THE APPARITION--HOMECOMING OF THE STORMS IN AUGUST, OR THE LAST
QUARREL--THE RAIMENT OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL.
One night, at about eleven o'clock, a tremendous blow was heard to
strike the roof-tree, as if two or three hundredweights of Alps had
come down upon it. Lenette went upstairs with Sophia to see whether it
was the devil, or only a cat. They came back with wintry faces, the
colour of flour, and as long as one's arm; and Sophia cried out, "Oh!
it's the Poor's Advocate (may the Lord have a care of him!) he's lying
up yonder on the camp-bed, like a corpse." The _live_ Poor's Advocate,
to whom this tale was being told, was sitting in his room. He said it
could not be true, or _he_ would have heard the noise as well as the
others. From this deafness of his, all the women at once inferred what
the occurrence really portended--to wit, his death. The cobbler Fecht
(who, by right of royal succession, was night-watchman regnant that
night), glad of an opportunity of showing the pluck that was in
him, armed himself with the watchman's spear-staff (his entire
artillery-park), but, when nobody was looking, stuck a black leather
hymn-book in his pocket--by way of a species of saintly host--in case
it _should_ turn out that it _was_ the devil that was upstairs. On his
way up he repeated a good many fragments of the Evening Service, which
was more than could, perhaps, have been required of him on that evening
when, as Archon of the Watch, his calling of the hours was, in fact, a
species of _expanded_ Evening Prayer, distributed in small modicums
about the streets. He was marching bravely up to the camp-bed, when,
alas! _he too_ saw the white powdery face before him, and, behind
the bed, a hell-hound with eyes of fire, watching the corpse in a
grim and ferocious fashion. He stood still instantaneously, as if
petrified--like a watchman carved out of alabaster, _hard boiled_ (so
to speak), in a perspiration of terror, with his weapon held out before
him. He foresaw, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the moment he
turned his back to go flying down the stairs, _the thing_ would clasp
its arms about him from behind, saddle him, and ride him down. By the
greatest good luck, a voice from downstairs here fell into his heart
like a cordial or courage-water, and he heaved up his boar-spear with
the view of striking _the thing_ dead, or, at all events, gauging the
cubic contents of it. But when, at this juncture, the snowy-looking
thing began to rise slowly up, as if growing--his head began to feel as
if he had on a bonnet of pitch, and somebody were screwing this cap,
and the hair inside it, tighter and tighter every moment; and he
could not keep hold of his eel-spear because the top of it felt as
heavy as if his biggest journeyman was hanging to it. So he let his
sticking-iron go, and flew bravely from the topmost, three-ledger-lined
octave of the stair, like a flash of lightning, down to the double-bass
key or step.
When he got down, he swore, in presence of the master of the house and
all the lodgers assembled, that he was going to do his watchman's duty
without his halberd, for the ghost had got hold of that; and in fact,
he quivered like an aspen-leaf and his blood ran cold in his veins,
every time his eye so much as rested for a moment on the Advocate's
face. Firmian was the only one of the company who had the courage to go
upstairs for the weapon. When he got upstairs he found what he had
expected to find, namely, his friend Leibgeber, who had whitened
himself with the powder out of an old wig by way of gradually paving
the way and preparing people's minds for Siebenkæs's artificial death.
They quietly embraced, and Henry said he would come upstairs, in an
orthodox fashion, next day.
When Firmian returned to his room, he said there was nothing upstairs
but an old wig; here was the swift-footed spearman's spear, and he
counted here before him two timid hares of the female sex and one of
the male. But the entire conventicle knew as well as possible what all
this _meant_. Nobody, with as many brains as a turnip in his head,
would give a halfpenny for Siebenkæs' life; and these ghost-seers
thanked Heaven most devoutly that they _were_ thus frightened to death,
since it was a proof that their own lives were in no immediate danger.
Lenette could not bring herself to sit up in bed all night, for fear
she should see her husband's likeness.
