Behind the house there was a small garden, in which they spent a good part of the day during the summer, in spite of the sweetish vapours which were almost always being wafted across it from a neighbouring sugar-refinery. An old, gnarled walnut-tree grew there, and often little Johannes sat in its shade on a low wooden stool and cracked nuts, while Frau Friedemann and the three sisters, who were now grown up, sat together in a tent of grey canvas. The eyes of the mother often lifted themselves from her embroidery and wandered across to the child with pathetic tenderness.
He was not a beautiful child, little Johannes; and as he sat there on his stool with his pointed pigeon-breast, his hunched-up back, and his all too long, skinny arms, and cracked nuts with a great zest, he offered a most remarkable spectacle. His hands and feet, however, were small and delicate, and he had large, light-brown eyes, like those of a doe, a soft, well-cut mouth, and fine, light-brown hair. Although his head sat so lamentably between his shoulders, yet he was almost to be called beautiful.
When he was seven years old, he was sent to school, and now the years went by swiftly and uniformly. Day by day, with that comically dignified manner of walking which is often a characteristic of the deformed, he would wander between the gabled houses and the shops to the old schoolhouse with the Gothic vaults; and when he had done his work at home, he would perhaps read in his books, with the lovely, coloured pictures on the covers, or occupy himself in the garden, while the sisters would tend house for the ailing mother. They also went to parties, for the Friedemanns belonged to the first families of the town; but the girls had unfortunately not yet married, for their fortune was not very large and they were rather plain-looking.
Johannes, to be sure, also received an invitation now and then from his companions of the same age, but he had no great pleasure in associating with them. He could not take part in their games, and as they always maintained a shy restraint towards him, comradeship was impossible.
There came the time when in the schoolyard he would often hear them talk of certain experiences; he would listen with wide and attentive eyes as they spoke of their ardour for this or that little girl, and would remain silent. These things, which obviously absorbed the others so completely, belonged to those for which he was not suited, like gymnastics and ball-throwing. Often this made him a bit sad; but, after all, he had always been accustomed to stand by himself and not to partake of the interests of the others.
In spite of this it happened—he was sixteen years old at the time—that he conceived a sudden inclination for a girl of the same age. She was the sister of one of his classmates, a blond, wayward, merry creature, and he had become acquainted with her at her brother’s. He was seized by a strange awkwardness in her presence, and the self-conscious and artificially friendly manner with which she, too, treated him filled him with deep sadness.
One summer afternoon as he was walking alone upon the ramparts that lay beyond the town gates, he heard a whispering behind a bush of jasmine and peered cautiously between the branches. On the bench which stood there sat that identical girl and beside her a tall, red-haired boy whom he knew very well; he had his arm about her waist and was pressing upon her lips a kiss, which she returned, tittering. When Johannes Friedemann had seen this, he turned on his heels and went softly away.
His head sat deeper than ever between his shoulders, his hands trembled, and a sharp, insistent pain mounted from his breast into his throat. But he choked it down and carried himself resolutely erect, as well as he could. “Very well,” he said to himself, “that is the end of that. I’ll never again trouble myself about all this. It brings joy and happiness to others, but to me always only pain and sorrow. I am done with it. It is all over for me. Never again.”
This resolution did him good. He renounced, renounced forever. He went home and took up a book or played the violin, as he had learned to do in spite of his deformed breast.
When he was seventeen, he left school, in order to enter business life, as was the universal custom in that world of his. He obtained a position as an apprentice in the great lumber firm of Schlievogt and Company, down along the river. He was treated with consideration; he, on his part, was friendly and obliging; and so the time passed peacefully and all was in good order. In his twenty-first year his mother died after a long illness.
This was a great sorrow for Johannes Friedemann, a sorrow which he retained for a long time. He enjoyed this sorrow, he abandoned himself to it, just as one abandons oneself to a great happiness; he cultivated it with a thousand childhood memories and exploited it as his first deep experience.
Is not life in itself something good, whether or not it takes that form which one calls “happy”? Johannes Friedemann felt that and he loved life. No one can realize with what circumspection he, who had renounced the greatest happiness which life can offer us, knew how to enjoy the pleasures which lay open to him. A walk in springtime through the park that surrounded the town, the perfume of a flower, the song of a bird—might one not be thankful for such things?
And that a cultivated mind belongs to the capacity for enjoyment—yes, that a cultivated mind is always only the same thing as the capacity for enjoyment—that, too, he understood; and he cultivated himself. He loved music and went to all the concerts given in the town. Gradually he himself
