After such an abduction they confined Gustavus's theatre and pleasure-ground strictly within the wall of the castle; into the waving grain-fields and the hamlet of Auenthal, which lay at about a seventeenth of a German mile distant, he could only look. This flowery mountain island he cruised round all day long, in order to knock down every red chafer, to twist off every marbled snail-house from its leaf, and generally to shut up everything that skipped about on six feet in the prison he had prepared for it. At the expense of his inexperienced fingers, he even undertook at first to pull the bee by the hinder part of the body out of its cup of joy. The motley prisoners he now crowded together (as princes do all classes of men into one metropolis) into a beautiful Solomon's-temple, or into a silver-plated Noah's-ark of pasteboard, with more windows than walls. The architect of this fourth temple of Solomon was not, as with the first, the Devil or the Worm Lis,[14]but a human being, who could easily be likened to both, the so-called princely rat-catcherRobisch. This vassal of the Captain visited annually the best chambers and gardens of the whole land, in order to cleanse both, not so much of theirworstas of theirleastinmates--mice and moles. I will not exactly assure the learned Republic that this mouse-butcher dispatched as many subterranean moles out of the world as there are scribbling ones that annually come in, to set themselves on their hind feet and then with their fore feet, which in both kinds of moles resemble human hands, in the book stores and at the Leipsic trade-sale, throw up their mole-hills as little Parnassus-mountains;--meanwhile, Robisch was paid exactly as if the chamber-hunter had cleared out all vermin. For the people thought, if one should provoke this cup-poisoner of the rodents, instead of paying him, he would imitate the miracles of Moses, and redouble, by colonies left behind him, the vermin which one took out of his royal and penal jurisdiction. I will take my hands off from this dirty soul, whose orbit, I hope, may never bring him nearer my Gustavus, when I have recorded that he was often in the house of the Falkenbergs; that, when there were strangers there, he acted as extra and occasional domestic, and when wild game, in the shape of recruits, was to be caught, as drawing-hound to the Captain, and that he pressed himself and his wares upon little Gustavus. Such a hooking-on to children, without parental childlikeness, is ambiguous. Children, however, have a special love for servants, and Gustavus particularly, who, indeed, could not, even at a later period, possibly hate any one whom he had loved in his childhood; all the misdeeds which Robisch might have committed against him could not have snapped asunder the bond of that gratitude he felt for the gift of the miserable insect block-house which depopulated the wall.
Whatever lived and buzzed in the Solomon's-castle-church must be fed with sugar, because children look upon that as both lunch and dessert; and the finest inmates would have starved to death had not their overseer, Gustavus, received from the chamber-hunter, as a further present, a starling; for this starling he let hop into the Pantheon, and eat everything which itself had nothing to eat.... If I have here hid away under the wing-sheaths of the insects, and in the bill of the starling the most just reflections and the boldest hints, I hope the reader will cleverly find them there.
Except myself, no one, perhaps, had Gustavus's name in his bill so often as the starling, who, like court people, never had anything in his head but anomen proprium. The little fellow thought the starling thought, and was a man as much as Robisch, and loved him for all he did; therefore, he could not be satisfied with listening to him and loving everything about him. In fact, there was nothing which he could love and hug enough. The farmer had for that purpose given him for a companion a black lamb, which he led and lured around the wall with a red ribbon and a crust of bread. The lamb, like a village comedian, had to play all parts. At one time he must be the Genius, then the poodle; now Gustavus and now Robisch. Thus did our little friend play solo his first earthly parts, and was at once manager, prompter, and theatre poet. Such comedies as childrenmakefor themselves are a thousand times more profitable than those theyact, even though they came out of Weisse's writing-desk; in our day, besides, when the whole man is a figurant, his virtue a dramatic part, and his sensibility lyric poetry, this wrenching of children's souls is particularly dangerous. However, this is also, sometimes, not true; for I, myself, acted the complete sharper, to be sure only once, twice, or thrice in my life, but that was even before I had gone to my first confession.
The decree which forbade his going down the castle hill, differed honorably from the decrees of our transcendant parents, the magistracy, in this respect, that it was, in the first place, made known to the party concerned, and, secondly, that it was maintained for at least a fortnight. Gustavus would have given his life to have taken himself and his lamb from the wall down to the foot of the mountain. Now, as the Captain knew, from Quistorp's Juridical Contributions, that one may substitute for close confinement within the walls, the larger one of gaol limits, or the bounds of the district, accordingly he dictated the latter punishment instead of the former, and said: "Can not one give the lamb in charge of the farmer's Regel (Regina), so long as she tends the flock on the hillside? So far as I am concerned, the youngster may join in driving, if I only have him always in sight." I must still wait to see what the Imperial Knighthood will say or write upon this, viz., that an honorary member thereof, my hero, at four o'clock in the afternoon regularly twisted off a long hazel wand, and therewith transformed himself into a young ox-driver, and by the side of Strössner's eleven-year-old Regina, drove out the sheep and cattle and the lamb led by the ribbon with such pride and such Jupiter's eyebrows, that any one could easily see he directed the whole stall, and challenged the imperial chivalry at this moment to come and see him.
Only in the Millenial Kingdom are there such afternoons as Gustavus enjoyed, as in the lap of the earth, on that eminence. My father should have sent me to a drawing school: could I not now have caught and mirrored the whole landscape in my stream of colors instead of a stream of ink? Verily, I could image before the eyes of the reader every bush with its bird gliding into it, every lip-colored strawberry of the rocky slope, every sheep with its new growth of down, and every tree around whose roots the squirrel had strewed his crumbled fir-cones. Meanwhile there are, on the other hand, things at which the pole-cat hairs of the pencil brush in vain, but which flow beautifully from my quill--the eye of Gustavus swimming on the tide of pleasure, sails lightly to and fro between the lamb, the bright flowery ground with the shadow-formed spit of land and the enchanting face of Regina, and needs never to look away.
