philosophical reflections about the preposterous size of keys, and the
smallness of the corresponding keyholes--so profound, in fact, that he
sat for a long, long time upon the stone-steps, his head buried in his
hands, and his eyes closed, until at dawn a cool breath of air roused
him from his meditations, so that he rose shivering and passed into the
house.
After several hours of refreshing sleep he awoke in no very enviable
condition. He looked about him with wondering eyes, and suddenly he
opened them to abnormal width as if to pierce the object upon which
they fell.
It was the new swallow-tail. Merciful heavens, how it looked! During
his _siesta_ on the door-steps he had sat upon the cream-filled candies
he had in his pocket, and the mixture of chocolate, sugar, and fruit
had formed into a sticky crust on the tails of his coat which was truly
horrible to behold.
The bass violinist jumped out of bed at a single bound, and examined
the luckless coat, which in the very flower of its youth had been
called upon to endure such hardships.
“When my old woman sees that, there’ll be a row,” he muttered, passing
his hand desperately through his bristling locks. He seized a brush
and began to belabour the swallow-tail with an amount of energy such
as he had never before displayed; but although his perseverance was
rewarded by the disappearance of some of the smaller stains, the large
blurs which had been caused by the crushed chocolate-drops would yield
to no amount of brushing, the less so as they were still moist, and by
rubbing acquired a more formidable appearance.
Meanwhile he heard his wife beginning to stir in her room, and poor
terrified Schnorps, who at times quaked in his shoes before his fair
spouse, puzzled his head to find some remedy for his trouble. Suddenly
it occurred to him that years ago he had bought a bottle of benzine
which he knew must be somewhere in his room.
[Illustration: “HE SEIZED A BRUSH AND BEGAN TO BELABOUR THE
SWALLOW-TAIL.”]
He found a dozen bottles on top of the wardrobe, but how was he to know
which was the one he wanted? He rummaged until he discovered one at the
sight of which the certainty dawned within his dizzy brain that this
was it. He spread out the unfortunate coat upon the table, poured a
generous supply of the liquid supposed to be benzine upon it, and was
about to rub it in with his handkerchief when a horrible sight appeared
before him.
Wherever a drop of the fluid had fallen, the cloth turned red; and
before the perplexed violinist could find an explanation for this
remarkable metamorphosis, there appeared upon the coat an infinite
number of large and small holes which sealed its doom for now and
eternity.
It so happened that instead of benzine, Schnorps had laid hold of a
bottle of sulphuric acid, which he had once used to clean the screws of
his instrument.
When he realised what had happened, he certainly expected to go
mad, and he weakly fell back in his chair, gazing fixedly upon his
murdered swallow-tail. His head whirled--the new coat--his wife--the
15 thalers--the intendant--sulphuric acid--all was swallowed up in one
wild eddy, and it was some time before he regained any self-possession.
Ye saints! it would never do to have his wife get hold of this! The
first thing to do was to remove the article in question. Hastily he
dressed himself, slipped on his felt slippers, hid the dress-coat
beneath his dressing-gown, and stealthily crept upstairs, where he hid
it, with many misgivings, in the utmost depths of the old wardrobe.
It was high time, for when he came back his better-half appeared upon
the scene. Never had she inspired him with such terror as at this
moment, and yet never since the days of their honeymoon had he bidden
her good-morning as tenderly as he did to-day. She too was unusually
amiable, a fact which only weighed the more upon his guilty conscience.
“Well, did you have a pleasant evening?” she asked.
“Oh yes, very nice--yes--quite nice!” he replied, in an embarrassed
tone of voice.
“Oh, indeed!” she said, glancing about her as if she were looking for
something, which caused poor Schnorps to tremble again.
“What are you looking for, dear?”
She gazed at him in surprise. Dear? He had only called her so once
before, and that was when he asked her if she would have him.
“Nothing--that is--where’s your new coat?”
“The coat,” he answered, shaking in his shoes; “what do you want it
for?”
“I should like to put it away,” she said very gently.
“You needn’t do that. I put it where it belongs.”
“Where it belongs?” she asked in great excitement.
“Why yes,” replied Schnorps; “upstairs in the wardrobe.”
“Ah, so,” she remarked, greatly relieved--“in the wardrobe! Yes, yes!
