“There may be another advantage in this short reprieve, too,” said Leibgeber. “I have an old collection of family sermons here, which I bought for somewhere about half the amount of a police-court fine. I do not know anywhere else but in this work where such impressive sermons are delivered—it is more especially in the binding that they are preached. The binding is wood, you perceive, and there is a live preacher in there, preaching as finely as any preacher that can be found in a pulpit.” This preacher in the wooden boards of the old book in question, was the beetle which goes by the name of the death-watch, wood-borer, or Ptinus pertinax, because when he is touched he keeps up the appearance of a sham death, torture him as you will—and because the little blows he strikes, which are nothing but knocks at his sweetheart’s door, are supposed to be Death’s knocks at ours. For which reason any piece of furniture in which he was wont to knock used to be thought a valuable article of commerce, or heirloom.
Leibgeber added that, as there was nothing he so detested as a man who tried to outwit God and the Devil (from fear of death) by a sudden repentance, he was fond of hiding this sermon-book amongst the furniture of a hell-fearing individual of this description, so as to give him a good sound terrifying with the beetle’s funeral sermons (although the insect, for his part, was, in fact, thinking solely of mundane matters during his preaching—like many other preachers). “So, could I not put the sermon-book, with its funeral preacher, in amongst your books, that your wife might hear him, and think of death—of yours, that is to say—and so get more used to the idea of it?”
“No, no,” said Firmian, “she shall not suffer so much for me before her time. She has suffered quite enough already.”
“Just as you please,” said Henry; “but my beetle and you would have gone together capitally. You are going to simulate death, just as the Ptinus pertinax does.”
For the rest, he was delighted that everything had worked together so well, and that it was just a year since he had stamped upon Blaise’s glass periwig, and insulted, or blackguarded, him. Because (as we have seen) libels of this sort are not actionable after the lapse of a year, except libels by a critic—which (like the Rector in Ragusa) only reign for a month—that is to say, the time during which the journal in which they appear circulates in the reading society. And a book—which may be said to hold the rank of dictator in the realm of letters—cannot reign, with all its influence, more than a Roman dictator, namely, six months—that is to say, from its birth-fair to its death-fair—and, like Grub Street scribblers, it dies either in spring or in autumn.
They went back into a new-dressed, freshly-arranged room. Lenette did what she could to paint the cracks of her housekeeping over with flowers (like the flaws in porcelain), and always opened pieces of music in which that particular string (of an article of furniture), which chanced to be broken, did not require to be touched. Firmian, on this occasion, sacrificed a greater number of the good and entertaining ideas (which struck him) than usual to her efforts to place Spanish screens between the company and the steppes and fallow-fields of her poverty; and more than Henry did even then. All women—even those without brains—are the sharpest and most delicately-observant of augurs and clairvoyante prophetesses concerning matters which closely concern themselves. Lenette was an instance. Stiefel was there in the evening—a good deal of argument was going on, and Stiefel openly declared that he (with Salvian and other able theologians) was of opinion that the children of Israel (whose garments never wore into the minutest hole during all the forty years they passed in the wilderness) always continued of exactly the same size (so as always to fit their clothes exactly) with the exception of children, in whose cases the clothes, which had been cut to fit them out of the wardrobes of the dead, grew with their bodies in length and breadth. “In this way,” he added, “all the difficulties of the great miracle are got over easily, by means of lesser accessory-miracles.”
Leibgeber answered (with sparkling eyes), “I knew that while I was yet in my mother’s womb. There was not a hole in all the hosts of Israel, except those which they brought with them out of Egypt—and these never got any bigger. Even suppose anybody made a hole in his cheek, or in his coat, when he was mourning—these holes stitched themselves together in a trice, of their own accord. What a shameful and deplorable thing it is, though, that the host of Israel should have been the first, and the last, army whose uniform was a sort of delightful over-body, which grew with the soul it enveloped—and where the frock-coat developed into an electoral mantle, and from a Microvestis to a Macrovestis! I see that eating was cloth manufacturing (in the wilderness), manna was English wool, and the stomach the loom. An Israelite who fed himself up to the proper pitch was, by so doing, yielding the produce of the land, and of the wilderness. If I had been in the recruiting-service in those days, I should simply have hung the recruit’s jackets on to the recruit’s measure. But how go matters in our wilderness here—which leads to Egypt, not to the promised land? In our regiments, the privates grow every year, but the coats do not. Nay, the uniforms are made for dry seasons only, and for lean men—in wet years the clothes contract like hygrometers, and perspiration steals more cloth than the tailor does, or even the contractor. A commanding officer who should expect his uniforms to stretch—who should reckon upon a Periphrasis of them—going by the example, not only of the Israelites, but likewise of the clothes-moths, and the snails (who do not expand to suit their shells, but whose shells expand to suit them)—this commanding officer, I say, would go out of his mind—for his men would be fighting in the condition of the athletes of old—and the men themselves would be in a nice frame of mind on the subject.”
This innocuous sermon (wholly addressed to the account of Stiefel’s piece of exegetic absurdity) Lenette supposed was directed against her wardrobe. She was like the Germans in general, who search after some special satiric kernel hidden in every rocket and firework serpent of humour. Wherefore Siebenkæs begged him to pardon this poor wife of his (over whose heart so many a sharp sorrow besides was strewn) the inevitable and invincible ignorance of her exegesis—or rather, to spare her the knowledge of it altogether.
At length a Kuhschnappel bath-keeper departed this life, and fell under the plane of the costly carpenter. “I have not a minute to waste over my apoplexy now,” said Firmian, in Latin; “who is to be my warrant that nobody shall die before I do, and so the cheap carpenter slip through my fingers?” So it was arranged that he should be taken ill the following evening.