Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 13

The reason is that every sentiment and every pa.s.sion is a mad thing, demanding, or building, a complete world of its own. We are capable of being vexed because it's past twelve o'clock, or because it's _not_ past, but only _just_ twelve o'clock. What nonsense! The pa.s.sion wants besides a personality of its own (sein eignes Ich), and a world of its own,--a time of its own as well. I beg every one, just for once, to let his pa.s.sions speak plainly out, and to listen to them, and ascertain what it is that they really each of them want; he will be dismayed when he sees what monstrous things are these desires of theirs which they have previously only half muttered. Anger would have but one neck for all mankind, love would have but one heart, sorrow but one pair of lachrymal ducts, and pride two bent knees!

When I was reading in Widman's 'Hofer Chronik' the account of the fearful, b.l.o.o.d.y times of the thirty years' war, and, as it were, lived them over again; when I beard once more the cries for help of those poor suffering people, all struggling in the Danube-whirlpools of their days--and saw the beating of their hands, and their delirious wanderings on the crumbling pillars of broken bridges, foaming billows and drifting ice-floes das.h.i.+ng against them; and then, when I thought "All these waves have gone down, the ice is melted, the howling turmoil is all sunk to silence, so are the human beings and all their sighs"--I was filled with a melancholy comfort, a thought of consolation for _all_ times, and I asked, "Was, and is, then, this pa.s.sing, cursory, transient burst of sorrow at the CHURCHYARD-GATE OF LIFE, which three steps into the nearest cavern could end, a fit cause for this cowardly lamentation?" Truly if, as I believe, there be such a thing as true patience under an eternal woe, then, verily, patience under a transitory sorrow is hardly worth the name.

A great but unmerited national calamity should not humble us, as the theologians would have it--it should make us proud. When the long, heavy sword of war falls upon mankind, and thousands of blanched hearts are torn and bleeding--or when in the blue, pure evening sky the hot cloud of a burning city, smoking on its funereal pyre, hangs dark and lurid, like a cloud of ashes, the ashes of thousands of hearts and joys all burnt to cinders and dust--then let thy spirit be lifted up in pride, let it loathe, contemn, and despise tears, and that for which they fall, and let it say--

"Thou art much too small a thing, thou every-day, common life, that an immortal being should be inconsolable with regard to _thee_, thou torn and tattered chance-bargain of an existence. Here upon this earth--the ashes of centuries rolled into a sphere, worked into shape and form from vapour by convulsion--the cry of one dreaming in a sorrowful dream--I say, it is a disgrace that the sigh should cease only when the breast which gives it utterance is resolved into its elements, and that the tear should cease to flow only when the eye is closed in death."

But moderate this thy sublime transport of indignation and put to thyself this question, "If He, the Infinite one, who, veiled from thy sight, sits surrounded by the gleaming abysses, without bounds save such as Himself creates, were to lay bare to thy sight the immeasurability of infinity, and let Himself be seen of thee as he distributes the suns, the great spirits, the little human hearts, and our days, and a tear or two therein; wouldst thou rise up out of thy dust against Him, and say, 'Almighty, be other than thou art!'"

But there is one sorrow which will be forgiven thee, and for which there is recompense; it is sorrow for thy dead. For this sweet sorrow for thy lost ones is, in truth, but another form of consolation; when we long for them, this is but a sadder way of loving them still; and when we think of their departure we shed tears, as well as when we picture to ourselves our happy meeting with them again. And perhaps these tears differ not.

CONTINUATION AND CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER VI.

THE CHECKED CALICO DRESS--MORE PLEDGES--CHRISTIAN NEGLECT OF THE STUDY OF JUDAISM--A HELPING ARM (OF LEATHER) STRETCHED FORTH FROM THE CLOUDS--THE AUCTION.

