Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 31

The time had arrived when Siebenkaes had to pave the way, and give a colour to, his sham death, by a feigned sickness of some sort; but this voluntary bending over the grave, and drooping towards it, gave his conscience a pretext for trying to win back Lenette's embittered heart.

Thus it is that deceived, and deceiving, man always magnifies and elevates his false shows, his cheateries, and deceptions either into _less_ ones than they really are, or into beneficently intended ones.

The Greek and Roman lawgivers invented dreams and prophecies, which contained the ground-plans and elevations of their projects, as well as the building-conditions, and building-materials of them. For instance, Alcibiades lied forth a prophecy of the conquest of Sicily. Firmian imitated this process, with alterations suitable to the circ.u.mstances of his case. He often said, in Stiefel's presence (for Stiefel took a deep and tender interest in everything, and, consequently, so did _she_), that he should soon be going away for ever--that he should soon be playing in a game at hide-and-seek, and hide himself so effectually that no friendly eye should be able to find him again--that he would soon slip behind the bed-curtain of the coffin-pall, and vanish. He told them a dream (which, perhaps, was no invention). He said, "The Schulrath and Lenette were looking at a room in which a scythe was moving of its own accord;[82] then, in a while, Firmian's _clothes_ were walking about in the room, empty, without any _body_ in them. 'He must have _other_ clothes on,' they both said. Then all at once the churchyard pa.s.sed along the street, with a fresh grave in it, no gra.s.s on it as yet. But a voice cried, 'Seek him not there; it is over and past now.' And a second (softer) voice cried, Rest--rest--thou art worn and weary. And a third said, 'Weep not, if ye love him.' But a fourth cried out, in terrible tones, 'Jest--jest--all human life and death.'"

Firmian was the first to shed tears; his friend was the next, and his angry spouse wept, _with the latter_.

But now he looked with eager longing for the coming of Leibgeber, whose hand would lead him quicker and more pleasantly through the dark foreground, and the hot, reeking, sultry, breathless, fore_h.e.l.l_ of his artificial death. For he himself was now too feeble and too tender to pa.s.s through them alone.

And upon one particular, unusually lovely, August evening he was so, more than ever before. There played and rested on his face that glorified and celestial bliss of self-devotion--that tearless depth of emotion and smiling gentleness, which sometimes come to us when pain and sorrow are--_weary_ for the time, rather than over and past--something like the blue sky when the brightness of the rainbow falls in light athwart its radiant beauty. He resolved to bid good-bye, in solitude, that day to all the beautiful country which lay around the town.

The face of Nature was veiled (but not for his eyes, for his soul only), in a thin, soft mist, which went hovering before the breeze in ever-changing wreaths, like the tender vapouriness--not amounting to a shrouding--which Berghem's and Wouvermanns' pencils have cast upon their landscapes. As though to say farewell, he went and touched, and gazed upon, every leafy tree beneath whose branches he had been wont to read--each little darkling brooklet, purling on its way beneath its thickets of forest-roots, laved bare of earth by its ripples--each rocky crag, all green and sweet of scent with moss and flowers--each stair-way of rising hillocks which, in the days gone by, he had climbed to see the sun set (or gone down to watch his risings) many times instead of once--and every spot where wide creation had brought tears of rapture from his happy heart. But everywhere--amid the long harvest corn-ears, amid Creation's oft-repeated tale in Nature's brooding-oven with all its swarming life, in the seed-nursery of the ripe and endless garden--a hollow, broken voice cried out, in long-drawn tones which mingled with, and sounded clear above, the bright, rejoicing, trumpet-clang of Nature's 'Alexander's Feast,' "What are these dead men's bones that move about amid this life of mine, defiling all my blossoms?" And to him it seemed as if, from out the glory of the red West sky, a something sang to him, "Wandering skeleton! with strings of nerves clasped in thy bony hand, thou playest not on thyself. The breath of endless life is breathing on the aeolian harp, which answers back in music, and thou art played _upon_." But soon this mournful error fell away from him, and he thought thus: "I am both playing and answering back in music. I both _think_ and _am thought_. It is not the green bark that holds _my_ Dryad, my _spiritus rector_ (the soul). The latter holds the former. The life of the body depends as intimately on the life of the soul, as that of the latter on that of the former. Life and force are at work, with power, everywhere. The grave hillock and the mouldering body are each a _world_ of powers at work. We _change_ our stage, but do not _retire_ from it."

