He soon felt himself at home; even before the supper was washed and picked and ready, he found out, or, rather, took it in, that the gentle old man, named Lind, was a bee-keeper. The latter I believe; for otherwise he would not have been so mild, as, in fact, in most cases, animal society is less corrupting than human. Hence Plato assigns the Lange's colloquies of man with the animals as the best thing left of Saturn's golden reign. It is not all one whether one is a dog-keeper, a lion-keeper, or a bee-keeper; for our menagerie in the lower viscera, according to the Platonic allegory, barks and bleats in unison with the external one.—When Victor actually went with the old man round the house and among the bee-hives, then he came back into the supper-room with the face of a man who claimed already a seat in the Kussewitz Church and a page in the church-book. Did he not already know that the bee-father had followed three parsons and five squires in Kussewitz to the grave; that he had celebrated his first marriage with his "mother" (so he called his wife) at the age in which the silver wedding usually falls; that his head had still memory and hair; that he expected to carry black eyebrows under the coffin-lid; that he, Lind, had not the least need, like old Gobel and even the beadle Stenz, for the sake of his eyes, to take his place near the church-window, but could read his verse anywhere; and that he once every year went to Maienthal to church, and thrust a sovereign[[113]] into the church billiard-pocket,[[114]] because the churchyard there covered all his relations on the father's side?
O, this contentment with the evening-clouds of life refreshes the hypochondriacal hearer and spectator, whose melancholy strings in an old man's presence begin so easily to tremble like a death-watch; and an ardent old man seems to us an immortal being, hardened against the scythe of death, and a finger-post pointing to the next world! Victor especially saw, with heavy thoughts, in an old man, an organized past, a bent incarnation of years, the plaster cast of his own mummy standing before him. Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul, have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual loss of sight become casters again,—then head smiths,—then foundery apprentices. The good Newton,[[115]] Linnæus, Swift, went back to be foundery-apprentices of learning. But so singularly timid is man, that, while he regards his soul, in its greatest advantageous dependence upon his organs, still as a vowel,—and justly,—nevertheless, in the case of an injurious dependence upon the same, fears it may be merely a consonant of the body,—and that unjustly.
As a walk about a strange place gives a traveller the best naturalization act, and as Victor was incapable of being anywhere a stranger, he went—out a little way. There are many nights when it is not night. He saw outside, not far from the garden-fence of the senior (not the seignior of nobility, but the senior parson), a very beautiful girl sitting, buried in a Latin Whitsuntide programme, and praying from it with folded hands. A case of beauty and craziness united he never could resist; he greeted her, and would not let her roll up and put up her Latin prayer-book. The good soul, having lost her prayer-book and paternoster, had easily despatched her devotions out of the Whitsuntide programme De Chalifis literarum studiosis, as she neither understood Latin nor how to read, and looked upon the folding of the hands as a Masonic finger-speech, which would be readily understood in the higher places. She unrolled from a paper a sixth finger which had been cut off, and said the cloister of Mary in Flachsenfingen, on whose mother of God her father had wished to hang it as a thank-offering, would not accept it, because it was not made of silver. As Buffon ascribes to man's fingers the clearness of his ideas, so that the thoughts may be dissected at the same time with the hand, it follows that one who has a sext[[116]] of fingers, must think 1/6 or 1/11 the more clearly; and such a one, with such a supernumerary writing-finger, could do more in the sciences than we with the whole hand.
She related that her father would not marry her till after two years, and that his son could get her sister, if she were not only just six years old,—and they two had been adopted as children by the six-finger,—and that he had his bijouterie shop wherewith he wandered from one ducal palace to another; just now in that of the Count of O—, together with board and lodging, and that he was an Italian, named Tostato. Heavens! Victor knew him full well. Without further question—for he loved besides to go a Sabbath-day's journey or two with any girl or any Pomeranian dog, and used to say he never would make the least distinction between a new face and a pretty one, even if he were obliged to—he marched off with her straight toward the Count's to see her father. He peeled off more and more of the hull of his little maid of honor: she was not only uncommonly beautiful, but equally—stupid.