Why did I say "enchanting face," when it was only an every-day one? Because my little Apollo and sheepherd with thirsty eyes flew to this face, as to a flower. In a brain like his, wherein all day long the white flame of fancy and no blue phlegmatic brandy-flame blazed up, it could not fail that every female face should shine with gilded charms in a divine color, and not in a hue of death. All beauties had with him the advantage, too, of having been seen, not for ten years, but within ten days. This, however, is not his first love, but only a morning-divine-service, a vigil eve, a Protevangelium of some first love or other--nothing more.
For two whole weeks he drove his lamb to pasture, before his courage rose so high that he could venture--not to seat himself beside her knitting (that exceeded his human powers), but--to hold fast his sheep to itspostillion d'amour, not, however, to lead it to Regina, but to be drawn by it himself to her; for the best love is the most bashful, as the basest is the most bold. Then, like a tranquillizing moon, would her image, as she was more in his thoughts than in his sight, lay itself upon his dreaming soul, and so much was enough. His second contrivance for being her assessor (or by-sitter) was the round shadow of a linden-tree that waved lower down the hill, behind which, as behind a lattice, the evening sun was broken into splinters. With this shadow he now edged up nearer and nearer to Regina; under the pretext of shunning one sun, he drew nearer to another redder one. With such little trickeries love runs over; but they are all guessed and forgiven; and they are often prompted more by instinct than by conscious design. To be sure, when the evening slowly stretched upward from the valley to the heights--when drowsy nature, sinking to slumber, still, as if half in sleep, murmured a word or two in the broken tones of a bird that had gone to its nest--when the chime of bells on the necks of the herd, that plucked the innocent flowers of joy from the meadow, and the monotone of the cuckoo and the confused hum of dying day had pressed the keys of the lowest strings; then did his love and his courage grow wonderfully, and not seldom to such a pitch that he openly took out of his pocket the cake which he had kept for her, and, without scruple, laid it in the grass, in order actually to make her a tender of this pastry, so soon as they should have, in the twilight, to part from each other at the castle-gate: there he thrust the donation upon her with hurried confusion and darted away with joyful shame. If he succeeded in insinuating into her hand this evening offering, then was every pulse of his arterial system a rapturously beating heart (for the speech and joy of his love wasgiving), and under his bed-clothes he was all night planting bold plans for the morrow, which the afternoon bell-hammer with four blows killed utterly down to their very tap-roots. She always put on her mother's wide neckerchief; from this a philosopher of sense must infer that in after years the large neckerchiefs of the ladies pleased him, which I myself prefer to the former short aprons of the neck; on the same ground he, like myself, also liked broad head-bands and broad aprons. I have already playedL'Hombrewith philosophers, who reversed the thing and asserted that all this pleased him, not because the article was on the beauty (Regina), but because the beauty was in the article.
In fact, I am ashamed that, while the raggedest Baccalaurei dip their pens and portray to their fellow Baccalaurei the most elegant Sponsalia of Queens and Marchionesses, I meanwhile spend my writing materials on the sheep-tending and love-making of two children. Both occupations ran on into the autumn, and fain would I picture them; but, as I said, my shame before the Bachelors!--and yet how I envy thee, winsome dreamer, this white sunny side of thy life on thy mountain, and thy lamb and thy vision! And how gladly would I arrest the days that glide over thy head and load thy little lap with flowers, and bring them to a standstill, so that the funeral-train of the armed days should have to halt in the background, which may empty thy lap--let the gairish light into thy pleasure-grove--stab thy lamb--pay thy Regina the wages of a serving-maid!
But in October all go off to Unter-Scheerau; and the children do not even know, as yet, that there are such things as lips and kisses!
O weeks of the very first love! why do we despise you more than our later follies? Ah, on all your seven days, which in you look like seven minutes, we were innocent, unselfish and full of love. Beautiful weeks! ye are butterflies that have lived over from an unknown year[15]to flutter as heralds of our life's spring-time! Would that I could think of you as enthusiastically as once, of you, days when neither pleasure nor hope were checked by any limits! Thou poor son of humanity--when the tender, white mist of thy childhood which spreads its enchantment over all nature is gone, still thou dost remain long in thy sunlight, but the fallen mist creeps up again from below into the blue as a denser rain-cloud, and in the noon of youth thou standest under the lightnings and thunder-bolts of thy passions!--and at evening thy rent heavens still rain on!
As the nobility and wood-rats inhabit the country in summer, and in winter the city, the Captain did so too; for the beauty of nature (he thought, and so did his lawyer) amounted at last to nothing more than an inventory of boors, whose elbows and thighs are cased half in ticking and half in stitched leather, swampy grounds, fallow fields, and herds of swine, and that there is nothing there for the senses but stench; whereas in the city there is at least a bit of flesh to be had, a game of French cards, some real good fun and a human being or two. It is youthful intolerance to deny that a man who has no feeling for music or scenery, may still have some for other people's needs and honor, especially if that man is the Captain.
Much weightier reasons still drove him to Scheerau; he sought there 13,000 Rixdollars, a lot of recruits, and a tutor. The last first! His wife said: "Gustavus must have some one; he is still deficient in breeding!" But tutors are not wanting in that; these infants from the Alumneum, whom nothing raises but a pulpit staircase, who continue to be shepherds of the soul to the young noblemen, till they become spiritual shepherds of the Church, which their pupil governs--these educational potters are able to shape and smooth not merely the mind of the young gentleman--as the father hopes--but his body also--as the mother hopes--right well; first, without any polish of their own; secondly, in study hours; thirdly, with words; fourthly, without women; fifthly, in a sixth way, this, namely, that the tutor compresses the broadest lion-heart into a sleepy badger's heart.
