Hammer and Anvil Part 37

G.o.d bless you both for your love to me; and when I am free again and am a rich man, I will repay it with interest. And now, my dear good fellow, you must go; I have to go and see the superintendent. And do you hear, Klaus, you go right back without wasting a minute. And one thing more: if your eldest is a boy----"

"He is to be named George; we settled that some time ago," said Klaus, showing his very farthest grinders.

I put Klaus out of the door, and was pacing up and down the room, somewhat agitated by what had just pa.s.sed, when I bethought me of the disguise which I had pushed under the bed, and which, in our excitement, we had quite forgotten. I now drew it out, and could not resist the temptation to try on the jacket of rough cloth. It was as Klaus had said. In the sleeves, the back, and the skirts, there were folds so dexterously made and caught with st.i.tches, that I had only to give a smart pull and they came out; and although I was a head taller and six inches wider across the shoulders than Klaus, the garment fitted me as if it had been made for me. So was it with the waistcoat and the trousers: all were so accurately made that--now that my illness had left me much thinner than I had been--I could very conveniently put them on over the clothes I was wearing.

Just as I had finished doing so, some one knocked at the door. It could only be the sergeant or the superintendent, who usually came at this hour. I seated myself at the table with my back to the door and called, "Come in!"

It was the sergeant.

He thrust in his head and began: "We are to go to the captain at eleven o'clock to-day, because----" here he checked himself, as it looked odd that the strange sailor sat there so still and I was nowhere to be seen. He came into the room and asked: "Where are we, then?"

"Gone to the devil!" I answered without turning round, imitating as well as I could the broad _Plattdeutsch_ which Klaus had used as a part of his stratagem.

"No stupid jokes!" said the old man.

"And now it is my turn!" I cried, rushing past the astonished sergeant out at the door, which I flung to, and turned the key.

There lay the long corridor before me: not a soul was to be seen. It was an easy thing to run down the steps and into the house-yard, and from this by a side-gate which I knew was never closed at this hour, to get into the adjoining alley. To find out Klaus's lodging would be an easy matter; probably I should reach it before him--in ten minutes we could be out of the town, and----

"Good morning, Herr Sussmilch, how are we?" I asked, opening the door again.

The sergeant was standing just where I had left him; and to judge from the confounded look of his honest face, had not been able to comprehend what it all meant. I pulled off the broad-brimmed hat, made him a low bow with a sc.r.a.pe of the right foot, and said: "Have the honor to place myself again under your worshipful charge."

"After that, one can take a toothpick for a barn door!" exclaimed the old man, who began now to get a glimmering of the real state of the case. "That codfish of a smoke-dried flounder! Isn't it enough to turn a body into a bear with seven senses?"

"Hush!" I cried, "I hear the doctor coming. Not a word, my good Sussmilch!" and I pushed the old man out of the door, by which Doctor Snellius entered in his usual hasty fashion, with his hat in his hand.

He started when he saw me, gave a glance round the room, looked at me again, and went out without saying a word.

I pulled off my sailor-dress in a moment, thrust it under the bed, and called after him in my natural voice:

"Why do you go away, doctor?"

He turned back instantly, came into the room, sat down upon a chair in front of me, and stared steadily at me through his round spectacles. I fancied he looked paler; and feared that perhaps I had carried the jest too far, and offended my irascible friend.

"Doctor----" I began.

"Something very singular has just happened to me," he interrupted me, always with the same fixed look.

"What is the matter, doctor?" I inquired, startled at his looks and the unaccustomed gentleness of his tone.

"Nothing at this moment; but I have just been the subject of a most remarkable hallucination."

"Of what, did you say?"

"A hallucination. A complete and perfect hallucination. When I first entered your chamber, my friend, I saw, standing before me, a sailor of just your height, or possibly an inch or an inch and a half shorter, but of your breadth across the shoulders, in a rough sailor jacket, gray trousers, wide straw-hat like the traders to the West Indies wear; with exactly no, not exactly, but very nearly your features. I saw the figure as plainly as I see you at this moment--it could not have been more distinct. The illusion was so perfect that I supposed they had put you in another room, and went to ask Sussmilch what he meant by giving our healthiest room to the first comer. Do not smile, my friend; it is no laughing matter--at least for me. It is the first time that anything of the kind has happened to me, though my frequent congestions of the head might have prepared me to expect it, I know that I shall die of apoplexy; and even if I had not known it before, I should know it now."

He took out his watch and examined his pulse.

"Strange to say, my pulse is perfectly normal; and all this morning I have felt unusually well and cheerful."

"My dear doctor," I said, "who knows what you saw? You learned men have such singular notions, and out of the merest gnat you will make a scientific elephant."

