Prevod

It was more than a hundred years ago! Beyond the forest, beside the great lake, stood an old manor house, surrounded by deep moats in which bulrushes, sedges, and reeds grew. Close to the bridge leading to the entrance gate stood an old willow tree, leaning out over the reeds.

From the sunken lane came the sound of horns and pounding hoofs, and the little goose girl hurried to drive her geese away from the bridge before the hunting party came galloping up. They came at such a pace that she had to leap onto one of the tall stones beside the bridge to keep from being ridden down. She was scarcely more than a child, slight and delicate, but with a sweet expression on her face and two kind, clear eyes. The lord of the manor paid no heed to that. As he swept past, he turned his whip in his hand and, in a fit of coarse merriment, thrust the handle straight against her chest, sending her tumbling backwards.

“Everything in its proper place!” he shouted. “Into the muck with you!” Then he laughed, for this was supposed to be a splendid joke, and the others laughed along with him. The whole party whooped and shouted, and the hounds barked. It was a fine example of:

“The rich bird comes swooping!”—though goodness knows how rich he really was. As the poor goose girl fell, she reached out and caught hold of one of the drooping willow branches. Clinging to it, she kept herself above the mire, and as soon as the gentry and their dogs were safely through the gate, she struggled to climb out. But the branch broke off at the crown, and the goose girl fell heavily back into the reeds. At that very moment, a strong hand reached down and seized her. It belonged to a travelling hosiery pedlar, who had seen what happened from a little distance and now hurried to her aid.

“Everything in its proper place!” he said, jokingly echoing the lord of the manor, and pulled her onto dry ground. He set the broken branch against the place where it had snapped off, but putting things “in their proper place” is not always possible! So he thrust the branch into the soft earth. “Grow if you can, and cut them a good whistle up at the manor!” He would gladly have seen the master and his friends made to run the gauntlet. Then he went into the manor, though not up to the great hall; he was too humble for that! He went in among the servants in their hall, where they examined his wares and bargained with him. From the banquet above came howls and bellows, which were meant to be singing; they could do no better. There was laughter and the yowling of dogs, and a great deal of gluttony and carousing. Wine and strong old ale foamed in glasses and tankards, and the favourite dogs ate with the company. Now and then one of the young gentlemen kissed a beast, after first wiping its muzzle with its own long ear. The hosiery pedlar was summoned upstairs with his wares, but only so that they could have their fun with him. Wine had come in, and sense had gone out. They poured beer into a stocking for him to drink his share—but quickly! This was thought extraordinarily clever and amusing. Whole herds of cattle, peasants, and farms were staked on a single card and lost.

“Everything in its proper place!” said the hosiery pedlar when he was safely out of Sodom and Gomorrah, as he called it. “The open road—that is my proper place. I was quite out of my element up there.” And the little goose girl nodded to him from the field gate.

Days passed, and weeks passed, and it turned out that the broken willow branch the pedlar had thrust into the earth beside the moat stayed fresh and green; indeed, it even put out new shoots. The little goose girl saw that it must have taken root, and she was delighted. She felt that it was her tree.

Yes, the tree prospered, but everything else on the estate went sadly downhill through drinking and gambling: those are two rollers on which no one can stand firm.

Before six years had passed, the lord of the manor went away from his estate a poor man, with a beggar’s bag and staff. The place was bought by a rich hosiery pedlar—the very man who had been mocked and laughed at and offered beer in a stocking. But honesty and industry bring a fair wind, and now the pedlar was master of the estate. From that day on, however, there was never any card-playing there. “It is wicked reading,” he said. “It came about because, when the Devil first saw the Bible, he wanted to make a parody of it, something of the same sort, and so he invented playing cards!”

The new master took a wife, and who was she? The little goose girl, who had always been decent, devout, and good. In her new clothes she looked as lovely and refined as though she had been born a lady. How did it come about? Well, that is too long a story for these busy times of ours; but come about it did, and the most important part is still to follow.

Life at the old manor was good and blessed. Mother herself managed everything indoors, and Father everything outside. Blessings seemed to spring up everywhere, and where prosperity dwells, more prosperity comes to live. The old house was plastered and painted, the moats cleared, and fruit trees planted. Everything looked pleasant and well cared for, and the floor indoors shone like a scrubbed chopping board. On winter evenings the mistress sat in the great hall with all her maids, spinning wool and flax; and every Sunday evening the Bible was read aloud by the councillor of justice himself—for the hosiery pedlar became a councillor of justice, though not until he was very old. The children grew up—for there were children—and all were well taught, though they were not all equally clever, as is the way in every family.

