We may quite properly apply to the human hand the expression “it was shod with rings like a horse’s hoof,” it has been long applied to the horse’s hoof itself, and Daubenton has proved, by dissections, that the latter contains all the different parts of the human hand. The use of these hand or finger manacles is quite proper and permissible; indeed rings are indispensable to the fingers of those who ought by rights to have them in their noses. According to the received opinion, these metal spavins, or excrescences of the fingers, were only invented to make pretty hands ugly, as a kind of chain and nose-rings to keep vanity in check; so that fists which are ugly by nature can easily dispense with these disfigurements. I should like to know whether there is anything in another idea of mine bearing on this subject. It is this. Pascal used to wear a great iron ring with sharp spines on it round his naked body, that he might always be ready to punish himself for any vain thought which might occur to him by giving this ring a slight pressure; now is it not perhaps the case that these smaller and prettier rings in a similar way chastise any vain thoughts which may occur, by slightly, but frequently hurting? They seem at least to be worn with some such object, for it is exactly the people who suffer most from vanity who wear the greatest quantities of them, and move about their beringed hands the most.
Unwished-for visits often pass off better than others; on this occasion everyone got on pretty comfortably. Siebenkæs of course was in his own house—and behaved himself accordingly. He and the Venner looked out of the window at the people in the market-place. Lenette, in accordance with her upbringing, and the manners and customs of the middle classes of small towns, didn’t venture to be otherwise than silent, or at the most to take an exceedingly subordinate, obligato, accompanying part in the concert of a conversation between men; she fetched and carried in and out, and, in fact, sat most of the time down stairs with the other women. It was in vain that the courteous, gallant Rosa Everard, tried upon her his wonted wizard spells to root women to a given spot. To her husband he complained that there was little real refinement in Kuhschnappel, and not one single amateur theatre where one could act, as there was in Ulm. He had to order his new books and latest fashions from abroad.
Siebenkæs in return expressed to him merely his enjoyment over the—beggars in the market-place. He made him notice the little boys blowing red wooden trumpets, loud enough to burst the drum of the ear, if not to overthrow the walls of Jericho. But he added, with proper thoughtfulness, that he shouldn’t omit to notice those other poor devils who were collecting the waste bits of split wood in their caps for fuel. He asked him if, like other members of the chamber, he disapproved of lotteries and lotto, and whether he thought it was very bad for the Kuhschnappel common people’s morals that they should be crowding about an old cask turned upside down, with an index fixed to the bottom of it which revolved round a dial formed of gingerbread and nuts, and where the shareholders, for a small stake, carried off from the banker of the establishment, a greedy old harridan of a woman, a nut or a ginger cake. Siebenkæs took pleasure in the little, because in his eyes it was a satirical, caricaturing diminishing mirror of everything in the shape of burgherly pomposity. The Venner saw no entertainment whatever in double-meaning allusions of the kind; but indeed the advocate never dreamt of amusing anybody but himself with them. “I may surely speak out whatever I like to myself,” he once said; “what is it to me if people choose to listen behind my back, or before my face either?”
At length he went down among the people in the market-place, not without the full concurrence of the Venner, who expected at last to be able to have some rational conversation with the wife. Now that Firmian was gone, Everard begun to feel in his element, swimming in his own native pike-pond as it were. As an introductory move he constructed for Lenette a model of her native town; he knew a good many streets and people in Augspurg, and had often ridden through the Fuggery, and it seemed only yesterday, he said, that he saw her there working at a lady’s hat, beside a nice old lady, her mother he should think. He took her right hand in his (in an incidental manner), she allowing him to do so out of gratefulness for calling up such pleasant memories; he pressed it—then suddenly let it go to see if she mightn’t just have returned the pressure the least bit in the world, in the confusion of fingers as it were—or should try to recover the lost pressure. But he might as well have pressed Götz von Berlichingen’s iron hand with his thievish thumb as her warm one. He next came upon the subject of her millinery work, and talked about cap and bonnet fashions like a man who knew what he was talking about; whereas when Siebenkæs mixed himself up with these questions, he displayed no real knowledge of the subject at all. He promised her two consignments, of patterns from Ulm, and of customers from Kuhschnappel. “I know several ladies who must do what I ask them,” he said, and showed her the list of his engagements for the coming winter balls in his pocket-book; “I shan’t dance with them if they don’t give you an order.” “I hope it won’t come to that,” said Lenette (with many meanings). Finally, he was obliged to ask her to let him see her at work for a little, his object here being to weaken the enemy by effecting a diversion of her forces—her eyes being occupied with her needle, she could only have her ears at liberty to observe him with. She blushed as she took two bodkins and stuck one of them into the round red little pincushion of—her mouth; this was more than he could really allow, it was so very dangerous—it formed a hedge against himself—and she might swallow either the stiletto in question, or at all events some of the poisonous verdigris off it. So he drew this lethal weapon with his own hand out of its sheath in her lips, scratching the cherry mouth a little, or not at all—as he loudly lamented—in the process, however. A venner of the right sort considers himself liable in a case of this kind for the fees and expenses consequent upon the accident; Everard, in his liberality, took out his English patent pomade, smeared some on to her left forefinger, and applied the salve to the invisible wound with the finger as a spatula—in doing which he was obliged to take hold of her whole hand as the handle of the spatula, and frequently squeeze it unconsciously. He stuck the unfortunate stiletto itself into his shirt front, giving her his own breastpin instead, and exposing his own tender white breast to—the cold. I particularly beg persons who have had experience in this description of service to give their opinion with firm impartiality on my hero’s conduct, and, sitting in court martial on him, to point out such of his movements and dispositions as they may consider to have been ill-advised.
