When Sphex opened the Librarian's room for him, the said room was
already occupied with a box of vipers (also arrived from Italy), with
three-quarters of a hundred weight of flax, a white hoop-petticoat, and
three silk shoes, with the holes punched, belonging to the doctoress,
and a supply of camomile. The medical married couple had thought the
pedagogical couple nested together; but Schoppe replied admirably well,
and almost with some irony toward the more politely treated Augusti:
"The more powerful and intellectual and great two men are, so much the
less can they bear each other under one ceiling, as great insects, which
live on _fruits_, are unsocial (for example, in every hazel-nut there
sits only one chafer), whereas the little ones, which only live on
_leaves_,--for instance, the leaf-lice,--cleave together nest-wise."
Zesara would by all means have been glad to hold to his insatiable heart
the friend whom fate had placed thereupon, constantly in every situation
and season as a brother-in-arms; but Schoppe has the right of it.
Friends, lovers, and married people must have everything else in common,
but not a chamber. The gross requisitions and trifling incidents of
bodily presence gather as lamp-smoke around the pure, white flame of
love. As the echo is always of more syllables the farther off our call
starts, so must the soul from which we desire a fairer echo not be too
near ours; and hence the nearness of souls increases with the distance
of bodies.
The Doctor caused his noisy children to run like a cleansing stream
through the Augean stable; but he went down again to the drummer, with
whom, according to his own story, his connection stood thus: Sphex had
already, several years before, ventured certain peculiar conjectures
upon the secretion of fat and the diameter of the fat-cells, in a
treatise which he would not publish till he could append to it the
anatomical drawings thereunto appertaining, for which he was awaiting
the dissection and injection of the drummer that sat there. This sickly,
simple, flabby man, named _Malt_, he had a year since, when certain
symptoms of the fat-eye attached to him, taken to board gratis, on
condition that he should let himself be dissected when he was dead.
Unfortunately Sphex has found, for a considerable time, that the corpse
daily falls away and dries up from the likeness of an eel to a
horned-snake; and he cannot possibly make out what does it, since he
allows him nothing emaciating, neither thinking, nor motion, nor
passions, sensibility, vinegar, nor anything else.
As to the drum, the corpse is obliged--since he is full as hard of
hearing as he is of comprehending, and never can adopt a reason, for the
very reason that he never hears one--to carry that round, strapped to
him, because during its vibration he can better apprehend what his
employer and prosector has to censure in him.[49] The Doctor now began
to scold at him down below--Schoppe stood listening at the window--in
the following wise: "I would the Devil had taken your cursed father of
blessed memory before he had died. You shrink up like army-cloth under
your lamentation, and yet never wake him up, though you cried your nose
away. Drum better, church-mouse! Don't you know, then, scrub, that you
have made a contract with another, to grow into fat as well as you can,
and that it's expensive maintaining a fellow that steals his wages in
this way, till he becomes available? Others would gladly grow fat, if
they had such a chance. And you! speak, rope!" Malt let the drum-sticks
clatter down under his thighs, and said: "Thou hast hit the true secret
of thy trouble with me,--there is no real blessing upon our grease,--and
one of us silently wears away at the thought. As to my blessed father,
verily, I send him out of my head, let him happen in when he will."