Part 2
Doctor Fenk diverted and dissipated by whimsical consolation the solitary curses which his friend the Captain vented instead of sighs. He said he had remarked in Ernestina more than once, at some specially good move of his making, no other start than one of pleasure. He would stake his traveling money upon it that she, as she loved him, was nursing some trick in her head which would pave his way or frame his staircase to the bridal chamber. He advised him to appear distrait and inattentive, so as not to detect and disturb her in the hatching of her secret plan. He asked him: "Do you understand perfectly the _minor offices_ of love?" No German comprehended metaphors less than the Captain. "I mean," he continued, "can you not, then, be out and out the most crafty _vocativus_? Can you not retain hold for a long time of the piece you mean to move, so as to keep your hand a long time over your chess-militia, and with your hand make the Generalissima fall into agitation and love? Can you not change every minute your attitudes towards this fair foe, and especially contrive to lift yourself up, because a man standing seems better looking to a woman who is sitting than to one who stands? I and she should see you now leaning back in your chair, now stretching forward, now to the left, now to the right, now in the shade, now with your eyes fixed on her hand, now on her lips, during the game. Nay, you should knock three or four pawns over on to the floor merely that you may have to stoop over to pick them up, so that your swelling facial veins might make an impression on her heart, and that you might drive the blood up into your own head and hers at the same time. Let your queue be buckled an eighth of an ell nearer the occiput or farther from it, in case such buckling and such distance has hitherto counteracted your marriage prospects." The poor Captain neither understood nor performed a single iota of the whole service-regulation, and the Doctor was quite as well satisfied, for it was a part of his humor that he loved no party to talk to better than the wind.
Ernestina goes on with her letter:
"To-morrow, thank God, my Passion weeks come to an end; and it is fortunate for the Captain, who grows daily more sensitive, that no one is present but the Doctor, who has a pat joke for every move that is made. His wit, he says, proves he himself is a miserable player, because good players never make a bonmot upon or during their play.
"_June 20, 3 o'clock_.--This evening at 12 o'clock I shall be unlocked from the foot-block of the chess-board. He will play all day at the rubber, the _Definitive match_--Fenk calls it--but at night, as he guesses from his day's campaign the result of the nightly one, he has ordered his coachman to drive up with his carriage, so that, like a corpse, he may mournfully depart. Only he should not expect me to play as badly as he does. But he is in all things so hasty, and stops his ears against all remonstrances.
"_12 o'clock at night_.--I am beside myself. Who would have believed it of my father? My game could hardly have stood better--by my father's second-hand watch, which lay near the chess-board, it was already considerably more than half-past eleven--he had only two officers and I still had all mine; one flying streak of red after another darted across his whole face. It grew at last really oppressive, and even the Doctor no longer spoke a playful word--only my white pussy marched round purring on the table. Naturally no human being is thinking of the cat, and for the first time in the game he gives me check. Just then he (or was it I, for I _sometimes_ beat such little trills on the table) might have made some such slight drumming with his fingers on the edge of the board. Like lightning the creature flew at it, thinking probably it was a mouse, and knocked our whole game into pi and there we sat. Imagine the scene:--I half glad that this middle person had relieved him of the shame of the formal basket; he with a face full of disconsolateness and wrath; my father with one full of wrath and confusion; and the Doctor looking round the room and snapping his fingers and swearing: 'The Captain would have beaten as sure as Amen!' Not a foot budged from the spot; the Doctor did not stay a minute on his, and finally in a fit of enthusiasm which our embarrassed silence more and more intensified, threw himself on his knees before a white bust of Cupid, before a miniature of my father, and before his own image in the looking-glass, and prayed: 'Holy Herr von Knoer! holy Cupid! holy Fenk! pray for the Captain, and strike the cat dead! Ah! were you three images alive, then would Cupid surely assume the form of Dr. Fenk, and Cupid who had thus come to life would grasp the hand of the now animated Knoer, and place in it that of the female player; then would his give hers to still a third. Ye saints! pray, I beseech you, for the Captain, who would have won the game!' But that is not true; only, unfortunately, the interval was too short to begin a new one."
Now, as at this point the pole-cat-Doctor (I, as author, resume my narrative) rose up and actually laid Knoer's hand in that of Ernestina and said he was Cupid--and inasmuch as, after all, by the assurances of the Doctor and by the uncertainty of the game, the player, teased by men and cats, had quite as much to lose in the matter of honor as in that of love; and as I show in a whole Sector that Falkenberg was of the oldest nobility in the whole land; and as, luckily, in the Head-forester (as with many of the rural nobility) the manners of his rude breeding lay half-hid under the varnish of those derived from his more refined intercourse, just as his old furniture was under that of the new fashion; thus the electric enthusiasm of the Doctor passed over in great sparks into the bosom of the father, and Knoer in transport laid the hand of Ernestina, who feigned astonishment, in that of the Captain, who really felt it; and the bridegroom rushed and threw himself in a tempest of gratitude upon the neck of the new-born father-in-law, even before--inasmuch as his honor triumphed more than his love--he somewhat more coldly kissed the clever hand which had hitherto snatched from him this double triumph.
