The reviews were sent to the editor; the critical invoice amounted to three florins four groschen and five pfennige. Strange! we smile when we see the spiritual and the corporeal, intellect and hard cash, pain and pecuniary compensation, stated as sums in proportion; but is not our whole life an equation, a sum in “partnership” between soul and body; and is not all action upon us corporeal, and all reaction from us spiritual?
The servant-girl brought back only “kind regards;” not the leaves of silver which his ink should have crystallised into. Peltzstiefel had not given the matter a thought. He was so absorbed in his studies that he was indifferent to his own money, and blind to the poverty of other people. He was capable, indeed, of noticing a hiatus; but it must be in a manuscript—not in his own or other people’s shoes, stockings, &c. An inward fire blinded this fortunate man to the phosphorescence of the rotten wood around him. And happy is every actor in the school-theatricals of life who finds the lofty inward delusion suffice to compensate him for the delusions without, or to hide them from his view;—who is so carried away by the enthusiasm with which he enters into and renders his spiritual rôle, that the coarse daubs of landscapes of the scenery seem to bloom, and the branches to rustle in the refreshing showers (of peas) from the rain-box—and who does not wake to reality at the shifting of the scenes.
But this beautiful blindness of the Rath was very distressing to our two dear friends; their little constellation, which was to have shone in their evening sky, fell all down in meteoric drops upon the earth. I do not blame Stiefel; he had an ear for distress, though not an eye. But ye rich and great ones of the earth, who, helpless in the honeycombs of your pleasures, swimming with clogged wings in your melted sugar of roses, do not find it an easy matter to move your hand, put it into your money-bag, and take out the wage of him who helped to fill your honey-cells—an hour of judgment will strike at last for you, and ask you if ye were worthy to live, let alone to live a life of pleasure, when ye avoid even the trifling trouble of paying the poor who have undergone the immense trouble of earning. But ye would be better if ye thought what misery your comfortable, indolent, indisposition to open a purse, or to read a little account, often inflicts upon the poor; if ye pictured to yourselves the backward start of hopeless disappointment of some poor woman whose husband comes home without his money—the starvation, the obliteration of so many hopes, and the weary sorrowful days of a whole family.
The advocate, therefore, put on his wicked silverising face again and went prying about into every corner with his eyeglass, making himself into a species of pressgang of the furniture. As a king or an English minister sits up in his bed at night, rests his head on his hand, and considers what commodity or what tree-stem full of birch-sap he may stick his winetap of a new tax into, or (in another metaphor) so cut the peat of taxation that new peat may grow in its place: thus did Siebenkæs. With his letter of marque in his hand he scanned minutely every flag that hove in sight; he lifted up his shaving-dish and set it down; he shook the paralytic arms of an old chair till they cracked again—he subjected it to a trial more severe, by sitting down in it and getting up again.—I interrupt my period to observe en passant that Lenette fully understood the danger of this conscription and measuring of the children of the land, and that she protested continuously and unavailingly against this game of pledges with Job-like lamentations.—He also took down from its hook an old yellow mirror, with a gilt leaf-pattern frame, which hung in the bedroom opposite the green-railed bed, examined its wooden case and the back of it, moved the glass of it up and down a little and then hung it up again—an old firedog and some bedroom crockery he did not touch; he whipt the lid off a porcelain butter-boat, made, according to the plastic art of the period, in the shape of a cow, and glanced into the inside of it, but set it back, empty and full of dust, as an ornament on the mantelpiece again; he weighed, longer and with both hands, a spice-mortar, and put it back again into the cupboard.
He looked more and more dangerous, and more and more merry; he drew out with both arms the drawer of a wardrobe, shoved back table-napkins, and begun to overhaul a mourning-dress of checked cotton a little ——. But here Lenette flew out, seized him by his overhauling arm, and cried, “Why not, indeed! But, please God, it shall not come to that with me!”
He shut the drawer quietly, opened the cupboard again, and carefully lifted the mortar on to the table, saying, “Oh! very well, it matters little to me, it comes all to the same thing; the mortar will have to take its departure.” By covering this bell of shame with his open hand by way of a damper, he was able to take out the pestle, its clapper, without producing any ring or clang. He had been perfectly aware all the time that she would rather pawn the garment of her soul (i. e. her body) than the checked garment of that garment; but it was of set purpose that, like the Court of Rome, he demanded the entire hand that he might be the more likely to obtain a single finger of it—in this case the mortar—and moreover he hoped the mere frequency with which he reiterated his determination would save him the necessity of stating any reasons, and that he would familiarise Lenette with the bugbear and hobgoblin by keeping it continually before her eyes (I mean, with his design upon the mortar). Wherefore he went on to say, “The fact is, that it’s very little that we have to pound in the course of a twelvemonth, except when we have a quarter of a fat beast; at the same time, just give me some idea why you’re so anxious to keep the checked gown—what on earth is the use of it? The only time you can wear it will be when I depart this life. Now, Lenette, that’s a terrible sort of idea; I can’t stand it. Coin the dress into silver—eliminate it altogether; I’ll send two pairs of mourning-buckles of mine along with it; I hope I may never have anything to buckle with them again.”
She stormed without bounds and preached with much wisdom against all “careless, thoughtless householders;” and this for the very reason, that she felt it was only too probable that he would soon take every article of furniture in the place (which he had been feeling and valuing, like a person buying bullocks) to the slaughter-house, and—goodness gracious! the checked dress among the rest. “I had rather starve,” she cried, “than throw away that mortar for a mere song. The Schulrath is sure to be here to-morrow evening, with the money for your reviews.”
“Now you begin to talk sense,” said he; and he carried the pestle horizontally in both his hands into the bedroom, and laid it on to Lenette’s pillow—next bringing the mortar, and placing it on his own. “If people should happen to hear it ring,” he said, “they would think I wanted to turn it into silver, as we were pounding nothing in it; and I shouldn’t like that.”
The united capital contained in his greenish-yellow cotton-purse, and her large money-bag (which she wore at her girdle), amounted to about three groschen, good money. In the evening there would have to be a groschen-loaf bought, for cash, and the remainder of the metallic-seed must be sown in the morning to grow the breakfast- and dinner-crop. The servant-girl went out for the bread, but came back with the groschen and with the Job’s message, “There’s nothing left at the bakers’ shops at this time of night but two-groschen loaves; father (the cobbler Fecht) couldn’t get any either.” This was lucky; the advocate could enter into partnership with the shoemaker, and it would be easy for these partners, by each contributing a groschen to the partnership funds, to obtain a two-groschen loaf. The Fechts were asked if they agreed to this. The cobbler, who made no secret of his daily bankruptcies, answered—
“With all my heart. G—d d—n me! (Heaven forgive me for swearing) if I and the whole crew of young tatterdemalions in the place have had a scrap of anything to fill our mouths with the whole blessed day but waxed-ends.” In short, this coalition of the tiers état with the learned estates put an end to the famine, and the covenanting parties broke the loaf in two and weighed it in a just balance, it being itself both the weight and the thing weighed. Ah! ye rich! Ye, with your manna, or bread sent from heaven, little think how indispensable to poverty are small weights, apothecaries’ measure, heller-loaves,[[45]] a dinner for eight kreuzers (and your shirt washed into the bargain); and a broken-bread shop, where mere crumbs and black-bread powder are to be had for money; and how the comfort of a whole family’s evening depends on the fact that your hundredweights are on sale in lots of half-an-ounce.