BOOK III.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER IX.A POTATO WAR WITH WOMEN—AND WITH MEN—A WALK IN DECEMBER—TINDER FOR JEALOUSY—A WAR OF SUCCESSION ON THE SUBJECT OF A PIECE OF CHECKED CALICO—RUPTURE WITH STIEFEL—SAD EVENING MUSIC.I should very much like to make an incidental digression about this point; however, I feel that I don’t dare.You see there are, now-a-days, so very few readers (at all events, of the younger and more aristocratic sort) who don’t know everything—while, at the same time, they expect their pet authors (and I don’t blame them for it) to know more than themselves—which is impossible. By the help of the English machinery (now brought to such high perfection), of encyclopædias, of encyclopædic-dictionaries, of conversations-lexicons, of excerpts from conversations-lexicons, of Ersch and Gruber’s ‘Universal Dictionaries of all the Sciences,’ a young man, after devoting hisdaysto it for a month or two (he has no occasion to devote hisnights) converts himself into a perfect Senatus Academicus of all the Faculties of a University, which he represents in his own single person; besides, in a sense, also himself standing to it in the relation of the student-body at the same time.I have never, myself, met with a phenomenal youth of the sort above described, unless it were, perhaps, a fellow I once heard playing in the Baireuth band, who represented in his own person a whole Royal Academy of Music—a complete orchestra—inasmuch as he held, carried, and played upon instruments of every kind. This Panharmonist performing, to us partial harmonists only (as we were), blew a French horn, which he held under his right arm, and this right arm bowed a fiddle placed under his left; and that left arm beat, at the proper moments, a drum which was fastened on his back; his cap was hung round with bells, out of which he shook an accompaniment “alla Turca,” by moving his head, and he had a cymbal strapped upon each of his knees, which he banged vigorously together; so that the man was all music, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot So that, one is tempted to make this simile-man an occasion and ground-work of further similes, and liken him to a prince who represents in his own person all the instruments of his State, and all its members and representatives. Now, in the presence of readers who are all-knowers, just as this man was an all-player, how is a humble individual such as I, who am but a mere Heidelberg master of seven arts, at the outside, and doctor of a small trifle of philosophy, or so, to venture to take upon himself to attempt such a thing as a bit of a digression with any approach to the clever or the felicitous about it? No; the safe course, in the circumstances, for me is to go quietly on with my story.We find the advocate, Siebenkæs, once more, then, in full blossom of hope; although that blossom is all sterile, and not of the sort which bears fruit. After his royal shot, he had reckoned upon, at any rate, as many happy days as the money would last for—upon fourteen at least; but mourning-black, now the traveller’s uniform, ought to have been the colour of his upon his earthly night-journey—thatvoyage pittoresquefor poets. Though marmots and squirrels know how to plug up that particular hole in their dwellings which chances to be on the side from which the approaching storm is coming, men do not; Firmian thought if the hole in hispursewas mended no more was necessary. Alas! a better thing than money now departed from him—Love. His good Lenette receded to a greater distance from his heart, as he did from hers, day by day.Her having concealed from him the fact that Rosa had given back the wreath, formed in his heart (as foreign matter lodged in any vessel of the body always does) the nucleus of a gradual deposit of stone about it. But that was only a small matter.For she brushed and scraped of a morning, and every morning, and that whether (as the saying goes) he “liked it or lumped it.”She would persist, and insist, on communicating all her prorogations of parliament and other decrees to the servant girl, in several duplicates and revised copies, let him protest as much as he chose.She asked him every thing she had to ask him (no matter what) two or three separate times over; and that whether he shouted beforehand like a quack doctor at a fair, or swore afterwards like one of his customers.She continued to say, “It has struck four quarters to four o’clock.”When he had proved, with immense care and trouble, that Augspurg was not in the Island of Cyprus, she would return him the quiet incontrovertible answer, “Well, it’s not in Roumania either, nor in Bulgaria, nor in the Principality of Jauer, nor in Vauduz, nor in the neighbourhood of Hüshen—two very little, insignificant places, both of them.” He could never bring her to give an unqualified assent, when he made the unconditional and positive assertion (in a loud voice), “It’s in Swabia—or the devil’s in it.” She would go no further than to admit that it was situated, in a certain sense, and to some extent, between Franconia, Bavaria, and Switzerland, &c.; it was only to the bookbinder’s wife that she wouldacknowledgethat it was in Swabia.Burdens, nay, overloads, of this sort, however, can be borne more or less easily and bravely by a soul fortified by the example of great sufferers—such as a Lycurgus, who let himself be deprived of an eye, and an Epictetus, who allowed his master to hack off his leg; and all these little failings of Lenette’s have been touched upon in a previous chapter. But I have to tell of new shortcomings besides; and as regards these, I leave it to unbiassed married men to determine whether they are among the matters which husbands can, and should, put up with.Firstly: Lenette washed her hands forty times in the course of the day, at the very least; no matter what she touched, she must needs put herself through this process of Holy Re-baptism; like a Jew, she was rendered unclean by the propinquity ofeverything. She would far more probably have followed the example of Rabbi Akiba, than have been in the least astonished at his proceedings—who, when he was a captive in prison, and in the direst distress for water, instead of quenching his thirst with the very small quantity of it he could get, preferred to use it for his ablutions.“Of course it is right and proper that she should be scrupulous about cleanliness,” said Siebenkæs, “and more so than I am; but there are limits to all things. Why doesn’t she rub herself with a towel when anybody breathes upon her? Why not purify her lips with soap after a fly has deposited itself (and notonlyitself) upon them? I’m sure she turns our sitting-room into a regular English man-of-war, scoured and holystoned from stem to stern every morning; and I look on as pleased as any officer on her quarter-deck.”If a heavy Irish rain-cloud, or a waterspout with its attendant thunders and lightnings, came over his and her days, she always managed to put her husband right under water (like a Dutch fortress), with all his courageous energy, and gave free course to all her tears. But when the sun of happiness cast a feeble ray no broader than a window into the room, Lenette would always have a hundred things, other than this pleasant one, to attend to and to look at. Firmian had particularly made up his mind that he would most thoroughly winnow the husks from the corn of these few days during which he had a few shillings of ready money in his pocket; that he would skim off the cream of them, and completely hide, with a thick veil, the second Janus face, let it be smiling or weeping over the past or the future, as the case might be; but Lenette would insist upon rending this veil, and pointing to the hidden face. “My dear soul!” her husband more than once implored her, “do but wait till we’re as poor as church mice, and leading the life of a dog, again; then I’ll groan and moan with you with the greatest pleasure.” And she only once made him any pertinent answer, namely, “How long will it be before we’re without a farthing in the house?” But to this he was able to return a still more apposite reply: “If that is your way of looking at the matter, you will never be able to enjoy a single quiet, bright, happy day, unless one can give you his solemn oath that there will never come another dark, cloudy, wretched one again; in which case, of course, you canneverenjoy one. What king or emperor—ay! and though he had thrones upon the head of him and crowns under his tail—can ever be sure but that any post-delivery, or any sitting of his parliament, may bring him a cloudy time of it; yet he passes his happy day in hisSans Souci, or hisBellevue(or whatever he may call it), and enjoys his life.” (She shook her head). “I can prove it to you in print, and from the Greek.” And, opening the New Testament, he read out the following passage (inserted by himself on the spur of the moment): “If, in a time of good fortune and happiness, thou delayest the joy of thine heart until a moment shall come in which nothing shall lie before thee save hopes in unbroken sequence for whole years to come, then there can be no true happiness on the face of this changing world. For after ten days, or years, some sorrow shall surely come; and thus thou canst delight in no May-day, though it shower blossoms and nightingales upon thee, since, beyond all doubt, the winter will come thereafter, with its nights and its snowflakes. Yet thou enjoyest thine ardent youth, not thinking with dread upon the ice-pit of age, which is ready in the background, with a gradually-increasing coldness to preserve thee for a certain season. Look, then, upon the glad To-day as a long youth; and let the sad Day-after-to-morrow appear unto thee but as a brief old age.”“The Latin or the Greek always has a more religious sound, I know,” she answered, “and we often hear the thing in the pulpit, too; and whenever I do hear it preached I always go home and feel much comforted and consoled, till the money’s all gone again.”He had greater difficulty still to get her to jump for joy quite to his liking at the dinner-table at mid-day. If, instead of their every-day fare, some extraordinary fleshpot of Egypt should chance to be smoking on the table—some dish such as the Counts of Wratislaw might have served, and the Counts of Waldstein have carved, without a blush—then Siebenkæs might be sure that his wife would have at least one hundred things more than usual to finish and to put away before she could come to dinner. There sits her husband, eager to begin; he looks round for her, quietly at first, angrily after a while, but keeps command of himself for two or three entire minutes, during which he has time to remember all his troubles as well as think about the roast—then, however, he discharges the first thunder-clap of his storm, and shouts, “Thunder and lightning! here have I been sitting for a whole Eternity, and everything getting as cold as charity. Wife! Wife!!”In Lenette, as in other women, the cause of this was not ill-temper, neither was it stupidity, nor stubborn indifference to the matter or to her husband; she really could not do otherwise, however, and that’s quite sufficient explanation.At the same time, my friend Siebenkæs—who will have this story in his hands even before the printer’s devils get hold of it—musn’t take it ill of me that I divulge to the world in general certain small breakfast-failings of his own—which he has communicated to me with his own lips. As he lay in his trellis-bed in the morning, before getting up, with his eyes closed, there would suddenly flash upon him ideas for his book, and forms in which to express them, such as never occurred to him while he was sitting or standing during the day; and, indeed, I have in the course of my reading found that there have been many men of learning—such, for instance, as Descartes, Abbé Galiani, Basedow—I, myself, too, whom of course I don’t count, who belonged to the Coleopterous family of backswimmers (Notonectæ), and got on quickest in the recumbent position, and in whose cases bed has been the brewing-kettle of their most brilliant and original ideas. I, myself, could point to many such which I have written down immediately after getting out of bed in the morning. Any one who sets himself to work to explain this phenomenon should adduce in the first place the matutinal power of the brain, and the fact of its lending itself with a more nimble, as well as vigorous obedience to the impulses of the spirit after its internal and external holiday of rest; next, the freedom and facility both of thinking and of brain mobility, which the manifold impulsions of the day has not yet begun to weary and impair; and, lastly, the vigour which is a peculiar property of all firstborn things—a vigour which our earliest morning thoughts possess in common with the first impressions of youth.Now, after the above explanations, it will doubtless seem clear that, when the advocate lay in this fashion, sprouting and sending out long shoots in the warm forcing-house of the pillow, and bearing the most precious flowers and fruit, nothing could strike upon his ear in a harsher and more distracting manner than the voice of Lenette calling from the next room, “Come to breakfast, the coffee’s ready.” He generally gave birth to one or two more happy turns of expression after hedidhear it, pricking his ears all the while, however, in dread of a second order to march. But as Lenette knew that he always allowed himself a considerable number of minutes of grace after the summons, she always cried, “Get up, the coffee’s cold,” when it was only just coming to the boil. The notonectic satirist, for his part, had observed the law which governed this precession of the equinoxes, and lay quietly among the feathers breeding his ideas happy and undisturbed when it was only once that she had summoned him, merely answering, “This very moment!” and availing himself of the double usance prescribed by law.This obliged his wife, for her part, to go farther back, and when the coffee was made and standing by the fire, to cry, “Come, dear, it’s getting quite cold.” Now, on this system, of getting earlier on one side and later on the other, matters became more critical every day, with nowhere a prospect of extrication from the difficulty; in fact, what was naturally to be expected was the arrival of a state of things in which Lenette would end by calling him to get up a whole day too soon; although, in the end, this would eventuate in a mere restoration of the original condition of affairs, just as our suppers at the present day threaten to become too-early breakfasts, and our breakfasts unfashionably early dinners. Had Siebenkæs been able to bear the process of grinding the coffee, he might have moored himself to that as to an anchor of hope, and it would then have been a simple matter to calculate the time the coffee would take to get ready; but this he could not, for, in the absence of a coffee-mill, the coffee was bought ready ground (by everybody in the house, for that matter). If Lenette could have been induced to call him just one exact minute before the coffee was boiling and smoking,shewould have done instead of the coffee-mill—however, she couldnotbe induced.What are trifling differences of opinion before marriage assume large dimensions thereafter—as north winds are warm in summer and cold in winter; the zephyr, when it is breathed forth by conjugal lungs, is like Homer’s zephyr, concerning the biting keenness of which the poet sings so much. For this period onward, Firmian set himself to look with much care and minuteness for every crack, feather, flaw, or cloudiness, which might be discoverable in that diamond—Lenette’s heart. Poor fellow! this being the case with thee, soon, soon must the crumbling altar of thy love go toppling down one stone after another, and the sacrificial fire flutter and go out.He now discovered that she was not nearly as learned a woman as Mdlles. Burmann and Reiske. It is true no book wearied her, but neither did any interest her, and she could read her one book of Sermons as often as scholars can go through Homer and Kant. Her secular or “profane” authors were only two; in fact, one married pair of authors—the immortal authoress of her own cookery receipts, and that, lady’s husband—but the latter she never read. She paid his essays the tribute of her profoundest admiration, but she never glanced into them. Three sensible words with the bookbinder’s wife were of more value in her eyes than all the bookbinder’s and bookmaker’s printed ones put together. To a literary man who is making new arguments, and new ink, all the year long, it is incomprehensible how those persons who have neither a book, nor a pen, nor a drop of ink in the house (except the pale rusty liquid borrowed from the village schoolmaster) can exist at all. Firmian sometimes appointed himself a species of special Professor-extraordinary, and mounted the professional chair with the view of initiating Lenette into one or two of the elementary principles of Astronomy; but either she had no pineal gland (that manor-house of the soul and its ideas), or else the chambers of her brain were saturated, satiated, and crammed to the roof with lace, bonnets, shirts, and saucepans; at all events, it was beyond his power to get a single star into her head bigger than a reel of cotton. With Pneumatology (Psychology), again, his difficulty was exactly of theconversesort. In this branch of science, where the calculus of the infinitesimally small would have come to his aid with an equal amount of serviceableness as that of the infinitely great in astronomy, Lenette expanded and stretched out the dimensions of the angels, souls, and so forth, passing the minutest and most ethereal of spiritual beings through the stretching mill of her imagination, so that angels—of whom the scholiasts would have invited whole companies to a carpet-dance on the tip of a new needle (or have threaded them with it by couples on one and the same point of space)—expanded on her hands to such an extent that each angel would have filled a cradle by itself; and as for the Devil, he swelled out upon her till he got to be pretty much about the size of her husband.Further, Siebenkæs discovered an iron-mould stain, a pock-mark or wart, on her heart; he could never warm her into a true lyric enthusiasm of Love, in which she should forget heaven and earth, and all things. She could count the strokes of the town clock amid his kisses; though some affecting story or discourse of his might bring the big tears to her eyes, she could still hear the soup-pot boiling over, and run away to it, tears and all. She would join devoutly in the hymns which came resounding from the other lodgers’ rooms of a Sunday, but in the middle of a verse ask the prosaic question, “What shall I warm for supper?” and he never could forget that, once, when she was listening, apparently much interested and quite touched, to one of his chamber-sermons on death and immortality, she looked at him, thoughtfully it is true, but with a glance directed downward, and said, “Don’t put on that left stocking to-morrow morning till I’ve darned it for you.”The author of this tale declares that he has sometimes been driven nearly out of his mind by feminineentr’actesof this sort, against the occurrence of which there is no warranty for the man who soars up into the æther in company with these beautiful birds of paradise, and there hovers up and down with them, in the fond hope of hatching the eggs of his phantasies upon their backs up among the clouds.