A Romance Of Tompkins Square.
by Thomas A. Janvier.
Whether the honey shall be brought to the boiling-point slowly or rapidly; whether it shall boil a long time or a short time; when and in what quant.i.ties the flour shall be added; how long the kneading shall last; in what size of earthen pot the dough shall be stored, and what manner of cover upon these pots best preserves the dough against the a.s.saults of damp and mould; whether the pots shall be half-buried in the cool earth of the cellar or ranged on shelves to be freely exposed to the cool cellar air--all these several matters are enshrouded in a mystery that is penetrated only by the elect few of Nurnberg bakers by whom perfect lebkuchen is made. And the same is true of the Brunswick bakers, who call this rare compound honigkuchen, and of the makers of pferfferkuchen, as it is called by the bakers of Saxony.
Nor does the mystery end here. This first stage in the making of lebkuchen is but means to an end, and for the compa.s.sing of that end--the blending and the baking of the finished and perfect honey-cake--each master-baker has his own especial recipe, that has come down to him from some ancestral baker of rare parts, or that by his own inborn genius has been directly inspired. And so, whether the toothsome result be Nurnberger lebkuchen, or Brunsscheiger peppernotte, or Basler leckerly, the making of it is a mystery from first to last.
It was because of this mystery that the life of Gottlieb Brekel had been imbittered for nearly twenty years--ever since, in fact, his first essay in the compounding of Nurnberger lebkuchen had been made. He was but a young baker then: now he was an old one, and notwithstanding the guarded praise of friends and the partial approval of the public (notably of that portion of the public under the age of ten years that attended St.
Bridget"s Parochial School) he full well knew that his efforts through all these years to make, in New York, lebkuchen such as he himself had eaten when he was a boy, at home in Nurnberg, had been neither more nor less than a long series of failures.
In the hopeful days of his apprenticeship all had seemed so easy before him. Let him but have a little shop, and then a little capital wherewith to lay in his supply of honey, and the thing would be done! He had no recipe, it is true; for he was a baker not by heredity, but by selection. Yet from a wise old baker he had gleaned the knowledge of honey-cake making, and he believed strongly that from the pure fount of his own genius he could draw a formula for the making of lebkuchen so excellent that compared with it all other lebkuchen would seem tasteless. But these were the bright dreams of youth, which age had refused to realize.
In course of time the little shop became an accomplished fact; a very little shop it was in East Fourth Street. Capital came more slowly, and three several times, when a sum almost sufficient had been saved, was it diverted from its destined purpose of buying the honey without which Gottlieb could not make even a beginning in his triumphal lebkuchen career.
His first acc.u.mulation was swept away through the conquest of Ambition by Love. In this case Love was personified in one Minna Schaus--who was not by any means a typical st.u.r.dy German la.s.s, with laughing looks and stalwart ways, but a daintily-finished, golden-haired maiden, with soft blue eyes full of tenderness, and a gentleness of manner that Gottlieb thought--and with more reason than lovers sometimes think things of this sort--was very like the manner of an angel. And for love of her Gottlieb forgot for a while his high resolves in regard to lebkuchen making; and on the altar of his affections--in part to pay for his modest wedding-feast, in part to pay for the modest outfit for their housekeeping over the bakery--the money laid aside for the filling of his honey-pots very willingly was offered up.
A second time were his honey-pots sacrificed, that the coming into the world of the little Minna might be made smooth. This, also, was a willing sacrifice; though in his heart of hearts Gottlieb felt a twinge of regret that his first-born was not a son, to whom the fame and fortune incident to the making of perfect lebkuchen might descend.
But he was a philosopher in his way, and did not suffer himself to be seriously disconcerted by an accident that by no means was irreparable.
As he smoked his long pipe that night, while the bread was baking, he said to himself, cheerily: "It is a girl. Yes, that is easy. Girls sprout everywhere; they are like gra.s.s. But a boy, and a boy who is to grow up into such a baker as my boy will be--ah, that is another matter.
