“Well, so he has made a face at it, and a long face, too—the hippocratic face,” answered the Doctor, not wholly without wit. “I can’t but believe you,” answered Leibgeber, in a gentle manners “I have not the least doubt you are perfectly right. We laymen, you see, have so few opportunities of seeing those faces, whereas doctors can study the hippocratic countenance in their patients every day of their lives. And, of course, an experienced doctor is always distinguished by a quickness of eye which enables him to tell at a glance if a patient be going to die—which is an impossibility to other people, who, not being doctors in practice, have not many opportunities of seeing people depart this life.”
“A medical connoisseur of your cultivation and experience as a matter of course put mustard poultices to the patient’s feet? Only, I presume, it was too late for them to be of any use, was it?”
“I did manage to hit upon the notion of trying that trick of soling my poor friend’s feet with mustard and vinegar” (answered Leibgeber), “and paper-hanging the calves of his legs with blisters; but the patient (at all times rather fond of his joke, as you know), called that sort of thing ‘medical boot and shoemaking,’ and called us doctors ‘Death’s shoemakers,’ who, when Nature has cried to a poor fellow ‘Look out! Mind your head!’ go and put Spanish flies on to him by way of Spanish boots, mustard-plasters by way of Cothurni, and cupping-glasses by way of leg-irons: as if a man could not make his appearance in the next world without red heels consisting of mustard-blister marks, and red cardinal stockings of plaster blisters. And so saying, the deceased aimed a skilful kick at my face and the plaster, and said the connoisseurs were like stinging-flies, which always fasten upon the legs.”
“He wasn’t far wrong, I suspect, as regarded you. A ‘shoemaker of Death’ might perhaps put something on just under that caput tribus insanabile of yours which wouldn’t fit so badly,” said the Doctor, and made off as fast as he could.
I have already said a few words concerning those emetic powders of his, and I now wish to add what follows. If he does send people to their long homes by means of them, the chief difference between him and a fox[[91]] is that (according to the ancient naturalist), the latter imitates the distant sound of a man being sick to make the dogs run to him, that he may attack them. At the same time even those whose opinion of the members of the medical profession is the highest conceivable must admit that there are certain limits to their criminal jurisdiction. As by European International Law, no army can shoot down another with glass bullets, or poisoned ones, but only with leaden ones—further, as no nation may put poison into the enemies’ food, or wells, but only dirt—so, although the medical police allow a practising physician (of the higher jurisdiction) the utmost freedom in the administration of narcotics, drastics, emetics, diuretics, and the whole pharmacopœia, in a word (so that it would be a breach of the police regulations to attempt to prevent him), yet were the most celebrated of doctors, town or country, within the limits of his jurisdiction to set to work and give people poison-balls in place of pills, or ratsbane by way of a strong emetic, the upper courts of justice would take a pretty serious view of the matter—unless it were for ague that he prescribed the mouse-poison. Nay, I suspect that an entire medical collegium would scarce escape some judicial inquiry if it were to take a sword and run a man through with it (though it might open his veins with a lancet at any hour of the day or night if it pleased), or if it were to knock him down with a warlike but nonsurgical instrument. Thus we find in the criminal records that doctors who threw people into the water from bridges have by no means got clear off—that being a different affair altogether from putting them into a smaller bath, mineral or otherwise.
When the hairdresser heard that the corpse-lottery money had safely arrived in its harbour of refuge, he came upstairs and offered to curl his deceased lodger’s hair, make him a pigtail, and let his comb and pomatum accompany him under the sod. Leibgeber was obliged to be economical on the poor widow’s account, for more than half her feathers were plucked out of her already by the innumerable insect-feelers, vultures’-talons, and boars’-tusks of the domestics of death, and he said the most he could do was to buy the comb and put it in the deceased’s waistcoat-pocket, so that he might do it himself after his own taste. He said the same to the barber, and added that, of course, as hair goes on growing in the grave, the whole secret society (and fruit-bearing society) therein is adorned with fine beards, like Swiss of the age of sixty. These two collaborateurs in hair (who revolve round the same central-sphere like two of the satellites of Uranus) went off with abbreviated hopes, and elongated faces and purses, the one wishing, in the excess of his gratitude, that he had at that moment the shaving of the undertaker Henry, the other wishing he had the cutting of his hair. On the stairs they grumbled out, “It would be no wonder if the dead man should not be able to rest in his grave, but went about frightening people.”