[52]All in an instant, down drops the winged mate, as if by magic, with a green gleam, on to a clod of earth. I admit that this is but an excellence the more; it makes them resemble the hens, whose eyes the Great Optician of the Universe has made so perfect that they can see the most distant sparrow-hawk in the sky as well as the nearest grain of malt on the dunghill. It is to be hoped, indeed, that the author of this story, should he ever chance to marry, may meet with a wife to whom he may be able to give readings concerning the more essential principles and dictata of psychology and astronomy without her bringing in the subject of his stockings in the middle of his loftiest and fullest flights of enthusiasm; but yet he will be well content should one possessed of moderate excellencies fall to his lot—one who shall be capable of accompanying him, side by side with him, in his flights, so far as they may extend—whose eyes and heart may be wide enough to take in the blooming earth and the shining heavens in great, grand masses at a time, and not in mere infinitesimal particles; for whom this universe shall be something higher than a nursery and a ball-room; and who, with feelings delicate and tender, and a heart both pious and wide, should be continually making her husband better and holier. The author’s fondest wishes go not beyond this.Thus, then, while the flowers, if not the leaves, were falling fast from Firmian’s love, Lenette’s was like a rose somewhat overblown, whose beauty a touch will scatter to the earth. Her husband’s endless arguments wearied her heart at length. Moreover, she was one of those women whose loveliest blossoms remain sterile and dead, unless children troop around to enjoy them, as the flowers of the vine do not produce grapes unless frequented by bees. She belonged to this class of women also in this respect, that she was born to be the spiral mainspring of a housekeeping engine—the stage-manageress of a great household theatre. Alas! the market-value of the shares, and the state of the treasury of the said theatre are well-known to everybody—from Hamburg to Ofen.Moreover, our couple, like phœnixes and giants, were childless: the two columns stood apart and unconnected, no fruit garlands twining about them to bind them one to another. Firmian had, in imagination, thoroughly rehearsed the character ofpère de famille, and dispatcher of invitations to be godfather, but it never came to a performance.What was most of all effective in breaking him away from Lenette’s heart, however, was his dissimilarity to Peltzstiefel. The Schulrath had in him as much of the wearisome, the deliberately circumspect, the grave and reserved, the stiff and starched, the pompous and inflated, the heavy and the dull, as——these three lines have; but this delighted the very soul of our born housekeeper. Siebenkæs, again, was like a jerboa from morning till night. She often said to him, “I’m sure people must think you’re not quite right in the head;” to which he would answer, “And am I?” He concealed the beauty of his character behind a comedy mask, and the trodden-down heels of the buskins he always wore made his stature seem shorter than it really was. The brief drama of his own life he turned into a mere burlesque and parodied epic, and it was from higher motives than mere vain folly that he so gave himself over to grotesque performances. In the first place he delighted with a deep delight in the sense of freedom of soul, and entire absence of all conventional trammels; secondly, he found pleasure in the thought that he travestied—not imitated—the follies of his fellow-men. In acting his part he had a double enjoyment—that of comedian as well as that of the spectator. A person who puts humour into action is a satiricalimprovisatore. Every male reader understands this though no female reader does. I have often wished that I could place in the hands of a woman, looking at the white sun-ray of wisdom broken into a tinted spectrum by the prism of humour, some powerful lens which shouldburnthat spectrum back into its pristine whiteness,—but it is not to be done. The fine, delicate, womanly sense of the fit, the proper, the becoming, seems to be torn and scratched by the touch of anything angular and unpolished; these souls, so firmly welded on to the every-day, commonplace, conventional relations of things, cannot understand souls which place themselves in antagonism to these relations. And therefore it is that humorists are so rare in the hereditary kingdoms of women, courts—and in their realm of shadows, France.Lenette could not be otherwise than much, and continually, vexed and annoyed with this whistling, singing, dancing husband of hers—a man who didn’t behave to his very clients with anything like proper professional gravity; who, sad to say—and people assured her it was a fact—often walked in circles round the gallows on the hill,—concerning whose sanity sensible people spoke very doubtfully—as to whom she complained, that you would never think, to see him, that he lived in a royal burgh, the capital of the province—and who was respectful and reserved only before one person in the world, namely, himself. Why, when maidservants, from the very best houses in the place, came in—with linen to be made up, and so on—didn’t they very often see him jump up and, without a “With your leave,” or “By your leave,” to anybody, run to his old, battered, rattling piano (it still had all its keys, and nearly as many strings), and there he would stand with a wooden yard-measure in his mouth, up which, as over a drawbridge, the notes climbed to him from the soundboard, then through the portcullis of his teeth, finally arriving at his soul by way of the Eustachian tube and the drum of the ear. He held this stork’s-beak of a yard-measure between his teeth as described in order to magnify the inaudible pianissimo of his piano into a fortissimo at its upper end. However, humour looks paler when reflected in narrative than in the vividness of reality.That portion of earth’s surface on which these two stood was riven into two distinct islets by these continual tremblings of the soil, and these islets kept drifting steadily further and further apart. And ere long there came a serious shock of earthquake.For the Heimlicher came on the stage again, with his plea of demurrer to Siebenkæs’s suit, in which all he demanded was justice and equity—in other words, the money which was in question, unless Siebenkæs could prove himself to be himself, that is to say, the ward, whose patrimony the Heimlicher had hitherto kept in his paternal hands and purse. This juridical Hell-river took Firmian’s breath away and struck ice-cold to his heart, though he had jumped over the three previous petitions for postponement as easily as the crowned lion over the three rivers in the Gotha coat-of-arms. The wounds which we receive from Fate soon heal, but those inflicted by the blunt and rusty torture-implement of an unjust man suppurate and take long to close. This cut, made into nerves already laid bare by so many a rude clutch and sharp tongue, caused our dear friend some severe pain; yet he had seen that the cut was coming long before it came, and had cried to his spirit, “Look out—mind your head!” Alas! there is somethingnewineverypain. He had even taken legal steps in anticipation of it. A few weeks before he had had evidence sent from Leipsic, where he had studied, to prove that he had formerly been known by the name of Leibgeber, and was, consequently, Blaise’s ward. A young notary there, of the name of Giegold, an old college friend and literary brother in arms, had done him the service of seeing all the people who had known of his Leibgeberhood—particularly a rusty, musty old tutor, who had often been present when the guardian’s register-ships came in—and a postman, who had piloted them into port, and his landlord and other well-informed persons, who all took the Jus credulitalis (or oath of conviction), and whose evidence the young lawyer forwarded to Siebenkæs (like a mountain full of precious ore); he had no great difficulty, to speak of, in paying the postage of it, as he was king of the marksmen.With this stout club of evidence he resisted and withstood his guardian and robber.When Blaise’s denial was lodged, the timid Lenette gave herself and the suit up for lost; poverty, lean and bare, seemed inhereyes now to enmesh them in a network of parasite ivy, and there was no other prospect for them but to perish and fall to the ground. Her first proceeding was to burst into loud abuse of Von Meyern; for as he had himself told her that his father-in-law’s three applications for delay had been the result ofhisintercession, which he had made for her sake alone, she looked upon Blaise’s plea of demurrer as being the first thorn-sucker sent forth by Rosa’s revengeful soul in return for the imprisonment and the sacking he had undergone in Firmian’s house (and half ascribed to her), and for what he had lost.Up to the day of the shooting-match he had supposed that the husband was his enemy, but not the wife; then, however, his pleasant conceit had been embittered and proved to be groundless. But the Venner not being present to hear her reproaches, she was obliged to turn the full stream of her anger on to her husband, to whom she attributed all the blame, because of his having so wickedly and sinfully changed names with Leibgeber. He who has married a wife will be prepared to relieve me of the trouble of mentioning that it made not the slightest difference what Siebenkæs said in reply or adduced concerning Blaise’s wickedness (who, being the greatest Judas Iscariot and corn-Jew the world contained, would have robbed him just the same if his name had been Leibgeber still, and would have found out a thousand legal byepaths by which to proceed to the plundering of his ward). It had no effect. At last the following words were forced out of him: “You are quite as unjust as I should be were I to attribute this document of Blaise’s to your behaviour to the Venner.” Nothing irritates women so much as derogatory comparisons; they apply them indiscriminately, without distinction. Lenette’s ears lengthened to tongues, like those of Rumour; her husband was immediately out-bawled and unlistened to.He was obliged to send privately to Peltzstiefel to ask where he had been so long, and why he had utterly forgotten their house; Stiefel was not even in his own house, however, but out walking, for it was a beautiful day.“Lenette,” said Siebenkæs suddenly—he often preferred vaulting over a marsh on the leaping-pole of an idea to wading painfully across it on the long stilts of syllogism, and was anxious to banish from her memory the innocent remark which he had let slip about Rosa, and which she had so utterly misunderstood—“Lenette, I’ll tell you what we’ll do this afternoon; we’ll take a strong cup of coffee, and go and take a walk and enjoy ourselves: it is not a Sunday, but itisthe day which all the Catholics in the town keep holiday on as the feast of the Annunciation, and the weather is reallytoomagnificent. We’ll go and sit in the big upstairs room at the Rifle Club-house, as it would be a little too warm outside perhaps, and we can look down from the windows and see all the heterodox people promenading in their best clothes—and our Lutheran Stiefel among them, who knows?”Either I am more in error than I often am, or this was a most agreeable surprise to Lenette. Coffee, in the morning the water-of-baptism and altar-wine of the fair sex, is their love-philter and their waters-of-strife in the afternoon (thelatter, however, only as regards the absent); but what a wondrous mill-stream for the setting in motion of the machinery of the ideas must an afternoon cup of coffee on a common working-day be for a woman such as Lenette, who rarely had any on other than Sunday afternoons; for before the days of the blockade of the continent it cost too much money.A woman who is really very much delighted needs but a very short time to put on her black silk bonnet and take her big church-fan, and (contrary to all her ordinary manners and customs) bequiteready and dressed for a walk to the Rifle Club-house, even going the length of making the coffee during the process of dressing, so as to be able to take it, and the milk, with her in her hand.Our couple set forth at two o’clock in the happiest possible frame of mind, carrying with them warm in their pockets what was to be warmed up later on in the afternoon.Even at two o’clock, early as it was, the western and southern hills lay all beflooded with the warm evening glow with which the low December sun was bathing them, while great glaciers of cloud, ranged about the sky, cast their cheerful lights over the landscape. All about this world there beamed a beautiful brightness, which cheered and lighted up many a dark and narrow life.Siebenkæs pointed out the eagle’s perch to Lenette while they were still at some distance from it—the alpenstock or boat-pole which had so recently helped him out of his most imminent difficulties. When they reached the Clubhouse he took her and showed her the shooter’s-stand where he had shot himself with his rifle up to the dignity of bird emperor, and out of the Frankfort-Jew’s-quarter of duns, liberating at his coronation at leastonedebtor, namely, himself. They had room and to spare to “spread themselves out” (so to speak) upstairs in the members’ hall—he at a writing-table by the right-hand window, and she with her work at another on the left.How the coffee gave warmth to this December festival may be imagined, but not described.Lenette put on one stocking of her husband’s after another—put them on her left arm, that is, while her right wielded the darning-needle; and as she sat, with a stocking generally quite open at the bottom, she was, as regarded one of her arms at all events, like a lady with the long, fashionable Danish mittens, with holes for the fingers. However, she did not raise these arm-stockings of hers high enough to be seen by the people walking in the upper walks, but kept nodding down her “your very humble and obedient servant” from the open window to numbers of the most genteel she-heretics as they passed, wearing her own works of art upon their heads, in honour of the Annunciation-feast; and more than one sent an obliging salute up to her roof-thatcher.The strictest religious and political parity being established by law in Kuhschnappel, it was natural that Protestants of position should also go a-walking on this Catholic holiday. However, the advocate was perhaps enjoying himself quite as much as his wife; he went on writing his ‘Devil’s Papers,’ and at the same time feasting his gaze upon the high places, thesommitésof the landscape, if not of Kuhschnappel society.When he first entered the room he had a most agreeable reception from a child’s trumpet, left there by accident; the paint was not quite all licked away from it, and it was the smell of this paint, more even than the squeak of the trumpet, which pleased him so very much, by recalling the vague delights of Christmases of the past: so that pleasure was heaped upon pleasure. He could rise from his satires and point out to Lenette the great rooks’ nests in the leafless trees, and the bare tables and benches in the arbours, and the invisible guests who had occupied seats of the blessed there on summer evenings, and still remembered the time, looking forward to a repetition of it; and he could draw her attention to the fields, where, late as it was in the year, volunteer gardeneresses were gathering salad for him, namely, corn salad or rampion, which he might have some of for supper if he had a mind.And now he sat at his window, with his eyes fixed upon the hills, all flushed with the evening red, the sun growing larger as it sunk towards them. Beyond these hills lay the lands where wandered his Leibgeber, sporting away his life.“How delightful it is, wife,” he said, “that what parts me from Leibgeber is not a mere wide level plain, with nothing but a hillock or two cropping up here and there on it, but a grand, lofty wall of mountains, behind which he stands as if behind the grating of a monastery.” This sounded to her almost as if her husband was glad that this barrier stood between them; she herself had but little liking for Leibgeber, and considered him to be a sort of coin-clipper to her husband, who cut all his angles sharper than they were by nature; however, in dubious cases like this, she was always glad to ask no questions. What hehadmeant was exactly the reverse of what she supposed; he had meant that it is good, if parted from those we love, that it should be by holy hills, because they are, as it were, lofty garden-walls, behind which we picture the flowery thickets of our Edens; whereas, on the other verge of the broadest barnfloor of a level plain we only picture to ourselves a repetition of it sloping the other way. And this applies to nations as well as to individuals. The Luneburg moors or the Marklands of Prussia will not draw even an Italian’s longing gaze towards Italy; but when a Markman in Italy sees the Apennines, his heart yearns to his German loved ones behind them.As Firmian looked upon that sunny mountain-barrier between two severed spirits, there was that in his eyes which much resembled tears; but he only turned his chair a little away, that Lenette might ask no questions; he was well aware of his old ingrained habit of getting angry when anybody asked what brought tears to his eyes, and he strove with it. Was he not, in fact, tenderness personified to-day, only acting his comedy in the palest middle-tints before his wife, because he was delighting in the fresh-growth of this enjoyment of hers, of which he was himself the origin. It is true she did not discover the existence of this, his feeling of delicate consideration for her; but just as he was quite content when no one but himself (least of all,she) perceived that he was poking fun at her (in the most delicate manner), so was he content that she should be in utter ignorance that he was causing her a little happiness.At last they left the spacious room, the sun now robing them in purple hues; and as they went he drew Lenette’s attention to the liquid, golden splendour shining upon the roofs of the greenhouses, and he hung himself on to the sun—at that moment cut in two by the mountain-range—that he might sink, with it, to his far-away friend. Ah! how strong is love in distance—be it distance of space, or of time, of the future or the past—ay, or that greater distance still—beyond this world! And so the evening might very well have ended in an altogether delightful manner, had not something intervened.For some particularly ingenious evil spirit or other had taken the Heimlicher von Blaise, and so set him down, promenading in the open air, that the advocate must needs come within shooting range and hailing distance of him just on a feast of the Annunciation forgoodfolks only. When the guardian went through the proper forms of salutation—accompanying them with a smile such as, fortunately, can never be seen on a child’s face—Siebenkæs returned his salutes politely, although with a mere clutching and jerking at his hat—which he didn’t take off. Lenette tried to make amends for this, by doubling the profundity of her own bow and curtsey; but as soon as practicable she administered to her husband a garden lecture, or, rather, a gardenpalinglecture, on his always, as if on purpose, irritating his guardian whenever he had an opportunity. “Indeed, love,” he said, “I couldn’t help it. I really meant nothing of the kind to-day, of all days in the year.”The truth of the matter, indeed, is, that Siebenkæs had sometime before complained to his wife that his hat, which was of softish felt, was getting a good deal spoiled by having to be so often taken off to people in the streets, and that he could think of nothing better than to protect it with a coat of mail in the shape of a stiff cover of green oilskin, so that when packed up in this pudding roll he might go on daily employing it in those offices of out-door politeness which men owe one to another, without ever having to take hold of the hatitselfat all. Well, the first walk he took after assuming this double hat, or hat’s hat, was to a grocer’s, where he disembowelled the inner one from its envelope and swopped it away for six pounds of coffee, which warmed the four chambers of his brain better than the hare-skin had ever done; he then went tranquilly home, with only the coadjutor hat on his head, undetected, and thenceforward bore the empty case through the streets with a secret joy that, in a sense, he now really took off hishatto nobody—with other entertaining fancies bearing on the subject of his sugar-loaf.Of course, when he forgot—and on that day in particular, it was perhaps excusable that he did so—to support his hat-case with the necessary framework of artificial rafters, it was really almost an impossibility to take this mere shell of a hatrightOFF for purposes of salutation. The most he could do was just totouchit courteously, like an officer returning a salute; and thus, against his will, play the part of a rude and ill-bred individual.And it so happened that just on this very day get it off he could not.It was so ordained, however, that matters should not even resthere(as regarded our couple’s promenade), but one of the above-mentioned ingenious evil spirits changed the scene of the drama with such nimbleness, that we have a fresh combination before our eyes before we know where we are. Just in front of our wedded pair, a master tailor of the Catholic confession was taking his walk, most sprucely attired in honour of the Feast of the Annunciation, like all the rest of hispro- and CON-fession. As ill luck would have it, this tailor, being in a narrow walk, had (whether for fear of mud, or in the delight of his soul over his holiday) so elevated his coat-tails that the vertebral extremity, theos coccygis, or (shall we call it) insertion of the spinal cord, of his waistcoat, was clearly exhibited; in other words, thebackgroundof his waistcoat, which, as we know, is generally executed in colours more subdued than those used for the brighter and more prominent foreground on the chest of the wearer. “Hy! Mr.!” cried Lenette; “what are you doing with a lot of my chintz on the back of you?”The truth was that this tailor had put aside and taken possession of so much of a nice green Augspurg chintz (sent to him by Lenette, on her becoming a queen, to make her a new body) as he considered proper and Christianly honest, calculating on the principle of “no charge for wine samples,” and this trifle of a sample had just barely sufficed to form a sober background to his pea-green waistcoat; and he had contented himself with so dim a reverse side for this waistcoat in the confident expectation that it would never be seen. However, as the tailor went on with his walk (after Lenette had shouted her query at him), as utterly unmoved as if it had nothing on earth to do withhim, the little spark of her anger became a blazing flame, and, regardless of all her husband’s winks and whispers, she cried aloud, “Why, it’s my very own chintz, that I got all the way from Augspurg; do you hear, Mr. Mowser, you’ve stolen my chintz, you blackguard, you!” Then, and not till then, the guilty chintz-robber turned round with muchsangfroid, and said, “Provethat, if you please! But, mind,I’llCHINTZ YOU, if there be such a thing as law in all Kuhschnappel.”At this she burst into a conflagration. Her husband’s prayers and entreaties were but as wind to her. “Ey! you riff-raff,” she snapped out. “But I’ll have what’s my own—you villain!” she cried. The only reply the tailor vouchsafed to this attack was this—he simply lifted his coat-tails with both hands high above the endorsed waistcoat, and, bending a little forward, said, “There!” after which he strode slowly on, keeping at the same focal distance from her, so as to bask in her warmth as long as possible.Siebenkæs was the most to be pitied on this rich feast day, when, in spite of all his juristic and theological exorcisms, he could not cast out this devil of discord—when by good luck his guardian angel suddenly emerged from a side path, Peltzstiefel to wit, taking his walk. Gone, so far as Lenette was concerned, were the tailor, the quarter-ell of chintz, the apple of discord, and the devil thereof; the blue of her eyes and the blush on her cheek fronted Stiefel as bright and as fresh as the blue of the evening sky and the blush on its sunset clouds. Ten ells of chintz and half that number of tailors with waistcoat-backs of it into the bargain, were to her, at that moment, feathers light as air, not worth a word or a farthing; so that Siebenkæs saw on the instant that Stiefel’s coming was as that of a regular Mount of Olives all full of mere olive-branches of peace; although for discord devils hailing from another quarter there might without difficulty be pressed from the olives on said mountain an oil which could not be poured on any fire of matrimonial difference whichStiefel’swould be the bucket to put out. If Lenette was a tender, delicate, white butterfly, silently hovering and fluttering about Peltzstiefel’s flowery path,out of doors—when she got him into her house she was an absolute Greek Psyche; and, in spite of all my partiality for her, I am bound, under pain of having all the rest discredited, to insert in this protocol a clear statement (much as I regret to do so) to the effect that on this particular evening she gave one the idea of being nothing but some clear-winged translucent