"Scientific elephant is good," said the doctor; "n.o.body would have expected such an expression from an unscientific mammoth like you--very good! but you are mistaken. That may apply to others, but not to me. I observe too coolly to commit gross blunders. I have told you already that my pulse is normal, exactly normal, and all my functions in perfect order; therefore the thing must have a deeper psychological cause, which just now escapes my perceptions; for the psychological cause----"

"Then at all events you have a psychological cause," said I, who was mischievous enough to be delighted at the serious scruples of my learned friend.

"I have; and I will tell it to you, even at the risk of more of your malicious grins. I was dreaming all night long of you, you mammoth, and always the same dream, though in different forms, namely, that you either were escaping, or had escaped, or were about to escape from here. Sometimes you were lowering yourself by a rope from the window, or clambering over the roofs, or leaping down from the wall, or any other neck-breaking trick that one might expect from a fellow of your physical and moral peculiarities; and you were every time in a different dress, now a chimney-sweep, now a mason, a rope-dancer, and so forth. As soon as I awaked, I asked myself what this dream could mean, and I said to myself--True, George Hartwig is now again in his prison, but the exceptional position in which he stands still continues, and so does the danger for our valued friend the superintendent, which lies in an arrangement which we must acknowledge to be not merely irregular, but contrary to the rules. For every creature is only content in the element to which it is born. The frog would spring from a golden chair into his native swamp; and the bird escapes when he can, though you cram his cage with sugar. Will it not be so with this youth, who of all men must most long for liberty? May he not in a moment of weakness forget what consideration he owes to Herr von Zehren, that the latter to a certain extent risks his position on his account, and in this moment of weakness and forgetfulness make his escape? And do you know, young mammoth, I determined that, as I also had some claim upon you, I would privately and in all friendship ask you to give me your word that if such a temptation seizes you, you will only think of your own honor. This was what I had in my mind when I came up the corridor, and I was in some degree undecided, for I thought he will have taken this resolution already, and to give his word to me will be superfluous. But now, after this singular projection of my dream into reality--a _memento mori_ to me, moreover--I beg you earnestly to give me your word. Hm, hm, hm!"

I had ceased to laugh, long before he had reached this conclusion; and now, while the worthy doctor tuned down his voice, extended him my hand, and said with emotion:

"With all my heart I give you my word, although it is true that I have given it to myself, and that not ten minutes ago. And as for the hallucination, you may make your mind easy, doctor; here lies your _memento mori_."

With these words I pulled out the sailor's dress from under the bed, slipped on the jacket, and put on the hat, to make the proof more convincing.

"So you did really think of escaping, then?" said the doctor, adroitly dropping the hallucination, in order at least to preserve the dream.

"No," I answered, "but others tempted me, and I strove with them, and they fled leaving this garment behind them."

"Which you may hang as a votive offering on the temple-wall," replied Doctor Snellius, thoughtfully; "for though I do not know how it happened, I see this much, that you have escaped a great danger; and now--now for the first time you belong to us."

There was a saying in the prison that one could tell a lie to any one, but not to the superintendent.

Superintendent von Zehren had a way of looking at the person with whom he was speaking, to which none but a front of bra.s.s could have been callous. Not that one could read in his glance the endeavor to be as comprehensive and as penetrating as possible; his eye had in it nothing of the spy or the inquisitor; on the contrary, it was large and limpid as the eye of a child, and just in this lay the power which few men could resist. As he sincerely wished well to every one with whom he spoke, and on his own part had nothing to conceal, this large, clear, dark eye rested steadily upon one, with the gaze of the sun-bright G.o.ds, who do not wink like weak mortals living in twilight and concealment.

When, with this look fixed upon me, he asked me about the man whom he had sent to me that morning, I told him at once who the man was, and what was his object in coming. And I further told him in what frame of mind he had found me, and how strong the temptation had been, but that, even without the a.s.sistance of the good doctor, I had conquered it, I might venture to say, at once and for ever.

The superintendent listened to my narrative with all the signs of the most lively interest. When I ceased, he pressed my hand, and then turning to his writing-table, handed me a paper, which he said he had just received, and which he desired me to read.

The paper was an inquiry from the president, couched in polite but very decided phraseology, as to the facts referred to in a certain anonymous charge which had reached him, and the superintendent was called upon at once to put an end to an arrangement which compromised his position and character, and to treat the young man in question with the severity which the dignity of the law, of the judges, and his own, alike demanded.

