On these occasions women may be said to hold their exhibitions of pictures, the cakes being the altar-pieces. Everyone nibbles at and minutely inspects these baked escutcheons of her neighbour"s n.o.bility; and each has, as it were, her cake attached to her, as a medal is, or the lead tickets on bales of cloth, to indicate her value. They scarcely eat or drink anything, it is true, thick coffee being their consecrated sacrament wine, and thin transparent pastry their wafers; only the latter (in their friend"s and hostess"s houses) tastes best, and is eaten almost with fondness when it has turned out hard and stony and shot and dagger proof--or is burnt to a cinder--or, in short, is wretched from some cause or other; they cheerfully acknowledge all the failures of their dearest friends, and try to comfort them by taking them to their own houses and treating them to something of a _very different_ kind.
As for our Lenette, she, my dear lady reader, has always been a baker of such a sort that male connoisseurs have preferred her crust, and female connoisseurs her crum, both cla.s.ses maintaining that no one but she (and yourself, dearest) could bake anything like either. The kitchen fire was this salamander"s second element, for the first and native element of this dear nixie was water. To be scouring with sand, and squattering and splattering in it, in a great establishment like Siebenkaes"s (who had devoted all Leibgeber"s Ephraimites to the keeping of this feast), was quite her vocation. No kiss could be applied to her glowing face on such a day--and indeed she had her hands pretty full, for at ten o"clock the butcher came bringing more work with him.
The world will be glad (I"m perfectly certain in my own mind) if I just give them a very short account of this business--_who_ could have dune it better, for that matter? The facts of it were these: at the beginning of summer the four fellow lodgers had clubbed together and bought a cow in poor condition which they had then put up to fatten. The bookbinder, the cobbler, the poor"s advocate and the hairdresser--between whom and his tenants there was this distinction, that they owed _their_ rent to _him_, whereas he owed _his_ to his creditors--caused to be prepaid and drawn up by a skilful hand (which was attached to the arm of Siebenkaes) an authentic instrument (here KOLBE the word-purist will snarl at poor innocent me in his usual manner for employing foreign words in a doc.u.ment based on the Roman law) relative to the life and death of the cow; in which instrument the four contracting parties aforesaid--who all stood attentively round the doc.u.ment, he who was sitting and drawing it excepted--bound and engaged themselves in manner following, that is to say, that--
1stly. Each of the four parties interested, as aforesaid, in the said cow might and should have the privilege of milking her alternately.
2ndly. That this Cooking or Fattening Society might and should defray from a common treasury chest the price of said cow, the cost of the carriage of implements and provisions, and maintenance generally of the same; and
3rdly. That the allied powers as aforesaid should not only on the day before Michaelmas, the 28th September, 1785, slaughter the said cow, but further that each quarter of the same should then and there be further divided into four quarters, conformably to the lex agraria, for part.i.tion among the said parties to the said contract.
Siebenkaes prepared four certified copies of this treaty, one for each; he never wrote anything with graver pleasure. All that now remained to be performed of the contract by the house a.s.sociation of our four evangelists, who had collectively adopted as their armorial crest or emblematic animal, one single joint-stock beast, namely, the female of that of Saint Luke--was the third article of it.
However, I know the learned cla.s.ses are panting for my fair, so I shall only dash down a hurried sketch of my Man-and-Animal piece (Kolbe of course goes on taking me to task).
That Septembriseur, the butcher, did his part of the business well, though it was at the close of Fructidor--the four messmates looking on throughout the operation, as also did old Sabine, who did a good deal, and got something for it. The quadruple alliance regaled itself en the slain animal at a general picnic, to which each contributed something in order that the butcher might be included gratis; and it is undeniable that one member of the league, whom I shall name hereafter, attended this picnic in a frame of mind and in a costume barely serious enough for the occasion. The slaughter confederation then set to working its division sum, according to the number of its members, and the golden calf round which their dance was executed was cut, up with the appropriate heraldic cuts. Then the whole thing was over. I think I can say nothing more laudatory of the manner in which the whole process of zootomic division was carried out than what Siebenkaes, an interested party, said himself, viz., "It"s to be wished that the twelve tribes of Israel, as well as, in later times, the Roman empire, had been divided into as many and as fair divisions as our cow and Poland have been."
