Bashan and I - Thomas Mann (best e book reader .txt) 📗

with muscular arm rolled to one side before us. We thereupon marched in, and after we were all inside, we three were forced to make a swift and adroit escape so as to be able to shove the stable door to before the very nose of the beguiled sheep, making it a prisoner. It was only after this operation had been gone through that Bashan and I were able to resume our interrupted promenade amidst the fervent thanks of the maid. During the entire walk, however, Bashan persisted in maintaining a humble and disconsolate air.

So much for the sheep. Closely adjacent to the farm buildings on the left there is an extensive colony of small market-gardens. These are owned and tended by the clerks and working men of the city, and are the source of much joy, exercise, and considerable supplies of cheap flowers and vegetables. The gardens have a cemetery-like effect with their many arbours and summer houses, built in imitation of tiny chapels and with their countless small, fenced-in plots. The whole is enclosed by a wooden fence with an ornamental gateway. No one, however, except the small amateur gardeners, is permitted to have admittance through this wooden grille. At times I see some bare-armed man there digging up his little vegetable garden, a square rod or so in size, and always it seems to me as though he were digging his own grave. Beyond these gardens lie open meadows which are covered with molehills and which extend to the edge of the central wooded region. Here, in addition to the molehills, there are also great numbers of field-mice⁠—a fact which must be solemnly remarked in view of Bashan and his multiform joy in the chase.

On the other side, that is to say, to the right, the brook and the slope continue⁠—the latter, as I have already indicated, in diverse configuration. At first, covered with fir-trees, it displays a dusky and sunless visage. Later it transforms itself to a sandpit which warmly refracts the beams of the sun; still later it converts itself into a gravel-pit, and then to a cataract of bricks⁠—just as though a house had been demolished higher up and the débris hurled down the slope. This has imposed temporary difficulties upon the course of the brook. But the brook rises equal to the occasion; its waters mount a trifle and spread themselves out, stained red by the dust of the broken brick and also discolouring the grass along the bank. After this they flow the dearer and the more gaily on their way with glistenings here and there upon the surface.

I have a great love for brooks, as I have for all bodies of water⁠—from the ocean to the smallest, scum-covered puddle. When I happen to be in the mountains during the summer and chance to hear the secret splashing and gossip of such a streamlet, then I must follow the liquid call, even though it be distant, and I cannot rest until I have found its hiding-place. Then, face to face, I make acquaintance with the talkative child of the crags and the heights. Beautiful are the proud torrential brooks which come down in crystalline thunder between pines and steep terraces of stone, form green, ice-cold pools in rocky baths and basins, and then go plunging to the next step in a dissolution of snowy foam. But I am also fond of looking upon the brooks of the flatland, whether they be shallow, so as scarcely to cover the polished, silvery, and slippery pebbles of their beds, or as deep as little rivers which⁠—protected on both banks by low, overhanging willows⁠—go shouldering themselves forward with a vigorous thrust, flowing more swiftly in the middle than at the sides.

Who, being free to make his choice, would not follow the course of the waters on his wanderings? The attraction which water exercises upon the normal man is natural and mystically sympathetic. Man is a child of water. Our bodies are nine-tenths water, and during a stage of our prenatal development, we even have gills. As for myself, I gladly confess that the contemplation of water in every shape and form is for me the most immediate and poignant joy in nature⁠—yes, I will even go so far as to say that true abstractedness, true self-forgetfulness, the real merging of my own circumscribed existence in the universal, is granted to me only when my eyes lose themselves in some great liquid mirror. Thus, in the face of the sleeping or the charging and crashing of the on-rushing sea, I am like to be transported into a condition of such profound and organic dreams, of such a remote absence from myself, that all sense of time is lost and tedium becomes a thing without meaning, since hour upon hour spent in such identification and communion melt away as though they were but minutes. But I also love to lean upon the rail of a bridge that crosses a brook, and remain fixed to it as with thongs, losing myself in the vision of the flowing, streaming and whirling element⁠—quite immune to the fear or impatience with which I ought to be filled in view of that other streaming and flowing that goes on about me⁠—the swift, fluid flight of time. Such love of the water, and all that water means, renders the tight little territory which I inhabit the more important and precious to me in that it is surrounded on both sides by water.

The local brook is of the simple and faithful species. There is nothing very remarkable about it⁠—its character is based upon friendly averages. It is of a naiveté as clear as glass, without subtlety or deception, without an attempt to simulate depth by means of murkiness. It is shallow and dear and quite innocently reveals the fact that its bottom harbours castaway tin pots and the carcass of a lace-boot in a coat of green slime. It is, however, deep enough to serve