"You wish to know," said the superintendent, as I laid down the paper with an inquiring look, "what I intend to do. Exactly as if I had never received this. I do not desire to know whether Doctor Snellius, whose friendship for me often gives him a sharper insight in matters that concern me, than I have myself, was playing a little comedy when he hurried you off so abruptly yesterday, but I am very glad it so happened. For it would have wounded my pride to be compelled to sacrifice you, to whom I am so much attached, to a pitiful bit of chicanery. According to the letter of the law, they are right in insisting that a prisoner cannot be a guest in the superintendent's family; and this point I should have had to yield; but beyond this I am fully determined not to yield a single step. To decide in what kind of work a prisoner shall be engaged, and how he shall employ his hours of recreation, is my incontestable right, which I will not suffer to be curtailed by a hair's breadth, and which I will maintain through all the tribunals, even though it should be brought before the king. And I am not sorry that this has happened, since it gives us an occasion to speak of our mutual relations, and to have a clear understanding of the way we shall pursue in future. If you are disposed to hear what I think on the subject, we will go into the garden. My lungs suffer to-day from the confined air of a room."

We stepped from his office into the garden. I offered him my arm, as my strength was now sufficient for this service, and we walked in silence between the flower-beds, from which the warm south wind wafted us the perfume of wallflowers and mignonnette, to the grateful shade of the plane-trees. The superintendent took his seat upon one of the benches, motioned to me to place myself at his side, and after a silent glance of grat.i.tude at the leafy crowns of the n.o.ble trees that afforded the refreshing coolness, he said:

"If we are to believe the jurists, by whose words the students everywhere swear, Punishment is the right of Wrong. This definition, by its simplicity, recommends itself to the logicians at their desks, but I doubt extremely whether the Founder of the Faith would have been content with it. He did not declare that to be stoned was the right of the guilty woman; on the contrary, by summoning him who was without sin to cast the first stone, he showed that under the smooth logical surface of the legal code there lay a deeper principle, which only reveals itself to the eye that can see and the heart that can feel. To such an eye and such a heart it soon is clear that every wrong which is to be punished in order that it may have its right, is, if not always, almost always, a wrong at second, third, or hundredth hand; and thus the punishment rarely reaches the one who may have deserved it. So the justest judge, whether he will or not, resembles the sanguinary general who orders every tenth man to be led off to execution, not because he is guiltier than the other nine, but because he is the tenth.

"But this is not apparent to the logician, who smiles with satisfaction if he does not come into conflict with his principle of Ident.i.ty and his principle of Contradiction; nor to; the judge who has before him but an isolated fact, torn from its connections, and who has to give judgment when he has not all the parts in his hand, not to mention the visible and invisible threads upon which these parts are necessarily strung. They both are like the crowd which judges a picture by its effect alone; while the connoisseur knows how it came into existence, what colors the painter had upon his palette, how he blended them, how he handled his brush, what difficulties he encountered, and how he overcame them, or why it was that he failed of his aim. And as the only true criticism is creative, which takes the secrets of art as the starting-point of its judgment, so that none but an artist can be a real critic, even so men's actions can only be judged by those to whom the old wise word applies, that nothing human is alien to them, because they have experienced in themselves and in their brethren the whole misery of humanity. But for this are necessary, as I said before, the feeling heart and the seeing eye, and an ample opportunity for training and using both.

"Who has a better opportunity for this purpose than the superintendent of a prison? He and the physician, when their views coincide and they strive together towards the same ends, alone can know what the most conscientious judge has no means of learning, how the man whom mankind have thrust out from among them for a time or forever, became what he now is; how, born thus, and of such parents, brought up in such a.s.sociations, he acted thus and not otherwise at such a critical moment. Then when the superintendent, who is of necessity the confessor of the criminal, has learned his life in all its details, and the physician has discovered the defects with which he has suffered for years, when they consult upon his case, the question only is if he can be helped and how; and in the so-called prison they see, respectively, but a reformatory and an infirmary. For--and this is a point of infinite importance, which physiology will yet compel jurisprudence to acknowledge--nearly all who come here are diseased in the ordinary acceptation of the word; nearly all suffer from organic defects, and in almost every case the brain lacks the proper volume which a normal man needs for normal activity, for a life which shall not bring him into conflict with the law.

"And how could it be otherwise? Almost without exception they are children of want, of wretchedness, of moral and physical malformation, the Pariahs of Society which in its brutal egotism sweeps by with garments gathered up for fear of defilement, or thrusts them away with cruel violence from its path. The right of wrong! Insolence of Phariseeism! A time will come when this invention of the philosophers will be placed on a level with that other of the theologians, that death is the atonement for sin, and men will thank G.o.d that at last they have awaked from the night of ignorance which gave birth to such monsters.

"That day will come, but not so soon.

