But no, it was a fact, and I had to do something, go somewhere; I couldn’t just sit in my garret, staring at the newspaper, as though my redemption and my blessing were to be found there. But what should I do, where should I go? That was the question. After long hesitation I decided to appear before the grandfather of the deceased once again, or at least make an attempt to. It was crazy, I appreciated that, but I did it anyway, because I couldn’t do otherwise.
This was the only time in the course of my love that I was really happy, and no doubt that was only because she was already dead. When I appeared at the house of mourning, everything was empty and silent, as the deceased had yet to be brought home from the hospital. The old gentleman was quite alone among his ancestral inherited furniture, and opened the door for me when I rang the bell. Whether he had become even whiter I don’t know, but he certainly was even more stooped, his face more sunken and the skin on his face and hands had taken on a waxy tinge.
At first he didn’t recognise me, or pretended not to, but when I told him who I was, and reminded him of my previous visit, he didn’t let me continue, but invited me into the back room, taking me through the hall, where as before the piles of things from the dead past were on view, and into the smaller room, where he sat once again in his high-backed armchair and asked me to take a seat before him. I should have spoken, but my mouth, my tongue and my throat became painful and tight, when I saw how tears coursed over his now wrinkled and yellowed face, and his drooping moustache, one after the other, and dripped on to the soft dressing gown that covered his thin, wizened body. Thus we sat in silence for a while. Finally I managed to say, “I beg your pardon so very much that I’ve come to trouble you at this moment, but I could not do otherwise, I had to know why and how, so quickly, so suddenly, so incredibly unexpectedly…”
“What is there to tell you,” he replied quietly, without raising his eyes, as if it concerned a trifling matter. “Quite natural that it came like this, but if it had come otherwise, it might perhaps have been more natural. “A first birth, some sort of premature failure, a lack of the necessary help and skill for something which is just as natural as death in the countryside, a long distance to town, and who knows what else. I am old, I am of the soil, but death doesn’t want me, as if my sort of soil were of more use to someone in this world than a young and thriving life.”
“I too, grandfather, would have been ready to offer my life for hers, if I’d been asked to,” I said.
He raised his head a little, as if he wanted to see better who was calling him grandfather, let his head fall again and said, moving his tired hands, which had acquired a waxy sheen, “Perhaps you should have said that to me better when you were sitting the first time in that chair and talking about her; then she might still be alive today.”
“Ah, grandfather!” I cried covering my eyes with my hand. “Then I was so unhappy and frantic that I haven’t dared talk to you properly until today, because they were threatening to take away my job, as they did do later.”
“I know that, I know everything and I understand you. I am not going to reproach you, rather I blame myself that I, so old, with the smell of the soil about me, am trying to command life and love. But as you see, nothing good can come of that, when the soil takes command over love. Soil only turns everything to soil, even love, no matter how great and self-denying. Then I believed more in your words than in you. But young people’s words cannot be taken seriously, for they are bad at knowing people, especially when it concerns themselves. I should have known that you are a true Estonian man after all, with the heart of a true Estonian man, the kind of whom I’d seen plenty in my own life. Let me tell you a little story about that loyal Estonian heart. It must have been in the sixth year of this century when the Baltic lands lost the quit-rent by the command of his blessed majesty the Tsar. Of course you won’t remember it, you will have only heard or read about it. I was living at my country estate then. That was a golden age, but nobody wanted to believe then what a golden age it was. A person is never old or wise enough to really judge his times. Just this last year, when you were sitting right here in front of me, I complained in my heart about the bad times, because it was you asking for my grandchild’s hand, not someone else. But I do the same again today, because the only joy of my old eyes and ears is no longer among the living. In those days, in the sixth year of the century, when that order came from his blessed majesty the Tsar, I said, Must my manure not be carried and my rye not be reaped because of a decree from the Tsar of Russia? Where can I get so many working hands overnight so that I can give up the quit-rent system without a