I shall be doing ample justice to the cow"s embonpoint if I merely mention that Fecht the cobbler uttered a panegyric which commenced with the most lively and vigorous oaths, and the statement that she was an (adjective) bag of skin and bones, and ended with an a.s.surance, uttered in mild and pious accents that Heaven had indeed favoured the poor beast, and "blessed us unworthy sinners above measure." A frolicsome cult by nature, he had had the heavy coach-harness of pietism put on to him, and was consequently obliged to keep softening down the "strong language" which came naturally to him into the pious sighs appropriate to his "converted state." And it was to the frame of mind and the costume of this very FECHT that I made allusion above as being barely suitable to the occasion, for I"m sorry to say he had no breeches on him the whole day of this great slaughter, but ran up and down the slaughter-house in a white frieze frock of his wife"s, having a strange general effect of looking something like his own better half. However, the members of the a.s.sociation didn"t take any offence; he couldn"t help it, because while he was going about got up in this Amazon"s _demi-negligee_, and presenting this hermaphrodite appearance, his own black-leather leg-cases were in the dye pot, being prepared for a reissue.
The poor"s advocate had begged Lenette (about a quarter past four in the afternoon) not to go on working herself to death, and never to mind bothering about any supper, as he was going to be miserly for once, save himself a supper tonight, and sup upon eighteen penn"orth of pastry: but the busy soul kept running about brushing and sweeping, and by six o"clock they were both lying resting in the leather arms of--a big easy chair (for he had no flesh and she no bones), and looking around them with that expression of tranquil happiness which you may see in children while eating, at the room in its state of mathematical order, at the way in which everything in it was shining, at the pastry new-moon-crescents in their hands, and at the liquid burnished gold (or rather foilgold[26]) of the setting sun creeping up and up upon the gleaming tin dishes. There they rested and reposed like cradled children, with the screeching, clattering, twelve herculean labours of the rest of the people of the house going on all round them; and the clearness of the sky and the newly cleaned windows added a full half-hour to the length of the day; the bell-hammer, or tuning-hammer of the curfew bell gently let down the pitch of their melodious wishes till they lapsed into dreams.
At ten o"clock they woke up and went to bed...!
I quite enjoy this little starry night picture myself; though my head has reflected it all glimmery and out of focus, as the gilt hemisphere of my watch does the evening sun when I hold it up to it. Evening is the time when we weary, hunted men long to be at rest; it is for the evening of the day, for the evening of the year (autumn), and for the evening of life, that we lay up our hard-earned harvests, and with such eager hopes! But hast thou never seen in fields, when the crops were gathered, an image and emblem of thyself--I mean the autumn daisy, the flower of harvest; she delays her blossom till the summer is past and gone, the winter snows cover her before her fruit appears, and it is not till the--coming spring that that fruit is ripe!
But see how the roaring, dashing surges of the fair-day morning come beating upon our hero"s bedposts! He comes into the white, shining room, which Lenette had stolen out of bed like a thief before midnight to wash while he was in his first sleep, and had sanded all over like an Arabia; in which manner she had her own way while he had his. On a fair-day morning I recommend everybody to open the window and lean out, as Siebenkaes did, to watch the rapid erection and hiring of the wooden booths in the market-place, and the falling of the first drops of the coming deluge of people, only let the reader observe that it wasn"t by my advice that my hero, in the very arrogance of his wealth (for there were samples of every kind of pastry which the house contained on a table behind him), called down to many of the little green aristocratic caterpillars whom he saw moving along in the street with even greater arrogance than his own, and whose natural history he felt inclined to learn by a look at their faces.
"I say, sir, will you just be good enough to look at that house, that one there--do you notice anything particular?"
If the caterpillar lifted up its physiognomy, he could peruse and study it at his ease,--which was of course his object.
"You don"t notice anything particular?" he would ask.
When the insect shook its head, he concurred with it, and did the same up at the window, saying:
"No, of course not! I"ve been looking at it for the last twelve months myself, and can"t see anything particular about it; but I didn"t choose to believe my own eyes."