soul free from all trammels of body—which, at some former time, while as yet in the body, had stood in some love-relationship to the Schulrath, but now hovered about him with upraised pinions, and fanned him with fluttering downy plumes, and which at length weary of hovering, and pleased to rest once more on the loved perch of a body, settled upon Lenette’s, there being no other feminine one at hand, and there folded its wings to rest. Such seemed Lenette. But why was she thus to-day? Stiefel’s ignorance and delight at it were great; Firmian’s very small. Before I explain it, I will say, “I pity thee, poor husband, and thee, too, poor wife. For why must the smooth flow of the stream of your life (and of our own) be always broken by sorrows or by sins, and why cannot it fall into its grave in theBlackSea, without having to pass over thirteen cataracts, like the river Dnieper?” However, the reason why Lenette on this day in particular exhibited all her heart toward Stiefel, almost bared of the cloister grating of the breast, was that she was, just on this day, so keenly suffering under her misery—her poverty. Stiefel was full of genuine, solid treasures; Firmian’s were all lacquered. I know that her Siebenkæs, whom before marriage she had loved with the calm and cool regard of a wife, would have found that she would have come to love him after marriage with the warm affection of afiancée, if he had only been able to give her the bare necessaries of life. There are hundreds of girls who bring themselves to believe that they love the man to whom they are engaged, whereas it is not till after marriage that the play becomes a reality—and that for good reasons, both metallic and physiological. In a well-filled room and kitchen, filled with a comfortable income, and twelve household labours of Hercules, Lenette would have been quite true to the advocate, though an entire philosophical society of Stiefels had sat down all round her, and would have said and thought, every hour of the day, “No more, thank you—I am helped;” but as things were, in a house and kitchen so empty as hers, the chambers of a woman’s heart grow full; in one word, no good comes of it. For a woman’s soul is by nature a beautifulfrescopainted on rooms, table-leaves, dresses, silver salvers, and household plenishing in general. A woman has a large stock of virtue, but few virtues; she needs a confined sphere and social forms, and without these flower-sticks the pure white flowers trail in the dust of the border. A man may be a citizen of the world, and if he has nothing else to put his arms round he can press the entire earthly ball to his bosom, although he can’t put his arms round much more of it than will make him a grave. But a citizenessof the world is a giantess, and goes through the world with nothing but spectators, and is nothing but a character on the stage.I ought to have described the whole of this evening much more circumstantially than I have done, for it was upon this evening that the wheels of thevis-à-visphæton of wedded life began to smoke, as a consequence of the friction they had recently been subjected to, and threatened to break out into a blaze of the fire of jealousy. Jealousy is like Maria Theresa’s small-pox, which allowed that princess to pass with impunity through thirty hospitals, full of small-pox patients, but attacked her beneath the Crowns of Hungary and Germany. Siebenkæs had had on that of Kuhschnappel (the Bird-one) for a week or two now.After this evening Stiefel, who took an increasing delight in sitting basking in the rays of the still rising Sun of Lenette, came oftener and oftener, and considered himself the peace-maker, not the peace-breaker.It is now my duty to paint with the utmost minutiæ of detail the last and most important day of this year, the 31st of December, with its background and foreground all complete, and with all accessories.Before the 31st of December arrived, of course Christmas came, a time which had to be gilt, and which turned Siebenkæs’s silver age (after the Royal shot) into a brazen and a wooden age. The money went. But, worse than that, poor Firmian had fretted, and laughed, himself into an illness. A man who has all his life, upon the upper wings of Fantasy and the lower wings of good spirits, skimmed lightly away over the tops of all the spread-net snares and the open pitfalls of life, does, if once he chances to get impaled upon the hard spines of the full-blown thistles (above the purple blossoms and the honey-vessels of which he used to hover) beat in a terrible way about him, hungry, bleeding, epileptically—a glad, happy man finds in the first sunstroke of trouble well-nigh his death-blow. To the polypus of anxiety daily growing in Siebenkæs’s heart add the effects of the work and excitement of authorship. He was very anxious to get done with his ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ at the earliest moment possible, so as to live on the price of them and carry on the law-suit besides. So that he sat through entire nights almost (and chairs as well). And in this way he wrote himself into an affection of the chest, such as the present author brought upon himself, and that, as far as he could make out, simply by excess of bountiful generosity towards the world of letters. He was attacked, just as I was, by a sudden pausing of the breath and of the action of the heart, succeeded by a blank disappearance of the spirit of life, and then by a throbbing rush of blood up to the brain; and this came on most frequently while he was sitting at his literary spinning-wheel and spool.[53]However, not a soul offers either of us one single farthing, by way of indemnification, on account of it. It would appear to be ordained that authors are not to go down to posterity in the body, but only in the form of portraits or plaster-casts; as delicate trout are boiled before being sent away as presents, people don’t put in the laurel-sprig (which is stuck into our mouths as lemons are into the wild boar’s) until we have been killed and dished. It would be a gratification to my colleagues and to me if a reader whose heart we have moved (as well as its auricles) were only to say as much as, “Thissweetemotion ofmyheart was not produced without a hypochondriac palpitation of theirs.” We brighten and illuminate many a head which never dreams of thinking. “Yes, I have to thankthemfor this, it is true, but what is their reward? Why, pains in theirownheads—kephalalgia and neuralgia in various forms!” Ay, he ought to interrupt me in the middle of a satire like this, and cry, “Great as is the pain which his satires causeme, they causehimfar more; luckily,mypain is only mental!” Health of body only runs parallel with health of mind; it turns aside and departs from erudition, from over-much imagination, and from great profundity. All these as little indicate health of mind as corpulence, a runner’s feet, a wrestler’s arms, indicate health of body. I have often wished that all souls were bottled into their bodies as the Pyrmont water is put into its flasks. The best strength of it is allowed to escape first, because, otherwise, it would break the bottle; but it would seem that it is only in the case of colleges of cardinals (if we are to credit Gorani), cathedral chapters, &c., that this precaution is adopted, and thattheirextraordinary power of ability, which would other wise have burst their bodies up, is, as a preliminary measure, let off a good deal before they are put into bodies and sent upon earth; so that the bottles last quite well for seventy or eighty years.With a sick mind, then, and a sick heart, without money, Siebenkæs begun the last day of the year. The day itself had put on its most beautiful summer-dress—one of Berlin blue; it was as cerulean as Krishna, or the new sect of Grahamites, or the Jews in Persia. It had had a fire lighted in the balloon-stove of the sun, and the snow, delicately candied upon the earth, melted into wintergreen, like the sugar on some cunningly-devised supper-dish, as soon as the hills were brought within reach of its warmth. The year seemed to be saying good-bye to Time as if with a cheerful warmth, attended with joyful tears. Firmian longed to run and sun himself upon the moist, green sward; but he had Professor Lang, of Baireuth, to review first.He wrote reviews as many people offer up prayers—only in time of need. It was like the water-carrying of the Athenian, done that he might afterwards devote himself to the studies of his choice without dying of hunger. But when he was reviewing, he drew his satiric sting into its sheath, constructing his criticisms of material drawn only from his store of wax and his honey-bag. “Little authors,” he said, “are always better than their works, and great ones are worse than theirs. Why should I pardon moral failings—e.g. self-conceit—in the genius, and not in the dunce? Least of all should it be forgiven the genius. Unmerited poverty and ugliness do not deserve to be ridiculed; but they as little deserve it when theyare merited—though I am aware Cicero is against me here—for a moral fault (and consequently its punishment) can, of a certainty, not be made greater by a chance physical consequence, which sometimes follows upon it, and sometimes does not. Can it? Does an extravagant person who chances to come to poverty deserve a severer punishment than one who does not? If anything, rather the reverse.” If we apply this to bad authors, from whose own eyes their lack of merit is hidden by an impenetrable veil of self-conceit, and at whose unoffending heart the critic discharges the fury which is aroused in him by their (offending) heads, we may, indeed, direct our bitterest irony againstthe race, but theindividualwill be best instructed by means of gentleness. I think it would be the gold-test, the trial-by-crucible, of a morally great and altogether perfect scholar to give him a bad, but celebrated book to review.For my own part, I will allow myself to be reviewed by Dr. Merkel throughout eternity if I digress again in this chapter. Firmian worked in some haste at his notice of Lang’s essay, entitled “Præmissa Historiæ Superintendentium Generalium Bairuthi non Specialium—Continuatione XX.” It was quite essential that he should get hold of a dollar or two that day, and he also longed to go and take a walk, the weather was so motherly, sohatching. The new year fell on the Saturday, and as early as the Thursday (the day before the one we are writing of) Lenette had begun the holding of preliminary feasts of purification (she now washed daily more and morein advanceof actual necessities); but to-day she was keeping a regular feast of in-gathering among the furniture, &c. The room was being put through a course of derivative treatment for the clearing away of all impurities. With her eye on herindex expurgandorum, she thrust everything that had wooden legs into the water, and followed it herself with balls of soap; in short, she paddled and bubbled, in the Levitical purification of the room, in her warm, native element, for once in her life to her heart’s full content. As for Siebenkæs, he sat bolt-upright in purgatorial fire, already beginning to emit a smell of burning.For, as it happened, he was rather madder than usual that day, to begin with. Firstly, because he had made up his mind that he would pawn the striped calico-gown in the afternoon, though whole nunneries were to shriek their loudest at it, and because he foresaw that he would have to grow exceedingly warm in consequence. And this resolve of resolves he had taken on this particular day, because (and this is at the same time the second reason why he was madder than usual)—because he was sorry that their good days were all gone again, and that their music of the spheres had all been marred by Lenette’s funereal Misereres.“Wife!” he said, “I’m reviewing for money now, recollect.” She went on with her scraping. “I have got Professor Lang before me here—the seventh chapter of him, in which he treats of the sixth of the Superintendents-General of Bayreuth, Herr Stockfleth.” She was going to stop in a minute or two, but just then, you know, she reallycouldNOT. Women are fond of doing everything “by and bye”—they like putting a thing off just for a minute or two, which is the reason why they put off even their arrival in this world a few minutes longer than boys do.[54]“This essay,” he continued, with forced calmness, “ought to have been reviewed in the ‘Messenger’ six months ago, and it’ll never do for the ‘Messenger’ to be like the ‘Universal German Library’ and the Pope, and canonise people a century or so after date.”If he had only been able to maintain his forced calmness for one minute longer, he would have got to the end of Lenette’s buzzing din; however, he couldn’t. “Oh! the devil take me, and you, too, and the ‘Messenger of the Gods’ into the bargain,” he burst out, starting up and dashing his pen on the floor. “I don’t know,” he went on, suddenly resuming his self-control, speaking in a faint, piteous tone, and sitting down, quite unnerved, feeling something like a man with cupping-glasses on all over him—“I don’t know a bit what I’m translating, or whether I’m writing Stockfleth or Lang. What a stupid arrangement it is that an advocate mayn’t be as deaf as a judge. If I were deaf, I should be exempt from torture then. Do you know how many people it takes to constitute a tumult by law? Either ten, or you by yourself in that washing academy of music of yours.” He was not so much inclined to be reasonable as to do as the Spanish innkeeper did, who charged the noise made by his guests in the bill. But now, having had her way, and gained her point, she was noiseless in word and deed.He finished his critique in the forenoon, and sent it to Stiefel, his chief, who wrote back that he would bring the money for it himself in the evening, for he now seized upon every possible opportunity of paying a visit. At dinner Firmian (in whose head the sultry, fœtid vapour of ill-temper would not dissolve and fall), said, “I can’t understand how you come to care so very little about cleanliness and order. It would be better even if you ratheroverdidyour cleanliness than otherwise. People say, what a pity it is such an orderly man as Siebenkæs should have such a slovenly kind of wife!” To irony of this sort, though she knew quite well itwasirony, she always opposed regular formal arguments. He could never get her to enjoy these little jests instead of arguing about them, or join him in laughing at the masculine view of the question. The fact is, a woman abandons her opinion as soon as her husband adopts it. Even in church, the women sing the tunes an octave higher than the men that they may differ from them in all things.In the afternoon the great, the momentous, hour approached in which the ostracism, the banishment from house and home, of the checked calico gown was at last to be carried out—the last and greatest deed of the year 1785. Of this signal for fight, this Timour’s and Muhammed’s red battle-flag, this Ziska’s hide, which always set them by the ears, his very soul was sick: he would have been delighted if somebody would have stolen it, simply to be quit of the wearisome, threadbare idea of the wretched rag for good and all. He did not hurry himself, but introduced his petition with all the wordy prolixity of an M.P. addressing the house (at home). He asked her to guess what might be the greatest kindness, the most signal favour which she could do him on this last day of the old year. He said he had an hereditary enemy, an Anti-Christ, a dragon, living under his roof; tares sown among his wheat by an enemy, which she could pull up if she chose; and, at last, he brought the checked calico gown out of the drawer, with a kind of twilight sorrow: “This,” he said, “is the bird of prey which pursues me; the net which Satan sets to catch me; his sheep-skin my martyr-robe, my Cassim’s slipper. Dearest, do me but this one favour—send it to the pawn-shop!”“Don’t answer just yet,” he said, gently laying his hand on her lips; “let me just remind you what a stupid parish did when the only blacksmith there was in it was going to be hanged in the village. This parish thought it preferable to condemn an innocent master-tailor or two to the gallows, because they could be better spared. Now, a woman of your good sense must surely see how much easier and better it would be to let me take away this mere piece of tailor’s stitch-work, than metal things which we eat out of every day; the mourning calico won’t be wanted, you know, as long as I’m alive.”“I’ve seen quite clearly for a long while past,” she said, “that you’ve made up your mind to carry off my mourning dress from me, by hook or by crook, whether I will or no. But I’m not going to let you have it. Suppose I were to say to you, pawn your watch, how would you like that?” Perhaps the reason why husbands get into the way of issuing their orders in a needlessly dictatorial manner is, that they generally have little effect, but rather confirm opposition than overcome it.“Damnation!” he cried; “that’ll do, that’s quite enough! I’m not a turkey-cock, nor a bonassus neither, to be continually driven into a frenzy by a piece of coloured rag. It goes to the pawn-shop to-day, as sure as my name’s Siebenkæs.”“Your name is Leibgeber as well,” said she.“Devil fly away with me, if that calico remains in this house!” said he. On which she began to cry, and lament the bitter fortune which left her nothing now, not even the very clothes for her back. When thoughtless tears fall into a seething masculine heart, they often have the effect which drops of water have when they fall upon bubbling molten copper; the fluid mass bursts asunder with a great explosion.“Heavenly, kind, gentle Devil,” said he, “do please come and break my neck for me. May God have pity on a woman like this! Very well, then, keep your calico; keep this Lenten altar-cloth of yours to yourself. But may the Devil fly away with me if I don’t cock the old deer’s horns that belonged to my father on to my head this very day, like a poacher on the pillory, and hawk them about the streets for sale in broad daylight. Ay.I give you my word of honourit shall be done, for all the fun it may afford every soul in the place. And I shall simply say that it is your doing; I’ll do it, as sure as there’s a devil in hell.”He went, gnashing his teeth, to the window, and looked into the street, seeing vacancy. A rustic funeral was passing slowly by; the bier was a man’s shoulder, and on it tottered a child’s rude coffin.Such a sight is a touching one, when one thinks of the little, obscure, human creature, passing over from the fœtal slumber to the slumber of death, from the amnion-membrane in this life to the shroud, that amnion-membrane of the next; whose eyes have closed at their first glimpse of this bright earth, without looking on the parents who now gaze after it with theirs so wet with tears; which has been loved without loving in return; whose little tongue moulders to dust before it has ever spoken; as does its face ere it has smiled upon this odd, contradictory, inconsistent orb of ours. These cut buds of this mould will find a stem on which great destiny will graft them, these flowers which, like some besides, close in sleep while it is still early morning, will yet feel the rays of a morning sun which will open them once more. As Firmian looked at the cold, shrouded child passing by, in this hour, when he was ignobly quarrelling about the mourning dress (which should mourn forhim)—now, when the very last drops of the old year were flowing so fast away, and his heart, now becoming so terribly accustomed to these passing fainting fits, forbade him to hope that he could ever complete the new one—now, amid all these pains and sorrows, he seemed to hear the unseen river of Death murmuring under his feet (as the Chinese lead rushing brooks under the soil of their gardens), and the thin, brittle crust of ice on which he was standing seemed as if it would soon crack and sink with him into the watery depths. Unspeakably touched, he said to Lenette, “Perhaps you may be quite right, dear, after all, to keep your mourning dress; you may have some presentiment that I am not going to live. Do as you think best, then, dear; I would fain not embitter this last of December any more; I don’t know that it may not bemylast in another sense, and that in another year I may not be nearer to that poor baby than you. I am going for a walk now.”She said nothing; all this startled and surprised her. He hurried away, to escape the answer which was sure to come eventually; his absence would, in the circumstances, be the most eloquent kind of oratory. All persons are better than their outbreaks (or ebullitions)—that is, than theirbadones; for all are worse than theirnobleones, also—and when we allow the former an hour or so to dissipate and disperse, we gain something better than our point—we gain our opponent. He left Lenette a very grave subject for cogitation, however,—the stag’s horns and his word of honour.I have already once written it. The winter was lying on the ground all bare and naked, not even the bed-sheet and chrisom-cloth of snow thrown over it; there it lay beside the dry, withered mummy of the by-gone summer. Firmian looked with an unsatisfied gaze athwart unclothed fields (over which the cradle-quilt of the snow, and the white crape of the frost, had not yet been laid), and down at the streams, not yet struck palsied and speechless. Bright, warm days at the end of December soften us with a sadness in which there are four or five bitter drops more than in that belonging to the after-summer. Up to twelve o’clock at night, and until the thirty-first day of the twelfth month, the wintry, nocturnal, idea of dissolution and decay oppresses us; but as soon as it is one in the morning, and the first of January, a morning breeze, speaking of new life, moves away the clouds which were lying over our souls, and we begin to look for the dark, pure, morning blue, the rising of the star of morning and of spring. On a December day like this the pale, dim, stagnant world of stiffened, sapless, plants about us oppresses and hems us round; and the insect-collections lying beneath the vegetation, covered with earth; and the rafter-work of bare, dry, wrinkly trees; the December sun hanging in the sky at noon no higher than the June sun does at evening; all these combined shed a yellow lustre as of death (like that of burning alcohol) over the pale, faded meadows; and long giant shadows lie extended, motionless, everywhere—eveningshadows of this