CHAPTER XVII.
The city cellars of Grunwald cannot rival those of Bremen, but nevertheless they are very respectable cellars. The low, spacious vaults stretch far under the city hall, and extend even below the market-place, on which it is situated. There are rooms enough that have in former days served as drinking rooms of every size, and may even to-day be used for larger and smaller companies, but what is most needed is wanting--the guests. The good old times, when Grunwald was wealthy and powerful, are no longer. Those who built these vaults and filled them with ringing of cups, with songs of cheerful converse--the honorable sober-minded burgesses with their broad shoulders, their full, well-trimmed beards, and the broad-swords by their sides--they sleep, all of them, sound, good sleep in the old graveyards, or under the huge slabs of stone with which the churches are paved, if they were members of the council, or otherwise great men, and there "await a blissful resurrection." Their grandchildren crowd together in dark, narrow chambers, and drink stale brown beer, instead of fiery, golden wine; many a one, whose ancestor went down these steps day by day, whenever the rosy summer evening was lying on the high gable roofs, or the storms of winter were careering through the dark, narrow streets, hardly knows how it looks down there in the city cellars.
Nevertheless they do not seem to be entirely deserted by the good people of Grunwald. The dim little lamp at the entrance burns night after night--often far into the small hours, sometimes till daybreak--and the solemn citizen who has been belated at some Christening feast or other great festivity, and now walks home with wife and daughter in the silent night through the deserted streets, and past the city cellars, often sees a dim light shine through the unwashed windows, and hears perhaps low confused voices, which seem to rise from the bowels of the earth and make an uncanny impression at that hour and in that place.
But there are no gnomes carrying on their wicked doings below there, only gay companions, jovial, or at least not very pedantic fellows, who can fully appreciate the value of a good glass of wine, taken from a good cask, and enjoyed in good society. There are men who do not relish all of life so very heartily that they should not at times desire to wash the dusty, unpleasant taste down with a glass of wine; others who have neither chick nor child at home, and get tired at night among their silent books; still others who, wearied of the monotony of married life, want to have a merry night for once; and still others, who have quite accidentally found their way down the broad cellar-steps, and cannot very well get up again a few hours later, however broad the steps may be. There are young professional men, artists, actors--if there happen to be any in town--young literati, now and then a farmer from the neighborhood, or an official--these make the main ingredients of the public which is apt to assemble every evening in the great vault to the left of the entrance, and sometimes, when they wish to be still more exclusive, in a smaller room on the other side of the building.
Oswald knew the place very well from his former residence here, although he had never reached the dignity of an habitué. He had been occasionally at the cellars with Berger, without taking much notice of the rest of the company that might be there. Thus the damp, cool air, filled with the peculiar odor of marvellously-ancient walls, and the fragrance of last year's wine, greeted him pleasantly, and he found without much trouble the way to the low door which opened into the drinking-hall.
Except the waiter, there happened to be at that moment nobody in the long, vaulted, and badly-lighted room, but a single guest, who sat with his back to the door, and did not allow himself to be disturbed in the least by Oswald's entrance. He was pleasantly engaged in discussing fresh oysters, and Oswald, who had taken his seat not far from him at one of the small round tables, noticed with some astonishment what a mountain of shells the indefatigable worker had already accumulated. And yet he did not look tired. At least he leaned only now and then back in his chair, in order to sip with evident satisfaction a glass of wine, and then renewed his labors with a zeal which certainly spoke as eloquently for the good quality of the oysters as for the excellency of the digestive powers of the consumer.
The last shell was dropping from the mountain, and the last drops were flowing from the bottle into the glass.
"Sic transit gloria mundi," said the man; "nevertheless, we can easily renew this gloria. Carole, bring another dozen of these excellent dwellers in the deep, and half a bottle of this most praiseworthy hock."
Oswald listened. The voice was familiar to him; it reminded him of by-gone, happy days. That fresh, clear voice had refreshed and encouraged him more than once, as the wind does the prisoner blowing in through the open windows of his prison; it did not fail to-day to have the usual effect on his darkened mind. Of all men this was the one whose company was by far the most welcome to-night.