The second metallic spur which urged the Captain to the city was money. No one could fall into the condition of being either a creditor or a debtor so easily as he; as he neither denied himself nor others anything; he had at last transformed half the neighborhood into hisguestsanddebtors; but now he would almost change himself into both, unless the Prince should build up again his dwindling money-pile. He was obliged therefore to come to the residence-city of Ober-Scheerau with the disagreeable petition that the aforesaid Prince would--not so much present or lend--that might have been practicable--but ratherpay13,000 Rixdollars, as a capital of seven years standing. The Sufi of Scheerau had, namely, a habit of never dismissing a mistress without giving her a parting present of an estate, or a government, or a starred husband; he always left so much of a female favorite, that a marriageable wife might be made out of it for a marrying ninny; as the eagle and the lion (who are also Princes, of beasts) always leave a portion of their prey unconsumed for other creatures. Accordingly he divorced himself even from the mother of his natural son--Captain von Ottomar--on the knightly seat,Ruhestadt, which he, on one and the same day, bought and gave away (with Falkenberg's money.)
Thirdly, the Captain, by coming to Scheerau, would spare his under-officers, who were mostly stationed there, a step or two; for he could strike, indeed, with his cane as easily as a lady with her fan, but he would not willingly break the sixth leg of a grasshopper, and therefore he spared the limbs of his people, who had four legs less, so much the more.
At last they are packing up, the Falkenberg family; we will look on. As the only time that Falkenberg's soul, like clocks and horses, did not stop was in traveling, on the morning of his journey he was in his most joyous and impetuous mood; wanted to go ahead not byseconds, but bynones; cursed all hands and feet in the castle for not flying; crammed and jammed the female trinkets and toggery with brazen hands into the nearest box; and had no other seton to draw off his impatient ennui than his feet, with which he stamped, and his hands, with which he partly thrashed the coachman for the same reason that he did the horses, and partly and handsomely, distributed presents to all that were left behind in the castle.
But the Captain's lady understood so well how to do all things in the most complete and judicious manner, that she was never done with anything. If she had had three jumps to take to get out of the way of the moon as it came dumping down to the earth, she would, before jumping have smoothed one more wrinkle out of the window curtain--if she had been ironing it would have been still worse. Like scholars, in addition to her professional or livelihood-study, she devotes herself to an extra-study and by-work and does, in connection with every piece of work, those that lie adjacent to it. "Once for all, I cannot be so slovenly as other women," she has just been saying to her gnashing husband, who looked upon her for eight dumb minutes. "I would rather, in the devil's name, you were the most slovenly in the whole feudal nobility," he replied. Now as she, whenever she was overtaken by a storm and injustice, merely anchored to the angry hyperboles of the party, as I, in the capacity of appellant advocate must frequently do, so too, on this occasion, she cleverly proved that slovenly women did not amount to much--and as there is nothing which still more excites a heated Captain like a haughty proof of what he does not in the least deny; so now, as always, things went on from worse to worse; the war-flails of the tongue were set in motion, his saliva-glands, her lachrymal-glands, and the livers of both parties with their gall-bladders secreted as much as must needs be secreted in Christian connubial colloquies,--but fifteen minutes and fifteen packings absorbed again like blood-veins all these connubial secretions. In starting on a journey no mortal has time to be angry. She was, upon my honor, a right good wife, only not at all times,e. g., least of all in setting out on a journey: she wanted, in the first place, to stay at home, and scolded at everything that had ears; secondly, she wanted to go. Never, when her husband in the morning put on his own cravat and his dog's, to make visits, did she desire to go too (unless indeed she had foreseen the absolute impossibility of going with them), but if, on the second day after, he happened to drop a word about a lady he had met there, then she would bewail her distress in his ears: "One of us cannot, the whole summer long, get a whiff of air out of the house." If, the next time he would constrain her to accompany him, then there was a frightful deal to do; there was bleaching, weeding, screwing up meat-chests and napkin-presses, washing-bills, and everything to attend to, or this pretext: "I prefer to stay with my little ones." But her aim, which few guessed, was merely to be in two places at once, in the house and out of it, and it is unfortunate for our wives, if our philosophers and husbands have not as much insight as the Catholic philosophers and husbands the Combrian, Ariaga, Bekanus had long ago,[16]who perceived that the same body could easily at the same second not only sit, speak, grow in two or more places at once, but could even feel in one city and think in another,--at one and the same moment laugh in the church and weep in the theatre.
All the questions in this paper I once put to an Abbess, who cared more to make money than saints. Is not the triple crown of the Pope now on female heads, as a four or five-fold one, and do not their hats shoot up into the air like lettuce-heads in dog-days?--Is it not well known to women themselves that they are as infallible as the Pope, and if he, as the Jansenists believe, is more so in dogmatic than in historical matters, is not with the female Popes the reverse true? And who has the courage to contradict one, unless he has married her? The Pope is God's vicegerent or, in fact, God himself, if Felius[17]is to be credited; but are not the Papesses notoriously Goddesses? Certainly a Pope, Clement VI. himself says, that he can command angels to transport any church out of Purgatory into Heaven[18]; but do our female Popes need angels for that? They require only a week to cast us into Purgatory, and only an hour to snatch us out of it into Heaven. Marianus Socinus, who asserts[19]that a Pope can make something out of nothing, right out of wrong, and anything under heaven out of anything under heaven, must simply not think of doubting that our Papesses also have the same power, and do not their auricular confessions recur to is recollection? Who excommunicate their heretics or give dispensations to their faithful oftener. Popes or Papesses? and who, at this day, most serene Abbess! makes more omnipotent eye-briefs and lip-bulls, who creates more saints, more blessed ones and moreNuncios a and de latere, Peter's successors or Peter's successoresses? Popes are said formerly to have given away or taken away kingdoms; what then? Do not Papesses rule those Kingdoms? Popes could not bestow upon America anything except a name, but is not that which some Papesses bring us from that land something much morereal? Kings who once were tormented by Popes, are now blessed by Papesses; and if the former at most created a King or two, are not the Kings under most of the European throne canopies made by Papesses, and in fact, in neat pocket-form, until they gradually grow up from the baptismal font to be as tall as I or their throne? Do we not kiss their slippers oftener than that of the Holy Father, since their two arms were found by Professor Moskati at Padua long ago to be two fore-feet, to whose kid or silk shoes (hand-shoes) we every week press our lips? Do not Pope and Papess lay aside their old names, when they ascend the throne, which the one claims on the ground of age, the other on that of youth? And if it were true, that Pope and Papess were originally only bishops of a Province (a husband) and that there has never been any other female Pope than the good Joan; could I venture to say the exact opposite publicly in an extra-leaf or privately in your ear, most serene Abbess?
