full of life and motion, some was quite still and had not a single
thrill in it.
“My dear child,” said the powdered lady, “is it possible that you do
not know the reason? Why, those silent, dull things are _imitation_!”
This she said with so much decision that she evidently considered it a
condensed but complete answer.
“Imitation?” repeated August, timidly, not understanding.
“Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrications!” said the princess in pink
shoes, very vivaciously. “They only _pretend_ to be what we _are_! They
never wake up: how can they? No imitation ever had any soul in it yet.”
“Oh!” said August, humbly, not even sure that he understood entirely
yet. He looked at Hirschvogel: surely it had a royal soul within it:
would it not wake up and speak? Oh dear! how he longed to hear the
voice of his fire-king! And he began to forget that he stood by a lady
who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white china, with the year 1746 cut
on it, and the Meissen mark.
“What will you be when you are a man?” said the little lady, sharply,
for her black eyes were quick though her red lips were smiling. “Will
you work for the _Königliche Porcellan-Manufactur_, like my great dead
Kandler?”
“I have never thought,” said August, stammering; “at least—that is—I do
wish—I do hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin Hirschvogel at
Nürnberg.”
“Bravo!” said all the real _bric-à-brac_ in one breath, and the two
Italian rapiers left off fighting to cry, “_Benone_!” For there is not
a bit of true _bric-à-brac_ in all Europe that does not know the names
of the mighty masters.
August felt quite pleased to have won so much applause, and grew as red
as the lady’s shoes with bashful contentment.
“I knew all the Hirschvögel, from old Veit downwards,” said a fat _grès
de Flandre_ beer-jug: “I myself was made at Nürnberg.” And he bowed to
the great stove very politely, taking off his own silver hat—I mean
lid—with a courtly sweep that he could scarcely have learned from
burgomasters. The stove, however, was silent, and a sickening suspicion
(for what is such heart-break as a suspicion of what we love?) came
through the mind of August: _Was Hirschvogel only imitation?_
“No, no, no, no!” he said to himself, stoutly: though Hirschvogel never
stirred, never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in it. After all
their happy years together, after all the nights of warmth and joy he
owed it, should he doubt his own friend and hero, whose gilt lion’s
feet he had kissed in his babyhood? “No, no, no, no!” he said, again,
with so much emphasis that the Lady of Meissen looked sharply again at
him.
“No,” she said, with pretty disdain; “no, believe me, they may
‘pretend’ forever. They can never look like us! They imitate even our
marks, but never can they look like the real thing, never can they
_chassent de race_.”
“How should they?” said a bronze statuette of Vischer’s. “They daub
themselves green with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to get rusted;
but green and rust are not _patina_; only the ages can give that!”
“And _my_ imitations are all in primary colors, staring colors, hot as
the colors of a hostelry’s sign-board!” said the Lady of Meissen, with
a shiver.
“Well, there is a _grès de Flandre_ over there, who pretends to be a
Hans Kraut, as I am,” said the jug with the silver hat, pointing with
his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in a corner. “He has
copied me as exactly as it is given to moderns to copy us. Almost he
might be mistaken for me. But yet what a difference there is! How crude
are his blues! how evidently done over the glaze are his black letters!
He has tried to give himself my very twist; but what a lamentable
exaggeration of that playful deviation in my lines which in his becomes
actual deformity!”
“And look at that,” said the gilt Cordovan leather, with a contemptuous
glance at a broad piece of gilded leather spread out on a table. “They
will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and give him my name; but look!
_I_ am overlaid with pure gold beaten thin as a film and laid on me in
absolute honesty by worthy Diego de las Gorgias, worker in leather of
lovely Cordova in the blessed reign of Ferdinand the Most Christian.
_His_ gilding is one part gold to eleven other parts of brass and
rubbish, and it has been laid on him with a brush—_a brush!_—pah! of
course he will be as black as a crock in a few years’ time, whilst I
am as bright as when I first was made, and, unless I am burnt as my
Cordova burnt its heretics, I shall shine on forever.”
“They carve pear-wood because it is so soft, and dye it brown, and call
it _me_!” said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle.
“That is not so painful; it does not vulgarize you so much as the cups
they paint to-day and christen after _me_!” said a Carl Theodor cup
subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel.