evening of nature and of the year—like the ruined remains, the burnt-out ash-heaps of nights as long as themselves. But the glistening snow, on the other hand, spread over the blooming earth under us, is like the blue foreground of spring, or a white fog a foot or two in depth. The quiet dark sky lies above, and the white earth is like some white moon, whose sparkling ice-fields melt, as we draw nearer, into dark waving meadows of flowers.The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet as he stood upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of nature. The daily-recurring pausings of his heart and pulse were (he thought) the sudden silences of the storm-bell in his breast, presaging a speedy end of the thunder, and dissolution of the storm-cloud, of life. He thought the faltering of his mechanism was caused by some loose pin having fallen in among the wheels somewhere; he ascribed it to polypus of the heart, and his giddiness he felt sure gave warning of an attack of apoplexy. To-day was the three hundred and sixty-fifth Act of the year, and the curtain was slowly dropping upon it already: what could this suggest to him save gloomy similes of his own epilogue—of the winter solstice of his shortened, over-shadowed life? The weeping image of his Lenette came now before his forgiving, departing soul, and he thought, “She is really not in the right; but I will yield to her, as we have not very long to be together now. I am glad for her sake, poor soul, thatmyarms are mouldering away from about her, and that her friend is taking her to his.”He went up on to the scaffold of blood and sorrow wherehisfriend, Heinrich, had taken his farewell. From that eminence, as often as his heart was heavy, his glance would follow Leibgeber’s path as far as the hills; but to-day his eyes were moister than before, for he had no hope that he would see the spring again. This spot was to him the hill which the Emperor Adrian permitted the Jews to go up twice in the year, that they might look towards the ruins of the holy city and weep for the place wherein their steps might tread no more. The sun was now assembling the shadows which were to close in upon the old year, and as the stars appeared—the stars which rose at evening now being those which in spring adorn the morning—fate snapped away the loveliest and richest in flowers of the liana-branches from his soul, and from the wound flowed clear water. “I shall see nothing of the coming spring,” he thought, “except her blue, which, as in enamel-painting, is the first laid on of all her colours.” His heart—one educated to be loving—could always fly for rest from his satires and from dry details of business-duty, sometimes, too, from Lenette’s indifference and lack of sympathy, to the warm breast of the eternal goddess Nature, ever ready to take us to her heart. Into the free, unveiled, and blooming out-door world, beneath the grand wide sky, he loved to repair with all his sighs and sorrows, and in this great garden he made all his graves (as the Jews made them in smaller ones). And when our fellows forsake and wound us, the sky and the earth, and the little blooming tree, open their arms and take us into them; the flowers press themselves to our wounded hearts, the streams mingle in our tears, and the breezes breathe coolness into our sighs. A mighty angel troubles and inspires the great ocean-pool of Bethesda; into its warm waves we plunge, with all our thousand aches and pains, and ascend from the water of life with our spasms all relaxed and our health and vigour renewed once more.Firmian walked slowly home with a heart all conciliation, and eyes which, now that it was dark, he did not take the pains to dry. He went over in his mind everything which could possibly be adduced in his Lenette’s excuse. He strove to win himself over to her side of the question by reflecting that she could not (like him) arm herself against the shocks, the stumbling-stones, of life by putting on the Minerva’s helm, the armour of meditation, philosophy, authorship. He thoroughly determined (he had determined the same thing thirty times before) to be as scrupulously careful to observe in all things the outsidepolitessesof life withheras with the most absolute stranger;[55]nay, he already enveloped himself in the fly-net or mail-shirt of patience, in case he should really find the checked calico untranslated at home. This is how we men continually behave—stopping our ears tight with both hands, trying our hardest to fall into the siesta, the mid-day sleep, of a little peace of mind (if we can only anyhow manage it); thus do our souls, swayed by our passions, reflect the sunlight of truth as one dazzling spot (like mirrors or calm water), while all the surrounding surface lies but in deeper shade.How differently all fell out! He was received by Peltzstiefel, who advanced to meet him, all solemnity of deportment, and with a church-visitation countenance full of inspection-sermons. Lenette scarcely turned her swollen eyes towards the windward side of her husband as he came in at the door. Stiefel kept the strings tight which held the muscles of his knit face, lest it might unbend before Firmian’s, which was all beaming soft with kindliness, and thus commenced: “Mr. Siebenkæs, I came to this house to hand you the money for your review of Professor Lang; but friendship demands of me a duty of a far more serious and important kind, that I should exhort you and constrain you to conduct yourself towards this poor unfortunate wife of yours here like a true Christian man to a true Christian woman.” “Or even better, if you like,” he said. “What is it all about, wife?” She preserved an embarrassed silence. She had asked Stiefel’s advice and assistance, less for the sake of obtaining them than to have an opportunity of telling her story. The truth was, that when the Schulrath came unexpectedly in, while her burst of crying was at its bitterest, she had really just that very moment sent her checked, spiny, outer caterpillar-skin (the calico-dress, to wit) away to the pawnshop; for her husband having pledged his honour, she felt sure that, beyond a doubt, he would stick those preposterous horns on his head and really go and hawk them, all over the town, for she well knew how sacredly he kept his word, and also how utterly he disregarded “appearances,”—and that both of these peculiarities of his were always at their fellest pitch at a time of domestic difficulty like the present. Perhaps she would have told her ghostly counsellor and adviser nothing about the matter, but contented herself with having a good cry when he came, if she had had her way (and her dress); but, having sacrificed both, she needed compensation and revenge. At first she had merely reckoned up difficulties in indeterminate quantities to him; but when he pressed her more closely, her bursting heart overflowed andallher woes streamed forth. Stiefel, contrarily to the laws of equity (and of several universities), always held the complainant in any case to be in the right, simply because he spokefirst: most men think impartiality of heart is impartiality of head. Stiefel swore that he would tell her husband what he ought to be told, and that the calico should be back in the house that very afternoon.So this father-confessor began to jingle his bunch of binding-and-loosing keys in the advocate’s face, and reported to him his wife’s general confession and the pawning of the dress. When there are two diverse actions of a person to be given account of—a vexatious and an agreeable one—the effect depends on which is spoken of the first; it is the first narrated one which gives the ground-tint to the listener’s mind, and the one subsequently portrayed only takes rank as a subdued accessory figure. Firmian should have heard that Lenette pawned the dressfirst, while he was still out of doors, and of her tale-bearing not till afterwards. But you see how the devil brought it about, as it really did all happen. “What!” (Siebenkæsfelt, if not exactlythought) “What! She makes my rival her confidant and my judge! I bring her home a heart all kindness and reconciliation, and she makes a fresh cut in it at once, distressing and annoying me in this way, on the very last day of the year, with her confounded chattering and tale-telling.” By this last expression he meant something which the reader does not yet quite understand; for I have not yet told him that Lenette had the bad habit of being—rather ill-bred; wherefore she made common people of her own sex, such as the bookbinder’s wife, the recipients of her secret thoughts—the electric discharging-rods of her little atmospheric disturbances; while, at the same time, she took it ill of her husband that, though he did not, indeed, admit serving-men and maids and “the vulgar” into his own mysteries, he yet accompanied them into theirs.Stiefel (like all people who have little knowledge of the world, and are not gifted with much tact,—who never assume anything as granted in the first place, but always go through every subjectab initio)—now delivered a long, theological, matrimonial-service sort of exhortation concerning love as between Christian husband and wife, and ended by insisting on the recall of the calico (his Necker, so to say). This address irritated Firmian, and that chiefly because (irrespectively ofit) his wife thought he had not any religion, or, at all events, not so much as Stiefel. “I remember” (he said) “seeing in the history of France that Gaston, the first prince of the blood, having caused his brother some little difficulties or other of the warlike sort on one occasion, in the subsequent treaty of peace bound himself, in a special article, to love Cardinal Richelieu. Now I think there’s no question but that an article to the effect that man and wife shall love one another ought to be inserted as a distinct, separate, secret clause, in all contracts of marriage; for though love, like man himself, is by origin eternal and immortal, yet, thanks to the wiles of the serpent, it certainly becomes mortal enough within a short time. But, as far as the calico’s concerned, let’s all thank God thatthatapple of discord has been pitched out of the house.” Stiefel, by way of offering up a sacrifice, and burning a little incense before the shrine of his beloved Lenette,insistedon the return of the calico, and did so very firmly; for Siebenkæs’s gentle, complaisant readiness to yield to him, up to this point, in little matters of sacrifice and service, had led him to entertain the deluded idea that he possessed an irresistible authority over him. The husband, a good deal agitated now, said, “We’ll drop the subject, if you please.” “Indeed, we’ll do nothing of the kind,” said Stiefel; “I must reallyinsistupon it that your wife has her dress back.” “It can’t be done, Herr Schulrath.” “I’ll advance you whatever money you require,” cried Stiefel, in a fever of indignation at this striking and unwonted piece of disobedience. It was now, of course, more impossible than ever for the advocate to retire from his position; he shook his head eighty times. “Eitheryouare out of your mind,” said Stiefel, “orIam; just let me go through my reasons to you once more.” “Advocates,” said Siebenkæs, “werefortunate enough, in former times, to have private chaplains of their own; but it was found that there was no converting any of them, and therefore they are now exempt from being preached at.”Lenette wept more bitterly—Stiefel shouted the louder on that account; in his annoyance at his ill success, he thought it well to repeat his commands in a ruder and blunter form; of course Siebenkæs resisted more firmly. Stiefel was a pedant, a class of men which surpasses all others in a bare-faced, blind, self-conceit, just like an unceasing wind blowing from all the points of the compass at once (for a pedant even makes an ostentatious display of his own personal idiosyncrasies). Stiefel, like a careful and conscientious player, felt it a duty to thoroughly throw himself into the part he was representing, and carry it out in all its details, and say, “Either” “Or” Mr. Siebenkæs; “either the mourning gown comes, orIgo,aut-aut. My visits cannot be of much consequence, it’s true, still they have I consider, a certain value, if it were but on Mrs. Siebenkæs’s account.” Firmian, doubly irritated, firstly at the imperious rudeness and conceit of an alternative of the sort, and secondly at the lowness of the market price for which the Rath abandoned their society, could but say, “Nobody can influence your decision on that point now but yourself.Imost certainly cannot. It will be an easy matter for you, Herr Schulrath, to give up our acquaintance—though there is no real reason why you should—but it will not be easy for me to give up yours, although I shall have no choice.” Stiefel, from whose brow the sprouting laurels were thus so unexpectedly shorn—and that, too, in the presence of the woman he loved—had nothing to do but take his leave; but he did it with three thoughts gnawing at his heart—his vanity was hurt, his dear Lenette was crying, and her husband was rebellious and insubordinate, and resisting his authority.And as the Schulrath said farewell for ever, a bitter, bitter sorrow stood fixed in the eyes of his beloved Lenette—a sorrow which, though the hand of time has long since covered it over, I still see there in its fixity; and she could not go down stairs, as at other times, with her sorrowing friend, but went back into the dark, unlighted room, alone with her overflowing breaking heart.Firmian’s heart laid aside its hardness, though not its coldness, at the sight of his persecuted wife in her dry, stony grief at this falling to ruin of every one of her little plans and joys; and he did not add to her sorrow by a single word of reproach. “You see,” was all he said, “that it is no fault of mine that the Schulrath gives up our acquaintance; he ought never to have been told anything about the matter,—however, it’s all over now.” She made no reply. The hornet’s sting (which makes a triple stab), the dagger, thrown as by some revengeful Italian, was left sticking firm in her wound, which therefore could not bleed. Ah! poor soul; thou hast deprived thyself of so much! Firmian, however, could not see that he had anything to accuse himself of; he being the gentlest, the most yielding of men under the sun, always ruffled all the feathers on his body up with a rustle in an instant at the slightest touch ofcompulsion, most especially if it concerned his honour. Hewouldaccept a present, it is true, but only from Leibgeber, or (on rare occasions) from others in the warmest hours of soul communion; and his friend and he both held the opinion that, in friendship, not only was a farthing of quite as much value as a sovereign, but that a sovereign was worth just as little as a farthing, and that one is bound to accept the most splendid presents just as readily as the most trifling; and hence he counted it among the unrecognised blessings of childhood that children can receive gifts without any feeling of shame.In a mental torpor he now sat down in the arm-chair, and covered his eyes with his hand; and then the mists which hid the future all rolled away, and showed in it a wide dreary tract of country, full of the black ashy ruins of burnt homesteads, and of dead bushes of underwood, and the skeletons of beasts lying in the sand. He saw that the chasm, or landslip, which had torn his heart and Lenette’s asunder, would go on gaping wider and wider; he saw, oh! so clearly and cheerlessly, that his old beautiful love would never come back, that Lenette would never lay aside her self-willed pertinacity, her whims, the habits of her daily life; that the narrow limits of her heart and head would remain fixed firmly for ever; that she would as little learn to understand him, as get to love him; while, again, her repugnance to him would get the greater the longer her friend’s banishment endured, and that her fondness for the latter would increase in proportion. Stiefel’s money, and his seriousness, and religion, and attachment to herself combined to tear in two the galling bond of wedlock by the pressure of a more complex and gentle tie. Sorrowfully did Siebenkæs gaze into a long prospect of dreary days, all constrained silence, and dumb hostility and complaint.Lenette was working in her room in silence, for her wounded heart shrunk from a word or a look as from a cold fierce wind. It was now very dark, she wanted no light. On a sudden, a wandering street-singing woman began to play a harp, and her child to accompany her on a flute, somewhere in the house downstairs. At this our friend’s bursting heart seemed to have a thousand gashes inflicted on it to let it bleed gently away. As nightingales love to sing where there is an echo, so our hearts speak loudest to music. As these tones brought back to him his old hopes, almost irrecognisable now,—as he gazed down at his Arcadia now lying hidden deep, deep, beneath the stream of years, and saw himself down in it, with all his young fresh wishes, amid his long lost friends, gazing with happy eyes round their circle, all confidence and trust, his growing heart hoarding and cherishing its love and truth for some warm heart yet to be met in the time to come: and as he now burst into that music with a dissonance, crying, “And I have never found that heart, and now all is past and over,” and as the pitiless tones brought pictures of blossomy springs and flowery lands, and circles of loving friends to pass, as in a camera obscura, before him—himwho had nothing, not one soul in all the land to love him; his steadfast spirit gave way at last, and sank down on earth to rest as quite overdone, and nothing soothed him now but that which pained. Suddenly this sleep-walking music ceased, and the pause clutched, like a speechless nightmare, tighter at his heart. In the silence he went into the room and said to Lenette, “Take them down what little we have left.” But over the latter words his voice broke and failed, for he saw (by the flare of some potash-burning which was going on opposite) that all her glowing face was covered with streaming, undried tears, though when he came in she pretended to be busily wiping the windowpane dimmed by her breath. She laid the money down on the window. He said, more gently yet, “Lenette, you will have to take it to them now, or they will be gone.” She took it; her eyes worn with weeping met his (which were worn with weeping too); she went, and then their eyes grew well-nigh dry, so far apart were their two souls already.They were suffering in that terrible position of circumstances when not even a moment of mutual and reciprocal emotion can any longer reconcile and warm two hearts. His whole heart swelled with overflowing affection, but hers belonged to his no more; he was urged at once by the wish to love her, and the feeling that it was now impossible, by the perception of all her shortcomings and the conviction of her indifference to him. He sat down in the window seat, and leaned his head upon the sill, where it rested, as it chanced, upon a handkerchief which she had left there, and which was moist and cold with tears. She had been solacing herself after the long oppression of the day, with this gentle effusion, much as we have a vein opened after some severe contusion. When he touched the handkerchief, an icy shudder crept down his back, like a sting of conscience, but immediately after it there came a burning glow as the thought flashed to his mind that her weeping had been for another person than himself altogether. The singing and the flute now began again (without the harp this time), and floated in the rising, falling waves, of a slow-timed song, of which the verses ended always with the words, “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.” Sorrow now clutched him in her grasp, like some mantle-fish, casting around him her dark and suffocating folds. He pressed Lenette’s wet handkerchief to his eyes hard, and heard (but less distinctly), “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.” Then of a sudden his whole soul melted and dissolved at the thought that perhaps that halting heart of his would let him see no other new year save that of the morrow, and he thought of himself as dying; and the cold handkerchief, wet with his own tears now as well as hers, lay cool upon his burning brow, while the notes of the music seemed to mark like bells each stroke of time, so that its rapid flight was made distinguishable by the ear, and he saw himself asleep in a quiet grave, like one in the Grotto of the Serpents, but with worms in place of the serpents, licking off the burning poison of life.The music had ceased. He heard Lenette moving in the next room and getting a light; he went to her and gave her her handkerchief. But his heart was so pained and bleeding that he longed to embrace some one, no matter whom; he was impelled to press his Lenette to his heart, his Lenette ofthe pastif not ofthe present, hissuffering, if no longer his loving, Lenette; at the same time he could not utter one word of affection, neither had he the slightest wish to do so. He put his arms round her slowly, unbent, and held her to him, but she turned her head quickly and coldly away as from a kiss which was not proffered. This pained him greatly, and he said, “Do you suppose I am any happier than you are yourself?” He laid his face down on her averted head, pressed her to him again, and then let her away; and this vain embrace at an end, his heart cried, “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.”The silent room in which the music and the words had ceased to sound was like some unhappy village from whence the enemy has carried off all the bells, and where there is nothing but silence all the day and night, and the church tower is mute as if time itself were past.As Firmian laid him down on his bed, he thought, “A sleep closes the old year as if it were one’s last, and ushers in the new as it does, our own lives; and I sleep on towards a future all anxiety, vague of form, and darkly veiled. Thus does man sleep at the gate behind which the dreams are barred; but although his dreams are but a step or two—a minute or two—within that gate, he cannot tellwhatdreams await him at its opening; whether in the brief unconscious night beasts of prey with glaring eyes are lying in wait to dash upon him, or smiling children to come trooping round him in their play; nor if, when the cloudy shapes beyond that mystic door come about him, their clasp is to be the fond embrace of love, or the murderous clutch of death.”