Meanwhile, the willow branch outside had grown into a magnificent tree, standing free and unpruned. “That is our family tree!” the old couple said, and they told their children that the tree must be held in honour and respect—even those children who were not very clever.

And now a hundred years had passed. It was our own time. The lake had become a marsh, and the old manor house had all but vanished. An oblong pool of water remained, with a little stonework along one side: that was all that was left of the deep moats. And here still stood a splendid old tree, its branches drooping—the family tree. It stood as proof of how beautiful a willow can be when it is left to look after itself. True, its trunk had split down the middle, right from the roots to the crown, and storms had twisted it a little, but it still stood. Grass and flowers grew in every crack and crevice where wind and weather had deposited earth. Especially high up, where the great branches divided, there was something like a whole little hanging garden, with raspberries and chickweed; even a tiny rowan tree had taken root there and stood slender and graceful in the heart of the old willow. The willow mirrored itself in the black water whenever the wind drove the duckweed into one corner of the pool. A little path across the manor field ran close by.

High on the slope beside the forest, commanding a lovely view, stood the new manor house, large and splendid, with windowpanes so clear that one might have thought there was no glass at all. The broad steps by the door seemed to be sheltered by a bower of roses and broad-leaved plants. The lawn was so purely green that every blade might have been inspected morning and evening. Inside the drawing room hung costly paintings, and there were chairs and sofas upholstered in silk and velvet that could almost have walked on their own legs, tables with polished marble tops, and books bound in morocco with gilt edges . . . . Yes, the people who lived here were rich indeed; they were people of rank. This was the baron’s home.

Everything was in keeping. “Everything in its proper place!” they said too, and that was why all the pictures that had once adorned the old manor in such honour now hung in the passage to the farmhands’ room. They were dreadful rubbish, especially two old portraits: one of a man in a rose-coloured coat and a wig, the other of a lady with powdered hair piled high and a red rose in her hand. Both were framed by the same great wreath of willow branches. There were many round holes in these two pictures, because the little barons were always shooting at the two old people with their bows and arrows. These were the councillor of justice and his wife, from whom the whole family descended.

“But they don’t really belong to our family!” said one of the little barons. “He was a hosiery pedlar, and she was a goose girl. They weren’t like Papa and Mama!”

The pictures were so much worthless rubbish, and “Everything in its proper place!” people said; so Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother ended up in the passage to the farmhands’ room. The parson’s son was tutor at the manor. One day he went walking with the little barons and their eldest sister, who had only recently been confirmed, and they followed the path down towards the old willow tree. As they walked, she arranged a bouquet of greenery from the fields: “Everything in its proper place,” and it became a thing of beauty. All the while she listened closely to everything that was said, and she took great pleasure in hearing the parson’s son talk about the forces of nature and the great men and women of history. Hers was a wholesome, gracious nature, noble in soul and thought, with a heart capable of embracing all that God had created.

They stopped beside the old willow tree. The youngest of the barons dearly wanted a whistle cut for him; he had had them made from other willow trees before, and the parson’s son broke off a branch.

“Oh, don’t!” said the young baroness, but it was already done. “It is our famous old tree, you know! I am so fond of it! They laugh at me for it at home, but never mind! There is a story about that tree—!”

And now she told him all that we have heard about the tree, the old manor, the goose girl, and the hosiery pedlar, who had met here and become the ancestors of this noble family and of the young baroness herself.

“The good old couple would not let themselves be ennobled!” she said. “Their favourite saying was, ‘Everything in its proper place!’ And they did not think they would be in theirs if they paid to be raised in rank. It was their son, my grandfather, who became a baron. They say he was very learned, highly respected, and much liked by princes and princesses, and that he attended all their festivities. The others at home are proudest of him, but I cannot quite explain it—there is something about the old couple that draws my heart to them! Life must have been so cosy, so patriarchal, at the old manor, where the mistress sat spinning with all her maids and the old master read aloud from the Bible!”

“They must have been splendid people, sensible people!” said the parson’s son. Then they fell into a discussion of nobles and commoners, and from the way the parson’s son spoke of nobility, one might almost have thought he was not a commoner himself.

