Permit me, if you please, to take this opportunity of making a few remarks of importance. Is it not a piece of most culpable negligence on the part of the Government that, seeing the Jews are, as it were, farmers-general and metal-kings of the Christians in German states, the days of their feasts and fasts, and other times connected with their worship, are not published and clearly made known for the benefit of those very numerous persons who wish to borrow of them, or have any business to transact with them? Those who suffer most from this omission are just the upper circles of society, persons of birth and rank, officials of high position; these are the persons who bring papers and want money on Feasts of Haman, Feasts of Esther, of the Destruction of the Temple, of the Rejoicing of the Law, and can’t obtain any. Surely the Jewish festivals, with the hours at which they begin and end, ought to be given in every almanack—as they have been fortunately, for a considerable time, in those of Berlin and Bavaria—or in newspapers—or be proclaimed by the crier, and carefully taught in schools. The Jew, indeed, has no need of a calendar of our festivals, since we are always ready to put off and postpone, if he likes, every Sunday of the year, though it were the first Sunday of it, the feast of the Jewish Circumcision; and consequently hereafter, when the universal monarchy of the Jews is actually established, he won’t take the trouble to append a Christian calendar to his own Jewish calendars, as we now append the Jewish to our Christian. The necessity, however, of inculcating in our schools a better and more exact acquaintance with the seasons of the Jewish festivals, and with their religious observances in general, will not be so fully manifest until hereafter, when the Jews shall have elevated Germany to the proud position of being their Land of Promise, leaving us to make our crusade, and our return to the Asiatic land of promise, if we feel disposed—to a holy sepulchre, and a sacred Calvary.
And yet I think (to close this digression by another) that hereafter, when we become the Christian numerators of Jewish denominators, we should be wrong to set out, as modern crusaders, for the holy land, as to which the Jews themselves trouble their heads but little. It is certain that they will treat us with a far wider measure of the spirit of tolerance than we, unfortunately, have extended to them; but their genius for commerce, which they have hitherto been so much reproached with, will be found to prove itself a guardian angel for us poor Christians, and to take us under its tutelage, inasmuch as we are so indispensably necessary to them as purchasers and consumers of the unprepared hindquarters of the cattle (for it is only the fore-quarters which they may eat, unless the veins are all taken out). Who else but Christians can take the place of the beasts of burden—as no animal may be degraded by working on the “Schabbes”[[48]] (Sabbath)—and perform the necessary draught and other labour? and to whom are they to entrust the performance of menial and manual employments, like the ancient republicans, but to us, their nobler slaves and helots, whom they will, therefore, be sure to treat with more consideration than they have heretofore treated us when we have omitted to pay our promissory notes as they became due.
I return to our poor’s advocate, and record that on Michaelmas Day he could get no money, and consequently no Michaelmas goose. Lenette’s grief at the absence of the goose of her ecclesiastical communion we must all share. Women, who care less about eating and drinking than the most ascetic philosophers—caring, indeed, more about the latter themselves than about the former—are at the same time not to be controlled if they have to go without certain chronological articles of diet. Their natural liking for burgherly festivities brings it about that they would rather go without the appointed hymns and the gospel of the day than without butter-cakes at Christmas, cheesecakes at Easter, the goose at Michaelmas; their stomachs require a particular cover for each festival, like Catholic altars. So that the canonical dish is a kind of secondary sacrament, which, like the primary one, they take, not for the palate’s sake, but “by reason of the ordinance.” Antoninus and Epictetus could provide Siebenkæs with no efficient substitute for the goose, with which to console the weeping Lenette, who said, “We really are Christians, whatever you may say, and belong to the Lutheran Church; and every Lutheran has a goose on his table to-day—I’m sure my poor dear father and mother always had. As for you, you believe in nothing.” Whether he believed in anything or not, however, he slipped off, though it was the afternoon of the Jewish feast-day, to the Jew, who kept a nice pen of geese, with livers both fat and lean, serving as a post-stable for country friends of his own religion. When he went into his place he pulled a duodecimo Hebrew Bible out of his pocket and put it down on the table, with the words, “It was a great pleasure to him to meet with a keen, diligent, student of the law; to such a man it would be a real satisfaction to make a present of his Bible, without asking a halfpenny for it; as it was, an unpointed edition (that is to say, one without vowels), he couldn’t read it himself, especially as even if it had had points, he couldn’t have managed it. This napkin-press of mine, here”—he said, producing it from under his coat-tails “I should be very glad if you would allow me to leave with you, because I find it a good deal in my way at home; I don’t quite know what to do with it. You see, I have particular reasons for being anxious to get hold of a goose out of your pen; I don’t mind if it’s as thin as a whipping-post. If you like, you may call it giving it to me in charity on a holy day of this sort, for all I care; it’ll make no difference to me. If I should ever come and take away the press again, it’ll be an easy matter, and it’ll be time enough, to go into the transaction afresh.”
