CHAPTER II.HOME FUN—SUNDRY FORMAL CALLS—THE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE—A LOVE QUARREL, AND A FEW HARD WORDS—ANTIPATHETIC INK ON THE WALL—FRIENDSHIP OF THE SATIRISTS—GOVERNMENT OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.There is many a life which is as pleasant to live as to write, and the material of this one, in particular, which I am engaged in writing, is as yet always giving out, like rosewood on the turning lathe, a truly delicious perfume, all over my workshop. Siebenkæs duly arose on the Wednesday, but not till the Sunday was it his intention to deposit in the hands of his diligent house goddess—who put a cap on to her cap-block in the morning before she put one on to herself—the silver ingots from his guardian’s coffer (wrapped in blotting paper), her palisades of refuge in the siege of this life; for in fact he couldn’t do so any sooner, because his guardian had gone into the country, that is to say, out of town, till the Saturday night. “I can give you no notion, old Leibgeber,” said Siebenkæs, “what a joy I feel in looking forward to how this will delight my wife. I’m sure, to give her pleasure, I could wish it were three thousand dollars. The dear child has always hitherto had to live from bonnet to bonnet, but how shewillconsider herself a woman set up on a sudden for life, when she finds she can carry out a hundred housekeeping projects, which, I see as well as possible, she has got in her head already. And then, old boy, with the money in our hands, we shall begin the keeping of my silver wedding directly, the moment the evening service is over—there shall be a good half-florin’s worth of beer in every room in the house. Look here! why shouldn’t the dove, or call him the sparrow, ofmyhymen play out beer on the people as the two-headed eagle in Frankfort does wine at a coronation?” Leibgeber answered, “The reason he can’t is, that the prey he catches is of quite another brand. The sour wine (of the Frankfort eagle) is but the grapeskins—the feathers, the wool, and the hair which eagles always eject.”It would be of no use whatever—because hundreds of Kuhschnappelers would correct my statement in their local paper, the ‘Imperial News’—if I were to tell a falsehood here (which I should like very much to do), and assert that the two advocates spent the short week of their being together with that gravity and propriety which, becoming as they are to mankind in general, do yet more particularly secure to scholars and to the learned the respect and consideration of commoner minds, to say nothing of the Kuhschnappelian intelligences.Unfortunately I have got to sing to another tune. In the town of Kuhschnappel, as in all other towns, provincial, or metropolitan, what Leibgeber was least of all conspicuous for was a proper gravity of deportment and behaviour. Here, as elsewhere, his first proceeding was to get an introduction to the club, as a stranger artist, in order that he might ensconce himself on a sofa, and, without uttering a word or a syllable to a human being, go to sleep under the noses of the company of the “Relaxation” as the club was called. “This,” he said, “was what he liked to have the opportunity of doing in all towns where there were clubs, casinos, museums, musical societies, &c.; because to sleep in any rational manner at night in one’s ordinary quiet bed was a thing whichhe, at least, found he was seldom able to manage, on account of the loud battle of ideas which went on in his head, and the firework trains of processions of pictures all interweaving and whirling in and out with such a crash and a din that one could hardly see or hear one’s self. Whereas when one lies down upon a club sofa, everything of this sort quiets itself down, and a universal truce of ideas establishes itself; the delicious effect of the company all talking at once—the happily chosen and appropriate words contributed to the political-and-other-conversation-picnic, of which one distinguishes nothing but anultima, perhaps, or sometimes only anantepenultima; this alone sings you into a light slumber. But when a more serious discussion arises, and some point is argued, disputed and discussed in all its bearings in a universal clamorous shout—your barometer becomes completely stationary, and you sleep the deep sleep of a flower which is rocked, but not awakened, by the storm.”One or two towns with which I am acquainted must, I am sure, remember a stranger who always used to go to sleep in their clubs, and must also recollect the beaming expression of countenance with which he would look about him when he got up and took his hat, as much as to say, “Many thanks for this refreshing rest.”However, I have little to do with Leibgeber’s waking or with his sleeping here in Kuhschnappel; him I may treat with some indulgence, seeing that he is soon to be off again into the wide world. But it is anything but a matter of indifference that my young hero, just established here with his wife, and whose pranks I have undertaken to give some account of, as well as of the hits he gets in return, should go and conduct himself just as if his name was Leibgeber; which had long ceased to be the case, seeing that he had given formal notice to his guardian that he had changed it to Siebenkæs.To mention but one prank—was it not a piece of true tomfoolery that, when the procession of poor scholars, singing for alms about the streets, were just beginning their usual begging hymn under the windows of the best religious families on the opposite side of the street, and just as they had struck their key-note and were going to start off with their chorus, Leibgeber, to begin with, made his boar-hound “Saufinder” (he couldn’t live without a big dog) look out of window with a fashionable lady’s night-cap on his head? And was it by any means a soberer proceeding on Siebenkæs’s part, that he took lemons and bit into them before the eyes of the whole singing class, so that all their teeth begun to water in an instant? The result will answer these questions for itself. The singers, having Saufinder in his night-cap in full view, could no more bring their lips together into a singing position than a man can whistle and laugh at the same instant. At the same time all their vocal apparatus being completely submerged by the opening of their glands, every note they attempted to give out had to wade painfully through water. In short, was this entire ludicrous interruption of the whole company of street singers not the precise end aimed at by both the advocates?But Siebenkæs has only recently come back from college, and being still half-full of the freedom of university life, may be excused a liberty or two. And indeed I consider the little exuberances of university youth to be like the adipose matter, which, according to Reaumur, Bonnet, and Cuvier, is stored up by the caterpillar for the nourishment of the future butterfly during its chrysalis state; the liberty of manhood has to be alimented by that of youth, and if a son of the muse has not room given him to develop in full freedom, he will never develop into anything but some office-holder creeping along on all fours.Meanwhile the two friends spent the following days—not wholly in a disorderly manner—in the writing of marriage cards. With these, on which of course there was nothing but the words, “Mr. Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs, Poor’s Advocate, and his wife,néeEngelkraut; with compliments.”—with these papers, and with the lady, they were both to drive about the town on the Saturday, and Leibgeber had to get down at all the respectable houses and hand in a card, which is by no means otherwise than a laudable and befitting custom in towns where people observe the usages of good society. But the two brethren, Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, appeared to follow these usages of imperial and rural towns more from satirical motives than anything else, conforming to them pretty minutely, it is true, but clearly chiefly for the fun of the thing, each of them playing the part of first low comedian and of audience at the same time. It would be an insult to the borough of Kuhschnappel to suppose that, notwithstanding Siebenkæs’s zealous readiness to join in all the processions of the little place, in and out of churches, to the town hall and the shooting-ground, it was wholly unobservant of the satisfaction which it afforded him rather to make fun of some properly ordered cortége, and mar the effect of it by his unsuitable dress and absurd behaviour, than to be an ornament to it. And the genuine eagerness with which he tried to get admitted as a member of the Kuhschnappel shooting-club was ascribed rather to his love of a joke than to his being the son of a keen sportsman. As for Leibgeber, he of course has the very devil in him as regards all such matters; but he is younger than Siebenkæs, and about to set out on his travels.So they drove about the town on the Saturday—and where anybody in the shape of a grandee lived they stopped, left their passengers’ tickets and drove on, without any misbehaviour. Many ladies and gentlemen, it is true, got the wrong sow by the ear, and confounded the card carrier with the young husband sitting in the carriage; but the card carrier maintained his gravity, knowing that fun has its own proper time. The cards (some of which were glazed) were delivered according to the directory, firstly to the members of the government, both of the greater and lesser council—to the seventy members of the greater, and the thirteen of the lesser council; consequently the judge, the treasurer, the two finance councillors, the Heimlicher (so to say, tribune of the people) and the remaining eight ordinary members—these constituting the said lesser council—each received his card. After which the carriage drove down lower, and provided the minor government officials in the various chambers and offices withtheircards, such as the Offices of Woods, of the Game Commissioners, the Office of Reform (which latter was for the repression of luxury), and the Meat Tax Commission, which was presided over by a single master butcher, a very nice old man.I am much afraid I have made a considerable slip, inasmuch as I have drawn up no tables relative to the constitution, &c., of this imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (which is properly a small imperial town, though it was once a large one) to lay before the learned and statistical world. However, I can’t possibly pull up here in the full gallop of my chapter, but must wait till we all get to the end of it, when I can more conveniently open my statistical warehouse.The wheel of fortune soon began to rattle, and throw up mud; for when Leibgeber took his eighth part of a placard of Siebenkæs’s marriage to the house of his guardian, the Heimlicher von Blaise, a tall, meagre, barge-pole of a woman, wrapped up in wimples of calico, the Heimlicher’s wife, received it indeed, and with warmth, but warmth of the sort with which we generally administer a cudgelling; moreover, she uttered the following words (calculated to give rise to reflection)—“My husband is the Heimlicher of this town, and what is more, he’s away from home. He has nothing to do with seven cheeses;[13]he is tutor and guardian to persons belonging to the highest and noblest families. You had better be off as fast as you like; you’ve got hold of the wrong man here.”