Giddypated Firmian! Your seething foam of pleasure may soon drop down and disappear--as it did that Sat.u.r.day when the cards were left. As yet, however, his little drop of must which he has squeezed out of the forenoon hours was foaming and sparkling briskly. The landlord moved at a gallop, casting (with his powder-sowing machine) seed into a fruitful soil. The bookbinder conveyed his goods (consisting partly of empty ma.n.u.script books, partly of still emptier song books, partly of "novelties," in almanacs) to the fair by land-carriage in a wheelbarrow, which he had to make two journeys with in going, but only one in returning in the evening, because then he had got rid of his almanacs to purchasers and to sellers (almanacs are the greatest of all novelties, or pieces of news--for there is nothing in all the long course of time so new as the new year). Old Sabel had set up her East India house, her fruit garner, and her cabinet of tin rings at the town gate; she wouldn"t have let that warehouse of hers go to her own brother at a lower figure than half-a-sovereign. The cobbler put a st.i.tch in no shoe on this St. Michael"s Day except his wife"s.
Suck away, my hero, at your nice bit of raffinade sugar of life, and empty your forenoon sweetstuff spoon, not troubling your head about the devil and his grandmother, although the pair of them should be thinking (after the nature of them) about getting a bitter potion, even a poison cup, made ready and handing it to you.
But his greatest enjoyment is still to come, to wit, the numberless beggar people. I will describe this enjoyment, and so distribute it.
A fair is the high ma.s.s which the beggars of all ranks and cla.s.ses attend; when it is still a day or two off, all the footsoles that have nothing to walk upon but compa.s.sionate hearts, are converging towards the spot like so many radii, but on the morning of the fair-day itself the whole annual congress of beggardom and the column of cripples are fairly on the march. Anyone who has seen _F[)u]rth_, or been in Elw.a.n.gen during P. Ga.s.sner"s government, may cut these few leaves out of his copy; but no one else has any idea of it till I proceed and lead him in at the town-gate of Kuhschnappel.
The street choral service and the vocal serenades now commence. The blind sing like blinded singing-birds--better, but louder; the lame walk; the poor preach the gospel themselves; the deaf and dumb make a terrible noise, and ring in the feast with little bells--everybody sings his own tune in the middle of everybody else"s--a paternoster is clattering at the door of every house, and in the rooms inside n.o.body can hear himself swear. Whole cabinets of small coppers are lavished on one hand, pocketed on the other. The one-legged soldiery spice their ejaculatory prayers with curses, and blaspheme horribly, because people don"t give them enough--in brief, the borough which had made up its mind for a day"s enjoyment, is invaded and almost taken by storm by the rabble of beggars.
And now the maimed and the diseased begin to appear. Whoever has a wooden jury-leg under him, sets it and his long third leg and fellow-labourer the crutch, in motion towards Kuhschnappel, and drives and plants his sharp-pointed timber toe into moist earth there in the vicinity of the town-gate, in hopes of its thriving and bearing fruit.
Whosoever has no arms or hands left, stretches both out for an alms.
Those to whom Heaven has entrusted the beggars" talent, disease, above all paralysis, the beggars" _vapeurs_--trades with his talent, and the body appertaining to it, levying contributions with it on the whole and the sound. People who might stand as frontispieces to works on surgery and medicine, quite as appropriately as at city gates, take up their position near the latter and announce what they lack, which is, first and foremost, other people"s cash. There are plenty of legs, noses, and arms in Kuhschnappel, but a great many more people. There is one most extraordinary fellow--(to be admired at a distance, though impossible to be equalled--looked upon with envy, though indeed only by such blotting-paper souls as can never see supreme excellence without longing to possess it); there"s only half of him there, because the other half"s in his grave already, everything you could call legs having been shot clean away; and these shots have placed him in a position at once to arrogate and a.s.sume to himself the primacy and generalship-in-chief of the cripples, and be drawn about on a triumphal car as a kind of demiG.o.d, whose soul, in place of a corporeal garment, has on merely a sort of cape and short doublet. "A soldier," said Siebenkaes, "who is still afflicted with one leg, and who on that ground expostulates with fate, inquiring of her, "Why am _I_ not shot to pieces like that cripple, so that I might make as much in the day as he does?" seems to forget that on the other side of the question there are thousands of other warriors besides himself who haven"t even _one_ wooden leg (let alone more), but are totally unprovided with even _that_ fire- and begging-certificate; moreover, that however many of his limbs he might have been relieved of by bullets, he might still keep on asking, "Why not more?""