When morning came, Henry mounted the stair (with his dog), in dusty
boots. Siebenkæs felt as though his hat and his pockets must be full of
flowers from the Bayreuth Eden; he was like a garden statue from the
lost garden. To Lenette, just for this very reason, this palm-tree from
Firmian's East India possessions at Bayreuth (we shall say nothing of
Saufinder), was nothing but a prickly holly-bush, and never less than
now could she take any pleasure in such a gooseberry-bush, such a
thistle-head--beautiful as if fresh from Hamilton's pencil.[83] I must
admit, however (and I say it right out, without going about the bush),
that his affection for Firmian made his mode of treating Lenette (who
was in the wrong and in the right in about equal proportions) a little
too reserved and cool. We never hate a woman so heartily as when she is
torturing somebody who is very dear to us; just as, on the other hand,
a woman is so grim to nobody as to the tormentor of her pet female
friend.
The scene which I have now got to describe in a minute or two makes me
feel, in the keenest degree, sensible of the depth of the chasm which
lies between the novel-writer (who can skip annoying matters, and sugar
up anything he wishes for himself, his hero, or his readers) and the
mere biographer, or writer of actual history, like myself, who has to
dish up everything in a strictly historical form, without asking
whether it has got to be sugared or salted. If I formerly, then,
excised and omitted the scene in question altogether, I was perhaps to
blame: but there was nothing surprising in my doing so, seeing that in
these days I preferred delighting my readers to instructing them, and
thought more about pretty colouring than truthful drawing.
Leibgeber (and all belonging to him) had for some time been wholly
unendurable in Lenette's eyes, chiefly for this reason (amongst others)
that he, a man without anything in the shape of an official title or
appointment of any sort, should be on such very familiar and intimate
terms with her husband--a man who had held the post of "Poor's
Advocate" of Kuhschnappel for a considerable time. Also that, like her
said husband (by him misled and perverted), he went about without a
pigtail, so that people pointed at the pair of them, and cried, "Ey!
look at that nice couple!" or "_Par nobile fratrum_." These sayings,
and worse besides, Lenette could draw from the most authentic of all
sources of history. Of course, it is true that, _now-a-days_, it
requires about as much courage to _put on_ a tail as it then did to
_take it off_. A canon of a cathedral does not, now-a-days (as he did
in bygone times), find it incumbent on him to make himself a pigtail,
and pleasant society by help of it; consequently he has not got to
_cast_ it twice a year (as peacocks do their tails) that he may legally
earn his salary of two thousand florins by appearing in the choir at
vespers with close-cropped hair; the latter he wears at the card-table
now, us well as in the pulpit. In the few countries where the pigtail
still obtains, it is more in the nature of a duty-pendulum and
state-perpendicular than anything else; and long hair (which formed
part of the royal insignia of the Frank kings) is a badge of
servitude in the case of soldiers, so long as it is worn tied up with a
pigtail-ribbon, and not flying unbound and loose. The Frieslanders were
long in the habit of taking hold of the pigtail when swearing an
oath--calling this "the Bœdel Oath;" and to this day in many
countries the military or standard oath presupposes the existence of a
queue. And as among the ancient Germans a pigtail carried on a pole
represented a parish, of course a company or regiment (of which each
soldier has his own tail at the back of his head) must be considered to
represent a company-queue of patriotic union and of German nationality.
Lenette now made little secret of it to her husband (and Stiefel stood
by her in the background), that she was very little pleased, on the
whole, with Leibgeber and his on-goings. "My dear poor father" (she
said, in Leibgeber's presence), "was copyist to the Council, but he was
always just like other people in his dress, and everything else."
"Well, dear!" Siebenkæs answered, "as he was a copyist, of course he
had always to _be_ copying, with pens, or coats, as the case might be.
But _my_ father loaded guns for princes, and did not trouble his head
about what else might happen or not happen." Ere this, when opportunity
had offered, she had held up and measured the copying clerk as against
the gun-charger, distantly suggesting, as it were, that Siebenkæs had
not had anything like so great and distinguished a father as she had,
and, as a consequence, had not received the sort of superior education
which teaches people manners, and how they ought to behave. This
preposterous and ludicrous looking down upon his genealogical tree so
annoyed him always that he often laughed at himself. At the same time,
the little by-blow at Leibgeber did not surprise him so much as her
remarkable _bodily_ repugnance and antipathy to him. Nothing would
induce her to shake hands with him: "And I'm sure," she said, "if he
were ever to _kiss_ me, it would be my death." With all his laborious
urgency and questions as to the reason of this, he could get no answer
out of her but that she "would tell him after Leibgeber was gone."