He rose, therefore, approached him, and greeted him with unusual animation.
"Ah, dottore, dottore!" exclaimed the oyster-eater, rising at once and seizing the proffered hand. "You here? Well, that is a most sensible notion of our stupid friend's accident. Carole, a whole bottle instead of half a bottle, and several dozen oysters instead of one."
"Am I really at this moment a persona grata to you, Timm?" said Oswald, taking a seat by Albert's side.
"Persona grata! at this moment!" cried Albert Timm. "Don Oswaldo! Don Oswaldo! I have missed you sadly, upon my word, ever since we parted at Grenwitz, and I am as delighted as a snow-bird to see you here again. Where on earth have you been hiding all this time? I have inquired of everybody. Since when are you back?"
"Three hours ago."
"And, of course, you are hungry and thirsty, just as you were when you left the stage-coach; at least you look so. Carole, Carole! Why does the fellow not come? At last! Here, dottore, is food for a sound stomach, and drink for a sick heart! Here's your health! Welcome in Grunwald!"
And Mr. Timm's face smiled so kindly as he said these kind words that it would have looked like blackest ingratitude to doubt the sincerity of his sentiments.
Oswald at least was most pleasantly affected by this cordial reception of a man whose friendship he had never tried to win, whose amiable frankness he had often met with repulsive coldness, and he felt this all the more deeply as he had suffered a few moments before acutely from a sense of loneliness in the world.
"One service deserves another, Timm," he said, while the latter was filling the glasses again. "I can tell you that I am heartily glad to have met you the very first night I spend again in this town. Let us have another glass! Here's our good friendship!"
"With pleasure!" cried Mr. Timm, heartily grasping Oswald's proffered hand. "We will hold together honestly. Heaven knows this wretched old-fogy place does not have an abundance of men with whom one can hold together, or like to do it. But this league of two noble souls ought to be celebrated in a nobler beverage. Carole! A bottle of champagne--Clicquot and frappé--else, by the bones of my fathers, the lightning of my wrath falls upon your bald pate. And now come, dottore mio, tell us something of your wanderings; or, rather, tell us that some other time; and let me know, first of all, for that is most interesting to me, has Fame told us falsely in making a most wonderful mixture of great and small things of the last scenes of your farce, your drama, or your tragedy at Grenwitz?"
"Before I can answer that," said Oswald, whom the oysters, the wine, Timm's company, and the whole atmosphere, were gradually putting into better humor, "I must know what it is Fame has reported."
"Do you really wish to know?"
"Certainly."
"Well, there were two readings; but you must not blame me, Stein, if I touch a sore place in your heart without knowing."
"But, Timm, do you think I am a child?"
"In some respects all men are children, and remain children, dottore, and you are no exception to the rule. Whatever flatters our self-love, goes down as easily as a rich oyster; whatever hurts our vanity, tastes like wormwood and quinine. Eh bien! Some say you had favored an understanding between Bruno--what a pity, by the way, the poor boy had to bite the grass so young!--and Miss Helen; that Felix had come to you to hold you to an account about this in the name of the parents; that this had led to a difficulty between you, which had ended in a scuffle; that Felix had slipped, in his endeavor to turn you out of the house, and that he had broken his right--some say his left--arm, once; some say twice."
"The accursed rascal," murmured Oswald, between his teeth, hastily throwing an empty oyster-shell to the others.
"Did I not tell you I might annoy you, Oswald? Come, don't be a child, and wash your anger down in a glass of this famous wine. The other reading is not half so bitter."
"Let us hear!"
"According to this variation it was not the pupil, but the teacher, whom the young lady looked upon with favor; and the broken arm of the baron was not the effect of a fall, but of a pistol ball, which was applied to his aforesaid extremity in the presence of witnesses, and according to all the rules of art."
"Well, and which reading do you prefer?"