End of the Extra-Leaf.
* * * *
While I was questioning the Abbess, my attention was drawn away from the extravagantly whimsical Captain's lady. I will suppose that I or the reader had married her; then we should certainly have thanked heaven that we had screwed our brilliant ring on her ring-finger; and yet, as one sees, we should have had every day to have a tussle with her; so true it remains, that not the vices, but the whims of women strew so much horse-dust and so many thorns in the nuptial couch, that oftentimes Satan would be glad to lie there.
But for Gustavus, who carried so much, we should not have got out of the Castle ten minutes ago. My reader pictures him to himself, quite contrary to my expectation, and very falsely, namely, as being sad, because he has quitted the earthly cradle of his childhood, his garden of Adam and his evening mountain. How false! Another reader would imagine him full of joy, because with children, to whom every change of scene presents a new one, journeying is the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, and because the fancies of a child are not as yet gloomy ones. Scheerau must have seemed to his anticipation nothing less than the city with long houses, wherein he had played with his sister. Besides--which is a naturalization-act to all children--his play-house had been put on board; even the starling, who, as an agitated hierarch, sprang up and down in the Solomon's-Chapel-of-Ease, he held in his jouncing lap. He pitied every corner of the Castle with all that was in it, that it could not take passage with him; this whole shell of a house seemed to him so narrow, so worn out, so faded out! People who have traveled little look upon their familiar home at the moment of departure, at that of arrival, and at other times, with three different feelings; but for migrating locusts and birds of passage the high roads and city streets are only the corridors between the apartments.
Half an hour before starting he seated himself on the empty coach-box, with his legs wedged in among the baggage and in palpitating expectation of the moment when the horses should make their first leap. At last the carriage door was shut to and all rolled away, down the mountain, across the common, on which the white, peeled tree that was once more to be planted in the earth with red-painted flag and ribbon streamers for the church-wake, grew quite despicable in the eyes of Gustavus, who was just going to meet in Scheerau a hundred finer May-poles and church fairs. But as he passed along by thefruitful regionof his mountain, where such a harvest of joys had ripened for him: Ah, then, from the funeral pile of dead afternoons, from the tinkling herd that grazed on the summits, from an associate herd boy with whom he had been no great friends, from the stone-built pen in which he had folded his lamb, that now stood up there without a ribbon and without any one to love him, and, finally, from the boundary-stone, on which once his sweetheart, his beauty, sat knitting--from all this, of course he turned his eyes away slowly, with many a long-lingering backward glance. "Ah!" he thought, "who will give thee citron-cakes and my little lamb crusts of bread? But I will send you over every day ever so many things!"
It was a pure October morning, the mist lay folded up at the feet of the heavens, the migrating summer still hovered with its blue pinions high over the foliage and the flowers which had brought it, and gazed with its broad and quietly warming sunny eye upon man, to whom it was bidding farewell. Gustavus would fain get out of the carriage, in order to wrap up the dew-sprinkled, fleeing summer, which, delicately woven, overspread the earth like a human life, and take it along with him. But thou, man! how often dost thou hang down over nature as a pestilential and mephitic vapor!
For they could hardly have gone on a league, after which he already began to take every village for Scheerau.... But I will first indicate where it was. At Yssig he screamed out in the wood: "O now the black arm yonder will reach in and take me out!" While the old man was still wondering how the little one knew that a finger-post was coming, which now actually pointed out from among the trees, all at once in behind there a voice began to scream: "Oh! my eyes! my eyes!" The child and the mother were petrified with terror; but the Captain leaped out from or through the carriage, smashed the glasses and bounded into the wood--and right upon a beautiful kneeling child, from whose lacerated eyes ran tears and water. "Oh, don't do anything to me, I can never see any more!" he said, and groped about him with his hands, in order to strike away the lancet which lay at his knees. "Who has done this?" said the Captain, with the softest voice, that broke with intense compassion; but ere the child spoke, an old haggard beggar-woman approached and said a beggar had darted into the thicket, who would fain have blinded the child, in order to beg with it. But the child clung with increasing convulsions to his hand, and said: "Oh, she will cut me again!" The Captain guessed the knavery, broke off the nearest branch, switched at the wretched woman's face with a rage that missed its aim, and ran with the blind boy in his arms to the affrighted carriage. It was a heart-rending spectacle, the innocent worm, with fine features and movements, in rags, and with red and wrinkled eyes!
Not merely liars and L'Hombre players, but romance readers also, must have a good memory to learn by heart the first ten or twelve sections, as if they were declensions and conjugations, because without these they cannot get on in the exposition. With me no stroke is in vain; in my book and in my body there hang bits of spleen; but the use of this inward part will very soon be brought out. Since a romance writer, like a courtier, aims at one sole object, namely, to ruin his friend and hero and lead him into heavily charged tempests, accordingly, I, too, have been for the last quarter building up, here a gray cloud that vanishes, there one that melts away; but when at last I have irresistibly charged with electricity all cells of the horizon, then I compress the whole devil into a thunder-storm--after fourteen sheets have been struck off, the compositor can already hear and set up the crash.... At bottom, to be sure, there is not a word of truth in it all; but as other authors are fond of giving out their romances for biographies, the privilege will be granted me of sometimes divesting my biography of the appearance of a romance.