“Nothing can be so annoying as to see common gimcracks aping _me_!”
interposed the princess in the pink shoes.
“They even steal my motto, though it is Scripture,” said a _Trauerkrug_
of Regensburg in black-and-white.
“And my own dots they put on plain English china creatures!” sighed the
little white maid of Nymphenburg.
“And they sell hundreds and thousands of common china plates, calling
them after me, and baking my saints and my legends in a muffle of
to-day; it is blasphemy!” said a stout plate of Gubbio, which in its
year of birth had seen the face of Maestro Giorgio.
“That is what is so terrible in these _bric-à-brac_ places,” said the
princess of Meissen. “It brings one in contact with such low, imitative
creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless under glass at
the Louvre or South Kensington.”
“And they get even there,” sighed the _grès de Flandre_. “A terrible
thing happened to a dear friend of mine, a _terre cuite_ of Blasius
(you know the _terres cuites_ of Blasius date from 1560). Well, he
was put under glass in a museum that shall be nameless, and he found
himself set next to his own imitation born and baked yesterday at
Frankfort, and what think you the miserable creature said to him, with
a grin? ‘Old Pipe-clay,’—that is what he called my friend,—‘the fellow
that bought _me_ got just as much commission on me as the fellow that
bought _you_, and that was all that _he_ thought about. You know it
is only the public money that goes!’ And the horrid creature grinned
again till he actually cracked himself. There is a Providence above all
things, even museums.”
“Providence might have interfered before, and saved the public money,”
said the little Meissen lady with the pink shoes.
“After all, does it matter?” said a Dutch jar of Haarlem. “All the
shamming in the world will not _make_ them us!”
“One does not like to be vulgarized,” said the Lady of Meissen, angrily.
“My maker, the Krabbetje,[A] did not trouble his head about that,” said
the Haarlem jar, proudly. “The Krabbetje made me for the kitchen, the
bright, clean, snow-white Dutch kitchen, wellnigh three centuries ago,
and now I am thought worthy the palace; yet I wish I were at home; yes,
I wish I could see the good Dutch vrouw, and the shining canals, and
the great green meadows dotted with the kine.”
“Ah! if we could all go back to our makers!” sighed the Gubbio plate,
thinking of Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and gracious days of the
Renaissance: and somehow the words touched the frolicsome souls of the
dancing jars, the spinning teapots, the chairs that were playing cards;
and the violin stopped its merry music with a sob, and the spinnet
sighed,—thinking of dead hands.
Even the little Saxe poodle howled for a master forever lost; and only
the swords went on quarrelling, and made such a clattering noise that
the Japanese bonze rode at them on his monster and knocked them both
right over, and they lay straight and still, looking foolish, and the
little Nymphenburg maid, though she was crying, smiled and almost
laughed.
Then from where the great stove stood there came a solemn voice.
All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and the heart of its little human
comrade gave a great jump of joy.
“My friends,” said that clear voice from the turret of Nürnberg
faïence, “I have listened to all you have said. There is too much
talking among the Mortalities whom one of themselves has called the
Windbags. Let not us be like them. I hear among men so much vain
speech, so much precious breath and precious time wasted in empty
boasts, foolish anger, useless reiteration, blatant argument ignoble
mouthings, that I have learned to deem speech a curse, laid on man to
weaken and envenom all his undertakings. For over two hundred years
I have never spoken myself: you, I hear, are not so reticent. I only
speak now because one of you said a beautiful thing that touched me. If
we all might but go back to our makers! Ah, yes! if we might! We were
made in days when even men were true creatures, and so we, the work of
their hands, were true too. We, the begotten of ancient days, derive
all the value in us from the fact that our makers wrought at us with
zeal, with piety, with integrity, with faith,—not to win fortunes or to
glut a market, but to do nobly an honest thing and create for the honor
of the Arts and God. I see amidst you a little human thing who loves
me, and in his own ignorant childish way loves Art. Now, I want him
forever to remember this night and these words; to remember that we are
what we are, and precious in the eyes of the world, because centuries
ago those who were of single mind and of pure hand so created us,
scorning sham and haste and counterfeit. Well do I recollect my master,
Augustin Hirschvogel. He led a wise and blameless life, and wrought
in loyalty and love, and made his time beautiful thereby, like one of
his own rich, many-colored church casements, that told holy tales as
the sun streamed through them. Ah, yes, my friends, to go back to our
masters!—that would be the best that could befall us. But they are
gone, and even the perishable labors of their lives outlive them. For
many, many years I, once honored of emperors, dwelt in a humble house
and warmed in successive winters three generations of little, cold,
hungry children. When I warmed them they forgot that they were hungry;
they laughed and told tales, and slept at last about my feet. Then I
knew that humble as had become my lot it was one that my master would
have wished for me, and I was content. Sometimes a tired woman would
creep up to me, and smile because she was near me, and point out my
golden crown or my ruddy fruit to a baby in her arms. That was better
than to stand in a great hall of a great city, cold and empty, even
though wise men came to gaze and throngs of fools gaped, passing with
flattering words. Where I go now I know not; but since I go from that
humble house where they loved me, I shall be sad and alone. They pass
so soon,—those fleeting mortal lives! Only we endure,—we, the things
that the human brain creates. We can but bless them a little as they
glide by: if we have done that, we have done what our masters wished.
