Authors: Robert Walser
H
EDGEHOG
: It suits me fine, don’t you think? I’m so nice and round in it, so appetizing. I
have spines because I’m afraid. I am all flight and fear. Look at my little head,
my little eyes, my little nose. I don’t fly, with majesty, like you. There’s not a
tittle of elevation about me. My feet are incomprehensibility itself, but I am dainty,
I look like some poor silly thing. I don’t strut about with wings, not likely. I don’t
build, on church steeples, comfortable nests with the bright air wafting around them.
I live in forests, only venture forth, softly, in the dark.
S
TORK
: You dear shy thing!
H
EDGEHOG
: You take pity on me. But I have no pity. Pity is something grand. It doesn’t suit
me. I am puny. My spines, what’s more, are mockery itself; they mock me.
S
TORK
: So you’re mocked by what seems called upon to shield you. I love you all the more
for your forsakenness.
H
EDGEHOG
: But I’m in enormously good spirits. You have no idea how splendidly one can live
inside a covering that’s laughable. My well-being is unspeakably original. The assurance
that I look pretty streams through me, it fairly does. You’re rather a comical one
yourself.
S
TORK
: My dignity, you mean. But I can’t do anything about it. I appear somewhat stiff,
solemn, but it’s precisely in this gravity of my manner that I myself vanish, do you
understand?
H
EDGEHOG
: I don’t allow myself to understand anything. Understanding would annoy me. Do you
think I’d take the trouble to start looking into you? Deep thinking I leave to you
and your kind. I’m sorry for you because you can’t put me out of your mind, but I
find it funny that you make me feel sorry for you. So then I’m not really sorry for
you at all. Look, I’m shaped like a hill and give an impression of lifelessness.
S
TORK
: That’s a huge advantage. I admire you, are you giggling at something?
H
EDGEHOG
: Oh, only at the anxieties of such an intelligence as yours. To be cultivated and
want to extract a smile from a hedgehog! Inner glee is all I feel. On the outside
I would never laugh. I mind my good manners too much for that. Besides, I’ve been
talking with you for too long. You love me. But me, feathered friend, me you fill
with horror. Yet I only shrink from you because that happens to suit me. Shrinking,
I find, is my pleasure.
S
TORK
: Do you despise me?
H
EDGEHOG
: My spines tell me I should. Otherwise, you’d impress me. But you’re also much too
long-leggity, big-beaked, too proud, too beautiful for me.
S
TORK
: Would that your inconspicuousness could be the death of me.
The hedgehog tucks himself entirely into his mantle, still peering out a little. Sees
the good stork trembling with his inclination, swathed in his slendernesses. But he
speaks no more. Finds speech from now on pointless; simply crouches there still, unspeakably
odd and incomprehensible. The stork stands transfixed. Hedgehoggish helplessness invades
him. Deep down, the hedgehog is a complete child, and, loving what is solitary, the
kindly stork is now himself strange and solitary. He thinks that he too is tricked
out with spines. Night has fallen in the forest; the enchanted stork stands on one
leg, plunged in a lofty sorrow of love.
The hedgehog ignores him.
Apparently the hedgehog is asleep.
But that is not so. The hedgehog is waiting to see if the stork will sob. This is
giving the stork some trouble, it seems, but there’s a fair outlook that he will manage
it.
What a nocturnal comedy.
I could recount much else about the relationship of the stork to the hedgehog, but
I mean to be moderate. The stork’s situation vis-à-vis this scrap of deplorability
seems deplorable. Why, too, does he allow himself to be moved so foolishly? Now tears
are running down his ordinarily so judicious beak. Didn’t I tell him it would be like
this?
Is the hedgehog pleased about it?
That remains a secret. The nature of secrets is to be not explainable. The unexplainable
is interesting. What is interesting is pleasing.
Stork! How art thou fallen!
Yet, on the other hand, you did fall for the dear and actually not insignificant hedgehog.
What a privilege!