For this the fair possessor of the hand blamed him; but I again impute the blame to her; with what reason can she expect it of the man who never divined a soul, hardly his own, and never that of a woman, that he should have had his wisdom-teeth and his philosophic beard grown as long as the indulgent reader has both, who, of course, does not need to learn for the first time, and to have it printed here beforehand--for he has already remarked it these three good hours--that behind the copulative cat there lay (or lied)[6] something, viz., Ernestina herself.
This is how it was. But I need hardly inform the reader of what he has long since known, that Ernestina had, _privatissime_, each of four evenings previous, placed the glue-and-stitch cat on the table, and instructed her to dart at the fingers when she heard them drumming; and I am glad the acuteness of the reader is as much above the ordinary as it is, because now he can go on and surmise still more: for she also on the final evening, made the paste-eel of a cat creep after her as a lime-rod, kept her till half-past eleven o'clock down in her lap, and at last with a movement of her knee threw up this feline _terminus medius_ out of her lap on to the table, and the _terminus_ after that did her part. Poor Captain!
But it is a matter for serious reflection. For if, in this way, women can transmute design into accident, and _vice versa_--if, even before betrothal (consequently still more afterwards), they know how to place in the front rank against men (as Cambyses did against the Egyptians)[7], confederate cats, who, like inferior interposing Deities _ex-machina_ upset the male game and set up the female--if in a hundred human beings there are only five men who can tolerate bestial cats or, in fact, human ones, and only ten women who can _not_--if, most manifestly, the best women carry under their arms terrible bundles of man-traps, hares'-nets, lark springes, night-nets, and draw-nets; _what_ shall the uniped or one-leg[8] do who, on the very same day when he has begun writing a romance, begins at the same time to play one, and so would fain carry through both simultaneously as on a double harpsichord? The most remarkable thing for me to do, I see, is to let my wife stand all day by me bear-trap, and throw twigs on it, that I may stumble into it, but absolutely place no bear there, though no ape either. No! ye pliable, oppressed creatures! I once more propose to myself the undertaking, and publicly make the vow to one of you here, in print. Should it happen, nevertheless, that I wanted after the honeymoon to plague the one, then I merely read out aloud this Sector, and move my heart with the coming picture of your connubial Pilatus; which, for that reason, I here bring forward--namely, how the stupidest man accounts himself shrewder than the shrewdest wife; how before him, who, perhaps, out of the house lies on his knee, to be blest, before a goddess or idol, she must sink down on hers, like the camel, to be loaded; how he sweetens his Imperial Chancery decrees, and his Plebiscita, (after the mildest remonstrances have been ventured only in a doubtful and desperate voice of resignation, as if of a lost cause), with nothing better than a "but if I choose to have it so;" how the very tear which fascinated him in the free eye of the bride, now disenchants and makes him quite frantic, when it drops from that of the wedded wife, just as in the "Arabian Nights" all enchantments and disenchantments are effected by sprinkling with water--verily, the only good thing about it after all is just this, that you do really delude him. Ah! and when I once bring it home to myself, how far such a married Bruin must have gone before you went so far as, in order not to be devoured by him, actually to make believe fall in a swoon (as one does with the actual bears in the forest) and Bruin stalked with his idle paws round the seeming corpse! ...
"In my old age the one-leg shall whistle a different tune!" says the married reader; but I am myself already nine years older than he, and still single into the bargain.
SECOND SECTION.
Price-Current of the Wholesale Pedigree-Merchant.--The Stallion and the Patent of Nobility.
There is not in the whole known world a more pestilent job than that of writing a first section; and if I were not in all my life to write any other sections, a second, a tenth, a thousandth, I would rather make logarithms or publicistic reports of Circles than a book with aesthetic ones. On the contrary, in the second chapter and sector an author comes to himself again, and knows full well in the most distinguished circle, perhaps, that exists (in mine are nothing but snobs) what he is to set about with his writing-fingers, and with his hat, head, wit, penetration, and everything.
As the wedded pair, from whose betrothal through chess and cat we have just returned in a body, are to deliver over to me in nine months the hero of this book, I must show beforehand that I do not buy at random, but (to speak commercially) select my goods (_i. e_., my hero) from a very _good_ house, or, to speak heraldically, from a very _old_ one. For it must, for the benefit of the free knighthood, the feudal landlords and the patricians, be stated and proved here or nowhere, that the purveyor of my hero, Herr von Falkenberg, is of an older nobility than any of them; and, in fact, of an illegitimate one.
