The Bachelors

by Adalbert Stifter

  “I’m on the crabs already,” he said to the young man who had just entered. “You were too long in coming. I have my fixed times, as good health dictates, and I keep to them. They will bring you something in a moment. Sit down on the chair opposite me.”

  “My mother and guardian send you their greetings,” Victor began, standing there still with his knapsack on his back and wanting to convey first his relations’ messages and then his own respects and greetings.

  His uncle, however, raised both his hands, each one of which held a piece of broken crab, and, gesturing back and forth, said: “I know who you are from your face—so your stay here, where I have summoned you, should now begin—and you are the one I summoned, that I acknowledge. We are at table now, so sit down and eat. As for what else needs to be done, that will happen in due course.”

  Victor therefore put his knapsack down on a chair, leant the walking staff in a corner and then made for the chair indicated, pulling the dog after him. The thin face of the old man he now sat opposite was bent down over his plate and took on a reddish hue as he ate. He broke open the crabs very adroitly with his hands, took out the meat and sucked the juice out of the shell of the main body and the knot of legs. The goodwill that the youth had brought with him in his heart felt suffocated and he sat silently opposite his relation, who continued equally silently with the business of eating. On the table stood several variously shaped and coloured tall bottles, in which there must have been a variety of wines; his uncle had probably already drunk from these, for next to every bottle there stood an accompanying glass with wine dregs at the bottom. Only one bottle was still standing next to the plate and from this the old man periodically poured himself out a few drops into a small wine glass which had a green bowl. In the meantime Victor was brought some soup, which he ate with his right hand, while with his left he held the dog sitting beneath him against his knee. While he was eating his soup, an old woman gradually carried in so many dishes for him that he was amazed. He ate until he had had enough and then left the rest where it stood. His uncle hadn’t offered him any of the wines; Victor detested wine anyway and instead helped himself to the water from a fine crystal bottle that was replenished regularly by the same old woman who stood in attendance; he had never drunk such excellent, fresh and full-bodied strong water, he noted. While he was eating his fill, his uncle ate some cheese and then a variety of fruit and confectionery.

  Thereupon the old man himself carried the various plates, with glass covers over the dessert items, and put them into cupboards set into the walls, locking them away. He then poured the wine dregs each back into its own bottle and locked the bottles away into similar cupboards.

  In the part of the room where his uncle had sat during the meal a thick carpet was spread out and on this three fat old dogs were lying; the old man had occasionally thrown them first a crab claw, then an almond, then a piece of cake. The moment Victor had entered with his dog, all three of these had growled and during the meal, whenever he had passed a small piece of food down to his wretched dog, they had again curled their lips and whined feebly.

  For as long as his uncle had been busy eating his dinner, he hadn’t said a word to Victor, almost as if there weren’t time for anything else; now, however, he said: “So you brought that bag of bones with you again after all. Whoever has an animal has to be able to feed it, too. I advised you to throw it into the lake but you thought better. I’ve never been able to abide students’ dogs; they’re like sad spectres. And it’s precisely those types who insist on having dogs. Where did you pick it up? And did you bring it here without giving it anything to eat on the way?”

  “It’s my foster-mother’s dog, Uncle,” said Victor. “I didn’t pick him up anywhere, neither bought nor exchanged; he ran after me, in fact, on the third day after I left. He must have run hard, something he wasn’t used to doing before; he also must have been very frightened, something again he never had cause to feel with my foster-mother—and it’s for this reason that in the days following he became so thin, thinner than he’s ever been, even though I gave him whatever he wanted. Allow me then to keep him here in your house, so that I can return him to my foster-mother; otherwise I would have to journey back immediately and take him back to her.”

  “And so you’ve had it with you all the time, day and night?”

  “Of course.”

  “So that he can rip open your throat one day.”

  “That he’d never do. It would never enter his head. He has lain down at my feet whenever I rested or slept, rested his head there, and he would rather starve than leave me or do me any harm.”