"We are still deeply sunk in the mire of the Middle Ages, and no man can yet see when this flood of blood and tears will have pa.s.sed away.

However far the glances of a few brighter intellects may reach into the coming ages, the progress of humanity is unspeakably slow. Wherever we look abroad into our own time, we behold the unbeautiful relics of a past that we had believed to be overthrown long ago. Our systems of government, our n.o.bility, our religious inst.i.tutions, our official arrangements, the organization of our armies, the condition of the laboring cla.s.ses--everywhere the scarcely hidden relation between masters and slaves; everywhere the critical choice whether we will be hammer or anvil. All our experience, all our observation seems to prove that there is no third alternative. And yet no greater misconception of the real state of the case is possible. Not hammer _or_ anvil, hammer _and_ anvil is the true word, for every man is both, and both at once, in every moment of his life. With the same force with which the hammer strikes the anvil, the anvil strikes the hammer; the ball is thrown off from the wall at the same angle under which it impinges upon it; the elements which the plant has appropriated in its growth, it must exactly restore in its decomposition--and so throughout all nature. But if nature unconsciously obeys this great law of action and reaction, and is thereby a cosmos and not a chaos, then should man, whose existence is subordinated to precisely the same law, acquire an intelligent knowledge of it, and endeavor intelligently to shape his life in conformity with it; and his worth increases or diminishes exactly in proportion as he does this or neglects it. For though the law remains the same, whether the man knows it or knows it not, yet for himself it is not the same. Where it is known, where the inseparableness, the unity of human interests, the inevitableness of action and reaction, are recognized, there bloom freedom, equity, justice, which are all but varying expressions for the same law. Where it is not known, and he fancies in his blindness that he can with impunity make a tool of his fellow-man, there flourish rankly slavery and tyranny, superst.i.tion and priestcraft, hatred and contempt, in all their poisonous luxuriance. What man would not naturally wish rather to be hammer than anvil, so long as he believes that the choice lies open to him? But what reasonable man will not cheerfully renounce the part of hammer, when he has learned that the part of anvil will not and cannot be spared him, and that every blow that he gives smites also his own cheek; that the serf corrupts the master as well as the master the serf, and that in politics the guardian and the ward are rendered equally stupid. Would that the consciousness of this might at last penetrate to the mind of the German peoples, who stand so sorely in need of it!

"So sorely in need! For I must say it that at this moment, hardly twenty years after our war of freedom, that fundamental principle of human existence is probably by no enlightened nation so thoroughly and universally ignored as by us Germans, fond though we are of calling ourselves the intellectual flower of the nations, the people of thinkers. Where is the young plant of humanity subjected with more intolerable schoolmasterly pedantry to a too early, too strict, and incredibly narrow training? Where is its free, beautiful development more systematically hindered and maimed than it is with us? The shameful wrongs that we perpetrated by aid of school-benches and church-benches, the drill-sergeant's stick, the Procrustes-bed of examination, the many-rounded ladder of official hierarchy--to think of them sends the blush of shame to the cheeks and the glow of indignation to the brow of those who can perceive it; it is justly the inexhaustible theme of derision for our neighbors. The frenzy of ruling, the slavish desire of being ruled, these are the two serpents that have coiled around the German Hercules, and are crushing him; they it is that are everywhere impeding the free circulation, and producing here a condition of hypertrophy, and there of atrophy, that cruelly injure the body of the nation; they it is that, injecting their venom into the veins of the people, poison its blood and marrow, and degrade the race itself; they it is, finally, that we have to thank for the fact that our penitentiaries and jails can no longer contain the mult.i.tude of the prisoners. For it is not an exaggeration if I say that nine out of ten that come here would never have come had they not been made anvils by force, in order that the lords of the hammer might have something to vent their courage on. And as the natural right of every man to maintain himself in the way most suitable to his powers and capabilities has been impeded in them as much as possible by hindering them systematically from becoming sound strong members of the commonwealth, they have finally been brought here to the workhouse. The workhouse is at bottom nothing but the last consequence of our conditions, the problem of our life reduced to its simplest terms. Here they must accomplish a strictly prescribed task in a strictly prescribed manner; but when were they ever allowed freely to choose their work? Here they must be silent; but when were they ever allowed to speak freely? Here they must pay implicit obedience to the lowest overseer; but without having read Shakspeare, do they not know that a dog in office is obeyed? Here they must walk, stand, lie down, sleep, wake, pray, work, idle, at the word of command; but are they not admirably trained for it?--are they not all born workhouse men? My heart aches when I think of it; yet how can I help thinking of it especially at this moment when I see you before me, and ask myself: how comes this youth with the frame of a strong man, and the frank blue eyes of a child, in this abode of vice and crime?