Heavens! what double meanings in every corner, and on every side! For how triumphantly Siebenkæs could have refuted the error of confounding Fantasy with Fantaisie, if he had merely shown how little of the poetic Fantasy there was in the Fantaisie at Bayreuth, and how (in the latter) French “taste” had trimmed, behung, and begarlanded the lovely, romantic hills and valleys of Nature’s inventing with rhetoric edifices of flowers, periods, and antithesis; and that what Leibgeber said about Fantasy’s gilding the Paris apples of life, applied in quite another sense to the Bayreuth Fantaisie, because there the French Christmas silver-foil would have to be scraped off from Nature’s apples before they could be bitten.
Scarce was Leibgeber gone out from the house, and off into the storm (which, according to his custom, he enjoyed in the open air), when Lenette’s storm broke, ere the atmospherical one did. “There, you see, I heard with my very own ears,” she said, “how that Unbeliever and Kill-joy there goes about coupling and marrying you in the Fantaisie at Bayreuth; and this is the fellow an honest woman is expected to shake hands with, or touch with the tip of one of her fingers.” She let a few more peals of thunder roll—but it is my duty to the poor woman (turned into a fermenting vat by the addition to her of such a quantity of mash) not to give too accurate a record of all her frothings. Meantime, all the acid matter in her husband began to effervesce in its turn. To find fault with his friend to his face, no matter what misunderstanding this might arise from (and he did not trouble himself to ask what the misunderstanding was, inasmuch as none could be any excuse)—was, in his eyes, a sin against the Holy Ghost of his friendship. Accordingly, he thundered most roundly in reply. It is some excuse for the husband, and for the wife, too, for that matter, that the storm in the air fanned the fuel in his head into a brighter blaze, so that he strode up and down the room like a man demented, and instantly, and on the spot, blew to the four winds of heaven his resolve not to be put out with anything Lenette might do till after he was dead; for he would not, and could not, suffer that “his last friend in life and death should be wrongfully accused by the inheritress of his name, either in his sayings or in his doings.” It will give some idea of the violence of his volcanic eruptions (all of which, for his sake, I mean to pass by in silence), if I say that, vieing in loudness of thundering with the sky itself, he shouted—
“Such a man as he!” and with the words, “you are a female head, too, curse you!” administered a ringing box on the ear to a bonnet-block, which had a grand hat, with feathers upon it. As this head was Lenette’s favourite Sultana of all the blocks—one which she often fondled—nothing was to be expected but an outbreak as violent as if he had given the box to her very self, just as Siebenkæs stormed at the insult to his friend. Nothing came, however, but a gentle shower of bitter tears. “Oh! good heavens! don’t you hear what a terrible storm?” was all she said. “Thunder here, thunder there!” cried Siebenkæs (who, once set rolling down from the lofty peak where he had been reposing, went on, according to both the moral and the physical laws of falling bodies, increasing in velocity and momentum, until he reached the bottom). “I wish the lightning would shatter all the rag-tag and bob-tail in Kuhschnappel that dare to say a syllable against my Henry.”
As the storm grew fiercer she spoke more and more gently, saying, “Ah! gracious, what a peal! Oh, please repent! Suppose it were to strike you in your sin?” “My Henry is out in it,” he said. “Oh that the lightning would strike us both dead, him and me, with the same flash! I should be spared all this miserable business of dying, and we should always be together then.”
His wife had never seen him so angry, or so contemptuous of life and religion, and consequently, could only expect the lightning to fall on the Merbitzer’s house, and strike both him and her dead, by way of an “example.”
And at this moment, a flash of such brilliance illumined the heavens, and such a shattering peal of thunder followed close upon it, that, stretching out her hand to him, she said, “I will do anything and everything you wish me to do; only, for Heaven’s sake, be a God-fearing man again! I will even give Leibgeber my hand; yes, and a kiss too, if I must—no matter whether he has washed his face after the dog’s licking it, or not—and I shall neither listen, nor mind, when you say what a delightful, beautiful place the silvery, flowery Bayreuth Fantaisie is.”
Heavens! how this lightning-flash illumined the depths of two of Lenette’s labyrinths for him, letting him see her innocent confounding of Fantasy and Fantaisie (already noticed), and his own confounding of her strong, personal, idiosyncratic repugnance to (what she considered) uncleanness, with real dislike. The latter was on this wise. Inasmuch as her feminine proclivity for excessive cleanness and beautifying and polishing were more akin to the feline race than to the canine (which cares little about either, or about the feline race, for that matter), Leibgeber’s hand, after Saufinder’s tongue had touched it, was to her as a thumbscrew, and Esau’s hand all Chiragra. Her sense of cleanliness shrunk from touching it; and as for Henry’s lips! though ten days had elapsed since the dog had jumped up to them with his, they would have been considered the most fearful bugbears, and scarecrows, which abhorrence could set up for her. Even time itself was no lipsalve in her eyes.[[84]]
This time, however, the discovery of the error did not bring about peace (as it used to do in former times), but only a renewal of the decree of separation. Tears came to his eyes, indeed, and he gave her his hand, saying, “Forgive me! It is the last time! As the proverb says, ‘The storms come home in August.’” But he could neither offer nor receive a kiss of reconciliation. This, his latest falling away from his warm resolves to be patient, irrevocably proclaimed how wide their inner separation had become. What is the use of seeing one’s errors, when the causes of them are still in force? What is the good of clipping a ripple or two away from the ocean, when there are still clouds and billows? The crime against the bonnet-block was what rankled most in his breast; it became a Gorgon’s head to him, continually threatening and avenging.
He sought his friend with a renewal of affection, for he had suffered for him; and with new eagerness, that he might arrange the place for his death with him.
“Of what dangerous malady do you think you would prefer to give up the ghost,” said Henry, commencing the medical consultation. “Would inflammation of the lungs be to your taste? or inflammation of the bowels, or of the uvula; or would phrenitis be more in your line, or bronchitis; or would you prefer a quinsy, a colic, the devil and his grandmother? We have got all the requisite miasmata and materia epidemica ready to our hands; and when we throw in the month of August—harvest-month of reapers and doctors—by way of poison-powder, you certainly never can get over it all.” Firmian answered: “You are a sort of master-beggar with all kinds of ailments for sale;[[85]] blindness, palsy, and the rest. But for my part, I am for apoplexy, that volti subito, that extra post of death. I have had more than my share of legal prolixities, verbosities, and delays of all sorts.” “Well,” said Leibgeber, “apoplexy probably is the summarissimum of death. At the same time, we must be guided by the best pathological works, and make up our minds for three attacks of it. We can’t go by Nature here, we must be guided by the laws of medicine; and by them, death has to forward a set of three bills of exchange before one of them is accepted and honoured in the next world. He knocks three times with his auctioneer’s hammer. I know too well, the doctors are not the men to listen to reason on this point; you will have to make up your mind to the three apoplectic strokes.” “But what the deuce!” said Siebenkæs, with comic warmth, “If apoplexy gives me two pretty powerful strokes, what more can a doctor desire? The only thing is, I can’t be attacked for the next three or four days, because I must wait for a cheaper coffin-builder.” The right of coffin-building (it should perhaps be explained) goes its round in a migratory manner among the carpenters, and one has got to pay these shipwrights of our last ark whatever they demand, because the property we leave behind us at death has to be given over as plunder by our executors and administrators, to the undertaker, (that excise officer of death) like the palace of a dead doge or pope.