A POTATO WAR WITH WOMEN—AND WITH MEN—A WALK IN DECEMBER—TINDER FOR JEALOUSY—A WAR OF SUCCESSION ON THE SUBJECT OF A PIECE OF CHECKED CALICO—RUPTURE WITH STIEFEL—SAD EVENING MUSIC.

I should very much like to make an incidental digression about this point; however, I feel that I don’t dare.

You see there are, now-a-days, so very few readers (at all events, of the younger and more aristocratic sort) who don’t know everything—while, at the same time, they expect their pet authors (and I don’t blame them for it) to know more than themselves—which is impossible. By the help of the English machinery (now brought to such high perfection), of encyclopædias, of encyclopædic-dictionaries, of conversations-lexicons, of excerpts from conversations-lexicons, of Ersch and Gruber’s ‘Universal Dictionaries of all the Sciences,’ a young man, after devoting hisdaysto it for a month or two (he has no occasion to devote hisnights) converts himself into a perfect Senatus Academicus of all the Faculties of a University, which he represents in his own single person; besides, in a sense, also himself standing to it in the relation of the student-body at the same time.

I have never, myself, met with a phenomenal youth of the sort above described, unless it were, perhaps, a fellow I once heard playing in the Baireuth band, who represented in his own person a whole Royal Academy of Music—a complete orchestra—inasmuch as he held, carried, and played upon instruments of every kind. This Panharmonist performing, to us partial harmonists only (as we were), blew a French horn, which he held under his right arm, and this right arm bowed a fiddle placed under his left; and that left arm beat, at the proper moments, a drum which was fastened on his back; his cap was hung round with bells, out of which he shook an accompaniment “alla Turca,” by moving his head, and he had a cymbal strapped upon each of his knees, which he banged vigorously together; so that the man was all music, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot So that, one is tempted to make this simile-man an occasion and ground-work of further similes, and liken him to a prince who represents in his own person all the instruments of his State, and all its members and representatives. Now, in the presence of readers who are all-knowers, just as this man was an all-player, how is a humble individual such as I, who am but a mere Heidelberg master of seven arts, at the outside, and doctor of a small trifle of philosophy, or so, to venture to take upon himself to attempt such a thing as a bit of a digression with any approach to the clever or the felicitous about it? No; the safe course, in the circumstances, for me is to go quietly on with my story.

We find the advocate, Siebenkæs, once more, then, in full blossom of hope; although that blossom is all sterile, and not of the sort which bears fruit. After his royal shot, he had reckoned upon, at any rate, as many happy days as the money would last for—upon fourteen at least; but mourning-black, now the traveller’s uniform, ought to have been the colour of his upon his earthly night-journey—thatvoyage pittoresquefor poets. Though marmots and squirrels know how to plug up that particular hole in their dwellings which chances to be on the side from which the approaching storm is coming, men do not; Firmian thought if the hole in hispursewas mended no more was necessary. Alas! a better thing than money now departed from him—Love. His good Lenette receded to a greater distance from his heart, as he did from hers, day by day.

Her having concealed from him the fact that Rosa had given back the wreath, formed in his heart (as foreign matter lodged in any vessel of the body always does) the nucleus of a gradual deposit of stone about it. But that was only a small matter.

For she brushed and scraped of a morning, and every morning, and that whether (as the saying goes) he “liked it or lumped it.”

She would persist, and insist, on communicating all her prorogations of parliament and other decrees to the servant girl, in several duplicates and revised copies, let him protest as much as he chose.

She asked him every thing she had to ask him (no matter what) two or three separate times over; and that whether he shouted beforehand like a quack doctor at a fair, or swore afterwards like one of his customers.

She continued to say, “It has struck four quarters to four o’clock.”

When he had proved, with immense care and trouble, that Augspurg was not in the Island of Cyprus, she would return him the quiet incontrovertible answer, “Well, it’s not in Roumania either, nor in Bulgaria, nor in the Principality of Jauer, nor in Vauduz, nor in the neighbourhood of Hüshen—two very little, insignificant places, both of them.” He could never bring her to give an unqualified assent, when he made the unconditional and positive assertion (in a loud voice), “It’s in Swabia—or the devil’s in it.” She would go no further than to admit that it was situated, in a certain sense, and to some extent, between Franconia, Bavaria, and Switzerland, &c.; it was only to the bookbinder’s wife that she wouldacknowledgethat it was in Swabia.

Burdens, nay, overloads, of this sort, however, can be borne more or less easily and bravely by a soul fortified by the example of great sufferers—such as a Lycurgus, who let himself be deprived of an eye, and an Epictetus, who allowed his master to hack off his leg; and all these little failings of Lenette’s have been touched upon in a previous chapter. But I have to tell of new shortcomings besides; and as regards these, I leave it to unbiassed married men to determine whether they are among the matters which husbands can, and should, put up with.

Firstly: Lenette washed her hands forty times in the course of the day, at the very least; no matter what she touched, she must needs put herself through this process of Holy Re-baptism; like a Jew, she was rendered unclean by the propinquity ofeverything. She would far more probably have followed the example of Rabbi Akiba, than have been in the least astonished at his proceedings—who, when he was a captive in prison, and in the direst distress for water, instead of quenching his thirst with the very small quantity of it he could get, preferred to use it for his ablutions.

“Of course it is right and proper that she should be scrupulous about cleanliness,” said Siebenkæs, “and more so than I am; but there are limits to all things. Why doesn’t she rub herself with a towel when anybody breathes upon her? Why not purify her lips with soap after a fly has deposited itself (and notonlyitself) upon them? I’m sure she turns our sitting-room into a regular English man-of-war, scoured and holystoned from stem to stern every morning; and I look on as pleased as any officer on her quarter-deck.”

If a heavy Irish rain-cloud, or a waterspout with its attendant thunders and lightnings, came over his and her days, she always managed to put her husband right under water (like a Dutch fortress), with all his courageous energy, and gave free course to all her tears. But when the sun of happiness cast a feeble ray no broader than a window into the room, Lenette would always have a hundred things, other than this pleasant one, to attend to and to look at. Firmian had particularly made up his mind that he would most thoroughly winnow the husks from the corn of these few days during which he had a few shillings of ready money in his pocket; that he would skim off the cream of them, and completely hide, with a thick veil, the second Janus face, let it be smiling or weeping over the past or the future, as the case might be; but Lenette would insist upon rending this veil, and pointing to the hidden face. “My dear soul!” her husband more than once implored her, “do but wait till we’re as poor as church mice, and leading the life of a dog, again; then I’ll groan and moan with you with the greatest pleasure.” And she only once made him any pertinent answer, namely, “How long will it be before we’re without a farthing in the house?” But to this he was able to return a still more apposite reply: “If that is your way of looking at the matter, you will never be able to enjoy a single quiet, bright, happy day, unless one can give you his solemn oath that there will never come another dark, cloudy, wretched one again; in which case, of course, you canneverenjoy one. What king or emperor—ay! and though he had thrones upon the head of him and crowns under his tail—can ever be sure but that any post-delivery, or any sitting of his parliament, may bring him a cloudy time of it; yet he passes his happy day in hisSans Souci, or hisBellevue(or whatever he may call it), and enjoys his life.” (She shook her head). “I can prove it to you in print, and from the Greek.” And, opening the New Testament, he read out the following passage (inserted by himself on the spur of the moment): “If, in a time of good fortune and happiness, thou delayest the joy of thine heart until a moment shall come in which nothing shall lie before thee save hopes in unbroken sequence for whole years to come, then there can be no true happiness on the face of this changing world. For after ten days, or years, some sorrow shall surely come; and thus thou canst delight in no May-day, though it shower blossoms and nightingales upon thee, since, beyond all doubt, the winter will come thereafter, with its nights and its snowflakes. Yet thou enjoyest thine ardent youth, not thinking with dread upon the ice-pit of age, which is ready in the background, with a gradually-increasing coldness to preserve thee for a certain season. Look, then, upon the glad To-day as a long youth; and let the sad Day-after-to-morrow appear unto thee but as a brief old age.”

“The Latin or the Greek always has a more religious sound, I know,” she answered, “and we often hear the thing in the pulpit, too; and whenever I do hear it preached I always go home and feel much comforted and consoled, till the money’s all gone again.”

He had greater difficulty still to get her to jump for joy quite to his liking at the dinner-table at mid-day. If, instead of their every-day fare, some extraordinary fleshpot of Egypt should chance to be smoking on the table—some dish such as the Counts of Wratislaw might have served, and the Counts of Waldstein have carved, without a blush—then Siebenkæs might be sure that his wife would have at least one hundred things more than usual to finish and to put away before she could come to dinner. There sits her husband, eager to begin; he looks round for her, quietly at first, angrily after a while, but keeps command of himself for two or three entire minutes, during which he has time to remember all his troubles as well as think about the roast—then, however, he discharges the first thunder-clap of his storm, and shouts, “Thunder and lightning! here have I been sitting for a whole Eternity, and everything getting as cold as charity. Wife! Wife!!”

In Lenette, as in other women, the cause of this was not ill-temper, neither was it stupidity, nor stubborn indifference to the matter or to her husband; she really could not do otherwise, however, and that’s quite sufficient explanation.

At the same time, my friend Siebenkæs—who will have this story in his hands even before the printer’s devils get hold of it—musn’t take it ill of me that I divulge to the world in general certain small breakfast-failings of his own—which he has communicated to me with his own lips. As he lay in his trellis-bed in the morning, before getting up, with his eyes closed, there would suddenly flash upon him ideas for his book, and forms in which to express them, such as never occurred to him while he was sitting or standing during the day; and, indeed, I have in the course of my reading found that there have been many men of learning—such, for instance, as Descartes, Abbé Galiani, Basedow—I, myself, too, whom of course I don’t count, who belonged to the Coleopterous family of backswimmers (Notonectæ), and got on quickest in the recumbent position, and in whose cases bed has been the brewing-kettle of their most brilliant and original ideas. I, myself, could point to many such which I have written down immediately after getting out of bed in the morning. Any one who sets himself to work to explain this phenomenon should adduce in the first place the matutinal power of the brain, and the fact of its lending itself with a more nimble, as well as vigorous obedience to the impulses of the spirit after its internal and external holiday of rest; next, the freedom and facility both of thinking and of brain mobility, which the manifold impulsions of the day has not yet begun to weary and impair; and, lastly, the vigour which is a peculiar property of all firstborn things—a vigour which our earliest morning thoughts possess in common with the first impressions of youth.

Now, after the above explanations, it will doubtless seem clear that, when the advocate lay in this fashion, sprouting and sending out long shoots in the warm forcing-house of the pillow, and bearing the most precious flowers and fruit, nothing could strike upon his ear in a harsher and more distracting manner than the voice of Lenette calling from the next room, “Come to breakfast, the coffee’s ready.” He generally gave birth to one or two more happy turns of expression after hedidhear it, pricking his ears all the while, however, in dread of a second order to march. But as Lenette knew that he always allowed himself a considerable number of minutes of grace after the summons, she always cried, “Get up, the coffee’s cold,” when it was only just coming to the boil. The notonectic satirist, for his part, had observed the law which governed this precession of the equinoxes, and lay quietly among the feathers breeding his ideas happy and undisturbed when it was only once that she had summoned him, merely answering, “This very moment!” and availing himself of the double usance prescribed by law.

This obliged his wife, for her part, to go farther back, and when the coffee was made and standing by the fire, to cry, “Come, dear, it’s getting quite cold.” Now, on this system, of getting earlier on one side and later on the other, matters became more critical every day, with nowhere a prospect of extrication from the difficulty; in fact, what was naturally to be expected was the arrival of a state of things in which Lenette would end by calling him to get up a whole day too soon; although, in the end, this would eventuate in a mere restoration of the original condition of affairs, just as our suppers at the present day threaten to become too-early breakfasts, and our breakfasts unfashionably early dinners. Had Siebenkæs been able to bear the process of grinding the coffee, he might have moored himself to that as to an anchor of hope, and it would then have been a simple matter to calculate the time the coffee would take to get ready; but this he could not, for, in the absence of a coffee-mill, the coffee was bought ready ground (by everybody in the house, for that matter). If Lenette could have been induced to call him just one exact minute before the coffee was boiling and smoking,shewould have done instead of the coffee-mill—however, she couldnotbe induced.

What are trifling differences of opinion before marriage assume large dimensions thereafter—as north winds are warm in summer and cold in winter; the zephyr, when it is breathed forth by conjugal lungs, is like Homer’s zephyr, concerning the biting keenness of which the poet sings so much. For this period onward, Firmian set himself to look with much care and minuteness for every crack, feather, flaw, or cloudiness, which might be discoverable in that diamond—Lenette’s heart. Poor fellow! this being the case with thee, soon, soon must the crumbling altar of thy love go toppling down one stone after another, and the sacrificial fire flutter and go out.

He now discovered that she was not nearly as learned a woman as Mdlles. Burmann and Reiske. It is true no book wearied her, but neither did any interest her, and she could read her one book of Sermons as often as scholars can go through Homer and Kant. Her secular or “profane” authors were only two; in fact, one married pair of authors—the immortal authoress of her own cookery receipts, and that, lady’s husband—but the latter she never read. She paid his essays the tribute of her profoundest admiration, but she never glanced into them. Three sensible words with the bookbinder’s wife were of more value in her eyes than all the bookbinder’s and bookmaker’s printed ones put together. To a literary man who is making new arguments, and new ink, all the year long, it is incomprehensible how those persons who have neither a book, nor a pen, nor a drop of ink in the house (except the pale rusty liquid borrowed from the village schoolmaster) can exist at all. Firmian sometimes appointed himself a species of special Professor-extraordinary, and mounted the professional chair with the view of initiating Lenette into one or two of the elementary principles of Astronomy; but either she had no pineal gland (that manor-house of the soul and its ideas), or else the chambers of her brain were saturated, satiated, and crammed to the roof with lace, bonnets, shirts, and saucepans; at all events, it was beyond his power to get a single star into her head bigger than a reel of cotton. With Pneumatology (Psychology), again, his difficulty was exactly of theconversesort. In this branch of science, where the calculus of the infinitesimally small would have come to his aid with an equal amount of serviceableness as that of the infinitely great in astronomy, Lenette expanded and stretched out the dimensions of the angels, souls, and so forth, passing the minutest and most ethereal of spiritual beings through the stretching mill of her imagination, so that angels—of whom the scholiasts would have invited whole companies to a carpet-dance on the tip of a new needle (or have threaded them with it by couples on one and the same point of space)—expanded on her hands to such an extent that each angel would have filled a cradle by itself; and as for the Devil, he swelled out upon her till he got to be pretty much about the size of her husband.

Further, Siebenkæs discovered an iron-mould stain, a pock-mark or wart, on her heart; he could never warm her into a true lyric enthusiasm of Love, in which she should forget heaven and earth, and all things. She could count the strokes of the town clock amid his kisses; though some affecting story or discourse of his might bring the big tears to her eyes, she could still hear the soup-pot boiling over, and run away to it, tears and all. She would join devoutly in the hymns which came resounding from the other lodgers’ rooms of a Sunday, but in the middle of a verse ask the prosaic question, “What shall I warm for supper?” and he never could forget that, once, when she was listening, apparently much interested and quite touched, to one of his chamber-sermons on death and immortality, she looked at him, thoughtfully it is true, but with a glance directed downward, and said, “Don’t put on that left stocking to-morrow morning till I’ve darned it for you.”

The author of this tale declares that he has sometimes been driven nearly out of his mind by feminineentr’actesof this sort, against the occurrence of which there is no warranty for the man who soars up into the æther in company with these beautiful birds of paradise, and there hovers up and down with them, in the fond hope of hatching the eggs of his phantasies upon their backs up among the clouds.[52]All in an instant, down drops the winged mate, as if by magic, with a green gleam, on to a clod of earth. I admit that this is but an excellence the more; it makes them resemble the hens, whose eyes the Great Optician of the Universe has made so perfect that they can see the most distant sparrow-hawk in the sky as well as the nearest grain of malt on the dunghill. It is to be hoped, indeed, that the author of this story, should he ever chance to marry, may meet with a wife to whom he may be able to give readings concerning the more essential principles and dictata of psychology and astronomy without her bringing in the subject of his stockings in the middle of his loftiest and fullest flights of enthusiasm; but yet he will be well content should one possessed of moderate excellencies fall to his lot—one who shall be capable of accompanying him, side by side with him, in his flights, so far as they may extend—whose eyes and heart may be wide enough to take in the blooming earth and the shining heavens in great, grand masses at a time, and not in mere infinitesimal particles; for whom this universe shall be something higher than a nursery and a ball-room; and who, with feelings delicate and tender, and a heart both pious and wide, should be continually making her husband better and holier. The author’s fondest wishes go not beyond this.

Thus, then, while the flowers, if not the leaves, were falling fast from Firmian’s love, Lenette’s was like a rose somewhat overblown, whose beauty a touch will scatter to the earth. Her husband’s endless arguments wearied her heart at length. Moreover, she was one of those women whose loveliest blossoms remain sterile and dead, unless children troop around to enjoy them, as the flowers of the vine do not produce grapes unless frequented by bees. She belonged to this class of women also in this respect, that she was born to be the spiral mainspring of a housekeeping engine—the stage-manageress of a great household theatre. Alas! the market-value of the shares, and the state of the treasury of the said theatre are well-known to everybody—from Hamburg to Ofen.

Moreover, our couple, like phœnixes and giants, were childless: the two columns stood apart and unconnected, no fruit garlands twining about them to bind them one to another. Firmian had, in imagination, thoroughly rehearsed the character ofpère de famille, and dispatcher of invitations to be godfather, but it never came to a performance.