When he got home, he found the following letter from Leibgeber for him:--

"I am on _my_ way; set out on _yours_.--L."

CHAPTER XIX.

THE APPARITION--HOMECOMING OF THE STORMS IN AUGUST, OR THE LAST QUARREL--THE RAIMENT OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL.

One night, at about eleven o'clock, a tremendous blow was heard to strike the roof-tree, as if two or three hundredweights of Alps had come down upon it. Lenette went upstairs with Sophia to see whether it was the devil, or only a cat. They came back with wintry faces, the colour of flour, and as long as one's arm; and Sophia cried out, "Oh!

it's the Poor's Advocate (may the Lord have a care of him!) he's lying up yonder on the camp-bed, like a corpse." The _live_ Poor's Advocate, to whom this tale was being told, was sitting in his room. He said it could not be true, or _he_ would have heard the noise as well as the others. From this deafness of his, all the women at once inferred what the occurrence really portended--to wit, his death. The cobbler Fecht (who, by right of royal succession, was night-watchman regnant that night), glad of an opportunity of showing the pluck that was in him, armed himself with the watchman's spear-staff (his entire artillery-park), but, when n.o.body was looking, stuck a black leather hymn-book in his pocket--by way of a species of saintly host--in case it _should_ turn out that it _was_ the devil that was upstairs. On his way up he repeated a good many fragments of the Evening Service, which was more than could, perhaps, have been required of him on that evening when, as Archon of the Watch, his calling of the hours was, in fact, a species of _expanded_ Evening Prayer, distributed in small modic.u.ms about the streets. He was marching bravely up to the camp-bed, when, alas! _he too_ saw the white powdery face before him, and, behind the bed, a h.e.l.l-hound with eyes of fire, watching the corpse in a grim and ferocious fas.h.i.+on. He stood still instantaneously, as if petrified--like a watchman carved out of alabaster, _hard boiled_ (so to speak), in a perspiration of terror, with his weapon held out before him. He foresaw, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the moment he turned his back to go flying down the stairs, _the thing_ would clasp its arms about him from behind, saddle him, and ride him down. By the greatest good luck, a voice from downstairs here fell into his heart like a cordial or courage-water, and he heaved up his boar-spear with the view of striking _the thing_ dead, or, at all events, gauging the cubic contents of it. But when, at this juncture, the snowy-looking thing began to rise slowly up, as if growing--his head began to feel as if he had on a bonnet of pitch, and somebody were s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g this cap, and the hair inside it, tighter and tighter every moment; and he could not keep hold of his eel-spear because the top of it felt as heavy as if his biggest journeyman was hanging to it. So he let his sticking-iron go, and flew bravely from the topmost, three-ledger-lined octave of the stair, like a flash of lightning, down to the double-ba.s.s key or step.

When he got down, he swore, in presence of the master of the house and all the lodgers a.s.sembled, that he was going to do his watchman's duty without his halberd, for the ghost had got hold of that; and in fact, he quivered like an aspen-leaf and his blood ran cold in his veins, every time his eye so much as rested for a moment on the Advocate's face. Firmian was the only one of the company who had the courage to go upstairs for the weapon. When he got upstairs he found what he had expected to find, namely, his friend Leibgeber, who had whitened himself with the powder out of an old wig by way of gradually paving the way and preparing people's minds for Siebenkaes's artificial death.

They quietly embraced, and Henry said he would come upstairs, in an orthodox fas.h.i.+on, next day.

When Firmian returned to his room, he said there was nothing upstairs but an old wig; here was the swift-footed spearman's spear, and he counted here before him two timid hares of the female s.e.x and one of the male. But the entire conventicle knew as well as possible what all this _meant_. n.o.body, with as many brains as a turnip in his head, would give a halfpenny for Siebenkaes' life; and these ghost-seers thanked Heaven most devoutly that they _were_ thus frightened to death, since it was a proof that their own lives were in no immediate danger.

