Peter Camenzind Read Online Free PDF Page B

climbed a steep precipice, of having risked my life to place a spray of rhododendron on a staircase. This knowledge contained something sweet, melancholy, and poetic, which made me feel very good; I can feel it even today. Only in times of complete despair does it occur to me that this “adventure with the Alpine roses” might have been as quixotic as all my other love affairs.
    This, my first love, never came to any conclusion—its echo receded gradually and enigmatically. Unrelieved throughout my adolescence, it always accompanied me whenever I fell in love later on, like a quiet elder sister. Nor have I ever been able to imagine anything purer, lovelier, or more beautiful than that well-born, calm-eyed patrician’s daughter. Many years later, when I happened to see the anonymous, enigmatic portrait of the Fugger daughter at an exhibition in Munich, it seemed to me that my whole enthusiastic, melancholy youth stood before me, gazing forlornly from the depths of its unfathomable eyes.
    Meanwhile I slowly and cautiously sloughed off the skin of childhood and gradually turned into a youth. The photograph taken of me at that time shows a bony, overgrown farm boy in shabby clothes, somewhat dull-eyed, with ill-proportioned, loutish limbs. Only the head reveals a certain precocity and firmness. With a kind of astonishment, I watched myself discard my boyhood ways. I looked forward to the university with somber anticipation.
    I was to study in Zurich and, in the event of my doing particularly well, my patrons held out the possibility of an extended educational tour through Europe. All this appeared to me as a beautiful classical picture: I visualized myself sitting in a friendly grove solemnly appointed with the busts of Plato and Homer, bent over learned tomes, and on all sides an unhampered view over the town, the lake and mountains, enchanting vistas. I had become a little less confused, yet livelier too, and looked forward to the good fortune awaiting me with the firm conviction that I would prove worthy of it.
    During my last year at school I took up the study of Italian and made my first acquaintance with the old novelists of Italy. I promised myself a more thorough acquaintance with them as a bonus for my first year at the university. Then the day came when I said goodbye to my teachers and my housemaster, packed and secured my little foot locker, and, with pleasurably melancholy feelings, spent some time lounging about in the vicinity of Rösi’s house.
    The vacation that now followed gave me a bitter foretaste of life and made a mockery of my high-flown dreams. The first shock was finding my mother ill. She was bedridden, hardly spoke at all, and even my arrival did not bestir her. I did not exactly feel sorry for myself, but it hurt to find that my happiness and young pride elicited no response. Thereupon my father informed me that although he had no objections to my studying, he was in no position to help financially. If my small scholarship did not suffice, I would have to try to earn the rest myself. By the time he was my age he had eaten bread earned with his own two hands, and so forth …
    Neither did I have much chance to go hiking, boating, or mountain-climbing, for I had to help out in the house and in the fields. During my half-days off, I did not feel like doing anything at all, not even reading. It enraged and exhausted me to observe how the common daily life callously demanded its due and devoured the abundance of optimism I had brought with me. My father, once he had settled the question of money, was as curt and harsh as ever, but not actually unfriendly. Yet this did not make me any happier. The silent, half-contemptuous respect my education and bookishness elicited from him irked me, and I felt sorry that it did. Moreover, I often thought of Rösi and was again overcome by the evil, indignant realization of my peasant inability to turn myself into a self-assured man of the