Siebenkaes was merry over the poor because they are merry over themselves; and he never would kick up a politico-economical row about their occasionally tippling and guzzling a little too much,--when, for instance, a whole lazarette-wagon, or ambulance-load of them, halting at some shepherd"s hut, they get down, and go in, and their plasters, their martyrs" crowns, their spiked girdles and hair-shirts come off, leaving nothing but a brisk human being who has left off sighing just for a minute; or--since what everybody works for is, not merely to live, but to live a little better now and then--when the beggar too has something a little better than his everyday fare, and when the cripple pulls the G.o.ddess of joy into his boarded dancing-barn to dance with him as his partner, and her hot mask falls off in the waltz (as for _our_ ball-rooms, it never falls off in them).
About 11 o"clock, the devil, as I have half hinted already, dropped a handful of blue-bottle flies into Firmian"s wedding soup--to wit, Herr Rosa von Meyern, who graciously intimated his aristocratic intention of coming to call that afternoon, "because there was such a good view of the market-place." People of impecunious gentility, who can"t issue orders in any houses but their own, construct _in_ their own, with much ease, loopholes whence they can fire upon the enemy who makes his attack from--within. The advocate had a piece of rudeness towards the Venner to put into either scale of his balance of justice, so as to determine which was the least of the two. The one was, to let him be told he might stay where he was; the other, to let him in, and then behave just as though the noodle were up in the moon. Siebenkaes chose the latter as the smaller.
Women, good souls, have always to carry and hold up the Jacob"s ladder by which the male s.e.x mount into the blue aether and into the evening-red; this call of the Venner came as an extra freight loaded on to Lenette"s two burden-poles of arms. The laving of all moveable property, and the aspersion of all immoveable, recommenced. Meyern, the false lover of the poor child-murderess, Lenette detested with all her heart; at the same time, all her polishing machinery was at once set agoing on the room, indeed, I think women dress themselves more and with greater pains for their lady-enemies than for their lady-friends.
The advocate went up and down, all behung with long chains of ratiocination, like a ghost, and would fain have succeeded in imbuing her with the idea that she shouldn"t give herself the slightest bother of any kind about the nincomp.o.o.p. "It was no good," she said, "what would he think of me?" It was not until having eliminated from the room as a piece of crudity his old ink-bottle, into which he had only that minute put ink-powder to dissolve and make ink for the "Selection from the Devil"s Papers," she was about to lay hands on that holy ark, his writing-table--that the head of the house ramped up--on his hind legs, pointing with his fore paw to the line of demarcation.
Rosa appeared! n.o.body who had just a little soft place in his heart could really have cursed this youngster, or beaten him into a jelly; one rather got to feel a kind of a liking for him, between his pranks.
He had white hair on his head and on his chin, and was soft all over; and had stuff like milk instead of blood in his veins, like the insects, just as poisonous plants have generally white milky juice. He was of a very forgiving nature, especially towards women, and often shed more tears himself in an evening at the theatre than he had caused many whom he had ruined to let fall. His heart was really not made of stone, or lapis infernalis, and if he prayed for a certain time, he grew pious during the process and sought out the most time-honoured of religious formularies to give in his adhesion to them then and there.
Thunder was to him a watchman"s rattle, arousing him from the sleep of sin. He loved to take the needy by the hand, especially if the hand was pretty. All things considered, he may perhaps get to heaven sooner or later; for, like many debtors in the upper circles of society, he doesn"t pay his play-debts, and he also has in his heart an inborn duel-prohibition against shooting and hacking. As yet he is not a man of his word; and if he were poorer, he would steal without a moment"s hesitation. Like a lap-dog, he lies down wagging his tail at the feet of people of any importance, but tugs women by the skirts, or shows his teeth and snarls at them.