Well, come and have your breakfast, Gottlieb; I am coming down in a
minute.”
With these words she walked out, and now it was Schnorps’ turn to take
a deep breath of relief.
He finished dressing and gradually became more tranquil--but it was the
tranquillity that precedes a mighty storm.
The reader can readily imagine what followed.
After a pause of ten minutes, the shrill voice of Frau Sally rang
through the house in a manner which made all the inmates start and
tremble. Intending to return the borrowed coat to its rightful
possessor, she had discovered the catastrophe, and raged like a lunatic.
At first Schnorps tried to defend himself and to comfort her, but
when he began to understand all the details and complications of the
hapless tale,--when he heard that he had ruined his neighbour’s coat,
and that his own had long ago gone to perdition by means of his wife’s
thoughtlessness and the old seamstress’s stupidity, then his wrath knew
no bounds.
It was really too much. To have to pay for _two_ new dress-coats, and
to have none! it was death to him, it would bring him to an untimely
grave.
I will cast the mantle of Christian charity over the ensuing scene; but
to this day the neighbours talk about the row that took place at the
house of the Schnorpses after the general’s party.
_Fritz Brentano._
_THE MAN OF ORDER._
SO far as I am concerned, I must confess that I am not greatly
interested either in painted Empresses, or in Cardinals, or in Pashas.
My attention was riveted upon a lank, lean man, who must have been of
unusual length when he was standing up, a man with white hair and a
grey beard, round blue glasses before his eyes, beneath them a nose
shaped like a potato, and a thin-lipped mouth drawn down at the corners
in a sardonic smile. On his head there was a straw hat, the brim of
which was of a width such as I had never before met with. This person
sat upon a camp-stool, holding with his left hand a parasol lined with
green over the afore-mentioned straw hat, and with his right hand
guiding a small telescope screwed to a stick, which was fastened in
the ground. There is no need to say that the ruler and guider of this
telescope was reconnoitring the châlet across the way. What pleased me
best was the fussiness, the apparatus, and the intensity of research
which served the man’s curiosity. Surely this was the last of the
Mohicans, one of the last original characters which are disappearing
more and more out of the insipid level of our most modern mediocrity
and uniformity. Who was the man? The dear old village of Ragaz has,
by no means to the delight of everybody, grown into a “fashionable”
resort, and one meets queer enough figures there every summer. But one
like the man with a telescope and camp-stool, who had improvised an
observatory on the spur of the moment, is an exotic plant, even in the
Ragaz of to-day, and is well worth the trouble of observation.
[Illustration: “WHO WAS THE MAN?”]
What a pity, I thought, that Amadeus Hoffmann is no more among the
living, or Edgar Poe. For either of them this fellow would have been a
find.
Gradually the spectators dispersed, as neither the empress, who had
been turned out of her empire, nor the cardinal, who had taken the hint
that he was superfluous, condescended to show themselves, and as it
was getting rather dull to gaze upon the red fez of the pasha, which
was just visible above the railing of the verandah at the right. At
last there were only two left: the telescope man, who continued his
observations, and my worthy self observing the obdurate observer.
Finally, we both accomplished our purpose--he in seeing Madonna Eugenia
and the Prince-Cardinal leave the house in quick succession, I in being
a witness to the geometrical correctness with which the discoverer took
down his observatory.
His motions were as measured as if he felt it incumbent upon him to
keep time to the music of the spheres. His very manner of getting up
showed a man who never puts one foot before the other without having
incontestably assured himself where he was about to tread. When his
long bony figure had drawn itself out to its full length his first
object was to see clearly. For this purpose he cautiously removed his
spectacles from his potato-shaped nose and wiped the large, round
blue glasses emphatically with a piece of soft leather he produced
out of his right vest-pocket. Having put back the piece of leather
and the spectacles to their original place, he commenced the work of
packing up, without haste and without delay. At first the telescope
was unscrewed, reduced to its smallest dimensions, wiped on all sides
with a large red silk handkerchief, and enclosed in a leather case, out
of which he had carefully blown the dust, and which he now laid down
gently upon the camp-stool. Hereupon he pulled out the stick which had
served as a holder for his telescope until now, but which, upon nearer
acquaintance, proved to be a perfect miracle, a very encyclopædia of
a stick, so to say. It was evidently the pride and joy of its happy
possessor. There could be no doubt of that from the satisfaction with
which he touched the various springs of the complicated apparatus to
display the countless metamorphoses which made the stick appear in turn
as a common cane, as an umbrella, as a hoe, as a geological hammer,
as a pocket-dagger, as a candle-snuffer, as a reading-desk, as a
corkscrew, as a cup, as a chisel, as an inkstand, and as various other
things. At last I should really not have been surprised if this Chinese
puzzle had suddenly put on the garb of a speaker in Parliament.