What was most of all effective in breaking him away from Lenette’s heart, however, was his dissimilarity to Peltzstiefel. The Schulrath had in him as much of the wearisome, the deliberately circumspect, the grave and reserved, the stiff and starched, the pompous and inflated, the heavy and the dull, as——these three lines have; but this delighted the very soul of our born housekeeper. Siebenkæs, again, was like a jerboa from morning till night. She often said to him, “I’m sure people must think you’re not quite right in the head;” to which he would answer, “And am I?” He concealed the beauty of his character behind a comedy mask, and the trodden-down heels of the buskins he always wore made his stature seem shorter than it really was. The brief drama of his own life he turned into a mere burlesque and parodied epic, and it was from higher motives than mere vain folly that he so gave himself over to grotesque performances. In the first place he delighted with a deep delight in the sense of freedom of soul, and entire absence of all conventional trammels; secondly, he found pleasure in the thought that he travestied—not imitated—the follies of his fellow-men. In acting his part he had a double enjoyment—that of comedian as well as that of the spectator. A person who puts humour into action is a satiricalimprovisatore. Every male reader understands this though no female reader does. I have often wished that I could place in the hands of a woman, looking at the white sun-ray of wisdom broken into a tinted spectrum by the prism of humour, some powerful lens which shouldburnthat spectrum back into its pristine whiteness,—but it is not to be done. The fine, delicate, womanly sense of the fit, the proper, the becoming, seems to be torn and scratched by the touch of anything angular and unpolished; these souls, so firmly welded on to the every-day, commonplace, conventional relations of things, cannot understand souls which place themselves in antagonism to these relations. And therefore it is that humorists are so rare in the hereditary kingdoms of women, courts—and in their realm of shadows, France.

Lenette could not be otherwise than much, and continually, vexed and annoyed with this whistling, singing, dancing husband of hers—a man who didn’t behave to his very clients with anything like proper professional gravity; who, sad to say—and people assured her it was a fact—often walked in circles round the gallows on the hill,—concerning whose sanity sensible people spoke very doubtfully—as to whom she complained, that you would never think, to see him, that he lived in a royal burgh, the capital of the province—and who was respectful and reserved only before one person in the world, namely, himself. Why, when maidservants, from the very best houses in the place, came in—with linen to be made up, and so on—didn’t they very often see him jump up and, without a “With your leave,” or “By your leave,” to anybody, run to his old, battered, rattling piano (it still had all its keys, and nearly as many strings), and there he would stand with a wooden yard-measure in his mouth, up which, as over a drawbridge, the notes climbed to him from the soundboard, then through the portcullis of his teeth, finally arriving at his soul by way of the Eustachian tube and the drum of the ear. He held this stork’s-beak of a yard-measure between his teeth as described in order to magnify the inaudible pianissimo of his piano into a fortissimo at its upper end. However, humour looks paler when reflected in narrative than in the vividness of reality.

That portion of earth’s surface on which these two stood was riven into two distinct islets by these continual tremblings of the soil, and these islets kept drifting steadily further and further apart. And ere long there came a serious shock of earthquake.

For the Heimlicher came on the stage again, with his plea of demurrer to Siebenkæs’s suit, in which all he demanded was justice and equity—in other words, the money which was in question, unless Siebenkæs could prove himself to be himself, that is to say, the ward, whose patrimony the Heimlicher had hitherto kept in his paternal hands and purse. This juridical Hell-river took Firmian’s breath away and struck ice-cold to his heart, though he had jumped over the three previous petitions for postponement as easily as the crowned lion over the three rivers in the Gotha coat-of-arms. The wounds which we receive from Fate soon heal, but those inflicted by the blunt and rusty torture-implement of an unjust man suppurate and take long to close. This cut, made into nerves already laid bare by so many a rude clutch and sharp tongue, caused our dear friend some severe pain; yet he had seen that the cut was coming long before it came, and had cried to his spirit, “Look out—mind your head!” Alas! there is somethingnewineverypain. He had even taken legal steps in anticipation of it. A few weeks before he had had evidence sent from Leipsic, where he had studied, to prove that he had formerly been known by the name of Leibgeber, and was, consequently, Blaise’s ward. A young notary there, of the name of Giegold, an old college friend and literary brother in arms, had done him the service of seeing all the people who had known of his Leibgeberhood—particularly a rusty, musty old tutor, who had often been present when the guardian’s register-ships came in—and a postman, who had piloted them into port, and his landlord and other well-informed persons, who all took the Jus credulitalis (or oath of conviction), and whose evidence the young lawyer forwarded to Siebenkæs (like a mountain full of precious ore); he had no great difficulty, to speak of, in paying the postage of it, as he was king of the marksmen.

With this stout club of evidence he resisted and withstood his guardian and robber.

When Blaise’s denial was lodged, the timid Lenette gave herself and the suit up for lost; poverty, lean and bare, seemed inhereyes now to enmesh them in a network of parasite ivy, and there was no other prospect for them but to perish and fall to the ground. Her first proceeding was to burst into loud abuse of Von Meyern; for as he had himself told her that his father-in-law’s three applications for delay had been the result ofhisintercession, which he had made for her sake alone, she looked upon Blaise’s plea of demurrer as being the first thorn-sucker sent forth by Rosa’s revengeful soul in return for the imprisonment and the sacking he had undergone in Firmian’s house (and half ascribed to her), and for what he had lost.

Up to the day of the shooting-match he had supposed that the husband was his enemy, but not the wife; then, however, his pleasant conceit had been embittered and proved to be groundless. But the Venner not being present to hear her reproaches, she was obliged to turn the full stream of her anger on to her husband, to whom she attributed all the blame, because of his having so wickedly and sinfully changed names with Leibgeber. He who has married a wife will be prepared to relieve me of the trouble of mentioning that it made not the slightest difference what Siebenkæs said in reply or adduced concerning Blaise’s wickedness (who, being the greatest Judas Iscariot and corn-Jew the world contained, would have robbed him just the same if his name had been Leibgeber still, and would have found out a thousand legal byepaths by which to proceed to the plundering of his ward). It had no effect. At last the following words were forced out of him: “You are quite as unjust as I should be were I to attribute this document of Blaise’s to your behaviour to the Venner.” Nothing irritates women so much as derogatory comparisons; they apply them indiscriminately, without distinction. Lenette’s ears lengthened to tongues, like those of Rumour; her husband was immediately out-bawled and unlistened to.

He was obliged to send privately to Peltzstiefel to ask where he had been so long, and why he had utterly forgotten their house; Stiefel was not even in his own house, however, but out walking, for it was a beautiful day.

“Lenette,” said Siebenkæs suddenly—he often preferred vaulting over a marsh on the leaping-pole of an idea to wading painfully across it on the long stilts of syllogism, and was anxious to banish from her memory the innocent remark which he had let slip about Rosa, and which she had so utterly misunderstood—“Lenette, I’ll tell you what we’ll do this afternoon; we’ll take a strong cup of coffee, and go and take a walk and enjoy ourselves: it is not a Sunday, but itisthe day which all the Catholics in the town keep holiday on as the feast of the Annunciation, and the weather is reallytoomagnificent. We’ll go and sit in the big upstairs room at the Rifle Club-house, as it would be a little too warm outside perhaps, and we can look down from the windows and see all the heterodox people promenading in their best clothes—and our Lutheran Stiefel among them, who knows?”

Either I am more in error than I often am, or this was a most agreeable surprise to Lenette. Coffee, in the morning the water-of-baptism and altar-wine of the fair sex, is their love-philter and their waters-of-strife in the afternoon (thelatter, however, only as regards the absent); but what a wondrous mill-stream for the setting in motion of the machinery of the ideas must an afternoon cup of coffee on a common working-day be for a woman such as Lenette, who rarely had any on other than Sunday afternoons; for before the days of the blockade of the continent it cost too much money.

A woman who is really very much delighted needs but a very short time to put on her black silk bonnet and take her big church-fan, and (contrary to all her ordinary manners and customs) bequiteready and dressed for a walk to the Rifle Club-house, even going the length of making the coffee during the process of dressing, so as to be able to take it, and the milk, with her in her hand.

Our couple set forth at two o’clock in the happiest possible frame of mind, carrying with them warm in their pockets what was to be warmed up later on in the afternoon.

Even at two o’clock, early as it was, the western and southern hills lay all beflooded with the warm evening glow with which the low December sun was bathing them, while great glaciers of cloud, ranged about the sky, cast their cheerful lights over the landscape. All about this world there beamed a beautiful brightness, which cheered and lighted up many a dark and narrow life.

Siebenkæs pointed out the eagle’s perch to Lenette while they were still at some distance from it—the alpenstock or boat-pole which had so recently helped him out of his most imminent difficulties. When they reached the Clubhouse he took her and showed her the shooter’s-stand where he had shot himself with his rifle up to the dignity of bird emperor, and out of the Frankfort-Jew’s-quarter of duns, liberating at his coronation at leastonedebtor, namely, himself. They had room and to spare to “spread themselves out” (so to speak) upstairs in the members’ hall—he at a writing-table by the right-hand window, and she with her work at another on the left.

How the coffee gave warmth to this December festival may be imagined, but not described.

Lenette put on one stocking of her husband’s after another—put them on her left arm, that is, while her right wielded the darning-needle; and as she sat, with a stocking generally quite open at the bottom, she was, as regarded one of her arms at all events, like a lady with the long, fashionable Danish mittens, with holes for the fingers. However, she did not raise these arm-stockings of hers high enough to be seen by the people walking in the upper walks, but kept nodding down her “your very humble and obedient servant” from the open window to numbers of the most genteel she-heretics as they passed, wearing her own works of art upon their heads, in honour of the Annunciation-feast; and more than one sent an obliging salute up to her roof-thatcher.

The strictest religious and political parity being established by law in Kuhschnappel, it was natural that Protestants of position should also go a-walking on this Catholic holiday. However, the advocate was perhaps enjoying himself quite as much as his wife; he went on writing his ‘Devil’s Papers,’ and at the same time feasting his gaze upon the high places, thesommitésof the landscape, if not of Kuhschnappel society.

When he first entered the room he had a most agreeable reception from a child’s trumpet, left there by accident; the paint was not quite all licked away from it, and it was the smell of this paint, more even than the squeak of the trumpet, which pleased him so very much, by recalling the vague delights of Christmases of the past: so that pleasure was heaped upon pleasure. He could rise from his satires and point out to Lenette the great rooks’ nests in the leafless trees, and the bare tables and benches in the arbours, and the invisible guests who had occupied seats of the blessed there on summer evenings, and still remembered the time, looking forward to a repetition of it; and he could draw her attention to the fields, where, late as it was in the year, volunteer gardeneresses were gathering salad for him, namely, corn salad or rampion, which he might have some of for supper if he had a mind.

And now he sat at his window, with his eyes fixed upon the hills, all flushed with the evening red, the sun growing larger as it sunk towards them. Beyond these hills lay the lands where wandered his Leibgeber, sporting away his life.

“How delightful it is, wife,” he said, “that what parts me from Leibgeber is not a mere wide level plain, with nothing but a hillock or two cropping up here and there on it, but a grand, lofty wall of mountains, behind which he stands as if behind the grating of a monastery.” This sounded to her almost as if her husband was glad that this barrier stood between them; she herself had but little liking for Leibgeber, and considered him to be a sort of coin-clipper to her husband, who cut all his angles sharper than they were by nature; however, in dubious cases like this, she was always glad to ask no questions. What hehadmeant was exactly the reverse of what she supposed; he had meant that it is good, if parted from those we love, that it should be by holy hills, because they are, as it were, lofty garden-walls, behind which we picture the flowery thickets of our Edens; whereas, on the other verge of the broadest barnfloor of a level plain we only picture to ourselves a repetition of it sloping the other way. And this applies to nations as well as to individuals. The Luneburg moors or the Marklands of Prussia will not draw even an Italian’s longing gaze towards Italy; but when a Markman in Italy sees the Apennines, his heart yearns to his German loved ones behind them.

As Firmian looked upon that sunny mountain-barrier between two severed spirits, there was that in his eyes which much resembled tears; but he only turned his chair a little away, that Lenette might ask no questions; he was well aware of his old ingrained habit of getting angry when anybody asked what brought tears to his eyes, and he strove with it. Was he not, in fact, tenderness personified to-day, only acting his comedy in the palest middle-tints before his wife, because he was delighting in the fresh-growth of this enjoyment of hers, of which he was himself the origin. It is true she did not discover the existence of this, his feeling of delicate consideration for her; but just as he was quite content when no one but himself (least of all,she) perceived that he was poking fun at her (in the most delicate manner), so was he content that she should be in utter ignorance that he was causing her a little happiness.

At last they left the spacious room, the sun now robing them in purple hues; and as they went he drew Lenette’s attention to the liquid, golden splendour shining upon the roofs of the greenhouses, and he hung himself on to the sun—at that moment cut in two by the mountain-range—that he might sink, with it, to his far-away friend. Ah! how strong is love in distance—be it distance of space, or of time, of the future or the past—ay, or that greater distance still—beyond this world! And so the evening might very well have ended in an altogether delightful manner, had not something intervened.

For some particularly ingenious evil spirit or other had taken the Heimlicher von Blaise, and so set him down, promenading in the open air, that the advocate must needs come within shooting range and hailing distance of him just on a feast of the Annunciation forgoodfolks only. When the guardian went through the proper forms of salutation—accompanying them with a smile such as, fortunately, can never be seen on a child’s face—Siebenkæs returned his salutes politely, although with a mere clutching and jerking at his hat—which he didn’t take off. Lenette tried to make amends for this, by doubling the profundity of her own bow and curtsey; but as soon as practicable she administered to her husband a garden lecture, or, rather, a gardenpalinglecture, on his always, as if on purpose, irritating his guardian whenever he had an opportunity. “Indeed, love,” he said, “I couldn’t help it. I really meant nothing of the kind to-day, of all days in the year.”

The truth of the matter, indeed, is, that Siebenkæs had sometime before complained to his wife that his hat, which was of softish felt, was getting a good deal spoiled by having to be so often taken off to people in the streets, and that he could think of nothing better than to protect it with a coat of mail in the shape of a stiff cover of green oilskin, so that when packed up in this pudding roll he might go on daily employing it in those offices of out-door politeness which men owe one to another, without ever having to take hold of the hatitselfat all. Well, the first walk he took after assuming this double hat, or hat’s hat, was to a grocer’s, where he disembowelled the inner one from its envelope and swopped it away for six pounds of coffee, which warmed the four chambers of his brain better than the hare-skin had ever done; he then went tranquilly home, with only the coadjutor hat on his head, undetected, and thenceforward bore the empty case through the streets with a secret joy that, in a sense, he now really took off hishatto nobody—with other entertaining fancies bearing on the subject of his sugar-loaf.

Of course, when he forgot—and on that day in particular, it was perhaps excusable that he did so—to support his hat-case with the necessary framework of artificial rafters, it was really almost an impossibility to take this mere shell of a hatrightOFF for purposes of salutation. The most he could do was just totouchit courteously, like an officer returning a salute; and thus, against his will, play the part of a rude and ill-bred individual.

And it so happened that just on this very day get it off he could not.

It was so ordained, however, that matters should not even resthere(as regarded our couple’s promenade), but one of the above-mentioned ingenious evil spirits changed the scene of the drama with such nimbleness, that we have a fresh combination before our eyes before we know where we are. Just in front of our wedded pair, a master tailor of the Catholic confession was taking his walk, most sprucely attired in honour of the Feast of the Annunciation, like all the rest of hispro- and CON-fession. As ill luck would have it, this tailor, being in a narrow walk, had (whether for fear of mud, or in the delight of his soul over his holiday) so elevated his coat-tails that the vertebral extremity, theos coccygis, or (shall we call it) insertion of the spinal cord, of his waistcoat, was clearly exhibited; in other words, thebackgroundof his waistcoat, which, as we know, is generally executed in colours more subdued than those used for the brighter and more prominent foreground on the chest of the wearer. “Hy! Mr.!” cried Lenette; “what are you doing with a lot of my chintz on the back of you?”

The truth was that this tailor had put aside and taken possession of so much of a nice green Augspurg chintz (sent to him by Lenette, on her becoming a queen, to make her a new body) as he considered proper and Christianly honest, calculating on the principle of “no charge for wine samples,” and this trifle of a sample had just barely sufficed to form a sober background to his pea-green waistcoat; and he had contented himself with so dim a reverse side for this waistcoat in the confident expectation that it would never be seen. However, as the tailor went on with his walk (after Lenette had shouted her query at him), as utterly unmoved as if it had nothing on earth to do withhim, the little spark of her anger became a blazing flame, and, regardless of all her husband’s winks and whispers, she cried aloud, “Why, it’s my very own chintz, that I got all the way from Augspurg; do you hear, Mr. Mowser, you’ve stolen my chintz, you blackguard, you!” Then, and not till then, the guilty chintz-robber turned round with muchsangfroid, and said, “Provethat, if you please! But, mind,I’llCHINTZ YOU, if there be such a thing as law in all Kuhschnappel.”

At this she burst into a conflagration. Her husband’s prayers and entreaties were but as wind to her. “Ey! you riff-raff,” she snapped out. “But I’ll have what’s my own—you villain!” she cried. The only reply the tailor vouchsafed to this attack was this—he simply lifted his coat-tails with both hands high above the endorsed waistcoat, and, bending a little forward, said, “There!” after which he strode slowly on, keeping at the same focal distance from her, so as to bask in her warmth as long as possible.