So in us our masters, being dead, yet may speak and live.”
Then the voice sank away in silence, and a strange golden light that
had shone on the great stove faded away; so also the light died down in
the silver candelabra. A soft, pathetic melody stole gently through the
room. It came from the old, old spinnet that was covered with the faded
roses.
Then that sad, sighing music of a bygone day died too; the clocks
of the city struck six of the morning; day was rising over the
Bayerischenwald. August awoke with a great start, and found himself
lying on the bare bricks of the floor of the chamber, and all the
_bric-à-brac_ was lying quite still all around. The pretty Lady of
Meissen was motionless on her porcelain bracket, and the little Saxe
poodle was quiet at her side.
He rose slowly to his feet. He was very cold, but he was not sensible
of it or of the hunger that was gnawing his little empty entrails. He
was absorbed in the wondrous sight, in the wondrous sounds, that he had
seen and heard.
All was dark around him. Was it still midnight or had morning come?
Morning, surely; for against the barred shutters he heard the tiny song
of the robin.
Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step up the stair. He had but a moment
in which to scramble back into the interior of the great stove, when
the door opened and the two dealers entered, bringing burning candles
with them to see their way.
August was scarcely conscious of danger more than he was of cold or
hunger. A marvellous sense of courage, of security, of happiness, was
about him, like strong and gentle arms enfolding him and lifting him
upwards—upwards—upwards! Hirschvogel would defend him.
The dealers undid the shutters, scaring the red-breast away, and then
tramped about in their heavy boots and chattered in contented voices,
and began to wrap up the stove once more in all its straw and hay and
cordage.
It never once occurred to them to glance inside. Why should they look
inside a stove that they had bought and were about to sell again for
all its glorious beauty of exterior?
The child still did not feel afraid. A great exaltation had come to
him: he was like one lifted up by his angels.
Presently the two traders called up their porters and the stove,
heedfully swathed and wrapped and tended as though it were some sick
prince going on a journey, was borne on the shoulders of six stout
Bavarians down the stairs and out of the door into the Marienplatz.
Even behind all those wrappings August felt the icy bite of the intense
cold of the outer air at dawn of a winter’s day in Munich. The men
moved the stove with exceeding gentleness and care, so that he had
often been far more roughly shaken in his big brothers’ arms than
he was in his journey now; and though both hunger and thirst made
themselves felt, being foes that will take no denial, he was still in
that state of nervous exaltation which deadens all physical suffering
and is at once a cordial and an opiate. He had heard Hirschvogel speak;
that was enough.
The stout carriers tramped through the city, six of them, with the
Nürnberg fire-castle on their brawny shoulders, and went right across
Munich to the railway-station, and August in the dark recognized all
the ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring, hissing railway-noises, and
thought, despite his courage and excitement, “Will it be a _very_ long
journey?” For his stomach had at times an odd sinking sensation, and
his head sadly often felt light and swimming. If it was a very, very
long journey he felt half afraid that he would be dead or something bad
before the end, and Hirschvogel would be so lonely: that was what he
thought most about; not much about himself, and not much about Dorothea
and the house at home. He was “high strung to high emprise,” and could
not look behind him.
