CHAPTER XIX.

I had travelled during the day a long distance upon an interminable turnpike-road where the rows of poplars on each side stretched away until they met at the horizon in an acute angle which never widened, never came nearer, and whose unattainability was enough to drive the most patient traveller to desperation. The autumn rains had made the roads heavy and slippery to the feet. All the morning the wind had rustled with a melancholy sound in the half-leafless poplars, and about noon it had commenced to rain, and wet and dreary looked the sandy heaths and desolate fields on either side the road, while every human creature and every animal that I met wore a cheerless and dejected aspect. I had already given up the expectation of reaching the city that evening, so I felt it as an unhoped-for piece of good fortune when I saw a reddish-yellow glare of misty light rising above the horizon, which a solitary wanderer whom I had overtaken explained to be the reflection of the city-lights. And now indeed my enemies, the poplars, began to give place to suburban houses. The suburb was long enough, it is true, but houses can not hold out as long as poplars; and--"There is the gate," said at last my companion, and bade me good evening.

There was the gate. It was by no means imposing, and did not attract much attention from me. This, however, was excited by an accumulation of buildings immediately, to the left of the gate, which by their size, and the ruddy light shining through colossal windows, I inferred to belong to a large manufactory. A high iron railing divided the courtyard from the street, and in this railing was a wide gate, one side of which was standing open for the egress of the workmen, who were coming out, first one by one, then in groups, and finally in a compact throng. Outside the gate, they scattered in various directions, while some remained in groups about the gate, talking with animation. I heard the words "day's wages," "piece work," "quitting service," "notification," frequently repeated; but I could not catch the connection, and did not feel at liberty to ask any questions. Nearer to the railing, with her back toward me, was standing a young woman holding in front of her a little boy, who stood upon the stone foundation of the railing and held fast to the bars, gazing eagerly into the yard, down which dark figures were still coming, though in fewer numbers.

"What factory is this?" I asked, stepping up to the young woman.

She turned her head and answered, "The machine-works of Commerzienrath Streber. Keep still, George; your father will be along directly."

The feeble light of a street-lamp fell upon her pretty round face. The commerzienrath's machine-works--George, whose father was coming directly--the good-natured bright eyes--the full, red lips--I could not be mistaken.

"Christel Möwe!" I said; "Christel Pinnow! is this really you?"

"Bless my heart alive!" exclaimed the young woman, hastily putting down the child from the railing; "is it you, Herr George? See, George, this is your godfather;" and she held up the boy as high as she could, that he might have a better view of so important a personage, "How glad Klaus will be!"

She put the boy down again, who no sooner felt himself at liberty than he began to try his best to climb up to the railing again. I took him in my arms. "Are you a giant?" asked the little man, patting my head with his hands.

At this moment a square-built, grimy figure came up, apparently rather surprised to see his wife in such familiar conversation with a strange man, who had moreover his George in his arms; but before either Christel or I could say a word he tore his black felt cap from his head, waved it in the air like a conquering banner, and shouted, "Hurrah! here he is! George has come!"

It was long since any human lungs had emitted a cry of joy on my account, and it was probably owing to this novelty that at the good Klaus's exuberant greeting my eyes filled with tears, so that the whole scene--the factory, the houses, the street-lamps, the passing carriages, the black workmen, and even the little group of friends at my side--swam for a moment in a misty veil.

This emotion passed in a few moments, and we went on together, Klaus holding the little George on one arm, and clinging to the great George with the other, while Christel walked before, every instant looking over her shoulder at us with a smiling face.

Happily the distance through the crowded street was not long, and we soon reached a large and, to my eyes, stately house, the inside of which corresponded but poorly to its exterior. The hall was dimly lighted, and the floors black with dirt from innumerable footsteps that seemed to have traversed it the same day. The yard into which we passed was surrounded by lofty buildings, behind whose windows, feebly lighted here and there, there did not prevail that peace which a lover of quiet would have preferred. The stone staircase which we ascended to one of these rear-buildings was very steep, and, if possible, worse lighted and dirtier than the hall we had just entered. Persons passed us at every moment, who seemed far more reckless of the rules of politeness than was pleasant. I felt rather uncomfortable as we climbed from one landing to another, following Klaus, who gave no signs of halting, and at last in desperation I asked if we would not soon be there.

"Here we are!" said Klaus, knocking at a door, which was immediately opened from within, and from which, as it was opened, issued that penetrating odor which arises in an apartment where all day long the process of ironing freshly-starched linen is kept up. Any illusion as to the origin of this odor was the less possible, as the irons were at this moment in operation in the hands of two young women, who, as well as the third who had opened the door for us, cast glances of curiosity at the new arrival.

"So it goes on the whole day," said Klaus, with a glance of profoundest admiration at his wife, who had joined the ironers; "the whole day--only in the evening she allows herself a quarter of an hour to fetch me home from the works."

"You are a lucky fellow, Klaus," said I, in vain trying to draw a full breath in this atmosphere.

"Am I not?" replied Klaus, showing all his teeth, which had lost nothing of their glittering whiteness; "but that is not much yet. You must first see her babies!"

"And yours, Klaus?"

"And mine, of course," Klaus answered, in a tone which implied that it really was not worth while to allude to so unimportant a particular. "You must first see them!"

"I know one already."

"Yes; but the others! Her very image, every one! It is really ridiculous--really ridiculous," he repeated, with another glance of admiration at his little plump wife.

"You don't know what you are talking about, you stupid fellow," said the latter, turning sharply around, and laying a hand that bore traces of hard work, and yet was both white and small, on the mouth of her Klaus. "Let us go into the sitting-room. You must excuse me for keeping you here so long."

We went into the room, but Klaus did not rest until his wife had taken us into the chamber, where, beside two large beds, stood four little cribs, in which were sleeping four charming children, for my little namesake had by this time been put to bed by one of the young women.

"Isn't that too lovely!" said Klaus, drawing me from one blond head to another; "and all boys--all boys; but that just suits me: a girl I should expect to be exactly like her, and that is a simple impossibility--a simple impossibility."

Here Christel pushed me out of the bedroom, as she had before pushed me out of the kitchen.

