HEDGEHOG: You’re wrong, and I’ll tell you something. A stork can brag of many things, but a hedgehog can’t. You are flattered, you are an educational and family ideal. Whole communities look up to you with unfeigned respect. All the opinions that go with you are good ones. With me, it’s different. What use to me is your affection? Have you been smitten by my timorousness?
STORK: Yes, I think so.
HEDGEHOG: It suits me fine, don’t you think? I’m so nice and round in it, so appetizing. I have spines because I’m afraid. I am all flight and fear. Look at my little head, my little eyes, my little nose. I don’t fly, with majesty, like you. There’s not a tittle of elevation about me. My feet are incomprehensibility itself, but I am dainty, I look like some poor silly thing. I don’t strut about with wings, not likely. I don’t build, on church steeples, comfortable nests with the bright air wafting around them. I live in forests, only venture forth, softly, in the dark.
STORK: You dear shy thing!
HEDGEHOG: You take pity on me. But I have no pity. Pity is something grand. It doesn’t suit me. I am puny. My spines, what’s more, are mockery itself; they mock me.
STORK: So you’re mocked by what seems called upon to shield you. I love you all the more for your forsakenness.
HEDGEHOG: But I’m in enormously good spirits. You have no idea how splendidly one can live inside a covering that’s laughable. My well-being is unspeakably original. The assurance that I look pretty streams through me, it fairly does. You’re rather a comical one yourself.
STORK: My dignity, you mean. But I can’t do anything about it. I appear somewhat stiff, solemn, but it’s precisely in this gravity of my manner that I myself vanish, do you understand?
HEDGEHOG: I don’t allow myself to understand anything. Understanding would annoy me. Do you think I’d take the trouble to start looking into you? Deep thinking I leave to you and your kind. I’m sorry for you because you can’t put me out of your mind, but I find it funny that you make me feel sorry for you. So then I’m not really sorry for you at all. Look, I’m shaped like a hill and give an impression of lifelessness.
STORK: That’s a huge advantage. I admire you, are you giggling at something?
HEDGEHOG: Oh, only at the anxieties of such an intelligence as yours. To be cultivated and want to extract a smile from a hedgehog! Inner glee is all I feel. On the outside I would never laugh. I mind my good manners too much for that. Besides, I’ve been talking with you for too long. You love me. But me, feathered friend, me you fill with horror. Yet I only shrink from you because that happens to suit me. Shrinking, I find, is my pleasure.
STORK: Do you despise me?
HEDGEHOG: My spines tell me I should. Otherwise, you’d impress me. But you’re also much too long-leggity, big-beaked, too proud, too beautiful for me.
STORK: Would that your inconspicuousness could be the death of me.
The hedgehog tucks himself entirely into his mantle, still peering out a little. Sees the good stork trembling with his inclination, swathed in his slendernesses. But he speaks no more. Finds speech from now on pointless; simply crouches there still, unspeakably odd and incomprehensible. The stork stands transfixed. Hedgehoggish helplessness invades him. Deep down, the hedgehog is a complete child, and, loving what is solitary, the kindly stork is now himself strange and solitary. He thinks that he too is tricked out with spines. Night has fallen in the forest; the enchanted stork stands on one leg, plunged in a lofty sorrow of love.
The hedgehog ignores him.
Apparently the hedgehog is asleep.
But that is not so. The hedgehog is waiting to see if the stork will sob. This is giving the stork some trouble, it seems, but there’s a fair outlook that he will manage it.
What a nocturnal comedy.
I could recount much else about the relationship of the stork to the hedgehog, but I mean to be moderate. The stork’s situation vis-à-vis this scrap of deplorability seems deplorable. Why, too, does he allow himself to be moved so foolishly? Now tears are running down his ordinarily so judicious beak. Didn’t I tell him it would be like this?
Is the hedgehog pleased about it?
That remains a secret. The nature of secrets is to be not explainable. The unexplainable is interesting. What is interesting is pleasing.
Stork! How art thou fallen!
Yet, on the other hand, you did fall for the dear and actually not insignificant hedgehog. What a privilege!
Have you ever seen a stork weep? You haven’t? Well, that makes it so much the more curious.
In the stillness of night he weeps, not just buckets, but Niagaras. Grief for his adored hedgehog becomes for him a lasting need.
What’s more, there’s heroism in his yielding like this. A stork sometimes gets bored. Then off he goes and makes a hero of himself.
Dawn comes and still he stands there, in his never sufficiently commended agony. What patience.
To think that he has neglected, all this time, to bring children. Lord, the loss!
How the stork would have loved to kiss, with his beak, the spines of the hedgehog. What a kissing that would have been! We shudder at the thought of it.
[1925]
A Contribution TO THE CELEBRATION OF CONRAD FERDINAND MEYER
FLYING along streets that were swept almost to a shine, a journalist jotted into his unremittingly active global brain: Fliers are flying in the blue above my head, which has no hat on it, something I find beautiful and, at the same time, healthy. I see a raw-materials truck and am astonished at my talent to perceive the way a cavalier handles his umbrella, which once belonged to the Duchess of Capulia. An official I identify by the fact that, in the sunshine, he conceals his hands in his trousers pockets. Some people do not dare to greet you, because they think it possible you might not return their courtesy. An acquaintance of mine had expected me to display the weakness of greeting him first. I refrained from doing so, however, with an almost magnificent alacrity. He thereby sacrificed the assurance of his conduct toward me, which conveyed to me that he held me in esteem but did not want to advertise it. As for me, it is this way: when I meet a person whom I respect, I remove from my mouth, four meters before the encounter, the Stumpen, which is what we call a cigar hereabouts, I doff my cap and bow so subtly and inconspicuously that there can be no possible doubt as to my showing esteem, interpolation, every bit of it, and now I suddenly hear a gentleman say to his neighbor: “There goes one of those people who are inclined to be not normal.” A lady cyclist was carrying a string bag full of vegetables and fruits. A girl was wearing red high shoes, in impressive contrast to her white-stockinged leg. In front of a hotel restaurant, where a governess is sitting whom I am interested in, not that I have no interests in other quarters, stands a wagon loaded with a big barrel, which might contain nectar. A soft autumnal shimmer lies upon every street and housefront. Hills on which vineyards are planted and evenings by lake shores arise before my lively mind’s eye, together with little dance halls in oak forests on islands. Perhaps I shall lodge for three or four days in a country room with furniture of the rococo period. Yet I doubt if I shall go there before completing, as I must, the present assignment. “Quatre-vingt-quatre” now rings in my ears. I lot of French is spoken in our city. In front of the municipal theater, a singer is arguing with an actor. A little child smiles at me, but, with children, one need not emphasize their smallness, because all children are small, although, here and there, big ones exist, perhaps more big ones than one is inclined to suppose.