The St. Andrew's shooting-match will take place in the seventh chapter: the present one fills up the wintry th.o.r.n.y interval up to that period--that is to say, the wolf-month with its wolf-hunger. Siebenkaes would at that period have been much annoyed if any one had told him beforehand with what compa.s.sion the flouris.h.i.+ng state of his trading enterprises was one day to be described by me, and, as a consequence, read by millions of persons in all time to come. He wanted no pity, and said, "If _I_ am quite happy, why should _you_ be pitying me?" The articles of household furniture which he had touched, as with the hand of death, or notched with his axe, like trees marked for cutting, were one by one duly felled and hauled away. The mirror, with the floral border, in the bedroom (which, luckily for itself, could not see itself in any other), was the first thing to be tolled out of the house by the pa.s.sing- or vesper-bell, under the pall of an ap.r.o.n. Before he stationed it in the train of this dance of death, he proposed to Lenette a subst.i.tute for it, the checked calico mourning-dress, in order to accustom her to the idea. It was the "Censeo Carthaginem delendam" (I vote for the destruction of Carthage) which old Cato used to say daily in the senate after every speech.

Next the old arm-chair was got rid of bodily (not like Shakespeare's arm-chair, which was weighed out by the ounce, like saffron, or in carats, like gold), and the firedog went in company with it. Siebenkaes had the wisdom to gay, before they went away, "Censeo Carthaginem delendam," _i. e_. "Wouldn't it be better to p.a.w.n the checked calico?"

They could barely subsist for two days upon the dog and the chair.

And then the process of alchemical trans.m.u.tation of metals was applied to the shaving-basin and the bedroom crockery, which were converted into table-money. Of course he previously said "Censeo." It is scarcely worth the trouble, but I may just observe here how little fruit was born by this branch of trade; it was rather a woody branch than a fruit-bearing one.

The lean porcelain cow or b.u.t.ter-boat would scarcely have served as their nouris.h.i.+ng milch cow for more than a day, if she had not been attended by seven potentates (that is to say, most miserable prints of them), who went "into the bargain," but for whom the woman at the shop added some melted b.u.t.ter. Wherefore he said "Censeo." Many of my readers must remember my mentioning that, a short time ago, when he was distributing sentences of death among the furniture, he did not take very much notice of certain table-napkins which were lying beside the checked calico dress. Now, however, he acted as screech-owl, or bird of death, and gallows-priest to them also, and routed them out all but a few. When they were gone, he remarked, in an incidental manner, shortly before Martinmas Day, that the napkin-press was still to the fore, though it was not very clear what was the use of it, as there was nothing for it to press.

"If such a thing should be necessary," he said, "the press might very well get leave of absence on private affairs, until _we_ get through the smoothing-press, oiling-press, and napkin-press of destiny, and come out all smooth and beautiful ourselves, and can stick the napkins into our b.u.t.ton-holes on their return." His first intention had even been to reverse the order of the funeral procession, and put the press in the van of it as _avant-courier_ of the napkins, and in that event he would only have had to invert his syllogism (as well as his procession) in this way: "I don't see what we can do with the napkins, or how we're to press them and keep them smooth, till we get the press home again."

I am most firmly convinced that the majority of people would have done as Lenette did with reference to my trade-consul Siebenkaes, and his Hanseatic confederation with everybody who dealt in anything--that is, clasped her hands above her head, and said, "Oh! the thoughtless, silly creature! he'll soon be a beggar at this rate: the beautiful furniture!"

Firmian's constant answer was--

"You would have me kneel down and howl, and tear my coat in lamentation, like a Jew--my coat, which is torn already and pull my hair out by the roots--that hair, which terror frequently causes to fall off in a single night. Isn't it enough if _you_ do the howling?

Are you not my appointed _praefica_ and keening-woman? Wife, I swear to you, and that as solemnly as if I were standing on pig's bristles,[47]

that if it is the will of G.o.d, who has given me so light and merry a heart--if it be His will that I am to go about the town with eight thousand holes in my coat, and without a sole to either shoe or stocking that I am to go on always getting poorer and poorer" (here his eyes grew moist in spite of him, and his voice faltered), "may the devil take me and lash me to death with the tuft of his tail if I leave off laughing and singing; and anybody who pities me, I tell him to his face, is an a.s.s. Good heavens! the apostles, and Diogenes, and Epictetus, and Socrates, had seldom a whole coat to their backs--never such a thing as a s.h.i.+rt--and shall a creature such as I let a hair of him turn grey for such a reason, in miserable PROVINCIALISTIC times such as these?"