The man could read open admiration, the most unselfish of human
sympathy, from my countenance, and consequently felt impelled to say,
as he pointed to his stick, having reduced it to its most primitive
form: “It is the result of five years of theoretic studies and three
years of practical constructive experiments. Ay, sir, with genius and
order one can accomplish some pretty good things upon this disorderly
earth.”
With that he leaned his miraculous staff carefully against a tree,
buckled his telescope-case to a broad strap which hung across his right
shoulder like a bandoleer, took up his camp-stool, devoted himself
assiduously to reducing it to infinitesimal dimensions, and buckled the
object, which in its present shape no person would ever have suspected
of being a chair, to his strap. He then took up his encyclopædic stick,
lightly pricked the ground with the point, and remarked, in the full
consciousness of work well done: “All’s in order! Cardinal, Pasha,
Ex-empress, all done up in good order.”
“Heilige Ordnung, segensreiche,” I began, quoting Schiller.
“Yes, sir; that is the wisest word ever the immortal Marbach sage
pronounced. To say that, he must have been a man of order himself. And
that he was so is proved to-day by his printed note-book. Unfortunately
his collection of pill-bills has not yet been published. Nor Goethe’s
Rhine-wine bills. Neither, I am sorry to say, have we as yet any
printed proofs of the number of pipe-lighters which were twisted
for Johann Heinrich Voss by his prudent housewife Ernestine. At the
same time I must admit that gradually we are reducing our history of
literature to something like order. There is nothing like a basis of
scientific research. This alone will bring light into chaos. When we
have once succeeded in establishing the relation of Goethe’s digestion
to his poetic production, then we may set to work to discover the
relation of the first part of _Faust_ to the second. Happily there
are men living and working who know that the so-called minutiæ and
bagatelles of life are in reality the most important things. I know a
Leipsic professor who has brought together scientific proof to show
that true literature is that which has been contemptuously dubbed
waste-paper-basket-literature. I know another Alexandrian ditto of
Leipsic who is to edit a work which his friends have signalled in
advance as about to create a new epoch in literature, the title of
which will be, ‘The Wash-bills of our Classic and Romantic Poets,
being a Collection of Records and Documents for a Prospective
Inductive Analytical History of German Literature of the Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Centuries.’ I know a third Byzantian of Leipsic, who
plans to bring the art of writing diplomatic history up to the acme of
perfection. He has made the different kinds of snuff which Frederick
the Great indulged in the objects of his preliminary investigations, in
order to be able to furnish proof of the effect which each individual
sort had upon the brain-nerves of said Frederick, and consequently upon
the destiny of the human race. Do you see, sir, that is what I call a
truly scientific spirit, a healthy realism that, a spirit of sterling
accuracy! Three groans for anything like disorder! It is incredible
what a mischief-maker disorder is in these days! There was a fellow
the other day had the audacity to spell Goethe G-ö-t-h-e throughout
an entire book! Would you believe it? Fortunately he got his fingers
whacked right heartily with the academical rattan. ‘Göthe’! what do you
think of it? Of course it is idiotic in German to write the diphthongs
_ä_, _ö_, _ü_ as if they were _æ_, _œ_, _ue_--I’ll admit that, and
I dare say Goethe himself would to-day save himself the trouble of
putting in the extra _e_, but the orthography of G-o-e-t-h-e has once
been established, and in the interest of order I would advise none but
anarchists and rebels to be so godless as to leave out the _e_. The law
of order is supreme, in great and in the greatest, in small and in the
smallest.”
He stopped exhausted and gasped for breath. “On earth and in the
heavens,” I added at haphazard.