Namely, in the year 1625 occurred the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, on which occasion his great-grandfather was unusually intoxicated and nevertheless drew out from the pot of fortune a handful of something extraordinary, a second diploma of nobility. For there sat drinking with him, but seven times deeper, a clever horse jockey from Westphalia, who was also a Herr von _Falkenberg_, but only a namesake; their two family-trees did not graze nor anastomose with each other, either in roots, fibres, or in leaves. Although, now, the genealogical tree of the Westphalian was so old and had stood so long in the wind and weather of life, that it seemed to have shot up out of the earth simultaneously with many a veteran on Lebanon or AEtna; in short, although the horse-dealer was a man of sixty-four-fold scutcheon, whereas the great-grandfather, to his great shame and that of him who takes him into his romance, really counted as many teeth as ancestors, namely, thirty-two; still the thing could be brought about. That is to say, the old Westphalian was the sole support and concluding vignette and Hogarthian tail-piece of his whole historical picture-gallery; not even in the two Indies, where we all have and inherit our cousins, had he a single one. Upon this the great-grandfather planted himself, and sought to extort from him by curses and prayers his patent of nobility, in order to give it out as his own; "for who the devil will be the wiser?" said he; "it is of no use to you and I can tack it on to mine." Nay, the compiler of ancestors, the great-grandfather, offered to act as a Christian, and to give the dealer in horses and ancestors in exchange for the diploma an unnaturally beautiful stallion, such a grand sultan and connubial master of a neighboring equine harem as one had hardly seen matched. But the last of his line turned his head slowly to and fro, and said coldly, "I would rather not," and drank his Zerbot bottle-beer. When he had merely tried a couple of glasses of Quedlinburg Gose (a light colored beer), he began already to storm and curse at the very supposition, which began to look promising. When he had put down on the top of that some Calktuff from Konigsbutter, I think it was (for Falkenberg had a whole _Meibomium de cerevisiis_, [Meibom or malt liquors] namely, his beers, in his cellar), then he actually came out with some grounds for his refusal, and things grew very hopeful.
When at last he found how finely the Breslau _Scheps_ foamed in the glass, or in his head, then he ordered the carcass of a miserable stallion to be led into the courtyard, and when he had seen him jump, it may have been two or three times, he gave the great-grandfather his hand and in it the 128 ancestors. Now, when great-grandfather Falkenberg had taken the purchased patent, which had been almost chewed to pieces by some ancestral generation of moths that had a thousand-fold scutcheon each, and, as it was porous as a butterfly's wing, had spread and stuck it with a plaster-knife on new parchment, first of all, however, covering it with bookbinders paste; then, as may easily be imagined, the parchment rendered his whole noble ancestry the same service of ennoblement which the stallion in Westphalia did to the equine posterity, and over a hundred buried men, in whom not a drop of blood was any longer to be ennobled, acquired at least noble bones. Therefore neither I nor any Canoness needs be ashamed of having as much intercourse with the future young Falkenberg as will hereafter occur. For the rest I should be glad if the anecdote went no further, and, in fact, to a reading-public of intelligence this needs hardly to be said.
The nuptial lupercalia, with their longest day and their shortest night, I have never undertaken to reproduce; but the introduction thereto I should be glad to describe. Only, as I unfortunately went to bed last night with the purpose this morning of transporting the nuptial and chess-playing couple with three strokes of the pen from the bridal to the marriage bed, which is nineteen leagues distant from it, namely in the knightly seat of the Falkenbergs in Auenthal--and as I quite naturally proposed to picture merely with three slight hints the little amount of ceremony, the little fifing, prancing, and powder, wherewith the good Auenthalers received their newly-married graces; accordingly all night the dream went up and down in my head that I was myself a home-returning Imperial Count and the Imperial Hereditary Casperl, and that my subjects, as they had not laid eyes on me for 15 years, almost shot me dead with joy. In my country there were naturally a thousand times more shouts of welcome and _honneurs_ sent up than in the Falkenberg feudality; I will therefore omit the honors paid the Cavalry Captain and present merely my own.
FIRST EXTRA LEAF.
Manifestations of Honor Which Were Made to me by my County on my Return Home from the Grand Tour.
If a Count's subjects take from him his six nonnatural things[9] I know not how they can give him a better reception. Now mine left me not a single non-natural thing.
