The Red Book Magazine/Volume 12/Number 2/What the Buyer Bought

by Anne Warner

 

What the Buyer Bought

BY ANNE WARNER

Author of “Susan Clegg”Susan Clegg, etc

IT lay deep in the innermost heart of the Alps—that little town of wood-carvers—and there was surely enough whiteness around it for eight months of every year to purify any evil breath that might come accidentally to blow therein. The Alpine snow—a true Christmas snow, for the peace of an everlasting Christmas seems to brood over the mountain’s winter—drifted softly in among the October winds and stayed and stayed, seeming truly Christmas-like, half brightness and half symbolic, until, in May, gradually and gently it withdrew itself to allow that other blessedly symbolic emblem—the green of leaf and stem—to take its place.

Then the sheep and goats went tinkling forth on the lower slopes and fed in plenty; then the geese were herded, too; then the half-yearly wash was well and thoroughly accomplished by those to whom a weekly laundry appears as amusingly impractical as an hourly laundry would to us; then the thatches were repaired and the gardens were planted and the yodel came ringing back from the heights.

And all sorts of annual things began to take place: the bishop passed through, and the men with goods to sell, and the wagons loaded with articles for farther on up where the mountain-climbers passed, and the hair-man who bought hair, and the man who took orders for all sorts of necessities that don’t grow naturally above the oak-level, and then along in August Bermann himself came, and his was the greatest coming of them all. for Bermann himself was the go-between, the one who turned Winter’s work into another year’s living, at once the Fate and the Providence of all the village.

To sum up in a word, Bermann was the buyer for the outer world—the world beyond the Alpine calm, the world the Alpine measure, the world in all its worldliness—that world which through long being has branded itself on brow and breast with its own name.

Bermann was of the world and they of the village were of the mountains: he was very much of the world and they were very much of the mountains, some more than others, of course, Hendrik the most of all. The world of Bermann knew Hendrik, however. The world knew Hendrik through the curious little mark which he always cut in the standard of every sheep that he carved. Sheep with that little twisted “H” upon them brought a price, for Hendrik was a wonderful carver of sheep; otherwise the world knew nothing of him and never would know anything of him, for the world would have no use for Hendrik as a man, and would probably have lodged him in an insane asylum before a twelve-month had passed.

Perhaps he really was weak-minded, I don’t know. He had been reared in the mountains alone with his mother until at eighteen he had gone away for a year with a party of travelers who wanted two stout fellows and chose Hendrik as one of them. At the end of the year he was back, and from that time, two years since, he lived alone with his mother now become ill.

The son herded goats and sheep and helped with the work about the small mountain-hut, but his chief occupation was carving, and although he accomplished but a few groups or single pieces yearly he was already widely known as a true artist in wood. He was a tall young fellow, very handsome, with beautiful brown eyes, a sweet boyish mouth, and square shoulders. Of course he knew nothing of his celebrity in the world or of the value of his work. Bermann took care of that. Were not the Alps a big sure barrier between the carver and the world, and is it not just that some such barrier shall be? The carver who is in the world and of the world can meditate the answer to that at his leisure.

So now it was August and Bermann had come. Everyone brought out his work and the buyer took it all and paid for it all. He bought everything—the stiff looking as well as well as the perfect, the deftly carved, the bungled, the true bits of art in with the false—all—all. Every wooden creature that had been cut since his last visit a year before he purchased and paid for in cash. Little Egge’s absurd hens were just as quickly disposed of as Walther’s good sheep—only, of course, Walther received more money, as was just. Walther’s sheep were really remarkable this year—almost as good as cousin Johann’s. Both of them had learned of Hendrik and Hendrik was recognized in the village as a genius.

“But I don’t see Hendrik,” said Bermann all of a sudden, looking into their faces; “why, where is he?”

“His mother’s sick,” said Louise, who looked very funny indeed because all her hair had been sold the month before; “he can’t leave her. And he hasn’t done anything this year anyway.”

