Part 3

To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to _ourselves_ sweet thoughts without _ennui_, why shall not another be suffered to awaken them within us still oftener? The good lady pictured to her children how gentle and tender, how delicate and womanly, her dear son was (for Victor always called her his mother),--how he relied upon her in all things,--how he was always sporting without ever teasing anybody, and always loved all human beings, even the greatest strangers,--and how she could open before him better than to any matron her oppressed heart, and how fondly he wept with her. A court-apothecary, with a heart of pumice-stone,--_Zeusel_ he writes himself,--once even regarded this melting of the warmest soul as a case of _lachrymal fistula_, because he thought that no eyes could weep but diseased ones.... Dear reader, do you not feel now just as the biographer does, who can hardly wait for the entrance of this good Victor into the parsonage and the biography? Will you not offer to him the friendly hand, and say: "Welcome, unknown one! Lo, thy soft heart opens ours here on the very threshold! O thou man with eyes full of tears, dost thou, then, feel with us, that in a life whose banks are lined with affrighted ones clinging to the _twigs_, and despairing ones clinging to the _leaves_, that, in such a life, where not only follies, but woes also hedge us round, man must keep a wet eye for red ones, an aching heart for every bleeding one, and a gentle hand that shall, in sad sympathy, hold the thick, heavy chalice of sorrow for the poor man who must drain it, and shall slowly raise it to his lips? And if thou art such a one, then speak and laugh as thou wilt, for no one should laugh at men but he who right heartily loves them."

In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,--a fragrant leaf-skeleton,--sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that he would--for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way--remove the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because his daughter was coming. "Esteemed Mr. Seebass!" answered the rat-controvertist, with emotion, "carry back my submissive compliments, and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assaf[oe]tida and stuff the parsonage with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay, it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent rosewood-oil."

He fetched, therefore, a great sack of hops and dragged it up under the roof, in order there, in a literal sense, to lead the rats by the nose into the bag. Rats are notoriously as dead-set upon rosewood-oil as men are on anointing-oil, which, so soon as only six drops fall on the skull, makes one a king or bishop on the spot, which I see by the fact, that in the first case a golden hoop shoots round the hair, and in the second it actually falls off. The militia, that is, the Chaplain, sprinkled the sack with some oil, and laid it with its mouth stretched and fastened wide open to receive the enemy;--he himself stood in the background, concealed behind a similarly oiled stove-screen. His plan was, to start out when the beasts were once in the sack, and carry off the whole crew like bees in a swarming-bag. The few chamber-hunters who read me must have frequently used this kind of trap. But they may not have stumbled over it as the Chaplain did, who was caught with the fragrant stove-screen between his legs, and who lay unable to stir, while the enemy ran off. In such a situation a man is refreshed by the trill of a curse. So after the Chaplain had struck a few such trills and thrills, had betaken himself to the family, and said to them, _en passant_: If there were in the temperate zone a fellow who from his swaddling-clothes rode a mourning-steed, who was lodged in a second mouse-tower of Hatto, and in an Amsterdam house of correction, and in limbo,--if there were any such correctioner, in regard to whom the only wonder was how he continued alive,--he alone was the one, and no devil beside him ... after he had relieved himself of this, he left the rats in peace,--and was himself very much so.

In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and Country, 1785, recommends this course."

His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin, and see what _he_ is doing therein. Nothing,--but out of it he is at this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of Æolus, full of pent-up storms--(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his velvet-knee cleaner than he)--could not possibly lie longer on his pillow,--he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender emotions and dreams;--its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill, on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times. He cursed and thundered at all his passions--to be sure _with_ passion--which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in friendship. "Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian," he said, and twitched his nag round, "I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder--" Ashamed at his self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.

His longing for his returning friend he expressed in the stable by plucking out some hairs from the top of the horse's head, drawing the cue-hair like the fourth string of a fiddle, and twisting off the bit of the key to the fodder-chest. Only a man who languishes for a friend _exactly_ as for a loved woman deserves either. But there are men who go out of the world without ever having been troubled or concerned at the fact that no one in it had loved them. He who knows nothing higher than the _commercial treaty_ of self-interest, the _social contract_ of civility, or even than the _boundary_ and _barter agreement_ of love, such a one,--but I wish he had never ordered me from the publisher!--whose withered heart knows nothing of the _Unitas Fratrum_ of men joined in friendship, of the intertwining of their nobler vascular system, and of their sworn confederacy in strife and sorrow--But I see not why I should talk so long of this ninny, as he knows not how to enter into the least feeling of Flamin's yearning, who desired a loving, appreciative eye, because his faults and his virtues stood out in equal relief; for with other men, either at least the spots balance the rays, or the rays the spots.

Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too, and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the coucher.

The 1st of May began, like man and human history, with a mist. Spring, the Raphael of the northern earth, stood already out of doors and covered all apartments of our Vatican with his pictures. I love a mist whenever it glides off like a veil from the face of a fair day, and whenever it is created, not by the "four _faculties_," but by greater ones. When (as this one did on the 1st of May) it webs-over summits and streams like a drag-net,--when the clouds, pressed down by their weight, crawl along on our lawns and through wet bushes,--when in one quarter it soils the heavens with a pitchy vapor and lines the wood with a heavy, unclean fog-bank, while in the other, wiped off from the moist sapphire of the sky, it gilds with minute drops the flowers, and when this blue splendor and that dirty night pass over close by each other and exchange places,--who does not feel, then, as if he saw lands and nations lying before him, on which poisonous and mephitic mists move round in groups, now coming and now going? And when, further, this white night encompasses my melancholy eye with flying streams of vapor, with floating, fluttering particles of perfume-dust, then do I sadly see in the vapor human life pictured, with its two great clouds on our rising and setting, with its seemingly light space around us, and its blue opening over our heads....

