thank Providence, if he find an artist like Mrs. Wister willing to put herself to the trouble of following his intentions, and of clothing his ideas in so brilliant a garb.
It is only natural, therefore, that, having been lucky enough to find so rare a translator, I should authorize the translation to the absolute exclusion of any other.
Ossip Schubin.
COUNTESS ERIKA'S APPRENTICESHIP.
Baron von Strachinsky reclined upon a lounge in his smoking-room, recovering from the last pecuniary calamity which he had brought upon himself. The fact was, he had built a sugar-factory in a tract of country where the nearest approach to a sugar-beet that could be found was a carrot on a manure-heap, and his enterprise had been followed by the natural result.
He bore his misfortune with exemplary fortitude, and beguiled the time with a sentimental novel upon the cover of which was portrayed a lady wringing her hands in presence of a military man drinking champagne. At times he wept over this fiction, at others he dozed over it and was at peace.
This he called submitting with dignity to the mysterious decrees of destiny, and he looked upon himself as a martyr.
His wife was not at home. Whilst he reposed thus in melancholy self-admiration, she was devoting herself to the humiliating occupation of visiting in turn one and another of her wealthy relatives, begging of them the loan of funds necessary for the furtherance of her husband's brilliant scheme.
"It is very sad, but 'tis the fault of circumstances," sighed the Baron when his thoughts wandered from his book to his absent wife, and for a moment he would cover his eyes with his hand.
It was near the end of August, and the asters were beginning to bloom. Cheerful industry reigned throughout the village. The Baron indeed complained of the failure of the harvest, but this he did of every harvest the proceeds of which were insufficient to cover the interest of his numerous debts: the peasantry, who by no means exacted so high a rate of profit from their meadows and pasture-lands, were happy and content, and the stubble-fields were already dotted with hayricks.
Outside in the garden a little girl in a worn and faded frock was playing funeral: she was interring her canary, which she had found dead in its cage. She was very sad: the bird had been her best friend. No one paid her any attention. Her mother was away, and the Englishwoman whose duty it was to superintend her education was just now occupied in company with the bailiff, an ambitious young man desirous of improving his knowledge of languages, in studying the working of a new mowing-machine. From time to time the child glanced through the open door of the principal entrance to the castle into a rather bare hall, its floor paved with red tiles and its high vaulted walls whitewashed and adorned with stags' horns of all sizes. The Baron von Strachinsky had bought these last in one lot at an auction, but he had long cherished the conviction that they all came from his forest. He had a decided taste for fine, high-sounding expressions, always designating his wood as his 'forest,' his estate as his 'domain,' and his garden as his 'park.'
A charwoman with a flat, red, perspiring face, and a knot of thin bristling hair at the back of her head, from which her yellow cotton kerchief had slipped down upon her neck, was shuffling upon hands and knees, her high kilted skirts leaving her red legs quite bare, over the tiles of the hall, rubbing away at the dirt and footmarks with a wisp of straw, while the steam of hot soapy water rose from the wooden bucket beside her.
The little girl outside had just planted a row of pink asters upon the grave, which she had dug with a pewter spoon, and had filled up duly, when the scratching of the wisp of straw suddenly ceased.
A young fellow was standing in the hall,--very young, scarcely sixteen, and with a portfolio under his arm. His garb was that of a journeyman mechanic, but his bearing had in it something of distinction, and his face was delicately modelled, very pale, with large dark eyes, almost black, gleaming below the brown curls of his hair. The same class of countenance is frequently seen among the Neapolitan boys who sell Seville oranges in Rome; but such eyes as this lad had are seen at most only two or three times in a lifetime.
The child in the garden looked with evident satisfaction at the young fellow. Apparently he had come into the castle through the back entrance,--the one used by servants and beggars.
She knocked several times. At last a sleepy, ill-humoured voice said, "What is it?"
"Your Grace, a young gentleman: he wants to speak to your Grace."
With eyes but half open, and the pattern of the embroidered cushion upon which he had been sleeping stamped upon his cheek, the Baron von Strachinsky came out into the hall.
