The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end of the fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it, and addressed me from behind with the following harangue of congratulation—“Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter’s head with all sorts of atheistical, nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till she’ll be of no more use in a shop than——”
“Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!” said I quite quietly, taking him into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; “just listen to one single, half-word!”
I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, “Herr Pigtail—for in Charles the Great’s time every officer was so styled, because in those days the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now—Herr Pigtail, I’m not going to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year’s going out and the new year’s coming in. I assure you solemnly that I am the son of the ——,[[32]] and that I shall never see you more, though you shall have all the Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for God’s sake, to allow your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman reads—one of whom will be her husband—and every tradesman’s wife. Yet for all this reading, there’s still plenty of spinning and cooking going on; there are shirts in plenty, and fat people in abundance. And as for corrupting her—why! that’s just what a man who reads will find it most difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads, and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her A B C. Let me entreat you, Captain.”
“If you would but just mind your own affairs! What’s the girl to you?” was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on neither of these two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year’s, had I, in the enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the daughter’s but about a groschen’s worth of hair (and that not her own), which got among my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.
It would have been little to have seized her hands, in the fervour of my biographical enthusiasm it would have been nothing at all; but, as I have said, I hadn’t done it. I had said to myself, “Enjoy a pretty face as you would a picture, and a female voice as you would a nightingale’s, and don’t touch the picture or throttle the bird. What! must every tulip be out up for salad, and all altar-cloths made into camisoles?”
Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit last of all is that there are certain men whom no amount of truth will convince. That Herr Pigtail was one of these presently occurred to me, not so soon as it ought to have done, and I determined that the only sermon I should preach, to him would be of the jocular and middle-age-Easter kind.[[33]] “Not so loud, Herr Pigtail, or mademoiselle will hear every syllable; you have pinned her, poor butterfly, into your letter book; but at the great day of judgment I shall accuse you of not having given her my works to read. I do wish you had only gone on pretending to be asleep long enough to allow me to tell her the other books of the history of Kuhschnappel, where Siebenkæs’s troubles occur, and his death, and his marriage. But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my publisher in Berlin to send you the remaining books of the story the moment they are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, like a morning newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail; may Heaven grant you a new heart with the new year, and your dear daughter a second heart inside her own.”
The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar components raged louder and louder: but I say no more about it—every additional word would have the appearance of an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may at all events say: happy is every daughter who may read my works while her father is awake (very few such daughters, however, recognise this truth). Unhappy is every dependent of an Oehrmann, because he will be starved, as a greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running (I do not mean on the piano with his fingers), as the dancers’ children get nothing to eat that they may spring the better! And fortunate are all needy persons who have nothing to do with him; because Jacob Oehrmann gives to everyone just as much moral, as he possesses mercantile, credit, to which recruit-measure of worth he has been habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who measure each other with yard-measures of metal. The only people who find favour in his sight are those who are complete paupers, and this because they serve as pedestals for his charity; for the alms which he distributes in the name of the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his own. Peace be with him! At that time I had not taken a part myself in celebrating the peace-festival of the soul which I have described in the Fruit-piece of this book, and I had read but little of what I have there written concerning the year of Jubilee which ought to last as long as the Long Parliament in our hearts with respect to all our moral debtors; for if I had I should not even have contradicted Herr Pigtail.
I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting speech to his daughter (for I wished him and her my wishes both together and at once, so that it might not appear which was for which).
“Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long farewell. No more shall I be able, in elysian evenings, to relate to you any of my biographies (shorn of the digressions); and the feast days and the holidays, as well as the eves thereof, will come and will go, but he who has caused you such vivid emotions will come no more. May fate send thee books instead of bookmakers, sometimes stir thy dull heart with a poetic throb, heave thy still breast with tender sighs prophetic of the future—bring to thy eyes some gentle tear drops, such as an andante causes to flow, and lead thee on through the hot, toilsome summer days, not to an after summer, but to a flowery tuneful spring. And so, good night.”
It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn hereditary foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything but my sworn hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more new year well-wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were giving utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music and miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses always touch me more—particularly in an appropriate mouth—than your sapless, new poems, all tricked out with artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry altogether wretched is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going through the town gate; my heart was filled with emotions of very different kinds—for you see it was only eleven o’clock and the cold night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the year, and I didn’t want to pass from the old year to the new in sleep, though that is how I would pass from this life to the next. I resolved to take that flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter company.