Part 24

It was the new swallow-tail. Merciful heavens, how it looked! During his _siesta_ on the door-steps he had sat upon the cream-filled candies he had in his pocket, and the mixture of chocolate, sugar, and fruit had formed into a sticky crust on the tails of his coat which was truly horrible to behold.

The bass violinist jumped out of bed at a single bound, and examined the luckless coat, which in the very flower of its youth had been called upon to endure such hardships.

“When my old woman sees that, there’ll be a row,” he muttered, passing his hand desperately through his bristling locks. He seized a brush and began to belabour the swallow-tail with an amount of energy such as he had never before displayed; but although his perseverance was rewarded by the disappearance of some of the smaller stains, the large blurs which had been caused by the crushed chocolate-drops would yield to no amount of brushing, the less so as they were still moist, and by rubbing acquired a more formidable appearance.

Meanwhile he heard his wife beginning to stir in her room, and poor terrified Schnorps, who at times quaked in his shoes before his fair spouse, puzzled his head to find some remedy for his trouble. Suddenly it occurred to him that years ago he had bought a bottle of benzine which he knew must be somewhere in his room.

He found a dozen bottles on top of the wardrobe, but how was he to know which was the one he wanted? He rummaged until he discovered one at the sight of which the certainty dawned within his dizzy brain that this was it. He spread out the unfortunate coat upon the table, poured a generous supply of the liquid supposed to be benzine upon it, and was about to rub it in with his handkerchief when a horrible sight appeared before him.

Wherever a drop of the fluid had fallen, the cloth turned red; and before the perplexed violinist could find an explanation for this remarkable metamorphosis, there appeared upon the coat an infinite number of large and small holes which sealed its doom for now and eternity.

It so happened that instead of benzine, Schnorps had laid hold of a bottle of sulphuric acid, which he had once used to clean the screws of his instrument.

When he realised what had happened, he certainly expected to go mad, and he weakly fell back in his chair, gazing fixedly upon his murdered swallow-tail. His head whirled--the new coat--his wife--the 15 thalers--the intendant--sulphuric acid--all was swallowed up in one wild eddy, and it was some time before he regained any self-possession.

Ye saints! it would never do to have his wife get hold of this! The first thing to do was to remove the article in question. Hastily he dressed himself, slipped on his felt slippers, hid the dress-coat beneath his dressing-gown, and stealthily crept upstairs, where he hid it, with many misgivings, in the utmost depths of the old wardrobe.

It was high time, for when he came back his better-half appeared upon the scene. Never had she inspired him with such terror as at this moment, and yet never since the days of their honeymoon had he bidden her good-morning as tenderly as he did to-day. She too was unusually amiable, a fact which only weighed the more upon his guilty conscience.

“Well, did you have a pleasant evening?” she asked.

“Oh yes, very nice--yes--quite nice!” he replied, in an embarrassed tone of voice.

“Oh, indeed!” she said, glancing about her as if she were looking for something, which caused poor Schnorps to tremble again.

“What are you looking for, dear?”

She gazed at him in surprise. Dear? He had only called her so once before, and that was when he asked her if she would have him.

“Nothing--that is--where’s your new coat?”

“The coat,” he answered, shaking in his shoes; “what do you want it for?”

“I should like to put it away,” she said very gently.

“You needn’t do that. I put it where it belongs.”

“Where it belongs?” she asked in great excitement.

“Why yes,” replied Schnorps; “upstairs in the wardrobe.”

“Ah, so,” she remarked, greatly relieved--“in the wardrobe! Yes, yes! Well, come and have your breakfast, Gottlieb; I am coming down in a minute.”

With these words she walked out, and now it was Schnorps’ turn to take a deep breath of relief.

He finished dressing and gradually became more tranquil--but it was the tranquillity that precedes a mighty storm.

The reader can readily imagine what followed.

After a pause of ten minutes, the shrill voice of Frau Sally rang through the house in a manner which made all the inmates start and tremble. Intending to return the borrowed coat to its rightful possessor, she had discovered the catastrophe, and raged like a lunatic.

