Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above
the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of
discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf
of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he
shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and
if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary
partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he
would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in
his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.
Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her
his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna,
he said not, as usual, _nolo episcopari_; he did not say he was hemmed
round by an impassable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that
perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of
fortune,--instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more
common to brides,--he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told
Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked
what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the
Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and
Rabette, and all.
But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through
Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the
arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the
greatest reluctance to eat with a nobleman, merely because, as
entertaining _acteur_ of the table, he had so much to do with
conversing, _savoir vivre_, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in
proper attitude, and passing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he
was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cucumbers,
chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting
them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard
fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's
pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the
feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague,
and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should assume
to himself the magnificent _winter crop_ in Alban's sowed field as his
own _summer crop_. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all
the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the
aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.[32]
With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own
hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a
three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his
entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some
time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir,"
replied coldly and gravely the _paradeur_ of a Falterle by the side of
our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well
at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to
scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a
cabinet, and not into a principal apartment."
What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two
brothers-in-office!--the master of accomplishments with the motley
scarf-skin or hind-apron of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow
outer wings of a buttermoth, whose dark under-wings represent the
waistcoat (when he unbuttons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a
roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him,
and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of
candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle
had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and
every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were
the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master
wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests.[33] The former
in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,--the one flapping up like
a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with
the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial
root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his
green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A
magnificent set-off, I repeat!
The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led
forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But
now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his
napkin open first,--which became now, as it were, introductory programme
and dokimasticum of Falterle's system of teaching. "_Posément,
Monsieur_," said he to the novice, "_il est messéant de déplier la
serviette avant que les autres aient déplié les leurs_." After some
minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one _à la
Brittanière_, with rings. "_Il est mésseant, Monsieur_," said
the master of accomplishments, "_de souffler sa soupe_." The
Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from
the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short,
frightened into a dead calm.
When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on
the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced
veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed
more inwardly than outwardly.
After the bomb, came in a pike _au four_, to which, as is well known,
the cutting away of the head and tail, and the closing up of the belly
give the appearance of a roe's loin. When Albano asked his old teacher
what it was, the latter replied, "A delicate roe's loin." "_Pardonnez,
Monsieur_," said his rival gourmand, "_c'est du brochet au four, mon
cher Compte; mais il est mésseant de demander le nom de quelque mets
qu'il soit,--on feint de le savoir_."
It is easy to show that this horizontal shot from a double rifle pierced
through the Magister's marrow and bone; the _instruments of passion_
which lay in the cut-off head of the pike _au four_, as in an armory,
continued to do their execution in his. Like most schoolmasters, he
thought himself to have the finest manners, so long as he taught them,
and fought against bad ones; so long he prized them uncommonly, just as
he did his dress; but when he was outdone in either, then he must needs
despise them from his heart. It brought him to his legs again that he
was all the while silently comparing the master of accomplishments with
the two Catos and Homer's heroes, who ate not much better than swine,
and that he thus tied the Viennite to a pillory, and thrashed him most
lustily thereon, with one hand, while with the other he rung above him
the shame-bell. Yes, he placed himself, in order to make his official
brother small, upon a distant planet, and looked down upon the bomb and
the pike _au four_, and could not help laughing up there on his planet,
to find that this yellow-silk shop-keeper of Nature, with his rubbish of
brains, was no bigger than a paste-eel. Then he pitied his forsaken
pupil, and so came down again, and swore on the way to weed as much out
of him every day as that other fellow raked in.
We shall learn quite soon enough how Albano's nerves quivered on this
lathe, and under these smoothing-planes. The Director was indescribably
delighted with this pedagogical cutting and polishing of so great a
diamond, although the cutting (according to Jeffries) takes from all
diamonds half their weight, and although he himself had all his, and
more carats than angles. Wehrfritz could never entirely forgive,--at
which point he was now aiming, because he had brought with him for the
little one the Oesterleins harpsichord,--until at least with one word he
had inflicted a short martyrdom; accordingly, blind to Albano's
concealed bloody expiation of the fault, he communicated to the company
how strictly the Minister educated his children, how they, e. g., for
any involuntary coughing or laughing at the table, like Prussian cavalry
soldiers, who fall off or lose their hats in the wind, suffer
punishment, and how they were, to be sure, no older than Albano, but
quite as well-mannered as grown people. At the house of the Minister he
had, on the contrary, boasted to-day the acquirements of his foster-son;
but many parents build up in every other house smoking altars of incense
for the same child, which in their own they smoke with brimstone, like
vines and bees. Besides, deuse take it! they, like princes (fathers of
their country), make redoubled demands precisely when children have
satisfied immoderate ones; so that the latter, by _opera
supererogationis_ in the shape of advanced lessons, forfeit rather than
win their play-hours. Do we not admire it in great philosophers, e. g.
