Iolanthe's Wedding Part 1

Iolanthe's Wedding.

by Hermann Sudermann.

CHAPTER I

I tell _you_, gentlemen, it's a rotten piece of business to be standing beside an old friend's open grave-simply disgusting.

You stand with your feet planted in the upturned earth, and twirl your moustache and look stupid, while you feel like crying the soul out of your body.

He was dead--there was no use wishing he weren't.

In him was lost the greatest genius for concocting and mixing punches, c.o.c.ktails, grogs, cobblers--every sort of drink. I tell you, gentlemen, when you went walking in the country with him and he began to draw the air in through his nose in his peculiar fashion, you might be sure he had just conceived a new idea for a punch. From the mere smell of a weed he knew the sorts of wine that had to be poured over it to bring into being a something extra fine, a something that had never before existed.

All in all he was a good fellow, and in the many years we sat opposite each other, evening after evening, when he came to me at Ilgenstein, or I rode over to him at Dobeln, the time never dragged.

If only it hadn't been for his eternal marriage schemes. That was his weak side. I mean as far as I was concerned. As for himself--"Good Lord," he'd say, "I'm just waiting for that vile water to creep up to my heart, then I'll slide off into the next world."

And now it had come to that. He had slid off. He lay there in his black coffin, and I felt like tapping on the lid and saying:

"Putz, don't play this dirty trick on me. Come out. Why, what's going to become of our piquet to-day?"

Nothing to laugh at, gentlemen. Habit is the most violent of all pa.s.sions, and the number of persons that are ruined every year by having their habits interfered with are never sung in song or epic, to quote my old friend Uhland.

Such weather! I wouldn't send a dog out in such weather. It rained and hailed and blew all at the same time. Some of the gentlemen wore mackintoshes, and the water ran down the folds in rivulets. And it ran down their cheeks and into their beards--perhaps a few tears, too--because he left no enemies behind. Not he.

There was only one chief mourner--what the world calls chief mourner--his son, a dragoon of the Guards in Berlin. Lothar was his name. He had come from Berlin on the day of his father's death, and he behaved like a good son, kissed his father's hands, cried a good deal, thanked me gratefully, and did a dreadful lot of ordering around--a lieutenant, you know--when all of a sudden--well, I was there--and we had arranged everything.

As I looked out of the corner of my eyes at the handsome fellow standing there manfully choking down his tears, I thought of what my old friend had said to me the day before he died.

"Hanckel," he had said, "take pity on me in my grave. Don't forsake my boy."

As I said, that is what occurred to me, and when the pastor beckoned to me to come throw the three handfuls of earth in the grave, I silently sent a vow along with them, "I will not forsake him, old fellow, Amen."

Everything comes to an end. The gravediggers had made a sort of mound of the mud, and laid the wreaths on top, since there were no women at the funeral. The neighbours took leave, and the only ones that remained were the pastor, Lothar and myself.

The boy stood like a block of stone, staring at the mound as if to dig it up again with his eyes, and the wind blew the collar of his riding coat about his ears.

The pastor tapped him gently on his shoulder and said:

"Baron, will you allow an old man one word more----"

But I beckoned to him to step aside.

"Just go home, little minister," I said, "and get your wife to give you a gla.s.s of good hot punch. I fancy it's a bit draughty in that silk vestment of yours."

"Hee, hee!" he said, and grinned slily. "It looks as if it were, but I wear my overcoat underneath."

"Never mind," I said. "Go home. I'll look out for the boy. I know better than you where the shoes pinches _him_."

So then he left us alone.

"Well, my boy," I said, "you can't bring him back to life again. Come home, and if you want, I'll sleep at your house to-night."

"Never mind, uncle," he said. That's what he called me because they had once nicknamed me uncle in a joke. His face was hard and sullen, as if to say, "Why do you bother me in my grief?"

"But maybe we can talk over business?" I asked.

He had nothing to say to that. You know what an empty house is like after a funeral, gentlemen. When you come back from the cemetery, the smell of the coffin still clings, and the smell of fading flowers.

Ghastly!

My sister, to be sure, who kept house for me then--the dear good soul has been dead, too, these many years--had had things put into some sort of order, the bier removed, and so on. But not much could be done in such a hurry.

I gave orders for her to be driven home, fetched a bottle of Putz's best port, and sat down opposite Lothar, who had taken a place on the sofa and was poking at the sole of his shoe with the point of his sword.

As I said, he was a superb fellow, tall, stalwart, just what a dragoon should be--thick moustache, heavy eyebrows, and eyes like two wheels of fire. A fine head, but his forehead a bit wild and low, because his hair grew down on it. But that sort of thing suits young people. He had the dash characteristic of the Guards, to which we all once so ardently aspired. Neither the Tilsit nor the Allenstein Dragoons could come up to it. The devil knows what the secret of it is.

We clinked gla.s.ses--to my old friend's memory, of course--and I asked him:

"Well, what next?"

"Do _I_ know?" he muttered between his teeth, and glared at me desperately with his burning eyes.

So that was the state of affairs.

My old friend's circ.u.mstances had never been brilliant. Added to that his love for everything in the shape of drink. Well--and you know where there's a swamp, the frogs will jump in--especially the boy, who had been going it for years, as if the stones at Dobeln were nuggets of gold.

"The debts are mounting?" I asked.

"Sky high, uncle," he said.

"Pretty bad juncture for you," I said. "Mortgages, first, second, third--way over the value of the property, and a lot of rebuilding required, and there's nothing to be earned from farming on the estate.

The very chickens know that."

"Then good--bye to the army?" he asked, and looked me full in the face, as if expecting to hear sentence p.r.o.nounced by the judge of a court martial.

"Unless you have a friend to pull you out of the hole."

He shook his head, fuming.

"Then, of course."

"And suppose I should have Dobeln cut up into lots, what do you think I'd realise?"

"Shame on you, boy," I said. "What! Sell the shirt from off your back, chop your bed into kindlings?"