Hammer and Anvil Part 38

"My dear young friend, I would that the answer were more difficult.

Would that it were not the same formula by which I can calculate the equation of your life also. Would that I did not know that the unnaturalness of our relations is like a poisonous simoon that withers the gra.s.s and even strips the leaves from the oak.

"I have endeavored from what I before knew of you, and from what you so frankly have confided to me of your earlier life, of your family affairs, of the life and customs of the citizens of your native town, to form a background upon which I might design your portrait. And how cheerless it is, lying in the dim light in which all things now seem to lie with us! Everywhere littleness, narrow-mindedness, restrictions, blind adhesion to old formulas, pedantic ceremoniousness, everywhere the free outlook into life shut out by high walls of prejudice. You have told me that you besought your father to let you go to sea, and that he steadfastly insisted that you should be a man of learning, or at least follow an official career. It was certainly not, as you accused yourself, a mere inclination to idleness or a hankering after adventures that again and again prompted this wish; and a.s.suredly your father, whatever his reasons, did not do well so obstinately to reject it. He had lost one son at sea--very well; there is another sea, the sea of happy, active, energetic life, in which all faculties have their free play. This he should not have forbidden you; and this was really the sea for which you longed, of which the ocean with its storms was but the image, though you took it for the reality.

"Your father did not do well; yet we cannot reckon with him, rendered gloomy by domestic misfortune, too soon left alone in the world, and irritated by his son's resistance. But what can we say of your pedantic teachers, not one of whom could comprehend a youth whose character is openness itself? What of your worthy friends who raised a hue and cry over the profligate who was leading their sons into mischief, and who held it a devout work to widen the breach between father and son? Many an honest German youth has been in your case, my friend; brought up under such desperately stringent social restrictions, that he thanks heaven, when, in the far west of America, under the trees of the primeval forest, he hears no more about social order. True, in your flight from the oppressive narrowness of your father's house, you did not get so far as the American forests, but unhappily, only as far as the woods of the Zehrenburg, and this filled up the measure of your misfortunes.

"For there you met with one towards whom you must have felt yourself drawn by an irresistible attraction, as his nature in many points had a wonderful resemblance to your own; one whose ruin had been mainly due to the wretchedness of our social relations, and who had made a wilderness around; him in which he could move in accordance with his unfettered will, which he called liberty. A wilderness in the moral as well as the literal sense; for as I learn from what you have told me of his discourses, and as the result has shown, in throwing away prejudice he also cast overboard judgment, with precaution, discretion, with scrupulousness, consideration, with the faults of the German character the virtues of all; and all that at last remained to him were his adventurous spirit and a kind of fantastic magnanimity which at times, as you have yourself experienced, could be more fantastic than magnanimous.

"But be that as it may, he was a man with whom you were at once struck, because he was the exact opposite of all men whom you had hitherto met, and who still possessed chivalrous qualities enough for a youth so inexperienced to see in him his ideal. And then the free life upon the broad heaths, the lofty cliffs, the far-reaching sh.o.r.e--how could this do other than intoxicate and confuse a brain yet clouded with the dust of the school-room?

"But this freedom, this independence, this energetic life, were all but a glittering reflection, the Fata-Morgana of a Hesperian sh.o.r.e, which was destined to vanish, leaving behind a guard-house and a penitentiary.

"To make this prison a Hesperian garden to you, is not in my power, my friend; nor would I do it if it were. But one thing I hope to effect, and that is, that here, where the errors that warped your early training can no longer reach you, you may come to yourself, learn to know yourself, your aims, and the measure of your powers--that in a workhouse you may learn how to work."

CHAPTER VIII.

I will not maintain that the excellent man said all that I have put into his mouth in the last chapter, in these identical words, or upon this particular morning. It is probable that I have thrown into connection his remarks upon more than a single occasion, and perhaps have added a phrase or a figure of my own. But hardly more than this; for I too deeply absorbed his philosophy, which descended upon my thirsting soul like the fruitful shower upon a parched field; and while I attempt to repeat his thoughts, his image stands so lively in my memory, that I fancy I hear the words issuing from his lips.