Now that she was wounded, poor thing, he wouldn’t let her go on working, but only show him her finished productions. He ordered a copy of one of them for Madame von Blaise. He begged her to put it on and let him see it on her—and he set it himself just as Madame von Blaise would wear it. By heaven! it was better even than he had thought; he swore it would suit Madame von Blaise quite as well, as she was just the same height as Lenette. This was all stuff and nonsense, really the one was taller by quite half a nose than the other. Lenette said so herself, she had seen Madame von Blaise at church. Rosa stuck to his own opinion, and swore by his soul and salvation (for in cases of the kind he was given to profane language), and by the sacrament, that he had measured himself with her a hundred times, and that she was half-an-inch taller than himself. “By heaven!” he said, suddenly jumping up, “of course I carry her measure about with me, like her tailor; all that need be done is that you and I measure ourselves together.”
I shall not here withhold from little girls a golden rule of war made by myself, “Don’t argue long with a man, whatever it may be about—warmth is always warmth, even if it only be warmth of argument—one forgets one’s self, and ultimately takes to proving by syllogistic figures, and this is just what the enemy wants—he converts these figures into poetical figures—ultimately even into plastic figures.”
Lenette, a little giddy with the rapid whirl of events, good naturedly stood up to serve as recruit measure for her recruit Rosa; he leant his back to hers. “This won’t do,” he said, “I can’t see,” and unlocked his fingers which had been intertwined together, backwards, over the region of her heart. He turned quickly round, stood before her, and embraced her gently, so as to determine, by comparing the levels of their eyes, whether their brows were an exact height or not. His were glaring quite an inch higher up than hers; he clasped her closely and said, turning red, “you see you were right; but my mistake was that I added your beauty to your height,” and in this proximity he pressed his mouth, red as sealing-wax, upon her lips, very founts and sources of truth as they were.
She was ashamed, annoyed and embarrassed, angry, and ready to cry, but had not the courage to let her indignation break out upon a gentleman of quality. She didn’t speak another word then. He set her and himself at the window, and said he would read her some songs, of rather a different kind, he hoped, to those which were being hawked down in the street. For he was one of the greatest poets in Kuhschnappel, although as yet it was not so much that his verses had made him known, as that he had made his verses known. His poems, like so many others nowadays, were like the muses themselves, children of memory. Every old Frankish town has at least its one fashionable fop, a person who fait les honneurs; and every town, however old, prosaic, imperial-judicature-endowed, possesses its genius, its poet, and sentimentalist; often both these offices are filled by the same individual—as was the case in Kuhschnappel. The greater and likewise the lesser house of assembly looked upon Rosa as a mighty genius, smitten with the genius-epidemic-fever. This disease is something like elephantiasis, of which Troil in his travels in Iceland gives such an accurate description in twenty-four letters, and the principal features of which are that the patient is exactly like an elephant as to hair, cracks, colour, and lumps of the skin, but has not the power of the elephant, and lives in a cold climate.
Everard took a touching elegy out of one of his pockets, the left one, in which (I mean in the elegy) a noble gentleman, lovesick, sang himself to death; and he told her he should like to read it to her, if his feelings would let him get through it without breaking down. However, the poem shortly drew more than one tear and emotion from its owner, and he, to his honour, was constrained to furnish a fresh proof of the fact that however manly and cold he and poets of his stamp can be to the heaviest sorrows of humanity, they really cannot quite contain themselves at the woes of love, but are compelled to weep at them. Meanwhile Rosa, who, like swindlers at play, always kept one eye upon a reflecting surface of some sort—water, window panes, or polished steel for instance, so as to catch a passing glimpse of the female countenance from time to time—saw by means of a little mirror in one of the rings of his left hand, in which hand he was holding the elegy, just a trace or two in Lenette’s eyes of the tragic dew left there by his poem. So he pulled out of his second pocket a ballad (it is, no doubt, printed long ago) in which an innocent child murderess, with a tearful adieu to her lover, throws herself upon a sword. This ballad (very unlike his other poetical children) had real poetic merit, for luckily (for the poem at least) he was a lover of that kind himself, so that he could speak from the heart to the heart. It is not easy to portray the emotion and the melting pitying tears on Lenette’s face; all her heart rose to her tear-dimmed eyes.
It was an experience utterly new to her to be thus agitated by a combination of truth and fiction.