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+*** Project Gutenberg etext of The Love of Ulrich Nebendahl ***
+By Jerome K. Jerome
+
+Scanned and proofed by Ronald Burkey (rburkey@heads-up.com) and Amy
+Thomte.
+
+Notes on the editing:  Punctuation and hyphenation have been retained
+as in the original, except words broken across lines have been joined.
+Italicized text is delimited by underlines ("_").  A long break
+between paragraphs is represented by "***".
+
+
+THE LOVE OF ULRICH NEBENDAHL
+By JEROME K. JEROME
+
+Author of "Paul Kelver," "Three Men in a Boat," etc., etc.
+
+NEW YORK
+DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
+1909
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY JEROME K. JEROME
+COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
+Published, September, 1908
+
+
+THE  LOVE OF ULRICH NEBENDAHL
+
+Perhaps of all, it troubled most the Herr Pfarrer.  Was he not the
+father of the village?  And as such did it not fall to him to see his
+children marry well and suitably? marry in any case.  It was the duty
+of every worthy citizen to keep alive throughout the ages the sacred
+hearth fire, to rear up sturdy lads and honest lassies that would
+serve God, and the Fatherland.  A true son of Saxon soil was the Herr
+Pastor Winckelmann--kindly, simple, sentimental.
+
+"Why, at your age, Ulrich--at your age," repeated the Herr Pastor,
+setting down his beer and wiping with the back of his hand his large
+uneven lips, "I was the father of a family--two boys and a girl.  You
+never saw her, Ulrich; so sweet, so good.  We called her Maria."  The
+Herr Pfarrer sighed and hid his broad red face behind the raised cover
+of his pewter pot.
+
+"They must be good fun in a house, the little ones," commented Ulrich,
+gazing upward with his dreamy eyes at the wreath of smoke ascending
+from his long-stemmed pipe.  "The little ones, always my heart goes
+out to them."
+
+"Take to yourself a wife," urged the Herr Pfarrer.  "It is your duty.
+The good God has given to you ample means.  It is not right that you
+should lead this lonely life.  Bachelors make old maids; things of no
+use."
+
+"That is so," Ulrich agreed.  "I have often said the same unto myself.
+It would be pleasant to feel one was not working merely for oneself."
+
+"Elsa, now," went on the Herr Pfarrer, "she is a good child, pious and
+economical.  The price of such is above rubies."
+
+Ulrich"s face lightened with a pleasant smile.  "Aye, Elsa is a good
+girl," he answered.  "Her little hands--have you ever noticed them,
+Herr Pastor--so soft and dimpled."
+
+The Pfarrer pushed aside his empty pot and leaned his elbows on the
+table.
+
+"I think--I do not think--she would say no.  Her mother, I have reason
+to believe--  Let me sound them--discreetly."  The old pastor's red
+face glowed redder, yet with pleasurable anticipation; he was a born
+matchmaker.
+
+But Ulrich the wheelwright shuffled in his chair uneasily.
+
+"A little longer," he pleaded.  "Let me think it over.  A man should
+not marry without first being sure he loves.  Things might happen.  It
+would not be fair to the maiden."
+
+The Herr Pfarrer stretched his hand across the table and laid it upon
+Ulrich's arm.
+
+"It is Hedwig; twice you walked home with her last week."
+
+"It is a lonesome way for a timid maiden; and there is the stream to
+cross," explained the wheelwright.
+
+For a moment the Herr Pastor's face had clouded, but now it cleared
+again.
+
+"Well, well, why not?  Elsa would have been better in some respects,
+but Hedwig--ah, yes, she, too, is a good girl a little wild
+perhaps--it will wear off.  Have you spoken with her?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"But you will?"
+
+Again there fell that troubled look into those dreamy eyes.  This time
+it was Ulrich who, laying aside his pipe, rested his great arms upon
+the wooden table.
+
+"Now, how does a man know when he is in love?" asked Ulrich of the
+Pastor who, having been married twice, should surely be experienced
+upon the point.  "How should he be sure that it is this woman and no
+other to whom his heart has gone out?"
+
+A commonplace-looking man was the Herr Pastor, short and fat and bald.
+But there had been other days, and these had left to him a voice that
+still was young; and the evening twilight screening the seared face,
+Ulrich heard but the pastor's voice, which was the voice of a boy.
+
+"She will be dearer to you than yourself.  Thinking of her, all else
+will be as nothing.  For her you would lay down your life."
+
+They sat in silence for a while; for the fat little Herr Pfarrer was
+dreaming of the past; and long, lanky Ulrich Nebendahl, the
+wheelwright, of the future.
+
+That evening, as chance would have it, Ulrich returning to his
+homestead--a rambling mill beside the river, where he dwelt alone with
+ancient Anna--met Elsa of the dimpled hands upon the bridge that
+spans the murmuring Muhlde, and talked a while with her, and said
+good-night.
