*** Project Gutenberg etext of The Love of Ulrich Nebendahl ***
By Jerome K. Jerome

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THE LOVE OF ULRICH NEBENDAHL
By JEROME K. JEROME

Author of "Paul Kelver," "Three Men in a Boat," etc., etc.

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
1909


COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY JEROME K. JEROME
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
Published, September, 1908


THE  LOVE OF ULRICH NEBENDAHL

Perhaps of all, it troubled most the Herr Pfarrer.  Was he not the
father of the village?  And as such did it not fall to him to see his
children marry well and suitably? marry in any case.  It was the duty
of every worthy citizen to keep alive throughout the ages the sacred
hearth fire, to rear up sturdy lads and honest lassies that would
serve God, and the Fatherland.  A true son of Saxon soil was the Herr
Pastor Winckelmann--kindly, simple, sentimental.

"Why, at your age, Ulrich--at your age," repeated the Herr Pastor,
setting down his beer and wiping with the back of his hand his large
uneven lips, "I was the father of a family--two boys and a girl.  You
never saw her, Ulrich; so sweet, so good.  We called her Maria."  The
Herr Pfarrer sighed and hid his broad red face behind the raised cover
of his pewter pot.

"They must be good fun in a house, the little ones," commented Ulrich,
gazing upward with his dreamy eyes at the wreath of smoke ascending
from his long-stemmed pipe.  "The little ones, always my heart goes
out to them."

"Take to yourself a wife," urged the Herr Pfarrer.  "It is your duty.
The good God has given to you ample means.  It is not right that you
should lead this lonely life.  Bachelors make old maids; things of no
use."

"That is so," Ulrich agreed.  "I have often said the same unto myself.
It would be pleasant to feel one was not working merely for oneself."

"Elsa, now," went on the Herr Pfarrer, "she is a good child, pious and
economical.  The price of such is above rubies."

Ulrich"s face lightened with a pleasant smile.  "Aye, Elsa is a good
girl," he answered.  "Her little hands--have you ever noticed them,
Herr Pastor--so soft and dimpled."

The Pfarrer pushed aside his empty pot and leaned his elbows on the
table.

"I think--I do not think--she would say no.  Her mother, I have reason
to believe--  Let me sound them--discreetly."  The old pastor's red
face glowed redder, yet with pleasurable anticipation; he was a born
matchmaker.

But Ulrich the wheelwright shuffled in his chair uneasily.

"A little longer," he pleaded.  "Let me think it over.  A man should
not marry without first being sure he loves.  Things might happen.  It
would not be fair to the maiden."

The Herr Pfarrer stretched his hand across the table and laid it upon
Ulrich's arm.

"It is Hedwig; twice you walked home with her last week."

"It is a lonesome way for a timid maiden; and there is the stream to
cross," explained the wheelwright.

For a moment the Herr Pastor's face had clouded, but now it cleared
again.

"Well, well, why not?  Elsa would have been better in some respects,
but Hedwig--ah, yes, she, too, is a good girl a little wild
perhaps--it will wear off.  Have you spoken with her?"

"Not yet."

"But you will?"

Again there fell that troubled look into those dreamy eyes.  This time
it was Ulrich who, laying aside his pipe, rested his great arms upon
the wooden table.

"Now, how does a man know when he is in love?" asked Ulrich of the
Pastor who, having been married twice, should surely be experienced
upon the point.  "How should he be sure that it is this woman and no
other to whom his heart has gone out?"

A commonplace-looking man was the Herr Pastor, short and fat and bald.
But there had been other days, and these had left to him a voice that
still was young; and the evening twilight screening the seared face,
Ulrich heard but the pastor's voice, which was the voice of a boy.

"She will be dearer to you than yourself.  Thinking of her, all else
will be as nothing.  For her you would lay down your life."

They sat in silence for a while; for the fat little Herr Pfarrer was
dreaming of the past; and long, lanky Ulrich Nebendahl, the
wheelwright, of the future.

That evening, as chance would have it, Ulrich returning to his
homestead--a rambling mill beside the river, where he dwelt alone with
ancient Anna--met Elsa of the dimpled hands upon the bridge that
spans the murmuring Muhlde, and talked a while with her, and said
good-night.

How sweet it had been to watch her ox-like eyes shyly seeking his, to
press her dimpled hand and feel his own great strength.  Surely he
loved her better than he did himself.  There could be no doubt of it.
He pictured her in trouble, in danger from the savage soldiery that
came and went like evil shadows through these pleasant Saxon valleys,
leaving death and misery behind them:  burnt homesteads; wild-eyed
women, hiding their faces from the light.  Would he not for her sake
give his life?