The child, instead of his history, gave mere lamentations over his history. He seemed over seven years old, spoke German with an Italian accent, and his sickly, delicate, and pale-red body enwrapped his soul as a pale rose-leaf does the worm within it. His father was named Doctor Zoppo, came from Pavia, botanized himself from Italy to Germany, and let the little ones tear yellow flowers along the way. The blind Amandus wanted to pluck in this wood herbs also, but the devilish she-oculist happened upon him, helped him find yellow flowers and lured him with them so far into the woods that she could rob him of his clothes and his eyes.
Gustavus kept asking him every minute whether he could not see yet, gave him his luncheon that he might leave off weeping, and could not, ashiseyes were so widely open, comprehend his blindness. In the next country town Falkenberg got himself shaved and Amandus bandaged. I once saw at the last station before Leipsic such a charming traverse-band over the eye and forehead of a maiden, that I wished my wife might from time to time have a slight cut in that region, because it has a very neat effect; contrariwise the bandage over Amandus's two eyes made him look a child of woe.
When Amandus, in better clothing and with the sad bandage, sat in the carriage, Gustavus could not possibly cease weeping, and would fain get out his starling and present it to him; for sympathy is determined not by the size but by the shape of suffering.
Few persons who journey to Scheerau, will have the absurd fortune to meet suddenly, two leagues before arriving, a solitary carriage without the occupant appertaining to it; Falkenberg and his people and horses had this luck. This carriage was bearing the stomach, the thick and thin intestines, the liver, wherein princes seethe their gall, the lungs, whose air-bladders are the princely gall-bladders, as the wind-pipe is the gall-passage to the same, and the heart; but no corpse came with them; for the corpse, which was the reigning Lord of Scheerau, already lay in the hereditary vault. This stomach digested as much as his conscience did, namely, whole hides of land; and better than his thin head, to which truths and grievances (gravamina) were a heavy food; the Papinian stomach-machine remained even in advanced age still fiery, as indeed all else about him was childish. He used to ride for hours, a short time before his death, on a chamberlain, to whom he took a considerable liking; nevertheless, as a thoroughly sensible man, he thrust aside platter and glass, when the old and right contents no longer remained in either. Behind the sarcophagus of the intestines--the relic casket of the abdomen--rode the chief steward of the kitchen, several assistant cooks, the adjunct of the waiting service, and still greater members of the court establishment,e. g., the Medical CounsellorFenk. He and Falkenberg did not observe each other. The latter was engrossed to-day with mere vanities: the Doctor, whom he sought in Italy, and the Prince, whom he still expected to find on the earth. The insolvent crowned entrails, which, in this way, could not pay money, involved him now in a financial litigation with the heir to the crown.
The funeral procession of the princely intestines went to the Abbey ofHopf, where occurred the interment of their princely members; which--if a word of Plato is to be believed--are true beasts, and with which man, be he enlaced with order-ribbons or harnessed with drawing-bands, always has his infernal tussle. I will follow the box of viscera just three steps, because the Medical Counsellor--according to his habit of amusing himself in all places, in theatre boxes and church pews and taverns, only not in his study, by writing--here in the burial church of the intestines untied his writing-tablets and wrote down things which literally read as follows: "As princes have themselves interred, just as they also reside, in several places at once, so would I, too--but only in this way, and no other: my stomach must be deposited in the Episcopal Church--my liver, with its bitter bladder, in a Court Church--the thick intestines in a Jewish oratory--the lungs in a mixed,[20]or, at least, a University Church--the heart in the church triumphant, and the spleen in a Dissenting Chapel. But if I were first funeral preacher of a crowned abdomen, I should take another course; I should take the gullet for entrance or exordium of the funeral sermon and the blind gut for the close! And could I not in the three parts of my discourse run through the three concavities, touching lightly therein the nobler parts of the body, and, finally on its last passages, deliver myself in tears and eulogies out of the dust? For so one jests here below." There is a poetic frenzy--"fine frenzy"--but also a humorous, which Sterne had; but only readers of finished taste do not account the highest stretch of the faculty as overstraining.
The Falkenberg traveling train reached Scheerau at evening--the finest time to arrive anywhere, hence so many arrive at evening in the other world. It seemed to Gustavus as if he had been there before during his abduction. But as the fewest possible of my readers can have been abducted on account of their beauty, and therefore they do not know the city, it shall be shown up to them in the tenth section.
No Geographer and Upper Consistorial Counsellor has ever yet had the misfortune which has befallen Herr Brüshcing--namely, of omitting in his topographical atlas a whole good principality, which shares a seat on the courtly bench of Wetteran and is calledScheerau--which, according to the imperial matriculation schedule, furnishes 8/9 of horse and 9-2/8 of foot, and pays the Master of the Exchequer 21 Fl. 1/91 Xr. (kreutzer)--which was promoted to princely rank under Charles IV.--which has its five fair representative Chambers, which have everywhere a say, but nothing to do; namely, the Commandery of the German Order, the University, the Knighthood, the cities and the towns, and which, among other inhabitants, contains also me. I would not stand in the shoes of such a writer--one who creeps with his geographic mirror into everycul-de-sacin order to take its likeness, and yet in this instance has skipped over a whole principality with its five paralytic estates; I know how it annoys him, but now that I have talked with the whole world about it there is no longer any help for him.
