What did our fanatic in the cause of order? Something I had never seen before. He pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket, and step by step he marked a neat circle round about each drop of milk.
“You see,” he said, “this is the way I do at home to call the attention of the women to such offences against all sense of decency and modesty, which of course they never see and correct of their own accord. Oh, disorder, thy name is woman.”
Johannes Scherr.
THE LUXURY OF GOING ABOUT INCOGNITO.
FOR six years the couple had lived in a very small town, in which each inhabitant could furnish a detailed biography of his neighbour, possessed an intimate knowledge of his daily menu, and knew just when the post delivered a package to him—the size and shape of which package being made the subject of conversation at the next coffee-party, where also unfailing conclusions were arrived at as to the contents and sender of the object in question. Judge Schwarz, being a person of distinction in town, naturally suffered more than others under the zealous observation of his neighbours, and was quite sure that he could not have a button sewed on his coat without having his friends mention the fact to each other and make their comments upon it;—ay, he went so far as to believe himself particularly favoured by good fortune if the local paper did not get hold of the important event and retail it to its readers the next morning in a sprightly editorial.
This consciousness had in the course of years reached such a stage in the judge’s mind as to become utterly unendurable; and as in certain individuals painful inner experiences seek to become personified in some external object, so all this small-town gossip, this puerile mutual observation and control, seemed to concentrate itself in the person of the Apothecary Lebermann, a good-natured but essentially prosy person, possessed of an insatiable curiosity, who was interested in the whole world, and wanted to know everything—on the other hand taking for granted that others had as lively a concern about him and the experiences of his daily life.
On the day on which our story begins the judge was returning from court in rather an irritable mood, and his face darkened perceptibly as he saw the apothecary coming to meet him.
While it was, as we have said, Herr Lebermann’s justifiable peculiarity to desire to know everything, and with a rare toughness of purpose to work upon his neighbour with queries until the other would fling the desired information at his head in a fit of uncontrollable indignation, the judge was the most uncommunicative of mortals. It was his intention that no one should know what he did, or where he bought his things, or with whom he kept up a correspondence—ay, even his Christian name was to him a matter of deep secrecy; in fact, a sharp altercation between him and his wife had once been brought about by no other cause than that she had failed to fully understand his feelings in this respect, and unadvisedly addressing him one day on the railroad with the harmless remark, “See the charming view, Karl!” had unmasked him before his fellow-travellers.
Here these two gentlemen, as unlike as possible in their peculiarities, met upon the street, and while the judge was as nimble as an eel in trying to escape the apothecary, the latter was equally assiduous in his efforts to detain him, and opened the conversation with the apparently unnecessary question, “Coming from court so early to-day, Herr Schwarz?”
“No!” replied the judge unkindly.