“Hasn’t done anything this year!” repeated Bermann, with a quick frown—he had a way of frowning that was dreadful. “Why—why, how’s that?”

“She’s been sick all year,” said Louise, “he’s sat with her, and read verses to her out of the Bible. and cooked and done everything. She’s done nothing this year.”

“Hasn’t he done me one sheep—not one ewe with lambs?” said Bermann, almost angrily. “I can’t believe it.”

“He’s had no time,” said Louise. “Hendrik’s done no other work than to nurse his mother this year.”

No more was said just then, but directly the sale was over and while the toys were being packed, the buyer set out for the little jägerhütte where Hendrik and his old mother lived. It was quite a walk up the stream and around the foot of the Kleinstein, and Bermann was warm and weary long before he reached there. When he did arrive and saw Hedrik standing before the door flinging grain for the chickens’ evening-meal, he felt angry. It is in the blood of the world to chafe and foam when it finds itself face to face with one who has done no carving that year and stands serene amidst the calm of the dawning night, feeding with a generous hand the dependent creatures upon whom he in turn is also dependent.

Bermann was more than vexed.

“Ah, Hendrik!” he called from the distance.

The young man turned with a smile that was so sunny and ingenious it always won all hearts.

“Ah, master,” he called in his turn, “you’ve come to ask after my work, I’ll wager.”

“Yes, surely.” Bermann was now approached. “You’ve made a poor showing this year.”

“Truly. One has but one mother, you know,” said Hendrick.

He fluttered the last of the corn abroad as he spoke, and smiled again. He was exasperatingly cheerful and careless.

“Can’t you find time to work at all? Haven’t you had any spare moments?”

“Oh, it isn’t my hands, master, it’s my head.”

“Your head! How do you mean? You don’t carve with your head, do you?” asked Bermann quite impatiently.

Hendrik laughed and nodded.

“Yes, master, just that. I carve with my head: that’s why I do so well. Hands don’t matter a bit; it’s the head that counts. It’s my head from start to finish. The fingers are but my machine.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, master, can’t you see? Look you, there’s the tree first, I see the sheep in the branch, I see the twigs that have made the knots that are going to give meaning to the fleece—”

“Give meaning to the fleece! You’re talking moonshine!”

“I’m too simple to explain myself any better, master, but it’s so; that’s all I can say. I choose my bit of tree, and then after I’ve cut the branch and laid it up to dry, comes the sheep into my head—a ewe or ram as the case may be, you understand—and it lives here and bleats there and lives in my head and stays by me until the work with my hands is just a mere nothing—just play—so plain in fact, that I hardly give a thought to the knife as I cut.”

“I can’t make rhyme or reason of what you mean, Hendrik, but your work is good, so never mind. And so you’ve had no time this year, you say?”

“Oh, this year, my head’s had no time surely, master. It’s been busy with the mother. No sheep came—none will come while she lies there ill. If there was any one else whom she loved maybe I could think, but I’m not sure. God only gives one mother.”

“You ought to have a wife, Hendrik.”

The young man smiled sadly. “That will never be, master,” he answered, and he said it so quietly and simply, but in so final a manner that the buyer passed on to another view of the case, saying:

“Or someone to tend to your mother.”

“I am the one she wants.”

“But how can you make a living this way?”

Hendrik smiled.

“Pfalz will trust me,” he said, easily. “The dear mother will not be here long; I shall have a lifetime to pay debts after I am left in the hut alone.”

“That’s a poor way to do.” Bermann’s tone was cold and disapproving. “I'll tell you a wiser and more sensible course. Let someone else carve the sheep and then you give a touch here and a touch there, and cut little square ‘H’ of yours inside the leg. After that, well and good; I'll take it at the same price as your own work.

Hendrik contemplated him drolly. “But they wont be my sheep,” he said, “so why should I be paid for them; and what reason would there be in my putting my mark on them?”

Bermann pulled a little wooden group of a ewe and her lamb out of his pocket.

