"You"re at your brushing and sweeping again, are you? although you know quite well that I"m sitting there working like a slave for you and myself too, and that I"ve been writing away for the last hour with scarcely an idea in my head. Oh! my heavenly better half! out with all your cartridges at one shot, for G.o.d"s sake, and don"t finish me off altogether with that rag of yours."
Lenette, full of astonishment said, "It"s simply impossible, old man.
that you can hear me in the next room"--and polished away harder than ever. He took her hand, somewhat hastily, though not roughly, and said in a louder tone, "Come, get up!--It"s exactly that which I complain of, that I _can"t_ hear you in the next room; I"m obliged to rack my brains to guess what you"re at--and the only ideas left in my head are connected with brushing and scrubbing, so that all the brilliant notions which I might otherwise be putting down on paper are driven away. My darling child, n.o.body could possibly sit and work away here more composedly and contentedly than I, if it were only grape-shot and canister, howitzer sh.e.l.ls, and hundred-pounders that you were banging away with at my back out of these embrasures of yours. What it is that I really can _not_ stand, is a _quiet_ noise."
All this talk having put him a little out of temper, ho fetched her out of the room, rag and all, saying--
"It does seem a little hard that, while I"m labouring away here with all my might, working myself almost to death, to provide a little entertainment for the reading public, a regular bear-baiting pit should be started in my own room, and that an author"s very bed should be turned into a siege-trench, and arrows and fire-b.a.l.l.s sent about his ears out of it. There, I shan"t be writing while we"re at dinner, I"ll talk the thing out at full length with you then."
At noon, then,[38] as he was about to enter on the subject of the morning"s tourney, he had first to hold a prayer-tourney. I mean this: "prayers" do not, in Nurnberg and Kuhschnappel, mean a certain hereditary office and service of ma.s.s in a court chapel, but--the ringing of the twelve o"clock bell. Now the dining-table of our couple stood against the wall, and was not put in the middle of the floor except for meals. Well, Siebenkaes never succeeded above twice during his married life in having this table brought forward BEFORE the soup came in (for if a woman ONCE forgets a thing, she goes on forgetting it a thousand times running[39]), though he preached his lungs as dry as a fox"s (which are used for curing ours); both soup and table were always moved together, after the soup came in, without the spilling of a greater quant.i.ty of the latter than one might have used in swallowing a pill.
To-day this was the case as usual. Siebenkaes slowly chewed the pill which he swallowed with the soup. The delay in moving the table he observed anxiously (as if it had been a delay in the arrival of an equinox), with a long face and slow breathing, and when the soup-libation was duly poured as usual, he broke out as follows, in a calm tone of voice, however--
"The fact is, Lenette, we are on board a good ship. At sea, you know, people spill their soup because their vessel rolls and pitches--and ours is spilt for a similar reason. See here, the dinner-table and the morning besom are both in a tale together; they are two conspirators who will blow out your husband"s candle--to use a strong expression--before they have done."
This, the exordium of his sermon, was followed by way of hymn, by the arrival of the town fool of Kuhschnappel, who brought in a great sheet of paper containing an invitation to the shooting match on St. Andrew"s Day, the 30th of November. Every one of us must, I am sure, have gathered from what has already been said that the only money left in the house was the queue-ducat. At the same time, Siebenkaes couldn"t leave the shooting-club, without thereby granting to himself a certificate of poverty, a _testimonium paupertatis_, in the face of the whole town. And really a shooting-ticket for this match was almost as good as mining shares or East India stock to a man who was as good a shot as Siebenkaes. It would also give him an opportunity of doing that public honour to his wife which she, as a senate clerk"s daughter from Augspurg, had a right to expect. Unfortunately, however, the grave man of folly couldn"t be got to give change for the curious queue-ducat, particularly as Siebenkaes aroused his suspicions with respect to it himself, by saying. "This is a very good tail or queue-ducat, I a.s.sure you. I don"t wear a tail myself," he added, "but that"s no reason why a ducat shouldn"t, if the King of Prussia chooses to immortalise his own by having it stamped upon it. Wife, would you get our landlord, the hairdresser, to come up; n.o.body can know better than he whether it"s a queue-ducat or not, seeing he has queues (not upon ducats) in his hands every day." The pickle-herring of Kuhschnappel didn"t vouchsafe the ghost of a smile at this. The hairdresser came, and declared it to be a queue, and civilly took it away himself to get it changed. Hairdressers can run; in five minutes he brought the change for the ducat.
