Hammer and Anvil: A Novel

by Friedrich Spielhagen

"But you see I have none, doctor."

"Don't you contradict me, you brainless mammoth! A friend who has capital that he places at our disposal is a capital of our own. I am your friend, I have capital, and I place it at your disposal. Who knows if in this I do not accomplish a work more pleasing to heaven than if I followed my old father's wishes and employed it in assisting orphan asylums and other such childish undertakings. You are an orphan; so in helping you I follow the words if not the intention of that pious man, and shall be perfectly easy in conscience on that score."

"But I shall not," I replied, laughing.

"Don't laugh, you monster!" cried the doctor. "You don't seem to comprehend that my proposition is perfectly serious. Take my money--there are fifty thousand thalers, or thereabouts--go into partnership with the commerzienrath; or better, found a rival establishment, and hoist him out of his saddle: in a few years you will be the first manufacturer and machinist of Germany, and----"

While the doctor thus spoke in feverish excitement the blood had rushed to his head in a really alarming manner. He suddenly checked himself, and it was not until long after that I learned what it was that required such an effort to suppress. It may be that my head, in consequence of my long sitting behind the grog, was by no means perfectly clear; at all events only thus can I explain the obstinacy with which I still contradicted the doctor and maintained that my sense of independence would never allow me to use the capital and assistance of another as the foundation of my fortune.

"Do you know what you are proclaiming in this?" cried the doctor in his shrillest tones, and wrathfully smiting the table--"that you will remain a beggar, a miserable beggarly fellow, as every one has done who was fool enough to try to drag himself out of the swamp by his own hair? No, no, my good sir; the art is to let others work for you. Whoever does not understand this, is and remains a beggar."

"What would our best friend have said if he had heard you talk thus?"

"Has he not in life and death proven the truth of it?" crowed the pugnacious doctor. "Do you call it living as a reasonable man, to leave the dearest we have on earth in poverty at our death? And what are the great results of all his long, self-sacrificing, heroic labor for the general good? He fancied, this high-priest of humanity, that his example would suffice to bring about an entire reform of the prison system. And now an old pedant of a king has but to shut his sleepy eyes, and the foundation of his edifice gives way; and as soon as he himself commits the folly of dying, it falls to ruin like a house of cards. If that be not folly I do not know how loud the bells must jingle."

"I know somebody whose cap is quite as well furnished," I said, looking the doctor full in the eyes. "What do you call a man who--as the only son of a rich old father who loves the son and lets him follow his own course, even though he does not comprehend it, with the certain prospect of a considerable inheritance--performs for years the laborious work of a prison-surgeon for the most trivial pay; who, after he has come into the possession of this estate, continues to labor as the physician of the poorest of the poor, and finally, because the weight of his wealth is too burdensome, throws it into the lap of the first man he meets, to die the same irreclaimable beggarly fellow that he has lived?"

"Did I ever pretend to be anything else?" asked my antagonist, not without some mark of confusion. "Oh yes, as if it were only the simplest thing in the world to be a child of prudence. To produce that result requires generations, for shrewdness must be bred in families, like the long legs of race-horses. Take the commerzienrath, who is a classic example how shrewdness grows and thrives when it is once properly grafted on a family stock: the man's grandfather was a needleman, who kept a little shop by the harbor-gate in S.; my own grandfather knew him well. He was a disreputable old fellow, who sold nails and needles in his front shop, and lent money on pawns in the back room. Then came his son, who was at least a head above his father, and could read and write, and calculate much better than the old man. He settled in your town and bought shares of ships, and finally whole ships, and paved the way for his son, who is the biggest of the lot. His flourishing period came in Napoleon's time. Napoleon and the blockade and the smuggling business made a rich man of him. Yes, smuggling--the same smuggling that cost your friend his life. When the Herr Commerzienrath was a smuggler, smuggling was a kind of patriotic work, and the poor devils who risked and lost their lives at it were martyrs of the good cause. God only knows how many men's lives he has on his conscience. And when afterwards the people who had got into the way of the business would not quit it, and indeed could not, or they would have starved, he was safe enough; he had brought his sheep out of the rain and could laugh in his sleeve. Then came the time of army-contracts, and that again was a good time for him; and thus this leech kept sucking and gorging himself with the blood of his fellow-creatures. Everything that he undertook succeeded; the needleman's grandson and broker's son has become a millionaire, has married a woman of noble birth, has titles, orders--all that the heart can desire. Look you, there is a child of prudence, whom I recommend to you as an example."