“I quite think we have, myself,” said Leibgeber.Siebenkæs, the ward, here tried to pacify his letter or paper carrier with the woman a little, by suggesting that, like every good dog, she was but barking at the strangers before fetching and carrying for them: and when his friend, more anxious than himself, said, “You’re quite sure, are you not, that you took proper legal precautions against any venomous ‘objections’ which the guardian might make to paying up your money, on account of your changing your name?” he assured him, that before he had established himself as Siebenkæs, he had procured his guardian’s opinion and approval in writing, which he would show him when they got home.But when they did get home, Von Blaise’s letter was nowhere to be found—it wasn’t in any of the boxes, nor in any of the college note-books, nor even among the wastepaper—in fact, there was nothing of the kind.“But what a donkey I am to bother about it!” cried Siebenkæs, “what do I require it for, at all?”Here Leibgeber, who had been glancing at the Saturday newspapers, suddenly shoved them into his pocket, and said in a somewhat unwonted tone of voice, “Come out, old boy, and let’s have a run in the fields.” When they got there, he put into his hands the ‘Schaffhausen News,’ the ‘Swabian Mercury,’ the ‘Stuttgart Times,’ and the ‘Erlangen Gazette,’ and said, “These will enable you to form some idea of the sort of scoundrel you have for a guardian.”In each of these newspapers, the following notification appeared:—“Whereas, Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, now in his 29th year, proceeded to the University of Leipzig in 1774, but since that date has not been heard of: now the said Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, is hereby, at the instance of his cousin, Herr Heimlicher von Blaise, edictally cited and summoned by himself or the lawful heirs of his body, within six months from the date of these presents (whereof two months are hereby constituted the first term, two months the second, and two months the third and peremptory term), to appear within the Inheritance Office of this borough, and, on satisfactory proof of identity, to receive over the sum of 1200 Rhenish gulden deposited in the hands of the said Heimlicher von Blaise as trustee and guardian;which failing, that, as directed by the decree of council of 24th July 1655 (which enacts, that any person who shall be for ten years absent from the realm, shall be takenpro mortuo), the above-named sum of 1200 Rhenish florins may be made over and paid to his said guardian and trustee, the aforesaid Heimlicher von Blaise. Dated at Kuhschnappel in Swabia, the 20th August, 1785.“Inheritance Office of the free Imperial Borough of Kuhschnappel.”It is unnecessary to remind the legal reader that the decree of council referred to is not in accordance with the legal usage of Bohemia, where thirty-one years is the stipulated period, but with that which formerly prevailed in France, when ten years were sufficient. And when the advocate came to the end of the notice, and stared, motionless, at its concluding lines, his soul’s brother took hold of his hand, and cried, “Alas! alas! it is I who am to blame for all this, for changing names with you.”“You?—oh, you? The devil alone, and nobody else. But I must find that letter,” he said, and they made another search all over the house, in every corner where a letter could be. After an hour of this Leibgeber hunted out one with a broken seal of the guardian, of which the thick paper, and the broad legal fold, without an envelope, told unmistakeably that it had been addressed neither by a lady, a merchant, nor courtier, but by the quill of a bird of quite a different tribe. However, there was nothinginthis letter, except Siebenkæs’s name in Siebenkæs’s own writing—not another word, outside or inside. Quite natural; for the advocate had a bad habit of trying his hand and his pen on the backs of letters, and writing his own name and other people’s as well, with flourishes about them.The letterhadonce been written in the inside, but, to save an incredible waste of good paper, the Heimlicher von Blaise had written his concurrence in the exchange of the names with an ink which vanishes from the paper of itself, and leaves it,in integrum, white as it was before it was written on.I may, perhaps, be doing a chance service to many persons of the better classes, who nowadays more than ever have occasion to write promissory notes and other business documents, if I here copy out for them the receipt for this ink which vanishes after it is dry; I take it from a reliable source. Let the man of rank scrape off the surface from a piece of fine black cloth, such as he wears at court—grind the scrapings finer still on a piece of marble—moisten this fine cloth dust repeatedly with water, then make his ink with this, and write his promissory note with it; he will find that, as soon as the moisture has evaporated, every letter of the promissory note has flown away with it in the form of dust; the white star will have shone out, as it were, through the blackness of the ink.But I consider that I am doing an equal service to the holders and presenters of such promissory notes as to the drawers of them, inasmuch as, for the future, they will be careful not to be satisfied with a security of this description, till they have exposed it for some time to the sun.Some time ago, I should have here been apt to confound this cloth ink with thesympatheticink (likewise possessing the property of turning pale and disappearing after a time), which is commonly made use of in both the preliminary and final treaties entered into between royal persons; the latter however, has aredtint. A treaty of peace of three years’ standing is no longer legible to a man in the prime of life, because theredink—theencaustum, with which formerly no one but the Roman emperors might write—is too apt to turnpale, unless a sufficient number of human beings (from whom, as from the cochineal insect, this dye stuff is prepared) have been made use of in its manufacture; and this (from motives of sordid parsimony) is not always the case. So that the treaty has frequently to be engraved and etched into the territory afresh with good instruments—the so-called “instruments of peace”—at the point of the bayonet.The two friends kept the happy young wife in ignorance of this first thunderclap of the storm which was threatening her married life. On the Sunday morning they went to make a friendly call on the Heimlicher during the church service; unfortunately he was at church, however. They postponed their entertaining visit till the afternoon; but then he himself was paying one to the chapel of the orphan asylum, the whole blooming body of the orphans, boys and girls, having previously made one to him, to enjoy the privilege of kissing his hand in his capacity of superintendent of the orphan asylum; for the inspectorship of that institution was, as he modestly but truly observed, entrusted to his unworthy hands. After the evening sermon, he had to perform a service of his own in his own house, in short, he was fenced off from the two advocates by a triple row of spiritual altar rails. It was his admirable custom to permit the members of his household, not indeed to eat, but to pray at the same table with him. He thought it well to spend the Sunday as a day of labour in psalm-singing with them, because, by such devotional exercises, he best preserved them from sins of Sabbath breaking, such as working ontheir ownaccount, at sewing, mending, &c. And, on the whole, he thought it well to make of the Sunday in this manner a day of preparation for the coming week, just as actors in places where Sunday representations are not allowed, have their rehearsals on that day.However, I recommend people in delicate health not to go near or smell at this sort of beautiful sky-blue plants which grow in the Church’s vineyard only to be looked at, as an English garden is adorned with the pretty aconite and its sky- or Jesuit’s-bluepoisonousflowers, which grow pyramidally to man’s height.[14]People like Von Blaise, not only ascend Mount Sinai and the Golgotha, that, like goats, they may feed as they climb; but they occupy these sacred heights for the purpose of making attacks and incursions from them, just as good generals take possession of the hills, and particularly thegallows-hills. The Heimlicher mounts from earth to the heavens oftener than Blanchard does, and with similar motives, indeed, he can keep his soul on the wing in these elevated regions for half a day at a time, in which respect, however, he does not quite equal the King of Siam’s dragon kites which the mandarins, by relieving each other at the task, manage to keep up in the sky for a couple of months at a time. He soars, not as the lark does, to make music, but as the noble falcon does, to swoop down upon something or other. If you see him praying on a Mount of Olives, be sure that he’s going to build an oil mill on it; and if he weeps by a brook Kedron, depend upon it he’s either going a-fishing in it, or else thinking of pitching somebody into it. He prays with the object of luring to him theignes-fatuiof sins; he kneels, but only as a front rank does, to deliver its fire at the foe before it; he opens his arms as with warm benevolent affection, to fold home one, a ward say, in their embrace, but only in the manner of the red-hot Moloch, that he may burn him to cinders; or he folds his arms piously together, but does it as the machines called “maidens” did, only to cut people to pieces.At last the friends, in their anxiety, came to see that there are some people whom one can only manage to get access to when one comes as thieves do, unannounced so at 8 o’clock on the Sunday evening they walked,sans façon, into Von Blaise’s house. Everything was still and empty; they went through an empty hall into an empty drawing-room, the half-open folding doors of which led into the household chapel. All they could see through the crevice was six chairs, an open hymn-book lying on its face on each of them, and a table with wax-cloth cover, on which were Miller’s ‘Heavenly Kiss of the Soul,’ and Schlichthoher’s ‘Five-fold Dispositions for all Sundays and Feasts of the Church.’ They pressed through the gap, and lo and behold! there was the Heimlicher all alone, continuing his devotions in his sleep, with his cap under his arm. His house- and church-servants had read to him till sleep had stiffened him to a petrifaction, or pillar of salt (an event which occurred every Sunday), for his eyes and his head were alike heavy with the edible, the potable, and the spiritual, refreshment of which he had partaken; or because he was like many who think it well to close their eyes during the sowing of the heavenly seed, just as people do when their heads are being powdered, or because churches and private chapels are still like those ancient temples in which the communications of the oracles were received during sleep. And as soon as they saw his eyes closed, the servants would read more and more softly, to accustom him gradually to the complete cessation of the sound; and, by and by, the devout domestics would steal gently away, leaving him in his attitude of prayer till 10 o’clock; at that hour (when, moreover, Madame von Blaise generally came home from paying visits) the domestic sacristan and night watchman would rouse him from his sleep with a shrill “Amen,” and he would put something on to his bald head again.This evening matters fell out differently. Leibgeber rapped loudly on the table two or three times with the knuckle of his forefinger to wake the city’s father out of his first sleep. When he opened his eyes and saw before him the two lean parodies and copies of one another, he took, in his beer- and sleep-heaviness of idea, a glass periwig from off a block, and put that on his head instead of his cap, which had fallen down. His ward addressed him politely, saying he wished to present to him his friend with whom he had made the exchange of names. He likewise called him his “kind cousin and guardian.” Leibgeber, more angry and less self-contained, because he was younger, and because the wrong had not been done tohim, fired into the Heimlicher’s ears, from a position closer to him by three discourteous paces, the inquiries, “Which of us two is it that your worship has given outpro mortuo, that you may be able to cite him as a dead man? There are the ghosts oftwoof us here both together.” Blaise turned with a lofty air from Leibgeber to Siebenkæs, and said, “If you have not changed your dress, sir, as well as your name, I believeyouare the gentleman whom I have had the honour of talking with on several previous occasions. Or was ityou, sir?” he said to Leibgeber, who shook like one possessed. “Well,” he continued in a more pleasant tone, “I must confess to you, Mr. Siebenkæs, that I had always supposed, until now, that you were the person who left this for the university ten years ago, and whose little inheritance I then assumed the guardianship or curatorship of. What probably chiefly contributed to my mistake, if it be a mistake, was, I presume, the likeness which,præter propter, you certainly seem to bear to my missing ward; for in many details you undoubtedly differ from him; for instance, he had a mole beside his ear.”“The infernal mole,” interrupted Leibgeber, “was obliterated by means of a toad, on my account entirely, because it was like an ass’s ear, and he never thought that, when he lost his ear, he should lose a relative along with it.”“That may be,” said the guardian coldly, “You must prove to me, Herr Advocate, that it was to YOU I had been thinking of paying over the inheritance to-day; for your announcement that you had exchanged your family name for that of an utter stranger I considered to be probably one of the jokes for which you are so celebrated. But I learned last week that you had been proclaimed in church and married in the name of Siebenkæs, and more to the same effect. I then discussed the question with Herr Grossweibel (the President of the Chamber of Inheritance), and with my son-in-law, Herr von Knärnschilder, and they assured me I should be acting contrary to my duty and safety if I let this property out of my hands. What would you do—they very properly said—what answer would you have to make if the real owner of the name were to appear and demand another settlement of the guardianship accounts? It would be too bad, truly, for a man, who, besides his manifold business of other kinds, undertook this troublesome guardian work, which the law does not require him to do, purely from affection for his relative, and from the love which he bears to all his brethren of mankind[15]—it would be too bad, I say, for him to have to pay up this money a second time out of his own pocket. At the same time, Mr. Siebenkæs, as, in my capacity of a private individual, I am more disposed to admit the validity of your claim than you perhaps suppose, you being a lawyer, know quite as well as I that my individual conviction carries with it no legal weight whatever, and that I have to deal with this matter not as a man, but as a guardian—it would probably be the best course to let some third party less biassed in my favour, such as the Inheritance Office, decide the question. Let me have the satisfaction, Mr. Siebenkæs, as soon as it may be possible” (he ended more smilingly, and laying his hand on the other’s shoulder) “to see that which I hope may prove the case, namely, that you are my long-missing cousin, Leibgeber, properly established by legal proof.”“Then,” said Leibgeber, grimly calm, and with all kinds of scale-passages and fugatos coursing over the colour-piano of his face, “is the little bit of resemblance which Mr. Siebenkæs there has to—tohimself, that is to say, to your worship’s ward, to be taken as proving nothing; not even as much as an equal similarity in a case ofcomparatio literarumwould prove?”“Oh, of course,” said Blasius, “something, certainly, but not everything; for there were several false Neros, and three or four sham Sebastians in Portugal; suppose, now,youshould be my cousin yourself, Mr. Leibgeber!”Leibgeber jumped up at once, and said in an altered and joyful voice, “So I am, my dearest guardian—it was all done to try you—I hope you will pardon my friend his share in the little mystification.”“All very well,” answered Blasius, more inflatedly, “but your own changes of ground must show you the necessity for a proper legal investigation.”This was more than Siebenkæs could endure, he squeezed his friend by the hand, as much as to say, “Pray be patient,” and inquired in a voice which an unwonted feeling of hatred rendered faint, “Did you never write to me when I was in Leipzig?”—“If you are my ward, I certainly did, many times; if you are not, you have got hold of my letters in some other way.”Then Siebenkæs asked, more faintly still, “Have you no recollection at all of a letter in which you assured me there was not the slightest risk involved in my proposed change of name, none whatever?”“This is really quite ludicrous,” answered Blaise, “in that case there could be no question about the matter!”Here Leibgeber clasped the father of the city with his two fingers as if they had been iron rivets, grasped his shoulders as one does the pommel of a saddle at mounting, clamped him firmly into his chair, and thundered out, “You never wrote anything of the kind, did you? you smooth-tongued, grey-headed old scoundrel! Stop your grunting, or I’ll throttle you! never wrote the letter, eh? keep quiet—if you lift a finger, my dog will tear your windpipe out. Answer me quietly you say you never received any letter on the subject, do you?”“I had rather say nothing,” whispered Blasius, “evidence given under coercion is valueless.”Here Siebenkæs drew his friend away from the Heimlicher, but Leibgeber said to the dog, “Mordax! hooy, Sau.,” took the glass periwig from the head of the servant of the state, broke off the principal curls of it, and said to Siebenkæs (Saufinder lay ready to spring), “Screw him down yourself, if the dog is not to do it, that he may listen to me. I want to say one or two pretty things to him—don’t let him say ‘Pap!’—Herr Heimlicher von Blasius, I have not the slightest intention of making use of libellous or abusive language to you, or of spouting an improvised pasquinade; I merely tell you, that you are an old rascal, a robber of orphans, a varnished villain, and everything else of the kind—for instance, a Polish bear, whose footmarks are just like a human being’s.[16]The epithets which I here make use of, such as scoundrel—Judas—gallows-bird” (at each word he struck the glass turban like a cymbal against his other hand), “skunk, leech, horse-leech—nominal definitions such as these are not abuse, and do not constitute libel, firstly because, according to ‘L. § de injur.,’ the grossest abuse may be uttered in jest, and I am in jest here—and we may always make use of abusive language in maintaining our own rights—see ‘Leyser.’[17]Indeed, according to Quistorp’s ‘Penal Code,’ we may accuse a person of the gravest crimes withoutanimus injurandi, provided that he has not been already tried and punished for them. And has your honesty ever been put on its trial and punished, you cheating old grey-headed vagabond? I suppose you are like the Heimlicher in Freyburg[18]—rather a different sort of man to you, it’s to be hoped—and have half-a-dozen years or so, during which no one can lay hold of you—but I’ve got hold of you to-day, hypocrite! Mordax!” The dog looked up at this word of command.“Let him go, now,” Siebenkæs begged, compassionating the prostrate sinner.“In a moment; but don’t you put me in a fury, please,” said Leibgeber, letting fall the plucked wig, standing on it, and taking out his scissors and black paper, “I want to be quite calm while I clip out a likeness of the padded countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap of a creature, because I shall take it away with me as agage d’amour. I want to carry thisecce homunculusabout with me half over the world, and say to everybody, ‘Hit it, bang away at it well; blessed is he who doth not depart this life till he hath thrashed Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel; I would have done it myself if I had not been far too strong.’“I shan’t be able,” he went on, turning to Siebenkæs, and finishing a good portrait, “to give that sneak and sharper there an account by word of mouth of my success, for a whole year to come; but by that time the one or two little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied to him will be covered by the statute of limitations, and we shall be as good friends as ever again.”Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkæs to stay by Saufinder—whom he had constituted into a corps of observation by a motion of his finger—as he was obliged to leave the room for a moment. On the last occasion of his being in Blaise’s grand drawing-room (where he displayed his magnificence before the Kuhschnappel world, great and small), he had noticed the paper-hangings there, and an exceedingly ingenious stove, in the form of the goddess of justice, Themis, who does, indeed, singe as frequently as she merely warms. And this time he had brought with him a camel’s-hair pencil, and a bottle of an ink made from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little muriatic acid dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which is visible at first and disappears afterwards, the sympathetic ink here spoken of is invisible at first, and only comes out a green colour on the paper when it is warmed. Leibgeber now wrote with his camel’s-hair pencil and this ink the following invisible notification on the paper which was closest to the stove, or Themis.“The Goddess of Justice hereby protests in presence of this assembly against being thus set up in effigy, and warmed and cooled (if not absolutely hanged), at the pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who is long since condemned at her inner secret tribunal.