Have you ever seen a stork weep? You haven’t? Well, that makes it so much the more
curious.
In the stillness of night he weeps, not just buckets, but Niagaras. Grief for his
adored hedgehog becomes for him a lasting need.
What’s more, there’s heroism in his yielding like this. A stork sometimes gets bored.
Then off he goes and makes a hero of himself.
Dawn comes and still he stands there, in his never sufficiently commended agony. What
patience.
To think that he has neglected, all this time, to bring children. Lord, the loss!
How the stork would have loved to kiss, with his beak, the spines of the hedgehog.
What a kissing that would have been! We shudder at the thought of it.
[1925]
A Contribution
TO THE CELEBRATION OF CONRAD FERDINAND MEYER
F
LYING
along streets that were swept almost to a shine, a journalist jotted into his unremittingly
active global brain: Fliers are flying in the blue above my head, which has no hat
on it, something I find beautiful and, at the same time, healthy. I see a raw-materials
truck and am astonished at my talent to perceive the way a cavalier handles his umbrella,
which once belonged to the Duchess of Capulia. An official I identify by the fact
that, in the sunshine, he conceals his hands in his trousers pockets. Some people
do not dare to greet you, because they think it possible you might not return their
courtesy. An acquaintance of mine had expected me to display the weakness of greeting
him first. I refrained from doing so, however, with an almost magnificent alacrity.
He thereby sacrificed the assurance of his conduct toward me, which conveyed to me
that he held me in esteem but did not want to advertise it. As for me, it is this
way: when I meet a person whom I respect, I remove from my mouth, four meters before
the encounter, the
Stumpen,
which is what we call a cigar hereabouts, I doff my cap and bow so subtly and inconspicuously
that there can be no possible doubt as to my showing esteem, interpolation, every
bit of it, and now I suddenly hear a gentleman say to his neighbor: “There goes one
of those people who are inclined to be not normal.” A lady cyclist was carrying a
string bag full of vegetables and fruits. A girl was wearing red high shoes, in impressive
contrast to her white-stockinged leg. In front of a hotel restaurant, where a governess
is sitting whom I am interested in, not that I have no interests in other quarters,
stands a wagon loaded with a big barrel, which might contain nectar. A soft autumnal
shimmer lies upon every street and housefront. Hills on which vineyards are planted
and evenings by lake shores arise before my lively mind’s eye, together with little
dance halls in oak forests on islands. Perhaps I shall lodge for three or four days
in a country room with furniture of the rococo period. Yet I doubt if I shall go there
before completing, as I must, the present assignment.
“Quatre-vingt-quatre”
now rings in my ears. I lot of French is spoken in our city. In front of the municipal
theater, a singer is arguing with an actor. A little child smiles at me, but, with
children, one need not emphasize their smallness, because all children are small,
although, here and there, big ones exist, perhaps more big ones than one is inclined
to suppose.
Over lunch I read, in a newspaper favored by liberal thinkers, about a railway accident.
I recall precisely that I ate lunch only three hours ago. A poem is pursuing me; I
shall have the energy to write it down. When girls want to be noticed they start to
make arrangements with their hair; this can be perceived as a subtle challenge to
spend one’s time voluntarily falling in love, but time is expensive, it wants to be
used up to the full. People without energy like to talk about energy. For my part
I am convinced that I have a quiet will of my own. Ah, how distinctive she was, this
servant girl leading a little boy by the hand! Once I blew, to a nursemaid who stood
for a superior style of life, a kiss. The movement of her head told me: “Save yourself
the trouble.” Often one is in somewhat too good a mood. The houses today had such
a beauty, a restraint, just standing there, I can hardly find words for it. A poet,
one of those disturbers of genteel little drawing rooms, took his lady, whom he idolized,
by her tiny gloved hand and asked how she had liked the verses which he had been quite
understandably saucy enough to send her. She answered, with a blush: “I was very glad,
but please, meanwhile, let me go.” For the simplicity of such language the poet appeared
to have no perfect understanding such as she would have desired. I drew his attention
to the reprehensibility, or impropriety, which, I said, seemed to me inherent in his
behavior. While her molester was looking at me, the noble creature fled.