Lenette could not bring herself to sit up in bed all night, for fear she should see her husband's likeness.

When morning came, Henry mounted the stair (with his dog), in dusty boots. Siebenkaes felt as though his hat and his pockets must be full of flowers from the Bayreuth Eden; he was like a garden statue from the lost garden. To Lenette, just for this very reason, this palm-tree from Firmian's East India possessions at Bayreuth (we shall say nothing of Saufinder), was nothing but a p.r.i.c.kly holly-bush, and never less than now could she take any pleasure in such a gooseberry-bush, such a thistle-head--beautiful as if fresh from Hamilton's pencil.[83] I must admit, however (and I say it right out, without going about the bush), that his affection for Firmian made his mode of treating Lenette (who was in the wrong and in the right in about equal proportions) a little too reserved and cool. We never hate a woman so heartily as when she is torturing somebody who is very dear to us; just as, on the other hand, a woman is so grim to n.o.body as to the tormentor of her pet female friend.

The scene which I have now got to describe in a minute or two makes me feel, in the keenest degree, sensible of the depth of the chasm which lies between the novel-writer (who can skip annoying matters, and sugar up anything he wishes for himself, his hero, or his readers) and the mere biographer, or writer of actual history, like myself, who has to dish up everything in a strictly historical form, without asking whether it has got to be sugared or salted. If I formerly, then, excised and omitted the scene in question altogether, I was perhaps to blame: but there was nothing surprising in my doing so, seeing that in these days I preferred delighting my readers to instructing them, and thought more about pretty colouring than truthful drawing.

Leibgeber (and all belonging to him) had for some time been wholly unendurable in Lenette's eyes, chiefly for this reason (amongst others) that he, a man without anything in the shape of an official t.i.tle or appointment of any sort, should be on such very familiar and intimate terms with her husband--a man who had held the post of "Poor's Advocate" of Kuhschnappel for a considerable time. Also that, like her said husband (by him misled and perverted), he went about without a pigtail, so that people pointed at the pair of them, and cried, "Ey!

look at that nice couple!" or "_Par n.o.bile fratrum_." These sayings, and worse besides, Lenette could draw from the most authentic of all sources of history. Of course, it is true that, _now-a-days_, it requires about as much courage to _put on_ a tail as it then did to _take it off_. A canon of a cathedral does not, now-a-days (as he did in bygone times), find it inc.u.mbent on him to make himself a pigtail, and pleasant society by help of it; consequently he has not got to _cast_ it twice a year (as peac.o.c.ks do their tails) that he may legally earn his salary of two thousand florins by appearing in the choir at vespers with close-cropped hair; the latter he wears at the card-table now, us well as in the pulpit. In the few countries where the pigtail still obtains, it is more in the nature of a duty-pendulum and state-perpendicular than anything else; and long hair (which formed part of the royal insignia of the Frank kings) is a badge of servitude in the case of soldiers, no long as it worn tied up with a pigtail-ribbon, and not flying unbound and loose. The Frieslanders were long in the habit of taking hold of the pigtail when swearing an oath--calling this "the B[oe]del Oath;" and to this day in many countries the military or standard oath presupposes the existence of a queue. And as among the ancient Germans a pigtail carried on a pole represented a parish, of course a company or regiment (of which each soldier has his own tail at the back of his head) must be considered to represent a company-queue of patriotic union and of German nationality.

Lenette now made little secret of it to her husband (and Stiefel stood by her in the background), that she was very little pleased, on the whole, with Leibgeber and his on-goings. "My dear poor father" (she said, in Leibgeber's presence), "was copyist to the Council, but he was always just like other people in his dress, and everything else."

"Well, dear!" Siebenkaes answered, "as he was a copyist, of course he had always to _be_ copying, with pens, or coats, as the case might be.

