The truth of the matter, indeed, is, that Siebenkæs had sometime before complained to his wife that his hat, which was of softish felt, was getting a good deal spoiled by having to be so often taken off to people in the streets, and that he could think of nothing better than to protect it with a coat of mail in the shape of a stiff cover of green oilskin, so that when packed up in this pudding roll he might go on daily employing it in those offices of out-door politeness which men owe one to another, without ever having to take hold of the hat itself at all. Well, the first walk he took after assuming this double hat, or hat’s hat, was to a grocer’s, where he disembowelled the inner one from its envelope and swopped it away for six pounds of coffee, which warmed the four chambers of his brain better than the hare-skin had ever done; he then went tranquilly home, with only the coadjutor hat on his head, undetected, and thenceforward bore the empty case through the streets with a secret joy that, in a sense, he now really took off his hat to nobody—with other entertaining fancies bearing on the subject of his sugar-loaf.
Of course, when he forgot—and on that day in particular, it was perhaps excusable that he did so—to support his hat-case with the necessary framework of artificial rafters, it was really almost an impossibility to take this mere shell of a hat right OFF for purposes of salutation. The most he could do was just to touch it courteously, like an officer returning a salute; and thus, against his will, play the part of a rude and ill-bred individual.
And it so happened that just on this very day get it off he could not.
It was so ordained, however, that matters should not even rest here (as regarded our couple’s promenade), but one of the above-mentioned ingenious evil spirits changed the scene of the drama with such nimbleness, that we have a fresh combination before our eyes before we know where we are. Just in front of our wedded pair, a master tailor of the Catholic confession was taking his walk, most sprucely attired in honour of the Feast of the Annunciation, like all the rest of his pro- and CON-fession. As ill luck would have it, this tailor, being in a narrow walk, had (whether for fear of mud, or in the delight of his soul over his holiday) so elevated his coat-tails that the vertebral extremity, the os coccygis, or (shall we call it) insertion of the spinal cord, of his waistcoat, was clearly exhibited; in other words, the background of his waistcoat, which, as we know, is generally executed in colours more subdued than those used for the brighter and more prominent foreground on the chest of the wearer. “Hy! Mr.!” cried Lenette; “what are you doing with a lot of my chintz on the back of you?”
The truth was that this tailor had put aside and taken possession of so much of a nice green Augspurg chintz (sent to him by Lenette, on her becoming a queen, to make her a new body) as he considered proper and Christianly honest, calculating on the principle of “no charge for wine samples,” and this trifle of a sample had just barely sufficed to form a sober background to his pea-green waistcoat; and he had contented himself with so dim a reverse side for this waistcoat in the confident expectation that it would never be seen. However, as the tailor went on with his walk (after Lenette had shouted her query at him), as utterly unmoved as if it had nothing on earth to do with him, the little spark of her anger became a blazing flame, and, regardless of all her husband’s winks and whispers, she cried aloud, “Why, it’s my very own chintz, that I got all the way from Augspurg; do you hear, Mr. Mowser, you’ve stolen my chintz, you blackguard, you!” Then, and not till then, the guilty chintz-robber turned round with much sangfroid, and said, “Prove that, if you please! But, mind, I’ll CHINTZ YOU, if there be such a thing as law in all Kuhschnappel.”
At this she burst into a conflagration. Her husband’s prayers and entreaties were but as wind to her. “Ey! you riff-raff,” she snapped out. “But I’ll have what’s my own—you villain!” she cried. The only reply the tailor vouchsafed to this attack was this—he simply lifted his coat-tails with both hands high above the endorsed waistcoat, and, bending a little forward, said, “There!” after which he strode slowly on, keeping at the same focal distance from her, so as to bask in her warmth as long as possible.
