16. CYCLE.
Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.
Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna, he said not, as usual, nolo episcopari; he did not say he was hemmed round by an impassable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of fortune,—instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more common to brides,—he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and Rabette, and all.
But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the greatest reluctance to eat with a nobleman, merely because, as entertaining acteur of the table, he had so much to do with conversing, savoir vivre, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in proper attitude, and passing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cucumbers, chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague, and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should assume to himself the magnificent winter crop in Alban's sowed field as his own summer crop. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.[32]
With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir," replied coldly and gravely the paradeur of a Falterle by the side of our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a cabinet, and not into a principal apartment."
What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two brothers-in-office!—the master of accomplishments with the motley scarf-skin or hind-apron of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow outer wings of a buttermoth, whose dark under-wings represent the waistcoat (when he unbuttons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him, and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests.[33] The former in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,—the one flapping up like a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A magnificent set-off, I repeat!
The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his napkin open first,—which became now, as it were, introductory programme and dokimasticum of Falterle's system of teaching. "Posément, Monsieur," said he to the novice, "il est messéant de déplier la serviette avant que les autres aient déplié les leurs." After some minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one à la Brittanière, with rings. "Il est mésseant, Monsieur," said the master of accomplishments, "de souffler sa soupe." The Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short, frightened into a dead calm.
When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed more inwardly than outwardly.
After the bomb, came in a pike au four, to which, as is well known, the cutting away of the head and tail, and the closing up of the belly give the appearance of a roe's loin. When Albano asked his old teacher what it was, the latter replied, "A delicate roe's loin." "Pardonnez, Monsieur," said his rival gourmand, "c'est du brochet au four, mon cher Compte; mais il est mésseant de demander le nom de quelque mets qu'il soit,—on feint de le savoir."
It is easy to show that this horizontal shot from a double rifle pierced through the Magister's marrow and bone; the instruments of passion which lay in the cut-off head of the pike au four, as in an armory, continued to do their execution in his. Like most schoolmasters, he thought himself to have the finest manners, so long as he taught them, and fought against bad ones; so long he prized them uncommonly, just as he did his dress; but when he was outdone in either, then he must needs despise them from his heart. It brought him to his legs again that he was all the while silently comparing the master of accomplishments with the two Catos and Homer's heroes, who ate not much better than swine, and that he thus tied the Viennite to a pillory, and thrashed him most lustily thereon, with one hand, while with the other he rung above him the shame-bell. Yes, he placed himself, in order to make his official brother small, upon a distant planet, and looked down upon the bomb and the pike au four, and could not help laughing up there on his planet, to find that this yellow-silk shop-keeper of Nature, with his rubbish of brains, was no bigger than a paste-eel. Then he pitied his forsaken pupil, and so came down again, and swore on the way to weed as much out of him every day as that other fellow raked in.
We shall learn quite soon enough how Albano's nerves quivered on this lathe, and under these smoothing-planes. The Director was indescribably delighted with this pedagogical cutting and polishing of so great a diamond, although the cutting (according to Jeffries) takes from all diamonds half their weight, and although he himself had all his, and more carats than angles. Wehrfritz could never entirely forgive,—at which point he was now aiming, because he had brought with him for the little one the Oesterleins harpsichord,—until at least with one word he had inflicted a short martyrdom; accordingly, blind to Albano's concealed bloody expiation of the fault, he communicated to the company how strictly the Minister educated his children, how they, e. g., for any involuntary coughing or laughing at the table, like Prussian cavalry soldiers, who fall off or lose their hats in the wind, suffer punishment, and how they were, to be sure, no older than Albano, but quite as well-mannered as grown people. At the house of the Minister he had, on the contrary, boasted to-day the acquirements of his foster-son; but many parents build up in every other house smoking altars of incense for the same child, which in their own they smoke with brimstone, like vines and bees. Besides, deuse take it! they, like princes (fathers of their country), make redoubled demands precisely when children have satisfied immoderate ones; so that the latter, by opera supererogationis in the shape of advanced lessons, forfeit rather than win their play-hours. Do we not admire it in great philosophers, e. g. Malebranche, and great generals, e. g. Scipio, that, after the greatest achievements which they made in the kingdom of truths, or in a geographical, they betook themselves to the nursery, and there carried on real child's fooleries, in order gently to relax the bow wherewith they had shot so many lies and liars to the ground. And why shall not this simile, wherewith St. John defended himself when he allowed himself a play-hour with his tame partridge, also excuse children for being children, when they have previously stretched too crooked the yet thin bow?
