CHAPTER VI.
The pale, quiet woman opened the door for them, and looked neither at Schnetz nor his companion, but withdrew hastily to a little back-room near the kitchen, without giving any other answer than a slow shake of the head to her master's kind nod and inquiry whether any one had been there. Felix was struck, even more than the first time, by the sad, timid expression of her eyes, which had a noble form and a soft brilliancy, while her features could never have been handsome even in her younger days.
"You must excuse me," said Schnetz, when they had entered his room, where he offered his visitor a cigar--he himself smoked Algerian tobacco out of a short clay-pipe--"for not having introduced you to Madame Thersites. You would not have gained much by it, for the spirits of that good soul are not, unfortunately, the best in the world. She labors under the fixed delusion that she is the great misfortune of my life, because I quitted the service on her account; since which time I have had hard work to keep her from quitting life itself in some moment of depression. Yes, my dear fellow, there is a little example of the profound sense, wisdom, and morality of our social condition. This excellent woman, who has now borne the world with me for ten years, comes of a family of country schoolmasters. I became acquainted with her when I was visiting the lord of the manor; her old father had been pensioned, her mother was dead, and she, the eldest daughter, took entire charge of the household, educated her brothers and sisters, and yet found time enough to do something for herself and perfect her education. Of course she is a Protestant. Well, I began to respect her greatly; and so one thing followed another, until I discovered that I could not live without her. The fact that I could not give the bonds which a lieutenant must have in order to marry, did not seem to me at the time an insurmountable difficulty. My sweetheart thought just as I did, that we only need wait until her second sister was old enough to take her place in the household. As soon as this was possible, we could live in the city. An old aunt, whose heir I expected to be, had, as she said herself, long had her trunks packed for the journey to the other world, and then I could easily raise the necessary sum; while the fact that my marriage would be a mésalliance especially delighted my heart on account of my family, with whom I had long before broken off all relations.
"But the departure of my aunt was put off from year to year; and we resolved not to wait till our best days were past, and lived for some four or five years in Christian and true marriage, though it had not received ecclesiastical sanction. Our only trouble was the loss of our four children. At last my aunt betook herself to her last resting-place; and now, for we were again expecting a child, we made preparations to procure an official recognition of our union, though nothing could make it closer than it was already. But see what sublime sentiments were all at once expressed by my good comrades!--the whole corps knew our relations to one another in all its uprightness, and knew me besides. The honor of the corps would suffer under it, they said, if I married a 'person' who had had children before the official recognition of her marriage. They wouldn't have found it in the least offensive had I merely continued the old relations. The logic of this point d'honneur was incomprehensible to my stupid head, as well as to my wife's. But while it merely made mine sit all the firmer on my shoulders, so that I preferred to resign rather than to submit, it threw my poor wife's completely off its balance. We went through the ceremony sadly; the child, which was soon after brought into the world, died within a few months; and since that time the poor creature has been afflicted with the melancholy delusion that she has the ruin of my life upon her conscience. I have tried a hundred times to make it clear to her that I could have wished for nothing better than to be free from the routine of military service, and devote my life to my studies. There are certain points in military history, and also a few technical problems and controversial questions, concerning which I sometimes have a word or two to say in military periodicals; and so, when the wretched campaign of '66 came, in which we had hard work to save the honor of our arms, to say nothing of our having been delightfully fooled by Austria, I thanked the Lord that I was not forced to march with the rest, but had done forever with a trade which can make a man act against his convictions. Since then, we have lived on unmolested, and I devote my spare hours, as you see, to illustrating my prosaic existence according to the best of my ability."
His eyes wandered over the little room, which certainly did not seem very cheerful, and had, even on this summer day, a strangely chilling air. It is possible that this impression was caused in part by the peculiar decoration of the walls, that were but sparsely relieved by a few plain articles of furniture, a black leather sofa and a carved, worm-eaten wardrobe. Instead of framed pictures or engravings, wherever there was a vacant spot, and even behind the stove and in the niche of the solitary window, there were the most grotesque silhouettes cut out of black paper and pasted on the bare plaster, which had once been painted white. They formed an extraordinary collection of figures, taken from the most different stations of life, most of them exhibited in ridiculous postures appropriate to their respective occupations--pedantic scholars, students, artists, women, ecclesiastics, and soldiers--all as if caught in flagrante in their pet weaknesses and sins, and fixed upon the wall, standing revealed in shadowy outline. Yet an artist could not help taking delight in the broad yet spirited strokes with which each figure was portrayed; and it was simply the superabundance of these weird groups that covered the walls, and had already begun to overspread the smoke-stained ceiling, which was calculated to excite feverish dreams in a quiet brain if they were looked at for any length of time.
"You see now why I dragged you up here," said Schnetz, throwing off his riding-jacket and crossing his lean arms (round which flapped a pair of coarse shirtsleeves) behind his back. "From my intercourse with artists I have caught vanity enough to mercilessly entice inoffensive people into my den, although the black art which I pursue appears to very few of them to be worth the trouble of toiling up four flights of stairs to examine. Life viewed from the wrong side--the fancies of a misanthrope--a Thersites album, or rather nigrum--well, am I wrong in thinking that this world of shadows is even less to your taste than an ordinary art exhibition?
"But when you consider the matter more carefully, you will find it has its good side. What is it that is so absolutely lacking in all modern art, and the absence of which is the source of all other defects? Simply this: it no longer respects the silhouette! In landscape and genre, historical and portrait painting, yes, even in sculpture, you find everywhere a lot of pretty little tricks of execution; delicate shades, tones, and touches; a devilish careful, nervous, and, on the whole, attractive piece of work, but in it all not a single great feature; no strong decoration, no solid construction, the very shadow of which suggests something. Give me a pair of shears and a quire of black paper, and I will cut you out the whole history of art up to the nineteenth century; the Sistine Madonna and Claude Lorraine as well as Teniers and Ruysdael; Phidias and Michael Angelo as well as Bernini; so that every one of them shall make a good showing, the rococo period included, which, after all, had something sounder at bottom than our boasted present. Take away from the latter its finical, over-refined tricks of color, and what is left? An incredible poverty of form, a little brilliancy or aspiring 'idealism,' and the bare canvas. The same thing might, it seems to me, be justly applied to our literature, and from that to all the other manifestations of our boasted civilization. But I, on the contrary, have from the very first devoted my attention to the essential part, the primary form, and the really determining outlines; and as these, unfortunately, only come out strongly in our sins and weaknesses, I have become a silhouette cutter--an art that not only earns no bread, but even takes out of one's mouth the bread he might otherwise have gained. Naturally, mankind will never forgive one who shows it its dark side, and points out its excrescences and deformities and defects; for each individual thinks he is just the one all of whose sides the sun should especially light up."
It was fortunate for Felix, in his absent-minded state, that Schnetz was one of those men who, when they once begin upon the great theme of their life, upon their mission or their one idea, take no offense when their hearer leaves them to run on alone, but play upon their single whim in inexhaustible variations. When, after half an hour or so, Felix interrupted Schnetz with the laughing remark that his teacher would scold him if he came to work too late, he found that he himself had not spoken a dozen words; and yet the lieutenant took leave of him with the remark that he rejoiced to have discovered in him a congenial spirit, and hoped the four flights of stairs would not be so high as to keep him from their acquaintance later over a glass of beer and a tolerable cigar.