CHAPTER XXI.DR. ŒLHAFEN AND MEDICAL BOOT AND SHOEMAKING—THE BURIAL SOCIETY—A DEATH’S HEAD IN THE SADDLE—FREDERICK II. AND HIS FUNERAL ORATION.As a step preliminary to everything else, Leibgeber quartered the sorrowing widow down stairs with the hairdresser, with the view of rendering the intermediate state after death easier to the dead man. “You must emigrate,” he told her, “and keep out of the sight of these sad memorials round us here, untilhehas been taken away.” Superstitious terror made her consent, so that he had no difficulty in giving the dear departed his food and drink. He compared him to a walled-up vestal, finding in her cell a lamp, bread, water, milk, and oil (according to Plutarch, in ‘Numa’); and added, “Unless you are more like the earwig, which, when cut in two, turns about and devours its own remains.” By jokes like these he brightened (or, at all events, strove to brighten) the cloudy and autumnal soul of his dear friend, who could see nothing all around him save ruins of his bygone life, from the widowed Lenette’s clothes to her work. The bonnet-block, which he had struck on the day of the thunder-storm, had to be put away in a corner out of his sight, because he said it made Gorgon faces at him.Next day, our good corpse-watcher, Leibgeber, had to perform the labours of a Hercules, an Ixion, and a Sisyphus combined. Congress after congress, picket after picket, came to see the dead man and speak well of him—for it is not until they make theirexitthat we applaud men and actors, and we think people aremorallybeautified by death as Lavater thought they were physically. But Leibgeber drove everybody away from the death-chamber, saying it had been one of his friend’s last requests that he should do so.Then came the woman to lay out the corpse (Death’s Abigail), and wanted to begin washing and dressing it. Henry tussled with her, paid her, and banished her. Then (in presence of the widow and Peltzstiefel), he had to pretend tobepretending to hide a bleeding heart behind outward resignation. “But I see through him,” said Stiefel, “without the slightest trouble. It is because he is not a Christian that he is striving to play the Stoic and the Philosopher.” Stiefel was here alluding to that specious, empty, and frivolous hardness which is exhibited by Zenos of the world and of the court, who are like those wooden figures which are made to look like stone statues and pillars by being smeared over with a coating of stone-dust. Also the share, or dividend, of the burial-fund was got together (by being collected on a plate from the members of that body), and this led to its coming to the knowledge of our old acquaintance Dr. Œlhafen, who was one of the paying members. He took occasion, on his morning round of visits, to drop in at the house of mourning, with the view of provoking his brother in science to as great an extent as he could. He therefore affected not to have heard a word about the death, and began by asking how the invalid was getting on. “According to thelatestbulletins,” said Henry, “he is notgettingon at all—he hasgoton; in a word, Herr Protomedicus Œlhafen, he is gone. August, March, and December are months when Death sends out his pressgang and gathers in his vintage.”“That lowering powder of yours,” said the vindictive Doctor, “seems to have loweredhistemperature pretty effectively; he’s cool enoughnow, eh?” This pained Leibgeber, and he answered, “I am sorry to say, he is. However, we did our best with him. We got your emetic down his throat, but the only thing he got rid of was that most terribly morbific of all matters in man—his soul. You, Mr. Protomedicus, are judge in a criminal court, having the power of life and death; whereas, you see, I am only an advocate, and possessed of a jurisdiction so far inferior thatIdidn’t dare meddle with anything, least of all the fellow’slife; a nice face he would have made if I had.”“Well, so hehasmade a face at it, and a long face, too—the hippocratic face,” answered the Doctor, not wholly without wit. “I can’t but believe you,” answered Leibgeber, in a gentle manners “I have not the least doubt you are perfectly right. We laymen, you see, have so few opportunities of seeing those faces, whereas doctors can study the hippocratic countenance in their patients every day of their lives. And, of course, an experienced doctor is always distinguished by a quickness of eye which enables him to tell at a glance if a patient be going to die—which is an impossibility to other people, who, not being doctors in practice, have not many opportunities of seeing people depart this life.”“A medical connoisseur ofyourcultivation and experience as a matter of course put mustard poultices to the patient’s feet? Only, I presume, it was too late for them to be of any use, was it?”“Ididmanage to hit upon the notion of trying that trick of soling my poor friend’s feet with mustard and vinegar” (answered Leibgeber), “and paper-hanging the calves of his legs with blisters; but the patient (at all times rather fond of his joke, as you know), called that sort of thing ‘medical boot and shoemaking,’ and called us doctors ‘Death’s shoemakers,’ who, when Nature has cried to a poor fellow ‘Look out! Mind your head!’ go and put Spanish flies on to him by way of Spanish boots, mustard-plasters by way ofCothurni, and cupping-glasses by way of leg-irons: as if a man could not make his appearance in the next world without red heels consisting of mustard-blister marks, and red cardinal stockings of plaster blisters. And so saying, the deceased aimed a skilful kick at my face and the plaster, and said the connoisseurs were like stinging-flies, which always fasten upon the legs.”