When the melancholy buffoon had pocketed his portion of it, Lenette"s face was all over double interjections and marks of interrogation; wherefore Siebenkaes resumed his midday sermon. "The princ.i.p.al prizes,"
he said, "are pewter dishes and sums of money for hitting the bird, and mostly provisions for the other marks we shoot at. I suspect that you and I shall dine on St. Andrew"s Day upon a nice piece of roast meat in a new dish, both of which I shall have shot into your kitchen, if I only take a little pains. And at all events don"t worry yourself, darling, because our money"s nearly all gone. Take refuge behind me. I am your sandbag, your gabion, your shelter trench, and with my rifle, more certainly still with my pen, I feel pretty sure I shall keep the devil of poverty at his distance, till my precious guardian hands over my mother"s property. Only for G.o.d"s sake don"t let _your_ work interrupt _mine_. Your rag and your besom have cost me at least sixteen currency dollars this morning. For supposing I get eight imperial dollars a printed sheet for my Devilish Papers (counting the imperial dollar at ninety kreuzer)--and I ought, to get more--I should have earned forty-eight currency dollars this morning if I had written a (printed) sheet and a half. But you see I had to stop in the middle of it and expend a great many words upon you, for none of which I get a single kreuzer. You should look upon me as a fat old spider stowed away in a box to shrivel up in time into a precious gold nugget or jewel.
Whenever I take a dip of ink I draw a thread of gold out of the ink bottle, as I"ve often told you, and (as the proverb says) the morning hours have gold in their mouths (Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund). Go on with your dinner, and listen. I"ll just take this opportunity of explaining to you the princ.i.p.al points in which the preciousness of an author consists, and so give you the key to a good many things. In Swabia, in Saxony, and Pomerania, there are towns in which there are people who appraise authors as our master butcher here does beef. They are usually known by the name of tasters or rulers of taste, because they try the flavour of every book as it comes out, and then tell the people whether they"ll like it or not. We authors in our irritation often call these people critics, but they might bring an action against us for libel for so doing. Now as these directors of taste seldom write books themselves, they have all the more time to read and find fault with other people"s. Yet it does sometimes happen that some of them have written bad books themselves, and consequently know a bad book in a moment when they come across one. Many become patron saints of authors and of their books for the same reason that St. John Nepomuck became the patron saint of bridges and those who cross them; because he was once thrown off one into the water. Now these scribblings of mine will be sent to these gentlemen as soon as they are in print (as your hymn-book is). And they"ll peer all through my productions to see whether or not I"ve written them quite legibly and distinctly (not too large or too small), whether I"ve put any wrong letters, a little e for a big, or an f instead of a ph, whether the hyphen-strokes are too long or too short, and all that sort of thing: indeed they often even give opinions about the thoughts in the book (which they have nothing to do with). Now you see, if you go on scrubbing and swishing about with besoms behind me, I shall keep writing all sorts of stuff and nonsense, and it"ll all be printed. Of course that"s a terrible thing to happen to a man, for these tasters tear great frightful holes and wounds in the paper however fine it is, with nails as long as fingers (b.u.t.tonmakers" nails are shorter, but not circ.u.mcisers" among the Jews), before they give it a name to carry about with it, as the circ.u.mcisers do to the Jew boys. And after this, they circulate a slip of unsized paper, in which they find fault with me, and give me a bad name, all over the empire, in Saxony and Pomerania, and tell all Swabia in so many plain words that I"m an a.s.s. May the devil confound their impertinence! This is the sort of birching, you see, that besom of yours will be getting me in for. Whereas, if I write beautifully and legibly, and with proper attention and ability--and every sheet of my Devilish Papers is so written--if I carefully weigh and consider every word and every page before I write it, if I am playful in one place, instructive in another, pleasing in all,--in that case I am bound to tell you, Lenette, that the tasters are people who are quite capable of appreciating work of that sort, and would think nothing of sitting down and circulating papers in which the least they would say of me would be that I had certainly brought something away from college in my head, and had a little to show for my studies. In short, they would say, they hadn"t expected it of me, and there was really something _in me_. Now a panegyric of this kind upon a husband is reflected, of course, upon his wife, and when the Augspurg people are all asking "Where does he live, this Siebenkaes whom everybody"s talking of?" there are sure to be lots of folks in the Fuggery to answer, "Oh! he lives in Kuhschnappel, his wife was a daughter of Engelkraut, the senate clerk, and a very good wife she is to him.""
