A fair is the high mass which the beggars of all ranks and classes attend; when it is still a day or two off, all the footsoles that have nothing to walk upon but compassionate hearts, are converging towards the spot like so many radii, but on the morning of the fair-day itself the whole annual congress of beggardom and the column of cripples are fairly on the march. Anyone who has seen Fŭrth, or been in Elwangen during P. Gassner’s government, may cut these few leaves out of his copy; but no one else has any idea of it till I proceed and lead him in at the town-gate of Kuhschnappel.
The street choral service and the vocal serenades now commence. The blind sing like blinded singing-birds—better, but louder; the lame walk; the poor preach the gospel themselves; the deaf and dumb make a terrible noise, and ring in the feast with little bells—everybody sings his own tune in the middle of everybody else’s—a paternoster is clattering at the door of every house, and in the rooms inside nobody can hear himself swear. Whole cabinets of small coppers are lavished on one hand, pocketed on the other. The one-legged soldiery spice their ejaculatory prayers with curses, and blaspheme horribly, because people don’t give them enough—in brief, the borough which had made up its mind for a day’s enjoyment, is invaded and almost taken by storm by the rabble of beggars.
And now the maimed and the diseased begin to appear. Whoever has a wooden jury-leg under him, sets it and his long third leg and fellow-labourer the crutch, in motion towards Kuhschnappel, and drives and plants his sharp-pointed timber toe into moist earth there in the vicinity of the town-gate, in hopes of its thriving and bearing fruit. Whosoever has no arms or hands left, stretches both out for an alms. Those to whom Heaven has entrusted the beggars’ talent, disease, above all paralysis, the beggars’ vapeurs—trades with his talent, and the body appertaining to it, levying contributions with it on the whole and the sound. People who might stand as frontispieces to works on surgery and medicine, quite as appropriately as at city gates, take up their position near the latter and announce what they lack, which is, first and foremost, other people’s cash. There are plenty of legs, noses, and arms in Kuhschnappel, but a great many more people. There is one most extraordinary fellow—(to be admired at a distance, though impossible to be equalled—looked upon with envy, though indeed only by such blotting-paper souls as can never see supreme excellence without longing to possess it); there’s only half of him there, because the other half’s in his grave already, everything you could call legs having been shot clean away; and these shots have placed him in a position at once to arrogate and assume to himself the primacy and generalship-in-chief of the cripples, and be drawn about on a triumphal car as a kind of demigod, whose soul, in place of a corporeal garment, has on merely a sort of cape and short doublet. “A soldier,” said Siebenkæs, “who is still afflicted with one leg, and who on that ground expostulates with fate, inquiring of her, ‘Why am I not shot to pieces like that cripple, so that I might make as much in the day as he does?’ seems to forget that on the other side of the question there are thousands of other warriors besides himself who haven’t even one wooden leg (let alone more), but are totally unprovided with even that fire- and begging-certificate; moreover, that however many of his limbs he might have been relieved of by bullets, he might still keep on asking, ‘Why not more?’”
Siebenkæs was merry over the poor because they are merry over themselves; and he never would kick up a politico-economical row about their occasionally tippling and guzzling a little too much,—when, for instance, a whole lazarette-wagon, or ambulance-load of them, halting at some shepherd’s hut, they get down, and go in, and their plasters, their martyrs’ crowns, their spiked girdles and hair-shirts come off, leaving nothing but a brisk human being who has left off sighing just for a minute; or—since what everybody works for is, not merely to live, but to live a little better now and then—when the beggar too has something a little better than his everyday fare, and when the cripple pulls the goddess of joy into his boarded dancing-barn to dance with him as his partner, and her hot mask falls off in the waltz (as for our ball-rooms, it never falls off in them).