Malebranche, and great generals, e. g. Scipio, that, after the greatest
achievements which they made in the kingdom of truths, or in a
geographical, they betook themselves to the nursery, and there carried
on real child's fooleries, in order gently to relax the bow wherewith
they had shot so many lies and liars to the ground. And why shall not
this simile, wherewith St. John defended himself when he allowed himself
a play-hour with his tame partridge, also excuse children for being
children, when they have previously stretched too crooked the yet thin
bow?
But now on with our story! Old Wehrfritz recounted to Rabette, in a very
friendly manner, "how he had seen to-day the pupil of Don Zesara, the
magnificent Countess de Romeiro, actually only twelve years old, but
with such a deportment as only a court dame had, and how the noble
Knight experienced more joy than usual in his little ward." These hard,
clattering words tore, as if he had hydrophobia, the open nerves of the
ambitious boy, since the Knight had hitherto been to him the
life's-goal, the eternal wish, and the _frère terrible_, wherewith they
kept him under,--but he sat still there without a sign, and choked his
crying heart. Wehrfritz recognized this dumb lip-biting of feeling;
however, he acted as if Albano had not understood him.
Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all
corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a
favorable light upon his dancing and music scholars therein, as well as
himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old,
speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano
has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of
Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not
yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which
made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes,
cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the
circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on
amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour
making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets
there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite
our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider,
ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle
said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody,
because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I,"
that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he
harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly,
not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only
honey (i. e. a little praise).
"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he
had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer
shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister
sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much
for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with
the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow;
and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat
cracking under his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went
slowly out.
The poor young man had, to-day, since the apparent forgiveness of his
Adamitish fall, and since the sight of the elegant new teacher, for whom
he had so long rejoiced in hope, and whose fine copperplate encasement
was just of a kind to have an imposing effect upon a child, cast off the
last chrysalis-shell of his inner being, and promised himself high
things. Some hand had within an hour snatched his inner man from the
close, drowsy cradle of childhood,--he had sprung at once out of the
warming-basket, had thrown stuffed-hat and frock far away from him,--he
saw the _toga virilis_ hanging in the distance, and marched into it, and
said, "Cannot I, too, be a youth?"
Ah, thou dear boy! man, especially the rosy-cheeked little man, too
easily cheats himself with taking repentance for reformation,
resolutions for actions, blossoms for fruits, as on the naked twig of
the fig-tree seeming _fruits_ sprout forth, which are only the fleshy
rinds of the _blossoms_!
And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and
exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,--just now
must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his
bosom,--he determined to pass through the coming years as through a
white colonnade of monumental pillars,--already a mere Alumnus from the
city was, to his soul thirsting for glory and knowledge, a classic
author,--and was he to endure it that the Director should falsely
accuse, and the Vienna master caricature him to the Knight his father?
Hard tears were struck, like sparks, from his proud, insulted soul, and
the heat dissolved the comet nucleus of his inner world into a sweltry
mist. In short, he resolved to run away to Pestitz in the night,--rush
into his father's presence, tell him all, and then come home again
without saying a word of it. At the end of the village he found a
night-express, of whom he inquired the way to Pestitz, and who wondered
at the little pilgrim without a hat.
But first let my readers look with me at the nest of the supper-party.
This very express brought the Vienna master a bad piece of news touching
the so-long-praised son of the Minister, whose name was Roquairol.
