Robisch.--The Starling.--A Lamb in the Place of the Above-Mentioned
Cat.
After such an abduction they confined Gustavus's theatre and
pleasure-ground strictly within the wall of the castle; into the waving
grain-fields and the hamlet of Auenthal, which lay at about a
seventeenth of a German mile distant, he could only look. This flowery
mountain island he cruised round all day long, in order to knock down
every red chafer, to twist off every marbled snail-house from its leaf,
and generally to shut up everything that skipped about on six feet in
the prison he had prepared for it. At the expense of his inexperienced
fingers, he even undertook at first to pull the bee by the hinder part
of the body out of its cup of joy. The motley prisoners he now crowded
together (as princes do all classes of men into one metropolis) into a
beautiful Solomon's-temple, or into a silver-plated Noah's-ark of
pasteboard, with more windows than walls. The architect of this fourth
temple of Solomon was not, as with the first, the Devil or the Worm
Lis,[14] but a human being, who could easily be likened to both, the
so-called princely rat-catcher _Robisch_. This vassal of the Captain
visited annually the best chambers and gardens of the whole land, in
order to cleanse both, not so much of their _worst_ as of their _least_
inmates--mice and moles. I will not exactly assure the learned Republic
that this mouse-butcher dispatched as many subterranean moles out of
the world as there are scribbling ones that annually come in, to set
themselves on their hind feet and then with their fore feet, which in
both kinds of moles resemble human hands, in the book stores and
at the Leipsic trade-sale, throw up their mole-hills as little
Parnassus-mountains;--meanwhile, Robisch was paid exactly as if the
chamber-hunter had cleared out all vermin. For the people thought, if
one should provoke this cup-poisoner of the rodents, instead of paying
him, he would imitate the miracles of Moses, and redouble, by colonies
left behind him, the vermin which one took out of his royal and penal
jurisdiction. I will take my hands off from this dirty soul, whose
orbit, I hope, may never bring him nearer my Gustavus, when I have
recorded that he was often in the house of the Falkenbergs; that, when
there were strangers there, he acted as extra and occasional domestic,
and when wild game, in the shape of recruits, was to be caught, as
drawing-hound to the Captain, and that he pressed himself and his wares
upon little Gustavus. Such a hooking-on to children, without parental
childlikeness, is ambiguous. Children, however, have a special love for
servants, and Gustavus particularly, who, indeed, could not, even at a
later period, possibly hate any one whom he had loved in his childhood;
all the misdeeds which Robisch might have committed against him could
not have snapped asunder the bond of that gratitude he felt for the
gift of the miserable insect block-house which depopulated the wall.
Whatever lived and buzzed in the Solomon's-castle-church must be fed
with sugar, because children look upon that as both lunch and dessert;
and the finest inmates would have starved to death had not their
overseer, Gustavus, received from the chamber-hunter, as a further
present, a starling; for this starling he let hop into the Pantheon,
and eat everything which itself had nothing to eat.... If I have here
hid away under the wing-sheaths of the insects, and in the bill of the
starling the most just reflections and the boldest hints, I hope the
reader will cleverly find them there.
Except myself, no one, perhaps, had Gustavus's name in his bill so
often as the starling, who, like court people, never had anything in
his head but a _nomen proprium_. The little fellow thought the starling
thought, and was a man as much as Robisch, and loved him for all he
did; therefore, he could not be satisfied with listening to him and
loving everything about him. In fact, there was nothing which he could
love and hug enough. The farmer had for that purpose given him for a
companion a black lamb, which he led and lured around the wall with a
red ribbon and a crust of bread. The lamb, like a village comedian, had
to play all parts. At one time he must be the Genius, then the poodle;
now Gustavus and now Robisch. Thus did our little friend play solo his
first earthly parts, and was at once manager, prompter, and theatre
poet. Such comedies as children _make_ for themselves are a thousand
times more profitable than those they _act_, even though they came out
of Weisse's writing-desk; in our day, besides, when the whole man is a
figurant, his virtue a dramatic part, and his sensibility lyric poetry,
this wrenching of children's souls is particularly dangerous. However,
this is also, sometimes, not true; for I, myself, acted the complete
sharper, to be sure only once, twice, or thrice in my life, but that
was even before I had gone to my first confession.
The decree which forbade his going down the castle hill, differed
honorably from the decrees of our transcendant parents, the magistracy,
in this respect, that it was, in the first place, made known to the
party concerned, and, secondly, that it was maintained for at least a
fortnight. Gustavus would have given his life to have taken himself and
his lamb from the wall down to the foot of the mountain. Now, as the
Captain knew, from Quistorp's Juridical Contributions, that one may
substitute for close confinement within the walls, the larger one of
gaol limits, or the bounds of the district, accordingly he dictated the
latter punishment instead of the former, and said: "Can not one give
the lamb in charge of the farmer's Regel (Regina), so long as she tends
the flock on the hillside? So far as I am concerned, the youngster may
join in driving, if I only have him always in sight." I must still wait
to see what the Imperial Knighthood will say or write upon this, viz.,
that an honorary member thereof, my hero, at four o'clock in the
afternoon regularly twisted off a long hazel wand, and therewith
transformed himself into a young ox-driver, and by the side of
Stroessner's eleven-year-old Regina, drove out the sheep and cattle and
the lamb led by the ribbon with such pride and such Jupiter's eyebrows,
that any one could easily see he directed the whole stall, and
challenged the imperial chivalry at this moment to come and see him.
