In another shop of our establishment several men had been wounded, more
or less dangerously, by the slipping of a belt. In our shop we had
heard the news of the accident just before dinner, and the men were
standing about the yard inquiring the particulars and talking it over.
I had joined one of the groups, and was listening attentively, when I
saw a little man pushing through the crowd, with his hat in his hand,
and whose great bald skull emerging here and there between these dark
figures resembled the full moon sailing through black clouds. This
skull could only belong to one man. I hastened in pursuit, and overtook
it by the gate at the moment when it was covered with a felt hat, which
had not improved in appearance since I last saw it. I followed the felt
hat a few steps in the street, and then with a stride placed myself
beside its wearer.
"Permit me, doctor," I said.
Doctor Snellius brought his round spectacles to bear on me, and stared
at me with a look of the profoundest astonishment.
"It is no hallucination, doctor," I said; "this is really myself."
"George, mammoth, man, how come you here, and in this questionable
shape?" cried the doctor, holding out both his hands.
"Hush, doctor," I said, "I am here incognito, and must deny myself the
pleasure of embracing you."
"Don't tell me you have run away, and that too after I expressly
forbade you," said the doctor, in a low, anxious tone.
I set his mind at rest on this point.
"Heaven be thanked!" he said; "not forgetting also to thank me, or
rather her. How did you find her?"
"I have not yet seen her, doctor."
"And you have been here two weeks? Shameful! incredible! Where is my
lantern, that I may dash it to pieces, for now I give up forever the
hope of finding a man. Go! I will never see you again."
"When shall I come to see you, doctor?"
"Whenever you will, or can: shall we say this evening? eh? A glass of
grog in the old fashion, half-and-half, eh?"
And over a glass of grog, half-and-half in the old fashion. Doctor
Snellius and I faced each other that very evening, in his more roomy
lodging, and talked of by-gone times, of what we had gone through
together, as two old friends talk who meet for the first time after
long separation.
The doctor gave me a drastic description of his great scene with Major
D., and how Herr von Krossow had come in, and how he had said that it
was true that three made a college, but for the whole world he would
not make a college with those two, and that he begged to take leave of
them at once and forever. I answered, laughing, that I now could
understand the vindictiveness with which I was persecuted by Herr von
Krossow, whom I had never offended.
"You are mistaken, my dear fellow," said the doctor. "The reptile had
other and better reasons for turning his fangs upon you. I can tell you
now that there is no danger of your wringing the miscreant's neck. So
now listen; but mix yourself a glass first--you will not get it down
without a good swig. This it was: he had once before paid his court to
her--to Paula von Zehren; and as he received one mitten, he thought he
might venture to apply for the other. For this purpose he selected as
the fittest time those days of grief and distraction immediately after
her father's death, nor did he forget to remind her that the new
superintendent was his good friend, and the president his cousin, and
that through these two he held the fortunes of Paula and her family, so
to speak, in his hands; for her mother's claim to a pension was, as she
knew herself, open to dispute; but the thing could be managed; and
although he had no property of his own, he had good connections, and by
no means bad prospects, especially under the new king, who was in truth
an anointed of the Lord. What do you think of that?" crowed Doctor
Snellius, springing up and performing a grotesque dance through the
room.
The doctor's statement filled me with astonishment and indignation. I
had had no idea that the sanctimonious deacon had dared to raise his
hypocritical eyes to Paula; and this suggested the thought that I might
probably have been equally dim of sight in another quarter. I sank into
a gloomy silence; but the doctor must have read my thoughts in my face
through his great round spectacles.
"You are thinking that it cost her no great effort to dismiss the
priest when her heart was already in the possession of the knight? I
know we often spoke of it and made each other uneasy, but it was all
nonsense, I assure you, all nonsense. Paula no more thinks of marrying
the young Adonis than an old satyr like me."
The doctor gave me a side-glance at these words, and smiled
sardonically as I involuntarily murmured a heart-felt "Thank heaven!"
"Don't rejoice too soon, though," he went on, and his smile grew ever
more diabolic; "we must not praise the day before the evening, and you
know my doctrine, that with men anything is possible. Arthur is really
a most fascinating youth, and now he has worked himself into the
diplomatic career, he may well die our Minister to London. It is the
same trade, and that they understand--ah! don't they understand it?
especially the old man, who really is a genius in the noble art. From
his tailor, whom he cajoles until the man gives him credit again, up to
the king, whom he without hesitation petitions for a subsidy that will
enable him to pay his debts and push his Arthur in his new career, no
man is safe from him--no man. I warn you button up your pockets when
you meet the gentleman on the street."
