Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 3

Leibgeber jumped up at once, and said in an altered and joyful voice, "So I am, my dearest guardian--it was all done to try you--I hope you will pardon my friend his share in the little mystification."

"All very well," answered Blasius, more inflatedly, "but your own changes of ground must show you the necessity for a proper legal investigation."

This was more than Siebenkaes could endure, he squeezed his friend by the hand, as much as to say, "Pray be patient," and inquired in a voice which an unwonted feeling of hatred rendered faint, "Did you never write to me when I was in Leipzig?"--"If you are my ward, I certainly did, many times; if you are not, you have got hold of my letters in some other way."

Then Siebenkaes asked, more faintly still, "Have you no recollection at all of a letter in which you a.s.sured me there was not the slightest risk involved in my proposed change of name, none whatever?"

"This is really quite ludicrous," answered Blaise, "in that case there could be no question about the matter!"

Here Leibgeber clasped the father of the city with his two fingers as if they had been iron rivets, grasped his shoulders as one does the pommel of a saddle at mounting, clamped him firmly into his chair, and thundered out, "You never wrote anything of the kind, did you? you smooth-tongued, grey-headed old scoundrel! Stop your grunting, or I'll throttle you! never wrote the letter, eh? keep quiet--if you lift a finger, my dog will tear your windpipe out. Answer me quietly you say you never received any letter on the subject, do you?"

"I had rather say nothing," whispered Blasius, "evidence given under coercion is valueless."

Here Siebenkaes drew his friend away from the Heimlicher, but Leibgeber said to the dog, "Mordax! hooy, Sau.," took the gla.s.s periwig from the head of the servant of the state, broke off the princ.i.p.al curls of it, and said to Siebenkaes (Saufinder lay ready to spring), "Screw him down yourself, if the dog is not to do it, that he may listen to me. I want to say one or two pretty things to him--don't let him say 'Pap!'--Herr Heimlicher von Blasius, I have not the slightest intention of making use of libellous or abusive language to you, or of spouting an improvised pasquinade; I merely tell you, that you are an old rascal, a robber of orphans, a varnished villain, and everything else of the kind--for instance, a Polish bear, whose footmarks are just like a human being's.[16] The epithets which I here make use of, such as scoundrel--Judas--gallows-bird" (at each word he struck the gla.s.s turban like a cymbal against his other hand), "skunk, leech, horse-leech nominal definitions such as these are not abuse, and do not const.i.tute libel, firstly because, according to 'L. -- de injur.,' the grossest abuse may be uttered in jest, and I am in jest here--and we may always make use of abusive language in maintaining our own rights--see 'Leyser.'[17] Indeed, according to Quistorp's 'Penal Code,'

we may accuse a person of the gravest crimes without _animus injurandi_, provided that he has not been already tried and punished for them. And has your honesty ever been put on its trial and punished, you cheating old grey-headed vagabond? I suppose you are like the Heimlicher in Freyburg[18]--rather a different sort of man to you, it's to be hoped--and have half-a-dozen years or so, during which no one can lay hold of you--but I've got hold of you to-day, hypocrite! Mordax!"

The dog looked up at this word of command.

"Let him go, now," Siebenkaes begged, compa.s.sionating the prostrate sinner.

"In a moment; but don't you put me in a fury, please," said Leibgeber, letting fall the plucked wig, standing on it, and taking out his scissors and black paper, "I want to be quite calm while I clip out a likeness of the padded countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap of a creature, because I shall take it away with me as a _gage d'amour_. I want to carry this _ecce homunculus_ about with me half over the world, and say to everybody, 'Hit it, bang away at it well; blessed is he who doth not depart this life till he hath thrashed Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel; I would have done it myself if I had not been far too strong.'

"I shan't be able," he went on, turning to Siebenkaes, and finis.h.i.+ng a good portrait, "to give that sneak and sharper there an account by word of mouth of my success, for a whole year to come; but by that time the one or two little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied to him will be covered by the statute of limitations, and we shall be as good friends as ever again."

Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkaes to stay by Saufinder--whom he had const.i.tuted into a corps of observation by a motion of his finger--as he was obliged to leave the room for a moment. On the last occasion of his being in Blaise's grand drawing-room (where he displayed his magnificence before the Kuhschnappel world, great and small), he had noticed the paper-hangings there, and an exceedingly ingenious stove, in the form of the G.o.ddess of justice, Themis, who does, indeed, singe as frequently as she merely warms. And this time he had brought with him a camel's-hair pencil, and a bottle of an ink made from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little muriatic acid dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which is visible at first and disappears afterwards, the sympathetic ink here spoken of is invisible at first, and only comes out a green colour on the paper when it is warmed. Leibgeber now wrote with his camel's-hair pencil and this ink the following invisible notification on the paper which was closest to the stove, or Themis.

"The G.o.ddess of Justice hereby protests in presence of this a.s.sembly against being thus set up in effigy, and warmed and cooled (if not absolutely hanged), at the pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who is long since condemned at her inner secret tribunal.

"THEMIS."

Leibgeber came away, leaving the silent seed of this Priestley's green composition behind him on the wall with the pleasing certainty that next winter, some evening when the drawing-room was nicely warmed by the G.o.ddess for a party, the whole dormant green crop would all of a sudden shoot l.u.s.tily forth.

So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder keeping up his appointed official contemplation, and his friend maintaining his observation of the dog. They then all took a most polite leave, and even begged the Heimlicher not to come into the street with them, as it mightn't be so easy to keep Mordax from a bite or so there.

When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, "Don't pull such a long face about it--I shall keep flying backwards and forwards to you, of course. Come through the gate with me--I must get across the frontier of this country; let's run, and get on to royal territory before six minutes are over our heads."

When they had pa.s.sed the gate, that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and s.h.i.+ning above the dark-green earth, and the ocean-calm of nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it), up above the world and down beneath it; the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail-pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching darkness.

The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends' hearts.

Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves lower, "G.o.d be thanked!

this writes a verse of peace round the storm bell within! the night seems to me to have m.u.f.fled my alarum drum with her black robe, and softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to find myself growing a little sad after all that anger and shouting."

"If it only hadn't all been on my account, old Henry," said Siebenkaes, "your humorous fury at that barefaced old sinner."

"Though you are not so apt to shy your satire into people's faces as I am," said Leibgeber, "you would have been in a greater rage if you had been in my place. One can bear injustice to one's self--particularly when one has as good a temper as I have--but not to a friend. And unluckily you are the martyr to my name to-day, and eyewitness and blood-witness into the bargain. Besides, I should tell you that, as a general rule, when once I am ridden by the devil of anger--or rather when 1 have got on to _his_ back--I always spur the brute nearly to death, till he falls down, so that I mayn't have to mount him again for the next three months. However, I have poured _you_ out a nice basin of black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon in your hand."

Siebenkaes had been dreading for some time that he would say something about the 1200 gulden, those baptismal dues of his re-baptism, the discount of his name. He therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly as his heart, torn by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him, "My wife and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a fortress of Konigstein, and we can sow and reap there too. Heaven only grant that we may have many a hard nut to crack; they give a delicious flavour to the table-wine of our stale, flat, everyday life. I shall bring my action to-morrow."

They both concealed their emotion at the approach of the moment of parting under the cloak of comic speeches. These two counterparts came to a column which had been erected by the Princess of ---- on the spot where, on her return from England, she had met her sister coming from the Alps; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite opposite significance to-night, Leibgeber said, "Now, right about face--march!

Your wife is getting anxious--it's past eleven o'clock. There, you see, we have reached your boundary mark, your frontier fortress, the gallows. I am off at once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my crop--other people's faces, to wit, and sometimes my own fool's face into the bargain. I shall most likely come and see you again, just for the fun of the thing, in a year and a day, when the verbal libels are pretty well out of date. By the by." he added, hastily, "promise me on your word of honour to do me one little favour."

Siebenkaes instantly did so. "Don't send my deposit after me[19]--a plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you well, dearest old man," he blurted huskily out, and after a hurried kiss, ran quickly down the little hill with an air of a.s.sumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered and forsaken, looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable.

When he got to the bottom of the hillock, the runner stopped, bent his head low towards the ground, and--loosened his garters.

"Couldn't you have done that up here?" cried Siebenkaes, and went down to him, and said, "We'll go as far as the gallows hill together." The sand-bath and reverberating furnace of a n.o.ble anger made all their emotions warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons and spices. As the _first_ parting had caused their eyes to overflow, they had nothing more to keep in control but voice and language.

"Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?" said Siebenkaes. "If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the master of the house, as the superst.i.tion runs," said Leibgeber, "I shall live to all eternity, for my menagerie[20] of beasts is all alive and kicking." At last they stopped at the market house, beside the place of execution. "Just up to the top," said Siebenkaes, "no further."