+
+How sweet it had been to watch her ox-like eyes shyly seeking his, to
+press her dimpled hand and feel his own great strength.  Surely he
+loved her better than he did himself.  There could be no doubt of it.
+He pictured her in trouble, in danger from the savage soldiery that
+came and went like evil shadows through these pleasant Saxon valleys,
+leaving death and misery behind them:  burnt homesteads; wild-eyed
+women, hiding their faces from the light.  Would he not for her sake
+give his life?
+
+So it was made clear to him that little Elsa was his love.
+
+Until next morning, when, raising his eyes from the whirling saw,
+there stood before him Margot, laughing.  Margot, mischief-loving,
+wayward, that would ever be to him the baby he had played with,
+nursed, and comforted.  Margot weary!  Had he not a thousand times
+carried her sleeping in his arms.  Margot in danger!  At the mere
+thought his face flushed an angry scarlet.
+
+All that afternoon Ulrich communed with himself, tried to understand
+himself, and could not.  For Elsa and Margot and Hedwig were not the
+only ones by a long way.  What girl in the village did he not love, if
+it came to that:  Liesel, who worked so hard and lived so poorly,
+bullied by her cross-grained granddam.  Susanna, plain and a little
+crotchety, who had never had a sweetheart to coax the thin lips into
+smiles.  The little ones--for so they seemed to long, lanky Ulrich,
+with their pleasant ways--Ulrich smiled as he thought of them--how
+should a man love one more than another?
+
+The Herr Pfarrer shook his head and sighed.
+
+"That is not love.  Gott in Himmel! think what it would lead to?  The
+good God never would have arranged things so.  You love one; she is
+the only woman in the world for you."
+
+"But you, yourself, Herr Pastor, you have twice been married,"
+suggested the puzzled wheelwright.
+
+"But one at a time, Ulrich--one at a time.  That is a very different
+thing."
+
+Why should it not come to him, alone among men?  Surely it was a
+beautiful thing, this love; a thing worthy of a man, without which a
+man was but a useless devourer of food, cumbering the earth.
+
+So Ulrich pondered, pausing from his work one drowsy summer's
+afternoon, listening to the low song of the waters.  How well he knew
+the winding Muhlde's merry voice.  He had worked beside it, played
+beside it all his life.  Often he would sit and talk to it as to an
+old friend, reading answers in its changing tones.
+
+Trudchen, seeing him idle, pushed her cold nose into his hand.
+Trudchen just now was feeling clever and important.  Was she not the
+mother of the five most wonderful puppies in all Saxony?  They swarmed
+about his legs, pressing him with their little foolish heads.  Ulrich
+stooped and picked up one in each big hand.  But this causing jealousy
+and heartburning, laughing, he lay down upon a log.  Then the whole
+five stormed over him, biting his hair, trampling with their clumsy
+paws upon his face; till suddenly they raced off in a body to attack a
+floating feather.  Ulrich sat up and watched them, the little rogues,
+the little foolish, helpless things, that called for so much care.  A
+mother thrush twittered above his head.  Ulrich rose and creeping on
+tiptoe, peeped into the nest.  But the mother bird, casting one glance
+towards him, went on with her work.  Whoever was afraid of Ulrich the
+wheelwright!  The tiny murmuring insects buzzed to and fro about his
+feet.  An old man, passing to his evening rest, gave him "good-day."
+A zephyr whispered something to the leaves, at which they laughed,
+then passed upon his way.  Here and there a shadow crept out from its
+hiding-place.
+
+"If only I could marry the whole village!" laughed Ulrich to himself.
+
+But that, of course, is nonsense!
+
+The spring that followed let loose the dogs of war again upon the
+blood-stained land, for now all Germany, taught late by common
+suffering forgetfulness of local rivalries, was rushing together in a
+mighty wave that would sweep French feet for ever from their hold on
+German soil.  Ulrich, for whom the love of woman seemed not, would at
+least be the lover of his country.  He, too, would march among those
+brave stern hearts that, stealing like a thousand rivulets from every
+German valley, were flowing north and west to join the Prussian
+eagles.
+
+But even love of country seemed denied to Ulrich of the dreamy eyes.
+His wheelwright's business had called him to a town far off.  He had
+been walking all the day.  Towards evening, passing the outskirts of a
+wood, a feeble cry for help, sounding from the shadows, fell upon his
+ear.  Ulrich paused, and again from the sombre wood crept that weary
+cry of pain.  Ulrich ran and came at last to where, among the wild
+flowers and the grass, lay prone five human figures.  Two of them were
+of the German Landwehr, the other three Frenchmen in the hated uniform
+of Napoleon's famous scouts.  It had been some unimportant "affair of
+outposts," one of those common incidents of warfare that are never
+recorded--never remembered save here and there by some sad face
+unnoticed in the crowd.  Four of the men were dead; one, a Frenchman
+was still alive, though bleeding copiously from a deep wound in the
+chest that with a handful of dank grass he was trying to staunch.