But patience, Gottlieb; all in good time." Then, when his third pipe was finished--which was his measure of time for the baking--he fetched out the sweet-smelling hot bread from the oven with his long peel, and set forth upon his round of delivery. And he whistled a mellow old Nurnberg air as he pushed his cart through the streets before him that frosty morning, and in his heart he thanked the good G.o.d who had sent him the blessings of a dear wife and a sweet little daughter and a growing trade.
And yet once more were his honey-pots sacrificed, and this time the sacrifice was sad indeed. From the day that the little Minna came into the world his own Minna, as in a little while was but too plain to him, began to make ready to leave it. As the weeks went by, the little strength that at first had come to her was lost again; the faint color faded from her cheeks, and left them so wan that through the fair skin the blue veins showed in most delicate tracery; and as her dear eyes ever grew gentler and more loving, the light slowly went out from them.
So within the year the end came. In that great sorrow Gottlieb forgot his ambition, and cared not, when the bills were paid, that his honey-pots still remained unfilled. For the care of his home and of little Minna his good sister Hedwig came to him. Very drearily, for a long while, the work of the bakery went on.
But a strong man, stirred by a strong purpose, does not relinquish that purpose lightly; and the one redeeming feature of the life of many sorrows which in this world we all are condemned to live is that even the bitterest sorrow is softened by time. But for this partial relief our race no doubt would have been extinguished ages ago in a madness wrought of grief and rage.
Gottlieb"s strong purpose was to make the best lebkuchen that baker ever baked. After a fashion his sorrow healed, as the flesh heals about a bullet that has gone too deep to be extracted by the surgeon"s craft, and while it was with him always, and not seldom sent through all his being thrills of pain, he bore it hidden from the world, and went about his work again. Working comforted him. The baking of bread is an employment that is at once soothing and sustaining. As a man kneads the spongy dough he has good exercise and wholesome time for thought.
While the baking goes on he may smoke and meditate. The smell of the newly-baked bread is a pleasant smell, and brings with it pleasant thoughts of many people well nourished in the eating of it. Moreover, there is no time in the whole twenty-four hours when a city is so innocent, so like the quiet honest country-side, as that time in the crisp morning when a baker goes his rounds.
As Gottlieb found himself refreshed and strengthened by these manifold good influences of his gentle trade, his burden of sorrow was softened to him and made easier to bear. Comforting thoughts of the little Minna--growing to be a fine little la.s.s now--stole in upon him, and within him the hope arose that she would grow to be like the dear mother whom she never had known. So the little fine roots of a new love struck down into his sad heart; and presently the sweet plant of love began to grow for him again, casting its delicate tendrils strongly about the child, who truly was a part of the being about which his earlier and stronger love had clung. Yet the love that thus was re-established in Gottlieb"s breast was far from filling it, and so for ambition there was ample room.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Sat beside the oven smoking his second pipe 204]
Somewhat to his surprise, one night, as he sat beside the oven smoking his second pipe, he found himself thinking once more about his project for making such lebkuchen as never yet had been known outside of Nurnberg--lebkuchen that would make him at once the admiration and the despair of every German baker in New York. Nor was there, as he perceived as he turned the matter over in his mind, any reason now why he should not set about making this project a reality; for he had money enough, and more than enough, in store to buy the honey that he had so long desired. His eyes sparkled; he forgot to smoke; and when he turned again, half unconsciously, to his pipe, it had gone out. This roused him. The brightness faded from his eyes; he drew a long sigh. Then he lighted his pipe again, and until the baking was ended his thoughts no longer were busied with ambitious schemes for the making of lebkuchen, but went back with a sad tenderness to the happy time that had come so quickly to so cruel an end.