Siebenkæs was the most to be pitied on this rich feast day, when, in spite of all his juristic and theological exorcisms, he could not cast out this devil of discord—when by good luck his guardian angel suddenly emerged from a side path, Peltzstiefel to wit, taking his walk. Gone, so far as Lenette was concerned, were the tailor, the quarter-ell of chintz, the apple of discord, and the devil thereof; the blue of her eyes and the blush on her cheek fronted Stiefel as bright and as fresh as the blue of the evening sky and the blush on its sunset clouds. Ten ells of chintz and half that number of tailors with waistcoat-backs of it into the bargain, were to her, at that moment, feathers light as air, not worth a word or a farthing; so that Siebenkæs saw on the instant that Stiefel’s coming was as that of a regular Mount of Olives all full of mere olive-branches of peace; although for discord devils hailing from another quarter there might without difficulty be pressed from the olives on said mountain an oil which could not be poured on any fire of matrimonial difference whichStiefel’swould be the bucket to put out. If Lenette was a tender, delicate, white butterfly, silently hovering and fluttering about Peltzstiefel’s flowery path,out of doors—when she got him into her house she was an absolute Greek Psyche; and, in spite of all my partiality for her, I am bound, under pain of having all the rest discredited, to insert in this protocol a clear statement (much as I regret to do so) to the effect that on this particular evening she gave one the idea of being nothing but some clear-winged translucent soul free from all trammels of body—which, at some former time, while as yet in the body, had stood in some love-relationship to the Schulrath, but now hovered about him with upraised pinions, and fanned him with fluttering downy plumes, and which at length weary of hovering, and pleased to rest once more on the loved perch of a body, settled upon Lenette’s, there being no other feminine one at hand, and there folded its wings to rest. Such seemed Lenette. But why was she thus to-day? Stiefel’s ignorance and delight at it were great; Firmian’s very small. Before I explain it, I will say, “I pity thee, poor husband, and thee, too, poor wife. For why must the smooth flow of the stream of your life (and of our own) be always broken by sorrows or by sins, and why cannot it fall into its grave in theBlackSea, without having to pass over thirteen cataracts, like the river Dnieper?” However, the reason why Lenette on this day in particular exhibited all her heart toward Stiefel, almost bared of the cloister grating of the breast, was that she was, just on this day, so keenly suffering under her misery—her poverty. Stiefel was full of genuine, solid treasures; Firmian’s were all lacquered. I know that her Siebenkæs, whom before marriage she had loved with the calm and cool regard of a wife, would have found that she would have come to love him after marriage with the warm affection of afiancée, if he had only been able to give her the bare necessaries of life. There are hundreds of girls who bring themselves to believe that they love the man to whom they are engaged, whereas it is not till after marriage that the play becomes a reality—and that for good reasons, both metallic and physiological. In a well-filled room and kitchen, filled with a comfortable income, and twelve household labours of Hercules, Lenette would have been quite true to the advocate, though an entire philosophical society of Stiefels had sat down all round her, and would have said and thought, every hour of the day, “No more, thank you—I am helped;” but as things were, in a house and kitchen so empty as hers, the chambers of a woman’s heart grow full; in one word, no good comes of it. For a woman’s soul is by nature a beautifulfrescopainted on rooms, table-leaves, dresses, silver salvers, and household plenishing in general. A woman has a large stock of virtue, but few virtues; she needs a confined sphere and social forms, and without these flower-sticks the pure white flowers trail in the dust of the border. A man may be a citizen of the world, and if he has nothing else to put his arms round he can press the entire earthly ball to his bosom, although he can’t put his arms round much more of it than will make him a grave. But a citizenessof the world is a giantess, and goes through the world with nothing but spectators, and is nothing but a character on the stage.

I ought to have described the whole of this evening much more circumstantially than I have done, for it was upon this evening that the wheels of thevis-à-visphæton of wedded life began to smoke, as a consequence of the friction they had recently been subjected to, and threatened to break out into a blaze of the fire of jealousy. Jealousy is like Maria Theresa’s small-pox, which allowed that princess to pass with impunity through thirty hospitals, full of small-pox patients, but attacked her beneath the Crowns of Hungary and Germany. Siebenkæs had had on that of Kuhschnappel (the Bird-one) for a week or two now.

After this evening Stiefel, who took an increasing delight in sitting basking in the rays of the still rising Sun of Lenette, came oftener and oftener, and considered himself the peace-maker, not the peace-breaker.

It is now my duty to paint with the utmost minutiæ of detail the last and most important day of this year, the 31st of December, with its background and foreground all complete, and with all accessories.

Before the 31st of December arrived, of course Christmas came, a time which had to be gilt, and which turned Siebenkæs’s silver age (after the Royal shot) into a brazen and a wooden age. The money went. But, worse than that, poor Firmian had fretted, and laughed, himself into an illness. A man who has all his life, upon the upper wings of Fantasy and the lower wings of good spirits, skimmed lightly away over the tops of all the spread-net snares and the open pitfalls of life, does, if once he chances to get impaled upon the hard spines of the full-blown thistles (above the purple blossoms and the honey-vessels of which he used to hover) beat in a terrible way about him, hungry, bleeding, epileptically—a glad, happy man finds in the first sunstroke of trouble well-nigh his death-blow. To the polypus of anxiety daily growing in Siebenkæs’s heart add the effects of the work and excitement of authorship. He was very anxious to get done with his ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ at the earliest moment possible, so as to live on the price of them and carry on the law-suit besides. So that he sat through entire nights almost (and chairs as well). And in this way he wrote himself into an affection of the chest, such as the present author brought upon himself, and that, as far as he could make out, simply by excess of bountiful generosity towards the world of letters. He was attacked, just as I was, by a sudden pausing of the breath and of the action of the heart, succeeded by a blank disappearance of the spirit of life, and then by a throbbing rush of blood up to the brain; and this came on most frequently while he was sitting at his literary spinning-wheel and spool.[53]

However, not a soul offers either of us one single farthing, by way of indemnification, on account of it. It would appear to be ordained that authors are not to go down to posterity in the body, but only in the form of portraits or plaster-casts; as delicate trout are boiled before being sent away as presents, people don’t put in the laurel-sprig (which is stuck into our mouths as lemons are into the wild boar’s) until we have been killed and dished. It would be a gratification to my colleagues and to me if a reader whose heart we have moved (as well as its auricles) were only to say as much as, “Thissweetemotion ofmyheart was not produced without a hypochondriac palpitation of theirs.” We brighten and illuminate many a head which never dreams of thinking. “Yes, I have to thankthemfor this, it is true, but what is their reward? Why, pains in theirownheads—kephalalgia and neuralgia in various forms!” Ay, he ought to interrupt me in the middle of a satire like this, and cry, “Great as is the pain which his satires causeme, they causehimfar more; luckily,mypain is only mental!” Health of body only runs parallel with health of mind; it turns aside and departs from erudition, from over-much imagination, and from great profundity. All these as little indicate health of mind as corpulence, a runner’s feet, a wrestler’s arms, indicate health of body. I have often wished that all souls were bottled into their bodies as the Pyrmont water is put into its flasks. The best strength of it is allowed to escape first, because, otherwise, it would break the bottle; but it would seem that it is only in the case of colleges of cardinals (if we are to credit Gorani), cathedral chapters, &c., that this precaution is adopted, and thattheirextraordinary power of ability, which would other wise have burst their bodies up, is, as a preliminary measure, let off a good deal before they are put into bodies and sent upon earth; so that the bottles last quite well for seventy or eighty years.

With a sick mind, then, and a sick heart, without money, Siebenkæs begun the last day of the year. The day itself had put on its most beautiful summer-dress—one of Berlin blue; it was as cerulean as Krishna, or the new sect of Grahamites, or the Jews in Persia. It had had a fire lighted in the balloon-stove of the sun, and the snow, delicately candied upon the earth, melted into wintergreen, like the sugar on some cunningly-devised supper-dish, as soon as the hills were brought within reach of its warmth. The year seemed to be saying good-bye to Time as if with a cheerful warmth, attended with joyful tears. Firmian longed to run and sun himself upon the moist, green sward; but he had Professor Lang, of Baireuth, to review first.

He wrote reviews as many people offer up prayers—only in time of need. It was like the water-carrying of the Athenian, done that he might afterwards devote himself to the studies of his choice without dying of hunger. But when he was reviewing, he drew his satiric sting into its sheath, constructing his criticisms of material drawn only from his store of wax and his honey-bag. “Little authors,” he said, “are always better than their works, and great ones are worse than theirs. Why should I pardon moral failings—e.g. self-conceit—in the genius, and not in the dunce? Least of all should it be forgiven the genius. Unmerited poverty and ugliness do not deserve to be ridiculed; but they as little deserve it when theyare merited—though I am aware Cicero is against me here—for a moral fault (and consequently its punishment) can, of a certainty, not be made greater by a chance physical consequence, which sometimes follows upon it, and sometimes does not. Can it? Does an extravagant person who chances to come to poverty deserve a severer punishment than one who does not? If anything, rather the reverse.” If we apply this to bad authors, from whose own eyes their lack of merit is hidden by an impenetrable veil of self-conceit, and at whose unoffending heart the critic discharges the fury which is aroused in him by their (offending) heads, we may, indeed, direct our bitterest irony againstthe race, but theindividualwill be best instructed by means of gentleness. I think it would be the gold-test, the trial-by-crucible, of a morally great and altogether perfect scholar to give him a bad, but celebrated book to review.

For my own part, I will allow myself to be reviewed by Dr. Merkel throughout eternity if I digress again in this chapter. Firmian worked in some haste at his notice of Lang’s essay, entitled “Præmissa Historiæ Superintendentium Generalium Bairuthi non Specialium—Continuatione XX.” It was quite essential that he should get hold of a dollar or two that day, and he also longed to go and take a walk, the weather was so motherly, sohatching. The new year fell on the Saturday, and as early as the Thursday (the day before the one we are writing of) Lenette had begun the holding of preliminary feasts of purification (she now washed daily more and morein advanceof actual necessities); but to-day she was keeping a regular feast of in-gathering among the furniture, &c. The room was being put through a course of derivative treatment for the clearing away of all impurities. With her eye on herindex expurgandorum, she thrust everything that had wooden legs into the water, and followed it herself with balls of soap; in short, she paddled and bubbled, in the Levitical purification of the room, in her warm, native element, for once in her life to her heart’s full content. As for Siebenkæs, he sat bolt-upright in purgatorial fire, already beginning to emit a smell of burning.

For, as it happened, he was rather madder than usual that day, to begin with. Firstly, because he had made up his mind that he would pawn the striped calico-gown in the afternoon, though whole nunneries were to shriek their loudest at it, and because he foresaw that he would have to grow exceedingly warm in consequence. And this resolve of resolves he had taken on this particular day, because (and this is at the same time the second reason why he was madder than usual)—because he was sorry that their good days were all gone again, and that their music of the spheres had all been marred by Lenette’s funereal Misereres.

“Wife!” he said, “I’m reviewing for money now, recollect.” She went on with her scraping. “I have got Professor Lang before me here—the seventh chapter of him, in which he treats of the sixth of the Superintendents-General of Bayreuth, Herr Stockfleth.” She was going to stop in a minute or two, but just then, you know, she reallycouldNOT. Women are fond of doing everything “by and bye”—they like putting a thing off just for a minute or two, which is the reason why they put off even their arrival in this world a few minutes longer than boys do.[54]“This essay,” he continued, with forced calmness, “ought to have been reviewed in the ‘Messenger’ six months ago, and it’ll never do for the ‘Messenger’ to be like the ‘Universal German Library’ and the Pope, and canonise people a century or so after date.”

If he had only been able to maintain his forced calmness for one minute longer, he would have got to the end of Lenette’s buzzing din; however, he couldn’t. “Oh! the devil take me, and you, too, and the ‘Messenger of the Gods’ into the bargain,” he burst out, starting up and dashing his pen on the floor. “I don’t know,” he went on, suddenly resuming his self-control, speaking in a faint, piteous tone, and sitting down, quite unnerved, feeling something like a man with cupping-glasses on all over him—“I don’t know a bit what I’m translating, or whether I’m writing Stockfleth or Lang. What a stupid arrangement it is that an advocate mayn’t be as deaf as a judge. If I were deaf, I should be exempt from torture then. Do you know how many people it takes to constitute a tumult by law? Either ten, or you by yourself in that washing academy of music of yours.” He was not so much inclined to be reasonable as to do as the Spanish innkeeper did, who charged the noise made by his guests in the bill. But now, having had her way, and gained her point, she was noiseless in word and deed.

He finished his critique in the forenoon, and sent it to Stiefel, his chief, who wrote back that he would bring the money for it himself in the evening, for he now seized upon every possible opportunity of paying a visit. At dinner Firmian (in whose head the sultry, fœtid vapour of ill-temper would not dissolve and fall), said, “I can’t understand how you come to care so very little about cleanliness and order. It would be better even if you ratheroverdidyour cleanliness than otherwise. People say, what a pity it is such an orderly man as Siebenkæs should have such a slovenly kind of wife!” To irony of this sort, though she knew quite well itwasirony, she always opposed regular formal arguments. He could never get her to enjoy these little jests instead of arguing about them, or join him in laughing at the masculine view of the question. The fact is, a woman abandons her opinion as soon as her husband adopts it. Even in church, the women sing the tunes an octave higher than the men that they may differ from them in all things.

In the afternoon the great, the momentous, hour approached in which the ostracism, the banishment from house and home, of the checked calico gown was at last to be carried out—the last and greatest deed of the year 1785. Of this signal for fight, this Timour’s and Muhammed’s red battle-flag, this Ziska’s hide, which always set them by the ears, his very soul was sick: he would have been delighted if somebody would have stolen it, simply to be quit of the wearisome, threadbare idea of the wretched rag for good and all. He did not hurry himself, but introduced his petition with all the wordy prolixity of an M.P. addressing the house (at home). He asked her to guess what might be the greatest kindness, the most signal favour which she could do him on this last day of the old year. He said he had an hereditary enemy, an Anti-Christ, a dragon, living under his roof; tares sown among his wheat by an enemy, which she could pull up if she chose; and, at last, he brought the checked calico gown out of the drawer, with a kind of twilight sorrow: “This,” he said, “is the bird of prey which pursues me; the net which Satan sets to catch me; his sheep-skin my martyr-robe, my Cassim’s slipper. Dearest, do me but this one favour—send it to the pawn-shop!”

“Don’t answer just yet,” he said, gently laying his hand on her lips; “let me just remind you what a stupid parish did when the only blacksmith there was in it was going to be hanged in the village. This parish thought it preferable to condemn an innocent master-tailor or two to the gallows, because they could be better spared. Now, a woman of your good sense must surely see how much easier and better it would be to let me take away this mere piece of tailor’s stitch-work, than metal things which we eat out of every day; the mourning calico won’t be wanted, you know, as long as I’m alive.”

“I’ve seen quite clearly for a long while past,” she said, “that you’ve made up your mind to carry off my mourning dress from me, by hook or by crook, whether I will or no. But I’m not going to let you have it. Suppose I were to say to you, pawn your watch, how would you like that?” Perhaps the reason why husbands get into the way of issuing their orders in a needlessly dictatorial manner is, that they generally have little effect, but rather confirm opposition than overcome it.

“Damnation!” he cried; “that’ll do, that’s quite enough! I’m not a turkey-cock, nor a bonassus neither, to be continually driven into a frenzy by a piece of coloured rag. It goes to the pawn-shop to-day, as sure as my name’s Siebenkæs.”

“Your name is Leibgeber as well,” said she.

“Devil fly away with me, if that calico remains in this house!” said he. On which she began to cry, and lament the bitter fortune which left her nothing now, not even the very clothes for her back. When thoughtless tears fall into a seething masculine heart, they often have the effect which drops of water have when they fall upon bubbling molten copper; the fluid mass bursts asunder with a great explosion.

“Heavenly, kind, gentle Devil,” said he, “do please come and break my neck for me. May God have pity on a woman like this! Very well, then, keep your calico; keep this Lenten altar-cloth of yours to yourself. But may the Devil fly away with me if I don’t cock the old deer’s horns that belonged to my father on to my head this very day, like a poacher on the pillory, and hawk them about the streets for sale in broad daylight. Ay.I give you my word of honourit shall be done, for all the fun it may afford every soul in the place. And I shall simply say that it is your doing; I’ll do it, as sure as there’s a devil in hell.”

He went, gnashing his teeth, to the window, and looked into the street, seeing vacancy. A rustic funeral was passing slowly by; the bier was a man’s shoulder, and on it tottered a child’s rude coffin.

Such a sight is a touching one, when one thinks of the little, obscure, human creature, passing over from the fœtal slumber to the slumber of death, from the amnion-membrane in this life to the shroud, that amnion-membrane of the next; whose eyes have closed at their first glimpse of this bright earth, without looking on the parents who now gaze after it with theirs so wet with tears; which has been loved without loving in return; whose little tongue moulders to dust before it has ever spoken; as does its face ere it has smiled upon this odd, contradictory, inconsistent orb of ours. These cut buds of this mould will find a stem on which great destiny will graft them, these flowers which, like some besides, close in sleep while it is still early morning, will yet feel the rays of a morning sun which will open them once more. As Firmian looked at the cold, shrouded child passing by, in this hour, when he was ignobly quarrelling about the mourning dress (which should mourn forhim)—now, when the very last drops of the old year were flowing so fast away, and his heart, now becoming so terribly accustomed to these passing fainting fits, forbade him to hope that he could ever complete the new one—now, amid all these pains and sorrows, he seemed to hear the unseen river of Death murmuring under his feet (as the Chinese lead rushing brooks under the soil of their gardens), and the thin, brittle crust of ice on which he was standing seemed as if it would soon crack and sink with him into the watery depths. Unspeakably touched, he said to Lenette, “Perhaps you may be quite right, dear, after all, to keep your mourning dress; you may have some presentiment that I am not going to live. Do as you think best, then, dear; I would fain not embitter this last of December any more; I don’t know that it may not bemylast in another sense, and that in another year I may not be nearer to that poor baby than you. I am going for a walk now.”

She said nothing; all this startled and surprised her. He hurried away, to escape the answer which was sure to come eventually; his absence would, in the circumstances, be the most eloquent kind of oratory. All persons are better than their outbreaks (or ebullitions)—that is, than theirbadones; for all are worse than theirnobleones, also—and when we allow the former an hour or so to dissipate and disperse, we gain something better than our point—we gain our opponent. He left Lenette a very grave subject for cogitation, however,—the stag’s horns and his word of honour.

I have already once written it. The winter was lying on the ground all bare and naked, not even the bed-sheet and chrisom-cloth of snow thrown over it; there it lay beside the dry, withered mummy of the by-gone summer. Firmian looked with an unsatisfied gaze athwart unclothed fields (over which the cradle-quilt of the snow, and the white crape of the frost, had not yet been laid), and down at the streams, not yet struck palsied and speechless. Bright, warm days at the end of December soften us with a sadness in which there are four or five bitter drops more than in that belonging to the after-summer. Up to twelve o’clock at night, and until the thirty-first day of the twelfth month, the wintry, nocturnal, idea of dissolution and decay oppresses us; but as soon as it is one in the morning, and the first of January, a morning breeze, speaking of new life, moves away the clouds which were lying over our souls, and we begin to look for the dark, pure, morning blue, the rising of the star of morning and of spring. On a December day like this the pale, dim, stagnant world of stiffened, sapless, plants about us oppresses and hems us round; and the insect-collections lying beneath the vegetation, covered with earth; and the rafter-work of bare, dry, wrinkly trees; the December sun hanging in the sky at noon no higher than the June sun does at evening; all these combined shed a yellow lustre as of death (like that of burning alcohol) over the pale, faded meadows; and long giant shadows lie extended, motionless, everywhere—eveningshadows of this evening of nature and of the year—like the ruined remains, the burnt-out ash-heaps of nights as long as themselves. But the glistening snow, on the other hand, spread over the blooming earth under us, is like the blue foreground of spring, or a white fog a foot or two in depth. The quiet dark sky lies above, and the white earth is like some white moon, whose sparkling ice-fields melt, as we draw nearer, into dark waving meadows of flowers.