When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy life--and when Siebenkaes looked down upon the green spotted stone altar where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought, in that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning tears which women who had killed their children[21] (and were themselves put to death by the state and their lovers) had let fall upon this their last and briefest rack of torture here in this field of blood--and as he gazed from this cloudbank of life out over the broad earth with the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over all its streams--he took his friend's hand, and, looking to the free starry heaven, said, "The mists of our life on earth _must_ be resolved into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky way part into suns. Henry, don't you yet believe in the soul's immortality?"--"It will _not_ do yet, I can _not_," Leibgeber replied. "Blasius, now, hardly deserves to live _once_, let alone twice or several times. I sometimes can't help feeling as if a little piece of the other world had been _painted on_ to this, just to finish it off and make it complete, as I've sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in fainter colours towards the edge of a picture, to make the princ.i.p.al subject stand out from the frame, and to give it unity of effect. But at this moment, human beings strike me as being like those crabs which priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling about churchyards, telling the people they were the souls of the departed.

Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal beings, crawl about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at last."

His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid conviction, "We do _not_ go out! Farewell a thousand times. We shall meet where there is no parting. By my soul! we do _not_ go out. Farewell, farewell."

And so they parted. Henry pa.s.sed slowly and with drooping arms through the footpaths between the stubble-fields, raising neither hand nor eye, that he might give no sign of sorrow. But a deep grief fell on Siebenkaes, for men who rarely shed tears shed all the more when they do weep. So he went to his house and laid his weary melting heart to rest on his wife's untroubled breast (there was not even a dream stirring it). But far on into the forecourt of the world of dreams did the thought of the days in store for Lenette attend him--and of his friend's night journey under the stars, which he would be looking up at without any hope of ever being nearer to them; and it was chiefly for his friend that his tears flowed fast.

Oh ye two friends--thou who art out in the darkness there, and thou who art here at home! But wherefore should I be continually harping back upon the old emotion which you have once more awakened in me--the same which in old days used to penetrate and refresh me so when I read as a lad about the friends.h.i.+p of a Swift, an Arbuthnott and a Pope in their letters? Many another heart must have been fired and aroused as mine was at the contemplation of the touching, calm affection which the hearts of these men felt for one another; cold, sharp, and cutting to the outer world, in the inner land which was common to them they could work and beat for each other; like lofty palm trees, presenting long sharp spines towards the common world below them, but at their summits full of the precious palm-wine of strong friends.h.i.+p.

So, in their lesser degree, 1 think we may find something of a similar kind to like and to admire in our two friends, Leibgeber and Siebenkaes.

We need not inquire very closely into the causes which brought about their friends.h.i.+p; for it is hate, not love, which needs to be explained and accounted for. The sources whence everything that is good wells forth from this universe upwards to G.o.d himself, are veiled by a night all thick with stars; but the stars are very far away.

These two men, while as yet in the fresh, green springtime of university life, at once saw straight through each other's b.r.e.a.s.t.s into each other's hearts, and they attracted each other with their opposite poles. What chiefly delighted Siebenkaes was Leibgeber's firmness and power, and even his capability of anger, as well as his flights and laughter over every kind of sham grandeur, sham fine feeling, sham scholars.h.i.+p. Like the condor, he laid the eggs (of his act or of his pregnant saying) in no nest, but on the bare rock, preferring to live without a name, and consequently always taking some other than his own.

On which account the poor's advocate used to tell him, ten times over, the two following anecdotes, just to enjoy his irritation at them.

The first was, that a German professor in Dorpat, who was delivering a eulogistic address on the subject of the reigning grand duke Alexander, suddenly stopped in the middle of it, and gazed for a long time in silence on a bust of that potentate, saying at length, "The speechless heart has spoken."

The second was that Klopstock sent finely got-up copies of his 'Messiah' to schoolporters, with the request that the most deserving among them might scatter spring-flowers on the grave of his own old teacher, Stubel, while softly p.r.o.nouncing his (Klopstock's) name. To which, if Leibgeber had anything to adduce on the subject, Siebenkaes would go on to add that the poet had called up four new porters to give them three readings apiece from his 'Messiah,' rewarding each with a gold medal provided by a friend. After telling him this he would look to see Leibgeber's foaming and stamping at a person's thus wors.h.i.+pping himself as a species of reliquary full of old fingers and bones.