“He wasn’t far wrong, I suspect, as regardedyou. A ‘shoemaker of Death’ might perhaps put something on just under thatcaput tribus insanabileof yours which wouldn’t fit so badly,” said the Doctor, and made off as fast as he could.I have already said a few words concerning those emetic powders of his, and I now wish to add what follows. If hedoessend people to their long homes by means of them, the chief difference between him and a fox[91]is that (according to the ancient naturalist), the latter imitates the distant sound of a man being sick to make the dogs run to him, that he may attack them. At the same time even those whose opinion of the members of the medical profession is the highest conceivable must admit that there are certain limits to their criminal jurisdiction. As by European International Law, no army can shoot down another with glass bullets, or poisoned ones, but only with leaden ones—further, as no nation may put poison into the enemies’ food, or wells, but only dirt—so, although the medical police allow a practising physician (of the higher jurisdiction) the utmost freedom in the administration of narcotics, drastics, emetics, diuretics, and the whole pharmacopœia, in a word (so that it would be a breach of the police regulations to attempt to prevent him), yet were the most celebrated of doctors, town or country, within the limits of his jurisdiction to set to work and give people poison-balls in place of pills, or ratsbane by way of a strong emetic, the upper courts of justice would take a pretty serious view of the matter—unless it were for ague that he prescribed the mouse-poison. Nay, I suspect that an entire medicalcollegiumwould scarce escape some judicial inquiry if it were to take a sword and run a man through with it (though it might open his veins with a lancet at any hour of the day or night if it pleased), or if it were to knock him down with a warlike but nonsurgical instrument. Thus we find in the criminal records that doctors who threw people into the water from bridges have by no means got clear off—that being a different affair altogether from putting them into asmallerbath, mineral or otherwise.When the hairdresser heard that the corpse-lottery money had safely arrived in its harbour of refuge, he came upstairs and offered to curl his deceased lodger’s hair, make him a pigtail, and let his comb and pomatum accompany him under the sod. Leibgeber was obliged to be economical on the poor widow’s account, for more than half her feathers were plucked out of her already by the innumerable insect-feelers, vultures’-talons, and boars’-tusks of the domestics of death, and he said the most he could do was to buy the comb and put it in the deceased’s waistcoat-pocket, so that he might do it himself after his own taste. He said the same to the barber, and added that, of course, as hair goes on growing in the grave, the whole secret society (and fruit-bearing society) therein is adorned with fine beards, like Swiss of the age of sixty. These two collaborateurs in hair (who revolve round the same central-sphere like two of the satellites of Uranus) went off with abbreviated hopes, and elongated faces and purses, the one wishing, in the excess of his gratitude, that he had at that moment the shaving of the undertaker Henry, the other wishinghehad the cutting of his hair. On the stairs they grumbled out, “It would be no wonder if the dead man should not be able to rest in his grave, but went about frightening people.”Leibgeber thought of the risk there was of losing the reward of all this long process of deception, should anybody go to have a look at the deceased gentleman while he was in the next room (for whenever he was going further he locked the door). So he went to the churchyard, took a skull out of the charnel-house, and brought it home under his coat. He handed it to Siebenkæs, saying, “If we were to shove this head in beneath the green trellis-bed whereondefunctusis lying, and keep it connected with his hand by means of a green-silk thread, it might be brought into play (in the dark, at all events), as a species of Belidor’s globe of compression, or jawbone of an ass as against Philistines, who have got to be frightened away if they come disturbing the repose of the warm dead.” To be sure (had the most extreme necessity to do so arisen) Siebenkæs would have come to himself, revived out of his prolonged insensibility, and repeated his apoplectic seizure for the third time—much to the gratification of medical systems of theory. However, the death’s head was better than the fit. The sight of this garret-lodging of a soul, this cold hatching-oven of a spirit, made Siebenkæs sad. He said, “No doubt the wall-creeper finds a quieter and safer nest here than did the bird-of-paradise,[92]which has flown away from it.”Leibgeber now chaffered with the servants of the Church and School, and (with whispered curses) paid the necessary surplice-fees and bridge-tolls, saying, “The day after tomorrow we will lay the deceased to rest as quietly as we may, without fuss or ceremony.” It was a matter of indifference to them; alltheycared about being the pocketing of the postage which franks people into the next world, which they were all glad enough to do—all except one old and poor School-servant, who said he thought it a sin to take a farthing from the poor widow, for he knew what poverty was. But this was exactly what the rich could not know.In the morning, Henry went down to the hairdresser and Lenette, leaving the key in the door—for, since the recent ghost story, the lodgers who lived upstairs were too frightened to put so much as their heads out of their own doors. The hairdresser, who was still annoyed that he had not been allowed to curl the deceased’s hair, bethought him that it would at least be something if he were to slip upstairs, and cut and carry off the entire hair-forest. The demand for hair and firewood is in excess of the supply (now that the former is made into rings and twisted into letters), and we should never leave any dead person a coffin or a single hair. Even the ancients sheared off the latter for the altars of the subterranean gods; so Meerbitzer crept on tiptoe into the room, and opened his scissor-feelers. Siebenkæs could easily look askew into the room through the eye-holes of the mask, and from the scissors and general aspect of his landlord, he divined the impending misfortune and ‘Rape of the Lock.’ He saw that in his strait he could reckon more upon the bare head under the bed than upon his own. The landlord, who, in his timidity, had carefully left the door wide open behind him to secure his retreat, drew near to the plantation of human pot-plants, with intent to play the part of reaper in the harvest-month—to combine therôlesof beard-shearer and hair-curler, and avenge them both. Siebenkæs wound up the thread as well as he could upon his covered fingers, so as to roll out the skull; but as the latter came much too slowly, and Meerbitzer far too quickly, he was obliged to come to his own assistance in the meantime (and this because evil spirits so oftenbreatheupon men, orinspirethem) by breathing out of the mouth-hole of his mask a long night-breeze upon the landlord. Meerbitzer could not explain to himself this most suspicious blast, which blew real azote, and a deadly simoom-wind, upon him; and all his warm constituent principles began to shoot into icicles. But, unluckily, the dead man had soon shot all his breath away, and was obliged to re-load his air-gun slowly. This suspension of hostilities brought the lock-raper to himself, and to his legs again; so that he made fresh preparations to take hold of the nightcap-tassel, and remove that gossamer (said nightcap) from the field of hair. But just as he was in the act of taking hold of it, he became aware that a something was beginning to move under the bed; he paused, and waited quietly (for it might be a rat) to see what this noise would turn out to be caused by. But, as he thus waited, it was all of a sudden borne in upon his mind thata round thingwas rolling up his legs, and coming higher and higher. In one instant he made a clutch at it with his empty hand (the other held the scissors), and, powerlessly as a pair of callipers, that hand rested on the ascending, slippery ball, which kept pressing it up and up. Meerbitzer grew visibly stiff in the legs, and his blood ran cold; but a fresh upward shove of his hand, and a glance at the ascending head, administered to him (ere he was felled to earth, wholly curdled to cheese), such a kick of terror that he flew like a feather across the floor, and out of the door like a cannonball shot straight at the bull’s eye by the cannon-powder of fear. He landed in the room downstairs with the open scissors in his hand, his mouth and eyes wide open, and a pallid spot on his face, compared to which his hair-powder and his shirt were court-mourning. Nevertheless, in this novel situation (I am glad to say it to his honour) he had the presence of mind not to say a word about what had happened; partly because ghost-stories cannot be related till nine days are over without the greatest danger to the narrator, partly because he could not well talk about his hair-shearing and privateering onanyday at all.At one in the morning, Firmian told this tale to his friend with the same fidelity as I have endeavoured to observe in recounting it to the reader. This gave Leibgeber a useful hint to set a trusty body-guard over the noble corpse; and to this office, in the absence of chamberlains and other court officials, he could appoint no other than Saufinder.On the last morning, which was to give our Siebenkæs “Notice to quit,” arrived thecasa santaof mankind, ourchambre garnie, our lastseed capsule—the coffin for which we have to pay whatever is demanded. “This is the last building grant of life,” said Henry, “the carpenter’s final piece of cheatery.”At half an hour after midnight—when neither bat nor night-watchman, nor beer-guest from the public-house, nor night-light was any longer to be seen; and only a field-cricket here and there could be heard in the sheaves, and a mouse or two in the houses—Leibgeber said to his sad and anxious friend, “March, now! Since you shuffled off this mortal coil, and entered into eternity, you have not known a moment of happiness or peace. All the rest is my affair. Wait for me at Hof on the Saale. We must see each other yet once more after death.” Firmian fell in silence on his burning face, and wept. In this twilight hour he once more revisited all the flowery places of the past, behind which he was sinking as into a grave. His softened heart took delight in depositing a parting tear upon every piece of dress belonging to his sorrowing, bereaved Lenette—on every piece of her work—on every trace of her housewifely hand. He pressed her betrothal wreath of roses and forget-me-nots hard to his burning bosom, and placed Nathalie’s rosebuds in his pocket. And thus—mute, oppressed, with stifled sobs, and like one cast out by an earthquake from this earth on to the icy coasts of a strange world—he crept down the steps after his friend; pressed his helping hand once more at the door; and then night built the funeral vault of her gigantic shadow all over him. Leibgeber wept heartily as