Right, my Firmian! Have a proper contempt for the narrow heart-sacs of the big clothes-moths about you--the human furniture-boring worms. And ye, poor devils, who chance to be reading me--whether ye be sitting in colleges or in offices, or even in parsonage-houses, who perhaps haven't got a hat without a hole in it to put on your heads, most certainly haven't got a black one--rise above the effeminate surroundings of your times to the grand Greek and Roman days, wherein it was thought no disgrace to a n.o.ble human creature to have neither clothes nor temple, like the statue of Hercules; take heed only that your soul shares not the poverty of your outward circ.u.mstances; lift your faces to heaven with pride--a sickly faint northern Aurora is veiling it, but the eternal stars are breaking through the thin blood-red storm!

It was but a few weeks now to the St. Andrew's Day shooting-match, which was Lenette's consolation in all her troubles, and to which all her wishes were directed; however, there came one day on which she was something worse than melancholy--inconsolable.

This was Michaelmas: on that day the press was to have followed Lenette's Salzburg emigrants, the napkins, as their lady superior; but n.o.body in all the town would have anything to do with it. The sole anchor of refuge was one Jew, because there was no species of animal (in the shape of articles of merchandise) which did not flee to his Noah's ark of a shop. Unfortunately, however, the day when the napkin-press applied to him was a Jewish feast-day, which he kept more strictly than ever he did his word. He said he would see about it to-morrow.

Permit me, if you please, to take this opportunity of making a few remarks of importance. Is it not a piece of most culpable negligence on the part of the Government that, seeing the Jews are, as it were, farmers-general and metal-kings of the Christians in German states, the days of their feasts and fasts, and other times connected with their wors.h.i.+p, are not published and clearly made known for the benefit of those very numerous persons who wish to borrow of them, or have any business to transact with them? Those who suffer most from this omission are just the upper circles of society, persons of birth and rank, officials of high position; these are the persons who bring papers and want money on Feasts of Haman, Feasts of Esther, of the Destruction of the Temple, of the Rejoicing of the Law, and can't obtain any. Surely the Jewish festivals, with the hours at which they begin and end, ought to be given in every almanack--as they have been fortunately, for a considerable time, in those of Berlin and Bavaria--or in newspapers--or be proclaimed by the crier, and carefully taught in schools. The Jew, indeed, has no need of a calendar of _our_ festivals, since we are always ready to put off and postpone, if he likes, every Sunday of the year, though it were the first Sunday of it, the feast of the Jewish Circ.u.mcision; and consequently hereafter, when the universal monarchy of the Jews is actually established, he won't take the trouble to append a Christian calendar to his own Jewish calendars, as we now append the Jewish to our Christian. The necessity, however, of inculcating in our schools a better and more exact acquaintance with the seasons of the Jewish festivals, and with their religious observances in general, will not be so fully manifest until hereafter, when the Jews shall have elevated Germany to the proud position of being their Land of Promise, leaving us to make our crusade, and our return to the Asiatic land of promise, if we feel disposed--to a holy sepulchre, and a sacred Calvary.

And yet _I_ think (to close this digression by another) that hereafter, when we become the Christian numerators of Jewish denominators, we should be wrong to set out, as modern crusaders, for the holy land, as to which the Jews themselves trouble their heads but little. It is certain that they will treat us with a far wider measure of the spirit of tolerance than we, unfortunately, have extended to them; but their genius for commerce, which they have hitherto been so much reproached with, will be found to prove itself a guardian angel for us poor Christians, and to take us under its tutelage, inasmuch as we are so indispensably necessary to them as purchasers and consumers of the unprepared hindquarters of the cattle (for it is only the fore-quarters which they may eat, unless the veins are all taken out). Who else but Christians can take the place of the beasts of burden--as no animal may be degraded by working on the "Schabbes"[48] (Sabbath)--and perform the necessary draught and other labour? and to whom are they to entrust the performance of menial and manual employments, like the ancient republicans, but to us, their n.o.bler slaves and helots, whom they will, therefore, be sure to treat with more consideration than they have heretofore treated us when we have omitted to pay our promissory notes as they became due.

