One night, at about eleven o’clock, a tremendous blow was heard to strike the roof-tree, as if two or three hundredweights of Alps had come down upon it. Lenette went upstairs with Sophia to see whether it was the devil, or only a cat. They came back with wintry faces, the colour of flour, and as long as one’s arm; and Sophia cried out, “Oh! it’s the Poor’s Advocate (may the Lord have a care of him!) he’s lying up yonder on the camp-bed, like a corpse.” The live Poor’s Advocate, to whom this tale was being told, was sitting in his room. He said it could not be true, or he would have heard the noise as well as the others. From this deafness of his, all the women at once inferred what the occurrence really portended—to wit, his death. The cobbler Fecht (who, by right of royal succession, was night-watchman regnant that night), glad of an opportunity of showing the pluck that was in him, armed himself with the watchman’s spear-staff (his entire artillery-park), but, when nobody was looking, stuck a black leather hymn-book in his pocket—by way of a species of saintly host—in case it should turn out that it was the devil that was upstairs. On his way up he repeated a good many fragments of the Evening Service, which was more than could, perhaps, have been required of him on that evening when, as Archon of the Watch, his calling of the hours was, in fact, a species of expanded Evening Prayer, distributed in small modicums about the streets. He was marching bravely up to the camp-bed, when, alas! he too saw the white powdery face before him, and, behind the bed, a hell-hound with eyes of fire, watching the corpse in a grim and ferocious fashion. He stood still instantaneously, as if petrified—like a watchman carved out of alabaster, hard boiled (so to speak), in a perspiration of terror, with his weapon held out before him. He foresaw, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the moment he turned his back to go flying down the stairs, the thing would clasp its arms about him from behind, saddle him, and ride him down. By the greatest good luck, a voice from downstairs here fell into his heart like a cordial or courage-water, and he heaved up his boar-spear with the view of striking the thing dead, or, at all events, gauging the cubic contents of it. But when, at this juncture, the snowy-looking thing began to rise slowly up, as if growing—his head began to feel as if he had on a bonnet of pitch, and somebody were screwing this cap, and the hair inside it, tighter and tighter every moment; and he could not keep hold of his eel-spear because the top of it felt as heavy as if his biggest journeyman was hanging to it. So he let his sticking-iron go, and flew bravely from the topmost, three-ledger-lined octave of the stair, like a flash of lightning, down to the double-bass key or step.
When he got down, he swore, in presence of the master of the house and all the lodgers assembled, that he was going to do his watchman’s duty without his halberd, for the ghost had got hold of that; and in fact, he quivered like an aspen-leaf and his blood ran cold in his veins, every time his eye so much as rested for a moment on the Advocate’s face. Firmian was the only one of the company who had the courage to go upstairs for the weapon. When he got upstairs he found what he had expected to find, namely, his friend Leibgeber, who had whitened himself with the powder out of an old wig by way of gradually paving the way and preparing people’s minds for Siebenkæs’s artificial death. They quietly embraced, and Henry said he would come upstairs, in an orthodox fashion, next day.
When Firmian returned to his room, he said there was nothing upstairs but an old wig; here was the swift-footed spearman’s spear, and he counted here before him two timid hares of the female sex and one of the male. But the entire conventicle knew as well as possible what all this meant. Nobody, with as many brains as a turnip in his head, would give a halfpenny for Siebenkæs’ life; and these ghost-seers thanked Heaven most devoutly that they were thus frightened to death, since it was a proof that their own lives were in no immediate danger. Lenette could not bring herself to sit up in bed all night, for fear she should see her husband’s likeness.
When morning came, Henry mounted the stair (with his dog), in dusty boots. Siebenkæs felt as though his hat and his pockets must be full of flowers from the Bayreuth Eden; he was like a garden statue from the lost garden. To Lenette, just for this very reason, this palm-tree from Firmian’s East India possessions at Bayreuth (we shall say nothing of Saufinder), was nothing but a prickly holly-bush, and never less than now could she take any pleasure in such a gooseberry-bush, such a thistle-head—beautiful as if fresh from Hamilton’s pencil.[[83]] I must admit, however (and I say it right out, without going about the bush), that his affection for Firmian made his mode of treating Lenette (who was in the wrong and in the right in about equal proportions) a little too reserved and cool. We never hate a woman so heartily as when she is torturing somebody who is very dear to us; just as, on the other hand, a woman is so grim to nobody as to the tormentor of her pet female friend.
The scene which I have now got to describe in a minute or two makes me feel, in the keenest degree, sensible of the depth of the chasm which lies between the novel-writer (who can skip annoying matters, and sugar up anything he wishes for himself, his hero, or his readers) and the mere biographer, or writer of actual history, like myself, who has to dish up everything in a strictly historical form, without asking whether it has got to be sugared or salted. If I formerly, then, excised and omitted the scene in question altogether, I was perhaps to blame: but there was nothing surprising in my doing so, seeing that in these days I preferred delighting my readers to instructing them, and thought more about pretty colouring than truthful drawing.