About 11 o’clock, the devil, as I have half hinted already, dropped a handful of blue-bottle flies into Firmian’s wedding soup—to wit, Herr Rosa von Meyern, who graciously intimated his aristocratic intention of coming to call that afternoon, “because there was such a good view of the market-place.” People of impecunious gentility, who can’t issue orders in any houses but their own, construct in their own, with much ease, loopholes whence they can fire upon the enemy who makes his attack from—within. The advocate had a piece of rudeness towards the Venner to put into either scale of his balance of justice, so as to determine which was the least of the two. The one was, to let him be told he might stay where he was; the other, to let him in, and then behave just as though the noodle were up in the moon. Siebenkæs chose the latter as the smaller.
Women, good souls, have always to carry and hold up the Jacob’s ladder by which the male sex mount into the blue æther and into the evening-red; this call of the Venner came as an extra freight loaded on to Lenette’s two burden-poles of arms. The laving of all moveable property, and the aspersion of all immoveable, recommenced. Meyern, the false lover of the poor child-murderess, Lenette detested with all her heart; at the same time, all her polishing machinery was at once set agoing on the room, indeed, I think women dress themselves more and with greater pains for their lady-enemies than for their lady-friends.
The advocate went up and down, all behung with long chains of ratiocination, like a ghost, and would fain have succeeded in imbuing her with the idea that she shouldn’t give herself the slightest bother of any kind about the nincompoop. “It was no good,” she said, “what would he think of me?” It was not until having eliminated from the room as a piece of crudity his old ink-bottle, into which he had only that minute put ink-powder to dissolve and make ink for the ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers,’ she was about to lay hands on that holy ark, his writing-table—that the head of the house ramped up—on his hind legs, pointing with his fore paw to the line of demarcation.
Rosa appeared! Nobody who had just a little soft place in his heart could really have cursed this youngster, or beaten him into a jelly; one rather got to feel a kind of a liking for him, between his pranks. He had white hair on his head and on his chin, and was soft all over; and had stuff like milk instead of blood in his veins, like the insects, just as poisonous plants have generally white milky juice. He was of a very forgiving nature, especially towards women, and often shed more tears himself in an evening at the theatre than he had caused many whom he had ruined to let fall. His heart was really not made of stone, or lapis infernalis, and if he prayed for a certain time, he grew pious during the process and sought out the most time-honoured of religious formularies to give in his adhesion to them then and there. Thunder was to him a watchman’s rattle, arousing him from the sleep of sin. He loved to take the needy by the hand, especially if the hand was pretty. All things considered, he may perhaps get to heaven sooner or later; for, like many debtors in the upper circles of society, he doesn’t pay his play-debts, and he also has in his heart an inborn duel-prohibition against shooting and hacking. As yet he is not a man of his word; and if he were poorer, he would steal without a moment’s hesitation. Like a lap-dog, he lies down wagging his tail at the feet of people of any importance, but tugs women by the skirts, or shows his teeth and snarls at them.
Pliant water-weeds of this sort fall away from the very slightest satiric touch, and you can’t manage to hit them with one, richly as they deserve it, because its effect is only proportionate to the resistance it meets with. Siebenkæs would have been better pleased had Von Meyern only been a little rougher and coarser, for it is just these yielding, pitiful, sapless, powerless sort of creatures that filch away good fortune, hard cash, feminine honour, good appointments and fair names, and are exactly like the ratsbane or arsenic, which, when it is good and pure, must be quite white, shining and transparent.
Rosa appeared, I have said, but oh! lovely to behold beyond expression! His handkerchief was a great Molucca of perfume; his two side locks were two small ones. On his waistcoat he had a complete animal kingdom painted (as the fashion of the day was), or Zimmermann’s Zoological Atlas. His little breeches and his little coat, and every thing about him salted the women of the house into Lottish salt-pillars, merely in passing them by on his way upstairs, I must, say, though, that what dazzle me personally, are the rings which emboss six of his fingers,—there were profile portraits, landscapes, stones, even beetle-wing covers all employed in this gold-shoeing of his fingers.