"You stay here," she said to her husband, "and wash yourself, and fix yourself up decent, you great bear, as you ought when we have such a visitor."

Klaus showed his teeth with delight at his Christel's jest.

"Whatever I do, pleases him," said Christel, shutting the door with mock-disgust at his black face.

"Better that than if it were the other way," I said.

"Yes: but sometimes he carries it too far. I often am ashamed, and wonder what people think of it. And he gets worse every year; I really don't know what I shall do when the children are older; I often think they will lose all respect for their father."

While Christel thus unbosomed her secret woe, she was neatly and deftly setting the table, while I, standing before the stove, in which a cheerful fire was burning, thought of by-gone times: of that evening when I met the Wild Zehren first at Pinnow's forge, and how Christel had set the table and waited, and how she afterwards besought me not to go with him. Had I then followed her counsel! All would have been different. Perhaps better, perhaps not. But so it had happened, and----

"You must put up with what we have," said Christel.

"That I will, Christel, that I will!" I said, seizing both her hands and pressing them with a warmth which seemed a little to startle her.

"How wild you are still," she said, looking up at me with her blue eyes in surprise, but with no mixture of displeasure. "Exactly as you used to be."

"You don't like me any the less on that account, Christel, do you?"

She shook her head smiling: "Those used to be lively times."

"In winter, over the mulled wine," I said.

"And in summer, over the kaltschale," she replied.

"Especially when the old man was not at home," I added.

"Yes, indeed," she said; but her countenance took a serious expression, and she continued, looking at me gravely, "you know it then?"

"Know what, Christel?"

"That he----"

She laid her finger upon her lips and drew me, with an uneasy look at the chamber-door, further back into the room.

"He must not hear it--he has not got over it yet, though it is now more than three months ago."

"What was three months ago, Christel?" I asked in some alarm, for the young woman had turned quite pale, and cast uneasy glances first at me and then at the bed-room door.

"I hardly know how to tell you," she said. "He lived at last entirely alone, for no one would have anything to do with him, and even the deaf and dumb Jacob left him. Nobody knew exactly how he lived; and for a week no one had seen him, until one day the collector came for the house-tax, and--and found him hanging in the forge, over the hearth, where he must have been hanging nobody knows how long."

"Poor Klaus!" I said. "He must have felt it deeply, in spite of all."

"Indeed he did," said Christel. "And no one knows how he came to his death; whether he did it himself, or whether it was done by others; for they swore--at that time, you know--that they would settle with him one day."

"Very likely, very likely," I said.

"Here I am again," said Klaus, coming in in his best coat, and with a face as red as cold water, black soap, and a coarse towel, all applied in haste, could make it.

The supper, at which Christel's young assistants joined us, was soon over, and after the cloth had been removed, the girls dismissed, and Christel had mixed us a glass of grog, for which she had not forgotten her old recipe, Klaus and I fell into such discourse as naturally arises between old friends who have not seen each other for many years, and have gone through many experiences in the interval. I had to narrate to Klaus the story of my imprisonment from that time in the first year when he paid me that memorable visit, which was within a hair of bringing him into contact with the criminal law. Not that I could tell him, or even desired to tell him, everything, good fellow as he was. We do not admit our friends, even the most intimate, behind the inmost of the seven walls with which we prudently surround the citadel of our soul; but enough came to discourse to arouse the interest of the good Klaus to the highest pitch, and quite passionate was his sympathy when I came to speak of the last period of my imprisonment, when I fell into the hands of the new superintendent and his accomplice, the pious Deacon Von Krossow, and in seven worse than lean months had to expiate the seven years of fatness which I had hitherto enjoyed.

"The wretches! The villains! Is it possible? Are such things allowed?" the good Klaus kept muttering.

"Whether it is allowed or not, my dear Klaus, I cannot say; but that it is possible is only too certain. Under the most frivolous pretexts in the world I was deprived of my place as secretary, and treated as an unusually ill-disposed and contumacious prisoner; and as all that did not satisfy their vengeance, I was ordered seven months of disciplinary punishment beside."

"And what did the good old overseer whom I saw with you that day say to that?"

"Sergeant Süssmilch? He would have sworn terribly, I promise you, if he had seen it. Fortunately, he went away with the family of Herr von Zehren a week after the death of the latter."

"I would never have done that," said Klaus with emphasis; "I would never have left you alone in their robber-den."

"But he had other claims upon him, of longer standing, Klaus."

"All the same: I would not have left you."

Then I told how I had been discharged at last, how my first visit had been to my native town, and the reception I met with there.

"Poor George! poor George!" said Klaus, over and over again, shaking his big head in sympathy.

"But you have had a harder trial still, poor fellow," I said.

"Who told you that?" asked Klaus, quickly.

"She did," I answered, pointing to the room in which Christel had been for the last five minutes busied in a vain attempt to quiet the wails of her youngest.

"Hush," said Klaus, "we must not speak of it so that she can hear; it is different with us men, but a little woman like that--it always has a dreadful effect upon her, poor thing: I am frightened whenever any legal paper comes in about the adjustment of the estate--you understand."

"Your father left a very respectable sum, did he not?"

"God forbid," said Klaus. "They must have robbed him, or else he buried it; and either is very possible, for at last he did not trust in any human creature, and had little reason to, God knows. And he always had a secret way in everything. Just think; we believed that Christel had floated to land, as naked and destitute as a fish flung up by the tide, without the least possibility of discovering the name of the ship in which she was wrecked, much less her own. And what does she find in the great cupboard, opposite the door, you know, but a bundle of papers in a tin case, which evidently belonged to the same ship; these papers were the captain's, and his name is written in them, with the name of the ship, and how he was married, and that his young wife had given birth to a child at sea; and there was a slip of paper besides, saying that the ship could not now be saved, and that it was impossible to save their lives, so he would fasten the child and the papers, which he had put in a tin case, to a piece of cork, and trust them to the sea and to God's mercy. So there is no doubt that my Christel is this child of the Dutch captain, whose name was Tromp--Peter Tromp, and his ship The Prince of Orange, and he was on his way home from Java. But I am not the least surprised at it all," Klaus concluded; "I should not be surprised if I she had turned out to be the daughter of the Emperor of Morocco----"

"And had come down from the sky in a chariot drawn by twelve peacocks," I said.