“It is a happy thing to belong to a family that has distinguished itself! To have, as it were, a spur in one’s blood urging one on to achievement. It is a fine thing to possess a family name that is a passport to the foremost houses. Nobility means nobleness: it is the gold coin stamped with the value it truly possesses. It is fashionable nowadays—and naturally many poets join in—to say that everything noble must be wicked and stupid, while among the poor, the lower one descends, the more brightly everything shines. But that is not my opinion, for it is utterly wrong, utterly false. Among the higher ranks there are many instances of deeply moving goodness. My mother told me one, and I could give you more. She was visiting a grand house in town; my grandmother, I believe, had been the lady’s wet nurse. My mother was standing in a room with the old master, a man of the highest nobility, when he saw an old woman on crutches coming into the courtyard below. She came every Sunday to receive a few pennies. ‘There is the poor old soul,’ said the master. ‘She finds walking so difficult.’ And before my mother knew what was happening, he was out of the door and down the stairs. His Excellency, seventy years old, had gone down himself to the poor woman, to spare her the difficult climb for the few pennies she had come to collect. It is only a small incident, of course, but like the widow’s mite, it rings from the depths of the heart, from human nature itself. That is what the poet should point to; in our time especially, that is what he should sing of. It does good, softens hearts, and reconciles us! But when some scrap of humanity, merely because he has noble blood and a pedigree like an Arabian horse, rears up and neighs in the street, and says in his drawing room, ‘There have been people off the street in here!’ because a commoner has visited him—then nobility has rotted away and become a mask of the sort Thespis made. We laugh at the fellow and hand him over to satire.”

That was the parson’s son’s speech. It was rather long, but by the end of it the whistle was finished. There was a large party at the manor, with many guests from the neighbourhood and the capital. There were ladies dressed with taste and ladies dressed without it. The great drawing room was quite full of people. The local clergymen stood respectfully huddled in a corner, looking as though they were at a funeral; but this was an entertainment, only it had not yet got under way.

There was to be a grand concert, and so the little baron had brought his willow whistle indoors. But he could not get a sound out of it, nor could Papa, and therefore it was no good.

There was music and singing of the sort that gives most pleasure to those performing it; otherwise, it was quite pretty. “You are a virtuoso too!” said a gentleman whose only distinction was being his parents’ child. “You play the whistle, and carve it yourself. Such genius commands—sits at the right hand—heaven preserve us! I keep quite abreast of the times; one must. Surely you will enchant us all with that little instrument!” And he handed the tutor the little whistle cut from the willow beside the pool, announcing in a loud, clear voice that the tutor would favour them with a solo on the whistle.

It was easy to see that they meant to make fun of him, and the tutor did not want to play, though he was quite capable of it. But they pressed him and insisted, and at last he took the whistle and put it to his lips.

It was a strange whistle! A note rang out, as long and sustained as the whistle of a steam engine, and far louder. It sounded through the whole manor, the garden, and the forest, and for miles across the countryside. With the sound came a storm wind that roared, “Everything in its proper place!” And Papa went flying, as though carried on the wind, out of the manor and straight into the cattleman’s cottage. The cattleman flew up—not into the drawing room, for there was no place for him there, but into the servants’ hall, among the fine servants in their silk stockings. Those proud fellows were almost crippled with indignation that such a lowly person should dare sit down at table among them.

But in the great hall the young baroness flew to the head of the table, where she was worthy to sit, and the parson’s son was given the seat beside her. There the two of them sat as though they were bride and groom. An old count of the country’s most ancient family remained undisturbed in his place of honour, for the whistle was just, and so one ought to be. The witty gentleman who had caused the whistle to be played, the one whose distinction was being his parents’ child, flew headfirst among the hens—but not alone.

The whistle sounded for miles across the countryside, and great happenings were heard of. A rich wholesale merchant’s family, driving in a coach-and-four, were blown clean out of their carriage and were not even given a place on the back. Two rich farmers, who in our own day had grown too tall for their own cornfields, were blown down into the muddy ditch. It was a dangerous whistle! Fortunately, it split at the very first blast, and a good thing too; then it went back into the pocket. “Everything in its proper place!”

The next day no one spoke of what had happened; that is why there is a saying about “putting your pipe away!” Everything was back in its old order, except that the two old portraits, the hosiery pedlar and the goose girl, now hung in the great hall: they had been blown up onto the wall there. And when a genuine connoisseur declared that they had been painted by a master’s hand, they were allowed to stay and were restored. No one had known before that they were any good—and how could they have known? Now they hung in the place of honour. “Everything in its proper place!” And there it will come! Eternity is long—longer than this story!