The Project Gutenberg EBook of German Moonlight, by Wilhelm Raabe

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Title: German Moonlight (several short stories)

Author: Wilhelm Raabe

Release Date: May 10, 2010 [EBook #32009]

Language: German

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GERMAN MOONLIGHT ***

Produced by Michael Wooff, with German from the original text, and his own translation.

German Moonlight

A Story by Wilhelm Raabe (1831-1910)

Let me state my case calmly and without any undue fuss. I am, even by German standards, an uncommonly prudent person and I know how to keep my five senses under control. Apart from that, I am a lawyer and father to three sons. Neither during lilac time nor when there are hibiscus, sunflowers and asters on the ground am I in the habit of laying myself open to sentimental and romantic mood-swings. I do not keep a diary, but my legal appointments books are stored in strict chronological order, year by year, on my library shelves. First of all I have to tell you that, in the year 1867, acting on medical advice, because of the sea air and the salt water, I found myself on the island of Sylt and that, while I was there, I made the acquaintance of someone—a quite extraordinary acquaintance.

It goes without saying that I cannot stop myself by means of an account in writing of my own experiences and feelings from correcting or corroborating things often felt and even more frequently depicted and described in letters or printed matter. The impression made by the lapping of waves, sand dunes and dune grass, the flight of seagulls and, above all, the west wind on everyone who has had to wash off the dust and sweat of German officialdom is a pleasant and invigorating one. These things did not fail to have the same effect on me either given that the efforts that preceded the said invigoration were no less strenuous.

I lived on the periphery of two villages, Tinnum and Westerland, and therefore had a walk of at least half an hour to cover in order to reach the beach and the health-giving briny. A not much shorter walk led from there to the good fellow who took us every day at noon for a consideration back again. As a German civil servant used to moderation I set no great store by domestic bliss or even luxury. As I had taken with me seven of my twenty-one pipes, I could have set up home for myself in a megalithic tomb and not have felt uncomfortable.

Good. I lived with a baker who heated his oven with jetsam wood, that is to say wood bought at beach auctions that came from the spars and timberwork of ships that had foundered on the sand. I helped him from time to time to split this wood and felt pleasantly stimulated here by the task—at home I devote myself to this chore more for health reasons.

At home I saw and split my firewood in my leisure time, whereas here I did things for fun or carefully perused some papers on the House of Brunswick inheritance that I had brought with me in my suitcase. During what would have been my business hours I went for walks along the beach.

When you stay in a place like this to take the waters everything takes that much longer. At home I walk every day and in every weather round the purpose-built walls of the town where I carry out my duties as a public servant. On Sylt I had lunch, lay down on a dune for an hour for an afternoon nap and then ran along the beach towards the north of the island, sometimes getting as far as the Red Cliff, but usually only as far as the bathing huts of Wenningstedt.

As the sea like a washerwoman of both sexes cannot keep things to him or herself, but throws everything back, these runs were never without a certain charm. Even though I am by nature a prosaic person, I can nevertheless feel sadness when I turn a dead seal lying on its back over onto its belly and have thoughts about my own mortality as I do so.

Good—or rather on this occasion: even better! I had been on this long, stretched out from south to north and vice versa, island for three weeks approximately when I had the encounter already mentioned at the start of my narrative.

It was getting on towards evening. The sun had gone down and today I was coming back from the Red Cliff, and no less tired for all that since low tide had made the way to the beach accessible for all those patients on Sylt suffering from abdominal problems to the best of its ability. After walking ten steps over quite tight-packed sand, people sank that much deeper into the sand over the next two hundred steps, and the wife, daughter, cousin or sweetheart of my readers who would have graciously picked their way over this path so uncommonly beneficial to health, I should not have hesitated in fact to commend to the attention of a lyric or epic poet if I could have numbered such a one then, with the later exception of Circuit Judge Löhnefinke, among my colleagues and other friends and enemies.

I said that the sun had gone down and I can put it even more succinctly. It was going down just as I reached the dunes south of Wenningstedt, opposite the great chasm. A fishing boat from Hamburg or Cuxhaven followed the sun in disappearing into the sea mist on the horizon and the pleasing and easy on the eye green colour of the water turned to gloomy grey. Even the orange colouring of the sandhill on the left of the sound but tiring path disappeared, and the colour grey got the upper hand to both left and right. The dune grass started to lisp as the wind got cooler—twilight had fallen and there were cogent reasons for supposing that it would soon be night.

Stumbling and, despite the evening cool, bathed in sweat, I was quickening my gait in the direction of my evening pipe when the unexpected happened and I got to know my colleague Löhnefinke.

Everyone who knows the beach on the west coast of Sylt also knows how steeply the dunes opposite the sandy sanatorium path fall down to the sea, and at one of the places where they were at their steepest my colleague fell out of the sky on top of my head and my journey through life was never the same again so may the estimable reader allow me to continue with my statement of events with my accustomed calm and without exciting myself.

I found myself, as previously stated, opposite the great chasm and the sun had said goodbye five minutes beforehand when, suddenly, at the top of the dune on the left, at approximately seventy feet above my head, a man appeared, running towards the edge of the precipice in a tearing hurry, threw his arms up to heaven, then crouched down and in one fell swoop, to my horror, all the way down the steep, almost vertical sandhill slipped—slid—shot!

Before the cry of total amazement, half of shock, that I then came out with had died away, the man was already sitting at the bottom of the dune in soft sand between a half stove-in barrel that had been washed ashore there and a broken ship's lantern and looking at me, the scurrying passer-by, with his mouth wide open, pale-faced with shock and yet managing to twist his lips into a broad grin. He called out, shouted or perhaps it was more of a howl:

"It's—it's—behind me! I'm very sorry, sir, I'm sure—but it puts me on edge…"

"Who?