“Themis.”Leibgeber came away, leaving the silent seed of this Priestley’s green composition behind him on the wall with the pleasing certainty that next winter, some evening when the drawing-room was nicely warmed by the goddess for a party, the whole dormant green crop would all of a sudden shoot lustily forth.So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder keeping up his appointed official contemplation, and his friend maintaining his observation of the dog. They then all took a most polite leave, and even begged the Heimlicher not to come into the street with them, as it mightn’t be so easy to keep Mordax from a bite or so there.When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, “Don’t pull such a long face about it—I shall keep flying backwards and forwards to you, of course. Come through the gate with me—I must get across the frontier of this country; let’s run, and get on to royal territory before six minutes are over our heads.”When they had passed the gate, that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and shining above the dark-green earth, and the ocean-calm of nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it), up above the world and down beneath it; the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail-pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching darkness. The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends’ hearts. Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves lower, “God be thanked! this writes a verse of peace round the storm bell within! the night seems to me to have muffled my alarum drum with her black robe, and softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to find myself growing a little sad after all that anger and shouting.”“If it only hadn’t all been on my account, old Henry,” said Siebenkæs, “your humorous fury at that barefaced old sinner.”“Though you are not so apt to shy your satire into people’s faces as I am,” said Leibgeber, “you would have been in a greater rage if you had been in my place. One can bear injustice to one’s self—particularly when one has as good a temper as I have—but not to a friend. And unluckily you are the martyr to my name to-day, and eyewitness and blood-witness into the bargain. Besides, I should tell you that, as a general rule, when once I am ridden by the devil of anger—or rather when I have got on tohisback—I always spur the brute nearly to death, till he falls down, so that I mayn’t have to mount him again for the next three months. However, I have pouredyouout a nice basin of black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon in your hand.” Siebenkæs had been dreading for some time that he would say something about the 1200 gulden, those baptismal dues of his re-baptism, the discount of his name. He therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly as his heart, torn by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him, “My wife and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a fortress of Konigstein, and we can sow and reap there too. Heaven only grant that we may have many a hard nut to crack; they give a delicious flavour to the table-wine of our stale, flat, everyday life. I shall bring my action to-morrow.”They both concealed their emotion at the approach of the moment of parting under the cloak of comic speeches. These two counterparts came to a column which had been erected by the Princess of —— on the spot where, on her return from England, she had met her sister coming from the Alps; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite opposite significance to-night, Leibgeber said, “Now, right about face—march! Your wife is getting anxious—it’s past eleven o’clock. There, you see, we have reached your boundary mark, your frontier fortress, the gallows. I am off at once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my crop—other people’s faces, to wit, and sometimes my own fool’s face into the bargain. I shall most likely come and see you again, just for the fun of the thing, in a year and a day, when the verbal libels are pretty well out of date. By the by.” he added, hastily, “promise me on your word of honour to do me one little favour.”Siebenkæs instantly did so. “Don’t send my deposit after me[19]—a plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you well, dearest old man,” he blurted huskily out, and after a hurried kiss, ran quickly down the little hill with an air of assumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered and forsaken, looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable. When he got to the bottom of the hillock, the runner stopped, bent his head low towards the ground, and—loosened his garters.“Couldn’t you have done that up here?” cried Siebenkæs, and went down to him, and said, “We’ll go as far as the gallows hill together.” The sand-bath and reverberating furnace of a noble anger made all their emotions warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons and spices. As thefirstparting had caused their eyes to overflow, they had nothing more to keep in control but voice and language.“Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?” said Siebenkæs. “If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the master of the house, as the superstition runs,” said Leibgeber, “I shall live to all eternity, for my menagerie[20]of beasts is all alive and kicking.” At last they stopped at the market house, beside the place of execution. “Just up to the top,” said Siebenkæs, “no further.”When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy life—and when Siebenkæs looked down upon the green spotted stone altar where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought, in that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning tears which women who had killed their children[21](and were themselves put to death by the state and their lovers) had let fall upon this their last and briefest rack of torture here in this field of blood—and as he gazed from this cloudbank of life out over the broad earth with the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over all its streams—he took his friend’s hand, and, looking to the free starry heaven, said, “The mists of our life on earthmustbe resolved into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky way part into suns. Henry, don’t you yet believe in the soul’s immortality?”—“It willnotdo yet, I cannot,” Leibgeber replied. “Blasius, now, hardly deserves to liveonce, let alone twice or several times. I sometimes can’t help feeling as if a little piece of the other world had beenpainted onto this, just to finish it off and make it complete, as I’ve sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in fainter colours towards the edge of a picture, to make the principal subject stand out from the frame, and to give it unity of effect. But at this moment, human beings strike me as being like those crabs which priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling about churchyards, telling the people they were the souls of the departed. Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal beings, crawl about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at last.”His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid conviction, “We donotgo out! Farewell a thousand times. We shall meet where there is no parting. By my soul! we donotgo out. Farewell, farewell.”And so they parted. Henry passed slowly and with drooping arms through the footpaths between the stubble-fields, raising neither hand nor eye, that he might give no sign of sorrow. But a deep grief fell on Siebenkæs, for men who rarely shed tears shed all the more when they do weep. So he went to his house and laid his weary melting heart to rest on his wife’s untroubled breast (there was not even a dream stirring it). But far on into the forecourt of the world of dreams did the thought of the days in store for Lenette attend him—and of his friend’s night journey under the stars, which he would be looking up at without any hope of ever being nearer to them; and it was chiefly for his friend that his tears flowed fast.Oh ye two friends—thou who art out in the darkness there, and thou who art here at home! But wherefore should I be continually harping back upon the old emotion which you have once more awakened in me—the same which in old days used to penetrate and refresh me so when I read as a lad about the friendship of a Swift, an Arbuthnott and a Pope in their letters? Many another heart must have been fired and aroused as mine was at the contemplation of the touching, calm affection which the hearts of these men felt for one another; cold, sharp, and cutting to the outer world, in the inner land which was common to them they could work and beat for each other; like lofty palm trees, presenting long sharp spines towards the common world below them, but at their summits full of the precious palm-wine of strong friendship.So, in their lesser degree, I think we may find something of a similar kind to like and to admire in our two friends, Leibgeber and Siebenkæs. We need not inquire very closely into the causes which brought about their friendship; for it is hate, not love, which needs to be explained and accounted for. The sources whence everything that is good wells forth from this universe upwards to God himself, are veiled by a night all thick with stars; but the stars are very far away.These two men, while as yet in the fresh, green springtime of university life, at once saw straight through each other’s breasts into each other’s hearts, and they attracted each other with their opposite poles. What chiefly delighted Siebenkæs was Leibgeber’s firmness and power, and even his capability of anger, as well as his flights and laughter over every kind of sham grandeur, sham fine feeling, sham scholarship. Like the condor, he laid the eggs (of his act or of his pregnant saying) in no nest, but on the bare rock, preferring to live without a name, and consequently always taking some other than his own. On which account the poor’s advocate used to tell him, ten times over, the two following anecdotes, just to enjoy his irritation at them.The first was, that a German professor in Dorpat, who was delivering a eulogistic address on the subject of the reigning grand duke Alexander, suddenly stopped in the middle of it, and gazed for a long time in silence on a bust of that potentate, saying at length, “The speechless heart has spoken.”The second was that Klopstock sent finely got-up copies of his ‘Messiah’ to schoolporters, with the request that the most deserving among them might scatter spring-flowers on the grave of his own old teacher, Stubel, while softly pronouncing his (Klopstock’s) name. To which, if Leibgeber had anything to adduce on the subject, Siebenkæs would go on to add that the poet had called up four new porters to give them three readings apiece from his ‘Messiah,’ rewarding each with a gold medal provided by a friend. After telling him this he would look to see Leibgeber’s foaming and stamping at a person’s thus worshipping himself as a species of reliquary full of old fingers and bones.What Leibgeber, on the other hand,—more like the Morlacks, who, as Towinson and Forlis tell us, though they have but one word to express both revenge and sanctification (osveta), do yet have their friends betrothed to them with a blessing at the altar—chiefly delighted in and loved about his satirical foster-brother was the diamond brooch which in his case pinned together poetry, kindly temper, and a stoicism which scorned this world’s absurdities. And lastly, each of them daily enjoyed the gratification of knowing that the other understood him completely and wonderfully, whether he were in jest or in earnest. But it is not every friend who meets with another of this stamp.