"No; not even then," replied Klaus, with immense emphasis, after a moment's reflection.

"And what have you done with the papers?" I inquired, with a smile.

"I have had them translated; nothing else."

"But that is not right," I said. "The papers might possibly lead to the discovery of a rich uncle, or something of the sort. Such things have happened before, Klaus."

"That is just what Doctor Snellius says."

"Who says?" I asked in astonishment.

"Doctor Snellius," Klaus repeated. "Your old friend in the prison. He is now the physician to the factory: did he never write to tell you?"

"No; or else the letter was intercepted, which is very possible. So he is your doctor, eh?--the doctor of the factory, I mean."

"Well, yes; I call him so, because he is always sent for when anything happens; but in truth he is, I believe, the doctor of all the poor in this part of the city."

"He must have a heavy practice, then."

"Heaven knows he has; but he will never grow rich with it, for he never takes a penny unless they can well spare it, which is not often the case, and frequently he gives them medicine besides. Ah, he has a noble soul; though he always seems as if he were going to eat you up, and the children scream whenever he comes in the door."

"And he is your doctor too, then?"

"Oh yes, of course: that is, we have really only called him in once--the last time--very much against Christel's will, who insisted that----but that you will not understand; a married man's cares, you know; and she was quite right, as it happened----"

"As always, Klaus."

"As always."

"And why do you not make some investigations about those papers?"

Klaus scratched his ear.

"Well, I don't know," he said. "We feel somehow--we are living so happily now, and I always think things can not be better; more likely worse. If she really had a rich aunt--we always suppose it is an aunt--and she should leave her property to Christel, what in the world should we do with all the money? I can't think, for my part."

"Suppose, for example, you lent it to me: I should know what to do with it."

"Yes, that is true," cried Klaus, "I never thought of that. That would be something for you, sure enough. To-morrow morning I will advertise in all the papers: I'll bring the aunt if she lives a hundred thousand miles off."

"But suppose it is an uncle?"

"No, no, it is an aunt," said Klaus, with an air of assurance.

"So be it!" said I, arising. "And now let us take a little walk. I must take a look at my new home."

There is probably no time in the twenty-four hours better fitted to impress a provincial with the greatness of a large city than the twilight of a gloomy autumn evening. In men of any liveliness of imagination the reality usually falls short of the fancy, but in an hour like this the reality and the fancy--what we perceive and what we imagine--blend indistinguishably together, and the barriers of the actual world seem broken down.

Such an evening was it when I strolled with Klaus through the streets of the city, which seemed enormous and gigantic in my eyes. Even now I can sometimes in the evening, and for a moment, behold it in the same light and with the same feelings as then. Coming from a region inhabited by workmen, we crossed in our walk one of the most brilliant quarters to reach the city proper, and returned through large squares, surrounded by magnificent palaces, to our own gloomy region again. And everywhere was the throng of hurrying crowds on the narrow sidewalks, and the rattle and thunder of vehicles, and the endless rows of lamps up and down the interminable streets, and the blaze of light from the shops illuminating the streets so that the figures of men, wagons and horses were strangely reflected from the wet pavement. Then the imposing masses of tall buildings, rising above one another like mountains; the sight here of a bronze equestrian statue upon a pedestal, high as a house, riding aloft through the night, and then of a giant figure pointing down at us with a drawn sword; wide bridges with balustrades peopled with white marble forms, and under whose arches rolled a black flood upon which quivered the reflections of a thousand lights; a glance into the shops where to uninitiated eyes the treasures of Arabia and the Indies seemed heaped up by fairy hands; dark yards, where, late as it was, mighty casks and chests were being piled by leather-aproned men--I walked, and stopped to gaze, and went on, and stopped again, staring, astonished, but not confounded, and altogether strangely happy. Was this the sea of ever-rolling life, engulfing itself and ever producing itself anew, towards which my teacher's prophecy had directed me--the sea whose mighty billows, if he had foreseen truly, where to be my home? Yes: this it was: this it must be. I felt it in the courageous beatings of my heart, in the power with which I clove this surge of men, in the delight with which I listened to the roar of this surf.

Part Third.

CHAPTER I.

In the machine-works of the commerzienrath a great boiler was being riveted. Three sooty workmen, with shirt-sleeves rolled above the elbows, and hammers in their strong hands, were waiting for the red-hot bolt which a fourth was bringing in the jaws of a pair of pincers from an adjacent forge. The bolt vanished into the boiler, and appeared in a few seconds through the rivet-hole; the cyclops grasped their hammers firmly, and, striking in measured cadence, finished the rivet-head. This hammering produced a tremendous noise.

And if any one had told a spectator, uninitiated to the craft, that in the hollow of the boiler upon which the heavy hammers fell with such deafening clangor, there lay a man upon his back who received the rivet in a pair of pincers, and with these exerted all his strength in resistance, while the hammers were ringing on the rivet-head, the uninitiated spectator would scarce have believed it, and he could not fail to consider the man in the hollow of the boiler as one of the most miserable and most to be pitied of mortals.

The riveting was finished, the hammers at rest; the man with the pincers crawled out of the belly of the monster. I need scarcely tell the reader who this man with the pincers was. Nor am I ashamed thus to appear before him, for he has very likely seen me in similar costume, though it is true that at this moment I present a rather frightful appearance. The lower part of my face, my neck and breast, are covered with blood, which during the last hour has been running from my nose and mouth. But the three with the hammers only laugh; and one, the foreman, says:

"Next time remember to keep your mouth open, comrade, no roast pigeons will fly into it."

Rather a poor joke, it must be owned; but the rest laugh, and I laugh too: for as the prudent proverb advises us to "howl with the wolves," so I have rarely been able to refrain from joining in any laughter, even when, as at present, it was at my own expense.

