It was under these circumstances that the Christmas feast drew near, to which little Hanno was counting the days, with a beating heart and the help of a calendar manufactured by Ida Jungmann, with a Christmas tree on the last leaf.
The signs of festivity increased. Ever since the a great gaily coloured picture of a certain Ruprecht had been hanging on the wall in grandmama’s dining-room. And one morning Hanno found his covers and the rug beside his bed sprinkled with gold tinsel. A few days later, as Papa was lying with his newspaper on the living-room sofa, and Hanno was reading “The Witch of Endor” out of Gerock’s Palm Leaves, an “old man” was announced. This had happened every year since Hanno was a baby—and yet was always a surprise. They asked him in, this “old man,” and he came shuffling along in a big coat with the fur side out, sprinkled with bits of cotton-wool and tinsel. He wore a fur cap, and his face had black smudges on it, and his beard was long and white. The beard and the big, bushy eyebrows were also sprinkled with tinsel. He explained—as he did every year—in a harsh voice, that this sack (on his left shoulder) was for good children, who said their prayers (it contained apples and gilded nuts); but that this sack (on his right shoulder) was for naughty children. The “old man” was, of course, Ruprecht; perhaps not actually the real Ruprecht—it might even be Wenzel the barber, dressed up in Papa’s coat turned fur side out—but it was as much Ruprecht as possible. Hanno, greatly impressed, said Our Father for him, as he had last year—both times interrupting himself now and again with a little nervous sob—and was permitted to put his hand into the sack for good children, which the “old man” forgot to take away.
The holidays came, and there was not much trouble over the report, which had to be presented for Papa to read, even at Christmas-time. The great dining-room was closed and mysterious, and there were marzipan and gingerbread to eat—and in the streets, Christmas had already come. Snow fell, the weather was frosty, and on the sharp clear air were borne the notes of the barrel-organ, for the Italians, with their velvet jackets and their black moustaches, had arrived for the Christmas feast. The shopwindows were gay with toys and goodies; the booths for the Christmas fair had been erected in the marketplace; and wherever you went you breathed in the fresh, spicy odour of the Christmas trees set out for sale.
The evening of the came at last, and with it the present-giving in the house in Fishers’ Lane. This was attended by the family only—it was a sort of dress rehearsal for the Christmas Eve party given by the Frau Consul in Meng Street. She clung to the old customs, and reserved the for a celebration to which the whole family group was bidden; which, accordingly, in the late afternoon, assembled in the landscape-room.
The old lady, flushed of cheek, and with feverish eyes, arrayed in a heavy black-and-grey striped silk that gave out a faint scent of patchouli, received her guests as they entered, and embraced them silently, her gold bracelets tinkling. She was strangely excited this evening—“Why, Mother, you’re fairly trembling,” the Senator said when he came in with Gerda and Hanno. “Everything will go off very easily.” But she only whispered, kissing all three of them, “For Jesus Christ’s sake—and my blessed Jean’s.”
Indeed, the whole consecrated programme instituted by the deceased Consul had to be carried out to the smallest detail; and the poor lady fluttered about, driven by her sense of responsibility for the fitting accomplishment of the evening’s performance, which must be pervaded with a deep and fervent joy. She went restlessly back and forth, from the pillared hall where the choirboys from St. Mary’s were already assembled, to the dining-room, where Riekchen Severin was putting the finishing touches to the tree and the table-full of presents, to the corridor full of shrinking old people—the “poor” who were to share in the presents—and back into the landscape-room, where she rebuked every unnecessary word or sound with one of her mild sidelong glances. It was so still that the sound of a distant hand-organ, faint and clear like a toy music-box, came across to them through the snowy streets. Some twenty persons or more were sitting or standing about in the room; yet it was stiller than a church—so still that, as the Senator cautiously whispered to Uncle Justus, it reminded one more of a funeral!
There was really no danger that the solemnity of the feast would be rudely broken in upon by youthful high spirits. A glance showed that almost all the persons in the room were arrived at an age when the forms of expression are already long