loss? And despite the Tsar’s order I sent a messenger to the distant parts of the forest among the tenants who worked in lieu of rent, and I made him tell them that they should carry on doing their work, because not even his powerful majesty the Tsar could do anything against voluntary quit-rent labourers, particularly as we were working the matter out between ourselves; for a tenant it was easier to do work than pay money, and it’s better for me to receive work than money. And believe it or not, the answer came from tenants everywhere that they would do as their baron wished, not according to the decree from his majesty the Tsar. Only one owner of a big place in a far corner of the estate lands, who had about twenty versts to travel to his work – in those days we didn’t know kilometres yet in this country – said that he would hold to the Tsar’s command, that is, he would start paying his rent in money, because he didn’t want to rattle so far over the land with a group of people and tools to the estate. Well, do you understand the people? For several generations in a row the estate has got by on quit-rent, and now suddenly it doesn’t. Moreover, if this tenant did take part in the labour-intensive tasks, others will follow him, because everywhere the messenger had been told that if others take part in the quick-rent work, then we will too, and if others drop out, then we will be too. There was nothing else for me to do but get the master of the big place invited to the manor. He didn’t come. He didn’t come because he didn’t have time and his mind was made up. The farmer said that he would act according to the law, so why should he go to the manor? And do you know, young man, what I did then? I had a horse hitched to a little sprung cart, because that was the easiest way to get to the distant parts of the forest, I took a coachman’s boy beside me and I drove to the farmer’s home. I hadn’t been there for a very long time and I didn’t recognise my own lands and people, or know how they were living. Whether it was theft of timber and secret distilling, as I had been told, or a lot of work and economies, as the people themselves claimed, it was clear that one way or another the farmer by the forest lands had become a wealthy man. He was living like a powerful and respected farmer behind my back, nobody interfered in his activities. The forester was the only check on him, but he was a law unto himself. I hadn’t raised the rent for ages, as they did on neighbouring estates every few years. And a farmer like that didn’t want to do quit-rent for me. The only explanation: he had got rich, proud and even pretentious. It turned out that there were two farmers on that farm, father and son. When I talked to the father, he claimed that the matter didn’t concern him, because he’d handed everything over to his son, but when I turned to the son, he laughed at me and said, ‘Why is the baron wasting his breath, when it was father who decided? So then I went – I, the baron and landlord – from Herod to Pontius Pilate out there in the distant forests. And since I didn’t get a definite answer even when father and son were both standing in front of me, I told them, ‘If you cannot do this quit-rent, you can look for a new place for yourself!’ But to that the son – a man of about fifty, stout and strong, so a pleasure and a joy to look at, hair and beard all over like his father, who was way over seventy, but not half as white as I am now – replied quite simply: ‘All right, baron, we will look for a new place for ourselves, a bit of open country, there’s plenty of it out in the backwoods. We’ve already been casting an eye in that direction, because we thought, isn’t this matter going to end the way these things always do, so we can go before the spring if you wish, Baron. We’ve lived well without squabbling, so we’ll leave the same way.’ That’s what the son said. And you won’t believe me when I tell you that those words brought tears to my eyes. Do you understand a person who is prepared to leave his forefathers’ home for the sake of the silly quit-rent? I didn’t at the time. I just sat down next to the grey-haired father on a block of wood and told him in his language: ’Don’t you feels shame and pity that you are leaving your forefathers’ and my forefathers’ land, where everyone has lived a beautiful and heppy life, over the lousy qvit-rent? Do you really luff that great and stronk Russian kaiser and his precious decree more than your forefathers’ and my forefathers’ land? You wants with a light heart to abendon your own home place and your baron, when he comes tventy versts alonk these pine roots, alonk these stones and stumps? Do we luff each other so liddle that when comes the stronk Russian kaiser’s decree, we starts to sqvabble and leave our own homeland? Am I beink to you a bad baron landlord, a bad person? Is my forefathers been to your forefathers a bad landlord and bad person? You open your mouth and say with your grey head to my grey head, I am beink a bad baron landlord, a bad person?’ Now the father replied to me, ‘No, baron, you are a good person and your forefathers were all golden people.’ ‘So then why won’t you do quit-rent any more, when I ask you to? So is it unjust and bad that I want to die as I lived? Do the work until one or other of us dies.’ ‘I would of course do it,’ said the father now, ‘but my son doesn’t want to.’ But the son was standing there listening to our talk, with women and children nearby. ‘Kaarel, won’t you just give in, since the baron has come so far and talked so nicely to you?’ said a woman’s voice behind my back. ‘Yes, Kaarel, let it be as it was while you’re alive,’ said the father too. Eventually Kaarel uttered these words: ‘All right, baron, if the others agree, so do I, or else I’d be alone in breaking relations with the manor.’ And so they carried on doing the labour with a pure loyal heart, and maybe they would be doing it to this day, if the new times hadn’t come. This story came to mind when I thought about your first visit and our conversation. I told you at the time that your Korporation and colours, your singing and drinking were empty stuff, eating away at the spirit, that you didn’t have the right spirit, the right Baltic spirit. Spirit is what brings life to singing and gives a sense to drinking. You argued then against that right spirit, you said that you sing and drink without spirit or that you drink with a new spirit, as far as I understood you. I believed you then and that was my mistake. I believed your explanation of the new spirit or of singing and drinking without spirit, but I should have been wiser than you in your youth and known that it is not from spirit that singing and drinking come, but spirit comes from singing and drinking. And if you drink and sing properly, as they did in the good old days in the Baltic lands, then you should acquire the right Baltic spirit, the right Baltic spiritual disposition, which drives you to distinction in every sense. And that is what gives a special beauty, brilliance, glow and glory to things, socially, economically, racially, and in class terms, and raises even the greatest follies of youth to an ideal light, an admirable elevation. Seen from that viewpoint the conversation with you has been a real pleasure and consolation, because not all is lost in our dear homeland when the younger student generation cultivates the right spirit. The old generation, the alien substance that arose from Russification in the Baltic lands, wanted to trim everything down to one level, which is completely foreign to us all in terms of history and development, tradition and culture, but the young generation is heading back on to the right Baltic track. Instead of manors there are settlers, but the spirit and soul of the manors, their high ideals, are coming into bloom again. They who bind themselves to earthly things or destroy the spirit, that everlasting and elusive thing, are mistaken in their materialistic blind faith. If the powerful Russian Tsar was unable with his decrees to force a loyal and just Estonian man to give up quit-rent for the sake of his merciful baron, who could demand of youthful students that they had to give up the true spirit of their homeland? That is how I have reasoned to myself about the future of our dear homeland, and I have come to the joyful conclusion that the past is not completely dead yet, that the past is the only living, vital, and life-giving period in the destiny of people and nations, for only the past enables development, and the spirit of the golden past is only now perhaps starting to spread and take root in our homeland, becoming the treasure of the masses, whereas until today it was the private property of individuals. My only fear,” he continued in Estonian, “is that they cripples the right Baltic past and spirit, as they don’t understand the real drinkink and singink. You says to them, when you goes to them, they must understand that really true drinkink and singink, then comes that really true spirit, that loyal Estonian spirit, which sits on that grey old man, when he says to his son, “You goes does that qvit-rent for your dear baron landlord, until he dies. I talked about this with my grandchild when she was still at home,” he continued in his own language, after a little silence, “but she was still too young to be interested in spirit. Moreover, spirit isn’t a woman’s affair; they seek the soul and love. Yet she did tell me that your young women seek, like your men, the true spirit of the homeland in drinking and singing. But how is it with your soul and love? Who cares for it when everyone is seeking the spirit in singing? Spirit does not love, it assesses. Or is there no longer a need for soul and love? That is the only thing that makes me think, makes me worry about the beloved and loyal Estonian people. But I am old, I am of the soil, I no longer understand well how…”