VIII

But one morning when Martin awoke he saw that the heavens shone with a brighter blue than they had for a long time and that there was a dripping from the eaves and the naked branches of the pear tree. And while he was sitting up in bed looking out at the shining blue, Maria came in with a branch that seemed to blossom in a hundred colors; but it was not flowers⁠—it was tinted feathers. She flicked him with the branch and danced and sang that it was Shrove Tuesday and she had a holiday from school, hurrah! And there were to be buns with almond icing for dinner.

Then they took the feathers off the branch and dressed up in them and played Indians and white men, but they were both Indians.

But mother took the switch and set it in the window in a jug filled with water in the full sunlight. The room faced the east and this was the morning sun. And lo and behold! it wasn’t many days before brown-and-greenish buds came out here and there on the twigs, they swelled and grew larger, until one day they had broken out and changed into frail light-green leaves; the whole branch had become verdant, and it was spring.

One afternoon a beam of sunlight fell into the hall which faced the west.

“Look at the sun, children,” said mother. “That’s our first afternoon sun this year.”

The sunbeam fell on the polished glass of the candelabra, where it broke and strewed rainbow-colored patches all over the room on the furniture and wallpaper. Just then father passed through the hall and set the three-sided bits of glass in motion with a slight blow of his hand. There was a tumultuous dance of the colored patches around the walls, a dance as of fluttering butterflies. Martin and Maria began a chase after them. They ran till they were flushed and hot, striking their hands against the walls, and when they saw a patch on their hand instead of on the wall paper, they screamed with delight, “Now I’ve got it!”

But in the next second it glided away, the sunbeam paled, and the butterflies, weary of fluttering and shining, departed⁠—Martin saw the last of them expire on his hand.

But it wasn’t spring yet after all.

The snow fell again, wet snow that melted at once and was dirty at once; again the bells rang in the black cupola, and it was Good Friday. Martin and Maria were in church, but they might not sit with their parents, for their parents sat far away in the choir in a multitude of solemn-looking people dressed in black. They were dressed in black themselves, father in a frock coat with a white cravat, and everything was black: the red on the pulpit and altar was gone, and there was black instead; the priests had black capes, a black cross rose menacingly from the leaden-hued cloud of the altarpiece far away in the dusk of the choir, and black-gray sky lay above all, staring in through the belfry windows of the cupola. Martin could not go to sleep as usual, because everything was so uncanny: the choir moaned and lamented, the minister looked sinister and forbidding and talked about blood, and a dog howled out in the churchyard.⁠ ⁠…

Martin was delighted with all this, although he didn’t realize it.

Spring at last, real spring.⁠ ⁠… It came first when the Royal Family drove out to the big park with their plumed and golden equipage. How the whole day shone, how radiant it was with blue and sunshine and spring around the chimneys and roofs, around the weathercock on the church tower! In Martin’s street the lindens were already out, and over the leaning fences hovered clouds of white blossom, cherry blossom, and hawthorn. On the square and along the Avenue the people thronged, the whole city was out in bright and gay-colored costumes, and in front of the Life Guards’ barracks stood the light blue guardsmen, whom Martin loved and worshiped, on duty with sabers drawn. The Royal Family drove past in a cloud of plumes and gold, the crowd cheered and Martin cheered, and then everybody went out to the park to drink fruit juices and mineral water at Bellmansruh. All around whined violins and street-organs, and Martin felt completely happy. But on the way back they stopped a moment to look at the Punch and Judy theater. The landscape was already beginning to darken, but people still flocked around the puppet theater where Punch was just going to beat his wife to death. Martin pressed close to his mother. He saw mouths open in a broad laugh around him in the dusk; he understood nothing, but the sound of the cudgel on the doll’s head frightened him⁠—were people laughing at that bad man there beating his wife? Then came the creditor, and him too Punch beat to death. The policeman and the devil he treated similarly, till finally Death lured him into his cauldron, and that was the end. Martin couldn’t laugh or weep either; he only stared abashed and terrified into this new world, which was so unlike his own. On the way home he was cold and tired. The sun was gone, it grew darker and darker; the king had long since driven home to his castle, and drunken men scuffled and bawled around him. The anemones which Martin had picked at the edge of the wood were withered, and he threw them away to be trampled into the mire.

But when he was home at last and it was night and Martin lay in his bed asleep, he dreamed that father hit mother on the head with a big cudgel.