Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 5

The G.o.ddess of Peace seemed to have here her church and her church seat.

The active soldier's wife was planting early peas in a little garden full of high bushes, and now and then threw up a clod of earth into the cherry-tree among the feathered fruit-thieves, and again fell to sprinkling indefatigably the new linen and the planted salad, and yet ran willingly from time to time to the little ten-year-old maiden, who, blind from the measles, sat knitting on the door-sill, and only when she dropped a st.i.tch called on her mother as interposing G.o.ddess. Albano stationed himself on the outermost balcony of the lovely opening valley, and every fanning of the wind breathed into his heart the old childish longing, that he could only fly. Ah, what bliss thus to s.n.a.t.c.h himself away from the receding earthly footstool, and cast himself free and pa.s.sive into the broad ether!--and so plashing up and down in the cool, all-pervading air-bath, to fly at mid-day into the darkling cloud, and unseen to float beside the lark as she warbles below it,--or to sweep after the eagle, and in the flight to see cities only as sculptured a.s.semblages of steps, and long streams only as gray, loose threads drawn between two or three countries, and meadows and hills shrunk up to little color-grains and colored shadows, and at length alight on the peak of a tower, and place himself over against the blazing evening sun, and then to soar upward when he had sunk, and look down once more into his eye still beaming on, bright and open, in the vault of night, and at last, when the earth-ball, whirling over, hides his...o...b.. to flutter, intoxicated with rapture, into the forest-conflagration of all the red clouds!...

Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like spiritual ones?

Whence had Albano this irrepressible longing for heights, for the slater's weaver-shuttle, for mountain-peaks, for the balloon,--just as if these were helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low earth-couch? Ah, thou dear deluded one! Thy soul, still covered with its chrysalis sh.e.l.l, confounds as yet the horizon of the eye with the horizon of the heart, and outer elevation with inner, and soars through the physical heaven after the ideal one! For the same power which in the presence of great thoughts lifts our head and our body and expands the chest, raises the body also even with the dark yearning after greatness, and the chrysalis swells with the beating wings of the Psyche; yes, it must needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul draws up the body the body also can lift up the soul.

The least Albano could do was to fly on foot down the mountain, to wade along with the brook, which was running away into the pale-green birch thicket to cool itself. Often before had his Robinsonading mania blown him to all points and leaves of the wind-rose,[29] and he loved to go with an unknown road a pretty piece of way to see what way it would itself take. He ran along on the silver Ariadne's thread of the brook, deep into the green labyrinth, and proposed, in fact, to come out through the back door of the long thicket upon a distant prospect. He could not accomplish it,--the birches grew now lighter, now darker, the brook broader,--the larks seemed to sing, out there, far and high overhead;--but he was obstinate. Extremes had from of old a magnetic polarity for him; as the medium had only points of indifference. Thus, for example, except the highest degree of the barometer, no other was so agreeable to him as the lowest, and the shortest day was as welcome as the longest; but the day after either was fatal.[30]

At last, after the progress of some hours in time and s.p.a.ce, he heard, beyond the lightening birches, and through a noise louder than that of the brook, his name uttered repeatedly, in low tones of commendation, by two female voices. Instantly he galloped panting back again, indifferent to the risk of lungs and life. He heard his name long after again called out on all sides of him, but in a cry;--it was his private patron saint, the castellain of the hut, who fired these shots of distress on his account at the foot of the mountain.

