And now Captain Rauchfuss was all alone with his little "Tubby."
His wife had often been an uncomfortable companion to him. He had imagined something quite different under the name of a wife; and now it was not so very different with his little "Tubby." He expected to find in her a pretty little plaything, and began to realize that instead he had got growing up in his house a small person whom he had to respect, a manager.
He went off to the town with just as uncomfortable a conscience as before, and growled in his red beard at womenfolks that put on airs, whom a man would have to show their place or send to the devil.
Frau Rauchfuss had taken care to provide a capable woman to look after the house and a bailiff for the estate, so that Beate's inheritance might be kept in good condition in spite of her light-headed father. In this plain and thrifty company Herr Rauchfuss was not at all at his ease. He went on drinking as before; and it was no longer requisite that it should be the "Elephant" where he washed down his worries and his ill-temper. Any tavern would do, even up behind the Ettersberg--he was not so particular. But he still remained a reputable member of society with his wits about him, behaving with perfect propriety in the tavern parlor and still proud of his ability to walk and talk straight after an indefinite number of glasses.
As Beate grew older, she went down every morning at five o'clock in the milk-wagon to the town, winter and summer, to go to school, and got down in the Entenfang at Madame Kummerfelden's. The child stayed with her until school began, had dinner with her at midday, took part in the famous sewing-class with the other girls under the kind, lively teacher, and then went home in the wagon when it brought the afternoon milk.
Good Frau Kummerfelden took a great deal of pleasure in the child's company--but she had some left over for the father also. When, arrayed in one of her flowered dresses and a cap tilted up over her still youthful face, she took her coffee comfortably on Sunday afternoons in the little house in the Entenfang, it was not at all disagreeable to her to have the old sinner pass an hour with her. He got two or three drinks of schnapps, some of the best snuff any nose could wish, and extra strong coffee, that even a throat as hardened as his could taste when it went down.
"It's good to see something like a man now and then," she said; "and Rauchfuss with his red beard and his giant stature and his mighty stride reminds an old woman like me that there are still men on earth, which one goes near to forgetting in these endless sewing-classes of wretched little girls!"
And, to tell the truth, she liked just such an old reprobate. "Yes," she said once to her friend, "if the good God were a woman, which isn't such an impossible thing to imagine, the men would get a pretty good deal up above. The worst scapegraces would be handled most graciously, as they are here on earth--where a man can do without any morals and be loved and run after because he's got a way with him." By such discourses the wise woman established herself in the captain's favor, and was able to make herself very much at home with him. Often she scolded him as if he were a schoolboy--but he took it in the friendliest fashion.
"With a man you must never come straight out with a thing. Spread plenty of honey about your mouth, and while they're licking it off they get the right thing with it, what they should get. That's the only way." So said the old woman often. And thus she gave it him roughly and merrily, like many another clever woman, and had a submissive friend for her pains.
The captain was foolishly vain of "Tubby's" beauty. The old friends were sitting together one Sunday afternoon in the little house in the Entenfang--the captain and the old actress turned sewing-teacher. "Well, Rauchfuss has got a pretty good-looking daughter, eh, my good Kummerfelden? Such plump, firm arms--and the walk of her! A well set up creature--and then her red-gold hair, and her confounded eyes! Eh, Kummerfelden, I didn't do a bad piece of work there, did I? Look at all the generation that's growing up--can you show me her like?"