But the spark was kindled, and presently the fire burned. When he told the good Hedwig that he had bought the honey at last, that excellent woman--albeit not much given to display of the tender emotions--shed tears of joy. She was a st.u.r.dy, thick-waisted, stout-ankled person, this Aunt Hedwig, with a cheery red face, and prodigiously fine white teeth, and very bright black eyes; and her taste in dress was such that when of a Sunday she went to the Church of the Redemptorist Fathers, in Third Street, she was more brilliant than ever King Solomon was in all his glory, in her startling array of vivid reds and greens and blues. But beneath her violent exterior of energetic color she had a warm and faithful heart, as little Minna knew already, and as her brother Gottlieb had known for many a long good year. Therefore was Gottlieb now gladdened by her hearty show of sympathy; and he returned with a good will the sounding smack that she gave him with her red lips, and the strong hug that she gave him with her stout arms.
It was at sight of this pleasing manifestation of affection that Herr Sohnstein, the notary--who was present in the little room back of the shop where it occurred--at once declared that he meant to buy some honey too. And Aunt Hedwig, smiling so generously as to show every one of her fine white teeth, promptly told him that he had better be off and buy it, because perhaps he could buy at the same place some hugs and kisses too: at which sally and quick repartee they all laughed. Herr Sohnstein long had been the declared lover of Aunt Hedwig"s, and long had been held at arm"s-length (quite literally occasionally) by that vigorous person; who believed, because of her good heart, that her present duty was not to consult her own happiness by becoming Frau Sohnstein, but to remain the Fraulein Brekel, and care for her lonely brother and her brother"s child.
Being thus encouraged, Gottlieb bought the honey forthwith; and with Aunt Hedwig"s zealous a.s.sistance set about boiling it and straining it and kneading it into a sticky dough, all in accordance with the wise old baker"s directions which he so long had treasured in his mind. And when the dough was packed in earthen pots, over which bladders were tied, all the pots were set away in the coolest part of the cellar, as far from the great oven as possible, that the precious honey-cake might undergo that subtle change which only comes with time.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Pots were set away in the coolest part of the cellar 208]
For at least a year must pa.s.s before the honey-cake really can be said to be good at all; and the longer that it remains in the pots, even until five-and-twenty years, the better does it become. Therefore it is that all makers of lebkuchen who aspire to become famous professors of the craft add each year to their stock of honey-cake, yet draw always from the oldest pots a time-soaked dough that ever grows more precious in its sweet excellence of age. Thus large sums--more hundreds of dollars than a young baker, just starting upon his farinaceous career, would dare to dream of--may be invested; and the old rich bakers who can dower their daughters with many honey-pots know that in the matter of sons-in-law they have but to pick and choose.
It was about Christmas-time--which is the proper time for this office--that Gottlieb made his first honey-cake; and it was a little before the Christmas following that his first lebkuchen was baked. For a whole week before this portentous event occurred he was in a nervous tremor; by day he scarcely slept; as he sat beside the oven at night his pipe so frequently went out that twice, having thus lost track of time, his baking of bread came near to being toast. And when at last the fateful night arrived that saw his first batch of lebkuchen in the oven, he actually forgot to smoke at all!
Gottlieb had but a sorry Christmas that year. The best that even Aunt Hedwig could say of his lebkuchen was that it was not bad. Herr Sohnstein, to be sure, brazenly declared that it was delicious; but Gottlieb remembered that Herr Sohnstein, who conducted a flourishing practice in the criminal courts, was trained in the art of romantic deviations from the truth whenever it was necessary to put a good face on a bad cause; and he observed sadly that the notary"s teeth were at variance with his tongue, for the piece of lebkuchen that Herr Sohnstein ate was infinitessimally small. As for the regular German customers of the bakery, they simply bit one single bite and then refused to buy.
Indeed, but for the children from St. Bridget"s School--who, being for the most part boys, and Irish boys at that, presumably could eat anything--it is not impossible that that first baking of lebkuchen might have remained uneaten even until this present day. And it was due mainly to the stout stomachs of successive generations of these enterprising boys that the series of experiments which Gottlieb then began in the making of lebkuchen was brought, in the course of years, to something like a satisfactory conclusion. But even at its best, never was this lebkuchen at all like that of which in his hopeful youth he had dreamed.