He went up thither, and the round table of the earth lay clear and with a singularly softening aspect around his thirsty eye. Truly, the stretch of distance, together with weariness, must have reminded this bird of pa.s.sage, behind the song-grating of the breast, of his own distant lands and times, and have made him melancholy at the thought, when the landscape so mottled with red roofs spread out before him its white, glistening stones and ponds, like light-magnets and sun-splinters,--when he saw on the long, gray causeway to Linden-town--views of which hung in the summer-house, and of which two spires shot up among the mountains--distant travellers plodding on toward the city whose gates for him were closed,--and when, indeed, everything seemed flying westward, the pigeons that went whispering by, floating over the grain-fields, and the shadows of the clouds that glided lightly away over high gardens.... Ah, the youngest heart has the waves of the oldest, only without the sounding-lead to fathom their depths! Learned Germany has, I perceive, for several cycles, held itself ready for great fates and fatalities, which are to give this herdsman's day of my hero the necessary dignity; I, who ought to have the first knowledge on the subject, do not at present know of any such. Childhood--ah yes, every age--often leaves behind in our hearts imperishable days, which every other heart had forgotten: so did this day never fade from Albano's.

Sometimes a child's-day is at once made immortal by a clearer glimpse of consciousness; in children, especially such as Zesara, the spiritual eye turns far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the breast than they show or we imagine.

Now it struck one o'clock in the castle-tower. The near and beloved tone, reminding him of his near foster-mother, and of the denied dinner, and the sight of the little blind one, who already had her twig of the bread-tree or her dry reindeer's moss in her hand,--and the thought that this was the birthday of his foster-father,--and his inexpressible love for his afflicted mother, upon whose neck he often suddenly fell when he was alone,--and his heart, bedewed with Nature, made him begin to weep. But not for this did the stubborn little fellow go home; only the Alpine shepherdess had run on unbidden to betray the fugitive to his seeking mother.

He would fain in this noonday stillness extort from the little blind Lea, upon whose countenance a soft, delicate line-work ran legibly through the punctuation of the pocks, a few words, or at least, as a fellow-laborer, the long stick wherewith she had to drive the pigeons from the peas and the sparrows from the cherries; but she pressed her arm in silence against her eyes, bashful before the distinguished young gentleman. At last the woman brought the pottage for the lost son, and from Rabette a little smelling-bottle of dessert-wine into the bargain.

Albina von Wehrfritz was one of those women who, unlike states, keep only their promises, but never a threat,--resembling the forest-officers of Nuremberg, who, upon the smallest violation of the forest-laws, impose a fine of one hundred florins, and in the same hour modify it to one hundred kreutzers.[31] They, however, like Solon, who gave out his laws for a hundred years in advance, give out theirs according to the proportion of their smaller jurisdiction, to last one hundred seconds.

13. CYCLE.

I would make more out of Albano's commemoration-dinner, which he, like a grown-up trencher-man, could carve in the little chamber, and distribute among the family circle, and at which he could fill for himself, were I not going to meet weightier incidents which befell during the carrying back of the table dinner-service.

Albano went out, with the whole sea of his inner being sparkling and phosph.o.r.escing under the influence of the wine and the forenoon, and the blue heaven fluttering in stronger breezes around him. He felt as if the morning had long since gone by; and he remembered it with a tender emotion, as we all in youth remember childhood, in age youth,--even as at evening we remember the morning,--and the forms of Nature drew nearer to him and moved their eyes like Catholic images. Thus does the present offer us only shapes for optical anamorphoses, and only our spirit is the sublime mirror which transposes them into fair human forms. With what a sweet dip into dreams did he, when he met the fanning of the eastern wind, close his eyes, and draw the hum of the landscape, the screaming of the c.o.c.ks and birds, and a herdsman's flute, as if deeper and deeper into his shaded soul! And then when he opened his eyes again on the sh.o.r.e of the mountain, there lay peaceful down below in the valley the pastured white lambs by the side of the flutist, and overhead in heaven lay stretched out far away above them the shining, fleecy lamb-clouds!

Meanwhile, he was fain for once to take the liberty of shutting his eyes and groping too far into the garden,--besides, the blind girl did not see,--holding his arms open before him so as not to run against anything, when all at once his breast touched a second, and looking up, he found the trembling maiden so near to him, who bent aside, stammering, "Ah, no! ah, no!" "It is only I," said the innocent one, holding her fast; "truly, I will not harm thee!"--and as she, with a modest shyness, trusted him, he held her a little while, and gazed down on her bowed head with sweet emotion.