At first Schnorps tried to defend himself and to comfort her, but when he began to understand all the details and complications of the hapless tale,--when he heard that he had ruined his neighbour’s coat, and that his own had long ago gone to perdition by means of his wife’s thoughtlessness and the old seamstress’s stupidity, then his wrath knew no bounds.

It was really too much. To have to pay for _two_ new dress-coats, and to have none! it was death to him, it would bring him to an untimely grave.

I will cast the mantle of Christian charity over the ensuing scene; but to this day the neighbours talk about the row that took place at the house of the Schnorpses after the general’s party.

_Fritz Brentano._

_THE MAN OF ORDER._

SO far as I am concerned, I must confess that I am not greatly interested either in painted Empresses, or in Cardinals, or in Pashas. My attention was riveted upon a lank, lean man, who must have been of unusual length when he was standing up, a man with white hair and a grey beard, round blue glasses before his eyes, beneath them a nose shaped like a potato, and a thin-lipped mouth drawn down at the corners in a sardonic smile. On his head there was a straw hat, the brim of which was of a width such as I had never before met with. This person sat upon a camp-stool, holding with his left hand a parasol lined with green over the afore-mentioned straw hat, and with his right hand guiding a small telescope screwed to a stick, which was fastened in the ground. There is no need to say that the ruler and guider of this telescope was reconnoitring the châlet across the way. What pleased me best was the fussiness, the apparatus, and the intensity of research which served the man’s curiosity. Surely this was the last of the Mohicans, one of the last original characters which are disappearing more and more out of the insipid level of our most modern mediocrity and uniformity. Who was the man? The dear old village of Ragaz has, by no means to the delight of everybody, grown into a “fashionable” resort, and one meets queer enough figures there every summer. But one like the man with a telescope and camp-stool, who had improvised an observatory on the spur of the moment, is an exotic plant, even in the Ragaz of to-day, and is well worth the trouble of observation.

What a pity, I thought, that Amadeus Hoffmann is no more among the living, or Edgar Poe. For either of them this fellow would have been a find.

Gradually the spectators dispersed, as neither the empress, who had been turned out of her empire, nor the cardinal, who had taken the hint that he was superfluous, condescended to show themselves, and as it was getting rather dull to gaze upon the red fez of the pasha, which was just visible above the railing of the verandah at the right. At last there were only two left: the telescope man, who continued his observations, and my worthy self observing the obdurate observer.

Finally, we both accomplished our purpose--he in seeing Madonna Eugenia and the Prince-Cardinal leave the house in quick succession, I in being a witness to the geometrical correctness with which the discoverer took down his observatory.

His motions were as measured as if he felt it incumbent upon him to keep time to the music of the spheres. His very manner of getting up showed a man who never puts one foot before the other without having incontestably assured himself where he was about to tread. When his long bony figure had drawn itself out to its full length his first object was to see clearly. For this purpose he cautiously removed his spectacles from his potato-shaped nose and wiped the large, round blue glasses emphatically with a piece of soft leather he produced out of his right vest-pocket. Having put back the piece of leather and the spectacles to their original place, he commenced the work of packing up, without haste and without delay. At first the telescope was unscrewed, reduced to its smallest dimensions, wiped on all sides with a large red silk handkerchief, and enclosed in a leather case, out of which he had carefully blown the dust, and which he now laid down gently upon the camp-stool. Hereupon he pulled out the stick which had served as a holder for his telescope until now, but which, upon nearer acquaintance, proved to be a perfect miracle, a very encyclopædia of a stick, so to say. It was evidently the pride and joy of its happy possessor. There could be no doubt of that from the satisfaction with which he touched the various springs of the complicated apparatus to display the countless metamorphoses which made the stick appear in turn as a common cane, as an umbrella, as a hoe, as a geological hammer, as a pocket-dagger, as a candle-snuffer, as a reading-desk, as a corkscrew, as a cup, as a chisel, as an inkstand, and as various other things. At last I should really not have been surprised if this Chinese puzzle had suddenly put on the garb of a speaker in Parliament.

