BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
A WEDDING DAY, SUCCEEDING A DAY OF RESPITE—THE COUNTERPARTS—DISH QUINTETTE IN TWO COURSES—TABLE-TALK—SIX ARMS AND HANDS.
Siebenkæs, parish advocate[[10]] for the royal borough of Kuhschnappel, had spent the whole of Monday at his attic-window watching for his wife that was to be, who had been expected to arrive from Augspurg a little before service-time, so as to get a sip of something warm before going to church for the wedding.
The Schulrath of the place, happening to be returning from Augspurg, had promised to bring the bride with him as return cargo, strapping her wedding outfit on to his trunk behind.
She was an Augspurger by birth—only daughter of the deceased Engelkraut, clerk of the Lutheran Council—and she lived in the Fuggery, in a roomy mansion which was probably bigger than many drawing-rooms are. She was by no means portionless, for she lived by her own work, not on other people’s, as penisoned court-ladies’-maids do. She had all the newest fashions in bonnets and other headgear in her hands earlier than the richest ladies of the neighbourhood, albeit in such miniature editions that not even a duck could have got them on; and she erected edifices for the female head at a few days’ notice, on a large scale, after these miniature sketches and small-scale plans of them.
All that Siebenkæs did during his long wait was to depose on oath (more than once) that it was the devil who invented seeking, and his grandmother who devised waiting. At length, while it was still pretty early, came, not the bride, but a night post from Augspurg, with an epistle from the Schulrath to say that he and the lady “could not possibly arrive before Tuesday. She was still busy at her wedding-clothes, and he in the libraries of the ex-Jesuits, and of Privy Councillor Zopf, and (among the antiquities) at the city gates.”
Siebenkæs’s butterfly-proboscis, however, found plenty of open honey cells in every blue thistle blossom of his fate; he could now, on this idle Monday, make a final application of the arm file and agate burnisher to his room, brush out the dust and the writing-sand with the feather of a quill from his table, rout out the accumulations of bits of paper and other rubbish from behind the mirror, wash, with unspeakable labour, the white porcelain inkstand into a more dazzling whiteness, and bring the butter-boat and the coffee-pot into a more advanced and prominent position (drawing them up in rank and file on the cupboard), and polish the brass nails on the grandfather’s leather arm-chair till they shone again. This new temple-purification of his chamber he undertook merely by way of something to do; for a scholar considers the mere arranging of his books and papers to be a purification as of the temple, at least so maintained the parish advocate, saying further, “orderliness is, properly defined, nothing but a happy knack which people acquire of putting a thing for twenty years in the old place, let that place be where it will.”
Not only was he tenant of a pleasant room, but also of a long red dining-table, which he had hired and placed beside a commoner one; also of some high-backed arm-chairs: moreover the landlords or proprietors of the furniture and of the lodgings (who all lived in the house) had all been invited by him to dinner on this his play Monday, which was an excellent arrangement, inasmuch as—most of the people of the house being working-men—their play Monday and his fell together; for it was only the landlord who was anything superior, and he was a wig-maker.
I should have had cause to feel ashamed of myself had I gone and used my precious historical colours in portraying a mere advocate of the poor (a fit candidate for his own services in that capacity). But I have had access to the documents and accounts relating to my hero’s guardianship during his minority, and from these I can prove, at any hour, in a court of justice, that he was a man worth at least 1200 Rhenish guldens (i.e. 100l.), to say nothing of the interest. Only, unfortunately, the study of the ancients, added to his own natural turn of mind, had endowed him with an invincible contempt for money, that metallic mainspring of the machinery of our human existence, that dial plate on which our value is read off, although people of sense, tradespeople for example, have quite as high an opinion of the man who acquires, as of him who gets rid of it; just as a person who is electrified gets a shining glory round his head whether the fluid be passing into or out of him. Indeed, Siebenkæs even said (and on one occasion he did it) that we ought sometimes to put on the beggar’s scrip in jest, simply to accustom the back to it against more serious times. And he considered that he justified (as well as complimented) himself in going on to say, “It is easier to bear poverty like Epictetus than to choose it like Antoninus; in the same way that it is easier for a slave to stick out his own leg to be cut off, than for a man who wields a sceptre a yard long to leave the legs of his slaves alone.” Wherefore he made shift to live for ten years in foreign parts, and for half a year in the imperial burgh, without asking his guardian for a single halfpenny of the interest of his capital. But as it was his idea to introduce his orphan, moneyless bride as mistress and overseer into a silver mine all ready opened and timbered for her reception (for such he considered his 100l. with the accumulated interest to be), it had pleased him to give her to understand, while he was in Augspurg, that he had nothing but his bare bread, and that what little he could scrape together by the sweat of his brow, went from hand to mouth, though he worked as hard as any man, and cared little about the Upper House of Parliament or the Lower. “I’ll be handed,” he had long ago said, “if I ever marry a woman who knows how much I have a year. As it is, women often look upon a husband as a species of demon, to whom they sign away their souls—often their child—that the evil one may give them money and eatables.”