Heartily glad would he have been to give the terrified one dole-money and benefits in this comedy for the poor; he had, however, nothing by him, till, luckily, his sister Rabette, that bandagist,--from whose ribbon mania he erroneously concluded that many girls are diabolically possessed for ribbons, and swallow them like jugglers, but never give them back,--she, and his new hair-band, came into his mind. He wound off, joyfully, the long, silken swathing-band from his head on hers. But the lovely neighborhood, the tie-work of an _inner_, finer band, and the blessedness of giving, and the vivacity of his inborn exuberance, so overcame him, that he would gladly have emptied the Green Cellar of Dresden into her ap.r.o.n, when a Jew pedler, with his smaller, silken one on his stomach, and with a bagful of bought-up hair on his back, came trudging up the Pest.i.tz road. The Jew suffered himself, very willingly, to be called, but nothing to be borrowed from him, despite all bills of exchange proposed to be drawn upon parents and pocket money. Ah, a magnificent red cap-ribbon would have been as becoming to Lea's blind eyes as a red bandage to a wound! For a blind lady loves to prink herself as much as one who can see, unless she is self-conceited, and would rather please herself in the gla.s.s than others out of it. The merchant was very glad to let her feel of the ribbon, and said he bought up hair in the villages, and yesterday the children of the inn, with a piece of burning punk, had crisped up his whole sackful of queues into short wool, and if the young gentleman would let him trim his brown hair down to the nape of the neck, he should, on the spot, have the ribbon, and a very serviceable leather queue of Wurzburg fabric into the bargain. What was to be done? The ribbon was very red,--so was Lea with hope,--the Jew said he must pack up,--besides, the hair-queue which he had hitherto worn ran like a second backbone down over the whole of the first, and became to Alban, by reason of the tedious swathing, every morning, a check-rein and snaffle-bridle of his mettle. In brief, the poor, plucked hare resigned to the Jew the royal French Insigne, and buckled on the Wurzburg sheath.

And now he shook her hand right soundly, and said, with a whole Paradise of loving joyousness in his face: "The ribbon is, no doubt, very pleasant to thee, thou poor, blind thing!" Then the everlasting rogue actually climbed the cherry-tree in order, up there, as a living scare-crow, to spoil the cherries for the sparrows, and, as a fruit-G.o.d, to throw down several of them to her as rosaries and festoons.

By Heaven! up there among the heart-cherries, it seemed as if real wolf-cherries must be working in the head of the boy: as the earth had her dark, middle ages, so have children often dark, middle days, full of pure _monkery_ and mischief. On the high boughs, the growing landscape, and the sun declining towards the mountains, and particularly the spires of Pest.i.tz, gleamed upon him with such heavenly light, that he could not now imagine to himself anything higher than the bird-pole near him, nor any more blessedly enthroned crown-eagle than one on the pole....

But now I beg every one of my fair readers either to step into the shooting-house, or make the best of her way out of it with the soldier's wife, who is running on to tell the naughty thing to her gracious lady,--for few of them can stand it out with me to see our hero, the male support of _t.i.tan_, firmly planted by some farmers' boys--to whom, moreover, Albina has intrusted the _remarche-reglement_ of hastening his return--on a cross-stick, which is fitted in just under the crotch of the bird-pole, and with his belly bound down to it, and so lying horizontal in the air, gradually lifted through the wide sweep of the arch, and held up in mid-heaven. It is too bad! but the servants could not possibly resist the supplications of his mighty eyes, his picturesque will and spirit, and the offered recompenses and coronation-coins, in comparison with which he verily weighed only half as much as the last bird.

I am, nevertheless, partial to thee, little one, despite that stiff dare-neck of thine built up between head and heart. Thy monstrous Baroque-pearls of energies will time soon, as the artists in the Green Cellar do with physical pearls, use up in the finishing of a fine figure!