I return to our poor's advocate, and record that on Michaelmas Day he could get no money, and consequently no Michaelmas goose. Lenette's grief at the absence of the goose of her ecclesiastical communion we must all share. Women, who care less about eating and drinking than the most ascetic philosophers--caring, indeed, more about the latter themselves than about the former--are at the same time not to be controlled if they have to go without certain _chronological_ articles of diet. Their natural liking for burgherly festivities brings it about that they would rather go without the appointed hymns and the gospel of the day than without b.u.t.ter-cakes at Christmas, cheesecakes at Easter, the goose at Michaelmas; their stomachs require a particular cover for each festival, like Catholic altars. So that the canonical dish is a kind of secondary sacrament, which, like the primary one, they take, not for the palate's sake, but "by reason of the ordinance." Antoninus and Epictetus could provide Siebenkaes with no efficient subst.i.tute for the goose, with which to console the weeping Lenette, who said, "We really _are_ Christians, whatever you may say, and belong to the Lutheran Church; and every Lutheran has a goose on his table to-day--I'm sure my poor dear father and mother always had. As for you, _you_ believe in nothing." Whether he believed in anything or not, however, he slipped off, though it was the afternoon of the Jewish feast-day, to the Jew, who kept a nice pen of geese, with livers both fat and lean, serving as a post-stable for country friends of his own religion. When he went into his place he pulled a duodecimo Hebrew Bible out of his pocket and put it down on the table, with the words, "It was a great pleasure to him to meet with a keen, diligent, student of the law; to such a man it would be a real satisfaction to make a present of his Bible, without asking a halfpenny for it; as it was, an unpointed edition (that is to say, one without vowels), he couldn't read it himself, especially as even if it had _had_ points, he couldn't have managed it. This napkin-press of mine, here"--he said, producing it from under his coat-tails "I should be very glad if you would allow me to leave with you, because I find it a good deal in my way at home; I don't quite know what to do with it. You see, I have particular reasons for being anxious to get hold of a goose out of your pen; I don't mind if it's as thin as a whipping-post. _If you like_, you may _call_ it giving it to me in charity on a holy day of this sort, for all I care; it'll make no difference to _me_. If I should ever come and take away the press again, it'll be an easy matter, and it'll be time enough, to go into the transaction afresh."

It was thus that, in order to secure his wife the free exercise of her religious observances, he _brought in_ this goose of controversy, which _seemed_ to have some polemical bearing, as well as to be connected with distinctive doctrines of faith; and next day these two Doctor Martin Lutherists ate up the Schmalkaldian article (and, indeed, _another_ Schmalkaldian article, a _commercial_ one--cold iron, namely--has often been employed in defence of the articles of theology). Thus was the capitol of the Lutheran religion saved, in an easy manner, by the bird, which was roasted (so to speak) at the fire of an _auto-da-fe_.

But on this particular morning up came the wigmaker, an individual whom he was delighted to see generally, though _not_ to-day, for on the day before, Michaelmas, the quarter's house rent was due, as we may remember. The _Friseur_ presented himself as a sort of mute bill "at sight;" yet he was polite enough not to _ask_ for anything. He merely mentioned, in a casual manner, that "there was going to be an auction of a variety of things on the Monday before St. Andrew's Day, and in case the advocate might care to get together a few things for it, he thought he would give him notice of it, as he held a life appointment from the Houses of a.s.sembly as auction-crier."