What Leibgeber, on the other hand,--more like the Morlacks, who, as Towinson and Forlis tell us, though they have but one word to express both revenge and sanctification (osveta), do yet have their friends betrothed to them with a blessing at the altar--chiefly delighted in and loved about his satirical foster-brother was the diamond brooch which in his case pinned together poetry, kindly temper, and a stoicism which scorned this world's absurdities. And lastly, each of them daily enjoyed the gratification of knowing that the other understood him completely and wonderfully, whether he were in jest or in earnest. But it is not every friend who meets with another of this stamp.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II.

GOVERNMENT OF THE IMPERIAL MARKET BOROUGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.

I have omitted, all through two chapters, to state that the free imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (of which, it appears, there is a namesake in the Erzgebirge country) is the thirty-second of the Swabian towns which takes its seat on Swabia's town-bench of thirty-one towns.

Swabia may look upon herself as being a hotbed and forcing-house of imperial towns, these colonies, or hostelries, of the G.o.ddess of freedom in Germany, whom persons of position wors.h.i.+p as their household G.o.ddess; and according to whose "election of grace" it is that poor sinners are called to salvation. I must now, in this place, accede to the universally expressed desire for an accurate sketch map of the Kuhschnappel Government; though few readers, save people such as Nikolai, Schlaezer and the like, can be expected to form an idea of the difficulty I have experienced, and the sum I have had to expend in postage, before getting hold of information somewhat more accurate than that which is generally current on the subject of Kuhschnappel. Indeed, imperial towns, like Swiss towns, always plaster over and stop up the combs where their honey is stored, as though their const.i.tutions were stolen silver plate with the owner's name still un.o.bliterated--or as though the little bits of towns and territories were fortresses (which indeed they are as against their own inhabitants more than against their enemies), of which strangers are not allowed to take sketches.

The const.i.tution of our noteworthy borough of Kuhschnappel seems to have been the original rough draft or sketch which Bern (a place at no great distance) has copied hers from, only with the pantograph on a larger scale. For Bern, like Kuhschnappel, has her Upper House, or supreme council, which decides upon peace and war, and has the power of life and death just as in Kuhschnappel, and consists of chief magistrates, treasurers, Venners, Heimlichers and counsellors, only that there are more of them in Bern than in Kuhschnappel. Further, Bern has her Lower House, consisting of presidents, deputies and pensioners, subsidiary to the Upper. The two Chambers of Appeal, those of Woods and Forests, Game Laws, and Reform, the Meat Tax and other commissions are clearly but large text copies of the Kuhschnappel outlines.

To speak the truth, however, I have drawn this comparison between these two places solely with the view of being comprehensible (perhaps at the same time agreeable) to the Swiss generally, and particularly to the people of Bern. For in reality, Kuhschnappel rejoices in a much more perfect and aristocratic const.i.tution than Bern, such as was to be found in a measure in Ulm and Nurnberg, though the stormy weather of the revolution has rather kept them back than brought them forward. A short time since, Nurnberg and Ulm were as fortunate as Kuhschnappel is now, inasmuch as they were governed, not by the common, working cla.s.ses, but by people of family only, so that no mere citizen could meddle with the matter in the least degree either in person or by deputy. Now, unfortunately, it appears to be the case in both towns that the cask of the state has had to be fresh tapped just about an inch or so above the thick dregs of the common herd, because what came from the tap _nearer the top_ proved sour. However, it is impossible for me to go on until I have cleared out of the way a much too prevalent error respecting large towns.

The Behemoths and Condors among towns--Petersburg, London, Vienna--might, if they chose, establish universal equality of liberty and liberty of equality; very few statisticians have been struck by this idea, although it is so very clear. For a capital which it takes two hours and a quarter to go round is, as it were, an aetna-crater of equivalent circ.u.mference for an entire country, and benefits the neighbourhood of it as the volcano does, not only by what it _ejects_ (its eruptive matter), but by what it swallows up. It clears the country in the first place of villages, and next of country towns--which are primarily the outhouses and office-buildings of capital cities--inasmuch as it pushes itself outwards in all directions year by year, and gets grown over, fringed round, and walled about with the villages. London, we know, has converted the neighbouring villages into streets of itself; but in the lapse of centuries the long, constantly extending arms of all great towns must enfold not only the villages, but also the country towns, converting them into suburbs.

Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows which lie between the giant city and the villages get covered over like a river-bed with a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots in the windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the agricultural population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no state allows within its boundaries; and, prevention being better than cure, the state will have to clear this agricultural population out of the way before it sinks into this condition of idling, either by means of letters inhibitory directed against the increase of population, or by extermination, or by enn.o.bling them into soldiery and domestics. In a village which has undergone this process of being morticed into a town like a lump of rubble,--or converted into a stave of the great tun of Heidelberg in this manner--any country people that might be still to the fore, would be as ludicrous as useless; the coral cells of the villages must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of becoming reefs or atolls of a town.

When this is done, the hardest step towards equality has, no doubt, been taken; the people of the country towns, a cla.s.s the most hostile of all cla.s.ses, at heart, to equality--have next to be attacked and, if possible, exterminated by the great town; this, however, is more a matter of time than of good management. At the same time, what one or two residency-towns have accomplished in this direction, is a good beginning at all events. Could we attain to our ideal, however--could we live to see the day when the two cla.s.ses who are the most formidable opponents of equality--the peasants, and the people of the smaller towns--should have disappeared; and when not only the agricultural races but the lower n.o.bility, the small proprietors, should be extinct--ah! then the world would be in the blissful enjoyment of an equality of a n.o.bler sort than that which obtained in France, where it was merely a _plebeian_ one. There would be an absolute equality it pure n.o.bility and collective humanity could rejoice in the possession of _one_ patent of n.o.bility, and of real authentic _ancestors_. In Paris, the revolution wrote (as people did in the most ancient times) without capital letters; but if my golden age came to pa.s.s, the writing would be as it was in somewhat _later_ times than those just alluded to, _all_ capital letters, not, as at present, with capitals sticking up like steeples among quant.i.ties of small letters. But though such a lofty style, such an enn.o.blement of humanity as this may be nothing but a beautiful dream, and though we must be content with the minor consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle cla.s.ses restricted to a single street, as is now the case with the Jews; even that would be a clear gain to the intellectual portion of mankind in the eyes of anyone who considers what an accomplished, capable set of people the higher n.o.bility are.

It is upon the smaller towns, however, that we can more confidently rely than upon the great residency-towns, for aid in bringing about the n.o.bilisation of the collective human race, and this brings me back to Kuhschnappel. People really seem to forget that it is too much to expect that the four square versts or so which a residency-town occupies shall be able to dominate, swallow up, and convert into portions of itself, more than a thousand square miles of the surrounding country (just as the boa-constrictor swallows animals bigger than itself). London has not much above 600,000 inhabitants; what a miserably small force compared to the 5 millions of all England, which that city has to contend with, and cut off the wings, and supplies of, alone and una.s.sisted--to say nothing of Scotland and Ireland! This, however, does not apply to provincial towns; here the number of villages, villagers, and burghers which have to be coerced, starved, and put to rout, are in a fair proportion to the size of the town, the numbers of the aristocracy or governing cla.s.ses, who have to execute the task, and work the smoothing plane which is to level the surface of humanity. Here there is little difficulty in _precipitating_ the citizens (as if they were a kind of coa.r.s.e dregs swimming in the clear fluid of n.o.bility); and when this precipitation is not successfully accomplished, it is the aristocracy themselves who are to blame, in that they often show mercy in the wrong place, and look upon the Burgher-bank as a gra.s.sbank, the gra.s.s of which is, it is true, grown only to be sat upon and pressed down, but is kept always watered, in order that it may not wither from being so constantly sat upon. If there were to be nothing left but the n.o.blest cla.s.ses, the citizenic cinnamon-trees would be completely barked, by means of taxes and levyings of contributions--(which none but plebeian authors term "flaying" and "pulling the hide over the ears"),--and, the bark being off, the trees of course wither and die. At the same time, this process of aristocratization costs men. But in my opinion it would be cheaply purchased by the few thousands of people it would cost, seeing that the Americans, the Swiss, and the Dutch paid (so to speak) whole millions of men "cash down," on the battlefield, as the price of a freedom of a much more restricted kind. The fault which is sometimes found with modern battle pictures, namely that they are overcrowded with people, can rarely be found with modern countries. We should rather notice the clever manner in which many German states have, by _energetic_ treatment, _determined_ their population, as morbid matter, in a _downward_ direction (as good physicians are wont to do), namely, down to the United States of America, which are situated straight _below_ them.