soon as he was lost to view. Tears fell on every stone which he pocketed, and upon the old block which he took in his arms, to imbed in the coffin-shell so as to give it the due weight of a corpse. He filled up that haven of our bodies, and closed that ark of the covenant, hanging the coffin-key, like a black cross, upon his breast. And now for the first time he slept in peace in the house of mourning. All was done.In the morning he made no secret of it, before the bearers and Lenette, that he had placed the body in the coffin with his own two arms, and not without considerable effort. She sighed to see her departed husband once again, but Henry had thrown away the door-key of the painted house in the darkness. He helped most diligently in the search for it (he had it about him all the time), but it was in vain, and many of the bystanders soon guessed that Henry was only deceiving, anxious to spare the widow’s weeping eyes any further sight of the cause of her sorrow. So they went forth, with the mock passenger in the quasi coffin, to the churchyard which lay glistening in dew beneath the fresh blue sky. An icy thrill crept to Henry’s heart as he read the words on the gravestone. It had been lifted from off the flat, Moravian-like grave of Siebenkæs’s great-grandfather, and turned over, and on the smooth side glittered the newly-graven inscription—“STAN: FIRMIAN SIEBENKÆS, Departed this life, 24th August, 1786.”This name had once been Henry’s own, and on the reverse side of the monument was his present name, Leibgeber. Henry reflected that in a few dayshewould fall (with his name cast away from him) as a little brook into the world’s great ocean, and flow there without shores, and be lost amongst strange and unknown billows. He felt as though he himself with his old name, and his new, were going down to the grave. So strangely mingled were his feelings that he seemed to himself as if he were sticking fast in the frozen stream of life, while overhead a burning sun was beating upon the ice-field, and he was lying between the glow and the frost. In addition to this, the Schulrath just then came running (with his handkerchief to his eyes and nose), and, in stammering accents of sorrow, imparted the news which had just reached the town—that the old King of Prussia had died on the 17th of the month.The first thing that Leibgeber did was to look up to the morning sun, as though Frederick’s eye was beaming morning fire from it over the earth. It is easier to be a great king than a just one; it is easier to be admired than justified. A king lays his little finger upon the long arm of the monstrous lever, and, like Archimedes, lifts ships and countries with the muscles of his fingers; but it is only themachinethat is great—and the machinist, Fate—not he who works it. The voice of a king re-echoes like a peal of thunder amongst the numberless valleys around him; and every gentle ray he emits is reflected in the form of a burning beam condensed into a focus, from the countless plane-mirrors which are upon his throne. But Frederick could, at most, only beloweredby a throne, by having tositupon it. His head would only have beengreaterwithout the close-binding crown (its crown of thorns) and magic circle. And happy, thou great spirit, couldst thou still less become! For, although thou hadst broken down within thee the Bastilles and the prison-walls of all ignoble passions—although thou hadst given thy spirit what Franklin gave to earth, namely, lightning-conductors, musical glasses, and freedom—although no kingdom was to thee so lovely as that of truth, and there was none which thou so lovedst to enlarge—although thou didst permit the emasculate philosophy of French encyclopædists to hide from thee eternity only, but not divinity, only thebeliefin virtue, but not thine own—yet did thy loving bosom accept nothing from friendship and humanity but the echoes of their sighs—the flute. And thy spirit, which, with its great roots like the mahogany-tree, often shivered the rocks it grew upon—thy spirit, in the fell battle of thy wishes with thy doubts, in the contest of thy ideal world with the real one, and the one in which thou didst believe, felt a painful discord which no mild faith in asecondsoftened to harmony. And therefore there was upon thy throne no place of rest but that which thou hast now attained.Some men bring all humanity before our eyes at a glance, as certain events bring our whole lives. There fell upon Henry’s breast strong splinters of the fallen mountain whose crash he heard.He placed himself before the open grave, and delivered this speech more to invisible than to visible hearers:—“So, then, the epitaph on the tomb isversio interlinearioof this small, small printed life of ours. The heart does not rest until, like the head, it is set in gold.[93]Thou hidden Infinite one! make, for me, the grave a prompter’s tube, and tell me what I am to think of the whole theatre. Indeed, whatisthere in the grave? Some ashes, a few worms, coldness, and night—by Heaven! there is nothing betteraboveit either, except that onefeelsit. Mr. Schulrath, Time sits behind us, and reads the calendar of life so cursorily, and turns over the page of month after month at such a rate, that I can fancy this grave—this moat here about our castles in the air—this fortress trench—lengthening out and extending till it reaches my bed, and I am shaken out of the bedclothes into this cooking-hole, like a heap of Spanish flies. ‘Go on,’ I would say, ‘Go on. I shall come either to old Fritz, or to his worms—and therewithBasta! ‘By Heaven! one is ashamed of life when the greatest of men no longer possess it. And soholla!”
