The Chimney-Sweeper’s Wife
This is a grim and sad story. I heard it told more than once in my childhood, and it made me wonder and shudder.
In a side street stands an old middle-class house with a smooth gray façade. Through a large round-arched door without any decorations—there is, to be sure, a date, and perhaps too a couple of garlands with fruit—one comes upon a narrow courtyard paved with cobblestones, and a dark, stone-paved fountain like so many of its kind, where the sun never strikes the path. An old linden with pollarded branches, blackened bark, and leafage thinned with age stands in one corner; it is as old as the house, older indeed, and is always a favorite resort for the children and cats of the courtyard.
This was of old the yard of Wetzmann, the master chimney-sweep.
Sweeper Wetzmann must have been a very good-natured old fellow. He had had success in life and had got together quite a large property. He was kind to the poor, harsh to his prentices—for such was the custom; so perhaps it needed to be, too—and drank toddy in the tavern every evening, for he had a poor life at home.
His wife was likewise harsh to the prentices, but she was not kind to the poor or to anyone else either. She had worked as maidservant in sweeper Wetzmann’s house before she became his second wife. At that time Envy and Lust were the two of the seven deadly sins which were nearest her nature; now it was rather Wrath and Pride.
She was large and strongly built and in her earlier days must have been handsome.
The son Frederick was slim and pale. He was born of the first marriage, and it was said that he resembled his mother. He had a good head and a cheerful disposition, and was studying to be a minister. He had just become a student when he fell into a long and severe illness which held him to his bed a whole winter.
In a wing of the court lived a charwoman with her daughter Magda. Was her name really Magda? I do not know, but I always called her so to myself when as a child I heard the older people tell of her on a winter evening in the twilight; and I pictured to myself a pale, shy little child’s face, flooded about with an abundance of bright hair, and with a very red mouth. She was fifteen and had just been confirmed. Perhaps it was that “being confirmed” which made me represent her to myself as serious and quiet, like the young girls I used to see in church on Sunday, and which caused me to think of her as clad in a long shiny black dress.
In the spring, when the student began to convalesce, the charwoman’s daughter came by his desire to sit at his bedside a while in the afternoon and read aloud.
Mrs. Wetzmann did not approve of this. She was afraid a liking might grow up between them. Her stepson, for all she cared, might fall in love with whomsoever he wished and might betroth himself, too—that did not concern her; but at least it must not be with a charwoman’s daughter! She kept a mistrustful eye on Magda, but had to put up with the arrangement. An invalid should of course be diverted in some way or other; and the doctor had forbidden him to read in bed, because he had weak eyes and was not to overstrain himself.
So the girl sat by his bedside and read aloud both religious and secular books, and the student