And at this time I enjoyed the happiness of his converse every day and often for hours at a time. It was not in my power to keep the promise I had made to Paula, for her father did not wait for me to put the question to him. I had told him our conversation, however, at which he smiled.

"She wants to make a learned man of you," he said. "I wish to make nothing of you; I wish you to become what you are capable of becoming; and to find out your capabilities we must experiment a little. One thing is certain: you can become a first-rate hand-worker. You have shown that already; and I am well satisfied that you have gone through this brief course, for the first touches of the artist follow the last of the craftsman, and it is well that he should understand the handiwork upon which his art rests; not only because only thus is he able to see rightly and help with counsel and hand wherever help is needed, but only then is it truly his work, and belongs to him as a child to a parent not only spirit of his spirit, but also flesh of his flesh. Then how much more sharply does the eye see where the hand has been busy? Here is the ground-plan of the new infirmary; this is the foundation which you yourself helped to clear out, and for which you yourself helped to bring the stones. This wall will be built upon that foundation; it is of this height and this thickness; without a calculation you are satisfied that such a foundation can support such a wall. Do you not feel a pleasure in the neat, firm drawing in which a single line represents the work of an hour, or perhaps of many days?

Paula has told me that you have an accurate eye and a sure hand. I need copies of these plans: would you like to make them for me? It is work suited to a convalescent; and the use of compa.s.s, ruler, and drawing-pen, I can show you in five minutes."

From this day I worked in the superintendent's office, copying simple outlines or the design of a front, or engrossing specifications, with a pleasure which I had never imagined could accompany work. But who then ever had such a teacher--so kind, so wise, so patient, who so well knew how to lead the pupil to confidence in himself? How grateful to me was his praise; and how I stood in need of it. I who at school had always been blamed and scolded, who looked on it as a matter of course that my work was worse than that of any of the others, and who had come to consider myself as dest.i.tute of all capacity. My new teacher taught me that my capacities were only dormant, and that I could perfectly well understand anything that I thought worth understanding. Thus I had resigned myself in mathematics to make no progress beyond the first rudiments, and now to my astonishment I discovered that these uncouth symbols and crabbed formulas were composed of simple ideas and figures, and constructed with a logical consequence which I had no difficulty in perceiving, and in which I felt inexpressible delight.

"It is singular," I said on one occasion, "that when I was with Herr von Zehren I thought there could be nothing on earth more delightful than shooting over a wide heath on a sunny autumn morning; but I now find that to correctly employ a difficult formula gives more pleasure than a good shot that brings down an unlucky pheasant."

"The whole secret," replied my teacher, "lies in giving free play to our powers and our talents in a direction which is agreeable to our own nature. For in this manner we feel that we _are_; and every creature at every moment seeks for nothing further. But if we can so contrive it that our activity, besides giving us the proof of our existence, turns to the advantage of others--and happily that is almost always in our power--so much the better for us. Would to heaven my unfortunate brother had caught a sight of this truth."

Of course, especially in the earlier period of my imprisonment, our conversation frequently turned upon "the Wild Zehren."

"As a boy he bore that name," said the superintendent; "everybody called him 'the Wild One,' and it was hardly possible to give him another name. In his fiery nature lay an impulse that he could not resist, to put forth his exuberant strength even to excess, to venture whatever was most hazardous, and to attempt even the impossible. You can judge the field that our paternal estate offered to such a boy. To dash on the wildest horses down the steep heights, to put out to sea in a crazy boat during a raging storm, to roam over the perilous moors by night, to climb the giant beeches of the park to bring down a bird's nest, to dive into the tarn in search of the treasure which they say was thrown into it in the time of the Swedish invasion--these were his favorite sports. I have no idea how often he found himself in danger of death; but in truth it might be said to be every moment, for at any moment the impulse might seize him to do something which put his life in peril. Once we were standing at an upper window and saw an infuriated bull chasing one of the laborers around the court. Malte said, 'I must take that fellow in hand,' sprang down twenty feet into the court as another might arise from a chair, and ran to meet the bull, whose rage had however spent itself, so that he allowed the daring boy to drive him back to the cattle-yard. It was a mere chance here that he did not break his bones and was not gored; but as chance always stood his friend, he grew more and more reckless and daring.

