Hoppedizel had one afternoon at his house, beside the Captain, five
others, the lawyer Kolb, the raft-inspector Peuschel, an old
carmen-maker [or rhyme-smith], a court-chamber cleaner, and a court
page; for what does the reader care about the surnames of these
people? He first drew the lawyer aside and said to him: He must play a
joke to day and drink to the other four gentlemen in colored water,
which they would take for wine, while they would become fuddled with
real wine. "Very good," said the lawyer; "they shall all have cause to
remember the lawyer." The same thing the Professor repeated to the
raft-inspector, the carmen-maker, etc.; all answered: "Very good! they
shall all remember the raft-inspector, the carmen-maker," etc. Every
one meant to make fools of the other four; the Professor had his eye on
five--all were successful.
At evening five baskets of colored water were brought into the room;
each man placed himself behind his little table, and screwed out the
cork-stopper from the bottle of quasi-wine. The first flasks of bottled
water were drained by the company in silence; true cunning must needs
dictate to the pleasure-party or water-party this appearance of gradual
intoxication.
But now the solar system began its _drawing-of-water_. "The wine might
be stronger," every one said; and would fain deceive every one. The
lawyer with rosy-red nose-button moistened his clay with more water
(instead of spirit) than he had drunk or made or wrung from other
eyes in his whole eternity _a parte ante_. A man who becomes so
capable of holding water, as he is, that he can hardly stand straight
for--soberness, makes it easily credible to his other tippling
confederates that it arises from drunkenness; and all smiled very much
when he laughed.
The raft-inspector Peuschel led a whole stream of water into his
stomach, and made his blood-veins water-veins; but he was half vexed
that he should be compelled to cheat the rest with his make-believe
guzzling, and longed secretly for a real drunkenness instead of the
pretended.
The chamber-cleaner actually macerated and soaked himself through and
through with the colored water, and almost drowned out his Gallic
malady--he guzzled so in his malicious pleasure.
The page, who almost burst his stomach with drinking, fared worse;
three days after, he was carried off by an _incontinentia urinae_. The
porous carmen-maker was the only one through whom a whole colored
deluge glided in and out without doing any harm; he looked round gaily
and satirically, and watched for the moment when his next neighbors
behind the four tables should fall down dead drunk.
A burning barn might have been saved by the toasts they drank in their
whale-like throats.... Now came the time when every one who was in the
secret of the joke must appear drunk. They discoursed and gabbled at
each other with prancing, overbearing tongues. The page and the
polisher actually stretched themselves out into the room like two
felled trees, and their puffed-up paunches, the world was to fancy, lay
like wine-sacks on their tressles. The man of office opened his mouth
and shut his eyes--the carmen-maker imagined he should be doing it in
the maddest and most plausible manner, if, in the first place, he
should swear, like real drunkards, that he was sober; secondly, if he
should collapse against the bed-posts in such a way as to get a real
bruise. Fortunately he did in fact get a wound greater than his
drunkenness, and was on the point, out of revenge, of breaking out with
the information that he had made fools of the quartumvirate and drunk
only water. The Professor also was just about to let the cat out of the
bag and expose the wine and everything--the rest were going to do the
same, and already began to laugh simultaneously in the anticipation:
when meanwhile, unfortunately the raft-inspector, who had long been
satiated, had stolen away to the polisher and thievishly by way of
antidote and alleviative to his imitated wine, pledged himself in the
pretended original edition of the same, out of the polisher's (or
Frotteur's) cup.... there was water in that too as in his. Quick as
lightning and half-foolishly he sipped the cups of all the water-gods;
in all was water. Then out he came with the whole story--and the whole
marine went flying round and hob-a-nobbing with each other, and each
had to say seriously whether he was full and fou'.[28] Unfortunately,
the entire fraternity of practical jokers was sober. The Captain, who
loved such pranks better than fastnight hens, transformed, from love of
morals, the general pretense of drunkenness into pure sincerity, and
carried out his plan by genuine wine. When, by and bye, the pentagon
skipped homeward, and those five foolish virgins returned to their
several abodes as five wise ones, though with an aqueous plethora, then
he said: "Upon my soul, such a thing ought to be printed!" And in fact
it is printed here.
I should be glad if, before I and the reader leave his house, we might
take with us a medallion, an adumbration of this Hoppedizel, as a
souvenir; but I shrink from the labor--I would rather emboss all the
characters of this work on paper or wax than this man. His character
consists of a compilation of a hundred characters, his knowledge of all
departments of knowledge, his acuteness of skepticism, his vice of
stoicism, his virtue of a system upon virtue, and his actions of jokes
and tricks; and grimaces.
For all that, or _for_ all that, the Captain liked him, because he saw
him often (he was grum to almost everyone who did not visit him) and
because both were merry blades, and because people love each other in a
hundred instances without a devil's knowing why. Falkenberg would have
exchanged shots with Behemoth himself, for any friend, even for the one
who had been the first to _take him in_--he would have done it out of
honor and good-heartedness; the Professor, on the contrary, preferred
pure morals, as one might pure mathematics, to applied morality, and
seldom acted. One loves to remember, therefore, the proof of his fine
consistency to his principles which he once gave as a guest in
Auenthal, when at midnight, instead of the Captain, only his riderless
nag came home out of the heavy snowdrifts. Another, _e. g_., the
Captain himself, would have mounted the same nag and ridden out to seek
and save the lost; but the Professor neatly snuffed the tallow candle
and seated himself by the wife, who continued to weep disconsolately,
and who at a former time used to worry herself almost to death if her
husband was a little late at night, although she scolded herself
soundly for it the very next morning--and said to her composedly: "She
might just cry as much as she liked, he would gladly allow it; it did
little harm, rather it lightened the heart, and withal washed the pupil
of the eye and refracted a too intense light; besides the superfluous
tears must needs filter through the nasal cavity into the throat and
stomach and help digestion; but as to her husband, the worst that could
have befallen him would be that he had frozen to death; but he knew,
partly from experience, that there was no gentler way of dying than by
cold--for, in fact, it was the same as if one were hanged or drowned,
for one died by an apoplectic stroke."
But, as I said the Captain loved, and left him nevertheless.