The man could read open admiration, the most unselfish of human sympathy, from my countenance, and consequently felt impelled to say, as he pointed to his stick, having reduced it to its most primitive form: “It is the result of five years of theoretic studies and three years of practical constructive experiments. Ay, sir, with genius and order one can accomplish some pretty good things upon this disorderly earth.”

With that he leaned his miraculous staff carefully against a tree, buckled his telescope-case to a broad strap which hung across his right shoulder like a bandoleer, took up his camp-stool, devoted himself assiduously to reducing it to infinitesimal dimensions, and buckled the object, which in its present shape no person would ever have suspected of being a chair, to his strap. He then took up his encyclopædic stick, lightly pricked the ground with the point, and remarked, in the full consciousness of work well done: “All’s in order! Cardinal, Pasha, Ex-empress, all done up in good order.”

“Heilige Ordnung, segensreiche,” I began, quoting Schiller.

“Yes, sir; that is the wisest word ever the immortal Marbach sage pronounced. To say that, he must have been a man of order himself. And that he was so is proved to-day by his printed note-book. Unfortunately his collection of pill-bills has not yet been published. Nor Goethe’s Rhine-wine bills. Neither, I am sorry to say, have we as yet any printed proofs of the number of pipe-lighters which were twisted for Johann Heinrich Voss by his prudent housewife Ernestine. At the same time I must admit that gradually we are reducing our history of literature to something like order. There is nothing like a basis of scientific research. This alone will bring light into chaos. When we have once succeeded in establishing the relation of Goethe’s digestion to his poetic production, then we may set to work to discover the relation of the first part of _Faust_ to the second. Happily there are men living and working who know that the so-called minutiæ and bagatelles of life are in reality the most important things. I know a Leipsic professor who has brought together scientific proof to show that true literature is that which has been contemptuously dubbed waste-paper-basket-literature. I know another Alexandrian ditto of Leipsic who is to edit a work which his friends have signalled in advance as about to create a new epoch in literature, the title of which will be, ‘The Wash-bills of our Classic and Romantic Poets, being a Collection of Records and Documents for a Prospective Inductive Analytical History of German Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.’ I know a third Byzantian of Leipsic, who plans to bring the art of writing diplomatic history up to the acme of perfection. He has made the different kinds of snuff which Frederick the Great indulged in the objects of his preliminary investigations, in order to be able to furnish proof of the effect which each individual sort had upon the brain-nerves of said Frederick, and consequently upon the destiny of the human race. Do you see, sir, that is what I call a truly scientific spirit, a healthy realism that, a spirit of sterling accuracy! Three groans for anything like disorder! It is incredible what a mischief-maker disorder is in these days! There was a fellow the other day had the audacity to spell Goethe G-ö-t-h-e throughout an entire book! Would you believe it? Fortunately he got his fingers whacked right heartily with the academical rattan. ‘Göthe’! what do you think of it? Of course it is idiotic in German to write the diphthongs _ä_, _ö_, _ü_ as if they were _æ_, _œ_, _ue_--I’ll admit that, and I dare say Goethe himself would to-day save himself the trouble of putting in the extra _e_, but the orthography of G-o-e-t-h-e has once been established, and in the interest of order I would advise none but anarchists and rebels to be so godless as to leave out the _e_. The law of order is supreme, in great and in the greatest, in small and in the smallest.”

He stopped exhausted and gasped for breath. “On earth and in the heavens,” I added at haphazard.

“In the heavens? Not that I know of!” he said, drawing down the corners of his mouth. At the same time he touched his lifted cane, allowing the candle-snuffers to protrude for a moment, as if he were about to snuff out all anarchic stars in the firmament. “Do you know, in the so-called heavens there is not much order? The disorderly conduct of the comets should have been interfered with long ago. And then this transit of Venus, what do you say to that? Do you call that order? Venus should go in a decent and orderly manner above or below the sun, but certainly not straight before his Majesty’s very nose. Why, it is like snapping his fingers at the sun; it’s disrespectful, it’s opposed to all decorum, to all order.”