But despite the ardent zeal with which I entered into my new calling, I was not sorry that this work inside the boiler was but a temporary task, for which the foreman of my shop had lent me because another shop happened to be shorthanded, very unwillingly, and only at the order of the foreman of the works. To say that he did it very unwillingly sounds like a brag from one who like myself had only been a fortnight in the shop, and whose only work yet had been of the roughest sort, such as handling the sledge. Nor was it any merit of mine that the heavy sledge which others handled with difficulty was as light in my hands as an ordinary fore-hammer, and that my blow could easily be distinguished among the four or five that followed in regular cadence the foreman's stroke upon the glowing iron. It was no merit of mine; and yet in this place, where bodily strength played so important a part, it counted as a high one, even the highest. My foreman was proud of me; my fellow-workmen, in the most literal sense, looked up to me with admiration; and Klaus, whenever my name happened to be mentioned, showed all his white teeth, then shut his lips tight, held up his forefinger, and nodded mysteriously. I had strictly forbidden Klaus to indulge in these mysterious gestures, and Klaus had solemnly promised to avoid them, but in spite of all it was not his fault if all the two hundred hands in the establishment did not have the same exalted opinion of me with which his honest soul was overflowing.

"I declare," said Klaus--whenever I imparted to him some bit of information from my theoretical knowledge of machinery, or from my mathematical acquirements--"you know more about these things than any man in the works, the head-foreman and the engineers not excepted, and you deserve to be at least Chief of the Technical Bureau."

"You are a simpleton, Klaus," I said.

"But it is true, for all," answered he doggedly.

"No, Klaus, it is not true. In the first place, you far over-estimate my knowledge, and in the second place, one can be a very good theorist and at the same time a wretched bungler in practice. But I want to be both a good theorist and a skilful workman, and I must give many a stroke of hammer and of file before I get to be that. Just remember, Klaus, what a time it took you to rise from the common job-workman, who was glad if he could dress his round pliers decently, to the skilful machinist who can fit the straps on a connecting-rod as well as the best--"

"Yes," said Klaus, "but then you and I----"

"Forging is done everywhere at a fire, Klaus, and every piece must be hammered until it is finished; and so must a good machinist until he is finished; and there is much to be done before I can say that of myself, if I ever can."

"I am of a different opinion, then," answered the obstinate Klaus.

"Then be so good as to keep that opinion to yourself," I said, very earnestly.

I had good reasons for enjoining the honest Klaus to a silence which was so burdensome to him; for, beside the fact that he really had a ridiculously exaggerated opinion of me, his imprudence might be of serious inconvenience to me, and indeed might close against me the way which I was firmly resolved to tread. I wished to work my way up from the ranks in the calling to which I had devoted my life, remembering the saying of my never-to-be-forgotten teacher, that the true artist must understand the hand-work of his art. So for the present I was what I desired to be--a hand-worker, a laborer in the roughest work--and every one took me for just that, which was precisely what I wished.

My past history I had veiled under a simple story, which found ready belief with the simple fellows around me. I was the son of a seafaring man in Klaus Pinnow's native town. We had known each other from our boyhood; I had made up my mind to be a smith like him, and had worked awhile as an apprentice with his father. But ten years ago I had gone to sea, and had voyaged about the whole world as sailor, as ship's-carpenter, and, as ship's-blacksmith, and only returned home a short time before with the determination of quitting the sea for the future, and earning an honest living on land, for which purpose I was now learning the smith's craft regularly, which I had practiced as an apprentice.

I was seldom under the necessity of corroborating this story by accounts of my past adventures; and if now and then, when we were off work, some one more curious than the rest spoke of my travels, I understood enough of navigation and voyages, and had mixed too much with captains and mates, and read too many tales of the sea, not to be able to play the part of Sindbad for half an hour. One of my principal stories, the scene of which was laid somewhere in the Malay Archipelago, in which there was plenty of hot work and plenty of pirates knocked in the head, had procured me in the shop the nickname of "The Malay," which I bore until--but I must not anticipate.

I was all the more readily believed to be what I gave myself out for, as I conformed my habits exactly to those of the common workman. I was dressed neither better nor worse than the rest; I ate my breakfast from my hand, as did the others; I dined at a cheap cook-shop, in which some fifty other workmen took their dinners. The only luxury which I allowed myself out of the little money which I had brought from the prison was a better lodging than workmen of my class were accustomed to or could afford; and this deviation from the rule was due as much to necessity as to any consideration of comfort or taste. I could not, if I wished to prosecute my theoretical studies, live in a quarter where the streets were noisy until deep in the night with the rattling of vehicles, and too often with the uproar of drunken workmen in conflict with the police, and where, in the overcrowded houses, the ticking, pulsating, clattering clock of human life never stood still a moment.

For several days, during which I was Klaus's guest, I had looked about for a suitable lodging; and at last I found one.

Adjoining the factory was a large lot of ground, which was covered in the most singular way with buildings, some half-finished and others only commenced. According to the account of the old man who, in a half-finished porter's lodge, exercised a sort of guardianship over the place, the whole had been intended as an establishment to compete with Streber's. But the projector of the scheme had failed, the property was put up at auction and bought in by a wealthy creditor, who thought the best thing he could do with it for the present was to leave all things as they were.

"You see," said the old man, "he hopes that in two or three years the ground will be worth three times as much as it now is; and perhaps also that the commerzienrath must of necessity take the thing off his hands at any price, since it is of the utmost importance to him to keep a rival from starting up, so to speak, under his very nose. And then the commerzienrath has to put up new buildings, for they are so crowded they can hardly work, and where is he to build if not just on these lots? But he thinks it over, and my employer thinks it over, and now they have both been thinking it over for these two years. Recently he has been here again and looked over the place for the twentieth or fiftieth time, I believe; but it did not seem that he had come to any determination. Well, it is all one to me; and if you, sir, would like one of the rooms in the garden-house, your beard may be grown two inches longer before you have to move out."