The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys nothing about the whole thing except--May-butter, and from his mouth, amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but--spittle, and both, because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his throat and stomach.

As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes, but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,--that is to say, with porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add, that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new _yellow_ balls,[14] unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the muskets,--I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circumstance that the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,--unless I leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's voice from behind the army cried, "Halt!"

Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;--with a round hat, with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and attacked him with intent to destroy,--less from hatred than from love. It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms, face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a second,--the first utterances were their two names.

The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck, around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love; he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long therein, and made all good again.

With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,--for Spring had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,--the two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom, laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.

The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal. Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army, "to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely, to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces, because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."

He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: "It is much better to make presents in articles than in money, because gratitude for the latter is spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons, gratitude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves."

The only bad thing about it will be, that the Prince of Flachsenfingen and his war-ministry will at last interfere in the matter of the trousers, since neither can possibly allow regular troops to have more _on_ their bodies than _in_ them, namely, anything at all. In our days it should at last enter the heads of the stupidest commissary of equipment and provisioning,--but in fact there are discreet ones,--first, that, of two soldiers, the hungry is always to be preferred to the well-fed one, because it is already known, by the case of whole peoples, that the less they have, so much the braver they are; secondly, that just as, in Blotzheim,[15] of two equally virtuous youths, the poorer is crowned, even so the poor subject is preferred to the rich, though they may be equally courageous, and is alone enlisted, because the poor devil is better acquainted with hunger and frost; and, thirdly, that now, when on all the steps of the throne, as on walls, cannon are placed (as the sun receives its brilliancy from thousands of vomiting volcanoes), and, as in a well-conditioned state, the rod of up-shooting manhood is forced into ramrods,--the people advantageously fall into two classes of paupers,--the protected and their protectors; and, fourthly, the Devil take him who grumbles!

When my three beloved _personæ_ at length arrived in front of the parsonage, the whole disbanded army had secretly marched after them and demanded the breeches. But something still greater had travelled after them from Flachsenfingen,--the blind lord. Hardly had the Britoness smiled-in her young guest, not politely, but delightedly, hardly had Agatha, for the first time, seriously, hid herself behind her mother, and old Appel behind the pots and kettles, when Eymann, who was in the midst of his cleaning, made a long leap from the window at which four Englanders--not foreigners, but horses--came trotting up. Now for the first time the question occurred to every one, where the oculist was; and Sebastian had hardly time to reply, that there was no one else to come, for he himself was to operate on his father. Into the short interval which the father occupied in passing from the carriage-door to the room-door the son had to squeeze in the fib, or rather the entreaty _for_ the fib, which the family was to put upon his Lordship, that his son had not yet arrived, but only the oculist, whom a recent apoplectic attack had deprived of his speech.

I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father, Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings, who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.

When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion and yearning might pass from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile, the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and lied to him _quantum satis_; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a _dolum bonum_, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help out their honest man. "I very much wish," said the father, as the son entered, "that the operation might at once proceed before my son arrives." The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst the embarrassed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber. Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were equally serious. Flamin's noble mother drew near with her heart seized at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes, which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy beside his dumb father, but he passionately smothered every drop that might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling. Only the veiled Briton,--a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely, like a high mountain over a torrid zone,--he offered to the filial hand a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to the grave or no farther than this minute....

Fate said, Let there be light, and there was. The invisible destiny took a son's anxious hand and opened therewith an eye, which was worthy of a finer night than this starless one. Victor pressed the mature lens of the cataract--that smoke-ball[16] and cloud cast over creation--down into the bottom of the pupil; and so, when an atom had been sunk three lines deep, a man possessed immensity again, and a father his son. Oppressed mortal! thou that art at once a _son_ and a _slave_ of the dust, how slight is the thought, the moment, the drop of blood or tear-drop, that is required to overflow thy wide brain, thy wide heart! And if a couple of blood-globules can become, now thy Montgolfier's globes and now thy Belidor's percussion-balls,[17] ah, how little earth it takes to exalt or to crush thee!

"Victor! thou? Is it thou who hast cured me, my son?" said the delivered man, taking the hand that was still armed with the surgical instrument. "Lay it aside and bandage me again! I rejoice that I saw thee first of all." The son could not stir for emotion. "Bandage me, the light is painful! _Was_ it thou? speak!" He bandaged in silence the open eye amidst the glad tears of his own. But when the bandage hid from that noble stoical soul everything, his blushing and his weeping, then was it impossible for the happy son to contain himself any longer;--he gave himself up to his heart, and clung with his tears upon the veiled countenance to which he had given back brighter days; and when he felt on his trembling breast the _quicker_ beatings of his father's heart, and the _tighter_ embrace of his gratitude,--then was the best child the happiest,--and all rejoiced at his joy, and congratulated the son more than the father....

Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this History dead.

For now it is actually gone,--not a word, not a syllable of it do I know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;--the Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better things to do and to lay open now, namely,

THE OVERTURE AND SECRET INSTRUCTIONS.

Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning; but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,--in fact, at the Equator, for I reside on the island of _St. John's_, which lies, as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely surrounded by the principality of _Scheerau_. For nothing can be less unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book (the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times), than my latest home product, the _Invisible Lodge_,--a work, the reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his children, and even on his vassals, (it would not expressly contradict the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an island,--namely, the isle of _St. John's_, on which I now live and write.

The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title, Dog-post-days.