So saying he darted away from me--we had meanwhile reached the hotel “Hof Ragaz,” and entering the right wing had walked upstairs--and like a whirlwind he pounced upon a table standing in the hall, about which evidently there was something not in order.

“There it is again!” he muttered, slowly passing the tip of his fore-finger over the top of the table until upon the dusty surface the word “Dust” appeared in large type capitals.

“Hang those women!” grumbled the owner of the magic staff. “Will you believe me when I tell you that yesterday I wrote the same cry of warning upon the top of this table? All in vain!”

And setting down his elaborately-constructed cane with well-tempered force upon the first step of the staircase leading to the third storey, he continued: “Tell me, dear sir, did you ever in the course of your experience meet with a person of the feminine sex, be it child, girl, or matron, who could ever be prevailed upon by means of exhortation, kindness, severity, diplomacy, or force to fully shut the latch of a door, or turn down the bolt of a window-sash?”

“No, to tell the truth, I have never met a feminine person of that description.”

“I thought so!” he continued, with a triumphant smile. “Oh, if you knew all the trouble, all the untold trouble, I have taken for years to teach the women-folks at home to properly shut doors and windows. All in vain! But do you know how I punish the disorderly batch at home? Whenever I find a door left upon the latch, or a window with the bolt but half-turned, I at once lift the door or the sash out of the hinges and lean it against the wall. This has the desired effect of vexing the women and giving them additional work, especially in winter. There’s nothing like the law of order. But do you call that order, eh?”

And with a degree of moral indignation he pointed to a row of milk-stains upon the stairs. One of the chamber-maids, hastening up or down stairs with a breakfast-tray, had not kept an eye properly upon the milk-pitcher.

What did our fanatic in the cause of order? Something I had never seen before. He pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket, and step by step he marked a neat circle round about each drop of milk.

“You see,” he said, “this is the way I do at home to call the attention of the women to such offences against all sense of decency and modesty, which of course they never see and correct of their own accord. Oh, disorder, thy name is woman.”

_Johannes Scherr_.

_THE LUXURY OF GOING ABOUT INCOGNITO._

FOR six years the couple had lived in a very small town, in which each inhabitant could furnish a detailed biography of his neighbour, possessed an intimate knowledge of his daily _menu_, and knew just when the post delivered a package to him--the size and shape of which package being made the subject of conversation at the next coffee-party, where also unfailing conclusions were arrived at as to the contents and sender of the object in question. Judge Schwarz, being a person of distinction in town, naturally suffered more than others under the zealous observation of his neighbours, and was quite sure that he could not have a button sewed on his coat without having his friends mention the fact to each other and make their comments upon it;--ay, he went so far as to believe himself particularly favoured by good fortune if the local paper did not get hold of the important event and retail it to its readers the next morning in a sprightly editorial.

This consciousness had in the course of years reached such a stage in the judge’s mind as to become utterly unendurable; and as in certain individuals painful inner experiences seek to become personified in some external object, so all this small-town gossip, this puerile mutual observation and control, seemed to concentrate itself in the person of the Apothecary Lebermann, a good-natured but essentially prosy person, possessed of an insatiable curiosity, who was interested in the whole world, and wanted to know everything--on the other hand taking for granted that others had as lively a concern about him and the experiences of his daily life.

On the day on which our story begins the judge was returning from court in rather an irritable mood, and his face darkened perceptibly as he saw the apothecary coming to meet him.