DR. ŒLHAFEN AND MEDICAL BOOT AND SHOEMAKING—THE BURIAL SOCIETY—A DEATH’S HEAD IN THE SADDLE—FREDERICK II. AND HIS FUNERAL ORATION.
As a step preliminary to everything else, Leibgeber quartered the sorrowing widow down stairs with the hairdresser, with the view of rendering the intermediate state after death easier to the dead man. “You must emigrate,” he told her, “and keep out of the sight of these sad memorials round us here, untilhehas been taken away.” Superstitious terror made her consent, so that he had no difficulty in giving the dear departed his food and drink. He compared him to a walled-up vestal, finding in her cell a lamp, bread, water, milk, and oil (according to Plutarch, in ‘Numa’); and added, “Unless you are more like the earwig, which, when cut in two, turns about and devours its own remains.” By jokes like these he brightened (or, at all events, strove to brighten) the cloudy and autumnal soul of his dear friend, who could see nothing all around him save ruins of his bygone life, from the widowed Lenette’s clothes to her work. The bonnet-block, which he had struck on the day of the thunder-storm, had to be put away in a corner out of his sight, because he said it made Gorgon faces at him.
Next day, our good corpse-watcher, Leibgeber, had to perform the labours of a Hercules, an Ixion, and a Sisyphus combined. Congress after congress, picket after picket, came to see the dead man and speak well of him—for it is not until they make theirexitthat we applaud men and actors, and we think people aremorallybeautified by death as Lavater thought they were physically. But Leibgeber drove everybody away from the death-chamber, saying it had been one of his friend’s last requests that he should do so.
Then came the woman to lay out the corpse (Death’s Abigail), and wanted to begin washing and dressing it. Henry tussled with her, paid her, and banished her. Then (in presence of the widow and Peltzstiefel), he had to pretend tobepretending to hide a bleeding heart behind outward resignation. “But I see through him,” said Stiefel, “without the slightest trouble. It is because he is not a Christian that he is striving to play the Stoic and the Philosopher.” Stiefel was here alluding to that specious, empty, and frivolous hardness which is exhibited by Zenos of the world and of the court, who are like those wooden figures which are made to look like stone statues and pillars by being smeared over with a coating of stone-dust. Also the share, or dividend, of the burial-fund was got together (by being collected on a plate from the members of that body), and this led to its coming to the knowledge of our old acquaintance Dr. Œlhafen, who was one of the paying members. He took occasion, on his morning round of visits, to drop in at the house of mourning, with the view of provoking his brother in science to as great an extent as he could. He therefore affected not to have heard a word about the death, and began by asking how the invalid was getting on. “According to thelatestbulletins,” said Henry, “he is notgettingon at all—he hasgoton; in a word, Herr Protomedicus Œlhafen, he is gone. August, March, and December are months when Death sends out his pressgang and gathers in his vintage.”
“That lowering powder of yours,” said the vindictive Doctor, “seems to have loweredhistemperature pretty effectively; he’s cool enoughnow, eh?” This pained Leibgeber, and he answered, “I am sorry to say, he is. However, we did our best with him. We got your emetic down his throat, but the only thing he got rid of was that most terribly morbific of all matters in man—his soul. You, Mr. Protomedicus, are judge in a criminal court, having the power of life and death; whereas, you see, I am only an advocate, and possessed of a jurisdiction so far inferior thatIdidn’t dare meddle with anything, least of all the fellow’slife; a nice face he would have made if I had.”
“Well, so hehasmade a face at it, and a long face, too—the hippocratic face,” answered the Doctor, not wholly without wit. “I can’t but believe you,” answered Leibgeber, in a gentle manners “I have not the least doubt you are perfectly right. We laymen, you see, have so few opportunities of seeing those faces, whereas doctors can study the hippocratic countenance in their patients every day of their lives. And, of course, an experienced doctor is always distinguished by a quickness of eye which enables him to tell at a glance if a patient be going to die—which is an impossibility to other people, who, not being doctors in practice, have not many opportunities of seeing people depart this life.”
“A medical connoisseur ofyourcultivation and experience as a matter of course put mustard poultices to the patient’s feet? Only, I presume, it was too late for them to be of any use, was it?”
“Ididmanage to hit upon the notion of trying that trick of soling my poor friend’s feet with mustard and vinegar” (answered Leibgeber), “and paper-hanging the calves of his legs with blisters; but the patient (at all times rather fond of his joke, as you know), called that sort of thing ‘medical boot and shoemaking,’ and called us doctors ‘Death’s shoemakers,’ who, when Nature has cried to a poor fellow ‘Look out! Mind your head!’ go and put Spanish flies on to him by way of Spanish boots, mustard-plasters by way ofCothurni, and cupping-glasses by way of leg-irons: as if a man could not make his appearance in the next world without red heels consisting of mustard-blister marks, and red cardinal stockings of plaster blisters. And so saying, the deceased aimed a skilful kick at my face and the plaster, and said the connoisseurs were like stinging-flies, which always fasten upon the legs.”