"You"ve told me all that about bookmaking hundreds of times," she answered. "And it"s just what the bookbinder says too; and I am sure _he_ has all the best books through his hands, binding them."
This allusion to his repet.i.tions of himself, though not meant ill-temperedly, he didn"t very much relish. In fact, the habit had hitherto been, as it were, incubating unperceived in him, as a fever does in its early stage. Husbands, even those who are sage and of few words, talk to their wives with the same boundless liberty and unrestraint as they do to their own selves; and a man repeats himself _to_ himself immeasurably oftener than to anybody else, and that without so much as observing that he does it, let alone taking any count of how often. The wife, however, both observes and counts; accustomed as she is to hear the cleverest (and most unintelligible) remarks from her husband"s lips daily, she can"t help remembering them when they occur again.
The hairdresser reappeared unexpectedly, bringing a fleeting cloud with him. He said he had been to all the poor devils in the house to see if he could get as much of the Martinmas rent out of them in advance as would pay his subscription to the shooting match, but that they were a set of church mice and he hadn"t succeeded. The whole garrison of them were naturally unequal to the payment of an impost of this description six whole weeks before it was due, inasmuch as the majority of them didn"t see how they were to pay it when it _was_ due. So the Saxon came to the grandee of his house, to the "Lord of Ducats" as he styled the advocate. Siebenkaes couldn"t find in his heart to disappoint the patient soul with another "no" on the top of those he had borne so good-humouredly; his wife and he sc.r.a.ped together the little small change they had left out of the ducat, and sent him away rejoicing with half of the rent, three gulden. All they had left for themselves was--the question what they should do for light in the evening; for there weren"t even a couple of groschen in the house to get half a pound of candles, and there were no candles _in natura_.
I cannot say that he here turned deadly pale, or fainted, or began to rave. Praise be to every manly soul who has drunk the icy whey of stoicism for only half a spring, and does not fall down paralysed and frozen, like a woman, before the chill spectre of penury. In an age which has had all its strongest sinews cut through except the universal one, money, any diatribe, even the most extravagant, against riches, is n.o.bler and more useful than the most accurately just depreciation of poverty. For pasquinades on gold dirt are agreeable to the rich, reminding them that though their riches may take to themselves wings, true happiness does not depend thereon; while the poor derive from them not bitterer feeling merely, but also the sweeter satisfaction of conquering the same. All that is base in man--thoughts, fancies, what we look on as being examples--all join in one chorus in praise of gold; why should we desire to deprive poverty of her true reserve force, her _chevaliers d"honneur_, philosophy and beggars" pride?
The first thing Siebenkaes opened was not his mouth, but the door, and then the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, from which he carefully and with a good deal of gravity took down a bell-shaped tureen and three pewter plates, and put them on a chair. Lenette could no longer stand by in silence; she clasped her hands and said in a faint voice of shame, "Merciful Providence! is it come to selling our dishes?"
"I"m only going to turn them into silver," he said; "as kings make church bells into dollars, so shall we make our bell-dishes into coin.
