Beneath the Wheel Read Online Free PDF Page B

the brooks, their white blossoms always covered by an umbrella-like smudge of tiny insects, and they had stalks from which you could cut yourself flutes and pipes. Long rows of wooly and majestic mullein displayed themselves along the forest edges; willow catkin and purple loosestrife swayed on their tough slender stalks, bathing entire slopes violet. Inside the forest itself, under the spruce trees, stood solemn and beautiful and strange the high, steep, red foxglove with its broad, fibrous, silvery root leaves, the strong stalk and the high rows of beautiful red throat-shaped blossoms. Next to them all kinds of mushrooms: the shiny red fly-agaric, the fat and fleshy ordinary mushroom, the red tangled coral-mushroom, the curiously colorless and sickly-looking Pine Bird’s Nest. On the many heather-covered banks between the forest and the fields there blazed the tough, fiery-yellow broom, then came long strips of lilac-red heather followed by the fields themselves, most of them ready for the second mowing, overgrown with a profusion of cardamine, campions, meadow sage, knapweed. The woods resounded with the ceaseless chirping and singing of the finches. In the pine forest fox-red squirrels leapt from tree to tree; along ridges, walls and dry ditches green lizards sunned themselves, and over the meadows you could hear the endless ululations, the untiring trumpeting of the cicadas.
    The town made a very bucolic impression at this time of year. There were hay wagons about; the scent of grass and clanging of scythes filled streets and air. If there hadn’t been two factories, you would have thought you were in a rural village.
    Early in the morning of his first day of vacation, Hans stood impatiently in the kitchen waiting for his coffee practically before Anna had had time to get out of bed. He helped lay the fire, fetched bread from the baker, quickly gulped down coffee cooled with fresh milk, stuffed some bread into his pocket and rushed off. At the upper railroad embankment he took a round tin box out of his pants pocket and busied himself catching grasshoppers. The train passed—not in a great swoosh but at a comfortable pace because of a steep incline—with all its windows open and just a handful of passengers, a long banner of smoke and steam trailing behind. Hans gazed after it, watching the smoke dissolve and disappear in the sunny air. He inhaled deeply as if he wanted to make up doubly for all the time he had lost and to be once more a carefree, uninhibited boy.
    His heart trembled with delight and the eagerness of the hunt as he carried his box full of grasshoppers and the new rod across the bridge and through the gardens in back to the “horse trough,” the deepest part of the river. There was a spot where, if you leaned against a willow, you could fish more comfortably and with fewer interruptions than anywhere else. He unwound his line, tied the little lead pellets to it, ruthlessly impaled a plump grasshopper and cast with a broad sweep toward the middle of the river. The old, well-known game began: little minnows swarmed in swirling shoals around the bait, trying to tear it off the hook. Soon the bait had been nibbled away and it was a second grasshopper’s turn, and a third and fourth and fifth. He fastened them more and more carefully on his hook, finally weighted the line down with a second pellet, and now the first genuine fish tested the bait. He nudged it a little, let it go, then pulled at it again. Now the fish bit. A good fisherman feels the jerk through the line and rod in his fingers. Then Hans gave an artful twist and began to draw in his line very carefully. The fish was properly hooked and when it became visible Hans recognized it as a rudd. You recognize rudds at once by the broad belly which shimmers white-yellow, the triangular head, but most of all by the beautiful fleshy pink of their ventral fins. How much would it weigh? But before he even had a chance to guess its