Pliant water-weeds of this sort fall away from the very slightest satiric touch, and you can"t manage to hit them with one, richly as they deserve it, because its effect is only proportionate to the resistance it meets with. Siebenkaes would have been better pleased had Von Meyern only been a little rougher and coa.r.s.er, for it is just these yielding, pitiful, sapless, powerless sort of creatures that filch away good fortune, hard cash, feminine honour, good appointments and fair names, and are exactly like the ratsbane or a.r.s.enic, which, when it is good and pure, must be quite white, shining and transparent.
Rosa appeared, I have said, but oh! lovely to behold beyond expression!
His handkerchief was a great Molucca of perfume; his two side locks were two small ones. On his waistcoat he had a complete animal kingdom painted (as the fashion of the day was), or Zimmermann"s Zoological Atlas. His little breeches and his little coat, and every thing about him salted the women of the house into Lottish salt-pillars, merely in pa.s.sing them by on his way upstairs, I must, say, though, that what dazzle me personally, are the rings which emboss six of his fingers,--there were profile portraits, landscapes, stones, even beetle-wing covers all employed in this gold-shoeing of his fingers.
We may quite properly apply to the human hand the expression "it was shod with rings like a horse"s hoof," it has been long applied to the horse"s hoof itself, and Daubenton has proved, by dissections, that the latter contains all the different parts of the human hand. The use of these hand or finger manacles is quite proper and permissible; indeed rings are indispensable to the fingers of those who ought by rights to have them in their noses. According to the received opinion, these metal spavins, or excrescences of the fingers, were only invented to make pretty hands ugly, as a kind of chain and nose-rings to keep vanity in check; so that fists which are ugly by nature can easily dispense with these disfigurements. I should like to know whether there is anything in another idea of mine bearing on this subject. It is this. Pascal used to wear a great iron ring with sharp spines on it round his naked body, that he might always be ready to punish himself for any vain thought which might occur to him by giving this ring a slight pressure; now is it not perhaps the case that these smaller and prettier rings in a similar way chastise any vain thoughts which may occur, by slightly, but frequently hurting? They _seem_ at least to be worn with some such object, for it is exactly the people who suffer most from vanity who wear the greatest quant.i.ties of them, and move about their beringed hands the most.
Unwished-for visits often pa.s.s off better than others; on this occasion everyone got on pretty comfortably. Siebenkaes of course was in his own house--and behaved himself accordingly. He and the Venner looked out of the window at the people in the market-place. Lenette, in accordance with her upbringing, and the manners and customs of the middle cla.s.ses of small towns, didn"t venture to be otherwise than silent, or at the most to take an exceedingly subordinate, obligato, accompanying part in the concert of a conversation between men; she fetched and carried in and out, and, in fact, sat most of the time down stairs with the other women. It was in vain that the courteous, gallant Rosa Everard, tried upon her his wonted wizard spells to root women to a given spot. To her husband he complained that there was little real refinement in Kuhschnappel, and not one single amateur theatre where one could act, as there was in Ulm. He had to order his new books and latest fashions from abroad.
Siebenkaes in return expressed to him merely his enjoyment over the--beggars in the market-place. He made him notice the little boys blowing red wooden trumpets, loud enough to burst the drum of the ear, if not to overthrow the walls of Jericho. But he added, with proper thoughtfulness, that he shouldn"t omit to notice those other poor devils who were collecting the waste bits of split wood in their caps for fuel. He asked him if, like other members of the chamber, he disapproved of lotteries and lotto, and whether he thought it was very bad for the Kuhschnappel common people"s morals that they should be crowding about an old cask turned upside down, with an index fixed to the bottom of it which revolved round a dial formed of gingerbread and nuts, and where the shareholders, for a small stake, carried off from the banker of the establishment, a greedy old harridan of a woman, a nut or a ginger cake. Siebenkaes took pleasure in the little, because in his eyes it was a satirical, caricaturing diminishing mirror of everything in the shape of burgherly pomposity. The Venner saw no entertainment whatever in double-meaning allusions of the kind; but indeed the advocate never dreamt of amusing anybody but himself with them. "I may surely speak out whatever I like to myself," he once said; "what is it to me if people choose to listen behind my back, or before my face either?"