It was thus that, in order to secure his wife the free exercise of her religious observances, he brought in this goose of controversy, which seemed to have some polemical bearing, as well as to be connected with distinctive doctrines of faith; and next day these two Doctor Martin Lutherists ate up the Schmalkaldian article (and, indeed, another Schmalkaldian article, a commercial one—cold iron, namely—has often been employed in defence of the articles of theology). Thus was the capitol of the Lutheran religion saved, in an easy manner, by the bird, which was roasted (so to speak) at the fire of an auto-da-fé.
But on this particular morning up came the wigmaker, an individual whom he was delighted to see generally, though not to-day, for on the day before, Michaelmas, the quarter’s house rent was due, as we may remember. The Friseur presented himself as a sort of mute bill “at sight;” yet he was polite enough not to ask for anything. He merely mentioned, in a casual manner, that “there was going to be an auction of a variety of things on the Monday before St. Andrew’s Day, and in case the advocate might care to get together a few things for it, he thought he would give him notice of it, as he held a life appointment from the Houses of Assembly as auction-crier.”
He was scarcely down stairs before Lenette gave deep, but not loud, expression to her woes, saying he had “dunned them now, and that the whole house must know all about their disreputable style of housekeeping: had he not talked about furniture?” It was incomprehensible how the poor woman could have fancied anybody had been in the dark about it before! Poor people are always the first to nose out poverty. At the same time Firmian had been ashamed to tell the Friseur that he had been obliged to appoint himself auctioneer of his own furniture. Here he perceived that he blushed for his poverty more before one person, and before the poor, than he did before a whole town, and before the rich; and he flew into a furious indignation with these execrable eructations of human vanity in his noblest parts.
The path from hence to St. Andrew’s Day, all bordered with nothing but thistles as it is, cannot possibly seem longer, even to the reader, than it did to my hero, who, moreover, had to take hold of the thistles and pull them up with his own hands. The garden of his life kept getting more and more like a jardin Anglais, where only prickly and barren trees, but no fruit-trees, were to be found.
Every night, when he opened the latch of his bed-railings, he would say, with great enjoyment, to his Lenette, “Only twenty (or nineteen, or eighteen, or seventeen) days now to the shooting-match.” But the hairdresser and auction-crier had played the deuce and all with Lenette, though the evenings were long and dark and splendidly convenient for needy borrowers on deposit, veiling and hiding the naked, abashed, misery of the poor; she was ashamed the people in the house should know, and afraid to meet them. Firmian, who was astonished equally at the inexhaustible resources of his brain and of his house, and who kept saying to himself, “Do you know, I’m really curious to see what I shall hit upon to-day again, and how I shall manage to get out of this difficulty now—” Firmian, a day or two after the Michaelmas dinner, got his eye upon two more good articles of furniture—a long cask-siphon and a rocking-horse (a relic of his childhood). “We haven’t a cask, and we haven’t a baby,” he said. But his wife implored him, for heaven’s sake, “not to put her to this shame. The horse and the siphon” (she said) “are things that would stick out of the basket so terribly, or out from under one’s apron, and in the moonlight everybody would see them.”
And yet something must go! Firmian said, in an odd cutting, yet sorrowful way, “It must be so! Fate, like Pritzel,[[49]] is beating on the bottom of the drum, and the oats are jumping on the top of it; we have got to eat off the drum.”
“Anything,” she said, faint and beaten, “except things that stick out so.” She searched about, opened the top drawer of the cupboard, and took out a faded wreath of artificial flowers: she said, “Rather take this!” and neither smiled nor wept! He had often looked at it; but as he had sent it to her himself last New Year’s Day, the day of their betrothal, and because it was so romantically beautiful (a white rose, two red rosebuds, and a border of forget-me-nots) every fibre of that tender heart of his would have stood out against parting with this pretty relic—this memorial of better, happier, days. The patient, resigned way in which she made the sacrifice of these poor old flowers tore his heart in two. “Lenette!” he said, moved beyond expression—“why, you know, these are our betrothal flowers!”