"Chance, however, is a capricious deity, and unexpectedly leaves its greatest favorites in the lurch. A far worse enemy to my brother were the circ.u.mstances in which he grew up. The only thing he had been taught, was that the Zehrens were the oldest race on the island, and that he was the first-born. From these two articles of faith he constructed a sort of religion and mystical cultus which was all the more fantastic that his pompous fancies contrasted so glaringly with the threadbare reality.

"Our father was a n.o.bleman of the old lawless school, and of the wild ways of his cla.s.s in the eighteenth century: a man of all men least fitted to form the character of a haughty, audacious boy like my brother. Our mother had lived at courts, and in this unwholesome sphere frittered away her really remarkable gifts. She yearned for the vanished splendors of her former life; the solitude of a country life wearied, and the rudeness with which she was surrounded, shocked her.

Their life was not a happy one: as she knew she was no longer beloved by her husband, she soon ceased to love her children, in whom she fancied--whether rightly or wrongly is of no consequence--that she perceived only the traits of their father. Our father's regard was confined to his first-born alone; and when a wealthy, childless aunt asked to be allowed to take charge of the second son, Arthur, he willingly consented. Indeed I believe he would have been glad to be rid of me also, the youngest son, only no one was willing to take me. Thus I grew up as I best could; sometimes I had a tutor and sometimes I had none; no one cared for me; I should have been left entirely alone, had not my eldest brother, after his fashion, taken me under his charge.

"He loved me, who was ten years his junior, with pa.s.sionate devotion, with a wild, and, as it now appears to me, a touching tenderness.

Strong as I afterwards grew, I was a frail and sickly child. He, the dauntless, shielded me from every shadow of danger; he watched and guarded me as the apple of his eye; played with me, when I was well, for half-days at a time; watched, when I was sick, night after night by my bed. I was the only one who could control 'the Wild One' with a word, a look; but what could such influence avail? It was a thread that snapped, when the youth of twenty, after a scene of unusual violence with our father, left suddenly the paternal house, to enter it no more for ten years.

"He was sent to travel, as the customary phrase then ran; but the always insufficient remittances which he received from our father, whose means were daily diminishing, soon ceased altogether. He had to live as he could; and as he could not live at his own expense, he lived at the expense of others, like many a n.o.ble adventurer, to-day a beggar, to-morrow rolling in gold; to-day the comrade of the lowest rabble, tomorrow the companion of princes; with his irresistible power of fascination, conquering all hearts wherever he came, yet himself fixed nowhere, and roaming restlessly from one end of Europe to the other. He was in England, Italy, Spain, and longest in France; in the wild life of Paris he found his natural element, and he revelled in the arms of French ladies, whose brothers and husbands were devastating his native land with fire and sword.

"For five or six years we had heard nothing of him; our mother had died, and we had not known where to send him the news of her death; our father, broken before his time, was tottering to his grave; the devastation of our estates by the enemy, who had penetrated even to us, did not move his apathy--he drank the last bottle of wine in his cellar in a carouse with French officers. I could not endure all this with patience. I challenged the French colonel, a Gascon, who, seated at my father's table, with a guitar in his hands, was singing ribald songs insulting to the Germans. He laughed, and made his men take the sword from the boy of seventeen--it was a dress-sword which hung on the wall by a blue scarf as an ornament, and which I had s.n.a.t.c.hed in my fury--to punish his presumption by having him shot the next morning.

"In the night appeared a deliverer whom I had least reason to expect.

