Das Wydenweiblein (The Wyden Woman)

When a man of Nidfurnen has his clock stand still, he simply looks after the Schwanden time and does not even need to set on the nose-mirror, so near is the neighboring place with the high factory chimneys. A cat's jump it is till there—by day; but at night-time the road can stretch into hours, especially when one is alone.

If now a late homecomer comes, who in Schwanden among merry friends has taken a merry draught and is now with himself and the rest of the world wholly content, toward the Wyden: his feet find the wonted way of themselves, his thoughts go another. Then he suddenly starts up out of the sleep-walking. Has not someone called? Quite near it must have been, there beyond the road-ditch, by the hazel-bush. Now he hears it again: it is a woman's voice, softly wailing for help. And our wanderer, who in his lifted mood cannot pass by any sorrow, slips through the lath-fence into the meadow and hastes toward the brushwood that squats dark at the meadow's edge.

"Who is there?" All stays still. Already he would go back to the highway, then he hears the call anew. This time, though, it is a sweet luring: "Come, come!", coaxing and softly compelling like the first fiddle-strokes of a Kilbi waltz. And it will also seem to him that now the tone comes from the Linth. And he must follow it, whether he will or not. Over it goes to the river, where the melt-waters strike the weirs and the tender sounds sink away in the rushing of the waves.

Hardly climbs the man back over the bank-boulders, and as he stands up on the slope and listens and his eyes, through the dark, search for the road, there presses the calling from the Glärnisch-hang, from the Blumerwald down—fine and yet so mighty that the poor night-goer, will-less and blind, storms up over walls and fences, ditches and hummocks. He runs, he stumbles—breathless he reaches the forest-edge. There—a cracking in the twigs, a fluttering-up as of a bird—and the lovely lament sits again down in the Wyden.

So lasts the restless hunt until the Vrinelisgärtli shows up in pale early light and the sun reddens the Tödi. Then at last the fooled one stands at the Nidfurnen Stutz, just when the farmers clap shut their sheds and the factory workers step out of the doors with their little mid-morning kettles. The young girls giggle and may also point at the weary, wavering shape at the roadside. But the old folk, who for near half a century go the same way to the day's work, cast a pitying and understanding look upon the unlucky one, for they well know that the Wydenweiblein had him in its ban.