First of all, they took away from me the most important unnatural thing, sleep. Having traveled or waded, as if I were big with child, from Chalons to Strasburg, only to thunder down from there at such a rate that I rather hopped than sate, so furiously as to knock down my runner--I would for the life of me have gladly flown round Floerzhuebel (the first market town in my country) sleeping (and was not that easy to do in dream?); but just at the boundary and bridge, as I opened my eyes in going down hill and closed them in going up, I was fallen upon, not murderously, but musically, by a body of militia sixteen drunken men strong, who had been lying in wait here since seven in the morning with their musical trumpets and ear-breaking tools, in order at the right time to wound me and my horses in the ears with fife and drum. Fortunately the storming-artists had drummed all day long for fun and _ennui_ more vigorously than they did afterwards in earnest and for love. During the whole march, while orchestra and barracks went along beside my horses, I was scolding myself for having, seventeen years before, qualified and graduated Floerzhuebel to a city--"I don't mean merely" (I said to myself) "because afterward a Sovereign Rescript stripped Floerzhuebel again of city-rights and its Gens d'Armurie of its accoutrements, or merely because we proposed to sell the superfluous equipments at auction in Cassel--but because they will not now let me sleep, which is surely _the first non-natural thing_."
Eating they absolutely denied me, because that is the second unnatural thing of a reigning lord. Did not the Restaurateur of Floerzhuebel, who had set on the fire for me the whole boiled and roasted _widow's half_ of my country, summon me on the very carriage-step to take a bite, and when--for we grandees do not like to excite the populace to a hungry astonishment by despising envied fare--I begged with my own mouth only for a beer-soup, did not the Restaurateur make a sour face and say: "He had none in the whole hotel; and if he had, future hosts should never have it to say of him, that among so many _jus_ and _bouillons_, he had presented to his most gracious master nothing but a bowl of beer-soup."
The third thing, combining both _motion_ and _rest_, I came within a hair of losing through the triumphal arch of my place of burial, because it and the musical gallery upon it tumbled down close at the heels of my last servant, but to the joy of the country, harmed nothing belonging to any man, except the barber's cupping-glasses, which he had attached to the triumphal gate, projecting in such a manner as to have something hung upon them wherein was to be stuck the not bad illumination. I was going to be properly mad about the satirical cupping-vessels, which I was fain to take for satirical types and emblems of my Countly cupping of the full veins of my tenants and vassals, and I asked the Mayor whether he thought I was utterly devoid of wit; but they all in a body swore that in the whole getting up of the triumphal arch wit had not been once thought of.
_Air_, the fourth non-natural thing of an Imperial Hereditary Casperl, I might by this time have had; for not merely on account of the short misuse which the instruments and lungs of my vassals made of so glorious an element, should I have shut myself up and the sector of air around me so closely as I in fact did, into my carriage--_that_ I must say expressly, so that the good Kelzheim Chorister may not imagine I was displeased because his musical fire-arm, his trumpet, from the double sound-hole of his belfry and his body, stuck out towards me to such an extent that the melodious air-waves from the two came to meet me four acres off, while below in the steeple his wife also milked the bells, as if I were being buried and receiving not so much a reception as a requiem--I say, not on account of the musical married pair would I have shut the carriage, but it was on account of the danger of life; for a joyous picket of peasants discharged at me out of seventeen fowling-pieces and two or three pocket-pistols, not only salvos, but a few ramrods into the bargain.
Now, when a Count sits there deprived of four nonnatural things, he may not venture to think of the fifth, of evacuation. The sphincter of every, even the greatest, pore remains closed, as well as the coach-door; no wonder then, that, as I could not say to a single pore--Ephphatha: be opened!--I started up crying "Deil a bit do I gain by my sitting on the bench of Counts at Ratisbon, if here I must squat on the coach-cushion and not be able to do anything, even."
Genuine _Passion_, which is the sixth non-natural thing of man, is stifled by nothing so easily as by a satin dog's-pillow, on which the parsons, schoolmasters and magistrates, whom an Imperial Hereditary Casperl has under him, deliver to him the Carmina which they have caused to be composed in his honor; for they can neither be laughed at nor wept over, nor scolded at nor spoken of.
My tenants and vassals, after filching from me so much of my six non-natural things, gave me back in the very act half of the first, namely, _wakefulness_; but they had worked themselves into such a sweat on my account, that I was thrown into one on theirs. When I woke up, I thought at first I had been dreaming; but upon becoming more wide awake I observed that, with the exception of names, it was the stolen history of my own neighborhood. To be sure it vexes me just as much as if the illuminations and the musical uproar had been arranged expressly on my account, that the subjects make both merely with the malicious intention of driving their great or little Regent from disgust and torture to betake himself to his tour again; which they have evidently learned from the Oriental caravans, which, in like manner, by _drumming_ and _lighting fires_ keep off wild beasts from their bodies.
THIRD SECTION.
Underground Education.--The Best of Moravians and the Best of Poodles.