Whether for a long or a short journey, whether for weal or woe, the
stove with August still within it was once more hoisted up into a great
van; but this time it was not all alone, and the two dealers as well as
the six porters were all with it.
He in his darkness knew that; for he heard their voices. The train
glided away over the Bavarian plain southward; and he heard the men say
something of Berg and the Wurm-See, but their German was strange to
him, and he could not make out what these names meant.
The train rolled on, with all its fume and fuss, and roar of steam,
and stench of oil and burning coal. It had to go quietly and slowly on
account of the snow which was falling, and which had fallen all night.
“He might have waited till he came to the city,” grumbled one man to
another. “What weather to stay on at Berg!”
But who he was that stayed on at Berg, August could not make out at all.
Though the men grumbled about the state of the roads and the season,
they were hilarious and well content, for they laughed often, and, when
they swore, did so good-humoredly, and promised their porters fine
presents at New-Year; and August, like a shrewd little boy as he was,
who even in the secluded Innthal had learned that money is the chief
mover of men’s mirth, thought to himself, with a terrible pang,—
“They have sold Hirschvogel for some great sum! They have sold him
already!”
Then his heart grew faint and sick within him, for he knew very well
that he must soon die, shut up without food and water thus; and what
new owner of the great fire-palace would ever permit him to dwell in
it?
“Never mind; I _will_ die,” thought he; “and Hirschvogel will know it.”
Perhaps you think him a very foolish little fellow; but I do not.
It is always good to be loyal and ready to endure to the end.
It is but an hour and a quarter that the train usually takes to pass
from Munich to the Wurm-See or Lake of Starnberg; but this morning the
journey was much slower, because the way was encumbered by snow. When
it did reach Possenhofen and stop, and the Nürnberg stove was lifted
out once more, August could see through the fret-work of the brass
door, as the stove stood upright facing the lake, that this Wurm-See
was a calm and noble piece of water, of great width, with low wooded
banks and distant mountains, a peaceful, serene place, full of rest.
It was now near ten o’clock. The sun had come forth; there was a clear
gray sky hereabouts; the snow was not falling, though it lay white and
smooth everywhere, down to the edge of the water, which before long
would itself be ice.
Before he had time to get more than a glimpse of the green gliding
surface, the stove was again lifted up and placed on a large boat
that was in waiting,—one of those very long and huge boats which the
women in these parts use as laundries, and the men as timber-rafts.
The stove, with much labor and much expenditure of time and care, was
hoisted into this, and August would have grown sick and giddy with the
heaving and falling if his big brothers had not long used him to such
tossing about, so that he was as much at ease head, as feet, downward.
The stove once in it safely with its guardians, the big boat moved
across the lake to Leoni. How a little hamlet on a Bavarian lake got
that Tuscan-sounding name I cannot tell; but Leoni it is. The big boat
was a long time crossing: the lake here is about three miles broad, and
these heavy barges are unwieldy and heavy to move, even though they are
towed and tugged at from the shore.
“If we should be too late!” the two dealers muttered to each other, in
agitation and alarm. “He said eleven o’clock.”
“Who was he?” thought August; “the buyer, of course, of Hirschvogel.”
The slow passage across the Wurm-See was accomplished at length: the
lake was placid; there was a sweet calm in the air and on the water;
there was a great deal of snow in the sky, though the sun was shining
and gave a solemn hush to the atmosphere. Boats and one little steamer
were going up and down; in the clear frosty light the distant mountains
of Zillerthal and the Algau Alps were visible; market-people, cloaked
and furred, went by on the water or on the banks; the deep woods of the
shores were black and gray and brown. Poor August could see nothing of
a scene that would have delighted him; as the stove was now set, he
could only see the old worm eaten wood of the huge barge.
Presently they touched the pier at Leoni.
“Now men, for a stout mile and half! You shall drink your reward at
Christmas-time,” said one of the dealers to his porters, who, stout,
strong men as they were, showed a disposition to grumble at their task.