The imperial history of our imperial eagle on his pedestal, covering at the same time the events that took place on the mountain, when the Band-box master and Provincial Director came accidentally to the manned bird-pole, shall be incontinently resumed, when we have the 14th Cycle.

14. CYCLE.

Master Wehmeier, who could not at a distance explain to himself the form and motion of the bird, had made up towards it, and now saw his pupil lifted up on the cross. He fell instantly into the plunge-bath of an icy shudder at his daring, but soon came out of this into the shower-bath of a perspiring anxiety, which came over him at the thought of seeing every minute his _eleve_ fall down and be crushed into twenty-six fragments, like Osiris, or into thirty, like the Medicean Venus; "and this too, now," he thought besides, "just as I have brought the young Satan so far along in languages, and lived to win some honor by him." He therefore scolded only the operators in the raising department, but not the sentinel aloft, because there was reason to apprehend he might take a lurch in the effort of answering, and pitch down. Hard upon the heels of the optical chariot with which the Devil threatened to run over the master, thus spell-bound in the circle of agonizing anxiety, followed a real one, wherein sat the future Provincial Director. Ah, good G.o.d!

Besides, the Director always filled up his whole gall-bladder full of bitter extracts at the Minister's house, merely because he found there better-behaved and stiller children, without, however, reflecting--like a hundred other fathers who must be included in the charge--that children, like their parents, appear better to strangers than they are, and that, above all, city life, instead of the porous, thick bark of village life, overlays them with a smooth, white birch-roll, while yet, in the end, like their parents and courtiers, they prove to resemble chestnuts, being smooth only on the outer sh.e.l.l, but within confoundedly bristly. Thus surely will the finest man in the country always be outwitted by at least princes and ministers, who are ten years old,--supposing even he could manage it more easily with their fathers.

When Wehrfritz saw his foster-son in his eyrie on the Schreckhorn, and the Band-box master below, looking up at him, he imagined the instructor had arranged it all, and began loudly to vent upon his neck, from the locked-up carriage, a little heaven of thunder-storms and thunder-claps.

The persecuted Wehmeier began also, upon the mountain, to bawl up at the Schreckhorn, by way of making it evident to the Director that he was in the way of his office, and with the hammer of the law, as with a forming stamp-hammer, could mould a pupil as well as another man. The soldier's wife wrung her hands,--the servants arranged themselves for the taking down from the cross,--the poor little fellow, in a fever, drew his knife, and called down, "He would instantly cut himself loose and cast himself down so soon as ever any one should let down the pole."

He would have done it--and put an untimely end to his life and my t.i.tan--merely because he dreaded the disgrace of the real and verbal insults he might get from his father before so many people (yes, in the chariot sat a gentleman who was a perfect stranger) worse than suicide and h.e.l.l. But the Director, full of foolhardihood himself, and yet proportionately hating it in a child, was not to be disconcerted at that, and cried out, in a terrible tone, after the servant who had the key of the coach-door; he would get out and go up. He was indescribably exasperated, first, because behind the coach he had fastened on an Oesterlein's harpsichord as a gift for the present day of joy;--ah, Albano! why do thy joys, like the slurs of an ale-house fiddler, end in a discord?--and, secondly, because he had there a singing-dancing-music-and fencing-master from the polished and brilliant house of the Minister for Albano, sitting beside him on the cushion as spectator of this _debut_. Gottlieb sprang from the box, and round before the coach-door, ran his hand, cursing, through all his pockets;--the coach-key was not in one of them. The incarcerated Director lashed himself up and down in his cage like a wagging leopard, and his fury was like that of a lion, who, when one hunter after another has shot at him, flies at the third. At all events, there was Alban, in his noose, sawing the air to and fro. The Band-box master was best off; for he was half dead, and his cold body, running all away in a sweat of agony, transmitted little more sense of the outward world; his consciousness was packed away tight and good as snuff in cold lead.