  “Give him something to eat, then, and don’t forget water or he’ll get foul-tempered.”

  When dinner had finished, the old woman had come in and out, taking out the dishes, plates and their leftovers; now Christoph came, whom Victor hadn’t seen since he had brought him here.

  On seeing the servant enter, his uncle said to him: “Make sure you lock them in the stall properly, so none of them can get out, but before that let them walk about a bit downstairs on the sand.”

  At this the three dogs got up, as if at a familiar sign. Two of them followed Christoph of their own accord, while the third he took by the scruff and dragged out.

  “I’ll show you your bedroom myself,” his uncle said to Victor.

  On this he went into the interior of the room where it was noticeably dark, because there was just the one light burning on the table. There from a stand, or from some other thing—it was impossible to see what—he took a candlestick, came forward again, lit the candle and said: “Now follow me.”

  Victor put one strap of his knapsack over one arm, grabbed his staff, pulled the dog by the rope lead and went after his uncle. The latter led him through the door and out into a corridor, in which ancient cupboards were ranged in rows, then into another corridor which stood at a right angle, and finally again into a third, which was closed off by an iron grille, which was shut. His uncle opened this, led Victor forward a few more steps, then opened a door and said: “Here are your two rooms.”

  The first of these Victor walked into was large, the second smaller.

  “You can lock the dog in the neighbouring room so that he doesn’t do anything to you,” said his uncle, “and close the windows because of the night air.”

  Having said this, he lit the candle standing on the table of the first room and left without further ado. Victor heard him locking the grille door at the end of the passage, then the shuffle of slippers fading away until in the house a silence reigned like that of the dead. To convince himself that he had heard right as regards the grille door, Victor went out into the passage to check. It was indeed the case: the iron grille door had been locked.

  “You poor man,” thought Victor, “can you be afraid of me?”

  Then he put the candle he had taken out into the passage with him back onto the table next to the bent pewter washbasin and stepped up to the large, barred window. There were two windows in fact, hard up against each other and set into a stone moulding. As one of these was standing open, Victor looked out through the iron bars into the night, and the weight that had, as it were, been pressing down on his soul began to ease. It was a pale night that returned his gaze, with few stars filling the sky. A small sliver of the crescent moon may have been behind the house, for Victor saw its weak light shining on the leaves of a tree in front of the house—but the mountains opposite appeared completely devoid of light. He immediately recognised the Grisel, which had been mentioned so many times that day. It stood there like a flat, black silhouette against the silver of the sky, broadening outwards a little, lower down, and there on its shoulder stood a star, hanging down like a man-made, star-shaped medal of some order.

  Victor looked out for a long time.

  “In which direction is my mother’s valley,” he thought, “and the dear, shining cottage between the dark bushes?” For he had lost his bearings as a result of all the many twists and turns of
the path along the Afel and the crisscrossing passages of the house.

  “The stars will be shining down there, too, the elder tree will be standing quietly and the water will be rippling along. Mother and Hanna will be sleeping or still sitting at table after supper with their work, and thinking of me or even talking about me.”

  There was, of course, water outside his window now, too, a much larger amount than the stream in his native valley, but he couldn’t see it, for it was covered by a still, white mist, which terminated above in a horizontal and what seemed to be straight line.

  “No one now is looking out of the bedroom where I slept, watching the gleams of light in the busy waters of the stream, the trees standing round about, or the hills with the meadows rising up their sides.”

  As he was thus looking out, a damp and very cold night wind stole in gradually through the windows, so Victor closed them, and, before going to bed, went to inspect the second room. It was like the first, except that it had no bed. A soot-stained picture looked down from a niche—the portrait of a monk. Victor closed the narrow window here as well and returned to his bedroom. All the time he had, without thinking, been leading the dog around with him by the rope; he now undid the knot round the ring, took off the collar and said: “Lie down where you want, Pom—neither of us is going to shut the other away.”