HOME FUN—SUNDRY FORMAL CALLS—THE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE—A LOVE QUARREL, AND A FEW HARD WORDS—ANTIPATHETIC INK ON THE WALL—FRIENDSHIP OF THE SATIRISTS—GOVERNMENT OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
There is many a life which is as pleasant to live as to write, and the material of this one, in particular, which I am engaged in writing, is as yet always giving out, like rosewood on the turning lathe, a truly delicious perfume, all over my workshop. Siebenkæs duly arose on the Wednesday, but not till the Sunday was it his intention to deposit in the hands of his diligent house goddess—who put a cap on to her cap-block in the morning before she put one on to herself—the silver ingots from his guardian’s coffer (wrapped in blotting paper), her palisades of refuge in the siege of this life; for in fact he couldn’t do so any sooner, because his guardian had gone into the country, that is to say, out of town, till the Saturday night. “I can give you no notion, old Leibgeber,” said Siebenkæs, “what a joy I feel in looking forward to how this will delight my wife. I’m sure, to give her pleasure, I could wish it were three thousand dollars. The dear child has always hitherto had to live from bonnet to bonnet, but how shewillconsider herself a woman set up on a sudden for life, when she finds she can carry out a hundred housekeeping projects, which, I see as well as possible, she has got in her head already. And then, old boy, with the money in our hands, we shall begin the keeping of my silver wedding directly, the moment the evening service is over—there shall be a good half-florin’s worth of beer in every room in the house. Look here! why shouldn’t the dove, or call him the sparrow, ofmyhymen play out beer on the people as the two-headed eagle in Frankfort does wine at a coronation?” Leibgeber answered, “The reason he can’t is, that the prey he catches is of quite another brand. The sour wine (of the Frankfort eagle) is but the grapeskins—the feathers, the wool, and the hair which eagles always eject.”
It would be of no use whatever—because hundreds of Kuhschnappelers would correct my statement in their local paper, the ‘Imperial News’—if I were to tell a falsehood here (which I should like very much to do), and assert that the two advocates spent the short week of their being together with that gravity and propriety which, becoming as they are to mankind in general, do yet more particularly secure to scholars and to the learned the respect and consideration of commoner minds, to say nothing of the Kuhschnappelian intelligences.
Unfortunately I have got to sing to another tune. In the town of Kuhschnappel, as in all other towns, provincial, or metropolitan, what Leibgeber was least of all conspicuous for was a proper gravity of deportment and behaviour. Here, as elsewhere, his first proceeding was to get an introduction to the club, as a stranger artist, in order that he might ensconce himself on a sofa, and, without uttering a word or a syllable to a human being, go to sleep under the noses of the company of the “Relaxation” as the club was called. “This,” he said, “was what he liked to have the opportunity of doing in all towns where there were clubs, casinos, museums, musical societies, &c.; because to sleep in any rational manner at night in one’s ordinary quiet bed was a thing whichhe, at least, found he was seldom able to manage, on account of the loud battle of ideas which went on in his head, and the firework trains of processions of pictures all interweaving and whirling in and out with such a crash and a din that one could hardly see or hear one’s self. Whereas when one lies down upon a club sofa, everything of this sort quiets itself down, and a universal truce of ideas establishes itself; the delicious effect of the company all talking at once—the happily chosen and appropriate words contributed to the political-and-other-conversation-picnic, of which one distinguishes nothing but anultima, perhaps, or sometimes only anantepenultima; this alone sings you into a light slumber. But when a more serious discussion arises, and some point is argued, disputed and discussed in all its bearings in a universal clamorous shout—your barometer becomes completely stationary, and you sleep the deep sleep of a flower which is rocked, but not awakened, by the storm.”
One or two towns with which I am acquainted must, I am sure, remember a stranger who always used to go to sleep in their clubs, and must also recollect the beaming expression of countenance with which he would look about him when he got up and took his hat, as much as to say, “Many thanks for this refreshing rest.”
However, I have little to do with Leibgeber’s waking or with his sleeping here in Kuhschnappel; him I may treat with some indulgence, seeing that he is soon to be off again into the wide world. But it is anything but a matter of indifference that my young hero, just established here with his wife, and whose pranks I have undertaken to give some account of, as well as of the hits he gets in return, should go and conduct himself just as if his name was Leibgeber; which had long ceased to be the case, seeing that he had given formal notice to his guardian that he had changed it to Siebenkæs.
To mention but one prank—was it not a piece of true tomfoolery that, when the procession of poor scholars, singing for alms about the streets, were just beginning their usual begging hymn under the windows of the best religious families on the opposite side of the street, and just as they had struck their key-note and were going to start off with their chorus, Leibgeber, to begin with, made his boar-hound “Saufinder” (he couldn’t live without a big dog) look out of window with a fashionable lady’s night-cap on his head? And was it by any means a soberer proceeding on Siebenkæs’s part, that he took lemons and bit into them before the eyes of the whole singing class, so that all their teeth begun to water in an instant? The result will answer these questions for itself. The singers, having Saufinder in his night-cap in full view, could no more bring their lips together into a singing position than a man can whistle and laugh at the same instant. At the same time all their vocal apparatus being completely submerged by the opening of their glands, every note they attempted to give out had to wade painfully through water. In short, was this entire ludicrous interruption of the whole company of street singers not the precise end aimed at by both the advocates?
But Siebenkæs has only recently come back from college, and being still half-full of the freedom of university life, may be excused a liberty or two. And indeed I consider the little exuberances of university youth to be like the adipose matter, which, according to Reaumur, Bonnet, and Cuvier, is stored up by the caterpillar for the nourishment of the future butterfly during its chrysalis state; the liberty of manhood has to be alimented by that of youth, and if a son of the muse has not room given him to develop in full freedom, he will never develop into anything but some office-holder creeping along on all fours.
Meanwhile the two friends spent the following days—not wholly in a disorderly manner—in the writing of marriage cards. With these, on which of course there was nothing but the words, “Mr. Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs, Poor’s Advocate, and his wife,néeEngelkraut; with compliments.”—with these papers, and with the lady, they were both to drive about the town on the Saturday, and Leibgeber had to get down at all the respectable houses and hand in a card, which is by no means otherwise than a laudable and befitting custom in towns where people observe the usages of good society. But the two brethren, Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, appeared to follow these usages of imperial and rural towns more from satirical motives than anything else, conforming to them pretty minutely, it is true, but clearly chiefly for the fun of the thing, each of them playing the part of first low comedian and of audience at the same time. It would be an insult to the borough of Kuhschnappel to suppose that, notwithstanding Siebenkæs’s zealous readiness to join in all the processions of the little place, in and out of churches, to the town hall and the shooting-ground, it was wholly unobservant of the satisfaction which it afforded him rather to make fun of some properly ordered cortége, and mar the effect of it by his unsuitable dress and absurd behaviour, than to be an ornament to it. And the genuine eagerness with which he tried to get admitted as a member of the Kuhschnappel shooting-club was ascribed rather to his love of a joke than to his being the son of a keen sportsman. As for Leibgeber, he of course has the very devil in him as regards all such matters; but he is younger than Siebenkæs, and about to set out on his travels.
So they drove about the town on the Saturday—and where anybody in the shape of a grandee lived they stopped, left their passengers’ tickets and drove on, without any misbehaviour. Many ladies and gentlemen, it is true, got the wrong sow by the ear, and confounded the card carrier with the young husband sitting in the carriage; but the card carrier maintained his gravity, knowing that fun has its own proper time. The cards (some of which were glazed) were delivered according to the directory, firstly to the members of the government, both of the greater and lesser council—to the seventy members of the greater, and the thirteen of the lesser council; consequently the judge, the treasurer, the two finance councillors, the Heimlicher (so to say, tribune of the people) and the remaining eight ordinary members—these constituting the said lesser council—each received his card. After which the carriage drove down lower, and provided the minor government officials in the various chambers and offices withtheircards, such as the Offices of Woods, of the Game Commissioners, the Office of Reform (which latter was for the repression of luxury), and the Meat Tax Commission, which was presided over by a single master butcher, a very nice old man.
I am much afraid I have made a considerable slip, inasmuch as I have drawn up no tables relative to the constitution, &c., of this imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (which is properly a small imperial town, though it was once a large one) to lay before the learned and statistical world. However, I can’t possibly pull up here in the full gallop of my chapter, but must wait till we all get to the end of it, when I can more conveniently open my statistical warehouse.
The wheel of fortune soon began to rattle, and throw up mud; for when Leibgeber took his eighth part of a placard of Siebenkæs’s marriage to the house of his guardian, the Heimlicher von Blaise, a tall, meagre, barge-pole of a woman, wrapped up in wimples of calico, the Heimlicher’s wife, received it indeed, and with warmth, but warmth of the sort with which we generally administer a cudgelling; moreover, she uttered the following words (calculated to give rise to reflection)—
“My husband is the Heimlicher of this town, and what is more, he’s away from home. He has nothing to do with seven cheeses;[13]he is tutor and guardian to persons belonging to the highest and noblest families. You had better be off as fast as you like; you’ve got hold of the wrong man here.”