"He lives here, then?"
"Of course, he lives here. The soil here is not so soon exhausted, and
a great man like the Herr Steuerrath needs a wide field everywhere. Oh
these brows, these brows of brass!"
"Why do we talk so much of such a crew?" I asked. "Rather tell me
something about _her_. How does she live? How does she get on with her
painting? Has she made great progress? And has she found sale for her
pictures?"
"Made progress? Find sale?" cried the doctor. "Pretty questions,
indeed! I tell you she is in a fair way to make her fortune. They
fairly fight over her pictures."
"Doctor," I said, "I do not think this is a proper subject for
jesting."
The doctor, who had spoken in his shrillest tones, tuned down his voice
a couple of octaves by an energetic "ahem!" and said:
"You are right; but it is no jest--merely a lie. As I see, however,
that I have not made any progress in the art of lying, it is probably
best for me to tell you, or rather show you, the truth. Come with me."
He lighted two candles that stood under the looking-glass, and led me
into an adjoining room, which he had first to unlock.
"I have put them here," he said, pointing to the wall, which was hung
with large and small pictures, "because they are not safe from the boys
anywhere else. Now what do you think of them?"
Taking the candles from the doctor, and letting the light fall upon the
pictures, I saw at once that they were all by Paula's hand. I had too
long watched her studies, and too deeply entered into her way of seeing
and of reproducing what she saw, to be liable to any error.
There were three or four heads, all idealized, the originals of which I
fancied that I recognized; two or three genre-pieces--scenes from the
prison, which I had already seen in the first draught; and finally a
landscape--a great reach of coast with stormy sea--the sketch of which
I remembered perfectly. At this time I understood but little of
painting, and least of all did I know how to justify my opinion when
formed. Now I can say that I really perceived a decisive improvement in
these pictures--an improvement both in the technical execution and in
the freer and broader style of treatment: especially did the heads
strike me as exhibiting remarkable power, and I enthusiastically
expressed my opinion to the doctor in the best words I could find.
"Yes," said he, leaning his head first on one side and then on the
other, and contemplating the pictures with melancholy pride, "you are
right; perfectly right. She is a genius; but of what use is genius when
it has no name? The world is stupid, my friend; incredibly stupid: it
can discover anything grand or beautiful soon enough when the one or
two enlightened heads that a century produces have given their
testimony to it, one after the other; then the thing is an article of
faith that the boys recite from their benches and the sparrows chatter
upon the roofs. But when the gentlemen have to pass judgment upon the
work of an author whose name they have never before heard, or the
picture of an artist who comes before them for the first time, then
they are at the end of their lesson and do not know what to think. How
long would these pictures have travelled from one exhibition to
another, or hung in the dealers' shops, if I had allowed them to hang
there? So they have all travelled into my possession, and not to
America, England, and Russia, as the good Paula believes. But do not
look so seriously at me. My part of Mæcenas did not last long; her last
picture at the Artists' Exposition--you know it, and are in it
yourself--Richard the Lion-heart sick in his tent, visited by an Arab
physician: well, that picture, as I hear, has been bought by the
commerzienrath--your commerzienrath--strange to say, for the man knows
just as much about paintings as I do about making money, and Paula, by
my advice, fixed its price at a considerable sum. You see I am now
superfluous. _Sic tansit gloria!_"
The doctor sighed deeply, and then preceded me with the two candles in
his hands, casting flickering lights upon his broad skull.
We took our seats again behind the glasses of grog. The doctor seemed
disposed to drown the deep melancholy that had possessed him by
doubting the strength of his potations, while I sat in deep meditation.
The fact that the commerzienrath had bought Paula's picture set me to
pondering. I knew of old how absolutely indifferent the man was to
everything connected with art, and that the relationship had in any way
moved him to the purchase was the unlikeliest thing in the world. It
was therefore no very chimerical conclusion that the daughter had more
to do in the affair than the father; and I confess that as I reckoned
up the probabilities of this supposition the blood rushed to my cheeks.