“Look here,” he said, “what do you think of that?”

Hendrik took the carving into his own hands.

“That’s Johann’s,” he said with a nod; “he’s a smart boy. He’ll learn to carve someday—if he keeps his eyes open and watches real sheep.”

“Why, what’s wrong with this piece?” asked Bermann. “You speak as if it wasn’t well done.”

“Well done!” said Hendrik. “Why, master, have you never seen sheep? Look at this leg—and then a lamb never lies down that in that way. But still, Johann’s a smart boy.”

“Now, I'll tell you something,” said the buyer. “Look at that bit. I'll get six pieces of silver for that in the city; well, if it had your mark on it I’d get sixteen!”

“Why?” asked Hendrik. “My mark wont change the carving any.”

“Can’t you see how it will make the city-folk pay more, though?”

Hendrik, holding the bit of carving in his hand, shook his head, not understanding.

“No one will notice the leg or the lamb if your mark is on it,” Bermann said then.

“But now, why not? They’ll be just so bad anyway.”

“But people will think that they must be right if your mark is on them.”

At that Hendrik began to laugh. “Oh, I see. It's a joke. I have carved good sheep until now if I carve eight legs to one ram people will still think that I must know.”

His laughter rang merrily but after a minute he grew sober.

“Poor town-people,” he said, “poor, stupid town-people!”

“I’ll have Johann and Walther bring you all their sheep to-morrow,” said Bermann, smiling, “and you'll take them in hand at once.”

Hendrik raised his eyes very quickly.

“What for?” he asked.

“Why, for you to cut the name in the legs.”

The wood-carver stared. “You don’t mean that?” he asked. “You don’t really expect that?”

“Of course I mean it.”

“You mean that I shall pretend to have made such sheep as this that those boys cut out?”

“Oh, you can touch them up a bit with your knife, I said.”

“I wouldn’t touch my knife to them,” said Hendrik. handing the carving back contemptuously. “If you are not joking I am sorry for you, for it shows that you are not of the Alps—or even of Switzerland.” His tone was of a sort unpleasant to hear.

“You’re a fool,” said Bermann, good-naturedly. “Why, man, those boys can carve the year around and you can get three silver pieces for every sheep they get out—just by five minutes work on each.”

“I don’t want such work,” said Hendrik, proudly.

“Think of your mother,” Bermann said.

“Go and look at my mother as she lies within. She wants for nothing.”

“Think anyhow,” said Bermann, turning away. “It’s worth thinking over. I can sell sheep with your mark anywhere; I'm willing to pay for the mark only. Think it over. Every comfort. No debts. No harm done. Think it over.”

He went away and Hendrik laughed cheerfully and carelessly over the comical ideas of folks from afar. To him the proposal was so absurd as to be wholly unworthy consideration.

He went to bed a little later and the chill night air of later August made his sleep a heavy one. In the night, when the cold and peace of the Alpine Winter seemed to stretch out its hand over the Summer-time and bid her back, back some other hand stretched forth to touch the sick mother in her box like wooden bed, and morning bringing light, brought the knowledge that she was strangely, fatally worse. That superfluity of comfort to which her son as well as all the world apply the elastic term “wanting for nothing,” grew suddenly inadequate and when the doctor from the village and then one from the town four miles down the valley had been successively at her bed-side Hendrik began to find a new ratio of demand which illness can make on health. Very cheerfully he ran into debt to Pfalz and very hard he worked that all should be as it should be for the few weeks that ended everything.

Then came Death and the two or three days of celebrity which clings about that state in small, far-away places. Hendrik, walking behind his mother’s funeral car, had an hour when what he did counted almost as much as what the grand-duke had done when he had passed through there five years before.

“Just as it turned by the Ritterstrom he tripped on a stone,” Ilse told Katrine in a whisper later when old Frau Pfalz declared that he had looked at her and started to nod as he came towards her house. “I hope that he will get at work quickly now and pay me all he owes me,” her husband replied.