The satirical old porter pleased me well, and the garden-house still better. True it was a mere boast when the man spoke of "one of the rooms," while in reality it had but one in which a human being could possibly live, while the others, without doors or windows, seemed rather to be a caravanserai for homeless cats: an appearance which I found afterwards to be fully borne out by the facts. The little house, which was probably originally intended for the residence of the owner or manager, was planned in a very pleasing Italian style. An easy flight of stairs led to the rooms referred to, in which, to judge from the spots of ink on the unscrubbed floors, and several three-legged drawing-tables, and other similar bits of ruinous furniture, the architect of the building must have had his office; on the other side was a balcony. In front of the stairs a grass-plot had been designed, but at present it was only a plot without the grass; and similarly a great free-stone basin in the centre lacked the Triton and the water; and the trellis, which ran up between the windows, as high up as the projecting eaves, lacked its Venetian ivy. But I cared nothing for these deficiencies; on the contrary I regarded them as pointing to a better future, and they harmonized thus with my own frame of mind, which also looked from a barren present to richer and fairer days to come. Then this ruinous lodging had the real practical advantage of suitable cheapness, and also that of securing me the quiet which was so necessary to my studies; and, to tell the whole, the old man had told me that the young lady who had accompanied the commerzienrath, and must have been the old gentleman's daughter, had clapped her hands when she saw the garden-house, and said it was charming, and she would like to live in it.

"She'd soon get out of that notion," said the old growler. "She did not look as if the owl was her house-builder, and Skinflint her cook; but for one of our--I mean of your--sort, it will suit very well."

"It suits me exactly," I said; "and now, when can I move in?"

"When you please; no one has been before you, so you will not have to wait for the tenant to move out."

So on the same evening I took possession of my new lodging, with the assistance of the good Klaus, whose head scarcely stopped shaking the whole time.

What did I want with such a tumble-down old ruin, where I might be murdered and not a dog bark? And how could I fancy such furniture: two worm-eaten high-backed chairs, an arm-chair about a hundred years old, a table with clumsy twisted legs, and a looking-glass with tarnished gilt frame? To be sure, I had bought the rubbish cheap enough of a dealer in second-hand furniture, but for very little more he would have given me things of a very different sort; but somehow I had always had a strange sort of taste in those matters, and he remembered that I used to have a lot of just such useless rubbish in my own room in my father's house in Uselin.

So the good Klaus grumbled and scolded, and even Christel was seriously out of humor with me for some days. She had discovered a room in her own house, on the courtside, up two pair of stairs, beautifully furnished, and having only the inconvenience that to get to it one had to go through the kitchen and the landlady's room. And the landlady was a particularly respectable tailor's widow of eighty-two, with an excellent unmarried daughter of sixty, who would certainly have taken the very best care of me.

The honest Klaus and the good Christel! I could not help them; I could not for their sakes change my nature, to which this striving for freedom and independence was an absolute necessity. In my garret in my father's house, in my room at Castle Zehrendorf, even in my prison cell, I had ever felt too deeply the luxury and poetry of solitude to be able to dispense with it now that I was a man.

And now again I was alone in my room in the half-finished garden-house, among the ruins of buildings, large and small, that never would be completed. In the evening, when I looked up from my books, no sound reached me but the hollow unceasing rumble of vehicles, like the distant roll of the sea, or the bark of the shaggy poodle that by day kept the old man company in the porter's lodge, and in the evening and all night long traversed the spaces between the ruins and the ruins themselves, in, as it seemed to me, an interminable hunt after cats.

And when occasionally, to cool my heated head, I stepped out upon the balcony, all again was deserted, vacant, and dark around, only here and there the light of a solitary lamp, and sometimes a red pillar of flame which rose from one of the furnace-chimneys of our works into the night sky, and reddened the edges of the dark clouds which a sharp November wind drove before it. Then, when I returned to my room, how cheerful looked my modest lamp, before which lay open my book with figures and formulas; how cosily the old carven oak furniture, which had so moved the spleen of the good Klaus; and above all, with what pleasure I contemplated the two small antique vases of terracotta upon the mantel-piece, and the beautiful copy of the Sistine Madonna, which hung on the wall facing my worktable. The picture and the vases had been taken from my cell when the new superintendent came, but upon my release I had demanded them with so fixed a determination that they did not venture to withhold them: so I had packed them carefully in a box and placed them in the hands of a person whom I could trust, to be forwarded to me whenever I should have fixed myself somewhere. This very day they had arrived, and to-night, for the first time, again I enjoyed the pleasure of gazing at them.

And while I contemplated these precious relics I reproached myself earnestly that I had never prevailed upon myself to visit or give any token of my existence to the dearest friend I had in the world, in the same city with whom I had now been living a fortnight. It seemed so entirely contrary to my nature not at once to obey the impulse of my heart, and that so urgent an impulse--not to hasten without delay to her with whom I had lived in closest friendship so many years of my life, and whose heart I was convinced beat as warmly for me as ever. We had not kept up a very lively correspondence during the year of our separation, but we had agreed when we parted that we would not write except upon some especial emergency, as anything like a correspondence carried on under the eyes of the new superintendent and Herr von Krossow seemed an impossibility. An emergency of this kind occurred, when the baseness of this well-matched pair procured me a seven months' addition to my term of incarceration: I wrote to her, simply acquainting her with the fact, and she answered with but a word: "Endure."

No, this was not the cause of my reluctance; and indeed it had but one, which I was unwilling to admit, even to myself I knew how the dearest, noblest girl had to work and to care for herself and for those dear to her. For a year it had been my dearest wish--indeed it often seemed to me the single aim and object of my life--to attain a position that would enable me to lift this load from her frail shoulders. And now, when she perhaps more than ever needed a friend, a supporter, I must appear before her in a condition in which, even if I needed no assistance myself, I was utterly unable to afford it to others. That might have been foreseen; as things were, it was inevitable, and yet----

But will she, then, will she ever accept my assistance? I interrupted the course of my thoughts as I paced up and down my room with my hands behind me, a habit I had caught from my father. Has she not given me a hundred proofs how jealous she is of her independence? And has she not given me especially to understand, even at our parting, that if she should require a support it should not be my arm?

