XVII
Forest-Lily in the Snow
(A chapter from The Forest Schoolmaster)
A load is off our hearts. The storm has fallen. A soft wind came and gently relieved the trees of their burdens. There were a few mild days; then the snow settled and we can now go where we will with snow-shoes.
Nevertheless, something has happened lately over in the Karwässer. Berthold, whose family increases from year to year, and from year to year has less to eat—Berthold has turned poacher. A wood-cutter is a better hand at this than any of us, who remain faint-hearted humbugs all our lives long.—Poor people need not marry, says the wood-cutter. Well, according to custom and practice, they have not married, but they have kneeled before me in the forest … and … and now they are all starving together.
So Berthold has turned poacher. Wood-cutting brings in far too little for a roomful of children. I send them all the food I can, but it is not enough. He must have good, strong soup for the ailing wife and a piece of meat for the children; so he shoots the roe that comes his way. To this, then, has passion brought him, until Berthold, who once, as a herd, was such a good and jolly fellow, has, through poverty, pride, and the love of his own, grown into a pretty criminal.
I have once already pleaded with the gamekeeper for God's sake to be a little, just a little lenient with the poor husband and father: he was sure to mend his ways, I said, and I would go bail for him. Up to the present he has not mended his ways; but the events of these wild winter days have made him weep aloud, for he loves his Lily-of-the-Forest above everything.
It happened on a murky winter evening. The little windows are walled up with moss; outside new flakes are falling on the old snow. Berthold is sitting up with the children and with his sick Aga, only waiting until the eldest girl, Lily, comes back with the milk which she has gone to beg of a neighbouring hermit on the Hinterkar. For the goats at home have been killed and eaten; and, if only Lily would return, Berthold means to go into the forest with his gun. For the roe cannot be far to seek in this weather.
But it grows dark and Lily does not return. The snow falls thicker and heavier, night draws in and Lily does not come. The children by now are crying for their milk; the father is eager to be after his game; the mother sits up in bed:
"Lily!" she calls. "Wherever are you, child, trotting about in that pitch-dark forest? Come home!"
How can the sick woman's weak voice reach the wanderer through the fierce snowstorm?
As the night grows darker and stormier, Berthold's craving to go poaching grows deeper, while his fears for his Lily-of-the-Forest rise higher and higher. She is a frail little twelve-year-old girl. True, she knows the precipices and the wooded mountain-paths; but the paths are hidden by the snow and the precipices by the darkness.
At last, the man leaves his house to go in search of his child. For hours he roams and shouts through the storm-swept wilderness; the wind fills his eyes and mouth with snow; he has to put forth all his strength to get back to his hut.
And now two days pass. The snow keeps on falling; Berthold's hut is almost snowed in. They do their noisy best to console themselves: Lily is sure to be at the hermit's. This hope is destroyed on the third day, when Berthold, after struggling for hours over the snow-clad landscape, succeeds in reaching the hermitage. True, Lily was at the hermit's three days ago, but left early on her way home with the milk-pot.
"Then my Lily-of-the-Forest lies buried in the snow," says Berthold.
Whereupon he goes to other wood-cutters and begs, as no one has ever seen this man beg before, that they will come and help him look for his dead child.
They find Lily-of-the-Forest on the evening of the same day.
Down a lonely forest-glen, in a dark and tangled thicket of young pines and larches, through which no snowflake can make its way and upon which the loads of snow lie heaped and arched till the young branches groan again, in this thicket Forest-Lily is found sitting on the ground, on the dry pine-needles, amid a family of six roe-deer.
It is a very wonderful story. The child, returning home, lost her way in the forest-glen; and, as she was no longer able to cope with the masses of snow, she crept into the dry thicket to rest. She did not long remain alone. Hardly had her eyes begun to close, when a herd of deer, old and young together, came up to her and sniffed at the little girl and looked at her with gentle eyes of pity and understanding, and were not the least afraid of this human thing, but stayed and lay down and gnawed the little trees and licked one another and were quite tame: the thicket was their winter home.
The next day everything was muffled up in snow. Forest-Lily sat in the dark, which was only tempered by a faint twilight, and refreshed herself with the milk which she was taking to her people, and nestled up against the kind animals so as not to become quite numb with cold.
Thus passed the grim hours while she was lost. And, when Lily-of-the-Forest had already laid her down to die and, with her simple fancy, asked the animals to stay with her faithfully in her last dying hour, suddenly the roe-deer began to snuffle very strangely, and lifted their heads, and pricked up their ears, and broke through the thicket with wild bounds, and darted away with shrill cries.
And now the men work their way through the snow and underwood and see the little maiden and hurrah for joy; and old Rüpel, who is among them, shouts:
"Didn't I tell you to come and look in here with me,—that perhaps she was with the deer?"
And so it was; and when Berthold heard that the beasts of the forest had saved his child from being frozen to death, he yelled like a madman:
"Never again! As long as I live, never again!"
And he took the rifle with which for many years he had killed the beasts of the forest and smashed it on a stone.
I saw it myself; for I and the parish priest were in the Karwässer to help look for Lily-of-the-Forest.
This Lily-of-the-Forest is almost as soft and white as snow and has the eyes of a roe-deer in her little head.