At the rumors of an uprising in Germany--at that time the first _Frei corps_ was organizing--the Wild One had hurried back from the arms of his paramours and the _salons_ of the Faubourg St. Germain, and his way had led him to our native place, where just then the flames of war were most fiercely burning. He could not reach the _Frei corps_, which was in the citadel, so he turned to the island with the plan of stirring up a guerrilla warfare against the invaders. He came just at the right moment to s.n.a.t.c.h his brother from certain death. With a few trusty followers hastily collected, he broke into the prison under circ.u.mstances of the most daring audacity, and carried me away.

"From this time we were together for five years, and first as simple volunteers, then as officers of the line, shared perils and hardships like brothers. I was a good soldier, but my brother's name was known throughout the whole army, and again he was called 'the Wild Zehren,'

as if to such a man that was the only fitting epithet. Innumerable were the stories told of his courage and foolhardiness. The general opinion was that he was seeking death; but he was not thinking of death--he only despised life. He laughed when he heard others talking enthusiastically of the regeneration of Germany; how we would rid our native soil both of foreign and native tyrants, in order to establish a kingdom of fraternity and equality in the liberated land. At that time he often had the old phrase of 'hammer and anvil' on his lips, which, as he said, expressed his philosophy in the simplest terms.

'Fraternity! equality!' he scoffed--'away with such empty phrases! This is a world of the strong and the weak; of masters and serfs. You have so long been the anvil under that giant hammer Napoleon, that now you want to play hammer yourselves. See how far you will bring it. Not far, I fear. You have only talents for the part of anvil.'

"'Why did you come to help us fight Napoleon?' I asked.

"'Because I was bored in Paris,' was his reply.

"But he did himself injustice. He was something more than the _blase_ cavalier of fortune which he pretended to be; he had squandered in a life of wild adventures the treasures of a heart dearer than Plutus'

mine; but a fragment of this heart was yet left him, and in this fragment lived--if not genuine patriotism and philanthropy, at least the generous impulse to side with the oppressed and resist the oppressor, whether he be a brilliant conquerer or a stupid native prince ruling by the grace of G.o.d.

"And now that the conquerer was chained to the rock of St. Helena, and he saw the heroes of so many battles taking their old accustomed yoke once more upon their patient necks; when he saw that the whole proud torrent of liberty was wasting in the sand of loyal obedience, then he broke his sword, which he had gloriously carried through twenty battles, bestowed a curse upon both despots and slaves, and said that now, as before the war, the world was his home; the only home for a free-born man in a slavish age.

"I know well that his reasoning was strained and unsound; but there was a kernel of truth in it. The result has proven this; the incredibly vapid, idealess time in which we live, a time barren of thought and of deeds, a real age of the Epigoni, has completely confirmed his prediction. And now again he wandered, a homeless adventurer, through the land, only with the difference that before with insolent power he had sported with men, whom he now coldly preyed upon because he despised them. 'I endeavored to purchase with my blood a letter of indulgence for my past: it has been refused me. What now is the present or the future to me?' How often have I thought upon this expression of his to me at the moment of our parting. It has always remained with me a key to his enigmatical character.

"Again for years I heard nothing more of him. Our father was dead; our estate sequestered; my second brother, Arthur, whom his aunt had deceived in his expectations, was toiling in thankless public service; I, who had set my heart upon the regeneration of the public, and thought that I could see that the work must be begun at the very beginning, that is, at the bottom, had managed to obtain this place through my patron, Altenburg; had been here, a crippled man, for four years, and was still studying the rudiments of my vocation; Malte was nowhere heard of. Suddenly he reappeared, and with a wife who had followed the adventurer to his home. He declared his intention to take the paternal estate in hand. I afforded him every facility; Arthur sold his rights for a sum of money, the receipt of which, by the way, he still denies. The creditors were glad to get at all events something, and one of them at least consoled himself with the thought that 'omittance was no quittance,' and the hope--which has not deceived him--that the Zehren estates were as secure to him under the new master as under the old.