But now on with our story! Old Wehrfritz recounted to Rabette, in a very friendly manner, "how he had seen to-day the pupil of Don Zesara, the magnificent Countess de Romeiro, actually only twelve years old, but with such a deportment as only a court dame had, and how the noble Knight experienced more joy than usual in his little ward." These hard, clattering words tore, as if he had hydrophobia, the open nerves of the ambitious boy, since the Knight had hitherto been to him the life's-goal, the eternal wish, and the frère terrible, wherewith they kept him under,—but he sat still there without a sign, and choked his crying heart. Wehrfritz recognized this dumb lip-biting of feeling; however, he acted as if Albano had not understood him.
Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a favorable light upon his dancing and music scholars therein, as well as himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old, speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes, cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider, ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody, because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I," that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly, not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only honey (i. e. a little praise).
"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow; and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat cracking under his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went slowly out.
The poor young man had, to-day, since the apparent forgiveness of his Adamitish fall, and since the sight of the elegant new teacher, for whom he had so long rejoiced in hope, and whose fine copperplate encasement was just of a kind to have an imposing effect upon a child, cast off the last chrysalis-shell of his inner being, and promised himself high things. Some hand had within an hour snatched his inner man from the close, drowsy cradle of childhood,—he had sprung at once out of the warming-basket, had thrown stuffed-hat and frock far away from him,—he saw the toga virilis hanging in the distance, and marched into it, and said, "Cannot I, too, be a youth?"
Ah, thou dear boy! man, especially the rosy-cheeked little man, too easily cheats himself with taking repentance for reformation, resolutions for actions, blossoms for fruits, as on the naked twig of the fig-tree seeming fruits sprout forth, which are only the fleshy rinds of the blossoms!
And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,—just now must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his bosom,—he determined to pass through the coming years as through a white colonnade of monumental pillars,—already a mere Alumnus from the city was, to his soul thirsting for glory and knowledge, a classic author,—and was he to endure it that the Director should falsely accuse, and the Vienna master caricature him to the Knight his father? Hard tears were struck, like sparks, from his proud, insulted soul, and the heat dissolved the comet nucleus of his inner world into a sweltry mist. In short, he resolved to run away to Pestitz in the night,—rush into his father's presence, tell him all, and then come home again without saying a word of it. At the end of the village he found a night-express, of whom he inquired the way to Pestitz, and who wondered at the little pilgrim without a hat.
But first let my readers look with me at the nest of the supper-party. This very express brought the Vienna master a bad piece of news touching the so-long-praised son of the Minister, whose name was Roquairol.
