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Klein-Zünder, had gone out of existence early in 1915, Sponagel held the Frau Major’s rigidly-rectangularly offered arm. The rear guard, behind Herr and Frau Busenitz, who had a coal business in Bohnsack, consisted of Erich Lau, the disabled Schiewenhorst village mayor, and his superlatively pregnant Margarete who, as daughter of the Nickelswalde village mayor Momber, had not married below her station. Being on duty, Dike Inspector Haberland had been obliged to take his leave outside the church door. Quite likely the procession also included a bevy of children, all too blond and all too dressed up.
    Over sandy paths which only sparsely covered the straggling roots of the scrub pines, they made their way along the right bank of the river to the waiting landaus, to old man Tiede’s four-in-hand, which he had managed to hold on to in spite of the war and the shortage of horses. Shoes full of sand. Captain Bronsard laughed loud and breathless, then coughed at length. Conversation waited until after dinner. The woods along the shore had a Prussian smell. Almost motionless the river, a dead arm of the Vistula, which acquired a certain amount of current only farther down when the Mottlau flowed into it. The sun shone cautiously on holiday finery. Tiede’s daughters-in-law shivered pink pea-green violet-blue and would have been glad to have the widows’ shawls. Quite likely so much widow’s black, the gigantic Frau Major, and the disabled veteran’s monumental limp contributed to the coming of an event which had been in the making from the start: scarcely had the company left the Bohnsack Fishermen’s Church when the ordinarily undisplaceable gulls clouded up from the square. Not pigeons, for fishermen’s churches harbor gulls and not pigeons. Now in a steep slant bitterns, sea swallows, and teals rise from the rushes and duckweed. Up go the crested terns. Crows rise from the scrub pines. Starlings and black birds abandon the cemetery and the gardens of whitewashed fishermen’s houses. From lilac and hawthorn come wagtails and titmice, robins, finches, and thrushes, every bird in the song; clouds of sparrows from eaves and telegraph wires; swallows from barns and crannies in masonry; what ever called itself bird shot up, exploded, flashed like an arrow as soon as the baptismal cushion hove into sight, and was carried across the river by the sea wind, to form a black-torn cloud, in which birds that normally avoid one another mingled promiscuously, all spurred by the same dread: gulls and crows; a pair of hawks amid dappled songbirds; magpies with magpies I
    And five hundred birds, not counting sparrows, fled in mass between the sun and the christening party. And five hundred birds cast their ominous shadow upon christening party, baptismal cushion, and baptized child.
    And five hundred birds—who wants to count sparrows?—induced the christening party, from Lau, the disabled village mayor, to the Tiedes, to cluster together and first in silence, then muttering and exchanging stiff glances, to press from back to front and hurry their pace. August Sponagel stumbles over pine roots. Between Bronsard and Pastor Blech, who makes only the barest stab at raising his arms in pastoral appeasement, the gigantic Frau Major storms forward, gathering her skirts as in a rainstorm, and carries all in her wake: the Glommes and Kienast with wife, Ayke and the Kabus, Bollhagen and the Busenitzes; even the disabled Lau and his superlatively pregnant wife, who however did not suffer from shock and was delivered of a normal girl child, keep pace, panting heavily—only the godmother, bearing child and topsy-turvy cushion in her strong arms, drops back and is last to reach the waiting landaus and the Tiedes’ four-in-hand amid the first poplars on the road to Schiewenhorst.
    Did the baptizand cry? Not a whimper, but he didn’t sleep either. Did the cloud of five hundred birds and uncounted sparrows disperse immediately after the hasty and not