What a pleasant little dinner we had that day! It was laid out in a little summer-house of the inn-garden. All overgrown with a fine old fig-tree, through whose leaves the summer wind played deliciously, while a tiny rivulet rippled close by, and served to cool our “Achten-thaler,”—an amount of luxury that made Tintefleck quite wild with laughter.
“Is it cold enough?” she asked archly, in her peasant dialect, each time the old man laid down his glass.
As I came gradually to pick up the occasional meaning of her words,—a process which her expressive pantomime greatly aided,—I was struck by the marvellous acuteness of a mind so totally without culture, and I could not help asking Vaterchen why he had never attempted to instruct her.
“What can I do?” said he, despondently; “there are no books in the only language she knows, and the only language she will condescend to speak. She can understand Italian, and I have read stories for her, and sonnets, too, out of Leopardi; but though she will listen in all eagerness till they are finished, no sooner over than she breaks out into some wild Calabrian song, and asks me is it not worth all the fine things I have been giving her, thrice told.”
“Could you not teach her to write?”
“I tried that. I bought a slate, and I made a bargain with her that she should have a scarlet knot for her hair when she could ask me for it in written words. Well, all seemed to go on prosperously for a time; we had got through half the alphabet very successfully, till we came to the letter H. This made her laugh immediately, it was so like a scaffold we had in the circus for certain exercises; and no sooner had I marked down the letter, than she snatched the pencil from me, and drew the figure of a man on each bar of the letter. From that hour forth, as though her wayward humor had been only imprisoned, she burst forth into every imaginable absurdity at our lessons. Every ridiculous event of our daily life she drew, and with a rapidity almost incredible. I was not very apt, as you may imagine, in acquiring the few accomplishments they thought to give me, and she caricatured me under all my difficulties.”
“Si, si,” broke she in at this; for, with a wonderful acuteness, she could trace something of a speaker's meaning where every word was unknown to her. As she spoke, she arose, and fled down the garden at top speed.
“Why has she gone? Is she displeased at your telling me all these things about her?” asked I.
“Scarcely that; she loves to be noticed. Nothing really seems to pain her so much as when she is passed over unremarked. When such an event would occur in the circus, I have seen her sob through her sleep all the night after. I half suspect now she is piqued at the little notice you have bestowed upon her. All the better if it be so.”
“But here she comes again.”
With the same speed she now came back to us, holding her slate over her head, and showing that she rightly interpreted what the old man had said of her.
“Now for my turn!” said Vaterchen, with a smile. “She is never weary of drawing me in every absurd and impossible posture.”
“What is it to be, Tintefleck?” asked he. “How am I to figure this time?”
She shook her head without replying, and, making a sign that she was not to be questioned or interrupted, she nestled down at the foot of the fig-tree, and began to draw.
The old man now drew near me, and proceeded to give me further details of her strange temper and ways. I could mark that throughout all he said a tone of intense anxiety and care prevailed, and that he felt her disposition was exactly that which exposed her to the greatest perils for her future. There was a young artist who used to follow her through all the South Tyrol, affecting to be madly in love with her, but of whose sincerity and honor Vaterchen professed to have great misgivings. He gave her lessons in drawing, and, what was less to be liked, he made several studies of herself. “The artless way,” said the old man, “she would come and repeat to me all his raptures about her, was at first a sort of comfort to me. I felt reassured by her confidence, and also by the little impression his praises seemed to make, but I saw later on that I was mistaken. She grew each day more covetous of these flatteries, and it was no longer laughingly, but in earnest seriousness, she would tell me that the 'Fornarina' in some gallery had not such eyes as hers, and that some great statue that all the world admired was far inferior to her in shape. If I had dared to rebuke her vanity, or to ridicule her pretensions, all my influence would have been gone forever. She would have left us, gone who knows whither, and been lost, so that I had nothing for it but to seem to credit all she said and yet hold the matter lightly, and I said beauty had no value except when associated with rank and station. If queens and princesses be handsome, they are more fitted to adorn this high estate, but for humble folk it is as great a mockery as these tinsel gems we wear in the circus.
“'Max says not,' said she to me one evening, after one of my usual lectures. 'Max says, there are queens would give their coronets to have my hair; ay, or even one of the dimples in my cheek.'
“'Max is a villain,' said I, before I could control my words.
“'Max is a vero signor!' said she, haughtily, 'and not like one of us; and more, too, I 'll go and tell him what you have called him.' She bounded away from me at this, and I saw her no more till nightfall.
“'What has happened to you, poor child!' said I, as I saw her lying on the floor of her room, her forehead bleeding, and her dress all draggled and torn. She would not speak to me for a long while, but by much entreating and caressing I won upon her to tell me what had befallen her. She had gone to the top of the 'Glucksburg,' and thrown herself down. It was a fearful height, and only was she saved by being caught by the brambles and tangled foliage of the cliff; and all this for 'one harsh word of mine,' she said. But I knew better; the struggle was deeper in her heart than she was aware of, and Max had gone suddenly away, and we saw no more of him.”
“Did she grieve after him?”
“I scarcely can say she did. She fretted, but I think it was for her own loneliness, and the want of that daily flattery she had grown so fond of. She became overbearing, and even insolent, too, with all her equals, and though for many a day she had been the spoiled child of the troop, many began to weary of her waywardness. I don't know how all this might have turned out, when, just as suddenly, she changed and became everything that she used to be.”