But _my_ father loaded guns for princes, and did not trouble his head about what else might happen or not happen." Ere this, when opportunity had offered, she had held up and measured the copying clerk as against the gun-charger, distantly suggesting, as it were, that Siebenkaes had not had anything like so great and distinguished a father as she had, and, as a consequence, had not received the sort of superior education which teaches people manners, and how they ought to behave. This preposterous and ludicrous looking down upon his genealogical tree so annoyed him always that he often laughed at himself. At the same time, the little by-blow at Leibgeber did not surprise him so much as her remarkable _bodily_ repugnance and antipathy to him. Nothing would induce her to shake hands with him: "And I'm sure," she said, "if he were ever to _kiss_ me, it would be my death." With all his laborious urgency and questions as to the reason of this, he could get no answer out of her but that she "would tell him after Leibgeber was gone."

Unfortunately, by that time _he_ would be gone himself, too, and in his coffin, _i. e_. on the road to Vaduz.

And even this extraordinary obstinacy (as of an unyielding bonnet-block) he could endure at a time when one of his eyes warmed itself at his friend, while the other cooled itself at his grave.

At last something was superadded; and as I am sure that n.o.body can narrate it more faithfully than I, I beg that I may be believed. It was in the evening, before Leibgeber went back to his hotel (the Lizard, if I remember), and the deep black, half-orb of a thunder-cloud had gathered silently in the West, shrouding the sun, and mounting higher, and hanging more and more threateningly over the expectant world.

The two friends were talking of what a glorious thing a thunderstorm was, and of the espousals of heaven and earth--the highest with the lowest--of the "descent of heaven to earth" (as Leibgeber put it); and Siebenkaes remarked how, properly speaking, it was only one's "Fantasy"

which pictured the storm, and "Fantasy" only which brought about the union of the highest and the lowest. I wish he had followed the advice of Campe and Kolbe, and used the home-grown word "Fancy" (or "Imagination"), instead of the foreign word "Fantasy;" for that word-purist Lenette p.r.i.c.ked up her ears as soon as ever it pa.s.sed his lips. She who had nothing in her breast but jealousy, and nothing in her head but the "Fantaisie" (at Bayreuth), put down to the score of the latter every word that the two men were saying in eulogy of "Fantasy" in man; for instance, how _it_ (namely, "the Markgrave's Fantaisie," thought Lenette) blessed us through the beauty of its sublime creations--how, but for the enjoyment of its lovelinesses, a Kuhschnappel could not be borne with for a moment (of course, because he thinks of that Nathalie of his, thought she); how it clothes and adorns the bare spots of life with its beautiful flowers "two or three silk forget-me-nots," said Lenette to herself; and how it (the Bayreuth Fantaisie) gilds, not only the pills of life, but also the nuts, nay, the Paris apples of beauty themselves.

Heavens! what double meanings in every corner, and on every side! For how triumphantly Siebenkaes could have refuted the error of confounding Fantasy with Fantaisie, if he had merely shown how little of the poetic Fantasy there was in the Fantaisie at Bayreuth, and how (in the latter) French "taste" had trimmed, behung, and begarlanded the lovely, romantic hills and valleys of Nature's inventing with rhetoric edifices of flowers, periods, and ant.i.thesis; and that what Leibgeber said about Fantasy's gilding the Paris apples of life, applied in quite another sense to the Bayreuth Fantaisie, because there the French Christmas silver-foil would have to be sc.r.a.ped off from Nature's apples before they could be bitten.

Scarce was Leibgeber gone out from the house, and off into the storm (which, according to his custom, he enjoyed in the open air), when _Lenette's_ storm broke, ere the atmospherical one did. "There, you see, I heard with my very own ears," she said, "how that Unbeliever and Kill-joy there goes about coupling and marrying you in the Fantaisie at Bayreuth; and _this_ is the fellow an honest woman is expected to shake hands with, or touch with the tip of one of her fingers." She let a few more peals of thunder roll--but it is my duty to the poor woman (turned into a fermenting vat by the addition to her of such a quant.i.ty of mash) not to give too accurate a record of all her frothings.