A city notable mumbled something in his beard; the beard was absent, but the expression
is favored by many. Some turns of speech occur to us of their own accord. In a book-shop
window shone, resplendent, the editions of a great poet. I refer to Conrad Ferdinand
Meyer, the centenary of whose birth is being celebrated by the civilized world, which
one might also call the impatient or rushing world. Civilization still seems to be
an unfinished task. We shall always be vain about it, but never proud of it, and we
shall never say that we have nothing more to learn, and we shall remember not only
at the centenaries of famous poets the responsibilities which civilization lays upon
us, and first and foremost when being civilized is our concern we shall not brag about
it. To be sure, only the person who is always trying to be civilized is a civilized
person, a person who is quite simply trying to be civilized, because that, if the
truth were told, is not by any means so easy.
[1925]
A Sort of Speech
T
HIS
deputy, how he pursued in metropolitan suburbs his irresponsibilities garnished all
in green, afterwards casting deeply troubled glances at the ceiling, a consolation.
Certainly he’ll have been a splendid father. We are the last who doubt the opulence
of his somewhat pear-mellow noble intentions.
In the days of his youth he nodded with casual patience at the poets when they were
introduced to him in his opera box.
As for his wife, her first mistake was to follow him zealously on the paths of his
trespasses, thereby inviting him, deviously, to believe that he was very much loved
by her.
Second, she was too involved with her brother, who could never be satisfied, on his
solitary climbings, as morning breezes lisped around him, with mere medium heights.
So she was more of a sister than a wife and almost an egoist rather than a performer
of her really very lovely duties. Above all, she was a beauty and never as long as
she lived got over the idea.
Now to the sons, who carried jewelry caskets through woodlands by night, as if that
were essential to them and their world.
One of them dreamed only of disappearing entirely from sight. Often he must have read
exciting stories. As a person, he was, in addition, nothing to speak of. So we shall
dismiss him.
The second settled, as a recluse, in a villa which enshrouding ivy had rendered almost
invisible.
The beard of this country-house dweller grew longer by the hour, until it extended
out of the window, whereat he saw his life’s task completed—a belief we gladly allow
him.
The third found reason to become inconceivably incautious on account of a soprano,
all naturally behind the wonderfully shaped back of his mother, who had a way of saying:
“My sons displease me.”
They made her suffer, she made them suffer, and the patriarch suffered from his spouse,
and the products suffered because of the producers.
This family, to which many families looked up without reluctance, displayed a pompous
falling short.
No pen can describe the sighs they heaved together.
Folly upon folly was committed.
What use is the most dazzling scenery?
The father knew no peace till he could say: “One darn thing after another!”
All the members of the family longed to be constantly wept over; the daughters found
their language instructor bewitching.
Meanwhile, a book had been through many too many editions, a book which had the virtue
of being nicely written. The book had melody.
The family we are speaking of had melody too.
There was a Mediterranean island in it, where the best opportunities for perceiving
realities were dreamed away.
Still to this day it lies there, witness of a disinclination to wash oneself spiritually,
in the proper way.
But they all wore fitting clothes and were virtuosos of dissatisfaction.
And then she who bore the responsibility might step forward and say to her son: “I
command you to suffer!”
He laughed at her.
She says: “Get out of my sight!”—but wishes inwardly for him not to obey, she wrestles
laboriously with her composure.
She feels guilty and innocent.
She blames the times.
“Tell me all! Vindicate yourself!”
He quietly replies: “All this longing to cast off the shackles, to despise what the
surrounding world imposes upon you, isn’t this what you’re injecting into me? What
you prohibit me from doing you should also deny yourself,” and softly he adds: “Unbridled
woman!”
Whereupon she has a scene with her husband.
If I felt talkative I’d repeat the reproaches she brought against him.