Ah, I feel more keenly for the tormented boy than if I were sitting with him up on the pole; over his touchingly n.o.ble countenance, with its finely-curved nose, shame and the western aurora throw a purple hue, and the low sun hangs with kisses on his cheeks, as if on the last and highest roses of the dark earth, and he must withdraw his defiant eyes from the beloved sun and from the day which still dwells thereon, and from the two steeple k.n.o.bs of the Linden-city which glimmer on the sides turned from him, and sorrowfully cast down his strongly-drawn and sharply-angled eyebrows, which Dian likened to the too heroic and energetic ones of the infant Jesus in Raphael's ascending Madonna, to behold the hot and close altercation which was taking place on the ground below.

Gottlieb, with all his pains, could not squeeze out the key, for he had it in his pocket, and in his hand, and did not like much to produce it, from partiality for the young master, whom the whole service loved, "as if they could eat him,"--as much as they loved the nine-pin alley. He voted for sending and fetching the lock-smith, but the coachman outvoted him, with the advice to drive immediately to the door of the work-shop,--and growled at the horses, and drove off the imprisoned, controversial preacher in his pulpit, with the packed-up Oesterlein's harpsichord, at a smart trot. All that the Bombardier, during Gottlieb's mounting, had time to throw out of the carriage, consisted in his staving through a window, and firing, from the port-hole, a few of the most indispensable parting shots at the ill-omened bird on the pole.

By this time the magister had recovered his spirit and vexation, and boldly commanded the taking down of the Absalom. While the child came slowly down before him on his perch, he inserted the five incisor-teeth of his fingers, as a music-pen, into his scalp, and ruled or raked down along his occiput, with a view to playfully rectifying the crooked line of the hair, by pulling it moderately with his hand, as with the end of a fiddle-stick, when, to his astonishment, off came from my hero the Wurzburg queue like a tail-feather.

Wehmeier stared at the _cauda prehensilis_ (the ring-tail), and by his attention's being thus drawn off to the lesser fault, Albano gained as much as Alcibiades did from the lopping off of the tail of his--Robespierre. The magister thanked G.o.d that he would not sup to-day with old Wehrfritz, and sent him, with his mock queue, brow-beaten, home.

15. CYCLE.

The good-hearted Albina had been all day long removing out of the way of her lord all inflammatory stuff (for the vitriol naptha of his nervous spirit caught the fire of anger afar off), in order that nothing might transform her pleasure-castles into incendiary places of joy,--yes, as a sort of suburbs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the evening, Rabette had packed away an orchestra of miners that had chanced to pa.s.s by, in the cabinet of the dining-room,--and for Albano Albina had already contrived an heraldic costume, in which he should deliver to him the _vocation_ of the Province. Ah, but what did the lady get from it all but flames, which Wehrfritz vomited forth at his entrance, while he, as a camel in his maw, had laid up besides, a long, cold stream of water for the sprinkling of the magister?

Albina, who, like most women, took the gall-stone pelting of her husband for the fifty pounds of pa.s.sengers' ballast, which, to a pa.s.senger in the marriage-stage-coach, go free, cheerfully gave him, at first, as ever, credit of being right, and concealed every tear of unhappiness, because cold sprinkling hardens men and salad,--then step by step she took back the right,--but made the blame at first mild on her tongue, as nurses make the washing-water of the children lukewarm in their mouths,--and at last said he should just give the child up to her.

But we are making old Wehrfritz swell under our hand to a dragon of the Apocalypse, to a beast of Gevaudan, and a tyrant, whereas he is in reality only a lamb with two little horns. Had he not on his birth-feast in the drudging year of his slaving life a claim upon one unburdened evening, at least with a child whom he loved more strongly than his own, and for whom he had loaded himself down with a harpsichord and a teacher? And had he not a hundred times forbidden him--though he himself dared and did too much--to imitate him, and risk himself upon horseback, or in a tempest, in a pouring rain, or in a snow-storm? And had he not just come from the pedagogical knout-master, the Minister, whose educational system was only a longer real territion and a shorter condemnation? And does not the sight of stern parents make one sterner, and of mild ones, on the contrary, milder?