So it was made clear to him that little Elsa was his love.

Until next morning, when, raising his eyes from the whirling saw,
there stood before him Margot, laughing.  Margot, mischief-loving,
wayward, that would ever be to him the baby he had played with,
nursed, and comforted.  Margot weary!  Had he not a thousand times
carried her sleeping in his arms.  Margot in danger!  At the mere
thought his face flushed an angry scarlet.

All that afternoon Ulrich communed with himself, tried to understand
himself, and could not.  For Elsa and Margot and Hedwig were not the
only ones by a long way.  What girl in the village did he not love, if
it came to that:  Liesel, who worked so hard and lived so poorly,
bullied by her cross-grained granddam.  Susanna, plain and a little
crotchety, who had never had a sweetheart to coax the thin lips into
smiles.  The little ones--for so they seemed to long, lanky Ulrich,
with their pleasant ways--Ulrich smiled as he thought of them--how
should a man love one more than another?

The Herr Pfarrer shook his head and sighed.

"That is not love.  Gott in Himmel! think what it would lead to?  The
good God never would have arranged things so.  You love one; she is
the only woman in the world for you."

"But you, yourself, Herr Pastor, you have twice been married,"
suggested the puzzled wheelwright.

"But one at a time, Ulrich--one at a time.  That is a very different
thing."

Why should it not come to him, alone among men?  Surely it was a
beautiful thing, this love; a thing worthy of a man, without which a
man was but a useless devourer of food, cumbering the earth.

So Ulrich pondered, pausing from his work one drowsy summer's
afternoon, listening to the low song of the waters.  How well he knew
the winding Muhlde's merry voice.  He had worked beside it, played
beside it all his life.  Often he would sit and talk to it as to an
old friend, reading answers in its changing tones.

Trudchen, seeing him idle, pushed her cold nose into his hand.
Trudchen just now was feeling clever and important.  Was she not the
mother of the five most wonderful puppies in all Saxony?  They swarmed
about his legs, pressing him with their little foolish heads.  Ulrich
stooped and picked up one in each big hand.  But this causing jealousy
and heartburning, laughing, he lay down upon a log.  Then the whole
five stormed over him, biting his hair, trampling with their clumsy
paws upon his face; till suddenly they raced off in a body to attack a
floating feather.  Ulrich sat up and watched them, the little rogues,
the little foolish, helpless things, that called for so much care.  A
mother thrush twittered above his head.  Ulrich rose and creeping on
tiptoe, peeped into the nest.  But the mother bird, casting one glance
towards him, went on with her work.  Whoever was afraid of Ulrich the
wheelwright!  The tiny murmuring insects buzzed to and fro about his
feet.  An old man, passing to his evening rest, gave him "good-day."
A zephyr whispered something to the leaves, at which they laughed,
then passed upon his way.  Here and there a shadow crept out from its
hiding-place.

"If only I could marry the whole village!" laughed Ulrich to himself.

But that, of course, is nonsense!

The spring that followed let loose the dogs of war again upon the
blood-stained land, for now all Germany, taught late by common
suffering forgetfulness of local rivalries, was rushing together in a
mighty wave that would sweep French feet for ever from their hold on
German soil.  Ulrich, for whom the love of woman seemed not, would at
least be the lover of his country.  He, too, would march among those
brave stern hearts that, stealing like a thousand rivulets from every
German valley, were flowing north and west to join the Prussian
eagles.

But even love of country seemed denied to Ulrich of the dreamy eyes.
His wheelwright's business had called him to a town far off.  He had
been walking all the day.  Towards evening, passing the outskirts of a
wood, a feeble cry for help, sounding from the shadows, fell upon his
ear.  Ulrich paused, and again from the sombre wood crept that weary
cry of pain.  Ulrich ran and came at last to where, among the wild
flowers and the grass, lay prone five human figures.  Two of them were
of the German Landwehr, the other three Frenchmen in the hated uniform
of Napoleon's famous scouts.  It had been some unimportant "affair of
outposts," one of those common incidents of warfare that are never
recorded--never remembered save here and there by some sad face
unnoticed in the crowd.  Four of the men were dead; one, a Frenchman
was still alive, though bleeding copiously from a deep wound in the
chest that with a handful of dank grass he was trying to staunch.

