GUSTAVUS FALLS IN LOVE.
Now, it happened that this same Gustavus, after almost all the sap
of his body had been eliminated by fighting, and there seemed to
be scarcely enough left to lubricate the muscles that stretched
from promontory to point of his big bones, like tough hausers,
took it into his head to wish for a wife. We doubt if all the
physiologists or psychologists that ever hunted for traces of the
spirit among the white guts of the head could tell how such an
idea came into such an extraordinary place; and if his heart was
as dry as the voluntary muscles of his body, nothing short of a
dislocation of Cupid’s right arm could ever have sent into such a
leathery organ the tickling shaft. True, however, it is as death,
that Gustavus did actually fall in love, and the symptoms were just
as extraordinary as the passion itself; for there never was heard
in any man’s lungs before, such a rattle of sighs; and as for the
length of his jaws, the never a rough wood-cut of John Bunyan’s
hero in the Slough of Despond could come within many degrees of
their lugubrious longitude. It is even true that the power of the
tender passion reached to his stomach—a place of all others that
might _a priori_ have been considered perfectly independent of all
moral impulses whatsomever. Nothing before, except hunger itself,
had ever affected that organ; and, indeed, ensconced behind and
between, and beneath such ribs, nothing short of death itself might
have been supposed capable of reaching it, or subduing its tough
hide, its viscous linings, and its gastric juice, stronger than the
best gin that ever was made at Schiedam.
Now the _petit bel chose_ that had thus produced such an effect
upon the moral and physical economy of this big son of Mars, was
no other than a mere toy of a thing—a little milliner called
Julia Briggs—scarcely so big, when divested of the padding and
stuffing with which her art enabled her to supply her deficiency of
natural size, as one of his huge limbs. But this may be no manner
of marvel to those who are versant in the mysteries of love, who,
being himself a small creature, seems to delight in throwing into
the smallest of his victims the greatest portion of his power.
It is difficult to see philosophically any final cause in the
curious fact in nature; but surely, the never a man, who has any
observation in him, will deny, that pigmy beauties and colossal
swains (and _vice versa_) have a singular power of producing in
each other the tender passion. It may be owing to nature’s love
of the _juste milieu_, that thus induces her to take this mode
of keeping up a reasonable _mean size_ among human creatures,
or it may be any one of a thousand other speculations; but what
care we for such theories, when we have the fact to state as an
undoubted truth, that Gustavus fell in love with Julia Briggs, as
standing like a mighty Anak, in the Canongate of Edinburgh, he saw
the little creature skipping along, twisting her little limbs as
if she would have dislocated her joints in her efforts to appear
graceful, in the eyes of mankind generally, and in those of the
gigantic Gustavus, whom she had often seen looking after her, in
particular! Successful beyond any prior example of her wriggling
evolution of her graces, the little baggage—as quick in her eye
as ever were Pip, Trip, or Skip, the maids of honour (according
to Drayton) of Queen Mab—saw at once that she had hit the proper
twirl and twinkle, at last, that would subdue the involuntary
muscle that had so long been useless beneath the ribs of the great
Gustavus. The moment the effect was produced, the sinews of his
body began to move, and away he stalked after her, with strides as
long as the whole height _a capite ad calcem_ of the quarry upon
which he intended to pounce. It spoke well of the power of “her
harness of gossamer,” that it stood the tug of so huge a victim;
and, as she turned her twinkling eye to observe the triumph of her
power, she did not fail to rivet the chains by some higher displays
of graceful contortion, that made his eyeballs roll in the large
sockets, as if he had seen a hobgoblin, in place of Julia Briggs,
the _petite marchande de modes_.
This was just as good a beginning as ever a sly man-catcher
essayed in the world of love, since the days of Helen; and the
arch kidnapper knew very well how to follow up her wile; for,
after displaying, by a proper caper, as much of her ancle as
would do the business, she skipped away, as nimbly as Nymphidia
in the service of Oberon’s queen, and was not again seen till she
opened the window of her mother’s house, and displayed herself,
capless and coifless, to her staring admirer. The capture was now
completed. Jove himself was never more completely entoiled by the
chains of the little baggage Iynge; and, during the whole of that
day, Gustavus strode along the pavement, opposite the window of
his charmer, as if he had been on duty before a besieged city. He
had just as little power to walk away as he had to circumscribe
his step to the ordinary measure of God’s creatures; every stride
occupying, at least, four feet of pavement, and being executed
so regularly and methodically, that one step did not differ from
another by a single inch. But it is a mere bagatelle to describe
these pendulous movements, produced, for the first time, by the
spirit of love; while, to execute with truth a faithful picture
of the painful contortions of a countenance originally formed a
wood-cut of extraordinary dimensions, and now under the soft,
melting influence of the tenderest of passions, would require a
goose-quill, owning no less an influence than the spirit of an
immortal genius. As the loves of some of the inferior animals are
expressed by sounds and signs that seem to indicate nothing but
fierce war, so might the demonstrations of this extraordinary
affair of the heart, exhibited through the grotesque motions of
muscles that had been as rigid as dried leather for twenty years,
be looked upon as anything rather than signs of the languishing
passion which, as Augustin says, will make a musician out of
an ass. Yet, doubtless, there was, both in his goggle-eyes and
lengthened face, an expression that was intended for softness and
languishment; and it is not impossible, that, if one had been
apprized _a priori_ of the intention, he might have discovered
in the ludicrous gesticulations some resemblance to at least a
burlesque of what is only a very ridiculous exhibition at the very
best.
Love that is long a-coming, comes at last with a terrible
onset—overturning all sense and prudence, kicking up the heels
of all forms of etiquette, and removing every impediment to its
progress. It is but a very small matter to say, that Gustavus could
not sleep under the hug or embrace of the new customer that had
taken such a violent hold of his heart, though we do not deem it an
equally insignificant announcement, that a man who could swallow
a couple of pounds of flesh at a down-sitting, should lose his
gustative and digestive powers to such an extent that the knocking
of his heart sounded audibly through his empty stomach, as if it
had been a whispering gallery. But love is a leveller in more
senses than the vulgar one; and the only circumstance about the
matter of this particular case at all remarkable, was, that such
effects, upon a body iron-bound as it was, and of such gigantic
proportions, should have been produced by an agent of such truly
insignificant dimensions. A resolute disciplinarian, however, at
all points, without a single qualm of fear or doubt, and accustomed
to attack a city or a haunch of beef with equal _sang froid_, the
love-smitten victim, on the third day after his seizure, drew up
his huge limbs to their full extent, till he seemed like the
Colossus of Rhodes, and settled the whole affair by one resolute
gnash of his under maxillary bone. Two strides took him to the
door, one or two more brought him down stairs to the street, and
the never a man that stalked off ground that was to be his own,
went along with such strides as he used in making his way to the
house of Julia Briggs. With one solitary idea in his head, and one
word on his tongue—though there was room for a thousand—he went
direct up to the door, knocked, like one of Froissard’s warriors
at the barricades, was admitted, turned off the momentous question
of marriage by one heavy lurch of his jaw, and settled a matter
that danglers take years about in the space of time that a thirsty
Bacchanalian would occupy in taking a long pull of jolly good ale.