Selected Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

the lake is twice as blue, the sky three times as beautiful.
     Thun had a trade fair, I cannot say exactly but I think four years ago.
    [1913]

The Job Application
    E STEEMED GENTLEMEN ,
    I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I
     am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely,
     if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know
     that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing
     supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which,
     as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should
     know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and
     I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by
     people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession
     of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and
     thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender
     substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense
     as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious,
     vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who
     will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his
     duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging
     sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost
     I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker,
     a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your
     extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary
     functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? —I am, to put
     it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest
     to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome
     and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank
     God for life’s boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is
     unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you
     know what sort of a person I am. —I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand,
     and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear,
     but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I
     am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world
     in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be
     your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience,
    Wenzel
    [1914]

The Boat
    I THINK I’ve written this scene before, but I’ll write it once again. In a boat, midway upon
     the lake, sit a man and woman. High above in the dark sky stands the moon. The night
     is still and warm, just right for this dreamy love adventure. Is the man in the boat
     an abductor? Is the woman the happy, enchanted victim? This we don’t know; we see
     only how they both kiss each other. The dark mountain lies like a giant on the glistening
     water. On the shore lies a castle or country house with a lighted window. No noise,
     no sound. Everything is wrapped in a black, sweet silence. The stars tremble high
     above in the sky and also upward from far below out of the sky which lies on the surface
     of the water. The water is the friend of the moon, it has pulled it down to itself,
     and now they kiss, the water and the moon, like boyfriend and girlfriend. The beautiful
     moon has sunk into the water like a daring young prince into a flood of peril. He
     is reflected in the water like a