"Of course the latter, my brave Knight of La Mancha. Here, Oswald--nobody hears us in these halls, sacred to friendship and love--fill your glass and drink! Drink it to the last drop of silvery foam! Her health!--the health of the only one, the sweet, the fair, the beautiful one, with the blueish-black hair and the dark sea-deep eyes! Drink! I say, by the bones of the eleven thousand virgins at Cologne! Drink! How, noble Don, are you ashamed to confess the lady of your overflowing heart? and to deny her before me--me, the wise Merlin, who can hear the grass grow and the eyes sigh? Have I not heard the sighing of your beautiful eyes in those sunny days which are no more, when you and she, two children of a rare kind, played innocently under the rose-bushes and thought that no one saw you, not even the Creator of heaven and earth who gave you the warm breath with which you playfully whispered to each other the sweet mysteries of love? And did I not hear how serpents' tongues hissed around you? Did I not see with what intense hatred basilisk eyes glared at you? Oh, I have seen and heard all that, and I knew before that it would come thus, but I said nothing; for speech is silver, but silence is gold, and he who meddles with love affairs would do better to go and sit down in a bed of nettles."
"Tell me, Timm, have you--have you seen her since she has come to Grunwald?"
"I have seen her, my master!--not once, but many times, by the side of other fair beauties, among whom she looked like the rose of Sharon amid dandelions, gliding over the pavement of Grunwald, through dismal streets; and the paving-stones in the streets and the bricks in the houses received speech, and they spoke and sang: Blessed art thou among women!"
"She is at Miss Bear's house, is she not?" Oswald asked, who thought it would be folly to try and conceal his attachment from a man of such sharp observation as Albert.
"Yes, she is at the She Bear's--this pearl of an argus-eyed female. There she dwells, and sits at the window and sees the clouds drift over the tops of the poplars; and if you pass by there at noon, between twelve and one, you can see her sit there yourself, as I have seen her every time I have passed there at that hour. And always she raised her beautiful eyes, and always she looked at me inquiringly: Can you bring me no news of him--of him, the only man I love dearly? Why, Oswald, I--a prosy old fogy--I speak in verses whenever I think of the maid; and you, who are a poet, mean to deny that you love her with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind? Fie upon you; you do not deserve that I take so much trouble about you--that I have thought of you these last weeks more frequently than you have done during the whole time. But ingratitude is the reward of the world, and--Carole, another bottle!--I shall hereafter not trouble myself about you and your fate any further."
Timm rested his head in his hand, as Oswald had been doing these last ten minutes. A pause followed, while bald-headed Charles placed a new bottle of champagne into the wine-cooler, turned it round a few times in the ice, and then left them again as noiselessly as he had come.
This sudden transition from exuberant hilarity into such melancholy silence, in an elastic nature like Surveyor Timm's, was somewhat too sudden to be perfectly natural. Oswald, however, was too busy with his own thoughts to notice this. He thought Timm was sincere, and he was flattered by the lively interest which he had excited in a man whom he had heretofore looked upon as altogether frivolous and selfish. He filled his own glass and Albert's from the new bottle, and said,
"I am not ungrateful, Timm; I am really not so; and least of all in this case. And if I have heretofore not put full faith in your friendship, it was only because I felt how little I had deserved it. Let us have another glass together! You know you must not be exacting with a melancholy man like myself!"
"Well, I should think I knew that," said Timm, with his usual merry laugh, pushing back the long fair hair that had fallen down upon his forehead, and emptying his glass at a single draught. "And I have often wondered how a man like yourself, who has a right to enjoy life more than any one else, can look upon the world in a way which seems only fit for sick canary birds and like invalids. I should say nothing if you had never commenced to enjoy it from mere bashfulness, or if you had wasted your strength in enjoyment; but as neither the one nor the other is evidently the case with you--as you are not an enthusiastic saint nor a worn-out roué--as you suffer neither from an exuberance of strength nor from too great weakness, I really cannot tell what is the matter with you, except one thing."
"And what is that?"
Mr. Timm rested his elbows on the table, and the smooth face in his white hands, and smiled craftily at Oswald.
"And that is--what, Timm?"
"Ten thousand dollars annual income." Oswald laughed.
"A very prosaic remedy for contempt of the world."