Herr Sohnstein, to be sure, spoke highly of it, and even managed to eat of it quite considerable quant.i.ties. Gottlieb did not imagine that Herr Sohnstein could have in this matter any ulterior motives; but Aunt Hedwig much more than half suspected that in order to please her by pleasing her brother he was making a sacrifice of his stomach to his heart. If this theory had any foundation in fact, it is certain that Herr Sohnstein did not appreciably profit by his gallant risk of indigestion; for while Aunt Hedwig by no means seemed disposed to shatter all his hopes by a sharp refusal, she gave no indication whatever of any intention to permit her ripe red lips to utter the longed-for word of a.s.sent. Aunt Hedwig, unquestionably, was needlessly cruel in her treatment of Herr Sohnstein, and he frequently told her so.
Sometimes he would ask her, with a fine irony, if she meant to keep him waiting for his answer until her brother had made lebkuchen as good as the lebkuchen of Nurnberg? To which invariably she would reply that, in the first place, she did not know of any question that he ever had asked her that required an answer; and, in the second place, that she did mean to keep him waiting just precisely that long. And then she would add, with a delicate drollery that was all her own, that whenever he got tired of waiting he might hire a whole horse-car all to himself and ride right away. Ah, this Aunt Hedwig had a funny way with her!
And so the years slipped by; and little Minna, who laughed at the pa.s.sing years as merrily as Aunt Hedwig laughed at Herr Sohnstein, grew up into a blithe, trig, round maiden, and ceased to be little Minna at all. She was her mother over again, Gottlieb said; but this was not by any means true. She did have her mother"s goodness and sweetness, but her st.u.r.dy body bespoke her father"s stronger strain. Aunt Hedwig, of this same strain, undisguisedly was stocky. Minna was only comfortably stout, with good broad shoulders, and an honest round waist that anybody with half an eye for waists could see would be a satisfactory armful.
And she had also Aunt Hedwig"s constant cheeriness. All day long her laugh sounded happily through the house, or her voice went blithely in happy talk, or, failing anybody to talk to, trilled out some sc.r.a.p of a sweet old German song. The two apprentices and the young man who drove the bread-wagon of course were wildly and desperately in love with her--a tender pa.s.sion that they dared not disclose to its object, but that they frequently and boastingly aired to each other. Naturally these interchanges of confidence were apt to be somewhat tempestuous. As the result of one of them, when the elder apprentice had declared that Minna"s beautiful brown hair was finer than any wig in the window of the hair-dresser on the west side of the square, and that she had given him a lock of it; and when the young man who drove the bread-wagon (he was a profane young man) had declared that it was a verdammter sight finer than any wig, and that she hadn"t--the elder apprentice got a dreadful black eye, and the younger apprentice was almost smothered in the dough-trough, and the young man who drove the bread-wagon had his head broken with the peel that was broken over it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Almost smothered in the dough-trough 214]
Aunt Hedwig did not need to be told, nor did Minna, the little jade, the cause of this direful combat; and both of these amiable women thought Gottlieb very hard-hearted because he charged the broken peel--it was a new one--and the considerable amount of dough that was wasted by sticking to the younger apprentice"s person, against the wages of the three combatants.
This reference to the apprentices and to the wagon shows that Gottlieb"s bakery no longer was a small bakery, but a large one. In the making of lebkuchen, it is true, he had not prospered; but in all other ways he had prospered amazingly. From Avenue A over to the East River, and from far below Tompkins Square clear away to the upper regions of Lexington Avenue, the young man who drove the bread-wagon rattled along every morning as hard as ever he could go, and he vowed and declared, this young man did, that nothing but his love for Minna kept him in a place where all the year round he was compelled in every single day to do the work of two. Meanwhile the little shop on East Fourth Street had been abandoned for a bigger shop, and this, in turn, for one still bigger--quite a palace of a shop, with plate-gla.s.s windows--on Avenue B.