“He wasn’t far wrong, I suspect, as regardedyou. A ‘shoemaker of Death’ might perhaps put something on just under thatcaput tribus insanabileof yours which wouldn’t fit so badly,” said the Doctor, and made off as fast as he could.
I have already said a few words concerning those emetic powders of his, and I now wish to add what follows. If hedoessend people to their long homes by means of them, the chief difference between him and a fox[91]is that (according to the ancient naturalist), the latter imitates the distant sound of a man being sick to make the dogs run to him, that he may attack them. At the same time even those whose opinion of the members of the medical profession is the highest conceivable must admit that there are certain limits to their criminal jurisdiction. As by European International Law, no army can shoot down another with glass bullets, or poisoned ones, but only with leaden ones—further, as no nation may put poison into the enemies’ food, or wells, but only dirt—so, although the medical police allow a practising physician (of the higher jurisdiction) the utmost freedom in the administration of narcotics, drastics, emetics, diuretics, and the whole pharmacopœia, in a word (so that it would be a breach of the police regulations to attempt to prevent him), yet were the most celebrated of doctors, town or country, within the limits of his jurisdiction to set to work and give people poison-balls in place of pills, or ratsbane by way of a strong emetic, the upper courts of justice would take a pretty serious view of the matter—unless it were for ague that he prescribed the mouse-poison. Nay, I suspect that an entire medicalcollegiumwould scarce escape some judicial inquiry if it were to take a sword and run a man through with it (though it might open his veins with a lancet at any hour of the day or night if it pleased), or if it were to knock him down with a warlike but nonsurgical instrument. Thus we find in the criminal records that doctors who threw people into the water from bridges have by no means got clear off—that being a different affair altogether from putting them into asmallerbath, mineral or otherwise.
When the hairdresser heard that the corpse-lottery money had safely arrived in its harbour of refuge, he came upstairs and offered to curl his deceased lodger’s hair, make him a pigtail, and let his comb and pomatum accompany him under the sod. Leibgeber was obliged to be economical on the poor widow’s account, for more than half her feathers were plucked out of her already by the innumerable insect-feelers, vultures’-talons, and boars’-tusks of the domestics of death, and he said the most he could do was to buy the comb and put it in the deceased’s waistcoat-pocket, so that he might do it himself after his own taste. He said the same to the barber, and added that, of course, as hair goes on growing in the grave, the whole secret society (and fruit-bearing society) therein is adorned with fine beards, like Swiss of the age of sixty. These two collaborateurs in hair (who revolve round the same central-sphere like two of the satellites of Uranus) went off with abbreviated hopes, and elongated faces and purses, the one wishing, in the excess of his gratitude, that he had at that moment the shaving of the undertaker Henry, the other wishinghehad the cutting of his hair. On the stairs they grumbled out, “It would be no wonder if the dead man should not be able to rest in his grave, but went about frightening people.”
Leibgeber thought of the risk there was of losing the reward of all this long process of deception, should anybody go to have a look at the deceased gentleman while he was in the next room (for whenever he was going further he locked the door). So he went to the churchyard, took a skull out of the charnel-house, and brought it home under his coat. He handed it to Siebenkæs, saying, “If we were to shove this head in beneath the green trellis-bed whereondefunctusis lying, and keep it connected with his hand by means of a green-silk thread, it might be brought into play (in the dark, at all events), as a species of Belidor’s globe of compression, or jawbone of an ass as against Philistines, who have got to be frightened away if they come disturbing the repose of the warm dead.” To be sure (had the most extreme necessity to do so arisen) Siebenkæs would have come to himself, revived out of his prolonged insensibility, and repeated his apoplectic seizure for the third time—much to the gratification of medical systems of theory. However, the death’s head was better than the fit. The sight of this garret-lodging of a soul, this cold hatching-oven of a spirit, made Siebenkæs sad. He said, “No doubt the wall-creeper finds a quieter and safer nest here than did the bird-of-paradise,[92]which has flown away from it.”
Leibgeber now chaffered with the servants of the Church and School, and (with whispered curses) paid the necessary surplice-fees and bridge-tolls, saying, “The day after tomorrow we will lay the deceased to rest as quietly as we may, without fuss or ceremony.” It was a matter of indifference to them; alltheycared about being the pocketing of the postage which franks people into the next world, which they were all glad enough to do—all except one old and poor School-servant, who said he thought it a sin to take a farthing from the poor widow, for he knew what poverty was. But this was exactly what the rich could not know.