Unfortunately, by that time _he_ would be gone himself, too, and in his
coffin, _i. e_. on the road to Vaduz.
And even this extraordinary obstinacy (as of an unyielding
bonnet-block) he could endure at a time when one of his eyes warmed
itself at his friend, while the other cooled itself at his grave.
At last something was superadded; and as I am sure that nobody can
narrate it more faithfully than I, I beg that I may be believed. It was
in the evening, before Leibgeber went back to his hotel (the Lizard, if
I remember), and the deep black, half-orb of a thunder-cloud had
gathered silently in the West, shrouding the sun, and mounting higher,
and hanging more and more threateningly over the expectant world.
The two friends were talking of what a glorious thing a thunderstorm
was, and of the espousals of heaven and earth--the highest with the
lowest--of the "descent of heaven to earth" (as Leibgeber put it); and
Siebenkæs remarked how, properly speaking, it was only one's "Fantasy"
which pictured the storm, and "Fantasy" only which brought about the
union of the highest and the lowest. I wish he had followed the advice
of Campe and Kolbe, and used the home-grown word "Fancy" (or
"Imagination"), instead of the foreign word "Fantasy;" for that
word-purist Lenette pricked up her ears as soon as ever it passed his
lips. She who had nothing in her breast but jealousy, and nothing in
her head but the "Fantaisie" (at Bayreuth), put down to the score of
the latter every word that the two men were saying in eulogy of
"Fantasy" in man; for instance, how _it_ (namely, "the Markgrave's
Fantaisie," thought Lenette) blessed us through the beauty of its
sublime creations--how, but for the enjoyment of its lovelinesses, a
Kuhschnappel could not be borne with for a moment (of course, because
he thinks of that Nathalie of his, thought she); how it clothes and
adorns the bare spots of life with its beautiful flowers "two or three
silk forget-me-nots," said Lenette to herself; and how it (the Bayreuth
Fantaisie) gilds, not only the pills of life, but also the nuts, nay,
the Paris apples of beauty themselves.
Heavens! what double meanings in every corner, and on every side! For
how triumphantly Siebenkæs could have refuted the error of confounding
Fantasy with Fantaisie, if he had merely shown how little of the poetic
Fantasy there was in the Fantaisie at Bayreuth, and how (in the latter)
French "taste" had trimmed, behung, and begarlanded the lovely,
romantic hills and valleys of Nature's inventing with rhetoric edifices
of flowers, periods, and antithesis; and that what Leibgeber said about
Fantasy's gilding the Paris apples of life, applied in quite another
sense to the Bayreuth Fantaisie, because there the French Christmas
silver-foil would have to be scraped off from Nature's apples before
they could be bitten.
Scarce was Leibgeber gone out from the house, and off into the storm
(which, according to his custom, he enjoyed in the open air), when
_Lenette's_ storm broke, ere the atmospherical one did. "There, you
see, I heard with my very own ears," she said, "how that Unbeliever and
Kill-joy there goes about coupling and marrying you in the Fantaisie at
Bayreuth; and _this_ is the fellow an honest woman is expected to
shake hands with, or touch with the tip of one of her fingers." She let
a few more peals of thunder roll--but it is my duty to the poor woman
(turned into a fermenting vat by the addition to her of such a quantity
of mash) not to give too accurate a record of all her frothings.