It was here, beginning in a modest way with a couple of tables whereat chance-hungry people might sit while they ate zwieback or a thick slice of hearty pumpernickel and drank a gla.s.s of milk, that a restaurant was established as a tender to the bakery. It did not set out to be a large restaurant, and, in fact, never became one. In the back part of the shop were a dozen tables, covered with oil-cloth and decorated with red napkins, and at these tables, under the especial direction of Aunt Hedwig, who was a culinary genius, was served a limited, but from a German stand-point most toothsome, bill of fare. There was Hasenpfeffer mit Spatzle, and Sauerbraten mit Kartoffelklosse, and Rindfleisch mit Meerrettig, and Bratwurst mit Rothkraut; and Aunt Hedwig made delicious coffee, and the bakery of course provided all manner of sweet cakes. In the summer-time they did a famous business in ice-cream.
On the plate-gla.s.s windows beneath the sweeping curve of white letters in which the name of the owner of the bakery was set forth was added in smaller letters the words "Cafe Nurnberger." Gottlieb and Aunt Hedwig and the man who made the sign (this last, however, for the venal reason that more letters would be required) had stood out stoutly for the honest German "Kaffehaus;" but Minna, whose tastes were refined, had insisted upon the use of the French word: there was more style about it, she said. And this was a case in which style was wedded to substantial excellence. What with the good things which Gottlieb baked and the good things which Aunt Hedwig cooked, the Cafe Nurnberger presently acquired a somewhat enviable reputation. It became even a resort of the aristocracy, in this case represented by the dwellers in the handsome houses on the eastern and northern sides of Tompkins Square. Of winter evenings, when bright gas-light and a big glowing stove made the restaurant a very cozy place indeed, large parties of these aristocrats would drop in on their way home from the Thalia Theatre, and would stuff themselves with Hasenpfeffer and Sauerbraten and Kartoffelklosse, and would swig Aunt Hedwig"s strong coffee (out of cups big enough and thick enough to have served as sh.e.l.ls and been fired from a mortar), until it would seem as though they must certainly crack their aristocratic skins.
Altogether, Gottlieb was in a flourishing line of business; and but for the deep sorrow that time never wholly could heal, and but for the continued failure of his attempts to make a really excellent lebkuchen, he would have been a very happy man. By this time he had come to be a baker of ease. The hard part of the work was done by the apprentices, and the morning delivery of bread was attended to by the young man who drove the bread-wagon. In the summer-time he would take Minna and Aunt Hedwig, always accompanied by her faithful Herr Sohnstein, upon beer-drinking expeditions to Guttenberg and other fashionable suburban resorts; and through the cozy winter evenings he smoked his long pipe comfortably in the little room at the back of the shop, where Minna and Aunt Hedwig sat with him, and where Herr Sohnstein, also smoking a long pipe, usually sat with him too. Sometimes Minna would sing sweet German songs to them, accompanying herself very creditably upon a cabinet organ--for Minna had received not only the substantial education that enabled her to keep the bakery accounts, but also had been instructed in the polite accomplishments of music and the dance. In summer, when expeditions were not on foot, these smoking parties usually were held upon the roof; where Gottlieb had made a garden and grew roses in pots, and even had raised some rare and delicious cauliflowers.
It was a pleasant place, that roof, of a warm summer evening, especially when the rising full-moon sent a shimmering path of glory across the rippling waters of the East River, and cast over the bad-smelling region of Hunter"s Point a glamour of golden haze that made it seem, oil tanks and all, a bit of fairy-land. At such times, as they sat among the rose-bushes and cauliflowers, Herr Sohnstein not infrequently would stop smoking his long pipe while he slyly squeezed Aunt Hedwig"s plump hand.
And Gottlieb also would stop smoking, as his thoughts wandered away along that glittering path across the waters, and so up to heaven where his Minna was. And then his thoughts would return to earth, to his little Minna--for to him she still was but a child--and he would find his sorrow lessened in thankfulness that, while his greatest treasure was lost to him, this good daughter and so many other good things still were his.
But the lebkuchen dream of Gottlieb"s youth remained unrealized; still unattained was the goal that twenty years before had seemed so near.
However, being a stout-hearted baker of the solid Nurnberg strain, he did not at all surrender hope. Each year he added to his stock of honey-cake; and he knew that when fortune favored him at last, as he still believed that fortune would favor him, he would have in store such honey-cake as would enable him to make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the Kaiser himself!
