The pale, quiet woman opened the door for them, and looked neither at
Schnetz nor his companion, but withdrew hastily to a little back-room
near the kitchen, without giving any other answer than a slow shake of
the head to her master's kind nod and inquiry whether any one had been
there. Felix was struck, even more than the first time, by the sad,
timid expression of her eyes, which had a noble form and a soft
brilliancy, while her features could never have been handsome even in
her younger days.
"You must excuse me," said Schnetz, when they had entered his room,
where he offered his visitor a cigar--he himself smoked Algerian
tobacco out of a short clay-pipe--"for not having introduced you to
Madame Thersites. You would not have gained much by it, for the spirits
of that good soul are not, unfortunately, the best in the world. She
labors under the fixed delusion that she is the great misfortune of my
life, because I quitted the service on her account; since which time I
have had hard work to keep her from quitting life itself in some moment
of depression. Yes, my dear fellow, there is a little example of the
profound sense, wisdom, and morality of our social condition. This
excellent woman, who has now borne the world with me for ten years,
comes of a family of country schoolmasters. I became acquainted with
her when I was visiting the lord of the manor; her old father had been
pensioned, her mother was dead, and she, the eldest daughter, took
entire charge of the household, educated her brothers and sisters, and
yet found time enough to do something for herself and perfect her
education. Of course she is a Protestant. Well, I began to respect her
greatly; and so one thing followed another, until I discovered that I
could not live without her. The fact that I could not give the bonds
which a lieutenant must have in order to marry, did not seem to me at
the time an insurmountable difficulty. My sweetheart thought just as I
did, that we only need wait until her second sister was old enough to
take her place in the household. As soon as this was possible, we could
live in the city. An old aunt, whose heir I expected to be, had, as she
said herself, long had her trunks packed for the journey to the other
world, and then I could easily raise the necessary sum; while the fact
that my marriage would be a _mesalliance_ especially delighted my heart
on account of my family, with whom I had long before broken off all
relations.
"But the departure of my aunt was put off from year to year; and we
resolved not to wait till our best days were past, and lived for some
four or five years in Christian and true marriage, though it had not
received ecclesiastical sanction. Our only trouble was the loss of
our four children. At last my aunt betook herself to her last
resting-place; and now, for we were again expecting a child, we made
preparations to procure an official recognition of our union, though
nothing could make it closer than it was already. But see what sublime
sentiments were all at once expressed by my good comrades!--the whole
corps knew our relations to one another in all its uprightness, and
knew me besides. The honor of the corps would suffer under it, they
said, if I married a 'person' who had had children before the official
recognition of her marriage. They wouldn't have found it in the least
offensive had I merely continued the old relations. The logic of this
_point d'honneur_ was incomprehensible to my stupid head, as well as to
my wife's. But while it merely made mine sit all the firmer on my
shoulders, so that I preferred to resign rather than to submit, it
threw my poor wife's completely off its balance. We went through the
ceremony sadly; the child, which was soon after brought into the world,
died within a few months; and since that time the poor creature has
been afflicted with the melancholy delusion that she has the ruin of my
life upon her conscience. I have tried a hundred times to make it clear
to her that I could have wished for nothing better than to be free from
the routine of military service, and devote my life to my studies.
There are certain points in military history, and also a few technical
problems and controversial questions, concerning which I sometimes have
a word or two to say in military periodicals; and so, when the wretched
campaign of '66 came, in which we had hard work to save the honor of
our arms, to say nothing of our having been delightfully fooled by
Austria, I thanked the Lord that I was not forced to march with the
rest, but had done forever with a trade which can make a man act
against his convictions. Since then, we have lived on unmolested, and I
devote my spare hours, as you see, to illustrating my prosaic existence
according to the best of my ability."