Early in October Bermann returned. He had made a long tour and heaven alone knows what crates of horses, cats, dolls, etc., he had bought and shipped into the world outside.

“Hendrik’s sick himself now,” Louise, her head covered with flaxen rings that gave her an oddly child-like, doll-like look, told him. “He must have gotten it from his mother. He began to change just as soon as she died. It was as if the disease stayed behind in the hut when she went to be buried.”

“Ah,” said Bermann, “then he wont do much more work; but I'll go and see him anyhow.”

So he took the long walk and climbed the slope and there, sitting listlessly on a bench outside his door, was Hendrik, quite a changed man, and sick enough, to all appearances.

“Well, Hendrik, how’s this?”

Hendrik smiled a little and took the question to apply to what he was holding in his hands. It was a piece of wood carved roughly in the semblance of a human figure. Bermann took it from his hands and looked at it.

“Not so bad for the first, eh?” asked the carver, wistfully. “Now that I’m all alone greater things come to me than sheep, you see.”

Bermann turned the little figurine about in disdain.

“Hendrik, you’re a fool, as I’ve often told you before. What makes you waste time on this sort of thing anyhow when you can do such sheep as you do?”

The carver took back his figure and looked at it with an eye far more critical than the buyer’s had been.

“It’s not bad, master; it’s rather good—very good for a beginning. The arm hangs right and the head is set on so straight and nobly, you can’t see her through the wood as I do. but she is there, praying me to bring her forth to be prayed to. It’s the Virgin, master, Our Lady of Sorrows; it’s she herself, just as she stood by the mother and looked at me in pity after the mother was dead and I was alone. I had knelt there so long, and there had been no fire, and I had not eaten, so that being cold and fasting, I was fit for prayer just as the priest explained in the sermon last Spring. The mother was still and white—like the outside world that night—and then as I looked the whole room swam in gold and her dead face shone in ecstasy and the Virgin on the shrine grew larger, larger, larger, and all of a sudden I saw that she was distinct just as the sheep had been, and I thought: 'Not sheep again; my fingers—my knife for Her hereafter!’—and then I fell on the floor.”

“Ah!” said Bermann. “You're even more of a fool than I mistrusted. Here you are, half-sick and owing Pfalz money that he can ill afford to be kept out of. Here you have a way to settle and let his children run about as comfortably clad as the rest. And you throw away livelihood and honesty and set out to try a new game for your own silly taste.”

Hendrik looked at him earnestly. “Is it like that way to you?” he asked. “To me nothing appears but Her, growing more plain each hour and crying to be freed from the wooden veil. I’d quite forgotten Pfalz.”

“It looks that way to me, and to Pfalz too, you may be sure.”

“Does it? He didn’t tell me that he needed the money badly. In fact, he greets me so kindly that I’ve hardly ever thought of my debt since it was made.”

“He tells others, however.”

“Does he?” Hendrik was contemplating the wooden figure.

“Yes”

The carver considered.

“I’ll go back to the sheep,” he said at last; “I’ll leave Her till the debt’s paid.”

“Sheep wont help much now,” Bermann answered with a little scornful laugh. “I can’t pay for sheep that aren’t made yet and Pfalz can't wait until next year for his money.”

“That’s true,” said Hendrik, raising his eyes to the others.

“Be a sensible fellow,” urged Bermann; “do as I asked you before. Cut your mark into Johann’s and Walther’s sheep, and I'll give you a franc apiece without your doing one splinter of other work on them. Come, that will make twenty francs for Pfalz at once.”

“Oh, no, that I can’t do,” said Hendrik decidedly. “Why, to put my mark on those poor crooked-legs would be a lie stretched all over Bavaria. No, that I can’t do.”