“In the heavens? Not that I know of!” he said, drawing down the corners
of his mouth. At the same time he touched his lifted cane, allowing the
candle-snuffers to protrude for a moment, as if he were about to snuff
out all anarchic stars in the firmament. “Do you know, in the so-called
heavens there is not much order? The disorderly conduct of the comets
should have been interfered with long ago. And then this transit of
Venus, what do you say to that? Do you call that order? Venus should go
in a decent and orderly manner above or below the sun, but certainly
not straight before his Majesty’s very nose. Why, it is like snapping
his fingers at the sun; it’s disrespectful, it’s opposed to all
decorum, to all order.”
So saying he darted away from me--we had meanwhile reached the hotel
“Hof Ragaz,” and entering the right wing had walked upstairs--and like
a whirlwind he pounced upon a table standing in the hall, about which
evidently there was something not in order.
“There it is again!” he muttered, slowly passing the tip of his
fore-finger over the top of the table until upon the dusty surface the
word “Dust” appeared in large type capitals.
“Hang those women!” grumbled the owner of the magic staff. “Will you
believe me when I tell you that yesterday I wrote the same cry of
warning upon the top of this table? All in vain!”
And setting down his elaborately-constructed cane with well-tempered
force upon the first step of the staircase leading to the third storey,
he continued: “Tell me, dear sir, did you ever in the course of your
experience meet with a person of the feminine sex, be it child, girl,
or matron, who could ever be prevailed upon by means of exhortation,
kindness, severity, diplomacy, or force to fully shut the latch of a
door, or turn down the bolt of a window-sash?”
“No, to tell the truth, I have never met a feminine person of that
description.”
“I thought so!” he continued, with a triumphant smile. “Oh, if you
knew all the trouble, all the untold trouble, I have taken for years
to teach the women-folks at home to properly shut doors and windows.
All in vain! But do you know how I punish the disorderly batch at home?
Whenever I find a door left upon the latch, or a window with the bolt
but half-turned, I at once lift the door or the sash out of the hinges
and lean it against the wall. This has the desired effect of vexing the
women and giving them additional work, especially in winter. There’s
nothing like the law of order. But do you call that order, eh?”
And with a degree of moral indignation he pointed to a row of
milk-stains upon the stairs. One of the chamber-maids, hastening up or
down stairs with a breakfast-tray, had not kept an eye properly upon
the milk-pitcher.
What did our fanatic in the cause of order? Something I had never seen
before. He pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket, and step by step
he marked a neat circle round about each drop of milk.
“You see,” he said, “this is the way I do at home to call the attention
of the women to such offences against all sense of decency and modesty,
which of course they never see and correct of their own accord. Oh,
disorder, thy name is woman.”
_Johannes Scherr_.
_THE LUXURY OF GOING ABOUT INCOGNITO._
FOR six years the couple had lived in a very small town, in which
each inhabitant could furnish a detailed biography of his neighbour,
possessed an intimate knowledge of his daily _menu_, and knew just
when the post delivered a package to him--the size and shape of
which package being made the subject of conversation at the next
coffee-party, where also unfailing conclusions were arrived at as to
the contents and sender of the object in question. Judge Schwarz, being
a person of distinction in town, naturally suffered more than others
under the zealous observation of his neighbours, and was quite sure
that he could not have a button sewed on his coat without having his
friends mention the fact to each other and make their comments upon
it;--ay, he went so far as to believe himself particularly favoured by
good fortune if the local paper did not get hold of the important event
and retail it to its readers the next morning in a sprightly editorial.
This consciousness had in the course of years reached such a stage in
the judge’s mind as to become utterly unendurable; and as in certain
individuals painful inner experiences seek to become personified in
some external object, so all this small-town gossip, this puerile
mutual observation and control, seemed to concentrate itself in the
person of the Apothecary Lebermann, a good-natured but essentially
prosy person, possessed of an insatiable curiosity, who was interested
in the whole world, and wanted to know everything--on the other hand
taking for granted that others had as lively a concern about him and
the experiences of his daily life.
On the day on which our story begins the judge was returning from court
in rather an irritable mood, and his face darkened perceptibly as he
saw the apothecary coming to meet him.