The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet as he stood upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of nature. The daily-recurring pausings of his heart and pulse were (he thought) the sudden silences of the storm-bell in his breast, presaging a speedy end of the thunder, and dissolution of the storm-cloud, of life. He thought the faltering of his mechanism was caused by some loose pin having fallen in among the wheels somewhere; he ascribed it to polypus of the heart, and his giddiness he felt sure gave warning of an attack of apoplexy. To-day was the three hundred and sixty-fifth Act of the year, and the curtain was slowly dropping upon it already: what could this suggest to him save gloomy similes of his own epilogue—of the winter solstice of his shortened, over-shadowed life? The weeping image of his Lenette came now before his forgiving, departing soul, and he thought, “She is really not in the right; but I will yield to her, as we have not very long to be together now. I am glad for her sake, poor soul, thatmyarms are mouldering away from about her, and that her friend is taking her to his.”

He went up on to the scaffold of blood and sorrow wherehisfriend, Heinrich, had taken his farewell. From that eminence, as often as his heart was heavy, his glance would follow Leibgeber’s path as far as the hills; but to-day his eyes were moister than before, for he had no hope that he would see the spring again. This spot was to him the hill which the Emperor Adrian permitted the Jews to go up twice in the year, that they might look towards the ruins of the holy city and weep for the place wherein their steps might tread no more. The sun was now assembling the shadows which were to close in upon the old year, and as the stars appeared—the stars which rose at evening now being those which in spring adorn the morning—fate snapped away the loveliest and richest in flowers of the liana-branches from his soul, and from the wound flowed clear water. “I shall see nothing of the coming spring,” he thought, “except her blue, which, as in enamel-painting, is the first laid on of all her colours.” His heart—one educated to be loving—could always fly for rest from his satires and from dry details of business-duty, sometimes, too, from Lenette’s indifference and lack of sympathy, to the warm breast of the eternal goddess Nature, ever ready to take us to her heart. Into the free, unveiled, and blooming out-door world, beneath the grand wide sky, he loved to repair with all his sighs and sorrows, and in this great garden he made all his graves (as the Jews made them in smaller ones). And when our fellows forsake and wound us, the sky and the earth, and the little blooming tree, open their arms and take us into them; the flowers press themselves to our wounded hearts, the streams mingle in our tears, and the breezes breathe coolness into our sighs. A mighty angel troubles and inspires the great ocean-pool of Bethesda; into its warm waves we plunge, with all our thousand aches and pains, and ascend from the water of life with our spasms all relaxed and our health and vigour renewed once more.

Firmian walked slowly home with a heart all conciliation, and eyes which, now that it was dark, he did not take the pains to dry. He went over in his mind everything which could possibly be adduced in his Lenette’s excuse. He strove to win himself over to her side of the question by reflecting that she could not (like him) arm herself against the shocks, the stumbling-stones, of life by putting on the Minerva’s helm, the armour of meditation, philosophy, authorship. He thoroughly determined (he had determined the same thing thirty times before) to be as scrupulously careful to observe in all things the outsidepolitessesof life withheras with the most absolute stranger;[55]nay, he already enveloped himself in the fly-net or mail-shirt of patience, in case he should really find the checked calico untranslated at home. This is how we men continually behave—stopping our ears tight with both hands, trying our hardest to fall into the siesta, the mid-day sleep, of a little peace of mind (if we can only anyhow manage it); thus do our souls, swayed by our passions, reflect the sunlight of truth as one dazzling spot (like mirrors or calm water), while all the surrounding surface lies but in deeper shade.

How differently all fell out! He was received by Peltzstiefel, who advanced to meet him, all solemnity of deportment, and with a church-visitation countenance full of inspection-sermons. Lenette scarcely turned her swollen eyes towards the windward side of her husband as he came in at the door. Stiefel kept the strings tight which held the muscles of his knit face, lest it might unbend before Firmian’s, which was all beaming soft with kindliness, and thus commenced: “Mr. Siebenkæs, I came to this house to hand you the money for your review of Professor Lang; but friendship demands of me a duty of a far more serious and important kind, that I should exhort you and constrain you to conduct yourself towards this poor unfortunate wife of yours here like a true Christian man to a true Christian woman.” “Or even better, if you like,” he said. “What is it all about, wife?” She preserved an embarrassed silence. She had asked Stiefel’s advice and assistance, less for the sake of obtaining them than to have an opportunity of telling her story. The truth was, that when the Schulrath came unexpectedly in, while her burst of crying was at its bitterest, she had really just that very moment sent her checked, spiny, outer caterpillar-skin (the calico-dress, to wit) away to the pawnshop; for her husband having pledged his honour, she felt sure that, beyond a doubt, he would stick those preposterous horns on his head and really go and hawk them, all over the town, for she well knew how sacredly he kept his word, and also how utterly he disregarded “appearances,”—and that both of these peculiarities of his were always at their fellest pitch at a time of domestic difficulty like the present. Perhaps she would have told her ghostly counsellor and adviser nothing about the matter, but contented herself with having a good cry when he came, if she had had her way (and her dress); but, having sacrificed both, she needed compensation and revenge. At first she had merely reckoned up difficulties in indeterminate quantities to him; but when he pressed her more closely, her bursting heart overflowed andallher woes streamed forth. Stiefel, contrarily to the laws of equity (and of several universities), always held the complainant in any case to be in the right, simply because he spokefirst: most men think impartiality of heart is impartiality of head. Stiefel swore that he would tell her husband what he ought to be told, and that the calico should be back in the house that very afternoon.

So this father-confessor began to jingle his bunch of binding-and-loosing keys in the advocate’s face, and reported to him his wife’s general confession and the pawning of the dress. When there are two diverse actions of a person to be given account of—a vexatious and an agreeable one—the effect depends on which is spoken of the first; it is the first narrated one which gives the ground-tint to the listener’s mind, and the one subsequently portrayed only takes rank as a subdued accessory figure. Firmian should have heard that Lenette pawned the dressfirst, while he was still out of doors, and of her tale-bearing not till afterwards. But you see how the devil brought it about, as it really did all happen. “What!” (Siebenkæsfelt, if not exactlythought) “What! She makes my rival her confidant and my judge! I bring her home a heart all kindness and reconciliation, and she makes a fresh cut in it at once, distressing and annoying me in this way, on the very last day of the year, with her confounded chattering and tale-telling.” By this last expression he meant something which the reader does not yet quite understand; for I have not yet told him that Lenette had the bad habit of being—rather ill-bred; wherefore she made common people of her own sex, such as the bookbinder’s wife, the recipients of her secret thoughts—the electric discharging-rods of her little atmospheric disturbances; while, at the same time, she took it ill of her husband that, though he did not, indeed, admit serving-men and maids and “the vulgar” into his own mysteries, he yet accompanied them into theirs.

Stiefel (like all people who have little knowledge of the world, and are not gifted with much tact,—who never assume anything as granted in the first place, but always go through every subjectab initio)—now delivered a long, theological, matrimonial-service sort of exhortation concerning love as between Christian husband and wife, and ended by insisting on the recall of the calico (his Necker, so to say). This address irritated Firmian, and that chiefly because (irrespectively ofit) his wife thought he had not any religion, or, at all events, not so much as Stiefel. “I remember” (he said) “seeing in the history of France that Gaston, the first prince of the blood, having caused his brother some little difficulties or other of the warlike sort on one occasion, in the subsequent treaty of peace bound himself, in a special article, to love Cardinal Richelieu. Now I think there’s no question but that an article to the effect that man and wife shall love one another ought to be inserted as a distinct, separate, secret clause, in all contracts of marriage; for though love, like man himself, is by origin eternal and immortal, yet, thanks to the wiles of the serpent, it certainly becomes mortal enough within a short time. But, as far as the calico’s concerned, let’s all thank God thatthatapple of discord has been pitched out of the house.” Stiefel, by way of offering up a sacrifice, and burning a little incense before the shrine of his beloved Lenette,insistedon the return of the calico, and did so very firmly; for Siebenkæs’s gentle, complaisant readiness to yield to him, up to this point, in little matters of sacrifice and service, had led him to entertain the deluded idea that he possessed an irresistible authority over him. The husband, a good deal agitated now, said, “We’ll drop the subject, if you please.” “Indeed, we’ll do nothing of the kind,” said Stiefel; “I must reallyinsistupon it that your wife has her dress back.” “It can’t be done, Herr Schulrath.” “I’ll advance you whatever money you require,” cried Stiefel, in a fever of indignation at this striking and unwonted piece of disobedience. It was now, of course, more impossible than ever for the advocate to retire from his position; he shook his head eighty times. “Eitheryouare out of your mind,” said Stiefel, “orIam; just let me go through my reasons to you once more.” “Advocates,” said Siebenkæs, “werefortunate enough, in former times, to have private chaplains of their own; but it was found that there was no converting any of them, and therefore they are now exempt from being preached at.”

Lenette wept more bitterly—Stiefel shouted the louder on that account; in his annoyance at his ill success, he thought it well to repeat his commands in a ruder and blunter form; of course Siebenkæs resisted more firmly. Stiefel was a pedant, a class of men which surpasses all others in a bare-faced, blind, self-conceit, just like an unceasing wind blowing from all the points of the compass at once (for a pedant even makes an ostentatious display of his own personal idiosyncrasies). Stiefel, like a careful and conscientious player, felt it a duty to thoroughly throw himself into the part he was representing, and carry it out in all its details, and say, “Either” “Or” Mr. Siebenkæs; “either the mourning gown comes, orIgo,aut-aut. My visits cannot be of much consequence, it’s true, still they have I consider, a certain value, if it were but on Mrs. Siebenkæs’s account.” Firmian, doubly irritated, firstly at the imperious rudeness and conceit of an alternative of the sort, and secondly at the lowness of the market price for which the Rath abandoned their society, could but say, “Nobody can influence your decision on that point now but yourself.Imost certainly cannot. It will be an easy matter for you, Herr Schulrath, to give up our acquaintance—though there is no real reason why you should—but it will not be easy for me to give up yours, although I shall have no choice.” Stiefel, from whose brow the sprouting laurels were thus so unexpectedly shorn—and that, too, in the presence of the woman he loved—had nothing to do but take his leave; but he did it with three thoughts gnawing at his heart—his vanity was hurt, his dear Lenette was crying, and her husband was rebellious and insubordinate, and resisting his authority.

And as the Schulrath said farewell for ever, a bitter, bitter sorrow stood fixed in the eyes of his beloved Lenette—a sorrow which, though the hand of time has long since covered it over, I still see there in its fixity; and she could not go down stairs, as at other times, with her sorrowing friend, but went back into the dark, unlighted room, alone with her overflowing breaking heart.

Firmian’s heart laid aside its hardness, though not its coldness, at the sight of his persecuted wife in her dry, stony grief at this falling to ruin of every one of her little plans and joys; and he did not add to her sorrow by a single word of reproach. “You see,” was all he said, “that it is no fault of mine that the Schulrath gives up our acquaintance; he ought never to have been told anything about the matter,—however, it’s all over now.” She made no reply. The hornet’s sting (which makes a triple stab), the dagger, thrown as by some revengeful Italian, was left sticking firm in her wound, which therefore could not bleed. Ah! poor soul; thou hast deprived thyself of so much! Firmian, however, could not see that he had anything to accuse himself of; he being the gentlest, the most yielding of men under the sun, always ruffled all the feathers on his body up with a rustle in an instant at the slightest touch ofcompulsion, most especially if it concerned his honour. Hewouldaccept a present, it is true, but only from Leibgeber, or (on rare occasions) from others in the warmest hours of soul communion; and his friend and he both held the opinion that, in friendship, not only was a farthing of quite as much value as a sovereign, but that a sovereign was worth just as little as a farthing, and that one is bound to accept the most splendid presents just as readily as the most trifling; and hence he counted it among the unrecognised blessings of childhood that children can receive gifts without any feeling of shame.

In a mental torpor he now sat down in the arm-chair, and covered his eyes with his hand; and then the mists which hid the future all rolled away, and showed in it a wide dreary tract of country, full of the black ashy ruins of burnt homesteads, and of dead bushes of underwood, and the skeletons of beasts lying in the sand. He saw that the chasm, or landslip, which had torn his heart and Lenette’s asunder, would go on gaping wider and wider; he saw, oh! so clearly and cheerlessly, that his old beautiful love would never come back, that Lenette would never lay aside her self-willed pertinacity, her whims, the habits of her daily life; that the narrow limits of her heart and head would remain fixed firmly for ever; that she would as little learn to understand him, as get to love him; while, again, her repugnance to him would get the greater the longer her friend’s banishment endured, and that her fondness for the latter would increase in proportion. Stiefel’s money, and his seriousness, and religion, and attachment to herself combined to tear in two the galling bond of wedlock by the pressure of a more complex and gentle tie. Sorrowfully did Siebenkæs gaze into a long prospect of dreary days, all constrained silence, and dumb hostility and complaint.

Lenette was working in her room in silence, for her wounded heart shrunk from a word or a look as from a cold fierce wind. It was now very dark, she wanted no light. On a sudden, a wandering street-singing woman began to play a harp, and her child to accompany her on a flute, somewhere in the house downstairs. At this our friend’s bursting heart seemed to have a thousand gashes inflicted on it to let it bleed gently away. As nightingales love to sing where there is an echo, so our hearts speak loudest to music. As these tones brought back to him his old hopes, almost irrecognisable now,—as he gazed down at his Arcadia now lying hidden deep, deep, beneath the stream of years, and saw himself down in it, with all his young fresh wishes, amid his long lost friends, gazing with happy eyes round their circle, all confidence and trust, his growing heart hoarding and cherishing its love and truth for some warm heart yet to be met in the time to come: and as he now burst into that music with a dissonance, crying, “And I have never found that heart, and now all is past and over,” and as the pitiless tones brought pictures of blossomy springs and flowery lands, and circles of loving friends to pass, as in a camera obscura, before him—himwho had nothing, not one soul in all the land to love him; his steadfast spirit gave way at last, and sank down on earth to rest as quite overdone, and nothing soothed him now but that which pained. Suddenly this sleep-walking music ceased, and the pause clutched, like a speechless nightmare, tighter at his heart. In the silence he went into the room and said to Lenette, “Take them down what little we have left.” But over the latter words his voice broke and failed, for he saw (by the flare of some potash-burning which was going on opposite) that all her glowing face was covered with streaming, undried tears, though when he came in she pretended to be busily wiping the windowpane dimmed by her breath. She laid the money down on the window. He said, more gently yet, “Lenette, you will have to take it to them now, or they will be gone.” She took it; her eyes worn with weeping met his (which were worn with weeping too); she went, and then their eyes grew well-nigh dry, so far apart were their two souls already.

They were suffering in that terrible position of circumstances when not even a moment of mutual and reciprocal emotion can any longer reconcile and warm two hearts. His whole heart swelled with overflowing affection, but hers belonged to his no more; he was urged at once by the wish to love her, and the feeling that it was now impossible, by the perception of all her shortcomings and the conviction of her indifference to him. He sat down in the window seat, and leaned his head upon the sill, where it rested, as it chanced, upon a handkerchief which she had left there, and which was moist and cold with tears. She had been solacing herself after the long oppression of the day, with this gentle effusion, much as we have a vein opened after some severe contusion. When he touched the handkerchief, an icy shudder crept down his back, like a sting of conscience, but immediately after it there came a burning glow as the thought flashed to his mind that her weeping had been for another person than himself altogether. The singing and the flute now began again (without the harp this time), and floated in the rising, falling waves, of a slow-timed song, of which the verses ended always with the words, “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.” Sorrow now clutched him in her grasp, like some mantle-fish, casting around him her dark and suffocating folds. He pressed Lenette’s wet handkerchief to his eyes hard, and heard (but less distinctly), “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.” Then of a sudden his whole soul melted and dissolved at the thought that perhaps that halting heart of his would let him see no other new year save that of the morrow, and he thought of himself as dying; and the cold handkerchief, wet with his own tears now as well as hers, lay cool upon his burning brow, while the notes of the music seemed to mark like bells each stroke of time, so that its rapid flight was made distinguishable by the ear, and he saw himself asleep in a quiet grave, like one in the Grotto of the Serpents, but with worms in place of the serpents, licking off the burning poison of life.

The music had ceased. He heard Lenette moving in the next room and getting a light; he went to her and gave her her handkerchief. But his heart was so pained and bleeding that he longed to embrace some one, no matter whom; he was impelled to press his Lenette to his heart, his Lenette ofthe pastif not ofthe present, hissuffering, if no longer his loving, Lenette; at the same time he could not utter one word of affection, neither had he the slightest wish to do so. He put his arms round her slowly, unbent, and held her to him, but she turned her head quickly and coldly away as from a kiss which was not proffered. This pained him greatly, and he said, “Do you suppose I am any happier than you are yourself?” He laid his face down on her averted head, pressed her to him again, and then let her away; and this vain embrace at an end, his heart cried, “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.”

The silent room in which the music and the words had ceased to sound was like some unhappy village from whence the enemy has carried off all the bells, and where there is nothing but silence all the day and night, and the church tower is mute as if time itself were past.

As Firmian laid him down on his bed, he thought, “A sleep closes the old year as if it were one’s last, and ushers in the new as it does, our own lives; and I sleep on towards a future all anxiety, vague of form, and darkly veiled. Thus does man sleep at the gate behind which the dreams are barred; but although his dreams are but a step or two—a minute or two—within that gate, he cannot tellwhatdreams await him at its opening; whether in the brief unconscious night beasts of prey with glaring eyes are lying in wait to dash upon him, or smiling children to come trooping round him in their play; nor if, when the cloudy shapes beyond that mystic door come about him, their clasp is to be the fond embrace of love, or the murderous clutch of death.”

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