Encouraged by large promises, they shouldered sullenly the Nürnberg
stove, grumbling again at its preposterous weight, but little dreaming
that they carried within it a small, panting, trembling boy; for August
began to tremble now that he was about to see the future owner of
Hirschvogel.
“If he look a good, kind man,” he thought, “I will beg him to let me
stay with it.”
The porters began their toilsome journey, and moved off from the
village pier. He could see nothing, for the brass door was over
his head, and all that gleamed through it was the clear gray sky.
He had been tilted on to his back, and if he had not been a little
mountaineer, used to hanging head-downwards over crevasses, and,
moreover, seasoned to rough treatment by the hunters and guides of the
hills and the salt-workers in the town, he would have been made ill and
sick by the bruising and shaking and many changes of position to which
he had been subjected.
The way the men took was a mile and a half in length, but the road
was heavy with snow, and the burden they bore was heavier still. The
dealers cheered them on, swore at them and praised them in one breath;
besought them and reiterated their splendid promises, for a clock was
striking eleven, and they had been ordered to reach their destination
at that hour, and, though the air was so cold, the heat-drops rolled
off their foreheads as they walked, they were so frightened at being
late. But the porters would not budge a foot quicker than they chose,
and as they were not poor four-footed carriers their employers dared
not thrash them, though most willingly would they have done so.
The road seemed terribly long to the anxious tradesmen, to the plodding
porters, to the poor little man inside the stove, as he kept sinking
and rising, sinking and rising, with each of their steps.
Where they were going he had no idea, only after a very long time he
lost the sense of the fresh icy wind blowing on his face through the
brass-work above, and felt by their movements beneath him that they
were mounting steps or stairs. Then he heard a great many different
voices, but he could not understand what was being said. He felt that
his bearers paused some time, then moved on and on again. Their feet
went so softly he thought they must be moving on carpet, and as he
felt a warm air come to him he concluded that he was in some heated
chambers, for he was a clever little fellow, and could put two and two
together, though he was so hungry and so thirsty and his empty stomach
felt so strangely. They must have gone, he thought, through some very
great number of rooms, for they walked so long on and on, on and on. At
last the stove was set down again, and, happily for him, set so that
his feet were downward.
What he fancied was that he was in some museum, like that which he had
seen in the city of Innspruck.
The voices he heard were very hushed, and the steps seemed to go away,
far away, leaving him alone with Hirschvogel. He dared not look out,
but he peeped through the brass-work, and all he could see was a big
carved lion’s head in ivory, with a gold crown atop. It belonged to a
velvet fauteuil, but he could not see the chair, only the ivory lion.
There was a delicious fragrance in the air,—a fragrance as of flowers.
“Only how can it be flowers?” thought August. “It is November!”
From afar off, as it seemed, there came a dreamy, exquisite music, as
sweet as the spinnet’s had been, but so much fuller, so much richer,
seeming as though a chorus of angels were singing all together. August
ceased to think of the museum: he thought of heaven. “Are we gone to
the Master?” he thought, remembering the words of Hirschvogel.
All was so still around him; there was no sound anywhere except the
sound of the far-off choral music.
He did not know it, but he was in the royal castle of Berg, and the
music he heard was the music of Wagner, who was playing in a distant
room some of the motives of “Parsival.”
Presently he heard a fresh step near him, and he heard a low voice
say, close behind him, “So!” An exclamation no doubt, he thought, of
admiration and wonder at the beauty of Hirschvogel.
Then the same voice said, after a long pause, during which no doubt,
as August thought, this new-comer was examining all the details of the
wondrous fire-tower, “It was well bought; it is exceedingly beautiful!
It is most undoubtedly the work of Augustin Hirschvogel.”
Then the hand of the speaker turned the round handle of the brass door,
and the fainting soul of the poor little prisoner within grew sick with
fear.
The handle turned, the door was slowly drawn open, some one bent down
and looked in, and the same voice that he had heard in praise of its
beauty called aloud, in surprise, “What is this in it? A live child!”
Then August, terrified beyond all self-control, and dominated by one
master-passion, sprang out of the body of the stove and fell at the
feet of the speaker.
“Oh, let me stay! Pray, meinherr, let me stay!” he sobbed. “I have come
all the way with Hirschvogel!”