While it was, as we have said, Herr Lebermann’s justifiable peculiarity
to desire to know everything, and with a rare toughness of purpose to
work upon his neighbour with queries until the other would fling the
desired information at his head in a fit of uncontrollable indignation,
the judge was the most uncommunicative of mortals. It was his intention
that no one should know what he did, or where he bought his things, or
with whom he kept up a correspondence--ay, even his Christian name was
to him a matter of deep secrecy; in fact, a sharp altercation between
him and his wife had once been brought about by no other cause than
that she had failed to fully understand his feelings in this respect,
and unadvisedly addressing him one day on the railroad with the
harmless remark, “See the charming view, Karl!” had unmasked him before
his fellow-travellers.
Here these two gentlemen, as unlike as possible in their peculiarities,
met upon the street, and while the judge was as nimble as an eel in
trying to escape the apothecary, the latter was equally assiduous
in his efforts to detain him, and opened the conversation with the
apparently unnecessary question, “Coming from court so early to-day,
Herr Schwarz?”
“No!” replied the judge unkindly.
“No?” repeated Herr Lebermann, in a tone of surprise. “This is the way
I generally see you come. Where have you been, then?”
Apparently the judge was deaf.
“Seems to me you generally come from court at this time of day,”
persisted Herr Lebermann; “Ah, I see, you don’t care to tell me,” he
added pleasantly, “but I know all about it just the same!”
“If you know it there’s no need of asking,” growled the judge.
“And now you’re on your way home,” remarked Herr Lebermann, with the
blissful serenity of a man who has accomplished his purpose of knowing
all about the aims and intents of other people. “I’ll walk along with
you a bit. I am always out for a constitutional at this time of day!”
“That’s a wise thing to do!” remarked Herr Schwarz with fatal
indifference.
“And when I get home I eat my sandwich,” the apothecary confidentially
informed him; “only one, you know, so as not to take away my appetite
for dinner! By the way, that reminds me--how does it agree with you to
dine so much later?”
The judge gave him a scathing look. “How do you know that I dine later
than usual?” he asked indignantly.
“You see, your cook is the sister of our maid, and she told her about
it. You dine at half-past two, don’t you?”
“Sometimes,” cried the irritated judge, struggling to control his
temper; “here we are at my house--good morning, Herr Lebermann!”
“One moment!” said the apothecary, taking possession of the judge’s
button-hole while the latter was angrily seeking to escape; “there
seems to be company at your house.”
“Why?” asked Schwarz, trembling with ire--he had fetched his
sister-in-law from the station twelve hours ago, long after nightfall,
and had hoped that the fact of her presence was as yet unknown.
“Well, I saw your maid buy _three_ little tarts at the pastry-cook’s
this morning,” said the apothecary innocently; “she generally takes
only two--so I thought, perhaps----”
The judge darted a glance of utter contempt at his companion.
“Why did you not take it for granted I might desire to eat _two_ tarts
to-day?” he said with alarming politeness, and then walked into the
house full of wrath.
Weighty decisions were ripening within him, and the result of his
deliberation became apparent as he sat down to lunch with his ladies,
and suddenly delivered himself of the astonishing words: “We’ll start
for Berlin this evening!”
Helen dropped her fork and gazed at her husband with wide-open eyes.
“This evening?”
“When I say this evening I don’t mean next year,” growled the
paterfamilias. “That’s just like a woman! Here you’ve always been
talking and begging to go and travel--to go and leave this miserable
little place for awhile, and now when I offer to go, you raise
objections!”
“My dear Karl!” began his wife soothingly, “I was only taken by
surprise at your sudden resolve. What can have occurred to bring it
about?”
“I’m tired of this small town gossip, and more especially of the
apothecary!” said Karl, energetically. “Confound it--I can’t blow my
nose but that Lebermann sends to inquire if I have a cold! I want to
go and see what life is like in a large town, where I can go about
_incognito_. I can just manage to get away over Sunday. We’ll take
three round-trip tickets and go to Berlin this evening. Go and pack
your things!”
He folded his napkin and got up. A low exclamation from Annchen
interrupted him.
“_Three?_--shall I go too?”
[Illustration: “HELEN WAS SOFTLY CARESSING ON ONE SIDE, HIS LITTLE
SISTER-IN-LAW PATTING HIS SHOULDER ON THE OTHER.”]