There"s nothing you need be ashamed about in converting trash of table ware, the coffins of beasts, into currency, when Duke Christian of Brunswick turned a king"s silver coffin into dollars in 1662. Is a plate an apostle, do you think? Great monarchs hare taken many an apostle, if he happened to be a silver one, Hugo of St. Caro and others as well, divided them (as it were) into chapters, verses, and legends, sent them to the mint, and then dispatched them off all over the world in that a.n.a.lysed form."
"Ah! stupid nonsense," she answered.
Some few readers will probably say "What else was it?" and I ought long ago to have apologized, perhaps, for the style of speech, so incomprehensible to Lenette, which the advocate makes use of.
He justified it satisfactorily to himself by the consideration that his wife always had some DISTANT idea of what he was talking about, even when he made use of the most learned technical expressions, and the farthest-fetched plays upon words, because of its being good practice, and of his liking to hear himself do it. "Women," he would repeat, "have a distant and dim comprehension of all these things, and therefore don"t waste, in long tedious efforts to discover the precise signification of these unintelligibilities, precious time which might be better employed." This, I may observe, is not much encouragement for Reinhold"s "Lexicon to Jean Paul"s Levana," nor for me personally either, in some senses.
"Ah! stuff and nonsense" had been Lenette"s answer. Firmian merely asked her to bring the pewter into the sitting-room, and he would talk the matter over sensibly. But he might as well have set forth his reasons before a woman"s skin stuffed with straw. What she chiefly blamed him for, was that by his contribution to the shooting-club purse he had emptied hers. And thus she herself suggested to him the best answer he could have made. He said, "It was an angel that put it in my head; because on St. Andrew"s Day I shall regain everything that I turn into silver now, and repewterise it immediately. To please you, I shall keep not only the tureen and the plates I get as prizes, but all the rest of the pewter ware, and put it all into your cupboard. I a.s.sure you I had made tip my mind before to sell all my prizes."
What was to be done, then? There was no help for it. This banished and expatriated table ware was lowered in the darkness of evening into old Sabel"s basket--and she was celebrated all over the town for transacting this sort of commission agency or transfer business, with as discreet a silence as if she were dealing in stolen gold. "n.o.body gets it out of _me_," she would say, "whose the things are. The treasurer, who"s dead and gone poor man--you know I sold everything he had in the world for him--he often used to say there was never the equal of me."
But, my poor dear young couple, I fear this Sabbath[40] or "Descent of the Saviour into Hades" is but little likely to help you long, in that antechamber of h.e.l.l which you"ve got into. The flames are gone from about you to-day, certainly, and a cool sea-breeze is refreshing you, but tomorrow and the day after the old smoke and the old fire will be blazing at your hearts! However, I don"t want to put any restrictions upon your trade in tin. We"re quite right to have a good dinner to-day though we know perfectly well we shall be just every bit as hungry to-morrow again.
So the next morning Siebenkaes begged that he might be allowed to be all the quieter that day because he had been obliged to talk so much the day before. Our dear Lenette, who was a live washing-machine and scouring-mill, and in whose eyes the washing bill and the bill of fare had much of the weight of a confessor"s certificate, would sooner have let go her hold of everything in the world--her husband included--than of the duster and the besom. She thought this was merely _his_ obstinate persistency, whereas it was really her own, in blowing the organ bellows and thundering away upon her pedal reed stops right behind her author"s back during the morning hours, whose mouths had two kinds of gold in them for _him_, namely gold from the golden age, and ordinary metallic gold. She might have played with a thirty-two feet stop out in the afternoon as long as she liked, but she wasn"t to be got out of her usual daily routine. A woman is the most heterogeneous compound of obstinate will and self-sacrifice that I have ever met with; she would let her head be cut off by the headsman of Paris for her husband"s sake, very likely, but not a single hair of it. And she can deny herself to almost any extent for others" good, but not one bit for her own. She can forego sleep for three nights running for a sick person, but not one minute of a nap before bed-time, to ensure herself a better night"s sleep in bed. Neither the souls of the blest, nor b.u.t.terflies, though neither of them possess stomachs, can eat less than a woman going to a ball or to her wedding, or than one cooking for her guests; but if it"s only her doctor and her own health that forbid her some Esau"s mess or other, she eats it that instant. Now men"s sacrifices are all just turned the opposite way.