I called to mind the last days that I had spent with Paula and her family. There were not many of them, for they had urged Frau von Zehren to make room for her husband's successor with an insistance that was really indecent. This successor, a major on half-pay, and a special pet of the pietistic president, had long waited for the place, and, so to speak, had been standing at the door. The brutality with which he took possession at once of the superintendent's house, without the least consideration for the bereaved family, was really unexampled. He had given the afflicted lady the alternative of removing with her family to one of the prison cells, which he magnanimously offered to have cleared out for their occupation, or of taking refuge in one of the wretched taverns of the town. Frau von Zehren, of course, had not hesitated a moment as to what was to be done; and thus within three days after the death of my benefactor all the old familiar faces had vanished from the house in which he had lived so long. All had gone. Doctor Snellius, in the very first hour in which he had the questionable honor of being presented to the new superintendent, spoke his mind to him in full; and when Doctor Snellius spoke his mind to any one whom he had reason to despise and abhor, you might rest assured that the individual addressed would not have the slightest ground to complain of any obscurity in the doctor's expressions.

Immediately upon his heel followed old Sergeant Süssmilch; and although the register of the old man's voice lay fully two octaves lower than the doctor's, yet the melody which both sang must have been the same; at all events the result in both cases was identical, namely, Major D. foamed with rage, then stamped with his feet, and ordered the insolent fellow to be put in the dungeon immediately. Happily, the old man had been prudent enough to ask for and to obtain his discharge before he thoroughly eased his heart to his new chief, who therefore, rage as he might, had no authority over the old man, and on Sergeant Süssmilch threats were thrown away.

How gladly would I have followed these enticing examples, and spoken my mind also to the new superintendent. Probably in my whole life I have never exercised such constraint over myself as in those days, when I saw this miserable creature occupying the place which that noble man had left; and in all likelihood I should not have succeeded, and should have plunged myself into far worse misfortune, had not a voice perpetually sounded in my ear which was more potent with me than the impulse of my heart. And this voice said: "You have already endured much, poor George; bear this also, though it be the hardest of all, and if you cannot control yourself, call to mind him who loved you as his own son."

I sat down to my book again and turned the leaves; but this night I could not fix my attention on even the simplest things. Old well-known algebraic formulas wore a quite strange appearance, and seemed to form themselves into the words: If he loved me as his son, and she was the best beloved of his children, should she and I not also love each other?

"Are you going to keep your light burning all night?" called the voice of the old watchman from below. "It is now one o'clock, and I am to wake you at five, and a nice job I will have of it!"

CHAPTER II.

In another shop of our establishment several men had been wounded, more or less dangerously, by the slipping of a belt. In our shop we had heard the news of the accident just before dinner, and the men were standing about the yard inquiring the particulars and talking it over. I had joined one of the groups, and was listening attentively, when I saw a little man pushing through the crowd, with his hat in his hand, and whose great bald skull emerging here and there between these dark figures resembled the full moon sailing through black clouds. This skull could only belong to one man. I hastened in pursuit, and overtook it by the gate at the moment when it was covered with a felt hat, which had not improved in appearance since I last saw it. I followed the felt hat a few steps in the street, and then with a stride placed myself beside its wearer.

"Permit me, doctor," I said.

Doctor Snellius brought his round spectacles to bear on me, and stared at me with a look of the profoundest astonishment.

"It is no hallucination, doctor," I said; "this is really myself."

"George, mammoth, man, how come you here, and in this questionable shape?" cried the doctor, holding out both his hands.

"Hush, doctor," I said, "I am here incognito, and must deny myself the pleasure of embracing you."

"Don't tell me you have run away, and that too after I expressly forbade you," said the doctor, in a low, anxious tone.

I set his mind at rest on this point.

"Heaven be thanked!" he said; "not forgetting also to thank me, or rather her. How did you find her?"

"I have not yet seen her, doctor."

"And you have been here two weeks? Shameful! incredible! Where is my lantern, that I may dash it to pieces, for now I give up forever the hope of finding a man. Go! I will never see you again."

"When shall I come to see you, doctor?"

"Whenever you will, or can: shall we say this evening? eh? A glass of grog in the old fashion, half-and-half, eh?"

And over a glass of grog, half-and-half in the old fashion. Doctor Snellius and I faced each other that very evening, in his more roomy lodging, and talked of by-gone times, of what we had gone through together, as two old friends talk who meet for the first time after long separation.

The doctor gave me a drastic description of his great scene with Major D., and how Herr von Krossow had come in, and how he had said that it was true that three made a college, but for the whole world he would not make a college with those two, and that he begged to take leave of them at once and forever. I answered, laughing, that I now could understand the vindictiveness with which I was persecuted by Herr von Krossow, whom I had never offended.

"You are mistaken, my dear fellow," said the doctor. "The reptile had other and better reasons for turning his fangs upon you. I can tell you now that there is no danger of your wringing the miscreant's neck. So now listen; but mix yourself a glass first--you will not get it down without a good swig. This it was: he had once before paid his court to her--to Paula von Zehren; and as he received one mitten, he thought he might venture to apply for the other. For this purpose he selected as the fittest time those days of grief and distraction immediately after her father's death, nor did he forget to remind her that the new superintendent was his good friend, and the president his cousin, and that through these two he held the fortunes of Paula and her family, so to speak, in his hands; for her mother's claim to a pension was, as she knew herself, open to dispute; but the thing could be managed; and although he had no property of his own, he had good connections, and by no means bad prospects, especially under the new king, who was in truth an anointed of the Lord. What do you think of that?" crowed Doctor Snellius, springing up and performing a grotesque dance through the room.

The doctor's statement filled me with astonishment and indignation. I had had no idea that the sanctimonious deacon had dared to raise his hypocritical eyes to Paula; and this suggested the thought that I might probably have been equally dim of sight in another quarter. I sank into a gloomy silence; but the doctor must have read my thoughts in my face through his great round spectacles.

"You are thinking that it cost her no great effort to dismiss the priest when her heart was already in the possession of the knight? I know we often spoke of it and made each other uneasy, but it was all nonsense, I assure you, all nonsense. Paula no more thinks of marrying the young Adonis than an old satyr like me."

The doctor gave me a side-glance at these words, and smiled sardonically as I involuntarily murmured a heart-felt "Thank heaven!"