His eyes wandered over the little room, which certainly did not seem
very cheerful, and had, even on this summer day, a strangely chilling
air. It is possible that this impression was caused in part by the
peculiar decoration of the walls, that were but sparsely relieved by a
few plain articles of furniture, a black leather sofa and a carved,
worm-eaten wardrobe. Instead of framed pictures or engravings, wherever
there was a vacant spot, and even behind the stove and in the niche of
the solitary window, there were the most grotesque _silhouettes_ cut
out of black paper and pasted on the bare plaster, which had once been
painted white. They formed an extraordinary collection of figures,
taken from the most different stations of life, most of them
exhibited in ridiculous postures appropriate to their respective
occupations--pedantic scholars, students, artists, women,
ecclesiastics, and soldiers--all as if caught _in flagrante_ in their
pet weaknesses and sins, and fixed upon the wall, standing revealed in
shadowy outline. Yet an artist could not help taking delight in the
broad yet spirited strokes with which each figure was portrayed; and it
was simply the superabundance of these weird groups that covered the
walls, and had already begun to overspread the smoke-stained ceiling,
which was calculated to excite feverish dreams in a quiet brain if they
were looked at for any length of time.
"You see now why I dragged you up here," said Schnetz, throwing off his
riding-jacket and crossing his lean arms (round which flapped a pair of
coarse shirtsleeves) behind his back. "From my intercourse with artists
I have caught vanity enough to mercilessly entice inoffensive people
into my den, although the black art which I pursue appears to very
few of them to be worth the trouble of toiling up four flights of
stairs to examine. Life viewed from the wrong side--the fancies of a
misanthrope--a Thersites album, or rather nigrum--well, am I wrong in
thinking that this world of shadows is even less to your taste than an
ordinary art exhibition?
"But when you consider the matter more carefully, you will find it has
its good side. What is it that is so absolutely lacking in all modern
art, and the absence of which is the source of all other defects?
Simply this: it no longer respects the _silhouette_! In landscape and
_genre_, historical and portrait painting, yes, even in sculpture, you
find everywhere a lot of pretty little tricks of execution; delicate
shades, tones, and touches; a devilish careful, nervous, and, on the
whole, attractive piece of work, but in it all not a single great
feature; no strong decoration, no solid construction, the very shadow
of which suggests something. Give me a pair of shears and a quire of
black paper, and I will cut you out the whole history of art up to the
nineteenth century; the Sistine Madonna and Claude Lorraine as well as
Teniers and Ruysdael; Phidias and Michael Angelo as well as Bernini; so
that every one of them shall make a good showing, the _rococo_ period
included, which, after all, had something sounder at bottom than our
boasted present. Take away from the latter its finical, over-refined
tricks of color, and what is left? An incredible poverty of form, a
little brilliancy or aspiring 'idealism,' and the bare canvas. The same
thing might, it seems to me, be justly applied to our literature, and
from that to all the other manifestations of our boasted civilization.
But I, on the contrary, have from the very first devoted my attention
to the essential part, the primary form, and the really determining
outlines; and as these, unfortunately, only come out strongly in our
sins and weaknesses, I have become a _silhouette_ cutter--an art that
not only earns no bread, but even takes out of one's mouth the bread he
might otherwise have gained. Naturally, mankind will never forgive one
who shows it its dark side, and points out its excrescences and
deformities and defects; for each individual thinks he is just the one
all of whose sides the sun should especially light up."
It was fortunate for Felix, in his absent-minded state, that Schnetz
was one of those men who, when they once begin upon the great theme of
their life, upon their mission or their one idea, take no offense when
their hearer leaves them to run on alone, but play upon their single
whim in inexhaustible variations. When, after half an hour or so, Felix
interrupted Schnetz with the laughing remark that his teacher would
scold him if he came to work too late, he found that he himself had not
spoken a dozen words; and yet the lieutenant took leave of him with the
remark that he rejoiced to have discovered in him a congenial spirit,
and hoped the four flights of stairs would not be so high as to keep
him from their acquaintance later over a glass of beer and a tolerable
cigar.