The Story of Karl Ott

by Algernon Blackwood

 

THE STORY OF KARL OTT.

NIEDERWALD was a little village situated in a deep valley among the Alps, and it was generally conceded by the inhabitants that Karl Ott was the most obstinate man in it.

He was not only held to be such because his motto in life was “Never give in even if you are wrong,” but also because he had for three years proposed to the daughter of the English lady with amazing perseverance, and, in the face of equally persevering refusals, still persisted in renewing his offer.

Karl Ott, eldest and only son of the village pastor, called upon the daughter of the English lady just as regularly as the church-goers went to receive from his father’s hands the communion on the first Sunday in every month. Their walk through the village and up the winding path into the dark pine forest was as regularly expected by the simple villagers as was their return an hour or two later; Karl Ott with a set look on his face, and on the lips of the daughter of the English lady an amused and peculiarly sweet smile.

Leaving her at her mother’s house—the little wooden one opposite the Gasthaus with the creeping vines and the dark-stained pillars—Karl Ott strode down the village street to his father’s house, and the following conversation took place regularly.

“Karl, my son, had you a pleasant walk?”

“Yes, father.”

“And what did she say, my son?”

“She treated it as a grand joke, father.”

“She laughed at you, Karl?”

“Yes, father.”

“And did she give you no encouragement, my son?”

“No; that is—Vielletcht etwas.”

“Only a very little—perhaps,” repeated the pastor, who knew every answer in advance.

There was a little pause here, and then:

“You will try again, my son,” more as a statement of fact than a question.

“If she did not love me, father, she could not go with me so freely and often.”

“She is not playing with you, Karl?” with his eyes on his son’s face.

Karl never answered this last question. He only laughed, and asked a question, himself.

“With me? Aber was für eine Idee!”

Karl Ott may have been original, unsophisticated, but he was a dangerous man to be trifled with. He knew it, and thought of course every one else knew it. For was he not acknowledged to be the most obstinate and difficult man in the whole village?

The English lady and her daughter, with an English servant, had lived in the little house with the dark-stained pillars for three years. They were generally known to the village folk as the “English Lady” and the “Beautiful daughter of the English Lady,” because the villagers found themselves wholly unable to pronounce their double-barrelled name.

They were in reality very poor, though compared to Herr Stosch, the richest man in the village, they seemed rich, very rich. A small income goes a long way in Niederwald, and the English lady and her daughter had sought the secluded life it afforded because of reverses at home when the husband and father died. At least so they said, and no one questioned the truth of it. Niederwald was a quiet, curious little out-of-the-world spot, and the people who had been bred and born there were equally quiet and far more curious.

It was a lovely place. A stream tumbled from the big mountains behind, and flowed peacefully through the village, till the spring thaws and the winter storms converted it into a raging, racing torrent. Vineyards sloped away, below the village, to a lake, while above it dense pine forests stretched away till they joined the region of rocks and cliffs, and, finally, of everlasting snows. Above all, three lofty white peaks peered over from the clouds into the little village, and reflected the sunset glory long after the village was wrapped in darkness and shadow.

Karl Ott owned a large vineyard, and made money by it. His Wienese were always successful, and his grapes sweeter and juicier even, than those that grew in sunny Italy, on the other side of the great white peaks.

He had seen the English lady and her daughter when they first came to Niederwald, and his father, as pastor, went with him to ‘call upon them. While his father stumbled along in his broken English with the mother, Karl conversed with the beautiful daughter in German. He welcomed her to Niederwald. She had travelled with her father before he died, and had seen much. She had even been in the fair country that lay beyond the three white peaks. She was older than he was, and knew more of the world, he thought. He found that she loved the mountains and the forests, and that she listened eagerly to his descriptions of the gorges, ravines and vastnesses of the Alps around them. She longed to see them and climb to the great white peaks. And Karl, who knew every boulder and every tree, and had grown up in company with toppling seracs and dizzy crevasses, promised to show them to her.

He was not slow to believe what his father told him afterwards: that the proud English lady had sacrificed her daughter’s best years to her own pride in coming to live in Niederwald, and bury her poverty where none could see it and sneer.

It was thus their walks began; and the English lady, apparently wrapped up in her pride and disappointments, let them go together.

Karl Ott had been fortunate enough to earn the gratitude of the daughter of the English lady, and it was then he first made up his mind to fall in love with her.

He did everything so deliberately, and his obstinate will held his feelings so under control, that he was not able to fall in love without first thinking the matter over, and then coming to a decision. Such decision was, however, absolutely final, and from it there could be no recall.