Meantime, all the acid matter in her husband began to effervesce in its turn. To find fault with his friend to his face, no matter _what_ misunderstanding this might arise from (and he did not trouble himself to ask what the misunderstanding was, inasmuch as _none_ could be any excuse)--was, in his eyes, a sin against the Holy Ghost of his friends.h.i.+p. Accordingly, he thundered most roundly in reply. It is some excuse for the husband, and for the wife, too, for that matter, that the storm in the air fanned the fuel in his head into a brighter blaze, so that he strode up and down the room like a man demented, and instantly, and on the spot, blew to the four winds of heaven his resolve not to be put out with anything Lenette might do till after he was dead; for he would not, and could not, suffer that "his last friend in life and death should be wrongfully accused by the inheritress of his name, either in his sayings or in his doings." It will give some idea of the violence of his volcanic eruptions (all of which, for his sake, I mean to pa.s.s by in silence), if I say that, vieing in loudness of thundering with the sky itself, he shouted--

"Such a man as _he_!" and with the words, "_you_ are a female head, too, curse you!" administered a ringing box on the ear to a bonnet-block, which had a grand hat, with feathers upon it. As this head was Lenette's favourite Sultana of all the blocks--one which she often fondled--nothing was to be _expected_ but an outbreak as violent as if he had given the box to her very self, just as Siebenkaes stormed at the insult to _his_ friend. Nothing came, however, but a gentle shower of bitter tears. "Oh! good heavens! don't you hear what a terrible storm?" was all she said. "Thunder here, thunder there!" cried Siebenkaes (who, once set rolling down from the lofty peak where he had been reposing, went on, according to both the moral and the physical laws of falling bodies, increasing in velocity and momentum, until he reached the bottom). "I wish the lightning would shatter all the rag-tag and bob-tail in Kuhschnappel that dare to say a syllable against my Henry."

As the storm grew fiercer she spoke more and more gently, saying, "Ah!

gracious, what a peal! Oh. please repent! Suppose it were to strike you in your sin?" "My Henry is out in it," he said. "Oh that the lightning would strike us both dead, him and me, with the same flas.h.!.+ I should be spared all this miserable business of dying, and we should always be together then."

His wife had never seen him so angry, or so contemptuous of life and religion, and consequently, could only expect the lightning to fall on the Merbitzer's house, and strike both him and her dead, by way of an "example."

And at this moment, a flash of such brilliance illumined the heavens, and such a shattering peal of thunder followed close upon it, that, stretching out her hand to him, she said, "I will do anything and everything you wish me to do; only, for Heaven's sake, be a G.o.d-fearing man again! I will even give Leibgeber my hand; yes, and a kiss too, if I must--no matter whether he has washed his face after the dog's licking it, or not--and I shall neither listen, nor mind, when you say what a delightful, beautiful place the silvery, flowery Bayreuth Fantaisie is."

Heavens! how this lightning-flash illumined the depths of two of Lenette's labyrinths for him, letting him see her innocent confounding of Fantasy and Fantaisie (already noticed), and _his own_ confounding of her strong, personal, idiosyncratic repugnance to (what she considered) uncleanness, with real dislike. The latter was on this wise. Inasmuch as her feminine proclivity for excessive cleanness and beautifying and polis.h.i.+ng were more akin to the feline race than to the canine (which cares little about either, or about the feline race, for that matter), Leibgeber's hand, after Saufinder's tongue had touched it, was to her as a thumbscrew, and Esau's hand all Chiragra. Her sense of cleanliness shrunk from touching it; and as for Henry's lips! though ten days had elapsed since the dog had jumped up to them with his, they would have been considered the most fearful bugbears, and scarecrows, which abhorrence could set up for her. Even time itself was no lipsalve in her eyes.[84]

This time, however, the discovery of the error did not bring about peace (as it used to do in former times), but only a renewal of the decree of separation. Tears came to his eyes, indeed, and he gave her his hand, saying, "Forgive me! It is the last time! As the proverb says, 'The storms come home in August.'" But he could neither offer nor receive a kiss of reconciliation. This, his latest falling away from his warm resolves to be patient, irrevocably proclaimed _how wide_ their inner separation had become. What is the use of _seeing_ one's errors, when the _causes_ of them are still in force? What is the good of clipping a ripple or two away from the ocean, when there are still clouds and billows? The crime against the bonnet-block was what rankled most in his breast; it became a Gorgon's head to him, continually threatening and avenging.