“There’s the small Emilia,” said Bermann; “Pfalz can’t have the town-doctor to her because he has no money to pay him. You paid the town-doctor to come to your mother and so you can’t pay Pfalz. You’ve a curious notion of honesty, Hendrik; you keep your neighbor out of what you owe him sooner than do a thing that’s so common in business that there’d be no business without it. Does the king make every piece of money that bears his name? Did Herr Krupp sweat over every cannon shaped at Essen? As soon as anything has a value many are hired to make it. You’re a fool and a big Hendrik, and dishonest, too.”

Hendrik became quite pale at that. He opened his lips to speak once or twice but closed them again to listen. When Bermann was silent, he looked all about him, over the green slopes and the towering snow-capped mountains.

“You go and give Pfalz the twenty francs,” he said then with a line of pain across his brow and his lips quite dry, “and send me the sheep.”

Then he rose, and without saying a word more, went into the house and laid the unfinished carving on the bed that had one time been his mother’s.

“Now am I quite done,” he said to himself numbly; “now is all over. The Virgin can never come to me again after this.”

Then he went out to see if Bermann were gone, and he was gone. At that he breathed more easily a little more easily and heaved a long, deep sigh.

“God is very strange in His ways,” he said sadly, feeling the heavy hand of the world outside and calling it God when it is only one of God's ways of teaching every man the beauty of the Alpine unworldliness.

The sheep—the “crooked legs,” as Hendrik called them—came next day. They were all in a basket, and really they were not at all bad sheep. To you or me they would have appeared to be very good sheep, indeed, but to Hendrik their arrival and their appearance were alike agonizing. He stood them out upon the bench before his house and looked at them and groaned aloud.

“I cannot do it,” he said to Bermann—who certainly devoted a wonderful amount of his valuable time to this particular mission. “I cannot do it, after all. I can’t put my mark upon sheep with ears like this one, for instance—impossible.”

“Yah-h-h!” said Bermann, with his bitterest intonation. “That’s curious, your idea of right and wrong. You’ll sooner cheat the man who helped make your mother’s last hours comfortable than strangers who don’t know you from me, having never seen either.”

Hendrik put up his hands to his head and seemed to hold it together tightly. He made no answer and the twenty wooden sheep all stared straight at him—except such as Johann and Walther had made cross-eyed by chance.

“There’s a difference,” he said, helplessly, at last.

“Not to honest men.” said Bermann; “pay your debts comes first, to our way of thinking.”

Hendrik took up one of the sheep, contemplated it for a minute, his feelings clashing in a kind of spiritual conflict, and then looked at the mountains with a prayer in his eyes.

“I will mark them,” he said with a heavy sigh.

“That’s good,” said Bermann. “Now, remember, you've given your word and can’t go back on it, for I leave town to-night.”

“I will mark them,” Hendrik repeated slowly, and he kept his word.

All through that long Winter Johann and Walther cut into blocks and carved out of them sheep, and Hendrik, handling the creatures and inwardly writhing over their defects, did an extra bit here and there to remedy the more glaring faults, and cut his mark in the bottom of the standard of each.

“Do you never look at a real sheep?” he asked Johann one day in despair.

“The god of sheep would do well if he could paralyze you for setting on ears like those,” he cried wildly to Walther on another occasion.

And one day, when the artist-instinct, which must always be somewhat crushed out ’ere money can be made, was strongest, he flung away his knife and swore “No more!”

It was undoubtedly the time in which the world would have decreed the insane asylum, for oh, the wood-carver was indeed, half-crazed. The Virgin had grown more distinct each day for months and with her holy face illuminating his every thought he had been forced to work steadily upon the deformed sheep. Is there another torture-chamber like that one—a soul craving souls and its power chained to labor unworthily?

It was a cold starlight night that night when Hendrik’s spirit rushed into rebellion. The Alps were great in their grandeur, lofty in their heavenly towering. I have often thought how the Alpine deva must satisfy himself in being so free from all the living struggles of the universe. Surely the eternal circle of desire and fulfillment is perfect there; surely the Alps and the stars alike have learned their mission. What human struggle can fly to either without finding solace? Hendrik had learned that lesson. Desperately miserable, he strode out over the and asked of both as if both had been of Eleusis: “Is there a Wrong or a abroad in my life?”