Leibgeber thought of the risk there was of losing the reward of all this long process of deception, should anybody go to have a look at the deceased gentleman while he was in the next room (for whenever he was going further he locked the door). So he went to the churchyard, took a skull out of the charnel-house, and brought it home under his coat. He handed it to Siebenkæs, saying, “If we were to shove this head in beneath the green trellis-bed whereon defunctus is lying, and keep it connected with his hand by means of a green-silk thread, it might be brought into play (in the dark, at all events), as a species of Belidor’s globe of compression, or jawbone of an ass as against Philistines, who have got to be frightened away if they come disturbing the repose of the warm dead.” To be sure (had the most extreme necessity to do so arisen) Siebenkæs would have come to himself, revived out of his prolonged insensibility, and repeated his apoplectic seizure for the third time—much to the gratification of medical systems of theory. However, the death’s head was better than the fit. The sight of this garret-lodging of a soul, this cold hatching-oven of a spirit, made Siebenkæs sad. He said, “No doubt the wall-creeper finds a quieter and safer nest here than did the bird-of-paradise,[[92]] which has flown away from it.”
Leibgeber now chaffered with the servants of the Church and School, and (with whispered curses) paid the necessary surplice-fees and bridge-tolls, saying, “The day after tomorrow we will lay the deceased to rest as quietly as we may, without fuss or ceremony.” It was a matter of indifference to them; all they cared about being the pocketing of the postage which franks people into the next world, which they were all glad enough to do—all except one old and poor School-servant, who said he thought it a sin to take a farthing from the poor widow, for he knew what poverty was. But this was exactly what the rich could not know.
In the morning, Henry went down to the hairdresser and Lenette, leaving the key in the door—for, since the recent ghost story, the lodgers who lived upstairs were too frightened to put so much as their heads out of their own doors. The hairdresser, who was still annoyed that he had not been allowed to curl the deceased’s hair, bethought him that it would at least be something if he were to slip upstairs, and cut and carry off the entire hair-forest. The demand for hair and firewood is in excess of the supply (now that the former is made into rings and twisted into letters), and we should never leave any dead person a coffin or a single hair. Even the ancients sheared off the latter for the altars of the subterranean gods; so Meerbitzer crept on tiptoe into the room, and opened his scissor-feelers. Siebenkæs could easily look askew into the room through the eye-holes of the mask, and from the scissors and general aspect of his landlord, he divined the impending misfortune and ‘Rape of the Lock.’ He saw that in his strait he could reckon more upon the bare head under the bed than upon his own. The landlord, who, in his timidity, had carefully left the door wide open behind him to secure his retreat, drew near to the plantation of human pot-plants, with intent to play the part of reaper in the harvest-month—to combine the rôles of beard-shearer and hair-curler, and avenge them both. Siebenkæs wound up the thread as well as he could upon his covered fingers, so as to roll out the skull; but as the latter came much too slowly, and Meerbitzer far too quickly, he was obliged to come to his own assistance in the meantime (and this because evil spirits so often breathe upon men, or inspire them) by breathing out of the mouth-hole of his mask a long night-breeze upon the landlord. Meerbitzer could not explain to himself this most suspicious blast, which blew real azote, and a deadly simoom-wind, upon him; and all his warm constituent principles began to shoot into icicles. But, unluckily, the dead man had soon shot all his breath away, and was obliged to re-load his air-gun slowly. This suspension of hostilities brought the lock-raper to himself, and to his legs again; so that he made fresh preparations to take hold of the nightcap-tassel, and remove that gossamer (said nightcap) from the field of hair. But just as he was in the act of taking hold of it, he became aware that a something was beginning to move under the bed; he paused, and waited quietly (for it might be a rat) to see what this noise would turn out to be caused by. But, as he thus waited, it was all of a sudden borne in upon his mind that a round thing was rolling up his legs, and coming higher and higher. In one instant he made a clutch at it with his empty hand (the other held the scissors), and, powerlessly as a pair of callipers, that hand rested on the ascending, slippery ball, which kept pressing it up and up. Meerbitzer grew visibly stiff in the legs, and his blood ran cold; but a fresh upward shove of his hand, and a glance at the ascending head, administered to him (ere he was felled to earth, wholly curdled to cheese), such a kick of terror that he flew like a feather across the floor, and out of the door like a cannonball shot straight at the bull’s eye by the cannon-powder of fear. He landed in the room downstairs with the open scissors in his hand, his mouth and eyes wide open, and a pallid spot on his face, compared to which his hair-powder and his shirt were court-mourning. Nevertheless, in this novel situation (I am glad to say it to his honour) he had the presence of mind not to say a word about what had happened; partly because ghost-stories cannot be related till nine days are over without the greatest danger to the narrator, partly because he could not well talk about his hair-shearing and privateering on any day at all.
At one in the morning, Firmian told this tale to his friend with the same fidelity as I have endeavoured to observe in recounting it to the reader. This gave Leibgeber a useful hint to set a trusty body-guard over the noble corpse; and to this office, in the absence of chamberlains and other court officials, he could appoint no other than Saufinder.