  The dog looked at him clearly as if to say that everything appeared strange to him and that he didn’t know where he was.

  Victor now was the one to bolt the door of his room; then he undressed. While doing this, it struck him that he had seen just three people in the whole house that evening—and that all three of them were old.

  After saying his evening prayers, something he had done conscientiously from earliest childhood, he got into bed. For a while he let the light continue to burn on his bedside table, until his eyelids grew too heavy and his senses began to fade. Then he put out the candle and turned over towards the wall.

  The dog settled himself as usual at the foot of his bed, did him no harm, and for both of them, exhausted as they were, the night passed in a flash.

  V

  ISLAND SOJOURN

  WHEN VICTOR WOKE THE NEXT MORNING, he was shocked by the grandeur that presented itself to him. The Grisel stood across from where he was, sparkling and gleaming in all its crevices, and although at night it had appeared to be the highest mountain, higher ones now rose up on either side of it that he hadn’t seen in the night and these were now shining down, a soft blue, revealing in many places patches of snow, tucked into the crevices like white swans. Everything shone and shimmered in a mêlée of light; tall trees stood in front of the house glistening with more moisture than he had ever seen on them; the grass was a mass of dewdrops; everywhere broad shadows were cast; and the whole spectacle appeared again in the lake, which, swept clean of every wisp of mist, lay there like the most delicate of mirrors. Victor had flung open his window and thrust his glowing face out between the iron bars. He was awestruck. The sharpest of contrasts was created by all this encircling profusion of light and colours alongside the surrounding deathlike silence in which these gigantic mountains stood. There wasn’t a soul in sight, even in front of the house—only some birds twittered sporadically in the sycamore trees. What a chorus of morning sounds must be ringing out up there in those heights, but they went unheard because they were too far away. Victor stretched his head out as far as he could, so as to be able to look around. He could see a considerable part of the lake. Everywhere rock faces marched alongside it, and the young man was quite unable to make out the way he had come. The sun had risen, too, at quite another place than he had expected, that is, behind the house, and his windows were still in shadow, which made the light of the rock faces opposite even more intense. He was similarly wrong about the moon, which, to judge from its light, he had thought to be a narrow sickle at the most, for it was a half-moon that was still standing in the sky, inclining down towards the mountain peaks. Victor was not yet familiar with the effect of light in the mountains. What a flood of light would have to have fallen on those distant walls of rock to illuminate them as brightly as the church tower of his village, which had always reached up into the dark-blue night air so shimmeringly white and sharp in the moonlight. Although the sun had risen quite high already, the air that streamed into his windows, however, was still cold and damp, much more so than he was used to at home; but this didn’t trouble him: rather he found it simultaneously so hard and raw that it stimulated all his vital spirits.

  He stepped back finally from the window and began to unpack his knapsack in order to put on something different from what he had had on for the journey, for today, he thought, his uncle would speak to him and explain why he had got him to come to this solitary island to see him. He laid out some clean clothes, brushed the dust from his second suit, which he had brought with him along with his travelling clothes, making full use of the crystal-clear water there in the pewter jug to wash the stains of the journey from himself; he then dressed in clothes that both went together and suited him, just as he had learnt to do in his foster-mother’s spick-and-span house. He even combed and brushed the dog, who was such an unwelcome guest in this house. He then put his collar on again and tied the rope to its ring. When they were both completely ready, he opened his door and was about to set off for the room where they had eaten the evening before in order to find his uncle, when, in the passage, it struck him that he had forgotten to say his morning prayers that day for the first time. It must have happened as a consequence of the huge and unprecedented impressions he had been affected by that morning. He returned to his room, therefore, went and stood at the window again and spoke the simple words he had once secretly thought up for this purpose, and which no one knew anything about. Then he set off a second time in search of his uncle.