Neither answered his query. The Alps only pitched the one word “life” back and forth among them till it died away on the farthest slope. The stars remained silent. Other men of other races had been answered—but not the wood-carver of the Alps that night.

After a long time he went back into the hut. He was cold and dizzy. He was ill. For some days he more and more ill. Then he became better and went on carving the sheep the same as before.

When Bermann came the next August he brought his wife with him. We have seen that he was persistent by nature and no one will be astonished that he had succeeded in marrying a girl who had personally preferred to be a nun. She was a very young girl, barely nineteen, with a Madonna face and big, unhappy eyes.

Hendrik saw her and she saw him on the day when all the carvings came to the market-place. There was surprise, sorrow—curiosity, too—in the look that passed between them, but no words were exchanged.

Then a year went by and on the next August when Bermann came he came alone. It was all settled now that Hendriks was dying just as his mother had died—only younger.

“It doesn’t matter,” the buyer said to Pfalz, after the latter told him that bit of news. “I’ve found a man that can do better than sheep—a fellow that does figures. I’ll buy his mark just as I did Hendrik’s.”

Bermann supposed that he had made the above remark in confidence to Pfalz, but the next day, when he went to see Hendrik, he found that latter had spoken of it to him.

“Then I need not mark the sheep any more,” he asked eagerly.

This was an unexpected way for a man to look at the coming of a rival.

“Well, hardly that,” said the astonished Bermann, “but perhaps later—”

Hendrik’s face, pale and thin enough, goodness knows, fell quickly.

“Ah, I hoped too fast and too far.”

A week later Bermann, having finished his tour of the upper valley, came back that way.

“Now, deuce take all carvers and their crazy ideas,” he cried wrathfully to Pfalz. “I begin to think that there isn’t one among them that has any right ideas in any direction! Do you know, that fellow up the mountain is a real genius and yet he wouldn’t even see me. Two Virgins were finished and those I bought and that is all; not a promise—not a bargain—”

He almost choked in his vexation. He opened his sack as he spoke and took out the two figures which resembled the wonder of Nuremberg more than any others that have ever been made.

“Your wife was like that,” said Pfalz, examining them.

“Yes, God rest her soul,” said Bermann. “I shall get a big price for these,” he added. “Oh, if I only might have talked to the carver.”

“It will matter if Hendrik dies now, wont it?” said Pfalz, with Swiss inuendo, as dry and bracing as the land itself.

“I’m going to see if he can’t copy one of these,” Bermann said. “I’m going to ask him about it to-day.”

But Hendrik, sitting by his door, shaping the shapeless from dawn to dark, looked at the Virgins and merely shook his head.

“If I were rich I would buy one,” he said, holding the figure in his hand for a minute and contemplating its delicate face. “It looks like your wife,” he said, then, just as Pfalz had done.

“Yes. God rest her soul,” said Bermann. “Then you think that you couldn’t copy them, eh?”

“She dead, then?” Hendrik asked without replying to the question.

“Yes, last Winter.”

“Ah, I expect she wasn’t able to live in the world,” said Hendrik, softly; “couldn’t learn to set her mark on crooked legged things maybe—as I’ve done, master?”

“Oh, they’re not so bad,” said Bermann, his sense of Hendrik’s speech attaching itself to the sheep's legs, not to the esoteric meaning, “but if you could earn to carve figures—you wanted to once, you know—”

Hendrik started up abruptly. “I can learn nothing now; I can only mark sheep. The rest of me is dead—as dead as your wife.”

Of course again there was an esoteric meaning which Bermann naturally failed to catch. But he did not urge Hendrik, rather regarding him as more crazy than ever and feeling as a consequence more disgusted than ever with his lunacy.

The next year when the buyer came Johann had gone to act as a guide and Walther was doing his military service. Hendrik was dying and there were no sheep at all. Bermann went to the mountain-hut just as a matter of form.