In fact the hypothesis stood or fell on a certain point, which was yet
uncertain. I drew a long breath, took a deep draught from my glass, and
asked:
"Has King Richard still any likeness----"
"To you, my most esteemed friend; to you? Do not vex yourself with any
doubts on that score," answered Doctor Snellius with a promptness that
seemed to indicate that our thoughts had met in the same point. "The
only fault I have to find with it is just this, that Paula seems to
have fancied that she had only to take you as you were, and there was a
king ready made. Have the goodness not to take credit to yourself for
what is merely her poverty of invention."
"I think I have not yet given you any reason to hold me exceptionally
vain," I said.
"No; heaven knows you have not; you deserve rather to descend to
posterity in the character of St. Simon Stylites than as Richard
C[oe]ur de Lion."
"You say that as bitterly as if you were seriously dissatisfied with
me."
"And so I am, my good sir," cried the doctor. "What kind of a crochet
is it to live by the labor of your hands, when you can live by your
head? Do you know, sir, that our departed friend said to me, not long
before his death, that you had the most remarkable talent for
mathematics he had ever known, and that you could at any time take
charge of the highest class in a public school? Do you suppose that
your head grows acuter just in proportion as your hands grow coarser?
You will say, like the tailor to Talleyrand, _il faut vivre_; and a
journeyman blacksmith will make a living easier than a teacher of
mathematics. Well, have you no friends that could help you? Why did you
not come to me at once? Why did you leave it for chance to decide
whether we should meet or not?"
I endeavored to calm his irritation, showing him that I had taken my
present course, not from necessity but conviction; but he would not
yield the point.
"Why did you take the trouble to make a virtue of necessity? Necessity
was your adviser, necessity and your confounded pride to boot. You
would have set out in quite another way, if you had had any capital to
back you."
"But you see I have none, doctor."
"Don't you contradict me, you brainless mammoth! A friend who has
capital that he places at our disposal is a capital of our own. I am
your friend, I have capital, and I place it at your disposal. Who knows
if in this I do not accomplish a work more pleasing to heaven than if I
followed my old father's wishes and employed it in assisting orphan
asylums and other such childish undertakings. You are an orphan; so in
helping you I follow the words if not the intention of that pious man,
and shall be perfectly easy in conscience on that score."
"But I shall not," I replied, laughing.
"Don't laugh, you monster!" cried the doctor. "You don't seem
to comprehend that my proposition is perfectly serious. Take my
money--there are fifty thousand _thalers_, or thereabouts--go into
partnership with the commerzienrath; or better, found a rival
establishment, and hoist him out of his saddle: in a few years you will
be the first manufacturer and machinist of Germany, and----"
While the doctor thus spoke in feverish excitement the blood had rushed
to his head in a really alarming manner. He suddenly checked himself,
and it was not until long after that I learned what it was that
required such an effort to suppress. It may be that my head, in
consequence of my long sitting behind the grog, was by no means
perfectly clear; at all events only thus can I explain the obstinacy
with which I still contradicted the doctor and maintained that my sense
of independence would never allow me to use the capital and assistance
of another as the foundation of my fortune.
"Do you know what you are proclaiming in this?" cried the doctor in his
shrillest tones, and wrathfully smiting the table--"that you will
remain a beggar, a miserable beggarly fellow, as every one has done who
was fool enough to try to drag himself out of the swamp by his own
hair? No, no, my good sir; the art is to let others work for you.
Whoever does not understand this, is and remains a beggar."
"What would our best friend have said if he had heard you talk thus?"
"Has he not in life and death proven the truth of it?" crowed the
pugnacious doctor. "Do you call it living as a reasonable man, to leave
the dearest we have on earth in poverty at our death? And what are the
great results of all his long, self-sacrificing, heroic labor for the
general good? He fancied, this high-priest of humanity, that his
example would suffice to bring about an entire reform of the prison
system. And now an old pedant of a king has but to shut his sleepy
eyes, and the foundation of his edifice gives way; and as soon as he
himself commits the folly of dying, it falls to ruin like a house of
cards. If that be not folly I do not know how loud the bells must
jingle."