At length he went down among the people in the market-place, not without the full concurrence of the Venner, who expected at last to be able to have some rational conversation with the wife. Now that Firmian was gone, Everard begun to feel in his element, swimming in his own native pike-pond as it were. As an introductory move he constructed for Lenette a model of her native town; he knew a good many streets and people in Augspurg, and had often ridden through the Fuggery, and it seemed only yesterday, he said, that he saw her there working at a lady"s hat, beside a nice old lady, her mother he should think. He took her right hand in his (in an incidental manner), she allowing him to do so out of gratefulness for calling up such pleasant memories; he pressed it--then suddenly let it go to see if she mightn"t just have returned the pressure the least bit in the world, in the confusion of fingers as it were--or should try to _recover_ the lost pressure. But he might as well have pressed Gotz von Berlichingen"s iron hand with his thievish thumb as her warm one. He next came upon the subject of her millinery work, and talked about cap and bonnet fashions like a man who knew what he was talking about; whereas when Siebenkaes mixed himself up with these questions, he displayed no real knowledge of the subject at all. He promised her two consignments, of patterns from Ulm, and of customers from Kuhschnappel. "I know several ladies who _must_ do what I ask them," he said, and showed her the list of his engagements for the coming winter b.a.l.l.s in his pocket-book; "I shan"t dance with them if they don"t give you an order." "I hope it won"t come to that," said Lenette (with many meanings). Finally, he was obliged to ask her to let him see her at work for a little, his object here being to weaken the enemy by effecting a diversion of her forces--her eyes being occupied with her needle, she could only have her ears at liberty to observe him with. She blushed as she took two bodkins and stuck one of them into the round red little pincushion of--her mouth; this was more than he could really allow, it was so very dangerous--it formed a hedge against himself--and she might swallow either the stiletto in question, or at all events some of the poisonous verdigris off it. So he drew this lethal weapon with his own hand out of its sheath in her lips, scratching the cherry mouth a little, or not at all--as he loudly lamented--in the process, however. A venner of the right sort considers himself liable in a case of this kind for the fees and expenses consequent upon the accident; Everard, in his liberality, took out his English patent pomade, smeared some on to her left forefinger, and applied the salve to the invisible wound with the finger as a spatula--in doing which he was obliged to take hold of her whole hand as the _handle_ of the spatula, and frequently squeeze it unconsciously. He stuck the unfortunate stiletto itself into his shirt front, giving her his own breastpin instead, and exposing his own tender white breast to--the cold. I particularly beg persons who have had experience in this description of service to give their opinion with firm impartiality on my hero"s conduct, and, sitting in court martial on him, to point out such of his movements and dispositions as they may consider to have been ill-advised.
Now that she was wounded, poor thing, he wouldn"t let her go on working, but only show him her finished productions. He ordered a copy of one of them for Madame von Blaise. He begged her to put it on and let him see it on her--and he set it himself just as Madame von Blaise would wear it. By heaven! it was better even than he had thought; he swore it would suit Madame von Blaise quite as well, as she was just the same height as Lenette. This was all stuff and nonsense, really the one was taller by quite half a nose than the other. Lenette said so herself, she had seen Madame von Blaise at church. Rosa stuck to his own opinion, and swore by his soul and salvation (for in cases of the kind he was given to profane language), and by the sacrament, that he had measured himself with her a hundred times, and that she was half-an-inch taller than himself. "By heaven!" he said, suddenly jumping up, "of course I carry her measure about with me, like her tailor; all that need be done is that _you_ and _I_ measure ourselves together."
1 shall not here withhold from little girls a golden rule of war made by myself, "Don"t argue long with a man, whatever it may be about--warmth is always warmth, even if it only be warmth of argument--one forgets one"s self, and ultimately takes to proving by syllogistic figures, and this is just what the enemy wants--he converts these figures into poetical figures--ultimately even into plastic figures."