"But a very radical one, and in your case infallible."
"Why exactly in my case?"
Timm filled the glasses once more, lighted a fresh cigar, and said:
"Heine, you know, divides men in two classes: fat Grecians and lean Nazarenes. I have found this distinction as acute as true. The former believe in Our Lady of Melos, the latter worship the Virgin Dolorosa. The former enjoy the good things of life in cheerful happiness; the latter prefer a grumbling resignation and meditative asceticism. In order that both classes should be right, that the Grecians should be able to live well and the Nazarenes pray well, the former must have an abundance of money, and the latter must be poor, very poor indeed."
"Before you go on with your exposition, Timm, tell me first to which of the two classes you belong yourself."
"To both, or to neither of the two, as you choose. I have the good digestion, the sound teeth, the fine perception--in a word, the desire and the capacity to enjoy which belongs to the Grecians; but I have also the tenacity and frugality necessary to the Nazarenes for the practice of their peculiar virtues. I have the invaluable talent of the camel to be able to thirst a long time without losing heart or appetite; on the contrary, abstinence only serves in my case to sharpen the appetite and to season the next drink more attractively. When I have travelled through the desert, and--as just now, for instance--the branches of mimosas and the fans of palm-trees wave over me, and the icy-cold well--as just now, for instance, from the bottle--I meant to say, from the rock--foams and purls--then I bend my long camel's neck and drink and drink and drink, and bless the dry, brown desert which has led me to such a delicious well."
And Mr. Timm poured down a full glass of champagne with the hasty eagerness of a traveller whose tongue is glued to the palate.
Oswald watched the exulting companion who sat opposite to him with a peculiar sense of pleasure, not unmixed with envy. How sharp and bold, and yet how fine and intelligent, were the features in this smooth, almost boyish face! How well that haughty superciliousness suited him, which played around his delicate nostrils and curved the sharply-accented red lips! How the words flew from these lips, swift as feathered arrows, each one of which hits the bull's-eye! What a sovereign contempt for mere phrases, for any kind of ornament, for all those rags with which hypocrites and fools try to cover their nakedness! How eloquent the whole bearing of the man, his head thrown boldly back, as he blew the smoke of his cigar from him, or as he took the bottle from the cooler, shook it, and filled again and again his empty glass to overflowing! How light the burden of life seemed to be to this man, light as to the lion who leaps with the colt in his teeth swiftly over hedges and ditches!
Oswald was not inclined at that moment to cast a glance into the bottomless abyss of selfishness which lay concealed under the surface of this humor, dancing about in merry waves. The time and the place were not favorable to such an analysis. He felt down here, in this deep, quiet cellar, with its dim, mysterious light of two small candles, as if he were thousands of miles away from the rest of the world. He had come here to drink himself into oblivion; he had succeeded in his wishes. His brow was all aglow, as he followed the example of his companion and poured down glass after glass. He had not felt so free and so happy for a long time as he did at that moment.
"As for you, now, noble knight," continued Timm, "you are a Grecian, without the means of being so at all times, and without the gift of simply transferring the time during which you cannot be so to the account of the future. Instead of doing that, you play the Nazarene, and feel just as happy during the time as the eagle whose wings and claws have been clipped, and who wears a chain around his foot. The exuberant strength, which you cannot employ outwardly, turns within and checks the normal growth of your nature, which has once for all been intended for enjoyment. This is not the first time I call your attention to this contradiction in you. Do you recollect what I told yon already at Grenwitz? You hate the nobles, you hate the rich, you hate the powerful, because the ten fingers of our hands itch with a desire to be noble and rich and powerful yourself. Do not talk to me of your moral humbug of the nobility of mind, the wealth of a pure heart, and the power of truth! All that is mere stuff for those who know what merchandise is sold in the market of life. Pshaw! what has a man like you to do with poverty--a man of your youth, your charms, your pretty face--for, by heaven, Oswald, you are a handsome fellow, a man whom the women embrace without his asking, A man of thoroughly aristocratic tastes and tendencies! It is simply ridiculous! You ought not to be a poor schoolmaster, but a wealthy baron, like those Grenwitz people with whom, by the way, you have a most striking resemblance; then you could enjoy life, and afterwards blow out your brains with some show of reason; then you could marry the fair Helen; could do, in a word, or not do whatever you liked! That is why I say again: you want an income of ten thousand dollars. I wish I could get it for you, I would do it, and were I to take them I know not where."