Ulrich raised him in his arms.  The man spoke no German, and Ulrich
knew but his mother tongue; but when the man, turning towards the
neighbouring village with a look of terror in his half-glazed eyes,
pleaded with his hands, Ulrich understood, and lifting him gently
carried him further into the wood.

He found a small deserted shelter that had been made by
charcoal-burners, and there on a bed of grass and leaves Ulrich laid
him; and there for a week all but a day Ulrich tended him and nursed
him back to life, coming and going stealthily like a thief in the
darkness.  Then Ulrich, who had thought his one desire in life to be
to kill all Frenchmen, put food and drink into the Frenchman's
knapsack and guided him half through the night and took his hand; and
so they parted.

Ulrich did not return to Alt Waldnitz, that lies hidden in the forest
beside the murmuring Muhlde.  They would think he had gone to the war;
he would let them think so.  He was too great a coward to go back to
them and tell them that he no longer wanted to fight; that the sound
of the drum brought to him only the thought of trampled grass where
dead men lay with curses in their eyes.

So, with head bowed down in shame, to and fro about the moaning land,
Ulrich of the dreamy eyes came and went, guiding his solitary
footsteps by the sounds of sorrow, driving away the things of evil
where they crawled among the wounded, making his way swiftly to the
side of pain, heedless of the uniform.

Thus one day he found himself by chance near again to forest-girdled
Waldnitz.  He would push his way across the hills, wander through its
quiet ways in the moonlight while the good folks all lay sleeping.
His foot-steps quickened as he drew nearer.  Where the trees broke he
would be able to look down upon it, see every roof he knew so
well--the church, the mill, the winding Muhlde--the green, worn grey
with dancing feet, where, when the hateful war was over, would be
heard again the Saxon folk-songs.

Another was there, where the forest halts on the brow of the hill--a
figure kneeling on the ground with his face towards the village.
Ulrich stole closer.  It was the Herr Pfarrer, praying volubly but
inaudibly.  He scrambled to his feet as Ulrich touched him, and his
first astonishment over, poured forth his tale of woe.

There had been trouble since Ulrich's departure.  A French corps of
observation had been camped upon the hill, and twice within the month
had a French soldier been found murdered in the woods.  Heavy had been
the penalties exacted from the village, and terrible had been the
Colonel's threats of vengeance.  Now, for a third time, a soldier
stabbed in the back had been borne into camp by his raging comrades,
and this very afternoon the Colonel had sworn that if the murderer
were not handed over to him within an hour from dawn, when the camp
was to break up, he would before marching burn the village to the
ground.  The Herr Pfarrer was on his way back from the camp where he
had been to plead for mercy, but it had been in vain.

"Such are foul deeds!" said Ulrich.

"The people are mad with hatred of the French," answered the Herr
Pastor.  "It may be one, it may be a dozen who have taken vengeance
into their own hands.  May God forgive them."

"They will not come forward--not to save the village?"

"Can you expect it of them!  There is no hope for us; the village will
burn as a hundred others have burned."

Aye, that was true; Ulrich had seen their blackened ruins; the old
sitting with white faces among the wreckage of their homes, the little
children wailing round their knees, the tiny broods burned in their
nests.  He had picked their corpses from beneath the charred trunks of
the dead elms.

The Herr Pfarrer had gone forward on his melancholy mission to prepare
the people for their doom.

Ulrich stood alone, looking down upon Alt Waldnitz bathed in
moonlight.  And there came to him the words of the old pastor:  "She
will be dearer to you than yourself.  For her you would lay down your
life."  And Ulrich knew that his love was the village of Alt Waldnitz,
where dwelt his people, the old and wrinkled, the laughing "little
ones," where dwelt the helpless dumb things with their deep pathetic
eyes, where the bees hummed drowsily, and the thousand tiny creatures
of the day.

They hanged him high upon a withered elm, with his face towards Alt
Waldnitz, that all the village, old and young, might see; and then to
the beat of drum and scream of fife they marched away; and
forest-hidden Waldnitz gathered up once more its many threads of quiet
life and wove them into homely pattern.

They talked and argued many a time, and some there were who praised
and some who blamed.  But the Herr Pfarrer could not understand.

Until years later a dying man unburdened his soul so that the truth
became known.

Then they raised Ulrich's coffin reverently, and the yonng men carried
it into the village and laid it in the churchyard that it might always
be among them.  They reared above him what in their eyes was a grand
monument, and carved upon it:

"Greater love hath no man than this."

*** End of Project Gutenberg etext of The Love of Ulrich Nebendahl ***