He was scarcely down stairs before Lenette gave deep, but not loud, expression to her woes, saying he had "dunned them now, and that the whole house must know all about their disreputable style of housekeeping: had he not talked about furniture?" It was incomprehensible how the poor woman could have fancied anybody had been in the dark about it before! Poor people are always the first to nose out poverty. At the same time Firmian had been ashamed to tell the _Friseur_ that he had been obliged to appoint himself auctioneer of his own furniture. Here he perceived that he blushed for his poverty more before one person, and before the poor, than he did before a whole town, and before the rich; and he flew into a furious indignation with these execrable _eructations_ of human vanity in his n.o.blest parts.

The path from hence to St. Andrew's Day, all bordered with nothing but thistles as it is, cannot possibly seem longer, even to the reader, than it did to my hero, who, moreover, had to take hold of the thistles and pull them up with his own hands. The garden of his life kept getting more and more like a _jardin Anglais_, where only p.r.i.c.kly and barren trees, but no fruit-trees, were to be found.

Every night, when he opened the latch of his bed-railings, he would say, with great enjoyment, to his Lenette, "Only twenty (or nineteen, or eighteen, or seventeen) days now to the shooting-match." But the hairdresser and auction-crier had played the deuce and all with Lenette, though the evenings were long and dark and splendidly convenient for needy borrowers on deposit, veiling and hiding the naked, abashed, misery of the poor; she was ashamed the people in the house should know, and afraid to meet them. Firmian, who was astonished equally at the inexhaustible resources of his brain and of his house, and who kept saying to himself, "Do you know, I'm really curious to see what I shall hit upon to-day again, and how I shall manage to get out of _this_ difficulty now--" Firmian, a day or two after the Michaelmas dinner, got his eye upon two more good articles of furniture--a long cask-siphon and a rocking-horse (a relic of his childhood). "We haven't a cask, and we haven't a baby," he said. But his wife implored him, for heaven's sake, "not to put her to this shame. The horse and the siphon"

(she said) "are things that would stick out of the basket so terribly, or out from under one's ap.r.o.n, and in the moonlight everybody would see them."

And yet _something_ must go! Firmian said, in an odd cutting, yet sorrowful way, "It must be so! Fate, like Pritzel,[49] is beating on the bottom of the drum, and the oats are jumping on the top of it; we have got to eat off the drum."

"Anything," she said, faint and beaten, "except things that stick out so." She searched about, opened the top drawer of the cupboard, and took out a faded wreath of artificial flowers: she said, "Rather take this!" and neither smiled nor wept! _He_ had often looked at it; but as he had sent it to her himself last New Year's Day, the day of their betrothal, and because it was so romantically beautiful (a white rose, two red rosebuds, and a border of forget-me-nots) every fibre of that tender heart of his would have stood out against parting with this pretty relic--this memorial of better, happier, days. The patient, resigned way in which she made the sacrifice of these poor old flowers tore his heart in two. "Lenette!" he said, moved beyond expression--"why, you know, these are our betrothal flowers!"

"Well, who's to be any the wiser," she said, quite cheerfully and quite coolly. "You see they're not so _big_ as other things are."

"Have you forgotten, then quite," he stammered, "what I told you these flowers meant?"

"Let me see," the said, more coldly still, and proud of the goodness of her memory, "the forget-me-nots mean that I'm not to forget you, and that you won't forget me--the buds mean happiness--no, no, the buds mean happiness that's not quite all come yet--and the white rose--I don't recollect now _what_ the white rose means----"

"It means pain" (he said, overwhelmed with emotion), "and innocence, and sorrow, and a poor white face." He clasped her in his arms, as the tears came to his eyes, and cried, "Oh! poor darling! poor darling!

What can I do? It's all beyond me! I should like to give you everything the world contains, and I have nothing----"

He ceased suddenly, for while his arms were round her, she had shut up the drawer of the cupboard, and was looking at him with calm, clear, gentle eyes, not the trace of a tear in them. She resumed her pet.i.tion in the old tone saying, "I may keep the siphon and the horse, mayn't I?

We shall get more money for the flowers." What he said was, "Lenette!

Oh, darling Lenette," over and over again, each time more tenderly.