The Devil’s Rocks formed a steep slope of loose rocks that had crumbled down from the cliffs above, and accumulated. They were not twenty yards long, and terminated abruptly at the edge of a precipice over two thousand feet. The rocks had to be crossed on the way to Wannsee. They were very dangerous, because the slightest disturbance set them all rolling over each other towards the brink. Several persons from the neighbouring villages had been killed in this way by losing their balance when the rocks began to move under their weight, and being swept down over the short distance that lay between the narrow path and the dizzy abyss. They were called the Devil’s Rocks—Teufelsfelsen—because the devil was said to be concealed beneath them, and to move them with his fingers whenever any one approached.

Karl and the girl were climbing slowly, and the little dog had run on ahead. His weight was more than sufficient to start the treacherous stones in motion. In spite of his struggles, and with much piteous barking, the little fellow was carried to the edge. Karl saved it by going after it, while the girl, speechless with horror, watched them from the path. She was powerless to help, and she knew they must both be carried over, and—and she did so love the dog.

She could hear the rocks that had already leaped over the edge crashing down the face of the cliff, striking here and there its buttresses and projecting ledges. How brave of Karl! He had her darling by the scruff of his neck. Oh! the splendid fellow that he was. Ah! but—horrors! he had slipped again! Her heart stopped beating for a moment, and she hid her eyes in her hand. She heard a rush of wind, and she knew that Karl Ott and the dog had disappeared into the gulf.

The next minute he was standing by her side with the dog in his arms. It was licking his hand, and evidently had no idea of the cruel death it had escaped. How it was done Karl could not tell. Only the rush of loose rocks suddenly ceased, and the one his weight rested on, six inches from the edge, came to a standstill, and he scrambled up again to the path with the doggie panting and frightened in his hands. That was all he could say about it. He watched the girl kiss her dog, and saw her tears drop on to his little brown ears. He heard her thank him; and as her large eyes, with the long, moistened eyelashes, looked so gratefully into his, he experienced a strange sensation in his heart.

He thought the tears were those of gratitude.

He thought of the girl, of her eyes and hair. He thought of the tears that fell on the dog’s ears, and he thought of the slender brown hands that held him. A feeling more tender than any he had yet known crept into his heart. He thought of his father, the pastor; of the proud English lady; and then he thought again of her beautiful daughter.

He remembered, too, that he owned a vineyard, which made him rich. And he made up his mind.

The rocks were dropping past him, and plunging downwards over the precipice. He stooped, and picked one up.

“As surely as I have plucked this one from the fingers of the Devil who is moving them from beneath,” he said aloud, slowly, “and as surely as it will drop through the air and rest on the ground below,”—here he peered over the edge,—“so surely will I make the daughter of the English lady my wife.” He threw the stone upwards and forwards, saw it for a moment against the sky, and then heard it rushing downwards through the air.

A few seconds afterwards it crashed upon the rocks below, and Karl Ott, as soon as the echoes had died away, climbed down again, and went home to bed.

Next day he told his father of his resolve, and the pastor had said, “My son, you have my benediction.”

Karl waited a few weeks before he thought it well to speak his mind.

It was winter time, and one day Herr Miller, proprietor of the Gasthof, his son Fritz, Pastor Ott, Karl Ott, young Stosch, Frau Müller and the English girl took their skates and a luncheon basket, and drove six miles in a sleigh to the end of the frozen lake.

Karl slowly and deliberately fastened the shining skates on to the pretty little feet of the daughter of the English lady. They were soon flying together before the wind over the black ice, with the fox terrier racing after them as best he could on the slippery surface. He was barking his little heart out for happiness.

But in Karl Ott’s heart there was no sign of fluttering. His big muscular frame, with its mountain-trained sinews, never carried a more confident heart than then. The fact that he was going to ask the English girl to marry him did not make his pulse beat any more quickly than usual; and “usual” was by no means fast.

He felt, as he flew over the ice with the English girl beside him, as if the little gloved hands lying warmly in his own were already his; as if the hair, that escaped from under her fur cap and sometimes blew across his cheeks, was even then his to caress.

His purpose being so single, he had no recourse to beating about the bush, and saw no reason for hesitancy or difficulty in giving expression to so straight- forward a proposition.

Karl simply waited for a pause in their talk, turned to the English girl as they were skating out in the middle of the lake, and said in his deep voice, in which was no tremor, nor trace of nervousness:

“Ich liebe Dich. Ich anbiete Dir mein Leben, mein Herz, meine Weinbergen, und meines Vater’s Segnung.”