"We did not meet at his return; just at that time I could not well leave this place, and he, on his part, felt no desire to renew the old friendship. When we parted, I was about to contract a marriage, in which the first-born of an ancient line saw a criminal _mesalliance_; now for some years I had been holding an official post; and to hold any post, but especially such a post as this, was in his eyes throwing one's self away, trampling under foot the inborn right of a knight of the hammer, and making one's self a plebeian anvil. That I refused the compensation he had offered me for my interest in the estate, wounded him deeply. By so doing, in his eyes, I renounced my obedience and subordination to the first-born, the chief of the family. He could not forgive me that I had no more need of him; that I had no debts which he must plunge himself into debt to pay; in a word, that I was not like my brother Arthur, who was much more compliant in this point--too compliant, I fear.

"On the other side, what I heard of him--and he took care never to let men's tongues rest about him--confirmed me in the sad conviction that between him and me a gulf had opened, not to be crossed by even the sincere love I still felt for him. I heard of the wild life he was living with the n.o.blemen of his neighborhood, now impoverished by the war; of the drinking and gaming bouts, of mad exploits of which he was the originator. At this time a dark rumor got abroad that he was conducting the smuggling traffic, which during the war had flourished greatly, being then encouraged by the government, but now was strongly repressed. But the worst rumors were those that spoke of the wretched life he led with his unhappy wife. He ill-treated her, it was said; he had imprisoned her in a cellar; it was unaccountable that the authorities did not interfere.

"I could not bear to hear these things, of which I did not believe a word, for the charges were in too glaringly contradiction to the naturally n.o.ble and generous nature of my brother. But I felt a natural hesitation to mix myself up in these affairs, until a letter which I received brought me to a decision. The letter was written in bad French, and the very first words informed me that the unhappy woman who wrote it must be out of her right mind. 'I hear you know the road to Spain,' it began, and ended with the words, 'I entreat you to tell me the road to Spain.' In an hour after receiving it I set out, and, after so many years, saw my father's house and my brother again. It was a painful meeting.

"My father's house a ruin, my brother a shadow--worse, a caricature--of his former self. Ah, my friend, the hammer-theory had shown itself cruel to its staunchest maintainer. How had the clumsy anvil beaten out the delicate hammer! How ign.o.ble he had grown in the common world which he so deeply despised! 'Only despise reason and knowledge,' Goethe makes the Spirit of Lies say, 'and I have you then safe.' And I say, only despise men, and you will see how soon you grow despicable to others and to yourself.

"I told him why I had come; he led me in silence into the park, and pointed to a woman, who, in a fantastic dress, flowers and weeds in her glossy-black, half-dishevelled hair, in her hands a guitar with half its chords broken, was wandering under the trees and among the shrubbery, sometimes raising her dark eyes, as if in ecstacy, to heaven, and again dropping them, as in despair, to the earth.

"'You see,' he said, 'it is a lie that I have imprisoned her. Many another would do it, for it is not a pleasant thing to afford the public such an exhibition.'

"Take her to her native place," I said.

"'Try it,' he answered. 'She would leap out of the carriage; she would throw herself into the sea. And if you took her there in fetters and by force, what would be her fate? She would be thrown into the dungeon of a convent, where they would try with hunger and blows to exorcize the devil who tempted her to give her heart to a heretic. Though I love her no longer, I once loved her, or at least she has been mine; and no priest's ungentle hand shall touch what has once belonged to me.'

"I said how terrible it was to hear him speak thus of his wife, the mother of his child.

"'Who says that she is my wife?' was his reply.

"I looked at him amazed and shocked; he shrugged his shoulders.

"'That does not suit your citizen virtue,' he said. 'I would have made her Frau von Zehren, notwithstanding her father is a hidalgo of very doubtful lineage, had the child been a boy. What do I want with a girl?

She cannot continue our race; let it then end with me.'

"It was indifferent to him whether these words wounded me or not; he had no desire to wound me; he really looked upon the superintendent of a prison, who had married a poor painter's daughter, as not a Zehren.

"I besought him to give me the child, if, as he said, she was nothing to him. I would bring her up with my Paula, who was then just born.

Here she must perish both morally and physically; and there might be a time when he would long for a child, whether son or daughter, legitimate or illegitimate.