After the affair of the broken peel there was a coolness between Gottlieb and the elder apprentice, which, increasing, led to a positive coldness, and then to a separation. And then it was that Fate put a large spoke in all the wheels which ran in the Cafe Nurnberg by bringing into Gottlieb"s employment a ruddy young Nurnberger, lately come out of that ancient city to America, named Hans Kuhn.
It was not chance that led Hans to earn his living in a bakery when he came to New York. He was a born baker: a baker by choice, by force of natural genius, by hereditary right. Back in the dusk of the Middle Ages, as far as ever the traditions of his family and the records of the Guild of Bakers of Nurnberg ran, all the men of his race had been bakers, and famous ones at that. A c.u.mulative destiny to bake was upon him, and he loved baking with all his heart. It was no desire to abandon his craft that had led him to leave Nurnberg and cross the ocean; rather was he moved by a n.o.ble ambition to build up on a broad and sure foundation the n.o.ble art of baking in the New World. And it had chanced, moreover, that in the conscription he had drawn an unlucky number.
When this young man entered the Cafe Nurnberg--being drawn thither by its display of the name of his own native city--and asked for a job, his air was so frank, his talk about baking so intelligent, that Gottlieb took kindly to him at once; and Minna, sitting demurely at her accounts in the little wire cage over which was a fine tin sign inscribed in golden letters with the word "Cashier," was mightily well pleased, in a demure and proper way, at sight of his ruddy cheeks and bushy shock of light-brown hair and little yellow mustache and honest blue eyes. When he told, in answer to Gottlieb"s questions, that he was the grandson of the very baker in Nurnberg whose delicious lebkuchen Gottlieb had eaten when he was a boy, and that a part of his bakerly equipment was the lebkuchen recipe that had come down in his family from the baker genius, his remote ancestor, who had invented it--well, when he had told this much about himself, it is not surprising that Gottlieb fairly jumped for joy, and engaged him, not as his apprentice, but as his a.s.sistant, on the spot.
It was rather dashing to Gottlieb"s enthusiasm, however, that his a.s.sistant--thereby manifesting a shrewd worldly wisdom--declined immediately to impart his secret. He would make all the lebkuchen that was required, he said, but for the present he need not tell how it was made--possibly the Herr Brekel might not be satisfied with it, after all. But the Herr Brekel was satisfied with it, and so was all the neighborhood when the first batch of lebkuchen was baked and placed on sale. Indeed, as the fame of this delicious lebkuchen went abroad, the coming of the new baker was accepted by all Germans with discriminating palates as one of the most important events that ever had occurred on the East Side. The work of the young man who drove the bread-wagon was so greatly increased that he organized a strike, uniting in his own person the several functions of strikers, walking delegates, district a.s.sembly, and executive committee. And when the strike collapsed--that is to say, when the young man was discharged summarily--Gottlieb really did find it necessary to hire two new young men, and to buy an extra horse and wagon. Morally speaking, therefore (although the original young man, who remained out of employment for several weeks, and had a pretty hard time of it, did not think so), the strike was a complete success.
As a matter of course no well-set-up, right-thinking young fellow of three-and-twenty could go on baking lebkuchen in the same bakery with Minna Brekel for any length of time without falling in love with her.
Nor was it reasonable to suppose that even Minna, who had treated casual apprentices and wagon-driving young men with a seemly scorn, would continue to sit in the seat of the scornful when siege in form was laid to her heart by a properly ruddy-cheeked and blue-eyed a.s.sistant baker, whose skill was such that he could make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the German portion of the saints in Paradise. At the end of three months the feelings of these young people towards each other were quite clearly defined in their own minds; at the end of six months, as they were sitting together one afternoon in the little back room at a time when the shop happened to be empty, things came to the pleasing crisis that they both for a considerable period had foreseen.
But then, unfortunately, came a storm--that neither of them had foreseen at all--that shook the Cafe Nurnberg to its very foundations!