He sought his friend with a renewal of affection, for he had suffered for him; and with new eagerness, that he might arrange the place for his death with him.

"Of what dangerous malady do you think you would prefer to give up the ghost," said Henry, commencing the medical consultation. "Would inflammation of the lungs be to your taste? or inflammation of the bowels, or of the uvula; or would phrenitis be more in your line, or bronchitis; or would you prefer a quinsy, a colic, the devil and his grandmother? We have got all the requisite _miasmata_ and _materia epidemica_ ready to our hands; and when we throw in the month of August--harvest-month of reapers and doctors--by way of poison-powder, you certainly never can get over it all." Firmian answered: "You are a sort of master-beggar with all kinds of ailments for sale;[85]

blindness, palsy, and the rest. But for my part, I am for apoplexy, that _volti subito_, that extra post of death. I have had more than my share of legal prolixities, verbosities, and delays of _all_ sorts."

"Well," said Leibgeber, "apoplexy probably _is_ the _summarissimum_ of death. At the same time, we must be guided by the best pathological works, and make up our minds for _three_ attacks of it. We can't go by Nature here, we must be guided by the laws of medicine; and by them, death has to forward a set of _three_ bills of exchange before one of them is accepted and honoured in the next world. He knocks three times with his auctioneer's hammer. I know too well, the doctors are not the men to listen to reason on this point; you will have to make up your mind to the three apoplectic strokes." "But what the deuce!" said Siebenkaes, with comic warmth, "If apoplexy gives me _two_ pretty powerful strokes, what more can a doctor desire? The only thing is, I can't be attacked for the next three or four days, because I must wait for a cheaper coffin-builder." The right of coffin-building (it should perhaps be explained) goes its round in a migratory manner among the carpenters, and one has got to pay these s.h.i.+pwrights of our last ark whatever they demand, because the property we leave behind us at death has to be given over as plunder by our executors and administrators, to the undertaker, (that excise officer of death) like the palace of a dead doge or pope.

"There may be another advantage in this short reprieve, too," said Leibgeber. "I have an old collection of family sermons here, which I bought for somewhere about half the amount of a police-court fine. I do not know anywhere else but in this work where such impressive sermons are delivered--it is more especially in the _binding_ that they are preached. The binding is wood, you perceive, and there is a live preacher in there, preaching as finely as any preacher that can be found in a pulpit." This preacher in the wooden boards of the old book in question, was the beetle which goes by the name of the death-watch, wood-borer, or _Ptinus pertinax_, because when he is touched he keeps up the appearance of a sham death, torture him as you will--and because the little blows he strikes, which are nothing but knocks at his sweetheart's door, are supposed to be Death's knocks at ours. For which reason any piece of furniture in which he was wont to knock used to be thought a valuable article of commerce, or heirloom.

Leibgeber added that, as there was nothing he so detested as a man who tried to outwit G.o.d and the Devil (from fear of death) by a sudden repentance, he was fond of hiding this sermon-book amongst the furniture of a h.e.l.l-fearing individual of this description, so as to give him a good sound terrifying with the beetle's funeral sermons (although the insect, for his part, was, in fact, thinking solely of mundane matters during his preaching--like many other preachers). "So, could I not put the sermon-book, with its funeral preacher, in amongst _your_ books, that your wife might hear him, and think of death--of yours, that is to say--and so get more used to the idea of it?"

"No, no," said Firmian, "she shall not suffer so much for me before her time. She has suffered quite enough already."

"Just as you please," said Henry; "but my beetle and you would have gone together capitally. You are going to simulate death, just as the _Ptinus pertinax_ does."