As he spoke he looked her steadily in the face. He could not meet her eyes, because, in her desire to choose the best ice, she was looking downwards. But the girl made no answer, and no change came over her face. The wind roared in their ears as it swept past them, and the ring of their skates sounded musically over the lake.

Karl waited some time for an answer, and then came to the conclusion that the girl had not heard him. It was the fault of the wind. He took his eyes from her face, and glanced down at the little feet that shot forward so swiftly and gracefully. He was sure she had not heard him.

There was nothing for him to do but repeat the proposition; and this Karl Ott at once did, in a louder voice, and with an amount of calm deliberation that would have been the envy of all lovers in all lands, could they have seen him.

This time she certainly heard him, for she turned her face up and looked at him. Her eyes were wide open, but on her face, aglow with the wind, there was no evidence of surprise or embarrassment. Her lips were parted in the effort of breathing; her fur cap sat jauntily on her hair, and her hands nestled cosily and warm in his own. Karl kept his eyes on hers, and waited for her to speak. But she did not speak, and Karl began to feel decidedly uncomfortable. He did not know what to make of it.

Then the daughter of the English lady nestled in a little closer to his side, and, with a laugh that showed two rows of gleaming teeth, shouted against the wind,—“What was that you said just now about your father’s benediction? If you don’t look where you are taking me, it will be given over our drowned and frozen bodies.”

Then Karl knew that she could not have heard all that he said. She was shouting her loudest, and he heard her none too distinctly. Dropping his eyes from her face, he looked ahead. They were within fifty yards of the lake proper. The shallow water of the great marsh lay behind them, and they were already skating over the thin, green ice that a little farther on came to an abrupt end in the deep waters. Karl saw their danger at a glance. With a swing he altered his course, pulling the girl round with him, so that she came close up against his side and her hair blew again across his cheek. She laughed merrily, and tucked it under her fur cap.

Talking was an easy matter now. The wind was behind them.

“What was that remark you made about your father’s benediction?” she laughed again: “did you mean us to be drowned, or what? It would be a pity, to end our friendship in iced water!”

Something in her voice made Karl feel for a moment that there was between them an immeasurable distance. The thought fled as suddenly as it came, and Karl’s phenomenal obstinacy began to assert itself.

He was on the point of repeating, word for word, his twice-made proposition, when there was a sound of skaters behind them, and the next moment Müller and young Stosch raced up and joined them.

Their presence put an end, for the time, to any further avowals of love or proposals of marriage.

They formed a line of skaters hand in hand, the girl between Müller and himself, and sped along to join the rest of the party round a log fire and a luncheon basket.

Karl did not find himself again alone with the daughter of the English lady, until the horse was being harnessed into the sleigh, and the remnants of the luncheon were being packed up. And then it was only for a brief moment, when he had nothing prepared in the way of words. The fact was, he felt nonplussed. Had she vouchsafed some sort of an answer, he would have known what to do and say. But her silence completely outwitted him. He could not understand it, and, for the time being, his obstinacy was met and conquered by the subtler force of silence.

Now that they were alone again for a moment, she asked him to tighten the strap that fastened her skates together.

“Make a neat little bundle of it, Mr. Ott,” she said, “so that they won’t clash together, and get scratched.”

While he was doing her request, the muscles of his great fingers slow from the cold, the girl stood facing him. “And please,” she added ever so gently, and looking up into his eyes, “please, Karl, never ask me those sort of questions again, because, if you do, we cannot go together on the mountains. And you know there’s nobody else here who can climb like you, and—and I may not go alone. Now, please don’t, Karl, for it is quite impossible.”

The smile she gave him was gentle enough to melt his obstinacy into slavery. But it only made Karl Ott angry. It was his turn to be silent now, for he knew enough, cold, strange lover that he was, to understand that she looked upon him only as a companion.

The first time she met him after the skating party, she greeted him with an amused smile that, so far as he was concerned, seemed to increase the distance he felt lay between them. It also increased his obstinacy. And this same amused smile was all the answer he got to his many subsequent proposals.

She called him Karl now, and when he had concluded his awkward sentence about offering her his love and his life and his vineyards, there was only this little smile for answer.

If he dared, as he often did, to repeat his words, the little smile broadened out into a laugh, that effectually closed his lips for the moment, because he utterly failed to comprehend the feelings that caused it.

They never got any further than this, and the state of affairs might well have continued for a dozen years.

Meanwhile Karl’s love for the daughter of the English lady changed in character. It was beginning to come from his heart instead of from his will. He now and again caught himself wondering what in the world he would do if she died, or—the thought was horrible—if she married some one else!

One day in the early spring, when Karl Ott went to the little post office, he met the English girl there. The snow was still lying low down on the mountain sides. In the air was that indescribable sweetness that is only known in the neighbourhood of pine forests at a certain elevation.