“Well, well, Hendrik, how’s this?” he asked, more kindly than of old—possibly for the reason that Hendrik stretched out upon his narrow bed was a very pathetic sight indeed.

Hendrik smiled radiantly.

“She’s going to be my wife now,” he said; “think of it, master, she’s going to be my wife now!”

“Who? What do you mean?”

“Ottillie. She’s been here every day with me.”

“My wife!” cried Bermann. “Why, she’s dead!”

“My wife now,” said Hendrik, happily. “Listen, master. I don’t mind telling you now. It wont take long; it’s soon told.

“Long ago when she was a child—I knew her, but I was so poor. And my mother—you know how it was with my mother; I couldn’t have my life to live. And then later there wouldn’t be any life to live. The priest explained it all to her and to me. So Ottillie chose to become a nun—at least, I thought so. We were very simple, she and I—so she chose to become a nun. And I just lived and worked for the mother.

“Then, the master knows how the temptation of the sheep came into my life. That was wrong and I knew that it was wrong. But Ottillie was a nun, I thought, so it did not greatly matter. But then the master brought Ottillie up to me as his wife—then I saw how God works in the darkness and how we can never say ‘It cannot matter.’ It was plain to me that we had been overruled. I know how I was overruled and the master knows how, and he knows, too, why Ottillie did not become a nun. Then Ottillie died—God and the master know how, I don’t know for I have never spoken to her since she was the master’s wife.

“Yet I knew the night that she died because, as, I sat here cold, tired, hungry, cutting my mark on the misshapen sheep, she came and stood beside me. She was dressed as a nun again and her chin was bound in white and right across her forehead laid a smooth fold like snow. I sat still and looked at her, and just looking at her, I came to know much. Much was laid together clear in my mind at last. I had sinned, but Ottillie had only been sinned against. Therefore God, who is very just, took her first, and left me a little longer. I was permitted to stay until I could atone. I have atoned. If the master will draw the cloth over there—” He raised his hand and pointed to a rude shelf that ran above the table on the opposite side of the room.

Bermann, quite nervous and shaking, rose, and drew aside the cloth!

There were a dozen of them there—some praying, some upright, every one different—and everyone Bermann’s wife, and everyone a Virgin, too.

“It was I who carved those two that you bought,” said Hendrik, smiling brightly, “and these also. They saved my reason. I turned to them when I went mad among the sheep.”

“But, man! man!” almost shrieked Bermann, “why did you do sheep when you could do these? One of these is worth a hundred sheep.”

Hendrik smiled. “Ah, who could risk it?” he said. “You might have set Johann and Walther to carve out these, too, then and even who knows?—to carve my mark upon their poor work after I was gone. You see, master, it is the work and not the mark that counts. That’s where your world goes wrong.

“God hasn’t let you see things very clear, master,” he went on, gently, “but I fancy it’s the city way. Now, take the twelve Virgins with you, and say good-by to me, for I give you what you long for, what you can take to the city and sell—and I go away to the golden mist and Ottillie, which is what I long for and what I have bought for my own in Heaven’s market here on earth.”

Hendrik died a few days later, and before the empty funeral-car returned from the graveyard the buyer, with the twelve likenesses of his dead wife, carefully packed in wool and labeled conspicuously “Vorsichtig,” was half-way on his way to Basle. Little matters never ruffled him; that was what made him such a good business-man. He made his fortune—as fortunes go with buyers of carvings—and died rich and respected. In Genoa, in that grotesque cemetery-court of grotesque monuments, you may see his, splendidly done in a frock-coat that adapts itself to development in marble as gracefully as the cemetery adapts itself to the ideal conception of Death. He was buried in Genoa because he ended his life as a wealthy art-dealer in that handy place for American tourists to buy without having to get the goods over any frontiers.

As for Hendrik, he was buried amid the Alpine whiteness. No monument marked his grave. Some lives are like some stories—they finish very simply, and it is for those who come after to understand or not just as they please.