In the Year '13: A Tale of Mecklenburg Life — John Shaqi
In the Year '13: A Tale of Mecklenburg LifeReuter, Fritz
General
In the Year '13: A Tale of Mecklenburg Life
Reuter, Fritz
Mecklenburg (Germany : Region) -- Fiction
On the same morning that the Miller, with his headache, looked into his
boot-tops, Mamsell Westphalen dressed herself, and was just going to
put on her cap, when she saw it was rather out of shape; so she went
into her room to get a fresh one, but tapped first at the door and
asked, "Herr Droi, are you quite dressed?" The watchmaker said he was.
She opened the door--merciful heavens, what a sight! Anything like it
she had never seen in her life; for in the night she had only been as
far as the door, and had not even glanced into the room. The top of the
bed was broken in, and right across the door lay one of the Frenchmen
rolled up in the white bed-curtains, and smoking a clay pipe, with her
beautiful red-and-white-striped pillow under his head; the other was
sitting in her easy chair, and had wrapped his feet up in her new
gingham gown; Herr Droi sat at the foot of the bed, and from under his
bearskin peered a face that spoke only of sorrow and woe. What a sight
her poor room was! It had been her pride, her jewel-box; here she had
reigned supreme; here she had sat with everything round her clean and
in order. She had dusted and polished everything with her own hands. No
one else had dared to touch or alter anything--not even her oracle the
Frau Meister. "No," she had said, "the Frau Meister is all very well in
her way, but since she let my amber earrings fall, I cannot trust her
any more."
And now everything was turned upside down, the room was blue with
tobacco-smoke, her clothes had been taken out of the closet and were
lying beside Herr Droi's gun, and the French Chasseur's helmet; and her
bed--her beautiful bed--stood out in the middle of the room. The bed
was her own; her godfather, the joiner Reuss (the old Reuss, not the
young one) had made it for her from the same block of wood from which
he made her coffin; she had spun the yarn for the sacking herself, and
the Meister Stahl had woven it "pretty well," she said, "but two inches
too small each way, and that was stupid of him, for I am a well-grown
woman, and _that_ he might have known." The Frau Amtshauptmann had
wished to make her a present of the feathers, but she had not accepted
the offer, and had paid for them herself; "for, Frau Meister," she
said, "it's my pride to earn my earthly and my heavenly rest." And when
the bed was so far on, she bought two sets of snow-white curtains, and
put them up, and then she drew back a few paces, and, nodding her head
complacently, said, "Frau Meister, 'the last touch crowns the work.'"
And now the bedding lay scattered about in disorder, and the crown lay
levelled in the dust.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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