Albano first met Rabette with his leathern hind-axle in his hand, on his defiant way to the father's study, and therefore to the court-martial punishment of a real revolutionary tribunal. But she caught him from behind, with the angelic greeting, "Art thou here, Absalom?" and set him down by force; and, after the necessary astonishment and questioning, tied on the _vena cava_ of his hair tightly and ungently, and showed up to him, in a fearful light, the whirlwind of paternal wrath that awaited him; and again, in a ludicrous light, the lull of the musical mountain-department, who, near the dining-room, that race-ground and hunting-ground of the Director, striding up and down in rage and impatience, were waiting with a pause for times of peace; and finally she released him with a kiss, saying, "I pity you, you rogue!"

He marched, with a defiance which the tightness of his hair aggravated, into the dining-room. "Out of my sight!" said the sparkling a.s.sailant.

Alban instantly stepped back out of the door, enraged at the injustice of this wrath, and for that very reason the less troubled at its unhealthiness; for his benefactor kept pa.s.sionately running up to the table, which was spread for the birthday feast, and, after an old bad habit of his, extinguishing the well-kindled lime-pit of his indignation with wine.

In a few moments the musical academy and mining company, transformed by their ill-humor into growling contra-ba.s.sists, struck up also. The time had been tedious to them in the dry cabinet, so the ba.s.soonist and the violinist had taken it into their heads to entertain themselves with a low tuning. The Director, who could not comprehend what in the world that forlorn sound was that floated around him, took it for some time to be a melodious humming in his ears, when suddenly the hammer-master of the dulcimer let his musical hammer fall on the stringed floor.

Wehrfritz in an instant tore open the doors, and saw before him the whole musical nest and conspiracy sitting in a circle, armed and waiting. He asked them, hastily, "What business they had in the cabinet?" and, after a flying donation of a few curses and cuffs, ordered the whole garrison, without any tinkling noise, with their leather ap.r.o.ns and _culs de Paris_, to take themselves off instantly.

Albina, with a tender look, beckoned her outlawed darling into her sewing-chamber, where she asked him, quite composedly, because she knew he would not lie, to tell the truth. After hearing his report, she represented to him a little his fault (although she blamed the present child, in comparison with the absent man, pretty much in the style in which she had previously blamed the present man, in comparison with the absent child), and still more the consequences; she pointed out (untying and tying again his cravat the while, and b.u.t.toning some of his waistcoat b.u.t.tons) how her husband was disgraced in Albano's person before the second school-consul, (with four and twenty Fasces,) whom he had brought with him, the music- and dancing-master, Mr. Von Falterle, who was up-stairs dressing himself; how the dancing-master would certainly write all about it to Don Gaspard; and how for her good man the whole sweet, painted jelly-apple of to-day's joy had been turned into water: and now he must, even on this festive day, afflict his soul in solitude, and, perhaps, catch his death from drinking so much to drown his anger. Women, like harpers, usually, during their playing, convert, with small pedals, the whole tones of truth into semi-tones.

After she had still further enumerated to him all the paternal evening-tempests which he had ever drawn upon himself by his rides and his Robinson's voyages of discovery, and whose thunder-claps had, on every occasion, only melted down the lightning-conductor (namely, herself), she added, with that touching tone flowing, not from the bony throat, but from the swelling heart, "Ah, Albano, thou wilt one day think of thy foster-mother, when it is too late!" and melted into tears.