While it was, as we have said, Herr Lebermann’s justifiable peculiarity to desire to know everything, and with a rare toughness of purpose to work upon his neighbour with queries until the other would fling the desired information at his head in a fit of uncontrollable indignation, the judge was the most uncommunicative of mortals. It was his intention that no one should know what he did, or where he bought his things, or with whom he kept up a correspondence--ay, even his Christian name was to him a matter of deep secrecy; in fact, a sharp altercation between him and his wife had once been brought about by no other cause than that she had failed to fully understand his feelings in this respect, and unadvisedly addressing him one day on the railroad with the harmless remark, “See the charming view, Karl!” had unmasked him before his fellow-travellers.

Here these two gentlemen, as unlike as possible in their peculiarities, met upon the street, and while the judge was as nimble as an eel in trying to escape the apothecary, the latter was equally assiduous in his efforts to detain him, and opened the conversation with the apparently unnecessary question, “Coming from court so early to-day, Herr Schwarz?”

“No!” replied the judge unkindly.

“No?” repeated Herr Lebermann, in a tone of surprise. “This is the way I generally see you come. Where have you been, then?”

Apparently the judge was deaf.

“Seems to me you generally come from court at this time of day,” persisted Herr Lebermann; “Ah, I see, you don’t care to tell me,” he added pleasantly, “but I know all about it just the same!”

“If you know it there’s no need of asking,” growled the judge.

“And now you’re on your way home,” remarked Herr Lebermann, with the blissful serenity of a man who has accomplished his purpose of knowing all about the aims and intents of other people. “I’ll walk along with you a bit. I am always out for a constitutional at this time of day!”

“That’s a wise thing to do!” remarked Herr Schwarz with fatal indifference.

“And when I get home I eat my sandwich,” the apothecary confidentially informed him; “only one, you know, so as not to take away my appetite for dinner! By the way, that reminds me--how does it agree with you to dine so much later?”

The judge gave him a scathing look. “How do you know that I dine later than usual?” he asked indignantly.

“You see, your cook is the sister of our maid, and she told her about it. You dine at half-past two, don’t you?”

“Sometimes,” cried the irritated judge, struggling to control his temper; “here we are at my house--good morning, Herr Lebermann!”

“One moment!” said the apothecary, taking possession of the judge’s button-hole while the latter was angrily seeking to escape; “there seems to be company at your house.”

“Why?” asked Schwarz, trembling with ire--he had fetched his sister-in-law from the station twelve hours ago, long after nightfall, and had hoped that the fact of her presence was as yet unknown.

“Well, I saw your maid buy _three_ little tarts at the pastry-cook’s this morning,” said the apothecary innocently; “she generally takes only two--so I thought, perhaps----”

The judge darted a glance of utter contempt at his companion.

“Why did you not take it for granted I might desire to eat _two_ tarts to-day?” he said with alarming politeness, and then walked into the house full of wrath.

Weighty decisions were ripening within him, and the result of his deliberation became apparent as he sat down to lunch with his ladies, and suddenly delivered himself of the astonishing words: “We’ll start for Berlin this evening!”

Helen dropped her fork and gazed at her husband with wide-open eyes. “This evening?”

“When I say this evening I don’t mean next year,” growled the paterfamilias. “That’s just like a woman! Here you’ve always been talking and begging to go and travel--to go and leave this miserable little place for awhile, and now when I offer to go, you raise objections!”

“My dear Karl!” began his wife soothingly, “I was only taken by surprise at your sudden resolve. What can have occurred to bring it about?”

“I’m tired of this small town gossip, and more especially of the apothecary!” said Karl, energetically. “Confound it--I can’t blow my nose but that Lebermann sends to inquire if I have a cold! I want to go and see what life is like in a large town, where I can go about _incognito_. I can just manage to get away over Sunday. We’ll take three round-trip tickets and go to Berlin this evening. Go and pack your things!”

He folded his napkin and got up. A low exclamation from Annchen interrupted him.

“_Three?_--shall I go too?”

There was such an unmistakable expression of rapture upon her charming face that a smile stole across the features of her growling brother-in-law.

“Well, I should think so,” he said; “did you suppose we would leave you at home?”