The capital city, Scheerau, consists properly of two cities--New, or Upper Scheerau, where the Prince resides, and Old, or Lower Scheerau, where the Captain lodges. I, for my part, have long been convinced that the Saxon houses are not half so far removed from the Frankforters as the Old and New Scheerauers are from each other in style, face, fare and everything. The New Scheerauer has court-style enough to have dignity, debts and passion for extra-domestic pleasures; and yet, again, too much chancery style--because all the highest colleges of the land are there--not to recognize or demand everywhere stiff subordination, or to sink from the Chamberlain to the Chancery Clerk and Auditor of the Treasury. Now, the old Scheerauer perceives this. On the other hand, the New Scheerauer perceives that the other has the following traits: If in China the jaws of a dinner-party must all move simultaneously like a double piano; if in Monomotapa the whole country sneezes every time the Emperor does; let one go to Old Scheerau, and there he will find things still better; at the same moment all streets must weep, cough, pray, ease themselves, hate and spit; their Blue Book looks like a musical score, from which all play the same piece, only with different instruments and voices, (only in music are they swayed by some true spirit of freedom, and none slavishly binds his elbow or fiddle-bow or quill [Tangenten] to his neighbor's)--they hate belles-lettres as much as they do one another--incapable of doing without social pleasures, of arranging or enjoying them, incapable of enterprise, of openly either hating or loving or enduring each other, they worm themselves into their money-piles and publicly respect the richest and privately only the relative, or, in fact, nobody at all--without taste and without patriotism and without reading....
But I am putting it quite too strongly; no reader will be willing to stir a step after the Captain towards Lower-Scheerau. Their greatest fault is, that they are good for nothing; but, aside from that, they are thrifty, full of none but trades-people, temperate, and sweep the streets and their faces nice and clean. Capitals, like courts, have a family-likeness; but country-towns inasmuch as more commercial, military, legal, mining or marine sap flows through them--a different full-face and half-face.
The Falkenberg ship's company alighted from its traveling ark before the plated front door of the Professor of Ethics, Hoppedizel; in the Professor's second story they usually had their winter quarters. Just behind the said door the Captain encountered an absurd melodrama, namely: the Raft Inspector,Peuschel, was leaning against the wall, vomiting and cursing; and regularly alternating from one to the other, as between Pentameter and Hexameter. The Professor of Morals quickly, with an uninked finger, wrote on the wall the outlines of the following words which he read off as fast as he traced them: "It was indeed disgusting, devilishly disgusting." Any other man the entrance of an old friend like Falkenberg would at once have disconcerted in the whole scene; the Professor, however, was not to be cheated out of his joke, but began his embrace in an unaltered tone with a report of the present case: "The gentleman before you. Raft Inspector Peuschel," (began Hoppedizel) "is fond of tippling, with wine particularly--it was in vain that the inspectoress, his lady"--(for discreet forbearance was never on Hoppedizel's lips)--"had sought to reform him by letting a live frog die in his wine. He himself" (he added) "had therefore to-day tried his hand at making this guzzling sicken him. For he had luckily cut a gall-stone--as thick as a Muscatelle-pear--out of a University subject;thishe had hollowed out into a drinking urn and made Herr Peuschel believe it was of lava and to-day had let his vomiting friend drink out of it genuine Hungarian wine of the best crop; and that it might not fail to nauseate him and set hiscropinto a reaction, he had only a few minutes before made it clear to his patient that the volcanic beaker was veritable gravel-stone. And he hoped it would be some time before his friend would get this piece of earthenware out of his head."
The Professor begged the Inspector to do him the favor, in case the nausea left him, of staying there this evening and joining the Captain in a spoonful of soup.
There are certain houses where, let one visit them as often as he will, one shall find everything revised and turned up and turned over; this was emphatically the case in Hoppedizel's establishment; and the Captain's winter quarters looked always like a summer house in winter. People of refinement charm us by a certain delicate attention to another's little necessities, by an anticipation of his slightest wishes, by a constant sacrifice of their own, by courtesies that wind their silken web more softly and securely round our hearts than the cutting love-cord of a great benefaction. Hoppedizel used neither the silk nor the cord, and cared for nobody. It was not from absence of fine feeling, but from rebellion against it, that, when the Captain, the very first week, cursed both his quarters and his landlord, he simply laughed at him.
The delicate Amandus kept his sickbed all the evening and Gustavus crept to his side, in order to play with him. How, in the Arabia Petrea of the hateful world, are we refreshed by the sight of children who love one another, and whose good little eyes and little lips and little hands are no masks!
The next day an accident again took the two children away from each other. The Captain led them through all the streets of the city as through a picture gallery, and silently stopped at last with the two foster-brothers of the heart before the house of his friend Dr. Fenk, and looked wistfully at his picture (on the sign.) It represented a Doctor's coach with a Physician inside, Death in front, harnessed into the shafts, and the Devil sitting up on the box. "The dear, good droll," thought he, "might surely just trudge home from his Italy and give his friends a pleasure!" For he had not heard a word of his actual return. "Mandus! Mandus! run up!" cried suddenly a little maid overhead, who seemed on wires, and came herself skipping down and plucked and pecked at the little fellow. The good-natured Captain gladly followed the children out of the great parterre into the familiar house, and his astonishment at all signs of Fenk's return ceased only with the rushing in of the Doctor himself. The latter, when half way towards embracing him, bounded back to the little blind boy and amidst tears and kisses snatched off the bandage--examined the eyes for a long time at the window--and said, after drawing a long breath: "God be praised and thanked! he is not blind!" Now, for the first time, the Doctor flung his arms, with redoubled warmth, around his friend. "Pardon me, it is my child!" Nevertheless he drew Amandus again to the light, and examined him still longer, and said, with raised eyebrows; "It seems to be merely a lesion of thesclerotica; the oculist-woman let out the aqueous humor. In Pavia I saw it done every week with dogs, whose eyes the dentists (our medical feudal-cousins) slit up and spread over them a stupid salve. When afterwards the humor and the sight came back of themselves, the salve had the credit of it."
I skip over the stream of the outpouring, conversational and joyous, of the two friends, which left them hardly eye or ear for anything, least of all the clock. "Ah, here they come," said Fenk, namely, the guests. As my readers have understanding enough, they can permit me, I hope, to finish my narrative before they take down their rod of wrath, against the imaginary posterior of the Doctor, from behind the looking-glass.