“I quite think we have, myself,” said Leibgeber.
Siebenkæs, the ward, here tried to pacify his letter or paper carrier with the woman a little, by suggesting that, like every good dog, she was but barking at the strangers before fetching and carrying for them: and when his friend, more anxious than himself, said, “You’re quite sure, are you not, that you took proper legal precautions against any venomous ‘objections’ which the guardian might make to paying up your money, on account of your changing your name?” he assured him, that before he had established himself as Siebenkæs, he had procured his guardian’s opinion and approval in writing, which he would show him when they got home.
But when they did get home, Von Blaise’s letter was nowhere to be found—it wasn’t in any of the boxes, nor in any of the college note-books, nor even among the wastepaper—in fact, there was nothing of the kind.
“But what a donkey I am to bother about it!” cried Siebenkæs, “what do I require it for, at all?”
Here Leibgeber, who had been glancing at the Saturday newspapers, suddenly shoved them into his pocket, and said in a somewhat unwonted tone of voice, “Come out, old boy, and let’s have a run in the fields.” When they got there, he put into his hands the ‘Schaffhausen News,’ the ‘Swabian Mercury,’ the ‘Stuttgart Times,’ and the ‘Erlangen Gazette,’ and said, “These will enable you to form some idea of the sort of scoundrel you have for a guardian.”
In each of these newspapers, the following notification appeared:—
“Whereas, Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, now in his 29th year, proceeded to the University of Leipzig in 1774, but since that date has not been heard of: now the said Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, is hereby, at the instance of his cousin, Herr Heimlicher von Blaise, edictally cited and summoned by himself or the lawful heirs of his body, within six months from the date of these presents (whereof two months are hereby constituted the first term, two months the second, and two months the third and peremptory term), to appear within the Inheritance Office of this borough, and, on satisfactory proof of identity, to receive over the sum of 1200 Rhenish gulden deposited in the hands of the said Heimlicher von Blaise as trustee and guardian;which failing, that, as directed by the decree of council of 24th July 1655 (which enacts, that any person who shall be for ten years absent from the realm, shall be takenpro mortuo), the above-named sum of 1200 Rhenish florins may be made over and paid to his said guardian and trustee, the aforesaid Heimlicher von Blaise. Dated at Kuhschnappel in Swabia, the 20th August, 1785.
“Inheritance Office of the free Imperial Borough of Kuhschnappel.”
It is unnecessary to remind the legal reader that the decree of council referred to is not in accordance with the legal usage of Bohemia, where thirty-one years is the stipulated period, but with that which formerly prevailed in France, when ten years were sufficient. And when the advocate came to the end of the notice, and stared, motionless, at its concluding lines, his soul’s brother took hold of his hand, and cried, “Alas! alas! it is I who am to blame for all this, for changing names with you.”
“You?—oh, you? The devil alone, and nobody else. But I must find that letter,” he said, and they made another search all over the house, in every corner where a letter could be. After an hour of this Leibgeber hunted out one with a broken seal of the guardian, of which the thick paper, and the broad legal fold, without an envelope, told unmistakeably that it had been addressed neither by a lady, a merchant, nor courtier, but by the quill of a bird of quite a different tribe. However, there was nothinginthis letter, except Siebenkæs’s name in Siebenkæs’s own writing—not another word, outside or inside. Quite natural; for the advocate had a bad habit of trying his hand and his pen on the backs of letters, and writing his own name and other people’s as well, with flourishes about them.
The letterhadonce been written in the inside, but, to save an incredible waste of good paper, the Heimlicher von Blaise had written his concurrence in the exchange of the names with an ink which vanishes from the paper of itself, and leaves it,in integrum, white as it was before it was written on.
I may, perhaps, be doing a chance service to many persons of the better classes, who nowadays more than ever have occasion to write promissory notes and other business documents, if I here copy out for them the receipt for this ink which vanishes after it is dry; I take it from a reliable source. Let the man of rank scrape off the surface from a piece of fine black cloth, such as he wears at court—grind the scrapings finer still on a piece of marble—moisten this fine cloth dust repeatedly with water, then make his ink with this, and write his promissory note with it; he will find that, as soon as the moisture has evaporated, every letter of the promissory note has flown away with it in the form of dust; the white star will have shone out, as it were, through the blackness of the ink.
But I consider that I am doing an equal service to the holders and presenters of such promissory notes as to the drawers of them, inasmuch as, for the future, they will be careful not to be satisfied with a security of this description, till they have exposed it for some time to the sun.
Some time ago, I should have here been apt to confound this cloth ink with thesympatheticink (likewise possessing the property of turning pale and disappearing after a time), which is commonly made use of in both the preliminary and final treaties entered into between royal persons; the latter however, has aredtint. A treaty of peace of three years’ standing is no longer legible to a man in the prime of life, because theredink—theencaustum, with which formerly no one but the Roman emperors might write—is too apt to turnpale, unless a sufficient number of human beings (from whom, as from the cochineal insect, this dye stuff is prepared) have been made use of in its manufacture; and this (from motives of sordid parsimony) is not always the case. So that the treaty has frequently to be engraved and etched into the territory afresh with good instruments—the so-called “instruments of peace”—at the point of the bayonet.
The two friends kept the happy young wife in ignorance of this first thunderclap of the storm which was threatening her married life. On the Sunday morning they went to make a friendly call on the Heimlicher during the church service; unfortunately he was at church, however. They postponed their entertaining visit till the afternoon; but then he himself was paying one to the chapel of the orphan asylum, the whole blooming body of the orphans, boys and girls, having previously made one to him, to enjoy the privilege of kissing his hand in his capacity of superintendent of the orphan asylum; for the inspectorship of that institution was, as he modestly but truly observed, entrusted to his unworthy hands. After the evening sermon, he had to perform a service of his own in his own house, in short, he was fenced off from the two advocates by a triple row of spiritual altar rails. It was his admirable custom to permit the members of his household, not indeed to eat, but to pray at the same table with him. He thought it well to spend the Sunday as a day of labour in psalm-singing with them, because, by such devotional exercises, he best preserved them from sins of Sabbath breaking, such as working ontheir ownaccount, at sewing, mending, &c. And, on the whole, he thought it well to make of the Sunday in this manner a day of preparation for the coming week, just as actors in places where Sunday representations are not allowed, have their rehearsals on that day.
However, I recommend people in delicate health not to go near or smell at this sort of beautiful sky-blue plants which grow in the Church’s vineyard only to be looked at, as an English garden is adorned with the pretty aconite and its sky- or Jesuit’s-bluepoisonousflowers, which grow pyramidally to man’s height.[14]People like Von Blaise, not only ascend Mount Sinai and the Golgotha, that, like goats, they may feed as they climb; but they occupy these sacred heights for the purpose of making attacks and incursions from them, just as good generals take possession of the hills, and particularly thegallows-hills. The Heimlicher mounts from earth to the heavens oftener than Blanchard does, and with similar motives, indeed, he can keep his soul on the wing in these elevated regions for half a day at a time, in which respect, however, he does not quite equal the King of Siam’s dragon kites which the mandarins, by relieving each other at the task, manage to keep up in the sky for a couple of months at a time. He soars, not as the lark does, to make music, but as the noble falcon does, to swoop down upon something or other. If you see him praying on a Mount of Olives, be sure that he’s going to build an oil mill on it; and if he weeps by a brook Kedron, depend upon it he’s either going a-fishing in it, or else thinking of pitching somebody into it. He prays with the object of luring to him theignes-fatuiof sins; he kneels, but only as a front rank does, to deliver its fire at the foe before it; he opens his arms as with warm benevolent affection, to fold home one, a ward say, in their embrace, but only in the manner of the red-hot Moloch, that he may burn him to cinders; or he folds his arms piously together, but does it as the machines called “maidens” did, only to cut people to pieces.
At last the friends, in their anxiety, came to see that there are some people whom one can only manage to get access to when one comes as thieves do, unannounced so at 8 o’clock on the Sunday evening they walked,sans façon, into Von Blaise’s house. Everything was still and empty; they went through an empty hall into an empty drawing-room, the half-open folding doors of which led into the household chapel. All they could see through the crevice was six chairs, an open hymn-book lying on its face on each of them, and a table with wax-cloth cover, on which were Miller’s ‘Heavenly Kiss of the Soul,’ and Schlichthoher’s ‘Five-fold Dispositions for all Sundays and Feasts of the Church.’ They pressed through the gap, and lo and behold! there was the Heimlicher all alone, continuing his devotions in his sleep, with his cap under his arm. His house- and church-servants had read to him till sleep had stiffened him to a petrifaction, or pillar of salt (an event which occurred every Sunday), for his eyes and his head were alike heavy with the edible, the potable, and the spiritual, refreshment of which he had partaken; or because he was like many who think it well to close their eyes during the sowing of the heavenly seed, just as people do when their heads are being powdered, or because churches and private chapels are still like those ancient temples in which the communications of the oracles were received during sleep. And as soon as they saw his eyes closed, the servants would read more and more softly, to accustom him gradually to the complete cessation of the sound; and, by and by, the devout domestics would steal gently away, leaving him in his attitude of prayer till 10 o’clock; at that hour (when, moreover, Madame von Blaise generally came home from paying visits) the domestic sacristan and night watchman would rouse him from his sleep with a shrill “Amen,” and he would put something on to his bald head again.