Meantime, all the acid matter in her husband began to effervesce in its
turn. To find fault with his friend to his face, no matter _what_
misunderstanding this might arise from (and he did not trouble himself
to ask what the misunderstanding was, inasmuch as _none_ could be any
excuse)--was, in his eyes, a sin against the Holy Ghost of his
friendship. Accordingly, he thundered most roundly in reply. It is some
excuse for the husband, and for the wife, too, for that matter, that
the storm in the air fanned the fuel in his head into a brighter blaze,
so that he strode up and down the room like a man demented, and
instantly, and on the spot, blew to the four winds of heaven his
resolve not to be put out with anything Lenette might do till after he
was dead; for he would not, and could not, suffer that "his last friend
in life and death should be wrongfully accused by the inheritress of
his name, either in his sayings or in his doings." It will give some
idea of the violence of his volcanic eruptions (all of which, for his
sake, I mean to pass by in silence), if I say that, vieing in loudness
of thundering with the sky itself, he shouted--
"Such a man as _he_!" and with the words, "_you_ are a female
head, too, curse you!" administered a ringing box on the ear to a
bonnet-block, which had a grand hat, with feathers upon it. As this
head was Lenette's favourite Sultana of all the blocks--one which she
often fondled--nothing was to be _expected_ but an outbreak as violent
as if he had given the box to her very self, just as Siebenkæs stormed
at the insult to _his_ friend. Nothing came, however, but a gentle
shower of bitter tears. "Oh! good heavens! don't you hear what a
terrible storm?" was all she said. "Thunder here, thunder there!" cried
Siebenkæs (who, once set rolling down from the lofty peak where he had
been reposing, went on, according to both the moral and the physical
laws of falling bodies, increasing in velocity and momentum, until he
reached the bottom). "I wish the lightning would shatter all the
rag-tag and bob-tail in Kuhschnappel that dare to say a syllable
against my Henry."
As the storm grew fiercer she spoke more and more gently, saying, "Ah!
gracious, what a peal! Oh, please repent! Suppose it were to strike you
in your sin?" "My Henry is out in it," he said. "Oh that the lightning
would strike us both dead, him and me, with the same flash! I should be
spared all this miserable business of dying, and we should always be
together then."
His wife had never seen him so angry, or so contemptuous of life and
religion, and consequently, could only expect the lightning to fall on
the Merbitzer's house, and strike both him and her dead, by way of an
"example."
And at this moment, a flash of such brilliance illumined the heavens,
and such a shattering peal of thunder followed close upon it, that,
stretching out her hand to him, she said, "I will do anything and
everything you wish me to do; only, for Heaven's sake, be a God-fearing
man again! I will even give Leibgeber my hand; yes, and a kiss too, if
I must--no matter whether he has washed his face after the dog's
licking it, or not--and I shall neither listen, nor mind, when you say
what a delightful, beautiful place the silvery, flowery Bayreuth
Fantaisie is."
Heavens! how this lightning-flash illumined the depths of two of
Lenette's labyrinths for him, letting him see her innocent confounding
of Fantasy and Fantaisie (already noticed), and _his own_ confounding
of her strong, personal, idiosyncratic repugnance to (what she
considered) uncleanness, with real dislike. The latter was on this
wise. Inasmuch as her feminine proclivity for excessive cleanness and
beautifying and polishing were more akin to the feline race than to the
canine (which cares little about either, or about the feline race, for
that matter), Leibgeber's hand, after Saufinder's tongue had touched
it, was to her as a thumbscrew, and Esau's hand all Chiragra. Her sense
of cleanliness shrunk from touching it; and as for Henry's lips! though
ten days had elapsed since the dog had jumped up to them with his, they
would have been considered the most fearful bugbears, and scarecrows,
which abhorrence could set up for her. Even time itself was no lipsalve
in her eyes.[84]
This time, however, the discovery of the error did not bring about
peace (as it used to do in former times), but only a renewal of the
decree of separation. Tears came to his eyes, indeed, and he gave her
his hand, saying, "Forgive me! It is the last time! As the proverb
says, 'The storms come home in August.'" But he could neither offer nor
receive a kiss of reconciliation. This, his latest falling away from
his warm resolves to be patient, irrevocably proclaimed _how wide_
their inner separation had become. What is the use of _seeing_ one's
errors, when the _causes_ of them are still in force? What is the good
of clipping a ripple or two away from the ocean, when there are still
clouds and billows? The crime against the bonnet-block was what rankled
most in his breast; it became a Gorgon's head to him, continually
threatening and avenging.