She held some letters in her hand and was stamping them for England. Karl suggested a ramble on the heights of the Kronenberg, and the girl was pleased.

“Yes,” she said; “and if you think the snow is sufficiently melted, we will go by way of the Devil’s Rocks. I should like to see them once more.”

“Once more!” repeated Karl with surprise. “Why! what do you mean?”

“Oh! we are going away,” she said simply. “Mother is going back to live in England again. We leave in two days.”

Karl fairly gasped. His heart sank within him.

“Wait here a moment,” she added: “I will go and put on my nailed boots and climbing skirts. “Then I'll tell you all about it!” She had seen the blank look of dismay that had come into his face, and, for the first time, she felt in her heart a feeling of sorrow for him.

“Poor Karl Ott!” she thought; “but he is such a simple boy, and has so much to learn. He surely could not have imagined that I might care for him!”

So they climbed up the lower slopes of the great Kronenberg, these two, who had together explored every foot of the mountains, and knew their most inaccessible parts, who had seen the sun rise from the top of the three white peaks, and watched the last sunset lights linger on the far away snow slopes that seemed to hang in the sky over the village. For nearly five years they had been companions in many a ramble through the deep forests, and had followed the torrents to their sources under the ice of the dangerous, slow-creeping glaciers. And as they followed the winding path, so familiar to them, the English girl told her companion of the impending change in their life.

“We are going back to our old home in Kent,” she told him. “Mother’s sister is dead, and we shall be better off now. We go to Paris on Saturday, and you must come to the station, Karl, and see us off.”

Come to the station and see us off!

Karl listened in silence. He asked no questions, and made no comments. The shock had been so sudden and so unexpected, it had stirred his feelings as they never had been stirred before. He could not define them, much less reduce them to words. Surprise, disappointment, rage, struggled for the mastery with sorrow, pride and outraged confidence. They rose up in him in such a strength of turmoil, that he felt as if his heart was being torn out and destroyed. He walked as in a dream, not knowing what he would do next. But the feeling that was uppermost was the bitterness that he had been trifled with. Karl Ott was obstinate, and, whatever he felt, there was no indication of it on his face or in his manner. His feelings nevertheless increased in strength the more he tried to repress them. So he just walked on by her side, and listened to her voice, as they climbed up through the fragrant pine woods and then through the belt of stunted mountain oaks that led to the rocks beyond. When she had finished he made an effort to say something.

“I am sorry you are going. I did not expect it,” was what he said in a quiet voice.

The girl said she was sorry too, she was so fond of the mountains and forests; but he surely did not think she was going to live in Niederwald for the rest of her life!

Karl had no answer ready; or rather had a thousand ready, but they were all so strong, and he did not know which to choose.

Then the climbing over the rough boulders that formed the long slope at the foot of Kronenberg’s great shoulder began, and rendered talking, except in short exclamations, impossible.

They climbed on together, till they reached the final slope, at the top of which began the little path leading to the Devil’s Rocks.

“Karl,” she laughed, showing her white teeth, “I’m exhausted. You'll have to bury me here, or carry me to the top.”

Karl turned his head away and looked for a moment at the view of lake and forest far beneath them, and an expression came into his eyes that the girl did not see. Then he took her in his arms, swung her little body on to his great shoulders, and carried her steadily over the remainder of the trying, soft snow-slope. He did not tremble. He could have carried her, for that matter, over a tight-rope stretched from the peak of the Matterhorn to the Eggischorn. His feet never took false hold, his balance always was true; and, when she laughed aloud and clutched his head with her two arms for safety, he felt his muscles respond to this call on their reserve force, and carry their precious burden with the ease of steel springs.

When they reached the top he let her down gently from his shoulders. She looked up at him shyly, and told him he was the strongest pack-horse she had ever ridden upon in the Alps, and Karl felt that he wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her.

“And when did you—your mother, I mean—first decide to leave?” he asked, in a voice so quiet that a stranger would have thought him indifferent to whatever answer he got.

“Oh!” she said, with an almost imperceptible start, which did not escape his notice. “Oh! we have known it all along. We—we only came here for five years, you know.”

But Karl didn’t know; and her matter-of-fact way of announcing this important fact, which he felt should have been told him years ago, when he first proposed to her, came to him as a revelation. It acted as a stimulant too. “Then she does not care for me even as much as she does for one of the little snowdrops that are just coming up with the spring,” was the thought that passed through his brain.

“You intended from the beginning to leave Niederwald this spring?” he asked quietly.