No one had such a burning hatred as he for the narrowness, intolerance, and provincial pedantry of the inhabitants of Lower Scheerau, wherewith they made a short life so much the shorter to themselves, and a sour one so much the more sour. "It disgusts me to be praised by them"--he not merely said that, but he even loved to exasperate by putting the worst face upon his purest motives, the whole town, from one end to the other; meanwhile, in the tenderness of his heart, he could not do more than vex the whole cityin grosso, never one single person. For this reason on the second morning after his arrival he glided about like an influenza from one house to another, and invited all aunts, cousins, blood-relations and blood-enemies, people in whom he had no interest save as they belonged to the dear Christendom,e. g., the Raft Inspector, Peuschel, the Late-Director Eckert, with his four late-pears of daughters, and all that had breath in Unter-Scheerau--he invited all in a body to spend an afternoon, and inspect a rarity he had brought home with him, namely, aherbarium vivum, which he would exhibit. "It was no live book of plants, but something quite special, and he had brought home from the glaciers the very best."
And these all were now coming, not because they cared the least for a book of plants, but because they wanted to see it, andincidentallythe bachelor Doctor's housekeeping. I must confess thus much to the European courts, that the whole assembled township and cousinship swept in and coughed and hemmed their way through with grace; and the four late-pears were not wanting in good-breeding, but made instead of bows profound genuflexions and kept very well their perpendicular position. The host then brought in two long folios of plants, and said in a friendly manner he should take pleasure in showing them all--and now he kindled the hell into which he cast the company--he crawled with caterpillar's feet and snail-slime from leaf to leaf of book and plant; he showed nothing superficially; he went through the pistils, stamens, anthers of every single plant; he said he should weary them if he were more copious, and would describe, therefore, name, country, and natural history of every group very briefly. All faces burned, all backs were roasted, all toes were in a fidget. Vainly did one cousin attempt to turn away her eyes toward the blind Amandus, only for the sake of looking at something animal; the botanical connoisseur fastened their attention upon a new dust-bag which he at that moment eulogized. He had already dragged his club to thePentandria,[21]when he said: "This evening must find us in the neighborhood of theDodecandria[of twelve stamens]; but it will cost toil and sweat." He grew more and more delighted with the universal lamentation over such a purgatorial afternoon, the like of which no Scheerauer had ever before experienced, and said their attention fired his enthusiasm in the highest degree. Still the botanic candidates let themselves be martyred from one leaf to another, and would have obligingly stayed it out, till the Captain, although he divined the prank, grew infernally impatient and was on the point of going. The Doctor said he should have to reserve the second folio for another lesson; but he wished they would come again soon, that would be the only evidence that they had been pleased to-day. The mere thought of the second folio-torture, to which the Theresian[22]Codex with its racking pictures is but a pocket-almanac with monthly engravings, brought with it something of a feverish shudder. Thus had they disgracefully lost a whole half day without a bit of scandal, gossip, or calumny, which might have been carried home with them and retailed through the neighborhood. The elder dames usually visited balls and concerts, not at all, however, to be seen, but to see, and to elaborate there physiognomical fragments for the furtherance of theknowledge of humanity, though not for the promotion ofphilanthropy. Nay, they loved to visit even their avowed enemies, when there was a shot to be fired at an absent enemy; as wolves, who flee one another, nevertheless ally themselves together for the death of another wolf. I have always taken pleasure in observing how heartily and with what friendship a pair of Scheerau ladies sympathize with each other when they have the least scandal to bring out of their budget against a third. Only when two no longer sit beside each other on the sofa, but turn their faces instead of their hips towards each other, then I would rather not be the one they handle.
* * * *
To the men of that place the sight of a strange lady does little harm; it merely causes all frizzlers and barbers to come a little later than usual; at the billiard tables the cues or tobacco pipes point up into the air, and the teachers of the worthy gymnasium do not stop at all on that account. On the contrary the women!--
On the island of St. Hilda, when a stranger disembarks there occurs a misfortune which no philosopher has yet been able to explain--the whole countrycoughson his account.[23]All villages, all corporate bodies, all ages cough--if the passenger makes a purchase, the provision dealers cough, at the gate the military do it, and the body of teachers cough over their lessons. It is of no use at all to call in the physician--he barks more than his patients and is his own patient....
In Lower Scheerau the same misfortune occurs, only in a greater degree. Let a strange lady set foot in the post-house, in the concert hall or ball-room, immediately all the women of Scheerau are compelled tocough, and--which always proceeds from a sore throat--to speaklower--all are attacked by quinsy,i. e., theangina vera. The poor ladies show all signs of the most virulent inflammation of the throat; heat (hence the fanning)chills, distress for breath,fancies, swollen nostrils, heartburn. Cooling remedies, water, clearing of the air tubes, prove the most effectual thus far for the fair patients. But if (which Heaven avert!) the strange lady who enters is the handsomest--the cleverest--the richest--the famousest--the most celebrated--the most tasteful--then not a single sufferer in the whole hospital is cured; such an angel becomes a true death angel, and one should absolutely prevent any stranger of merit from passing the gate.
The attack, like every other malady, is most aggravating in autumn and winter during the winter gaieties and among the winter guests. This quinsy is ascribed by wit or understanding to two causes: first, to external or shell-merits (never to inner ones); thus, too, Unzer thinks that crustaceous animals act most upon the throat, hence,e. g., oysters produce difficulty of swallowing, calcined crabs counteract hydrophobia, steam of crabs produces dumbness, scorpions lameness of the tongue. The second reason is, that ladies in a city live as on an insulating stool, and if a stranger of their sex, who has not been puten rapportwith them, touches the manipulated clairvoyants, or even stands at a distance from them, these latter feel ugly sensations in all their limbs.
End of the Extra Lines.