In the morning, Henry went down to the hairdresser and Lenette, leaving the key in the door—for, since the recent ghost story, the lodgers who lived upstairs were too frightened to put so much as their heads out of their own doors. The hairdresser, who was still annoyed that he had not been allowed to curl the deceased’s hair, bethought him that it would at least be something if he were to slip upstairs, and cut and carry off the entire hair-forest. The demand for hair and firewood is in excess of the supply (now that the former is made into rings and twisted into letters), and we should never leave any dead person a coffin or a single hair. Even the ancients sheared off the latter for the altars of the subterranean gods; so Meerbitzer crept on tiptoe into the room, and opened his scissor-feelers. Siebenkæs could easily look askew into the room through the eye-holes of the mask, and from the scissors and general aspect of his landlord, he divined the impending misfortune and ‘Rape of the Lock.’ He saw that in his strait he could reckon more upon the bare head under the bed than upon his own. The landlord, who, in his timidity, had carefully left the door wide open behind him to secure his retreat, drew near to the plantation of human pot-plants, with intent to play the part of reaper in the harvest-month—to combine therôlesof beard-shearer and hair-curler, and avenge them both. Siebenkæs wound up the thread as well as he could upon his covered fingers, so as to roll out the skull; but as the latter came much too slowly, and Meerbitzer far too quickly, he was obliged to come to his own assistance in the meantime (and this because evil spirits so oftenbreatheupon men, orinspirethem) by breathing out of the mouth-hole of his mask a long night-breeze upon the landlord. Meerbitzer could not explain to himself this most suspicious blast, which blew real azote, and a deadly simoom-wind, upon him; and all his warm constituent principles began to shoot into icicles. But, unluckily, the dead man had soon shot all his breath away, and was obliged to re-load his air-gun slowly. This suspension of hostilities brought the lock-raper to himself, and to his legs again; so that he made fresh preparations to take hold of the nightcap-tassel, and remove that gossamer (said nightcap) from the field of hair. But just as he was in the act of taking hold of it, he became aware that a something was beginning to move under the bed; he paused, and waited quietly (for it might be a rat) to see what this noise would turn out to be caused by. But, as he thus waited, it was all of a sudden borne in upon his mind thata round thingwas rolling up his legs, and coming higher and higher. In one instant he made a clutch at it with his empty hand (the other held the scissors), and, powerlessly as a pair of callipers, that hand rested on the ascending, slippery ball, which kept pressing it up and up. Meerbitzer grew visibly stiff in the legs, and his blood ran cold; but a fresh upward shove of his hand, and a glance at the ascending head, administered to him (ere he was felled to earth, wholly curdled to cheese), such a kick of terror that he flew like a feather across the floor, and out of the door like a cannonball shot straight at the bull’s eye by the cannon-powder of fear. He landed in the room downstairs with the open scissors in his hand, his mouth and eyes wide open, and a pallid spot on his face, compared to which his hair-powder and his shirt were court-mourning. Nevertheless, in this novel situation (I am glad to say it to his honour) he had the presence of mind not to say a word about what had happened; partly because ghost-stories cannot be related till nine days are over without the greatest danger to the narrator, partly because he could not well talk about his hair-shearing and privateering onanyday at all.
At one in the morning, Firmian told this tale to his friend with the same fidelity as I have endeavoured to observe in recounting it to the reader. This gave Leibgeber a useful hint to set a trusty body-guard over the noble corpse; and to this office, in the absence of chamberlains and other court officials, he could appoint no other than Saufinder.
On the last morning, which was to give our Siebenkæs “Notice to quit,” arrived thecasa santaof mankind, ourchambre garnie, our lastseed capsule—the coffin for which we have to pay whatever is demanded. “This is the last building grant of life,” said Henry, “the carpenter’s final piece of cheatery.”
At half an hour after midnight—when neither bat nor night-watchman, nor beer-guest from the public-house, nor night-light was any longer to be seen; and only a field-cricket here and there could be heard in the sheaves, and a mouse or two in the houses—Leibgeber said to his sad and anxious friend, “March, now! Since you shuffled off this mortal coil, and entered into eternity, you have not known a moment of happiness or peace. All the rest is my affair. Wait for me at Hof on the Saale. We must see each other yet once more after death.” Firmian fell in silence on his burning face, and wept. In this twilight hour he once more revisited all the flowery places of the past, behind which he was sinking as into a grave. His softened heart took delight in depositing a parting tear upon every piece of dress belonging to his sorrowing, bereaved Lenette—on every piece of her work—on every trace of her housewifely hand. He pressed her betrothal wreath of roses and forget-me-nots hard to his burning bosom, and placed Nathalie’s rosebuds in his pocket. And thus—mute, oppressed, with stifled sobs, and like one cast out by an earthquake from this earth on to the icy coasts of a strange world—he crept down the steps after his friend; pressed his helping hand once more at the door; and then night built the funeral vault of her gigantic shadow all over him. Leibgeber wept heartily as soon as he was lost to view. Tears fell on every stone which he pocketed, and upon the old block which he took in his arms, to imbed in the coffin-shell so as to give it the due weight of a corpse. He filled up that haven of our bodies, and closed that ark of the covenant, hanging the coffin-key, like a black cross, upon his breast. And now for the first time he slept in peace in the house of mourning. All was done.