But now she ran away from him; the Flachsenfingen Court came travelling along, and she must needs see the ladies alight. He kept close to the tail of the whole corps, which was still trailing along the street, while half the rump was already in the palace. The draggling tail was somewhat short and thin, consisting of the Court-apothecary Zeusel, who from vanity was on hand with his fifty-four years and his youthful clothes and his bumping coach to take part in the affair. The smallest man in the world, in the biggest carriage in the world, could so little be looked upon as an entity, that I count his coach as an empty ceremonial coach, in which the coachman shook him about like a dry kernel in a walnut.
I will describe more copiously how the coachman winnowed and bolted him, and will make it up by being shorter in matters of less consequence.
Of course, if I should lay such an imputation upon the coachman as to say that he knew how by speed and stones to give the coach-body that hard pulsation, which made Zeusel sit more on the air than on the coach-cushion,—then would Kästner in Göttingen reply to me, and prove that the apothecary himself, by the counteraction which he produced upon the cushion by his posteriors, was to blame for the repulsion of the homologous pole; but we have, I trust, less to do here with the truth than with the apothecary. Victor, as Court-doctor, took a distant interest in the apothecary; nay, he would gladly have begged the favor of being allowed to get in and sit by his side, that he might see more distinctly how the skilful Vetturino sent the ball, Zeusel, into the air. But to the weak nerves of Victor comic scenes, by the physical suffering which they in reality brought with them, were too hard and sharp,—and he contented himself with following behind the bouncing box, and merely conceiving how the thing inside rose like a barometer to indicate the pleasant weather of the drunken coachman,—he merely pictured it out to himself (therefore I need not) how the good little courtier at a climax, to which the fellow brought him (who ended every lift with a higher one), would thrust his left hand, not into his waistcoat pocket, but merely into the coach-strap, while in his right he would be obliged to warm and squeeze for an hour a pinch of snuff, which for want of a quiet moment he could not raise to his empty nose till the rascal of a coachman cried, Brrr!
Come along! said the stupid girl to Victor, and drew him to her father's. The Italian made his windmill gesture, and placed himself against Victor's ear and whispered into it, Dio vi salvi![[117]] and the latter thanked him in a still lower voice in Italian, Gran mercè![[118]] Thereupon Tostato breathed three or four uncommonly soft-voiced curses into Victor's ear-cell. He had not lost his wits, but only his voice, and that only by a cold. He cursed and condoled about it, that to-morrow, of all days, he should have to be dumb as a haddock, precisely when so much was to be cut. Victor congratulated him sincerely on that very account, and begged him to accept him till to-morrow, not only as Doctor, but also as partner and spokesman; he would talk for him in the shop to-morrow, in order the better and incognito to see all that went on. "If you will tell me to-day," replied Tostato, "one more funny story." And now when he actually produced the adventure of Zeusel with an Italian systole and diastole of the hands, and when Tostato grew foolish with laughing at the joke,—(the Italian and Frenchman laugh with the whole body, the Englishman only in the brain,)—then was it no wonder that he took him into partnership at once. His doctorship he began by pulling off the patient's stocking and binding it round the untuned throat, for a warm stocking is worn with equal medicinal benefit on foot and neck; with a garter it would be different.
Now the beauty and stupidity of the programme-pray-er appeared greater than ever in his eyes; he would gladly have kissed her, but it was impracticable: the Bijoutier followed him about everywhere, eager for his witty overflowings, and held both ears under to catch the drops.
He took this occasion, as he thought of the German indifference to wit and the fine arts, to lay down the fundamentally false proposition,—The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian are men; the Germans are citizens. The latter earn life; the former enjoy it. And the Dutch are a cheaper edition of the Germans on mere printing paper and without engravings.