* * * *
After the botanical divine-service Fenk gave the departing ladies of Scheerau the additional piece of information to take home with them, as an altar-benediction, leaving it to them, meanwhile, to make the sign of the crossover it: That the two children, whom they had seen, the little boy and the little girl, had had no other cradle than the traveling carriage; but that he, at present, had become at once Pestilentiary and Medical Counsellor; he preferred however to cure women only, and in time hoped to wed one, and hereby made a standing offer....
When the people of Lower Scheerau have anything put upon them which seems at once sweet, sour and senseless, at first they listen to it--then they smile at it--then reflect upon it--then cannot see into it--then for three days surmise nothing good of it--and finally become fairly enraged about it. Fenk did not trouble himself about that, but said from time to time something or other and what neither they nor he himself understood.
Thereupon he explained all to the Captain, as I do to the reader. The pressed plants, he said, would keep, henceforth, all aunts and ninnies and visiting ants away from his lodgings, as an enclosing hemp-thread does caterpillars from a vegetable garden. That he communicated only half the history of his travels and a riddle or two growing out of it, because one becomes most interested in persons about whom one has something left him to guess, and the curious patient females would become his female patients. Whether he was married or not, he did not himself know; nor should others know, because all whose houses were sale-rooms of daughters would invite him in as physician that he might come out again as bridegroom. Finally, that the reasons of his taking only female patients were these: that they were the most numerous; that this exclusive practice would beget a peculiar confidence in him; that this confidence was a woman-doctor's whole dispensary; that most of the ailments of women consisted merely of weaknesses, and their whole cure in abstinence from--medicine; that apothecaries' shops were only for men, not for women; and because he liked full as well to adore as to cure them.
Another point was this, how he had so quickly come to Scheerau and come so quickly to be Medical Counsellor. This was the way: the hereditary Prince, who at this moment on the high throne-coach-box will drive with the state-carriage to the devil, loves nobody; on his journey he made jests upon his mistresses; his friendship is only a lesser degree of hatred, his indifference is a greater; but the greatest, which stings him like a heartburn, he cherishes for his unmarried brother, Captain von Ottomar, Fenk's friend, who had stayed in Rome in the midst of the most beautifulnatural nature, as well asartistic, in order to revel in the enjoyments of Roman landscapes and antiques. Ottomar seemed ageniusin the good sense as well as in the bad. He and the hereditary Prince could hardly endure each other in ante-chambers, and were often on the point of a duel. Now the Grand Duke of Scheerau hates poor Fenk also, first, because the latter is a friend of his foe; secondly, because he once restored to life and to his allowance-money the hereditary Prince's third brother; thirdly, because the Prince needed far less reasons (or in fact none) for hating any one than for loving him.
Now the Doctor would have been glad to be made Medical Counsellor under the former administration, whose stomach we met on the road; under the coming administration, whose stomach was still filling itself in Italy, there was little chance for him. The Doctor sought therefore to get his fortune firmly rooted a week or two before the new coronation. He found the old minister still at his post, who was patron and whose patron the hereditary Prince was far from being, for the reason that leads hereditary princes generally to think that they must get the creatures of their dead father under the ground just as certainly, only more slowly and delicately, as savage tribes do, who lay on the funeral-pile of the king his favorites and servants also.
When Fenk came, thedeceasedRegent made him all he wanted to be: for it was in this way: When the departed father of his people had become in the physiological sense a child of the people,i. e., had returned to the age of which he was when they had hung upon him the first order-ribbon instead of leading-strings, namely, six and a half years, the eternal signing of his cabinet decrees became much too disagreeable to the Prince, and at last impossible. As, however, he must after all still govern, when he could no longer write, the court-engraver cut his decreeing name so well in stone that he had only to dip the stamp in ink and press it while moist under the edict: then he had his edict before him. In this way he governed fifteen per cent. easier; but the minister one hundred per cent., who, at last, out of gratitude, in order to relieve the enfeebled Prince even of the heavy handling of the stamp, dipped, himself, the beautiful seal (which he preferred to Michael Angelo's) into his own ink-stand; so that the old lord, several days after his death, had subscribed sundry vocations and rescripts--but this modeling-stamp of men in general became the insect's-laying-sting[24]and father of the best government officials, and at last spawned the Pestilentiary.
Not the crown but the inkstand oppresses Princes, Grand Masters and Commanders; not the Sceptre, but the Pen do they find so much difficulty in wielding, because with the former they merely command, but with the latter they have to sign what is commanded. A cabinet councillor would not wonder if a tormented crowned scribe should, like Roman recruits, amputate his thumb, in order to be freed from the eternal making of his mark, astheydo to escape fighting. But the reigning and writing heads keep the thumb; they see that the welfare of the land requires their dipping the pen,--the little illegibleness on cabinet orders which one calls their name, opens and shuts, like a magic formula, money-chests, hearts, gates, warehouses, ports; the black drop of their pen manures and forces or macerates whole fields. Professor Hoppedizel had, when he was first teacher of morals to the Scheerau Infante, a good idea, although only in his last month: might not the princely tutor command the sub-tutor to let the crown-abecedarian, who of course must one day learn to write, instead of useless bills of feoffment merely scrawl his name in the middle of every blank leaf? The child would write his signature without disgust on as many pages as would be needed in his whole administration--the sheets might be laid away against the child's coronation--and then (he continued) when he had bespattered pages enough, as a college would often require his signature yearly, if, accordingly on New Year's day the necessary number of signed reams had been distributed among the colleges to last the whole year--what more would the child need to do in his whole administration?
End of the Extras-thoughts.
* * * *
One word more: after nine weeks the Doctor's revenge by means of the plant-book produced in him, as the least revenge does in every good man, a painful reaction. "The Herbarium," said he, "annoys me, as often as I stick anything into it; but it is certainly true, a man shall have passed through all capital cities and retain his modesty: at the very gate of his native town the devil of pride enters into him and accompanies him on his first visits--his good fellow citizens, he will have it, must during his absence have become rational."