  The iron grille door in the passage was no longer locked; he went through it and easily found the passage leading from the dining-room, out of which he had been led the evening before; but there was no door in the passage that might have led into a room; instead, there were all these old cupboards that he had seen by candlelight the previous night. The windows in the corridor were boarded up from top to bottom; there was only a small opening left at the very top that enabled the light to peer in through the pane, as if his uncle feared the freedom and clarity of light, loving rather to have these passages in darkness. As Victor was thus looking around, the old woman who had brought in the dishes for dinner the night before stepped out of one of the cupboards. She was carrying cups and bowls and disappeared again into another of these same cupboards. When Victor looked more closely at the one she had come out of, he discovered that it was in fact a secret door casing, at the back wall of which was the door through which he had come the previous evening when going into his uncle’s room; this he recognised from the ring and door knocker he’d seen picked out by the light the night before. He rapped softly on the knocker and on hearing a noise within that sounded like “Come in”, he opened it and went in. He found himself indeed in yesterday’s dining room and there beheld his uncle.

  The only reason why all these similar-looking cupboards—dating perhaps from former times—seemed to have been placed in the passageway was so that anyone with dishonest intent wanting to go in through a door would not be easily able to realise this intent, since he would have to waste precious minutes examining real and false door frames. It was apparently for this same reason of greater security that the corridors had, in addition, been made dark.

  His uncle was today dressed in the broad, grey coat that Victor had seen him in the day before when he had stood at the iron grille gate. He was standing now on a stool, holding a stuffed bird, which he was dusting off with a brush.

  “I’ll give you the house timetable today that Christoph has written down, so that you can act accordingly, since I’ve had to have breakfast already because it was time,” he said to Victor as he entered, without any other morning greeting or welcome.

 
“I wish you a very good morning, Uncle,” said Victor, “and apologise for not coming for breakfast at the right time—I didn’t know when it was.”

  “Of course not, you fool—you couldn’t have known, and no one asked you to. Pour out some water for the dog in that wooden trough.”

  On so saying, he stepped down from the stool, walked over to a stepladder, climbed it and put the bird in the top compartment of a glass cupboard, taking out another in place of this and beginning to dust this one, too.

  Now in the light of day Victor could see how unusually gaunt and decrepit the man was. Nothing suggesting goodwill and sympathy was conveyed by his features, which were instead turned in on themselves, as with someone on the defensive, someone who for countless years has loved only himself. His coat hung loosely round his arms and his reddish, shrivelled neck protruded up from the collar. His hair, though still not completely grey but made up of a mixture of many jarring colours, hung untidily around his shrunken temples, and never, from the time it first grew, had it been stroked by a loving hand. His eyes, which started out from under his drooping brow, were fixed on the tiny contours of the dead bird. The upper edge of his coat collar was very dirty and part of his shirt that was bulging out from the sleeve was also dirtier than any he had ever seen at his foster-mother’s home. And all about the man were things that were either lifeless or decayed. And in the room were a host of stands, shelves, nails, deer antlers, and all these had something hanging from them and something standing on them. Everything was, however, so strictly guarded that dust lay everywhere, many of the things not having been moved from their place for years. Dust clung to the insides of the dogs’ collars, a whole bundle of which were hanging up; the folds of the tobacco pouches had fossilised rigid from being untouched an unimaginably long time; the stems in the collection of pipes were all split open, and the pieces of paper underneath the countless paperweights had yellowed. The room, which, instead of having a ceiling, was very steeply vaulted, had originally been painted but the tones and shades of this colour had drained away into a uniform, ancient grey. A faded carpet lay on the floor and only there, where the man would sit at mealtimes, was a newer, smaller one laid, which had fresh colours. Right now the three dogs were lounging on it. Standing in this old man’s room, Victor presented a very striking contrast: an almost virginal innocence blossomed on his handsome face, which was full of strength and joie de vivre, framed neatly by his evenly dark hair, and, as he stood there in his suit, he was so cleanly turned out that it seemed he had just at that moment been attended to by the loving hands of a mother.