Lenette, a little giddy with the rapid whirl of events, good naturedly stood up to serve as recruit measure for her recruit Rosa; he leant his back to hers. "This won"t do," he said, "I can"t see," and unlocked his fingers which had been intertwined together, backwards, over the region of her heart. He turned quickly round, stood before her, and embraced her gently, so as to determine, by comparing the levels of their eyes, whether their brows were an exact height or not. His were glaring quite an inch higher up than hers; he clasped her closely and said, turning red, "you see you were right; but my mistake was that I added your beauty to your height," and in this proximity he pressed his mouth, red as sealing-wax, upon her lips, very founts and sources of truth as they were.
She was ashamed, annoyed and embarra.s.sed, angry, and ready to cry, but had not the courage to let her indignation break out upon a gentleman of quality. She didn"t speak another word then. He set her and himself at the window, and said he would read her some songs, of rather a different kind, he hoped, to those which were being hawked down in the street. For he was one of the greatest poets in Kuhschnappel, although as yet it was not so much that his verses had made him known, as that he had made his verses known. His poems, like so many others nowadays, were like the muses themselves, children of memory. Every old Frankish town has at least its one fashionable fop, a person who _fait les honneurs_; and every town, however old, prosaic, imperial-judicature-endowed, possesses its genius, its poet, and sentimentalist; often both these offices are filled by the same individual--as was the case in Kuhschnappel. The greater and likewise the lesser house of a.s.sembly looked upon Rosa as a mighty genius, smitten with the genius-epidemic-fever. This disease is something like elephantiasis, of which Troil in his travels in Iceland gives such an accurate description in twenty-four letters, and the princ.i.p.al features of which are that the patient is exactly like an elephant as to hair, cracks, colour, and lumps of the skin, but has not the _power_ of the elephant, and lives in a _cold_ climate.
Everard took a touching elegy out of one of his pockets, the left one, in which (I mean in the elegy) a n.o.ble gentleman, lovesick, sang himself to death; and he told her he should like to read it to her, if his feelings would let him get through it without breaking down.
However, the poem shortly drew more than one tear and emotion from its owner, and he, to his honour, was constrained to furnish a fresh proof of the fact that however manly and cold he and poets of his stamp can be to the heaviest sorrows of humanity, they really cannot quite contain themselves at the woes of love, but are compelled to weep at them. Meanwhile Rosa, who, like swindlers at play, always kept one eye upon a reflecting surface of some sort--water, window panes, or polished steel for instance, so as to catch a pa.s.sing glimpse of the female countenance from time to time--saw by means of a little mirror in one of the rings of his left hand, in which hand he was holding the elegy, just a trace or two in Lenette"s eyes of the tragic dew left there by his poem. So he pulled out of his second pocket a ballad (it is, no doubt, printed long ago) in which an innocent child murderess, with a tearful adieu to her lover, throws herself upon a sword. This ballad (very unlike his other poetical children) had real poetic merit, for luckily (for the poem at least) he was a lover of that kind himself, so that he could speak _from_ the heart _to_ the heart. It is not easy to portray the emotion and the melting pitying tears on Lenette"s face; all her heart rose to her tear-dimmed eyes.
It was an experience utterly new to her to be thus agitated by a combination of truth and fiction.
The Venner threw the ballad into the fire, and himself into Lenette"s arms, and cried--
"Oh! you sympathising, n.o.ble, holy creature!"
I cannot paint the amazement with which, completely unprepared for and incomprehensive of this transition from crying to kissing, she shoved him away. This made little impression on him; he was on his high horse and said he must have some souvenir of this "sacred entrancing moment"--only a little lock of her hair. Her humble station, his high-flown language, and the fact that she was perfectly unable to form the slightest idea what use her hair would be to him, even supposing she gave enough to stuff a pillow--all this put into her head the foolish idea that he wanted it to perform some magical rite with, such as putting her under a love spell, or something of the sort.
He might have stabbed himself there and then before her, hewn himself in pieces, impaled himself alive, she wouldn"t have interfered; she might indeed have shed her _blood_ to save him, but not a single _hair_ of her head.
He had still one resource _in petto_--he had really never met with such a case as this before; he lifted up his hand and vowed that he would get Herr von Blaise to recognise her husband as his nephew, and pay over his inheritance--and that with the greatest ease, because he would threaten to jilt his niece unless he did it--if she would just take the scissors and cut off a _little_ hair memorial, no bigger even than the fourth part of a moustache.