Master Wehmeier, who could not at a distance explain to himself the form
and motion of the bird, had made up towards it, and now saw his pupil
lifted up on the cross. He fell instantly into the plunge-bath of an icy
shudder at his daring, but soon came out of this into the shower-bath of
a perspiring anxiety, which came over him at the thought of seeing every
minute his _élève_ fall down and be crushed into twenty-six fragments,
like Osiris, or into thirty, like the Medicean Venus; "and this too,
now," he thought besides, "just as I have brought the young Satan so far
along in languages, and lived to win some honor by him." He therefore
scolded only the operators in the raising department, but not the
sentinel aloft, because there was reason to apprehend he might take a
lurch in the effort of answering, and pitch down. Hard upon the heels of
the optical chariot with which the Devil threatened to run over the
master, thus spell-bound in the circle of agonizing anxiety, followed a
real one, wherein sat the future Provincial Director. Ah, good God!
Besides, the Director always filled up his whole gall-bladder full of
bitter extracts at the Minister's house, merely because he found there
better-behaved and stiller children, without, however, reflecting--like
a hundred other fathers who must be included in the charge--that
children, like their parents, appear better to strangers than they are,
and that, above all, city life, instead of the porous, thick bark of
village life, overlays them with a smooth, white birch-roll, while yet,
in the end, like their parents and courtiers, they prove to resemble
chestnuts, being smooth only on the outer shell, but within confoundedly
bristly. Thus surely will the finest man in the country always be
outwitted by at least princes and ministers, who are ten years
old,--supposing even he could manage it more easily with their fathers.
When Wehrfritz saw his foster-son in his eyrie on the Schreckhorn, and
the Band-box master below, looking up at him, he imagined the instructor
had arranged it all, and began loudly to vent upon his neck, from the
locked-up carriage, a little heaven of thunder-storms and thunder-claps.
The persecuted Wehmeier began also, upon the mountain, to bawl up at the
Schreckhorn, by way of making it evident to the Director that he was in
the way of his office, and with the hammer of the law, as with a
forming stamp-hammer, could mould a pupil as well as another man. The
soldier's wife wrung her hands,--the servants arranged themselves for
the taking down from the cross,--the poor little fellow, in a fever,
drew his knife, and called down, "He would instantly cut himself loose
and cast himself down so soon as ever any one should let down the pole."
He would have done it--and put an untimely end to his life and my
Titan--merely because he dreaded the disgrace of the real and verbal
insults he might get from his father before so many people (yes, in the
chariot sat a gentleman who was a perfect stranger) worse than suicide
and hell. But the Director, full of foolhardihood himself, and yet
proportionately hating it in a child, was not to be disconcerted at
that, and cried out, in a terrible tone, after the servant who had the
key of the coach-door; he would get out and go up. He was indescribably
exasperated, first, because behind the coach he had fastened on an
Oesterlein's harpsichord as a gift for the present day of joy;--ah,
Albano! why do thy joys, like the slurs of an ale-house fiddler,
end in a discord?--and, secondly, because he had there a
singing-dancing-music-and fencing-master from the polished and brilliant
house of the Minister for Albano, sitting beside him on the cushion as
spectator of this _début_. Gottlieb sprang from the box, and round
before the coach-door, ran his hand, cursing, through all his
pockets;--the coach-key was not in one of them. The incarcerated
Director lashed himself up and down in his cage like a wagging leopard,
and his fury was like that of a lion, who, when one hunter after another
has shot at him, flies at the third. At all events, there was Alban, in
his noose, sawing the air to and fro. The Band-box master was best off;
for he was half dead, and his cold body, running all away in a sweat of
agony, transmitted little more sense of the outward world; his
consciousness was packed away tight and good as snuff in cold lead.
Ah, I feel more keenly for the tormented boy than if I were sitting with
him up on the pole; over his touchingly noble countenance, with its
finely-curved nose, shame and the western aurora throw a purple hue, and
the low sun hangs with kisses on his cheeks, as if on the last and
highest roses of the dark earth, and he must withdraw his defiant eyes
from the beloved sun and from the day which still dwells thereon, and
from the two steeple knobs of the Linden-city which glimmer on the sides
turned from him, and sorrowfully cast down his strongly-drawn and
sharply-angled eyebrows, which Dian likened to the too heroic and
energetic ones of the infant Jesus in Raphael's ascending Madonna, to
behold the hot and close altercation which was taking place on the
ground below.
Gottlieb, with all his pains, could not squeeze out the key, for he had
it in his pocket, and in his hand, and did not like much to produce it,
from partiality for the young master, whom the whole service loved, "as
if they could eat him,"--as much as they loved the nine-pin alley. He
voted for sending and fetching the lock-smith, but the coachman outvoted
him, with the advice to drive immediately to the door of the
work-shop,--and growled at the horses, and drove off the imprisoned,
controversial preacher in his pulpit, with the packed-up Oesterlein's
harpsichord, at a smart trot. All that the Bombardier, during Gottlieb's
mounting, had time to throw out of the carriage, consisted in his
staving through a window, and firing, from the port-hole, a few of the
most indispensable parting shots at the ill-omened bird on the pole.
By this time the magister had recovered his spirit and vexation, and
boldly commanded the taking down of the Absalom. While the child came
slowly down before him on his perch, he inserted the five incisor-teeth
of his fingers, as a music-pen, into his scalp, and ruled or raked down
along his occiput, with a view to playfully rectifying the crooked line
of the hair, by pulling it moderately with his hand, as with the end of
a fiddle-stick, when, to his astonishment, off came from my hero the
Würzburg queue like a tail-feather.
Wehmeier stared at the _cauda prehensilis_ (the ring-tail), and by his
attention's being thus drawn off to the lesser fault, Albano gained as
much as Alcibiades did from the lopping off of the tail of
his--Robespierre. The magister thanked God that he would not sup to-day
with old Wehrfritz, and sent him, with his mock queue, brow-beaten,
home.