"I really believe you were capable of doing it, Timm."
"Why not? And if it were only from curiosity to see how you would act in such a case towards your old friend."
"I would do with the mammon, you may rest assured of that, as I did when I was a boy with the cherries people gave me--I would share it with my friends."
Albert looked fixedly at Oswald, as he said these words with flushed cheek and raised voice. Suddenly he said, as if awaking from a dream:
"I am a curious fellow, Oswald; as sceptical as a heathen, and yet as fond of all sorts of omens as an old woman. As I was sitting here alone eating my oysters, I said to myself: you happen to have a few dollars in your pocket and you would like to spend them with a friend. And then there occurred to me, as to Wallenstein, the question: who of all those whom I meet here evening after evening meant it best and most honestly? and that it should be the one who would first enter at the door. But, strange enough, contrary to all the customs of the place, not one of them came. Instead of that, you came--you, of whom I had not thought at all. Oswald, I do not know how you think about such matters, and it may be that my request will offend you, but I should like to drink with you to our future, our intimate friendship. What do you say?"
"With all my heart!" cried Oswald. "There is just one more glass for each of us in the bottle."
"And no one shall ever drink again out of this glass!" cried Albert, and threw the empty glass on the floor.
Oswald did the same; but the noise of the breaking glasses sounded shrill and painful to his ear, like the laughter of delighted demons.
Bald Charles, who had sat behind his counter at the other end of the hall, nodding, started up when he heard the noise, and came gliding up, drunk with sleep, thinking they had called him.
"How is it, Oswald," cried Timm; "I think we had better have another bottle. We shall not meet again as young as we are now."
"No," said Oswald; "let us be content. My head burns. And I have to call, to-morrow, on Tom, Dick, and Harry. What is to pay?"
"Stop!" cried Mr. Timm, holding Oswald's arm. "Mine is the helmet, and it belongs to me! Carole, if you accept a red cent from this gentleman, I break this empty bottle on your bald skull! Come! Make yourself paid out of this rag for to-night and for the last nights; and what remains over, why you can buy yourself on the way a wig with it, my Carole!"
With these words Timm had drawn a twenty-five dollar note from a bulky parcel which he took from his coat-pocket, and handed it to the waiter, who seemed to be not a little astonished at this sudden wealth in the hands of one of his very worst customers. At least he grinned in a very peculiar manner as he took the note, while Mr. Timm put back the package with an air of perfect indifference, and tilting his hat on his head, sang:
"I am the last of guests to-night,
Come show me out of the house!
And we wish each other good-night,
I take a kiss from my little mouse!"
They were standing outside in the street. The mist had disappeared entirely, and the moon was shining brightly on the dark sky. The lamps had gone out, and deep shadows alternated with broad streaks of light in the narrow streets between the high gable-ends. A watchman standing at the corner with his long spear and antediluvian horn, called out the twelfth hour. Nothing else was to be seen in the death-like streets through which Oswald and Albert were now walking home, arm in arm, as it became such good and intimate friends: Oswald unusually heated and excited, Albert as cool and fresh as if he had been drinking nothing but water in the city cellars at Grunwald. They talked over the members of the town council and of the college on whom Oswald had to wait the next day, and Oswald's career at the college especially, which Albert declared was a fabulous idea, such as no one could have conceived but a Knight of La Mancha. Thus they reached the door of the hotel, then they wished each other good night. Oswald went in; Albert lounged down the main street, his hands in his pockets. But suddenly he stopped and seemed to meditate for a while. Then he turned into a by-street and vanished in a labyrinth of lanes and courts, formed by rheumatic little cottages, whose exterior did not belie the reputation enjoyed by this part of the town.