He sought his friend with a renewal of affection, for he had suffered
for him; and with new eagerness, that he might arrange the place for
his death with him.
"Of what dangerous malady do you think you would prefer to give up the
ghost," said Henry, commencing the medical consultation. "Would
inflammation of the lungs be to your taste? or inflammation of the
bowels, or of the uvula; or would phrenitis be more in your line, or
bronchitis; or would you prefer a quinsy, a colic, the devil and his
grandmother? We have got all the requisite _miasmata_ and _materia
epidemica_ ready to our hands; and when we throw in the month of
August--harvest-month of reapers and doctors--by way of poison-powder,
you certainly never can get over it all." Firmian answered: "You are a
sort of master-beggar with all kinds of ailments for sale;[85]
blindness, palsy, and the rest. But for my part, I am for apoplexy,
that _volti subito_, that extra post of death. I have had more than my
share of legal prolixities, verbosities, and delays of _all_ sorts."
"Well," said Leibgeber, "apoplexy probably _is_ the _summarissimum_ of
death. At the same time, we must be guided by the best pathological
works, and make up our minds for _three_ attacks of it. We can't go by
Nature here, we must be guided by the laws of medicine; and by them,
death has to forward a set of _three_ bills of exchange before one of
them is accepted and honoured in the next world. He knocks three times
with his auctioneer's hammer. I know too well, the doctors are not the
men to listen to reason on this point; you will have to make up your
mind to the three apoplectic strokes." "But what the deuce!" said
Siebenkæs, with comic warmth, "If apoplexy gives me _two_ pretty
powerful strokes, what more can a doctor desire? The only thing is, I
can't be attacked for the next three or four days, because I must wait
for a cheaper coffin-builder." The right of coffin-building (it should
perhaps be explained) goes its round in a migratory manner among the
carpenters, and one has got to pay these shipwrights of our last ark
whatever they demand, because the property we leave behind us at death
has to be given over as plunder by our executors and administrators, to
the undertaker, (that excise officer of death) like the palace of a
dead doge or pope.
"There may be another advantage in this short reprieve, too," said
Leibgeber. "I have an old collection of family sermons here, which I
bought for somewhere about half the amount of a police-court fine. I do
not know anywhere else but in this work where such impressive sermons
are delivered--it is more especially in the _binding_ that they are
preached. The binding is wood, you perceive, and there is a live
preacher in there, preaching as finely as any preacher that can be
found in a pulpit." This preacher in the wooden boards of the old book
in question, was the beetle which goes by the name of the death-watch,
wood-borer, or _Ptinus pertinax_, because when he is touched he keeps
up the appearance of a sham death, torture him as you will--and because
the little blows he strikes, which are nothing but knocks at his
sweetheart's door, are supposed to be Death's knocks at ours. For which
reason any piece of furniture in which he was wont to knock used to be
thought a valuable article of commerce, or heirloom.
Leibgeber added that, as there was nothing he so detested as a man who
tried to outwit God and the Devil (from fear of death) by a sudden
repentance, he was fond of hiding this sermon-book amongst the
furniture of a hell-fearing individual of this description, so as to
give him a good sound terrifying with the beetle's funeral sermons
(although the insect, for his part, was, in fact, thinking solely of
mundane matters during his preaching--like many other preachers). "So,
could I not put the sermon-book, with its funeral preacher, in amongst
_your_ books, that your wife might hear him, and think of death--of
yours, that is to say--and so get more used to the idea of it?"
"No, no," said Firmian, "she shall not suffer so much for me before her
time. She has suffered quite enough already."
"Just as you please," said Henry; "but my beetle and you would have
gone together capitally. You are going to simulate death, just as the
_Ptinus pertinax_ does."