This evening matters fell out differently. Leibgeber rapped loudly on the table two or three times with the knuckle of his forefinger to wake the city’s father out of his first sleep. When he opened his eyes and saw before him the two lean parodies and copies of one another, he took, in his beer- and sleep-heaviness of idea, a glass periwig from off a block, and put that on his head instead of his cap, which had fallen down. His ward addressed him politely, saying he wished to present to him his friend with whom he had made the exchange of names. He likewise called him his “kind cousin and guardian.” Leibgeber, more angry and less self-contained, because he was younger, and because the wrong had not been done tohim, fired into the Heimlicher’s ears, from a position closer to him by three discourteous paces, the inquiries, “Which of us two is it that your worship has given outpro mortuo, that you may be able to cite him as a dead man? There are the ghosts oftwoof us here both together.” Blaise turned with a lofty air from Leibgeber to Siebenkæs, and said, “If you have not changed your dress, sir, as well as your name, I believeyouare the gentleman whom I have had the honour of talking with on several previous occasions. Or was ityou, sir?” he said to Leibgeber, who shook like one possessed. “Well,” he continued in a more pleasant tone, “I must confess to you, Mr. Siebenkæs, that I had always supposed, until now, that you were the person who left this for the university ten years ago, and whose little inheritance I then assumed the guardianship or curatorship of. What probably chiefly contributed to my mistake, if it be a mistake, was, I presume, the likeness which,præter propter, you certainly seem to bear to my missing ward; for in many details you undoubtedly differ from him; for instance, he had a mole beside his ear.”
“The infernal mole,” interrupted Leibgeber, “was obliterated by means of a toad, on my account entirely, because it was like an ass’s ear, and he never thought that, when he lost his ear, he should lose a relative along with it.”
“That may be,” said the guardian coldly, “You must prove to me, Herr Advocate, that it was to YOU I had been thinking of paying over the inheritance to-day; for your announcement that you had exchanged your family name for that of an utter stranger I considered to be probably one of the jokes for which you are so celebrated. But I learned last week that you had been proclaimed in church and married in the name of Siebenkæs, and more to the same effect. I then discussed the question with Herr Grossweibel (the President of the Chamber of Inheritance), and with my son-in-law, Herr von Knärnschilder, and they assured me I should be acting contrary to my duty and safety if I let this property out of my hands. What would you do—they very properly said—what answer would you have to make if the real owner of the name were to appear and demand another settlement of the guardianship accounts? It would be too bad, truly, for a man, who, besides his manifold business of other kinds, undertook this troublesome guardian work, which the law does not require him to do, purely from affection for his relative, and from the love which he bears to all his brethren of mankind[15]—it would be too bad, I say, for him to have to pay up this money a second time out of his own pocket. At the same time, Mr. Siebenkæs, as, in my capacity of a private individual, I am more disposed to admit the validity of your claim than you perhaps suppose, you being a lawyer, know quite as well as I that my individual conviction carries with it no legal weight whatever, and that I have to deal with this matter not as a man, but as a guardian—it would probably be the best course to let some third party less biassed in my favour, such as the Inheritance Office, decide the question. Let me have the satisfaction, Mr. Siebenkæs, as soon as it may be possible” (he ended more smilingly, and laying his hand on the other’s shoulder) “to see that which I hope may prove the case, namely, that you are my long-missing cousin, Leibgeber, properly established by legal proof.”
“Then,” said Leibgeber, grimly calm, and with all kinds of scale-passages and fugatos coursing over the colour-piano of his face, “is the little bit of resemblance which Mr. Siebenkæs there has to—tohimself, that is to say, to your worship’s ward, to be taken as proving nothing; not even as much as an equal similarity in a case ofcomparatio literarumwould prove?”
“Oh, of course,” said Blasius, “something, certainly, but not everything; for there were several false Neros, and three or four sham Sebastians in Portugal; suppose, now,youshould be my cousin yourself, Mr. Leibgeber!”
Leibgeber jumped up at once, and said in an altered and joyful voice, “So I am, my dearest guardian—it was all done to try you—I hope you will pardon my friend his share in the little mystification.”
“All very well,” answered Blasius, more inflatedly, “but your own changes of ground must show you the necessity for a proper legal investigation.”
This was more than Siebenkæs could endure, he squeezed his friend by the hand, as much as to say, “Pray be patient,” and inquired in a voice which an unwonted feeling of hatred rendered faint, “Did you never write to me when I was in Leipzig?”—“If you are my ward, I certainly did, many times; if you are not, you have got hold of my letters in some other way.”
Then Siebenkæs asked, more faintly still, “Have you no recollection at all of a letter in which you assured me there was not the slightest risk involved in my proposed change of name, none whatever?”
“This is really quite ludicrous,” answered Blaise, “in that case there could be no question about the matter!”
Here Leibgeber clasped the father of the city with his two fingers as if they had been iron rivets, grasped his shoulders as one does the pommel of a saddle at mounting, clamped him firmly into his chair, and thundered out, “You never wrote anything of the kind, did you? you smooth-tongued, grey-headed old scoundrel! Stop your grunting, or I’ll throttle you! never wrote the letter, eh? keep quiet—if you lift a finger, my dog will tear your windpipe out. Answer me quietly you say you never received any letter on the subject, do you?”
“I had rather say nothing,” whispered Blasius, “evidence given under coercion is valueless.”
Here Siebenkæs drew his friend away from the Heimlicher, but Leibgeber said to the dog, “Mordax! hooy, Sau.,” took the glass periwig from the head of the servant of the state, broke off the principal curls of it, and said to Siebenkæs (Saufinder lay ready to spring), “Screw him down yourself, if the dog is not to do it, that he may listen to me. I want to say one or two pretty things to him—don’t let him say ‘Pap!’—Herr Heimlicher von Blasius, I have not the slightest intention of making use of libellous or abusive language to you, or of spouting an improvised pasquinade; I merely tell you, that you are an old rascal, a robber of orphans, a varnished villain, and everything else of the kind—for instance, a Polish bear, whose footmarks are just like a human being’s.[16]The epithets which I here make use of, such as scoundrel—Judas—gallows-bird” (at each word he struck the glass turban like a cymbal against his other hand), “skunk, leech, horse-leech—nominal definitions such as these are not abuse, and do not constitute libel, firstly because, according to ‘L. § de injur.,’ the grossest abuse may be uttered in jest, and I am in jest here—and we may always make use of abusive language in maintaining our own rights—see ‘Leyser.’[17]Indeed, according to Quistorp’s ‘Penal Code,’ we may accuse a person of the gravest crimes withoutanimus injurandi, provided that he has not been already tried and punished for them. And has your honesty ever been put on its trial and punished, you cheating old grey-headed vagabond? I suppose you are like the Heimlicher in Freyburg[18]—rather a different sort of man to you, it’s to be hoped—and have half-a-dozen years or so, during which no one can lay hold of you—but I’ve got hold of you to-day, hypocrite! Mordax!” The dog looked up at this word of command.
“Let him go, now,” Siebenkæs begged, compassionating the prostrate sinner.
“In a moment; but don’t you put me in a fury, please,” said Leibgeber, letting fall the plucked wig, standing on it, and taking out his scissors and black paper, “I want to be quite calm while I clip out a likeness of the padded countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap of a creature, because I shall take it away with me as agage d’amour. I want to carry thisecce homunculusabout with me half over the world, and say to everybody, ‘Hit it, bang away at it well; blessed is he who doth not depart this life till he hath thrashed Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel; I would have done it myself if I had not been far too strong.’
“I shan’t be able,” he went on, turning to Siebenkæs, and finishing a good portrait, “to give that sneak and sharper there an account by word of mouth of my success, for a whole year to come; but by that time the one or two little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied to him will be covered by the statute of limitations, and we shall be as good friends as ever again.”
Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkæs to stay by Saufinder—whom he had constituted into a corps of observation by a motion of his finger—as he was obliged to leave the room for a moment. On the last occasion of his being in Blaise’s grand drawing-room (where he displayed his magnificence before the Kuhschnappel world, great and small), he had noticed the paper-hangings there, and an exceedingly ingenious stove, in the form of the goddess of justice, Themis, who does, indeed, singe as frequently as she merely warms. And this time he had brought with him a camel’s-hair pencil, and a bottle of an ink made from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little muriatic acid dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which is visible at first and disappears afterwards, the sympathetic ink here spoken of is invisible at first, and only comes out a green colour on the paper when it is warmed. Leibgeber now wrote with his camel’s-hair pencil and this ink the following invisible notification on the paper which was closest to the stove, or Themis.
