The Black Spider Read Online Free PDF Page A

of dried pear, fat bacon and wonderful joints from pigs that weighed three hundred weight, beautifully red and white and succulent. All this slowly took its course, and whenever a new guest arrived, the whole meal was brought on again, beginning with the soup, and each newcomer had to begin where the others had begun earlier, none was let off a single course. In between, Benz, the father of the newborn child, assiduously poured out wine from the beautiful, white bottles which held more than a gallon and were richly decorated with coats of arms and mottoes. Where his arms could not reach, he transferred to others his office of cupbearer, earnestly pressing his guests to drink and very often exhorting them: “Drink it up, that’s what it’s there for, to be drunk!” And whenever the midwife came in carrying a dish of food, he held out his glass to her, and others did the same too, so that things might have gone very queerly in the kitchen if she had drunk a pledge every time that one was offered her.
    The younger godfather had to listen to a number ol jokes to the effect that he did not know how to encourage the godmother to drink as well as he should; if he could not give toasts better than that, he would never get a wife. “Oh, Hans Uli won’t want a wife,” the godmother finally said; unmarried fellows these days had quite different ideas in their heads from marriage, and most of them couldn’t even afford to get married now. “Huh,” said Hans Uli, he wasn’t so sure about that. Such slovenly creatures as most girls are nowadays make very expensive wives; most of them thought that all that was needed to make a good wife was a blue-silk piece of material to wrap round their heads, gloves in summer and embroidered slippers in winter. If you found that one of the cows in the cowshed was a poor specimen, that was certainly bad luck, but you could change it all the same; but if you are landed with a wife who does you out of a house and farm, that’s the end of it, and you can’t get rid of her. That’s why it’s more useful to think about other things rather than marriage and to let girls remain girls.
    “Yes, yes, you’re quite right,” the older godfather said; he was an insignificant looking little man in cheap clothes, but he was respected very much and called “Cousin,” for he had no children, but did possess a farm of his own without a mortgage on it and 100,000 Swiss francs in capital. “Yes, you are right,” he said. “Womenfolk are just no use any more. I won’t say that there isn’t one here or there who would do credit to a house but such are few and far between. All they can think about is foolery and showing off; they dress up like peacocks, strut about like daft storks, and if one of them has to do half a day’s work, she gets a headache that lasts three days, and spends four days lying in bed before she is herself again. When I was courting my old woman, things were different, you didn’t have to fear as much as you do now that you might get, instead of a good mistress of the house, only a fool or a devil about the house.”
    “Now look here, godfather Uli,” said the godmother who had been wanting to talk for a long time, but had not bad a chance, “anyone would think that it was only in your young days that there were any decent farmers’ daughters. The only thing is, you just don’t know them and you don’t take any notice of girls any more, which of course is quite right in an old man like you; but there are decent girls still, just as much as in the days when your old woman was still young. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but my father has told me many a time that if I go on as I have been doing, I shall outdo my late mother yet, and she became a really famous woman. My father has never taken such fat pigs to market as last year. The butcher has often said that he’d like to see the lass who had fed those pigs. But there’s plenty to complain about in young fellows