When a man intentionally works his anxieties and apprehensions up to the highest possible pitch, some consolation is sure to fall upon his heart from heaven, like a drop of warm rain. Siebenkæs began catechising himself more strictly, asking himself what it really was that he was tormenting himself about. Nothing but the fear of having to go to the shooting-match without money, without powder and shot, and without having had his boots abbreviated for the third time! “Is that really all?” he said. “And what, if you please, is there to make it a compulsory matter that I should go there at all? I’ll tell you what it is” (he went on to himself), “I am the monkey complaining bitterly that, having stuck his hand into a narrow-mouthed bottle of rice, and filled it, he can’t pull it out without a corkscrew. All I’ve got to do is to sell my rifle and my shooting ticket; all I’ve got to do is to open my hand and draw it out empty.” So he made up his mind to take his rifle to the barber on the day of the auction to be put up to sale.
All battered, bruised, and weary with the day, he climbed into his bed, with the thought of which safe and sheltered anchoring ground he consoled himself all day long. “There is this blessed property about night,” he said, as he sat and spread the feathers of his quilt level, “that while it lasts we need trouble ourselves neither about candles, coals, victuals, drink, debts, nor clothes; all we want is a bed. A poor fellow is in peace and comfort as long as he is lying down: and, luckily, he has only got to stand for half of his time.”
The attacks of syncope, to which our souls and our cheerfulness are subject, cease, as those of the body do (according to Zimmermann), when the patient is placed in a horizontal position.
Had his bed been provided with bed-tassel, I should have called it the capstan, whereby he heaved himself slowly up on the Monday morning from his resting place. When he got up, he ascended to the garret, where his rifle was nailed up in an old, long field-chest, to keep it safe. This rifle was a valuable legacy from his father, who had been huntsman and gun-loader to a great prince of the empire. He took a crowbar, and, using it as a lever, prised up the lid with its roots, i. e. nails; and the first thing he saw in it was a leather arm, which “gave him quite a turn;” for he had had many a good thrashing from that arm in bygone days.
It will not take me too far out of my way to expend a word or two on this subject. This full-dress arm had been borne by Siebenkæs’s father on his body (as it might be in the field of his escutcheon) ever since the time when he had lost his natural arm in the military service of the before-mentioned prince, who, as some slight reward, had got him his appointment as gun-loader to his corps of Jägers. The gun-loader wore this auxiliary arm fastened to a hook on his left shoulder; it being more like the arm of a Hussar’s pelisse, or an elongated glove, worn by way of ornament, than as a mouth Christian of an arm (pretending to be what it was not). In the education of his children, however, the leather arm served, to some extent, the purpose of a school library and Bible Society, and was the collaborateur of the fleshly arm. Every-day shortcomings—for instance, when Firmian made a mistake in his multiplication, or rode on the pointer dog, or ate gunpowder, or broke a pipe—were punished not severely, that is, only with a stick, which in all good schools runs up the backs of the children by way of capillary sap-vessel or siphon, to supply the nourishing juice of knowledge; or is the carriage-pole to which entire winter-schools are harnessed, and at which they tug with a will. But there were two other sorts of transgressions which he punished more severely. When one of the children laughed at table during meals, or hesitated, or made a blunder during the long table-grace or evening prayers, he would immediately amputate his adventitious arm with his natural one, and administer a tremendous thrashing to the little darling.
Firmian remembered, as if it had happened yesterday, one occasion when he and his sisters had been thrashed, turn about, for a whole half-hour at dinner-time with the battle-flail, because one of them began to laugh while the long muscle was swishing about the ears of another, who was serious enough. The sight of the bit of leather made his heart burn even at this day. I can quite see the advantage to parents and teachers who try the expedient of unhooking an empty by an organic arm, and smiting a pupil with this species of Concordat, and alliance between the temporal and spiritual arms; but this mode of punishment ought to be invariably the one made use of; for there is nothing which infuriates children more than anything new in the way of instruments of punishment, or a new mode of application of those in general use. A child who is accustomed to rulers and blows on the back, must not be set upon with boxes on the ear and bare hands; nor one accustomed to the latter treated to the former. The author of these Flower-pieces had once a slipper thrown at him in his earlier days. The scar of that slipper is still fresh in his heart, whereas he has scarcely any recollection of lickings of the ordinary sort.
Siebenkæs pulled the arm of punishment and the rifle out of the chest; but what a treasure trove there was beneath them! Here was help, indeed! At all events he could go to the shooting-match in shorter boots, and eat whatever he liked for some days to come. What most astonishes both him and me in this affair (it is easily explicable, however) is that he had never thought of it sooner, inasmuch as his father was a Jäger; while, on the other hand, I must confess it could not have happened on a luckier day, because it chanced to be just the day of the auction.
The hunting spear, the horse’s tail, the decoy bird, the fox-trap, the couteau de chasse, the medicine-chest, the fencing mask and foil—a collection of things which he had never had a thought of looking for in the chest—could be taken over instantly to the town-house, and set up to auction on the spot by the hairdressing Saxon.
It was done accordingly. After all his troubles, the little piece of good luck warmed and gladdened his heart. He went himself after the box—which was sent just as it stood to the auction, except that the rifle and the leathern artery were kept back—to hear what would be offered for the things.
He took up his position (on account of the excessive length of his half-boots) at the back of the auctioneer’s table, close to his hectic landlord. The sight of this pile of heterogeneous goods and chattels all heaped up higgledy-piggledy (as if some grand conflagration were raging, and it had been collected in haste for safety; or as if it were the plunder of some captured city), goods and chattels sold, for the most part, by people on the downward path to poverty, and bought by those who had arrived at poverty already—had the effect of making him contemn and despise more every moment all this complex pumping apparatus, this machinery for keeping the spring-wells of a few petty, feeble lives in clear and vigorous flow; and he himself, the engineer and driver of this machinery, felt his sense of manliness grow stronger. He was furious with himself, because his soul had seemed yesterday to be but a sham jewel, which a drop of aquafortis deprives of its colour and lustre, whereas a real jewel never loses either.