He was of middle height; his face had once been handsome, but was now red and bloated with excessive good living; he was slightly bald, and wore thick brown side-whiskers. His dress was a combination of slovenliness and foppery. He wore scarlet Turkish slippers, trodden down at heel, gray trousers, and a soiled dark-blue smoking-jacket with red facings and buttons.
"What do you want?" he roared, in a rage at being disturbed for so slight a cause.
The young fellow shrank from him, murmuring in a hoarse, tremulous voice, the voice of a very young man growing fast and but scantily nourished, "I am on my way home."
"What's that to me?" Strachinsky thundered, not without some excuse for his indignation.
The youth flushed scarlet. Shyly and awkwardly he held out his portfolio to the sleepy Baron. Evidently it contained drawings, which he would like to sell but had not the courage to show.
"Give him an alms!" Herr von Strachinsky shouted to the cook, who, hearing the noise, had hurried into the hall; then, turning to the scrubbing-woman, who was standing beside her steaming bucket, her toothless jaws wide open in dismay, he went on: "If you ever again dare for the sake of a wretched vagabond of a house-painter's apprentice to deprive me of the few moments of repose which I contrive to snatch from my wretched and tormented existence, I'll dismiss you on the spot!" With which he retired to his room, banging to the door behind him.
The cook offered the lad two kreutzers. His hand--a long, slender, boyish hand, almost transparent--shook, as he angrily threw the money upon the floor and departed.
The little girl in the garden had been watching the scene attentively. Her delicate frame trembled with indignation, as she rose, and, with arms hanging at her sides and small fists clinched in a somewhat dramatic attitude, fixed her eyes upon the door behind which the Baron had disappeared. She had very bright eyes for a child of nine years, and a very penetrating glance, a glance by no means friendly to the Baron. Thus she stood for a minute gazing at the door, then put her arms akimbo, frowned, and reflected. Before long she shrugged her shoulders with an air of precocious intelligence, deserted the newly-made grave, and hurried into the house, and to the pantry.
Deep down in her heart there was a vein of romance which contrasted oddly with the keen good sense already gleaming in her bright childish eyes.
She ran until she was quite out of breath, searching vainly for her handsome vagabond. Should she inquire of some one if a young man with a portfolio under his arm had passed along the road? Her heart beat; she felt a little shy. From a distance the warm summer breeze wafted towards her the notes of a foreign air clearly whistled, and she directed her steps towards the spot whence it seemed to proceed.
Beside the road rippled a little brook on its way to the rushing stream beyond the village, a brook so narrow that a twelve-year-old school-boy could easily have jumped across it. Nevertheless the Baron von Strachinsky had thought best to span it with a magnificent three-arched stone bridge. In the shade thrown by this monumental structure, for the erection of which the Baron had vainly hoped to be decorated by his sovereign, the lad was crouching. He was even paler than before, and there were traces of tears on his cheeks, but all the same he whistled on with forced gaiety, as one does whistle when one has nothing to eat and hopes to forget his hunger.
The little girl felt like crying. He looked up and directly at her. Overcome by sudden shyness, she stood for a moment as if rooted to the spot; then, awkwardly offering her basket, she stammered, "Will you have it?" When he did not answer she simply set the basket down before him, and in her confusion would have avoided all explanations by running away.
But a warm young hand detained her firmly and kindly. "Did you come from there?" the lad asked, pointing to the castle. "Who sent you?"
His voice was agreeable, and his address that of a well-born youth.
"No one knows that I came," she answered, in confusion, and seeing that he frowned discontentedly at this, she added hastily, by way of excuse, "But if mamma had been at home she certainly would have sent me; she never lets a beggar leave the house without giving him something to eat."
At the word 'beggar' he turned away, whereupon she began to cry loudly, so loudly that he had to laugh. "But what are you crying for?" he asked; and she replied, in desperation, "I am crying because you will not eat anything."
"Indeed! is that all you are crying for?"
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