"Don't rejoice too soon, though," he went on, and his smile grew ever more diabolic; "we must not praise the day before the evening, and you know my doctrine, that with men anything is possible. Arthur is really a most fascinating youth, and now he has worked himself into the diplomatic career, he may well die our Minister to London. It is the same trade, and that they understand--ah! don't they understand it? especially the old man, who really is a genius in the noble art. From his tailor, whom he cajoles until the man gives him credit again, up to the king, whom he without hesitation petitions for a subsidy that will enable him to pay his debts and push his Arthur in his new career, no man is safe from him--no man. I warn you button up your pockets when you meet the gentleman on the street."

"He lives here, then?"

"Of course, he lives here. The soil here is not so soon exhausted, and a great man like the Herr Steuerrath needs a wide field everywhere. Oh these brows, these brows of brass!"

"Why do we talk so much of such a crew?" I asked. "Rather tell me something about her. How does she live? How does she get on with her painting? Has she made great progress? And has she found sale for her pictures?"

"Made progress? Find sale?" cried the doctor. "Pretty questions, indeed! I tell you she is in a fair way to make her fortune. They fairly fight over her pictures."

"Doctor," I said, "I do not think this is a proper subject for jesting."

The doctor, who had spoken in his shrillest tones, tuned down his voice a couple of octaves by an energetic "ahem!" and said:

"You are right; but it is no jest--merely a lie. As I see, however, that I have not made any progress in the art of lying, it is probably best for me to tell you, or rather show you, the truth. Come with me."

He lighted two candles that stood under the looking-glass, and led me into an adjoining room, which he had first to unlock.

"I have put them here," he said, pointing to the wall, which was hung with large and small pictures, "because they are not safe from the boys anywhere else. Now what do you think of them?"

Taking the candles from the doctor, and letting the light fall upon the pictures, I saw at once that they were all by Paula's hand. I had too long watched her studies, and too deeply entered into her way of seeing and of reproducing what she saw, to be liable to any error.

There were three or four heads, all idealized, the originals of which I fancied that I recognized; two or three genre-pieces--scenes from the prison, which I had already seen in the first draught; and finally a landscape--a great reach of coast with stormy sea--the sketch of which I remembered perfectly. At this time I understood but little of painting, and least of all did I know how to justify my opinion when formed. Now I can say that I really perceived a decisive improvement in these pictures--an improvement both in the technical execution and in the freer and broader style of treatment: especially did the heads strike me as exhibiting remarkable power, and I enthusiastically expressed my opinion to the doctor in the best words I could find.

"Yes," said he, leaning his head first on one side and then on the other, and contemplating the pictures with melancholy pride, "you are right; perfectly right. She is a genius; but of what use is genius when it has no name? The world is stupid, my friend; incredibly stupid: it can discover anything grand or beautiful soon enough when the one or two enlightened heads that a century produces have given their testimony to it, one after the other; then the thing is an article of faith that the boys recite from their benches and the sparrows chatter upon the roofs. But when the gentlemen have to pass judgment upon the work of an author whose name they have never before heard, or the picture of an artist who comes before them for the first time, then they are at the end of their lesson and do not know what to think. How long would these pictures have travelled from one exhibition to another, or hung in the dealers' shops, if I had allowed them to hang there? So they have all travelled into my possession, and not to America, England, and Russia, as the good Paula believes. But do not look so seriously at me. My part of Mæcenas did not last long; her last picture at the Artists' Exposition--you know it, and are in it yourself--Richard the Lion-heart sick in his tent, visited by an Arab physician: well, that picture, as I hear, has been bought by the commerzienrath--your commerzienrath--strange to say, for the man knows just as much about paintings as I do about making money, and Paula, by my advice, fixed its price at a considerable sum. You see I am now superfluous. Sic tansit gloria!"

The doctor sighed deeply, and then preceded me with the two candles in his hands, casting flickering lights upon his broad skull.

We took our seats again behind the glasses of grog. The doctor seemed disposed to drown the deep melancholy that had possessed him by doubting the strength of his potations, while I sat in deep meditation. The fact that the commerzienrath had bought Paula's picture set me to pondering. I knew of old how absolutely indifferent the man was to everything connected with art, and that the relationship had in any way moved him to the purchase was the unlikeliest thing in the world. It was therefore no very chimerical conclusion that the daughter had more to do in the affair than the father; and I confess that as I reckoned up the probabilities of this supposition the blood rushed to my cheeks. In fact the hypothesis stood or fell on a certain point, which was yet uncertain. I drew a long breath, took a deep draught from my glass, and asked:

"Has King Richard still any likeness----"

"To you, my most esteemed friend; to you? Do not vex yourself with any doubts on that score," answered Doctor Snellius with a promptness that seemed to indicate that our thoughts had met in the same point. "The only fault I have to find with it is just this, that Paula seems to have fancied that she had only to take you as you were, and there was a king ready made. Have the goodness not to take credit to yourself for what is merely her poverty of invention."

"I think I have not yet given you any reason to hold me exceptionally vain," I said.

"No; heaven knows you have not; you deserve rather to descend to posterity in the character of St. Simon Stylites than as Richard Cœur de Lion."

"You say that as bitterly as if you were seriously dissatisfied with me."

"And so I am, my good sir," cried the doctor. "What kind of a crochet is it to live by the labor of your hands, when you can live by your head? Do you know, sir, that our departed friend said to me, not long before his death, that you had the most remarkable talent for mathematics he had ever known, and that you could at any time take charge of the highest class in a public school? Do you suppose that your head grows acuter just in proportion as your hands grow coarser? You will say, like the tailor to Talleyrand, il faut vivre; and a journeyman blacksmith will make a living easier than a teacher of mathematics. Well, have you no friends that could help you? Why did you not come to me at once? Why did you leave it for chance to decide whether we should meet or not?"

I endeavored to calm his irritation, showing him that I had taken my present course, not from necessity but conviction; but he would not yield the point.

"Why did you take the trouble to make a virtue of necessity? Necessity was your adviser, necessity and your confounded pride to boot. You would have set out in quite another way, if you had had any capital to back you."

"But you see I have none, doctor."

"Don't you contradict me, you brainless mammoth! A friend who has capital that he places at our disposal is a capital of our own. I am your friend, I have capital, and I place it at your disposal. Who knows if in this I do not accomplish a work more pleasing to heaven than if I followed my old father's wishes and employed it in assisting orphan asylums and other such childish undertakings. You are an orphan; so in helping you I follow the words if not the intention of that pious man, and shall be perfectly easy in conscience on that score."