Leibgeber (and all belonging to him) had for some time been wholly unendurable in Lenette’s eyes, chiefly for this reason (amongst others) that he, a man without anything in the shape of an official title or appointment of any sort, should be on such very familiar and intimate terms with her husband—a man who had held the post of “Poor’s Advocate” of Kuhschnappel for a considerable time. Also that, like her said husband (by him misled and perverted), he went about without a pigtail, so that people pointed at the pair of them, and cried, “Ey! look at that nice couple!” or “Par nobile fratrum.” These sayings, and worse besides, Lenette could draw from the most authentic of all sources of history. Of course, it is true that, now-a-days, it requires about as much courage to put on a tail as it then did to take it off. A canon of a cathedral does not, now-a-days (as he did in bygone times), find it incumbent on him to make himself a pigtail, and pleasant society by help of it; consequently he has not got to cast it twice a year (as peacocks do their tails) that he may legally earn his salary of two thousand florins by appearing in the choir at vespers with close-cropped hair; the latter he wears at the card-table now, us well as in the pulpit. In the few countries where the pigtail still obtains, it is more in the nature of a duty-pendulum and state-perpendicular than anything else; and long hair (which formed part of the royal insignia of the Frank kings) is a badge of servitude in the case of soldiers, so long as it is worn tied up with a pigtail-ribbon, and not flying unbound and loose. The Frieslanders were long in the habit of taking hold of the pigtail when swearing an oath—calling this “the Bœdel Oath;” and to this day in many countries the military or standard oath presupposes the existence of a queue. And as among the ancient Germans a pigtail carried on a pole represented a parish, of course a company or regiment (of which each soldier has his own tail at the back of his head) must be considered to represent a company-queue of patriotic union and of German nationality.
Lenette now made little secret of it to her husband (and Stiefel stood by her in the background), that she was very little pleased, on the whole, with Leibgeber and his on-goings. “My dear poor father” (she said, in Leibgeber’s presence), “was copyist to the Council, but he was always just like other people in his dress, and everything else.”
“Well, dear!” Siebenkæs answered, “as he was a copyist, of course he had always to be copying, with pens, or coats, as the case might be. But my father loaded guns for princes, and did not trouble his head about what else might happen or not happen.” Ere this, when opportunity had offered, she had held up and measured the copying clerk as against the gun-charger, distantly suggesting, as it were, that Siebenkæs had not had anything like so great and distinguished a father as she had, and, as a consequence, had not received the sort of superior education which teaches people manners, and how they ought to behave. This preposterous and ludicrous looking down upon his genealogical tree so annoyed him always that he often laughed at himself. At the same time, the little by-blow at Leibgeber did not surprise him so much as her remarkable bodily repugnance and antipathy to him. Nothing would induce her to shake hands with him: “And I’m sure,” she said, “if he were ever to kiss me, it would be my death.” With all his laborious urgency and questions as to the reason of this, he could get no answer out of her but that she “would tell him after Leibgeber was gone.” Unfortunately, by that time he would be gone himself, too, and in his coffin, i. e. on the road to Vaduz.
And even this extraordinary obstinacy (as of an unyielding bonnet-block) he could endure at a time when one of his eyes warmed itself at his friend, while the other cooled itself at his grave.
At last something was superadded; and as I am sure that nobody can narrate it more faithfully than I, I beg that I may be believed. It was in the evening, before Leibgeber went back to his hotel (the Lizard, if I remember), and the deep black, half-orb of a thunder-cloud had gathered silently in the West, shrouding the sun, and mounting higher, and hanging more and more threateningly over the expectant world. The two friends were talking of what a glorious thing a thunderstorm was, and of the espousals of heaven and earth—the highest with the lowest—of the “descent of heaven to earth” (as Leibgeber put it); and Siebenkæs remarked how, properly speaking, it was only one’s “Fantasy” which pictured the storm, and “Fantasy” only which brought about the union of the highest and the lowest. I wish he had followed the advice of Campe and Kolbe, and used the home-grown word “Fancy” (or “Imagination”), instead of the foreign word “Fantasy;” for that word-purist Lenette pricked up her ears as soon as ever it passed his lips. She who had nothing in her breast but jealousy, and nothing in her head but the “Fantaisie” (at Bayreuth), put down to the score of the latter every word that the two men were saying in eulogy of “Fantasy” in man; for instance, how it (namely, “the Markgrave’s Fantaisie,” thought Lenette) blessed us through the beauty of its sublime creations—how, but for the enjoyment of its lovelinesses, a Kuhschnappel could not be borne with for a moment (of course, because he thinks of that Nathalie of his, thought she); how it clothes and adorns the bare spots of life with its beautiful flowers “two or three silk forget-me-nots,” said Lenette to herself; and how it (the Bayreuth Fantaisie) gilds, not only the pills of life, but also the nuts, nay, the Paris apples of beauty themselves.