She looked at him sweetly, and nodded her head. Karl met her eyes for a moment without a sign of expression on his face, and then turned to look at the view again. It was ever changing, and a great grey cloud was rolling up the opposite rock-walls of Chasseront—gloomy Chasseront, as it was called.

Karl again broke the silence.

“Yet you never told me that,” he said, almost gently. “I thought you would always live in Niederwald.”

Karl was so simple, so innocent, so honest!

“Live here always!” she cried. “Oh, Karl!” And there came over her face that same smile of amusement that he knew so well. But there was in it something of pity as well, now, and Karl was stung more deeply than ever by it. Poor Karl!

“You allowed me to be always with you on the mountains,” he continued, with something like anger in his voice, “and you allowed no one else. You have made and permitted me to grow very fond of you. You have always——”

“Now, Karl,” she remonstrated. The smile of amused pity had died out of her eyes, for she felt that her companion was growing unpleasantly earnest. He spoke slowly, but in his voice was an inflection she had never heard there before. The idea of his getting really angry rather frightened her. Slow, deep natures, she knew, were never really angry unless when moved to their very bottom, and Karl Ott’s nature was a very slow and a very deep one.

“You have always laughed at my proposals,” he went on, in his deep voice, totally ignoring her interruption, “but you never forbade them. You knew I meant what I said, and that, in God’s name in heaven, I loved you seriously and for ever!”

“Silly boy!” she laughed with spirit, and looking him full in the face: “how could you possibly imagine anything so impossible?”

Karl did not move a muscle, or take his eyes off hers. He felt his blood leave his heart suddenly in a body, and then rush tumultuously back again. It made his cheeks blaze, and moistened his skin.

“You ought to have known,” she went on, emboldened by his silence, which she interpreted as an acknowledgment of defeat. “Our positions are so different; our ages, too; and we belong to different races. Besides, oh, Karl! I told you long ago, when first you spoke, that I could never love any one!”

Never love any one! Suddenly the truth began to dawn on his mind. She loved some one else, then!

The girl suddenly put her hand on his shoulder and looked into his face, moving closer to him, as if about to speak. She kept her hand there, although she was aware that he shrank from her touch as if she had been a leper. She had opened her lips when he interrupted her with raging vehemence.

“And you, damned girl,” he cried, “have allowed me all this time to remain in ignorance that you loved some one else; allowed me to pay court to you, and to love you until all my heart and life and future are all yours; to—to love so deeply, that to lose you must mean to die! And you might so easily have told me the truth: a word years ago would have prevented all, instead of letting month after month go by, playing with my life as only women can, who have—who are——”

“Karl, stop!” she cried. “I am married already!”

He stood and looked into the eyes and face he loved so hopelessly. Then he turned, and looked down, and out on to the panorama of distant woods and blue mountains. There was no word between them for a minute or more. Then the girl, who was sobbing now, sought his hand, and in a broken whisper, which could hardly have reached his ear, she moaned,—

“But, Karl, my husband was a criminal—and for five years he has been—has been away. That is, we are going home to meet him when he is released—next week.”

He felt the girl draw closer to him, until her heaving breast was against his heart, and he could feel her quick sobs. He felt her arms round his neck; her head, with the golden hair, was on his shoulder.

“Can you never forgive me, Karl?” she whispered, her tears falling fast and hot on his neck.

Karl made no answer. Perhaps he had not heard her. Perhaps his thoughts were still in the cloudy distance where the little patch of blue heaven had disappeared. Perhaps, ah! perhaps, he was wondering, and thinking, and asking himself if, after all, the girl had loved him all along and loved him still.

 

So they stood together on that lonely mountain path, and the girl’s head, radiant in the soft sunshine, sank lower on his shoulder, and the wind played with her beautiful hair.

But Karl Ott moved his feet, and set the Devil’s Rocks in motion. Then he seized the girl in his arms and, raising her face to his, covered the tear-stained cheeks and the red mouth and the hair with a thousand kisses.

The stones moved forward, with a hoarse, grinding sound, towards the brink.

She heard the sound; she felt them moving beneath her feet, and she tried to free herself.

But Karl pressed her struggling little body closer to him. He held her to his heart. She was his own at last, and—he loved her. Pressed thus to his heart, the beautiful daughter of the English lady was carried by the shifting rocks to the brink of the abyss.

Her cry of terror was half smothered by his hot lips laid on her own, as they fell backwards into the air.

And the wind heard her cry, and the far white peaks saw them fall.

And the Devil’s Rocks, that dropped over the edge for several minutes afterwards, covered their bodies and formed their tombstone.

Algernon Blackwood