“The Goddess of Justice hereby protests in presence of this assembly against being thus set up in effigy, and warmed and cooled (if not absolutely hanged), at the pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who is long since condemned at her inner secret tribunal.
“Themis.”
Leibgeber came away, leaving the silent seed of this Priestley’s green composition behind him on the wall with the pleasing certainty that next winter, some evening when the drawing-room was nicely warmed by the goddess for a party, the whole dormant green crop would all of a sudden shoot lustily forth.
So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder keeping up his appointed official contemplation, and his friend maintaining his observation of the dog. They then all took a most polite leave, and even begged the Heimlicher not to come into the street with them, as it mightn’t be so easy to keep Mordax from a bite or so there.
When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, “Don’t pull such a long face about it—I shall keep flying backwards and forwards to you, of course. Come through the gate with me—I must get across the frontier of this country; let’s run, and get on to royal territory before six minutes are over our heads.”
When they had passed the gate, that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and shining above the dark-green earth, and the ocean-calm of nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it), up above the world and down beneath it; the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail-pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching darkness. The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends’ hearts. Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves lower, “God be thanked! this writes a verse of peace round the storm bell within! the night seems to me to have muffled my alarum drum with her black robe, and softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to find myself growing a little sad after all that anger and shouting.”
“If it only hadn’t all been on my account, old Henry,” said Siebenkæs, “your humorous fury at that barefaced old sinner.”
“Though you are not so apt to shy your satire into people’s faces as I am,” said Leibgeber, “you would have been in a greater rage if you had been in my place. One can bear injustice to one’s self—particularly when one has as good a temper as I have—but not to a friend. And unluckily you are the martyr to my name to-day, and eyewitness and blood-witness into the bargain. Besides, I should tell you that, as a general rule, when once I am ridden by the devil of anger—or rather when I have got on tohisback—I always spur the brute nearly to death, till he falls down, so that I mayn’t have to mount him again for the next three months. However, I have pouredyouout a nice basin of black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon in your hand.” Siebenkæs had been dreading for some time that he would say something about the 1200 gulden, those baptismal dues of his re-baptism, the discount of his name. He therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly as his heart, torn by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him, “My wife and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a fortress of Konigstein, and we can sow and reap there too. Heaven only grant that we may have many a hard nut to crack; they give a delicious flavour to the table-wine of our stale, flat, everyday life. I shall bring my action to-morrow.”
They both concealed their emotion at the approach of the moment of parting under the cloak of comic speeches. These two counterparts came to a column which had been erected by the Princess of —— on the spot where, on her return from England, she had met her sister coming from the Alps; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite opposite significance to-night, Leibgeber said, “Now, right about face—march! Your wife is getting anxious—it’s past eleven o’clock. There, you see, we have reached your boundary mark, your frontier fortress, the gallows. I am off at once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my crop—other people’s faces, to wit, and sometimes my own fool’s face into the bargain. I shall most likely come and see you again, just for the fun of the thing, in a year and a day, when the verbal libels are pretty well out of date. By the by.” he added, hastily, “promise me on your word of honour to do me one little favour.”
Siebenkæs instantly did so. “Don’t send my deposit after me[19]—a plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you well, dearest old man,” he blurted huskily out, and after a hurried kiss, ran quickly down the little hill with an air of assumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered and forsaken, looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable. When he got to the bottom of the hillock, the runner stopped, bent his head low towards the ground, and—loosened his garters.
“Couldn’t you have done that up here?” cried Siebenkæs, and went down to him, and said, “We’ll go as far as the gallows hill together.” The sand-bath and reverberating furnace of a noble anger made all their emotions warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons and spices. As thefirstparting had caused their eyes to overflow, they had nothing more to keep in control but voice and language.
“Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?” said Siebenkæs. “If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the master of the house, as the superstition runs,” said Leibgeber, “I shall live to all eternity, for my menagerie[20]of beasts is all alive and kicking.” At last they stopped at the market house, beside the place of execution. “Just up to the top,” said Siebenkæs, “no further.”
When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy life—and when Siebenkæs looked down upon the green spotted stone altar where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought, in that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning tears which women who had killed their children[21](and were themselves put to death by the state and their lovers) had let fall upon this their last and briefest rack of torture here in this field of blood—and as he gazed from this cloudbank of life out over the broad earth with the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over all its streams—he took his friend’s hand, and, looking to the free starry heaven, said, “The mists of our life on earthmustbe resolved into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky way part into suns. Henry, don’t you yet believe in the soul’s immortality?”—“It willnotdo yet, I cannot,” Leibgeber replied. “Blasius, now, hardly deserves to liveonce, let alone twice or several times. I sometimes can’t help feeling as if a little piece of the other world had beenpainted onto this, just to finish it off and make it complete, as I’ve sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in fainter colours towards the edge of a picture, to make the principal subject stand out from the frame, and to give it unity of effect. But at this moment, human beings strike me as being like those crabs which priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling about churchyards, telling the people they were the souls of the departed. Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal beings, crawl about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at last.”
His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid conviction, “We donotgo out! Farewell a thousand times. We shall meet where there is no parting. By my soul! we donotgo out. Farewell, farewell.”
And so they parted. Henry passed slowly and with drooping arms through the footpaths between the stubble-fields, raising neither hand nor eye, that he might give no sign of sorrow. But a deep grief fell on Siebenkæs, for men who rarely shed tears shed all the more when they do weep. So he went to his house and laid his weary melting heart to rest on his wife’s untroubled breast (there was not even a dream stirring it). But far on into the forecourt of the world of dreams did the thought of the days in store for Lenette attend him—and of his friend’s night journey under the stars, which he would be looking up at without any hope of ever being nearer to them; and it was chiefly for his friend that his tears flowed fast.
Oh ye two friends—thou who art out in the darkness there, and thou who art here at home! But wherefore should I be continually harping back upon the old emotion which you have once more awakened in me—the same which in old days used to penetrate and refresh me so when I read as a lad about the friendship of a Swift, an Arbuthnott and a Pope in their letters? Many another heart must have been fired and aroused as mine was at the contemplation of the touching, calm affection which the hearts of these men felt for one another; cold, sharp, and cutting to the outer world, in the inner land which was common to them they could work and beat for each other; like lofty palm trees, presenting long sharp spines towards the common world below them, but at their summits full of the precious palm-wine of strong friendship.
So, in their lesser degree, I think we may find something of a similar kind to like and to admire in our two friends, Leibgeber and Siebenkæs. We need not inquire very closely into the causes which brought about their friendship; for it is hate, not love, which needs to be explained and accounted for. The sources whence everything that is good wells forth from this universe upwards to God himself, are veiled by a night all thick with stars; but the stars are very far away.
These two men, while as yet in the fresh, green springtime of university life, at once saw straight through each other’s breasts into each other’s hearts, and they attracted each other with their opposite poles. What chiefly delighted Siebenkæs was Leibgeber’s firmness and power, and even his capability of anger, as well as his flights and laughter over every kind of sham grandeur, sham fine feeling, sham scholarship. Like the condor, he laid the eggs (of his act or of his pregnant saying) in no nest, but on the bare rock, preferring to live without a name, and consequently always taking some other than his own. On which account the poor’s advocate used to tell him, ten times over, the two following anecdotes, just to enjoy his irritation at them.
The first was, that a German professor in Dorpat, who was delivering a eulogistic address on the subject of the reigning grand duke Alexander, suddenly stopped in the middle of it, and gazed for a long time in silence on a bust of that potentate, saying at length, “The speechless heart has spoken.”
The second was that Klopstock sent finely got-up copies of his ‘Messiah’ to schoolporters, with the request that the most deserving among them might scatter spring-flowers on the grave of his own old teacher, Stubel, while softly pronouncing his (Klopstock’s) name. To which, if Leibgeber had anything to adduce on the subject, Siebenkæs would go on to add that the poet had called up four new porters to give them three readings apiece from his ‘Messiah,’ rewarding each with a gold medal provided by a friend. After telling him this he would look to see Leibgeber’s foaming and stamping at a person’s thus worshipping himself as a species of reliquary full of old fingers and bones.
What Leibgeber, on the other hand,—more like the Morlacks, who, as Towinson and Forlis tell us, though they have but one word to express both revenge and sanctification (osveta), do yet have their friends betrothed to them with a blessing at the altar—chiefly delighted in and loved about his satirical foster-brother was the diamond brooch which in his case pinned together poetry, kindly temper, and a stoicism which scorned this world’s absurdities. And lastly, each of them daily enjoyed the gratification of knowing that the other understood him completely and wonderfully, whether he were in jest or in earnest. But it is not every friend who meets with another of this stamp.