Lenette, impelled by two imposing forces, what she was asked to do and what she wanted to do, tried to find the feminine line of the resultant, and hit upon the middle course of stopping her scouring and sweeping as long as he was sitting at his writing. But the moment he got up, and went to the piano for a couple of minutes, or to the window, or across the doorstep, that instant back she would bring her washing and scrubbing instruments of torture into the room again.
Siebenkaes wasn"t long in becoming cognisant of this terrible alternation and relieving-of-the-guard between her besom and his (satirical) one; and the way she watched and lay in wait for his movements drove all the ideas in his head higgledy-piggledy. At first he bore it with really very great patience, as great as ever a husband has, patience, that is, which lasts for a short time. But after reflecting for a considerable period in silence, that the public, as well as he, were sufferers by this room-cleaning business, and that all posterity was, in a manner, watching and hanging upon every stroke of that besom, which might do its work just as well in the afternoon when he would only be at his law papers--the tumour of his anger suddenly broke, and he grew mad, _i. e_. madder than he was before, and ran up to her and cried--
"Oh! this is the very devil! At it again, eh! I see what you"re about.
You watch till I get up from the table! Just be kind enough to finish me off at once; hunger and worry will kill me before Easter, whether or not. Good G.o.d! It"s a thing I really can _not_ comprehend. She sees as well as possible that my book is our larder--that there are whole rations of bread in every page of it--yet she holds my hands the entire morning, so that I can"t do a line of it. Here I"ve been sitting on the nest all this time and only hatched as far as letter E, where I describe the ascent of Justice to heaven. Oh! Lenette! Lenette!"
"Very well," said Lenette, "it"s all the same whatever I do, it"s sure to be wrong; do let me tidy the house properly, like any other woman."
And she asked him, in a simple manner, why it was that the bookbinder"s little boy (the language is mine, not hers), who played fantasias the whole day long upon a child"s toy fiddle, composing and enjoying whole Alexander"s Feasts upon it, didn"t disturb him with his screeching _un_harmonical progressions--and how he bore the chimneysweep"s sweeping the other day so much better than he did her sweeping of the room. And as he couldn"t quite manage to condense, just in a moment, into few words the demonstration of the magnitude of the difference which existed between these things, he found it better to get into a rage again, and say--
"Do you suppose I"m going to make a great long speech and explanation gratis, and lose dollar after dollar at my work? _Himmel_! _Kreuz_!
_Wetter_! The munic.i.p.al code, the Roman pandects, forbid a coppersmith even to enter a street where a professor is working, and here"s my own wife harder than an old jurist--and not only that--she"s the coppersmith herself. I"ll tell you what it is, Lenette, I shall really speak to the Schulrath about this." This did a great deal of service.
The produce of the Trinity dollar here arrived before the Schulrath; a piece of polite attention which no one would have expected from a man of so much learning and knowledge. No doubt all my readers will be as much delighted as if they were husbands of Lenette themselves at the fact that she was a perfect angel all the afternoon; her hands made no more noise at their work than her fingers or her needle; she even put off the doing of several things which were not necessary. She accompanied a sister in the oratorical art, who came in with a divine bonnet (in her hands, to be altered), all the way down stairs, not so much out of politeness as thoughtfulness, that all the points of princ.i.p.al importance connected with the doing up of the bonnet, which had already been settled, might be gone over again two or three times out of the advocate"s hearing.
This touched the old noise-hunter, and went to the weak and tender spot in him, his heart. He sought long in himself for a fitting thank-offering in return, till he at last hit upon quite a new sort of one.