"But I shall not," I replied, laughing.

"Don't laugh, you monster!" cried the doctor. "You don't seem to comprehend that my proposition is perfectly serious. Take my money--there are fifty thousand thalers, or thereabouts--go into partnership with the commerzienrath; or better, found a rival establishment, and hoist him out of his saddle: in a few years you will be the first manufacturer and machinist of Germany, and----"

While the doctor thus spoke in feverish excitement the blood had rushed to his head in a really alarming manner. He suddenly checked himself, and it was not until long after that I learned what it was that required such an effort to suppress. It may be that my head, in consequence of my long sitting behind the grog, was by no means perfectly clear; at all events only thus can I explain the obstinacy with which I still contradicted the doctor and maintained that my sense of independence would never allow me to use the capital and assistance of another as the foundation of my fortune.

"Do you know what you are proclaiming in this?" cried the doctor in his shrillest tones, and wrathfully smiting the table--"that you will remain a beggar, a miserable beggarly fellow, as every one has done who was fool enough to try to drag himself out of the swamp by his own hair? No, no, my good sir; the art is to let others work for you. Whoever does not understand this, is and remains a beggar."

"What would our best friend have said if he had heard you talk thus?"

"Has he not in life and death proven the truth of it?" crowed the pugnacious doctor. "Do you call it living as a reasonable man, to leave the dearest we have on earth in poverty at our death? And what are the great results of all his long, self-sacrificing, heroic labor for the general good? He fancied, this high-priest of humanity, that his example would suffice to bring about an entire reform of the prison system. And now an old pedant of a king has but to shut his sleepy eyes, and the foundation of his edifice gives way; and as soon as he himself commits the folly of dying, it falls to ruin like a house of cards. If that be not folly I do not know how loud the bells must jingle."

"I know somebody whose cap is quite as well furnished," I said, looking the doctor full in the eyes. "What do you call a man who--as the only son of a rich old father who loves the son and lets him follow his own course, even though he does not comprehend it, with the certain prospect of a considerable inheritance--performs for years the laborious work of a prison-surgeon for the most trivial pay; who, after he has come into the possession of this estate, continues to labor as the physician of the poorest of the poor, and finally, because the weight of his wealth is too burdensome, throws it into the lap of the first man he meets, to die the same irreclaimable beggarly fellow that he has lived?"

"Did I ever pretend to be anything else?" asked my antagonist, not without some mark of confusion. "Oh yes, as if it were only the simplest thing in the world to be a child of prudence. To produce that result requires generations, for shrewdness must be bred in families, like the long legs of race-horses. Take the commerzienrath, who is a classic example how shrewdness grows and thrives when it is once properly grafted on a family stock: the man's grandfather was a needleman, who kept a little shop by the harbor-gate in S.; my own grandfather knew him well. He was a disreputable old fellow, who sold nails and needles in his front shop, and lent money on pawns in the back room. Then came his son, who was at least a head above his father, and could read and write, and calculate much better than the old man. He settled in your town and bought shares of ships, and finally whole ships, and paved the way for his son, who is the biggest of the lot. His flourishing period came in Napoleon's time. Napoleon and the blockade and the smuggling business made a rich man of him. Yes, smuggling--the same smuggling that cost your friend his life. When the Herr Commerzienrath was a smuggler, smuggling was a kind of patriotic work, and the poor devils who risked and lost their lives at it were martyrs of the good cause. God only knows how many men's lives he has on his conscience. And when afterwards the people who had got into the way of the business would not quit it, and indeed could not, or they would have starved, he was safe enough; he had brought his sheep out of the rain and could laugh in his sleeve. Then came the time of army-contracts, and that again was a good time for him; and thus this leech kept sucking and gorging himself with the blood of his fellow-creatures. Everything that he undertook succeeded; the needleman's grandson and broker's son has become a millionaire, has married a woman of noble birth, has titles, orders--all that the heart can desire. Look you, there is a child of prudence, whom I recommend to you as an example."

"That I may lose your and every worthy man's friendship?"

"What good is my friendship to you? My friendship at best is worth but fifty thousand thalers. You are quite right not to put yourself out of your way for such a trifle. Marry Hermine Streber--then you will know why you were a beggarly fellow."

"It seems that one falls into this category by having either a great deal of money or none at all," I said, hiding under a loud laugh my embarrassment at his brusque suggestion.

"Certainly," said the doctor, still heated. "Extremes meet, and for this reason I consider your destiny inevitable. The question only is, how to deal with the old man; with the daughter the business is half done, or more than half. Your meeting on the steamer was capital; and now this Richard the Lion-heart in effigy, as long as she has him not in propria personæ----"

"Doctor," I said, rising, "I think it must be time to say good-night."

"As you please," replied the doctor. "You know with such remarkable exactitude what is good for you that most likely you know this too."

The doctor had also arisen and was now walking up and down the room making frightful faces.

"Doctor," said I, stepping before him.

"Go!" he cried, passing round me in a curve.

"I am going," I said, and I went.

But I halted at the door and looked back once more at the singular man, who had thrown himself again into his chair and was watching me angrily through his round spectacles.

"Doctor, you said to me once that you could not well carry more than four glasses, and this evening you have drunk six. So I will ascribe the unfriendly way in which you dismiss me--for what other reason I cannot imagine--to the fifth and sixth glass; and now good-by."

I left the room without his making any attempt to detain me, and as I closed the door behind me I heard him burst into a peal of shrill laughter.

"This comes from a man's not keeping within his measure," I said to myself, excusing him.

But as I reached the street below, and the frosty night air blew upon my heated face, I began to perceive that I had not exactly kept within my own measure. My gait as I traversed the empty, badly-lighted streets, now swept by a sharp December wind, was less steady than usual, and strange thoughts passed through my head, and I had curious fancies, whose origin could only be traced to the glasses I had emptied. And once I had to laugh aloud, for I imagined I heard the voice of the short, fat commerzienrath saying quite distinctly: "My dear son, we must mind what we are about or we shall not get home at all, and our Hermine will be alarmed."