Siebenkæs was the most to be pitied on this rich feast day, when, in spite of all his juristic and theological exorcisms, he could not cast out this devil of discord—when by good luck his guardian angel suddenly emerged from a side path, Peltzstiefel to wit, taking his walk. Gone, so far as Lenette was concerned, were the tailor, the quarter-ell of chintz, the apple of discord, and the devil thereof; the blue of her eyes and the blush on her cheek fronted Stiefel as bright and as fresh as the blue of the evening sky and the blush on its sunset clouds. Ten ells of chintz and half that number of tailors with waistcoat-backs of it into the bargain, were to her, at that moment, feathers light as air, not worth a word or a farthing; so that Siebenkæs saw on the instant that Stiefel’s coming was as that of a regular Mount of Olives all full of mere olive-branches of peace; although for discord devils hailing from another quarter there might without difficulty be pressed from the olives on said mountain an oil which could not be poured on any fire of matrimonial difference which Stiefel’s would be the bucket to put out. If Lenette was a tender, delicate, white butterfly, silently hovering and fluttering about Peltzstiefel’s flowery path, out of doors—when she got him into her house she was an absolute Greek Psyche; and, in spite of all my partiality for her, I am bound, under pain of having all the rest discredited, to insert in this protocol a clear statement (much as I regret to do so) to the effect that on this particular evening she gave one the idea of being nothing but some clear-winged translucent soul free from all trammels of body—which, at some former time, while as yet in the body, had stood in some love-relationship to the Schulrath, but now hovered about him with upraised pinions, and fanned him with fluttering downy plumes, and which at length weary of hovering, and pleased to rest once more on the loved perch of a body, settled upon Lenette’s, there being no other feminine one at hand, and there folded its wings to rest. Such seemed Lenette. But why was she thus to-day? Stiefel’s ignorance and delight at it were great; Firmian’s very small. Before I explain it, I will say, “I pity thee, poor husband, and thee, too, poor wife. For why must the smooth flow of the stream of your life (and of our own) be always broken by sorrows or by sins, and why cannot it fall into its grave in the Black Sea, without having to pass over thirteen cataracts, like the river Dnieper?” However, the reason why Lenette on this day in particular exhibited all her heart toward Stiefel, almost bared of the cloister grating of the breast, was that she was, just on this day, so keenly suffering under her misery—her poverty. Stiefel was full of genuine, solid treasures; Firmian’s were all lacquered. I know that her Siebenkæs, whom before marriage she had loved with the calm and cool regard of a wife, would have found that she would have come to love him after marriage with the warm affection of a fiancée, if he had only been able to give her the bare necessaries of life. There are hundreds of girls who bring themselves to believe that they love the man to whom they are engaged, whereas it is not till after marriage that the play becomes a reality—and that for good reasons, both metallic and physiological. In a well-filled room and kitchen, filled with a comfortable income, and twelve household labours of Hercules, Lenette would have been quite true to the advocate, though an entire philosophical society of Stiefels had sat down all round her, and would have said and thought, every hour of the day, “No more, thank you—I am helped;” but as things were, in a house and kitchen so empty as hers, the chambers of a woman’s heart grow full; in one word, no good comes of it. For a woman’s soul is by nature a beautiful fresco painted on rooms, table-leaves, dresses, silver salvers, and household plenishing in general. A woman has a large stock of virtue, but few virtues; she needs a confined sphere and social forms, and without these flower-sticks the pure white flowers trail in the dust of the border. A man may be a citizen of the world, and if he has nothing else to put his arms round he can press the entire earthly ball to his bosom, although he can’t put his arms round much more of it than will make him a grave. But a citizeness of the world is a giantess, and goes through the world with nothing but spectators, and is nothing but a character on the stage.
I ought to have described the whole of this evening much more circumstantially than I have done, for it was upon this evening that the wheels of the vis-à-vis phæton of wedded life began to smoke, as a consequence of the friction they had recently been subjected to, and threatened to break out into a blaze of the fire of jealousy. Jealousy is like Maria Theresa’s small-pox, which allowed that princess to pass with impunity through thirty hospitals, full of small-pox patients, but attacked her beneath the Crowns of Hungary and Germany. Siebenkæs had had on that of Kuhschnappel (the Bird-one) for a week or two now.
After this evening Stiefel, who took an increasing delight in sitting basking in the rays of the still rising Sun of Lenette, came oftener and oftener, and considered himself the peace-maker, not the peace-breaker.
It is now my duty to paint with the utmost minutiæ of detail the last and most important day of this year, the 31st of December, with its background and foreground all complete, and with all accessories.