For the rest, he was delighted that everything had worked together so
well, and that it was just a year since he had stamped upon Blaise's
glass periwig, and insulted, or blackguarded, him. Because (as we
have seen) libels of this sort are not actionable after the lapse of a
year, except libels by a _critic_--which (like the Rector in Ragusa)
only reign for a month--that is to say, the time during which the
journal in which they appear circulates in the reading society. And a
book--which may be said to hold the rank of dictator in the realm of
letters--cannot reign, with all its influence, more than a Roman
dictator, namely, six months--that is to say, from its birth-fair to
its death-fair--and, like Grub Street scribblers, it dies either in
spring or in autumn.
They went back into a new-dressed, freshly-arranged room. Lenette did
what she could to paint the cracks of her housekeeping over with
flowers (like the flaws in porcelain), and always opened pieces of
music in which that particular string (of an article of furniture),
which chanced to be broken, did not require to be touched. Firmian, on
this occasion, sacrificed a greater number of the good and entertaining
ideas (which struck him) than usual to her efforts to place Spanish
screens between the company and the steppes and fallow-fields of her
poverty; and more than Henry did even then. All women--even those
without brains--are the sharpest and most delicately-observant of
augurs and _clairvoyante_ prophetesses concerning matters which closely
concern themselves. Lenette was an instance. Stiefel was there in the
evening--a good deal of argument was going on, and Stiefel openly
declared that he (with Salvian and other able theologians) was of
opinion that the children of Israel (whose garments never wore into the
minutest hole during all the forty years they passed in the wilderness)
always continued of exactly the same _size_ (so as always to fit their
clothes exactly) with the exception of children, in whose cases the
clothes, which had been cut to fit them out of the wardrobes of the
dead, grew with their bodies in length and breadth. "In this way," he
added, "all the difficulties of the great miracle are got over easily,
by means of lesser accessory-miracles."
Leibgeber answered (with sparkling eyes), "I knew _that_ while I was
yet in my mother's womb. There was not a hole in all the hosts of
Israel, except those which they brought with them out of Egypt--and
_these_ never got any bigger. Even suppose anybody made a hole in his
cheek, or in his coat, when he was mourning--these holes stitched
themselves together in a trice, of their own accord. What a shameful
and deplorable thing it is, though, that the host of Israel should have
been the first, and the last, army whose uniform was a sort of
delightful over-body, which grew with the soul it enveloped--and where
the frock-coat developed into an electoral mantle, and from a
_Microvestis_ to a _Macrovestis_! I see that eating was cloth
manufacturing (in the wilderness), manna was English wool, and the
stomach the loom. An Israelite who fed himself up to the proper pitch
was, by so doing, yielding the produce of the land, and of the
wilderness. If I had been in the recruiting-service in those days, I
should simply have hung the recruit's jackets on to the recruit's
measure. But how go matters in _our_ wilderness here--which leads to
Egypt, not to the promised land? In _our_ regiments, the _privates_
grow every year, but the coats do not. Nay, the uniforms are made for
dry seasons only, and for lean men--in wet years the clothes contract
like hygrometers, and perspiration steals more cloth than the tailor
does, or even the contractor. A commanding officer who should expect
his uniforms to stretch--who should reckon upon a _Periphrasis_ of
them--going by the example, not only of the Israelites, but likewise of
the clothes-moths, and the snails (who do not expand to suit their
shells, but whose shells expand to suit _them_)--this commanding
officer, I say, would go out of his mind--for his men would be fighting
in the condition of the athletes of old--and the men themselves would
be in a nice frame of mind on the subject."
This innocuous sermon (wholly addressed to the account of Stiefel's
piece of exegetic absurdity) Lenette supposed was directed against her
wardrobe. She was like the Germans in general, who search after some
_special_ satiric kernel hidden in every rocket and firework serpent of
humour. Wherefore Siebenkæs begged him to pardon this poor wife of his
(over whose heart so many a sharp sorrow besides was strewn) the
inevitable and invincible ignorance of her exegesis--or rather, to
spare her the knowledge of it altogether.
At length a Kuhschnappel bath-keeper departed this life, and fell under
the plane of the costly carpenter. "I have not a minute to waste over
my apoplexy now," said Firmian, in Latin; "who is to be my warrant that
nobody shall die before I do, and so the cheap carpenter slip through
my fingers?" So it was arranged that he should be taken ill the
following evening.