For the rest, he was delighted that everything had worked together so well, and that it was just a year since he had stamped upon Blaise's gla.s.s periwig, and insulted, or blackguarded, him. Because (as we have seen) libels of this sort are not actionable after the lapse of a year, except libels by a _critic_--which (like the Rector in Ragusa) only reign for a month--that is to say, the time during which the journal in which they appear circulates in the reading society. And a book--which may be said to hold the rank of dictator in the realm of letters--cannot reign, with all its influence, more than a Roman dictator, namely, six months--that is to say, from its birth-fair to its death-fair--and, like Grub Street scribblers, it dies either in spring or in autumn.

They went back into a new-dressed, freshly-arranged room. Lenette did what she could to paint the cracks of her housekeeping over with flowers (like the flaws in porcelain), and always opened pieces of music in which that particular string (of an article of furniture), which chanced to be broken, did not require to be touched. Firmian, on this occasion, sacrificed a greater number of the good and entertaining ideas (which struck him) than usual to her efforts to place Spanish screens between the company and the steppes and fallow-fields of her poverty; and more than Henry did even then. All women--even those without brains--are the sharpest and most delicately-observant of augurs and _clairvoyante_ prophetesses concerning matters which closely concern themselves. Lenette was an instance. Stiefel was there in the evening--a good deal of argument was going on, and Stiefel openly declared that he (with Salvian and other able theologians) was of opinion that the children of Israel (whose garments never wore into the minutest hole during all the forty years they pa.s.sed in the wilderness) always continued of exactly the same _size_ (so as always to fit their clothes exactly) with the exception of children, in whose cases the clothes, which had been cut to fit them out of the wardrobes of the dead, grew with their bodies in length and breadth. "In this way," he added, "all the difficulties of the great miracle are got over easily, by means of lesser accessory-miracles."

Leibgeber answered (with sparkling eyes), "I knew _that_ while I was yet in my mother's womb. There was not a hole in all the hosts of Israel, except those which they brought with them out of Egypt--and _these_ never got any bigger. Even suppose anybody made a hole in his cheek, or in his coat, when he was mourning--these holes st.i.tched themselves together in a trice, of their own accord. What a shameful and deplorable thing it is, though, that the host of Israel should have been the first, and the last, army whose uniform was a sort of delightful over-body, which grew with the soul it enveloped--and where the frock-coat developed into an electoral mantle, and from a _Microvestis_ to a _Macrovestis_! I see that eating was cloth manufacturing (in the wilderness), manna was English wool, and the stomach the loom. An Israelite who fed himself up to the proper pitch was, by so doing, yielding the produce of the land, and of the wilderness. If I had been in the recruiting-service in those days, I should simply have hung the recruit's jackets on to the recruit's measure. But how go matters in _our_ wilderness here--which leads to Egypt, not to the promised land? In _our_ regiments, the _privates_ grow every year, but the coats do not. Nay, the uniforms are made for dry seasons only, and for lean men--in wet years the clothes contract like hygrometers, and perspiration steals more cloth than the tailor does, or even the contractor. A commanding officer who should expect his uniforms to stretch--who should reckon upon a _Periphrasis_ of them--going by the example, not only of the Israelites, but likewise of the clothes-moths, and the snails (who do not expand to suit their sh.e.l.ls, but whose sh.e.l.ls expand to suit _them_)--this commanding officer, I say, would go out of his mind--for his men would be fighting in the condition of the athletes of old--and the men themselves would be in a nice frame of mind on the subject."

This innocuous sermon (wholly addressed to the account of Stiefel's piece of exegetic absurdity) Lenette supposed was directed against her wardrobe. She was like the Germans in general, who search after some _special_ satiric kernel hidden in every rocket and firework serpent of humour. Wherefore Siebenkaes begged him to pardon this poor wife of his (over whose heart so many a sharp sorrow besides was strewn) the inevitable and invincible ignorance of her exegesis--or rather, to spare her the knowledge of it altogether.

At length a Kuhschnappel bath-keeper departed this life, and fell under the plane of the costly carpenter. "I have not a minute to waste over my apoplexy now," said Firmian, in Latin; "who is to be my warrant that n.o.body shall die before I do, and so the cheap carpenter slip through my fingers?" So it was arranged that he should be taken ill the following evening.

CHAPTER XX.