In the morning he made no secret of it, before the bearers and Lenette, that he had placed the body in the coffin with his own two arms, and not without considerable effort. She sighed to see her departed husband once again, but Henry had thrown away the door-key of the painted house in the darkness. He helped most diligently in the search for it (he had it about him all the time), but it was in vain, and many of the bystanders soon guessed that Henry was only deceiving, anxious to spare the widow’s weeping eyes any further sight of the cause of her sorrow. So they went forth, with the mock passenger in the quasi coffin, to the churchyard which lay glistening in dew beneath the fresh blue sky. An icy thrill crept to Henry’s heart as he read the words on the gravestone. It had been lifted from off the flat, Moravian-like grave of Siebenkæs’s great-grandfather, and turned over, and on the smooth side glittered the newly-graven inscription—
“STAN: FIRMIAN SIEBENKÆS, Departed this life, 24th August, 1786.”
This name had once been Henry’s own, and on the reverse side of the monument was his present name, Leibgeber. Henry reflected that in a few dayshewould fall (with his name cast away from him) as a little brook into the world’s great ocean, and flow there without shores, and be lost amongst strange and unknown billows. He felt as though he himself with his old name, and his new, were going down to the grave. So strangely mingled were his feelings that he seemed to himself as if he were sticking fast in the frozen stream of life, while overhead a burning sun was beating upon the ice-field, and he was lying between the glow and the frost. In addition to this, the Schulrath just then came running (with his handkerchief to his eyes and nose), and, in stammering accents of sorrow, imparted the news which had just reached the town—that the old King of Prussia had died on the 17th of the month.
The first thing that Leibgeber did was to look up to the morning sun, as though Frederick’s eye was beaming morning fire from it over the earth. It is easier to be a great king than a just one; it is easier to be admired than justified. A king lays his little finger upon the long arm of the monstrous lever, and, like Archimedes, lifts ships and countries with the muscles of his fingers; but it is only themachinethat is great—and the machinist, Fate—not he who works it. The voice of a king re-echoes like a peal of thunder amongst the numberless valleys around him; and every gentle ray he emits is reflected in the form of a burning beam condensed into a focus, from the countless plane-mirrors which are upon his throne. But Frederick could, at most, only beloweredby a throne, by having tositupon it. His head would only have beengreaterwithout the close-binding crown (its crown of thorns) and magic circle. And happy, thou great spirit, couldst thou still less become! For, although thou hadst broken down within thee the Bastilles and the prison-walls of all ignoble passions—although thou hadst given thy spirit what Franklin gave to earth, namely, lightning-conductors, musical glasses, and freedom—although no kingdom was to thee so lovely as that of truth, and there was none which thou so lovedst to enlarge—although thou didst permit the emasculate philosophy of French encyclopædists to hide from thee eternity only, but not divinity, only thebeliefin virtue, but not thine own—yet did thy loving bosom accept nothing from friendship and humanity but the echoes of their sighs—the flute. And thy spirit, which, with its great roots like the mahogany-tree, often shivered the rocks it grew upon—thy spirit, in the fell battle of thy wishes with thy doubts, in the contest of thy ideal world with the real one, and the one in which thou didst believe, felt a painful discord which no mild faith in asecondsoftened to harmony. And therefore there was upon thy throne no place of rest but that which thou hast now attained.
Some men bring all humanity before our eyes at a glance, as certain events bring our whole lives. There fell upon Henry’s breast strong splinters of the fallen mountain whose crash he heard.
He placed himself before the open grave, and delivered this speech more to invisible than to visible hearers:—
“So, then, the epitaph on the tomb isversio interlinearioof this small, small printed life of ours. The heart does not rest until, like the head, it is set in gold.[93]Thou hidden Infinite one! make, for me, the grave a prompter’s tube, and tell me what I am to think of the whole theatre. Indeed, whatisthere in the grave? Some ashes, a few worms, coldness, and night—by Heaven! there is nothing betteraboveit either, except that onefeelsit. Mr. Schulrath, Time sits behind us, and reads the calendar of life so cursorily, and turns over the page of month after month at such a rate, that I can fancy this grave—this moat here about our castles in the air—this fortress trench—lengthening out and extending till it reaches my bed, and I am shaken out of the bedclothes into this cooking-hole, like a heap of Spanish flies. ‘Go on,’ I would say, ‘Go on. I shall come either to old Fritz, or to his worms—and therewithBasta! ‘By Heaven! one is ashamed of life when the greatest of men no longer possess it. And soholla!”