Hitherto the unmeltable slags and the molten portion of his heart had been boiling up together within him, and the warm flood had pressed upward, ever higher and hotter, in his bosom, only his face had remained cold and hard,--for certain persons have, exactly at the melting point, the greatest appearance and capacity of hardening, as snow freezes just before a thaw; but now the strain upon the too tightly-bound queue, which was the paradoxical sign of the approaching eruption, made him, in the paroxysm of his fury, tear the Wurzburg appendage off over his head.

Before Albina saw it, she had handed him the Directorship appointment, with the words, "I ought hardly to do it; but just hand it to him, and say it was my present, and that thou wilt be quite another boy in future." But when she saw his hand armed, she asked, in a terrified tone, with the deep echo of a wearied-out grief, "Alban!" and turned immediately away from the poor child, whose pain she misunderstood, with too bitter tears, and said: "What new trouble is this? O, how you all torment my heart to-day! Go away! O, come here," she called after him, "and relate the circ.u.mstances!" And when he had innocently and truly done this, her voice, overpowered with tears, could no longer blame him, but only say, mildly, "Well, then, carry the present." Nevertheless, she had it in mind to represent to her husband the abbreviation of the hair as an act of obedience to her will, and to the fashion of city children in high life.

Alban went; but on the painful way, the full glands of his tears and his long-repressed heart broke forth, and he entered with eyes still weeping before his solitary foster-father, who was resting his tired and thinking head; and the boy held out to him, while yet a great way off, the big-sealed doc.u.ment, and could only say, "The present," and nothing more, and sparks darted with the storm-drops from his hot eyes. Lay thyself, innocent one, softly on thy father's unb.u.t.toned bosom; and while he holds in his right hand the enchanted cup of glory, and makes himself drunk with it, let him not on any account push thee away with his left! The repelling hand will by and by come to pulsate languidly and lightly upon thy wet, fiery cheeks, and warm, penitent eyes: then will the old man read the _Decretum_ over again still more slowly, so as almost to postpone the very first sound; then will he, when thou, with indescribable impetuosity, pressest his hand to thy face to kiss it, make appear as if he had just awaked, and say, with saltpetre coldness and glistening eyes, "Call mother"; and then, when thou liftest upon him thy glowing countenance all quivering with love from under thy downfallen locks, and when they are flung softly back from thy cherry cheeks,--then will he look a pretty long time after his departing darling, and brush away something from his eyes, that he may run over the address of the diploma at his will.

Say, Albano, have I not guessed right?

16. CYCLE.

Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.

Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna, he said not, as usual, _nolo episcopari_; he did not say he was hemmed round by an impa.s.sable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of fortune,--instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more common to brides,--he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and Rabette, and all.

But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the greatest reluctance to eat with a n.o.bleman, merely because, as entertaining _acteur_ of the table, he had so much to do with conversing, _savoir vivre_, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in proper att.i.tude, and pa.s.sing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cuc.u.mbers, chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague, and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should a.s.sume to himself the magnificent _winter crop_ in Alban's sowed field as his own _summer crop_. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.[32]

With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir,"

replied coldly and gravely the _paradeur_ of a Falterle by the side of our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a cabinet, and not into a princ.i.p.al apartment."

What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two brothers-in-office!--the master of accomplishments with the motley scarf-skin or hind-ap.r.o.n of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow outer wings of a b.u.t.termoth, whose dark under-wings represent the waistcoat (when he unb.u.t.tons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him, and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master wound upward the c.o.c.kle-stairs of his swaddling modests.[33] The former in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,--the one flapping up like a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A magnificent set-off, I repeat!

The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his napkin open first,--which became now, as it were, introductory programme and dokimastic.u.m of Falterle's system of teaching. "_Pos.e.m.e.nt, Monsieur_," said he to the novice, "_il est messeant de deplier la serviette avant que les autres aient deplie les leurs_." After some minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one _a la Brittaniere_, with rings. "_Il est messeant, Monsieur_," said the master of accomplishments, "_de souffler sa soupe_." The Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short, frightened into a dead calm.