"Listen, child," he said, taking her hand very affectionately; "wouldn"t it be more reasonable in me if I were to amuse myself with my writing in the _evening_? I mean, if the husband were to do his creating at a time when the wife had no washing to do. Just think what a life of nectar and ambrosia that would be; we should sit opposite to each other with a candle between us--you at your sewing, I at my writing--the other people in the house would all have their work done and be at their beer--of course there wouldn"t be customers with bonnets coming at that time of night to make themselves visible and audible. The evenings will be getting longer too, and of course I shall have the more time for my writing fun, but we need say nothing about that now. What do you think, or what do you _say_ (if you like the expression better), to this new style of life? Remember too, that we"re quite rich again now--the Russian Trinity dollar is like so much found money."
"Oh! it will be delightful," she said, "I shall be able to do all my household work in the morning, as a proper reasonable housekeeper should."
"Yes, just so," he answered, "I shall write away quietly at my satires all morning, then wait till evening, and go on where I left off."
The evening of nectar and ambrosia came duly on, and was quite without a rival among all evenings that had gone before it. A young married couple, sitting one on each side of a table, working away quietly at their work, with a candle between them, have a considerable notion what happiness is. He was all happy thoughts and kisses; she all smiles, and what little noise she made with the frying-pan seemed no louder to him than what she made with her needle. "When people are earning double working-pay by the light of one candle," he said, greatly delighted at the domestic reformation, "they needn"t, as far as I see, restrict themselves to a miserable dip, the thickness of a worm, which they can see nothing by, unless it be the wretchedness of its own light.
To-morrow we"ll set up a mould candle, and no more about it."
As I take some credit to myself for selecting for narration in this story such events only as are of universal interest, it will be sufficient cursorily to mention that the mould candle duly appeared next evening, and kindled a feeble strife, because, _apropos_ of this candle, the advocate once more brought forward a new theory of his, concerning the lighting of candles. He held the somewhat schismatic opinion that the rational way of lighting all candles, more particularly thick ones, was to light them at the thick end, and not at the top or thin end; and that this was the reason of there being two wicks projecting from every candle. "A law of combustion," he would add, "in support of which I need only refer (at least for women of sense) to the self-evident truth that, when a candle is burning down, it keeps growing larger and larger at its lower extremity--just as people who are burning down from debauchery grow thicker at theirs, with fat and dropsy. If we light the candle at the top, we find the result to be a useless lump, plug, or stump of tallow running all over our candlestick. Whereas, if we light it at the bottom, the liquefied grease from the thick end wraps itself gradually and with the most exquisite symmetry all over the thinner end as if feeding it, and equalising its proportions."
In reply to which, Lenette, with some force, adduced Shaftesbury"s touchstone of truth, ridicule. "Why, everybody that came in of an evening, and noticed that I had put my candle upside down in the candlestick, would burst out laughing; and it would be the wife that everybody would blame." So that a mutual treaty of peace had to put a period to this battle of the candle, to the effect that he should light his candle at the bottom, and she hers at the top. And for the present, as the candle common to both parties happened to be thick at the top, he agreed to admit, without objection, the erroneous method of lighting.
However, the Devil, who crosses and blesses himself at such treaties of peace, managed so to play his cards, that on this very day Siebenkaes chanced, in his reading, to come upon the touching anecdote of the younger Pliny"s wife holding the lamp for her husband that he might see to write. And it occurred to him that, now that he was getting along so swimmingly with his selection from the said Devil"s Papers, it would be a splendid arrangement, and save him many interruptions, if Lenette would snuff the candle always instead of his doing it himself.
"Of course," said she, "I shall be delighted." The first fifteen or twenty minutes pa.s.sed, and everything seemed to be all right.
The above period having elapsed, he c.o.c.ked up his chin towards the candle, by way of reminder to her to snuff it. Next, he gently touched the snuffers with the tip of his pen, with the like object, not saying anything however; and a little while after that, he moved the candlestick a little bit, and said softly, "The candle." Matters now began to a.s.sume a more serious aspect; he began to observe and watch with greater attention the gradual obscuration of his paper, and consequently the very snuffers which, in Lenette"s hands, had promised to throw so much light on his labours, became the means of impeding his progress quite as effectually as the crabs did Hercules in his battle with the hydra. The two wretched ideas, "snuff" and "snuffers," took bodily shape, and danced hand in hand, with a sprightly pertness up and down on every letter of his most biting satires. "Lenette," he had soon to say again, "please to amputate that stupid black stump there, on both our accounts."