Gottlieb was the storm, and he moved over a wide area with great rapidity and violence. He was central, naturally, over Hans and Minna: the first of whom, after being denounced with great energy as a viper who had been warmed to the biting point, was ordered to take himself off without a single instant"s delay, and never to darken the doors of the Cafe Nurnberg again; and the second of whom was declared to be a baby fool, who must be kept locked up in her own third-story back room, and fed on nothing more appetizing than pumpernickel and water until she came to her senses. In the outer edges of the storm the apprentices and the young men who drove the wagons found themselves most hotly involved; and a very violent gust swept down upon Aunt Hedwig and Herr Sohnstein, who surely were as innocent in the premises as any two people quite satisfactorily engaged in earnest but somewhat dilatory love-making of their own very well could be. Indeed, this storm was an ill wind that blew a famous blast of luck to Herr Sohnstein: for Aunt Hedwig, being dreadfully upset by her brother"s outbreak, went of her own accord to Herr Sohnstein for sympathy and consolation--and found both in such liberal quant.i.ties, and with them such tender pleadings to enter a matrimonial haven where storms should be unknown, that presently, smiling through her tears, she uttered the words of consent for which the excellent notary had waited loyally through more than a dozen weary years. It was Herr Sohn-stein"s turn to be upset then. He couldn"t believe, until he had soothed himself with a phenomenal number of pipes, that happiness so perfect could be real.
Possibly one reason why Gottlieb"s storm was so violent was that he could not give any good reason for it. Hans really was a most estimable young man; he came of a good family; as a baker he was nothing short of a genius. All this Gottlieb knew, and all this he frequently had said to Aunt Hedwig and to Herr Sohnstein, and, worst of all, to Minna. As each of these persons now pointed out to him, in order to be consistent in his new position he must eat a great many of his own words; and he would have essayed this indigestible banquet willingly had he been convinced that thus he really could have proved that Hans was a viper and all the other unpleasant things which he had called him in his wrath. In truth, Gottlieb was, and in the depths of his heart he knew that he was, neither more nor less than a dog in the manger. His feeling simply was that Minna was his Minna, and that neither Hans nor anybody else had any right to her. This was not a position that admitted of logical defence; but it was one that he could be ugly and stick to: which was precisely what he did.
Minna did not remain long a prisoner in her own room, feeding upon pumpernickel and water and bitter thoughts. Aunt Hedwig and Herr Sohnstein succeeded in putting a stop to that cruelty. And these elderly lovers, whose fresh love had made them of a sudden as young as Minna herself, and had filled thera with a warm sympathy for her, laid their heads together and sought earnestly to circ.u.mvent in her interest her father"s stern decree. It was a joy to see this picture, in the little room back of the shop, of middle-aged love-making; and it was a little startling to find how the new youth that their love had given them had filled them with a quite extravagantly youthful recklessness.
Herr Sohnstein, who was well known as a grave, sedate, and unusually cautious notary, seriously suggested (though he did not explain exactly how this would do it) that they should make an effort to bring Gottlieb to terms by burning down the bakery. And Aunt Hedwig, whose prudent temperament was sufficiently disclosed in the fact that she had hesitated in the matter of her own love affair for upward of a dozen years, not less seriously advanced the proposition that they all should elope from the Cafe Nurnberg and set up a rival establishment! Herr Sohnstein did not make any audible comment upon this violent proposal of Aunt Hedwig"s, but it evidently put an idea into his head.
As Gottlieb happened to be walking along the south side of Tompkins Square, a fortnight or so after the tempest, he found his steps arrested by a great sign that lay face downward on trestles across the sidewalk, in readiness for hoisting in place upon the front of a smart new shop.
Inside the shop he saw painters and paper-hangers at work; and on the large plate-gla.s.s window a man was gluing white letters with a dexterous celerity. The letters already in place read "Nurnberger Lebku--" And as to this legend he saw "chen" added, he rolled out a stout South German oath and stamped upon the ground. But far stronger was the oath that he uttered as the big sign was swung upward, and he read upon it, in golden German letters:
[Ill.u.s.tration: Bakery Sign 226]