The above-mentioned female pupil of the Knight, the little Countess of Romeiro, was very beautiful: cold ones called her an angel, and enthusiastic ones a goddess. Roquairol had none of your Belgic veins, wherein, as in Saturn, all liquids lie as fixed, frozen bodies, but African arteries, in which, as in Mercury, melted metals run round. When the Countess was with his sister, he was always trying, with the common boldness of boys in high-life, to run his heart, filled with a venous system of quick matches, upon hers, as a good fireship; but she placed his sister as a fire-wall before her. Unfortunately she had gone, by chance, dressed as Werther's Lotta, to this evening's masquerade, and the splendor of her despotic charms was swallowed up and flashed round by eyes all darkly glowing behind masks: he took his inner and outer both off, pressed towards her, and demanded, with some haste—because she threatened to be off, and with some confidence, which he had won on the amateur-stage, and with pantomimic passionateness, which on that stage had always gained him the finest serenade of clapping hands—demanded nothing just now but reciprocal love. Werther's Lotta haughtily turned upon him her splendid back, covered with ringlets; beside himself, he ran home, took Werther's costume and pistol and came back. Then, with a physiognomical hurricane on his countenance, he stepped up before her and said, showing the weapon, he would kill himself here in the hall, if she rejected him. She looked upon him a little too politely, and asked what he wanted. But Werther, half drunk with Lotta's charms, with Werther's sorrows, and with punch, after the fifth or sixth "No!" (being already used to public acting,) before the whole masquerade, pointed the murderous weapon against himself, pulled the trigger, but luckily injured only his left ear-flap,—so that nothing more can be hung on that,—and grazed the side of his head. She instantly fled, and set out upon her journey, and he fell down, bleeding, and was carried home.
This story blew out many lamps in Falterle's triumphal arch, and lighted up many on Wehmeier's; but it set Albina at once into agony about her quite as wild mad-cap Albano. She asked after him in the kitchen, and the express-messenger helped her to a clew by his account of the boy without a hat. She hastened, herself, in her usual extravagance of anxiety, out through the village. A good genius—the yard-dog, Melak—had proved the antagonist-muscle and turnpike-gate of the fugitive. That is to say, Melak wanted to go too, and Alban chose rather that a patron and coast-guard so serviceable to the castle-yard, and who oftener warned away intruders than the night-watch did themselves, should go home again. Melak was firm in his matters: he wanted reasons,—namely, sticks and stones thrown at him; but the weeping boy, whose burning hands the cold nose of the good-natured animal refreshed, could not give him a hard word, but he merely turned the fawning dog right about, and said softly, Go home! But Melak recognized no decrees except loud ones; he kept turning round again; and in the midst of these inversions,—during which, in Albano's mind, always on a Brockenberg and seeing giant forms loom and glide through the clouds, his tears and every undeserved word burned deeper and deeper,—he was found by his innocent mother.
"Albano," said she, with a friendly but forced composure, "thou here in the cold night-air?" This conduct and language of the only soul which he had injured, took so strong a hold on his full soul, which needed a vent, whether in tears or in gall, that, with a spasmodic shock of his overstrained heart, he sprang upon her neck, and hung there, melted in tears. At her questions, he could not confess his cruel purpose, but merely pressed himself more strongly to her heart. And now came the anxious and penitent Director, too, following after, whom the child's situation had melted over, and said: "Silly devil! was my meaning then so evil?" and took the little hand to lead the way back again. Probably Albano's anger was exhausted by the effusion of love, and satisfied through the appeasing of his ambition; accordingly and immediately, strange to tell, with greater affection towards Wehrfritz than towards Albina, he went back with them, and wept by the way, merely from tender emotion.
When he entered the room, his face was as if transfigured, though a little swollen; the tears had washed away, as with a flood, his defiance, and drawn all his heart's soft lines of beauty upon his countenance, somewhat as the rain shows in transparent, trembling threads the heaven-flower (nostock), which does not appear in the sun. He placed himself in a posture of attention near his father, and kept his hand the whole evening, and Albina enjoyed in the double love a double bliss; and even on the faces of the servants lay scattered fragments of the third mock-rainbow of the domestic peace,—the sign of the covenant after the assuaging of the waters.
Verily, I have often formed the wish—and afterwards made a picture out of it—that I could be present at all reconciliations in the world, because no love moves us so deeply as returning love. It must touch Immortals, when they see men, the heavy-laden, and often held so widely asunder by fate or by fault, how, like the Valisneria,[34] they will tear themselves away from the marshy bottom, and ascend into a fairer element; and then, in the freer upper air, how they will conquer the distance between their hearts and come together. But it must also pain Immortals when they behold us under the violent tempests of life arrayed against each other on the battle-field of enmity, under double blows, and so mortally smitten at once by remote destiny and by that nearer hand which should bind up our wounds!