"Dear me, have I been forgetting it?" she said, and snuffed it in a great hurry.
Readers of a historical turn--such as I should wish mine to be--can now see that things couldn"t but get worse and worse, and more and more out of joint. He had often to stop, making letters a yard or so in length, waiting till some beneficent hand should remove the black thorn from the rose of light, till, at length, he broke out with the word "Snuff!"
Then he took to varying his verbs, saying, "Enlighten!" or "Behead!" or "Nip-off." Or he endeavoured to introduce an agreeable variety by using other forms of speech, such as "The candle"s cap, Capmaker;" "There"s a long spot in the sun again;" or, "This is a charming _chiaroscuro_, well adapted for night thoughts in a beautiful Correggio-night; but snuff away all the same."
At last, shortly before supper, when the charcoal stack in the flame had really attained a great height, he inhaled half a river of air into his lungs, and, slowly dropping it out again, said, in a grimly mild manner, "You don"t snuff a bit--as far as I can see, the black funereal pyre might rise up to the ceiling for all you would care. All right! I prefer to be the candle-snuffer of this theatre myself till supper-time; and while we"re at supper I shall just say to you, as a rational man, what there is to say on the subject." "Oh! yes, please,"
she said, quite delighted.
When she had set four eggs on the table, two for each, he commenced: "You see, I had been looking forward to my working at night being attended with several advantages, because I thought you would have managed this easy little task of snuffing the candle always at the right time, as a Roman lady of high rank made herself do duty as a candlestick for her celebrated husband, Pliny junior (to use a commercial expression), and held his light for him. I was mistaken, it appears; for, unfortunately, I can"t write with my toes under the table, like a person with no arms, nor yet in the dark, as a clairvoyant might. The only use the candle is to me, in the circ.u.mstances, is that it serves as an Epictetus lamp, enabling me to get some practice in stoicism. It had often as much as twelve inches of eclipse, like a sun, and I wished in vain, darling, for an invisible eclipse--such as frequently occurs in the heavens. The cursed slag of our candle hatches just these obscure ideas and gloomy night thoughts, which authors (too) often have. Whereas, gracious goodness! if you had only snuffed, as you ought to have done----"
"You"re in fun, are you not?" she asked. "My st.i.tches are much smaller than your strokes, and I"m sure I saw quite well."
"Well, dear," he continued, "I"ll proceed to point out to you that, on the grounds of psychology and mental science, it isn"t that it matters a bit whether a person who is writing and thinking _sees_ a little more or less distinctly or not, it"s the snuffers and the snuff that he can"t get out of his head, and they get behind his spiritual legs, trip up his ideas, and stop him, just as a log does a horse hobbled to it.
For even when you"ve only just snuffed the candle, and I"m in the full enjoyment of the light, I begin to look out for the instant when you"ll do it next. Now, this watching being in itself neither visible nor audible, can be nothing but a thought, or idea; and as every thought has the property of occupying the mind to the exclusion of all others, it follows that all an author"s other and more valuable ideas are sent at once to the dogs. But this is by no means the worst of the affair.
I, of course, _ought_ not to have had to occupy my head with the idea of candle-snuffing any more than with that of snuff-taking; but when the ardently longed-for snuffing never comes off at all, the black s.m.u.t on the ripe ear of light keeps growing longer--the darkness deepening--a regular funereal torch feebly casting its ray upon a half-dead writer, who can"t drive from his head the thought of the conjugal hand which could snap all the fetters asunder with one single snip;--then, my dearest Lenette, it"s not easy for the said writer to help writing like an a.s.s, and stamping like a dromedary. At least, I express my own opinion and experience on the subject!"