SO far as I am concerned, I must confess that I am not greatly interested either in painted Empresses, or in Cardinals, or in Pashas. My attention was riveted upon a lank, lean man, who must have been of unusual length when he was standing up, a man with white hair and a grey beard, round blue glasses before his eyes, beneath them a nose shaped like a potato, and a thin-lipped mouth drawn down at the corners in a sardonic smile. On his head there was a straw hat, the brim of which was of a width such as I had never before met with. This person sat upon a camp-stool, holding with his left hand a parasol lined with green over the afore-mentioned straw hat, and with his right hand guiding a small telescope screwed to a stick, which was fastened in the ground. There is no need to say that the ruler and guider of this telescope was reconnoitring the châlet across the way. What pleased me best was the fussiness, the apparatus, and the intensity of research which served the man’s curiosity. Surely this was the last of the Mohicans, one of the last original characters which are disappearing more and more out of the insipid level of our most modern mediocrity and uniformity. Who was the man? The dear old village of Ragaz has, by no means to the delight of everybody, grown into a “fashionable” resort, and one meets queer enough figures there every summer. But one like the man with a telescope and camp-stool, who had improvised an observatory on the spur of the moment, is an exotic plant, even in the Ragaz of to-day, and is well worth the trouble of observation.
“WHO WAS THE MAN?”
What a pity, I thought, that Amadeus Hoffmann is no more among the living, or Edgar Poe. For either of them this fellow would have been a find.
Gradually the spectators dispersed, as neither the empress, who had been turned out of her empire, nor the cardinal, who had taken the hint that he was superfluous, condescended to show themselves, and as it was getting rather dull to gaze upon the red fez of the pasha, which was just visible above the railing of the verandah at the right. At last there were only two left: the telescope man, who continued his observations, and my worthy self observing the obdurate observer.
Finally, we both accomplished our purpose—he in seeing Madonna Eugenia and the Prince-Cardinal leave the house in quick succession, I in being a witness to the geometrical correctness with which the discoverer took down his observatory.
His motions were as measured as if he felt it incumbent upon him to keep time to the music of the spheres. His very manner of getting up showed a man who never puts one foot before the other without having incontestably assured himself where he was about to tread. When his long bony figure had drawn itself out to its full length his first object was to see clearly. For this purpose he cautiously removed his spectacles from his potato-shaped nose and wiped the large, round blue glasses emphatically with a piece of soft leather he produced out of his right vest-pocket. Having put back the piece of leather and the spectacles to their original place, he commenced the work of packing up, without haste and without delay. At first the telescope was unscrewed, reduced to its smallest dimensions, wiped on all sides with a large red silk handkerchief, and enclosed in a leather case, out of which he had carefully blown the dust, and which he now laid down gently upon the camp-stool. Hereupon he pulled out the stick which had served as a holder for his telescope until now, but which, upon nearer acquaintance, proved to be a perfect miracle, a very encyclopædia of a stick, so to say. It was evidently the pride and joy of its happy possessor. There could be no doubt of that from the satisfaction with which he touched the various springs of the complicated apparatus to display the countless metamorphoses which made the stick appear in turn as a common cane, as an umbrella, as a hoe, as a geological hammer, as a pocket-dagger, as a candle-snuffer, as a reading-desk, as a corkscrew, as a cup, as a chisel, as an inkstand, and as various other things. At last I should really not have been surprised if this Chinese puzzle had suddenly put on the garb of a speaker in Parliament.
The man could read open admiration, the most unselfish of human sympathy, from my countenance, and consequently felt impelled to say, as he pointed to his stick, having reduced it to its most primitive form: “It is the result of five years of theoretic studies and three years of practical constructive experiments. Ay, sir, with genius and order one can accomplish some pretty good things upon this disorderly earth.”
With that he leaned his miraculous staff carefully against a tree, buckled his telescope-case to a broad strap which hung across his right shoulder like a bandoleer, took up his camp-stool, devoted himself assiduously to reducing it to infinitesimal dimensions, and buckled the object, which in its present shape no person would ever have suspected of being a chair, to his strap. He then took up his encyclopædic stick, lightly pricked the ground with the point, and remarked, in the full consciousness of work well done: “All’s in order! Cardinal, Pasha, Ex-empress, all done up in good order.”
“Heilige Ordnung, segensreiche,” I began, quoting Schiller.