The Story of Silent Night by Paul Gallico Read Free Book Online Page B

the two innocents resting peacefully in their graves subsided. The nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and with it came honour and recognition for Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber. Plaques and reliefs blossomed on walls, memorials were erected, museums opened, new grave markers were wrought and the simple and sometimes pathetic memorabilia collected to which might cling some of the magic from two men who never professed to have any.
    It was difficult in the case of Mohr, because there was so very little of him left. No one had cherished him enough in life to care to remember his lonely death. He had so few possessions to leave and no one to inherit what there was. Not I even his name was his own.
    It was not easy to arrange a shrine for him, or assemble the few relics by which he might live again in the eyes of a visitor. But there was the modest cottage in Oberndorf which had once served as the Vicarage to St. Nikola and now adjoins the small memorial chapel raised to the memory of the men.
    For a small fee an ancient peasant Granny jingles the keys at her belt, unlocks the door and shows you the room where that ecclesiastical bird of passage lived during his brief tenure there as assistant and chief gadfly to grumpy Father Nostler.
    Her grandmother must have known Mohr personally and probably disapproved of his wild ways.
    The chamber contains the truckle bed on which he slept, a chest of drawers handpainted in gay colours in Austrian style and a table on which reposes his rosary, his Bible and prayer book, a candlestick, a crooked pipe, a jar and a tobacco pouch. And those are the remains of Mohr.
    If he were to return today he would not recognize the bronze bust of himself which, with that of Gruber, occupies a niche in St. Nikola, nor the character of the young priest painted on the iron fretwork over his grave, nor the saintly old man depicted in stained glass within the memorial chapel. For it is not even certain that the skull exhumed from the cemetery at Wagrain was his. Everything he ever was has been obliterated with the exception of some verses of a song.
    Gruber was more fortunate. He had a large family and a measure of fame. Upon his passing his wife (who survived him by ten years), and his children saw to it that things that had impinged not only upon his life, but on his work were preserved. These are now a permanent memento in the Silent Night Museum in Hallein. There you will see his pianoforte, his desk and chair, his inkwell, his pen, the kind of notepaper he used for his compositions, the manuscript of the song, the famous Halleiner version of 1854 and original of the very one he copied and sent to the Kapellmeister in Berlin. And further to bring him to life there is the guitar he played in the church at Oberndorf to accompany his friend, himself and the children.
    On the wall hangs a portrait in oil of the musician whose fingers once plucked the strings of the now mute instrument. He is clad in a bottle-green coat. His green waistcoat has tiny roses embroidered upon it and he wears a blue stock upon a white shirt. His eyes, a peculiarly light brown, gaze out of a nineteenth-century face, long nose, long sideburns, unruly hair framing a high, broad forehead, cleft chin and humorous, sardonic mouth that seems to say, “Well, and now here you are. And you’ve had to pay admission, too. Where were you all a hundred years ago?”
    During the last century and a half Oberndorf, Hallein and Wagrain have changed, but Arnsdorf has never stirred. In that little tucked-away corner of the world yesterday and tomorrow are as one. The schoolhouse adjacent to the church, except for the plaque over the door, is exactly the same as it was when Gruber taught there, even to the benches and desks in the classroom, the green porcelain stove and the scribblings on the blackboard.
    The plaque reads:
“Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht
Wer hat Dich o Lied gemacht?
‘Mohr hat mich so schön erdacht
Gruber zu Gehör