Free The Story of Silent Night by Paul Gallico Page B

he wished now to be alone with the words that Joseph Mohr had written, to give himself up to the spell that the poem in its innoccnce and simplicity had begun to weave about him. He clapped his hat hurriedly upon his head, wound his woollen muffler about his neck, said, “I’ll be back as quickly as I can,” and set off through the snow for his home in Arnsdorf.

he characters of the two friends, Mohr and Gruber, could not have been more antithetical, and at the time of the incident of the Christmas Eve crisis, the priest appears as the more robust and dramatic figure of the pair. For he was a bastard born of a musketeer, Joseph Mohr, who simultaneously deserted his mistress Anna Schoiberin, a seamstress in Salzburg, and his army, and was never seen or heard from again.
    In accordance with the customs of the times, the boy born of this union on 11 December 1792, was allowed his father’s name but his start in life was neither auspicious nor enviable.
    To begin with there were problems connected with the baptism. No one could be found willing to stand sponsor for this unfortunate by-blow, the third in the life of a poverty-stricken woman. Eventually one Franz Joseph Wohlmuth offered himself for this rite but was compelled to send a substitute to the font, for he himself was forever barred from crossing the threshhold of the church by his gruesome profession. Franz Joseph Wohlmuth was the official hangman and executioner of Salzburg.
    As is often the case with illegitimates, the child was talented, intelligent and attractive. As a boy of eight or nine, he had a stroke of luck—probably the only one of his entire life. His voice and charm brought him to the attention of Johann Hiernle, an important priest in charge of the Cathedral choir. Hiernle took him under his wing, opened his house to him, became his foster-father and undertook his education.
    Mohr developed a fine tenor voice. He was taught to play the violin and organ, and thus was rescued from what otherwise would have been an existence of abject squalor and drudgery. But there was also a price to pay. He was unable to command his own destiny, since he owed his good fortune to Father Hiernle who had him marked for the Church. For two years he attended the Seminary at Salzburg, again thanks to his foster-father, for bastards were not ordinarily admitted to this school, and on the 21 August 1815, the boy whose heart all through his student years was filled with the joy of life, gaiety and fun was ordained a priest. He was a most unlikely one. Also he had a further handicap. Never strong, he had weak lungs and lacked the stamina to handle a church on his own.
    This was the man whose trifling little verses written to cope with an emergency Franz Gruber now clutched in his fingers as he hurried homewards and like deaf Beethoven, tried to listen to the harmonies already clamouring within him.
    Gruber’s beginning had been of undistinguished placidity when contrasted with the origin of his friend. He was born on 25 November 1787, the third son of a weaver of Hochburg, close by the Bavarian-Austrian border. They were poor; their cottage tumbledown. Like Mohr, Gruber was talented musically and this leaning divided his family. His father considered it a waste of time for a boy who was to become a weaver; his mother, more sympathetic, abetted him in secret lessons given by one of those wonderful characters which every Austrian village in those days seemed to have—organist-choirmaster-schoolteacher, Andreas Peter Lichner.
    The boy progressed famously but without hope of any future other than the weaver’s chair. The elder Gruber had no use for music.
    And then, as they so often do in this story, Fate and Chance took a hand. When Franz Gruber was twelve years old, Peter Lichner fell ill and there was no one to play the organ in the church on Sunday. No one, that is, except Franzl, who sat at the console, his feet barely reaching the pedals and to the astonishment of all,