+
+Ulrich raised him in his arms.  The man spoke no German, and Ulrich
+knew but his mother tongue; but when the man, turning towards the
+neighbouring village with a look of terror in his half-glazed eyes,
+pleaded with his hands, Ulrich understood, and lifting him gently
+carried him further into the wood.
+
+He found a small deserted shelter that had been made by
+charcoal-burners, and there on a bed of grass and leaves Ulrich laid
+him; and there for a week all but a day Ulrich tended him and nursed
+him back to life, coming and going stealthily like a thief in the
+darkness.  Then Ulrich, who had thought his one desire in life to be
+to kill all Frenchmen, put food and drink into the Frenchman's
+knapsack and guided him half through the night and took his hand; and
+so they parted.
+
+Ulrich did not return to Alt Waldnitz, that lies hidden in the forest
+beside the murmuring Muhlde.  They would think he had gone to the war;
+he would let them think so.  He was too great a coward to go back to
+them and tell them that he no longer wanted to fight; that the sound
+of the drum brought to him only the thought of trampled grass where
+dead men lay with curses in their eyes.
+
+So, with head bowed down in shame, to and fro about the moaning land,
+Ulrich of the dreamy eyes came and went, guiding his solitary
+footsteps by the sounds of sorrow, driving away the things of evil
+where they crawled among the wounded, making his way swiftly to the
+side of pain, heedless of the uniform.
+
+Thus one day he found himself by chance near again to forest-girdled
+Waldnitz.  He would push his way across the hills, wander through its
+quiet ways in the moonlight while the good folks all lay sleeping.
+His foot-steps quickened as he drew nearer.  Where the trees broke he
+would be able to look down upon it, see every roof he knew so
+well--the church, the mill, the winding Muhlde--the green, worn grey
+with dancing feet, where, when the hateful war was over, would be
+heard again the Saxon folk-songs.
+
+Another was there, where the forest halts on the brow of the hill--a
+figure kneeling on the ground with his face towards the village.
+Ulrich stole closer.  It was the Herr Pfarrer, praying volubly but
+inaudibly.  He scrambled to his feet as Ulrich touched him, and his
+first astonishment over, poured forth his tale of woe.
+
+There had been trouble since Ulrich's departure.  A French corps of
+observation had been camped upon the hill, and twice within the month
+had a French soldier been found murdered in the woods.  Heavy had been
+the penalties exacted from the village, and terrible had been the
+Colonel's threats of vengeance.  Now, for a third time, a soldier
+stabbed in the back had been borne into camp by his raging comrades,
+and this very afternoon the Colonel had sworn that if the murderer
+were not handed over to him within an hour from dawn, when the camp
+was to break up, he would before marching burn the village to the
+ground.  The Herr Pfarrer was on his way back from the camp where he
+had been to plead for mercy, but it had been in vain.
+
+"Such are foul deeds!" said Ulrich.
+
+"The people are mad with hatred of the French," answered the Herr
+Pastor.  "It may be one, it may be a dozen who have taken vengeance
+into their own hands.  May God forgive them."
+
+"They will not come forward--not to save the village?"
+
+"Can you expect it of them!  There is no hope for us; the village will
+burn as a hundred others have burned."
+
+Aye, that was true; Ulrich had seen their blackened ruins; the old
+sitting with white faces among the wreckage of their homes, the little
+children wailing round their knees, the tiny broods burned in their
+nests.  He had picked their corpses from beneath the charred trunks of
+the dead elms.
+
+The Herr Pfarrer had gone forward on his melancholy mission to prepare
+the people for their doom.
+
+Ulrich stood alone, looking down upon Alt Waldnitz bathed in
+moonlight.  And there came to him the words of the old pastor:  "She
+will be dearer to you than yourself.  For her you would lay down your
+life."  And Ulrich knew that his love was the village of Alt Waldnitz,
+where dwelt his people, the old and wrinkled, the laughing "little
+ones," where dwelt the helpless dumb things with their deep pathetic
+eyes, where the bees hummed drowsily, and the thousand tiny creatures
+of the day.
+
+They hanged him high upon a withered elm, with his face towards Alt
+Waldnitz, that all the village, old and young, might see; and then to
+the beat of drum and scream of fife they marched away; and
+forest-hidden Waldnitz gathered up once more its many threads of quiet
+life and wove them into homely pattern.
+
+They talked and argued many a time, and some there were who praised
+and some who blamed.  But the Herr Pfarrer could not understand.
+
+Until years later a dying man unburdened his soul so that the truth
+became known.
+
+Then they raised Ulrich's coffin reverently, and the yonng men carried
+it into the village and laid it in the churchyard that it might always
+be among them.  They reared above him what in their eyes was a grand
+monument, and carved upon it:
+
+"Greater love hath no man than this."
+
+*** End of Project Gutenberg etext of The Love of Ulrich Nebendahl ***
+
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