Robert Walser - Selected Stories

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]

FLYING 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]

THIS 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.