Only in the Millenial Kingdom are there such afternoons as Gustavus
enjoyed, as in the lap of the earth, on that eminence. My father should
have sent me to a drawing school: could I not now have caught and
mirrored the whole landscape in my stream of colors instead of a stream
of ink? Verily, I could image before the eyes of the reader every bush
with its bird gliding into it, every lip-colored strawberry of the
rocky slope, every sheep with its new growth of down, and every tree
around whose roots the squirrel had strewed his crumbled fir-cones.
Meanwhile there are, on the other hand, things at which the pole-cat
hairs of the pencil brush in vain, but which flow beautifully from my
quill--the eye of Gustavus swimming on the tide of pleasure, sails
lightly to and fro between the lamb, the bright flowery ground with the
shadow-formed spit of land and the enchanting face of Regina, and needs
never to look away.
Why did I say "enchanting face," when it was only an every-day one?
Because my little Apollo and sheepherd with thirsty eyes flew to this
face, as to a flower. In a brain like his, wherein all day long the
white flame of fancy and no blue phlegmatic brandy-flame blazed up, it
could not fail that every female face should shine with gilded charms
in a divine color, and not in a hue of death. All beauties had
with him the advantage, too, of having been seen, not for ten years,
but within ten days. This, however, is not his first love, but only a
morning-divine-service, a vigil eve, a Protevangelium of some first
love or other--nothing more.
For two whole weeks he drove his lamb to pasture, before his courage
rose so high that he could venture--not to seat himself beside her
knitting (that exceeded his human powers), but--to hold fast his sheep
to its _postillion d'amour_, not, however, to lead it to Regina, but to
be drawn by it himself to her; for the best love is the most bashful,
as the basest is the most bold. Then, like a tranquillizing moon, would
her image, as she was more in his thoughts than in his sight, lay
itself upon his dreaming soul, and so much was enough. His second
contrivance for being her assessor (or by-sitter) was the round shadow
of a linden-tree that waved lower down the hill, behind which, as
behind a lattice, the evening sun was broken into splinters. With this
shadow he now edged up nearer and nearer to Regina; under the pretext
of shunning one sun, he drew nearer to another redder one. With such
little trickeries love runs over; but they are all guessed and
forgiven; and they are often prompted more by instinct than by
conscious design. To be sure, when the evening slowly stretched upward
from the valley to the heights--when drowsy nature, sinking to slumber,
still, as if half in sleep, murmured a word or two in the broken tones
of a bird that had gone to its nest--when the chime of bells on the
necks of the herd, that plucked the innocent flowers of joy from the
meadow, and the monotone of the cuckoo and the confused hum of dying
day had pressed the keys of the lowest strings; then did his love and
his courage grow wonderfully, and not seldom to such a pitch that he
openly took out of his pocket the cake which he had kept for her, and,
without scruple, laid it in the grass, in order actually to make her a
tender of this pastry, so soon as they should have, in the twilight, to
part from each other at the castle-gate: there he thrust the donation
upon her with hurried confusion and darted away with joyful shame. If
he succeeded in insinuating into her hand this evening offering, then
was every pulse of his arterial system a rapturously beating heart (for
the speech and joy of his love was _giving_), and under his bed-clothes
he was all night planting bold plans for the morrow, which the
afternoon bell-hammer with four blows killed utterly down to their very
tap-roots. She always put on her mother's wide neckerchief; from this a
philosopher of sense must infer that in after years the large
neckerchiefs of the ladies pleased him, which I myself prefer to the
former short aprons of the neck; on the same ground he, like myself,
also liked broad head-bands and broad aprons. I have already played
_L'Hombre_ with philosophers, who reversed the thing and asserted that
all this pleased him, not because the article was on the beauty
(Regina), but because the beauty was in the article.
In fact, I am ashamed that, while the raggedest Baccalaurei dip their
pens and portray to their fellow Baccalaurei the most elegant Sponsalia
of Queens and Marchionesses, I meanwhile spend my writing materials on
the sheep-tending and love-making of two children. Both occupations ran
on into the autumn, and fain would I picture them; but, as I said, my
shame before the Bachelors!--and yet how I envy thee, winsome dreamer,
this white sunny side of thy life on thy mountain, and thy lamb and thy
vision! And how gladly would I arrest the days that glide over thy head
and load thy little lap with flowers, and bring them to a standstill,
so that the funeral-train of the armed days should have to halt
in the background, which may empty thy lap--let the gairish light into
thy pleasure-grove--stab thy lamb--pay thy Regina the wages of a
serving-maid!
But in October all go off to Unter-Scheerau; and the children do not
even know, as yet, that there are such things as lips and kisses!
O weeks of the very first love! why do we despise you more than our
later follies? Ah, on all your seven days, which in you look like seven
minutes, we were innocent, unselfish and full of love. Beautiful weeks!
ye are butterflies that have lived over from an unknown year[15] to
flutter as heralds of our life's spring-time! Would that I could think
of you as enthusiastically as once, of you, days when neither pleasure
nor hope were checked by any limits! Thou poor son of humanity--when
the tender, white mist of thy childhood which spreads its enchantment
over all nature is gone, still thou dost remain long in thy sunlight,
but the fallen mist creeps up again from below into the blue as a
denser rain-cloud, and in the noon of youth thou standest under the
lightnings and thunder-bolts of thy passions!--and at evening thy rent
heavens still rain on!