"But why not?" she asked, more gently each time, for she didn't understand him in the least. "I had sooner p.a.w.n the coat off my back,"

was his answer. But as she now got the alarming idea into her head that what he was driving at was the calico gown, and as _this_ put her into a great state, and as she immediately began to inveigh warmly against all pledging of large articles; and as he clearly perceived that her previous coldness had been thoroughly genuine, and not a.s.sumed, he knew, alas! the very worst, a grief which no sweet drops of philosophy could avail to alleviate, namely--she either loved him no longer, or, she had never really loved him at all.

The sinews of his arms were now fairly cut in two, the sinews of his arms which had till now kept misfortune at bay. In the prostration of this his (spiritual) putrid fever he could say nothing but--"Whatever you please, dear; it's all the same to me now."

Upon that, she went out delighted, and quickly, to old Sabel, but came back again immediately. This pleased him; sorrow having gnawed deeper into his heart during the three moments she was gone, he could follow up the bitter speech with these quiet words: "Put up your marriage wreath along with the other flowers, there'll be a little more weight, and a little more money for it; though it is nothing like such pretty work as my flowers."

"My marriage wreath?" cried Lenette, colouring with anger, while two bitter tears burst from her eyes. "No, that I positively _shall_ NOT let go, it shall be put with me into my coffin, as my poor dear mother's was. Did you not take it up in your hand from the table on my wedding-day, when I had taken it off to have my hair powdered, and say you thought quite as much of it as you did of the marriage ceremony itself, if not more? (I noticed what you said very carefully, and remember it quite distinctly). No, no, I am your wife, at all events, and I shall never let that wreath go as long as _I_ live."

His emotion now took a new bent, one more in harmony with hers, but he masked this behind the question, "What made you come back in such a hurry?" It was that old Sabel had just been in at the bookbinder's, it seemed, and Herr von Meyern had been there too. That young gentleman was in the habit of getting off his horse and dropping in, partly to see what new books the ladies were having bound at the bookbinder's, and in what sort of pretty bindings, partly to stick up his leg with its riding boot upon the cobbler's bench and get him to st.i.tch a top tighter, asking about all sorts of things during the process.

The world--(which expression can only mean the collection of female tongue-threshers of empty straw belonging to Kuhschnappel)--may undoubtedly conclude, if it be so minded, the Venner to be a regular Henry the Fowler with respect to more women than one in the house, the latter being a feminine _Voliere_ to him; but I want proofs of this.

Lenette, however, didn't trouble herself about any proofs, but piously fled out of the way of Rosa the birdcatcher.

I further relate (doing so, moreover, without any very marked blush for the mutability of the human heart) that at this point Firmian's compressed thoracic cavity grew several inches wider, so as to give admission to a considerable modic.u.m of happiness, for no other reason but that Lenette had kept such a tight grasp of her marriage-wreath, and had endured the Venner for so short a time. "She is faithful, at all events, although she may be rather cool; in fact, I don't really believe she _is_ a bit cool, either, after all." So that he was quite pleased that she should have her way (which was _his_ also) about keeping the wedding-wreath in the house and in her heart. Besides which, without contending further about the betrothal-wreath, he let her have that _other_ way of hers, though less willingly--this being a proceeding which hurt _his_ feelings only, not hers. His old flower keepsake was accordingly deposited in the hands of an obliging lady who rejoiced in the t.i.tle of "Appraiser," on the solemn understanding that it was to be redeemed with the very first dollar which should drop from the bird-pole on St. Andrew's Day.

The blood-money of these silken flowers was so parcelled out as to be made available by way of stepping-stones in the muddy path leading to the Sunday before the shooting-match. This Sunday (the 27th November, 1785) was to be followed by the Monday for which the auction had been announced; on the Wednesday he (and I hope all of us with him) would be in his place in front of the bird-pole.

It is true, however, that on the Sunday he had to ford a stream swollen to a considerable extent by rainy weather; we will go through it after him, but I give due notice that, in the middle, it is pretty deep.