The above-mentioned female pupil of the Knight, the little Countess of
Romeiro, was very beautiful: cold ones called her an angel, and
enthusiastic ones a goddess. Roquairol had none of your Belgic veins,
wherein, as in Saturn, all liquids lie as fixed, frozen bodies, but
African arteries, in which, as in Mercury, melted metals run round. When
the Countess was with his sister, he was always trying, with the common
boldness of boys in high-life, to run his heart, filled with a venous
system of quick matches, upon hers, as a good fireship; but she placed
his sister as a fire-wall before her. Unfortunately she had gone, by
chance, dressed as Werther's Lotta, to this evening's masquerade, and
the splendor of her despotic charms was swallowed up and flashed round
by eyes all darkly glowing behind masks: he took his inner and outer
both off, pressed towards her, and demanded, with some haste--because
she threatened to be off, and with some confidence, which he had won on
the amateur-stage, and with pantomimic passionateness, which on that
stage had always gained him the finest serenade of clapping
hands--demanded nothing just now but reciprocal love. Werther's Lotta
haughtily turned upon him her splendid back, covered with ringlets;
beside himself, he ran home, took Werther's costume and pistol and came
back. Then, with a physiognomical hurricane on his countenance, he
stepped up before her and said, showing the weapon, he would kill
himself here in the hall, if she rejected him. She looked upon him a
little too politely, and asked what he wanted. But Werther, half drunk
with Lotta's charms, with Werther's sorrows, and with punch, after the
fifth or sixth "No!" (being already used to public acting,) before the
whole masquerade, pointed the murderous weapon against himself, pulled
the trigger, but luckily injured only his left ear-flap,--so that
nothing more can be hung on that,--and grazed the side of his head. She
instantly fled, and set out upon her journey, and he fell down,
bleeding, and was carried home.
This story blew out many lamps in Falterle's triumphal arch, and lighted
up many on Wehmeier's; but it set Albina at once into agony about her
quite as wild mad-cap Albano. She asked after him in the kitchen, and
the express-messenger helped her to a clew by his account of the boy
without a hat. She hastened, herself, in her usual extravagance of
anxiety, out through the village. A good genius--the yard-dog,
Melak--had proved the antagonist-muscle and turnpike-gate of the
fugitive. That is to say, Melak wanted to go too, and Alban chose rather
that a patron and coast-guard so serviceable to the castle-yard, and who
oftener warned away intruders than the night-watch did themselves,
should go home again. Melak was firm in his matters: he wanted
reasons,--namely, sticks and stones thrown at him; but the weeping boy,
whose burning hands the cold nose of the good-natured animal refreshed,
could not give him a hard word, but he merely turned the fawning dog
right about, and said softly, Go home! But Melak recognized no decrees
except loud ones; he kept turning round again; and in the midst of these
inversions,--during which, in Albano's mind, always on a Brockenberg and
seeing giant forms loom and glide through the clouds, his tears and
every undeserved word burned deeper and deeper,--he was found by his
innocent mother.
"Albano," said she, with a friendly but forced composure, "thou here in
the cold night-air?" This conduct and language of the only soul which he
had injured, took so strong a hold on his full soul, which needed a
vent, whether in tears or in gall, that, with a spasmodic shock of his
overstrained heart, he sprang upon her neck, and hung there, melted in
tears. At her questions, he could not confess his cruel purpose, but
merely pressed himself more strongly to her heart. And now came the
anxious and penitent Director, too, following after, whom the child's
situation had melted over, and said: "Silly devil! was my meaning then
so evil?" and took the little hand to lead the way back again. Probably
Albano's anger was exhausted by the effusion of love, and satisfied
through the appeasing of his ambition; accordingly and immediately,
strange to tell, with greater affection towards Wehrfritz than towards
Albina, he went back with them, and wept by the way, merely from tender
emotion.
When he entered the room, his face was as if transfigured, though a
little swollen; the tears had washed away, as with a flood, his
defiance, and drawn all his heart's soft lines of beauty upon his
countenance, somewhat as the rain shows in transparent, trembling
threads the heaven-flower (nostock), which does not appear in the sun.
He placed himself in a posture of attention near his father, and kept
his hand the whole evening, and Albina enjoyed in the double love a
double bliss; and even on the faces of the servants lay scattered
fragments of the third mock-rainbow of the domestic peace,--the sign of
the covenant after the assuaging of the waters.
Verily, I have often formed the wish--and afterwards made a picture out
of it--that I could be present at all reconciliations in the world,
because no love moves us so deeply as _returning_ love. It must touch
Immortals, when they see men, the heavy-laden, and often held so widely
asunder by fate or by fault, how, like the Valisneria,[34] they will
tear themselves away from the marshy bottom, and ascend into a fairer
element; and then, in the freer upper air, how they will conquer the
distance between their hearts and come together. But it must also pain
Immortals when they behold us under the violent _tempests_ of life
arrayed against each other on the _battle-field_ of enmity, under double
blows, and so mortally smitten at once by remote destiny and by that
nearer hand which should bind up our wounds!