"I know somebody whose cap is quite as well furnished," I said, looking
the doctor full in the eyes. "What do you call a man who--as the only
son of a rich old father who loves the son and lets him follow his own
course, even though he does not comprehend it, with the certain
prospect of a considerable inheritance--performs for years the
laborious work of a prison-surgeon for the most trivial pay; who, after
he has come into the possession of this estate, continues to labor as
the physician of the poorest of the poor, and finally, because the
weight of his wealth is too burdensome, throws it into the lap of the
first man he meets, to die the same irreclaimable beggarly fellow that
he has lived?"
"Did I ever pretend to be anything else?" asked my antagonist, not
without some mark of confusion. "Oh yes, as if it were only the
simplest thing in the world to be a child of prudence. To produce that
result requires generations, for shrewdness must be bred in families,
like the long legs of race-horses. Take the commerzienrath, who is a
classic example how shrewdness grows and thrives when it is once
properly grafted on a family stock: the man's grandfather was a
needleman, who kept a little shop by the harbor-gate in S.; my own
grandfather knew him well. He was a disreputable old fellow, who sold
nails and needles in his front shop, and lent money on pawns in the
back room. Then came his son, who was at least a head above his father,
and could read and write, and calculate much better than the old man.
He settled in your town and bought shares of ships, and finally whole
ships, and paved the way for his son, who is the biggest of the lot.
His flourishing period came in Napoleon's time. Napoleon and the
blockade and the smuggling business made a rich man of him. Yes,
smuggling--the same smuggling that cost your friend his life. When the
Herr Commerzienrath was a smuggler, smuggling was a kind of patriotic
work, and the poor devils who risked and lost their lives at it were
martyrs of the good cause. God only knows how many men's lives he has
on his conscience. And when afterwards the people who had got into the
way of the business would not quit it, and indeed could not, or they
would have starved, he was safe enough; he had brought his sheep
out of the rain and could laugh in his sleeve. Then came the time of
army-contracts, and that again was a good time for him; and thus
this leech kept sucking and gorging himself with the blood of his
fellow-creatures. Everything that he undertook succeeded; the
needleman's grandson and broker's son has become a millionaire, has
married a woman of noble birth, has titles, orders--all that the heart
can desire. Look you, there is a child of prudence, whom I recommend to
you as an example."
"That I may lose your and every worthy man's friendship?"
"What good is my friendship to you? My friendship at best is worth but
fifty thousand _thalers_. You are quite right not to put yourself out
of your way for such a trifle. Marry Hermine Streber--then you will
know why you were a beggarly fellow."
"It seems that one falls into this category by having either a great
deal of money or none at all," I said, hiding under a loud laugh my
embarrassment at his brusque suggestion.
"Certainly," said the doctor, still heated. "Extremes meet, and for
this reason I consider your destiny inevitable. The question only is,
how to deal with the old man; with the daughter the business is half
done, or more than half. Your meeting on the steamer was capital; and
now this Richard the Lion-heart in effigy, as long as she has him not
in _propria personæ_----"
"Doctor," I said, rising, "I think it must be time to say good-night."
"As you please," replied the doctor. "You know with such remarkable
exactitude what is good for you that most likely you know this too."
The doctor had also arisen and was now walking up and down the room
making frightful faces.
"Doctor," said I, stepping before him.
"Go!" he cried, passing round me in a curve.
"I am going," I said, and I went.
But I halted at the door and looked back once more at the singular man,
who had thrown himself again into his chair and was watching me angrily
through his round spectacles.
"Doctor, you said to me once that you could not well carry more than
four glasses, and this evening you have drunk six. So I will ascribe
the unfriendly way in which you dismiss me--for what other reason I
cannot imagine--to the fifth and sixth glass; and now good-by."
I left the room without his making any attempt to detain me, and as I
closed the door behind me I heard him burst into a peal of shrill
laughter.
"This comes from a man's not keeping within his measure," I said to
myself, excusing him.
But as I reached the street below, and the frosty night air blew upon
my heated face, I began to perceive that I had not exactly kept within
my own measure. My gait as I traversed the empty, badly-lighted
streets, now swept by a sharp December wind, was less steady than
usual, and strange thoughts passed through my head, and I had curious
fancies, whose origin could only be traced to the glasses I had
emptied. And once I had to laugh aloud, for I imagined I heard the
voice of the short, fat commerzienrath saying quite distinctly: "My
dear son, we must mind what we are about or we shall not get home at
all, and our Hermine will be alarmed."