When the old man had got thus far, the girl arose, and without saying a word, laid the slate before us. Vaterchen, not very quick-sighted, could not at once understand the picture, but I caught it at once, and laughed immoderately. She had taken the scene where I had presented Vaterchen and herself to the ladies at the tea-table, and with an intense humor, sketched all the varying emotions of the incident.' The offended dignity of the old lady, the surprise and mortification of Miss Herbert, and my own unconscious pretension as I pointed to the “friends” who accompanied me, were drawn with the spirit of high caricature. Nor did she spare Vaterchen or herself; they were drawn, perhaps, with a more exaggerated satire than all the rest.
The old man no sooner comprehended the subject than he drew his hand across it, and turned to her with words of anger and reproach. I meant, of course, to interfere in her behalf, but it was needless; she fled, laughing, into the garden, and before many minutes were over, we heard her merry voice, with the tinkle of a guitar to assist it.
“There it is,” said Vaterchen, moodily. “What are you to do with a temperament like that?”
That was a question I was in no wise prepared to answer. Tintefleck's temperament seemed to be the very converse of my own. I was over eager to plan out everything in life; she appeared to be just as impulsively bent on risking all.
My head was always calculating eventualities; hers, it struck me, never worried itself about difficulties till in the midst of them. Now, Jean Paul tells us that when a man detects any exaggerated bias in his character, instead of endeavoring, by daily watching, to correct it, he will be far more successful if he ally himself with some one of a diametrically opposite humor. If he be rash, for instance, let him seek companionship with the sluggish. If his tendency bear to over-imagination, let him frequent the society of realists. Why, therefore, should not I and Tintefleck be mutually beneficial? Take the two different kinds of wood in a bow: one will supply resistance, the other flexibility. It was a pleasant notion, and I resolved to test it.
“Vaterchen,” said I, “call me to-morrow, when you get ready for the road. I will keep you company as far as Constance.”
“Ah, sir,” said he, with a sigh, “you will be well weary of us before half the journey is over; but you shall be obeyed.”
Next morning, just as day was breaking, we set out on foot on our road to Constance. There was a pinkish-gray streak of light on the horizon, sure sign of a fine day, and the bright stars twinkled still in the clear half-sombre sky, and all was calm and noiseless,—nothing to be heard but the tramp of our own feet on the hard causeway.
With the cowardly caution of one who feels the water with his foot before he springs in to swim, I was glad that I made my first experiences of companionship with these humble friends while it was yet dark and none could see us. The old leaven of snobbery was unsubdued in my heart, and, as I turned to look at poor Vaterchen and then at the tinsel finery of Catinka, I bethought me of the little consideration the world extends to such as these and their belongings. “Vagabonds all!” would say some rich banker, as he rolled by in his massive travelling-carriage, creaking with imperials and jingling with bells. “Vagabonds all!” would mutter the Jew pedler, as he looked down from the banquette of the diligence. How slight is the sympathy of the realist for the poor creature whose life-labor is to please! How prone to regard him as useless, or, even worse, forgetting the while how a wiser than he has made many things in this beautiful world of ours that they should merely minister to enjoyment, gladden the eye and ear, and make our pilgrimage less weary! Where would be the crimson jay, where the scarlet bustard, where the gorgeous peacock with the nosegay on his tail, where the rose and the honeysuckle and the purple foxglove mingling with the wild thorn in our hedgerows, if the universe were of their creation, and this great globe but one big workshop? You never insist that the daisy and the daffodil should be pot-herbs; and why are there not to be wild flowers in humanity as well as in the fields? Is it not a great pride to you who live under a bell-glass, nurtured and cared for, and with your name attached to a cleft-stick at your side,—is it not a great pride to know that you are not like one of us poor dog-roses? Be satisfied, then, with that glory; we only ask to live! Shame on me for that “only”! As if there could be anything more delightful than life. Life, with all its capacities for love and friendship and heroism and self-devotion, for generous actions and noble aspirations! Life to feel life, to know that we are in a sphere specially constructed for the exercise of our senses and the play of our faculties, free to choose the road we would take, and with a glorious reward if our choice be the right one!
“'Vagabonds!' Yes,” thought I, “there was once on a time such a vagabond, and he strolled along from village to village, making of his flute a livelihood,—a poor performer, too, he tells us he was, but he could touch the hearts of these simple villagers with his tones as he could move the hearts of thousands more learned than they with his marvellous pathos; and this vagabond was called Oliver Goldsmith.” I have no words to say the ecstasy this thought gave me. Many a proud traveller doubtless swept past the poor wayfarer as he went, dusty and footsore, and who was, nevertheless, journeying onward to a great immortality; to be a name remembered with blessings by generations when the haughty man that scorned him was forgotten forever. “And so now,” thought I, “some splendid Russian or some Saxon Croesus will crash by and not be conscious that the thin and weary-looking youth, with the girl's bundle on his stick and the red umbrella under his arm, that this is Potts! Ay, sir, you fancy that to be threadbare and footsore is to be vulgar-minded and ignoble, and you never so much as suspect that the heart inside that poor plaid waistcoat is throbbing with ambitions high as a Kaiser's, and that the brain within that battered Jim Crow is the realm of thoughts profound as Bacon's, and high-soaring as Milton's.”
If I make my reader a sharer in these musings of mine, it is because they occupied me for some miles of the way. Vaterchen was not talkative, and loved to smoke on uninterruptedly. I fancy that, in his way, he was as great a dreamer as myself. Catinka would have talked incessantly if any one had listened, or could understand her. As it was, she recited legends and sang songs for herself, as happy as ever a blackbird was to listen to his own melody; and though I paid no especial attention to her music, still the sounds floated through all my thoughts, bathing them with a soothing flood; just as the air we breathe is often loaded with a sweet and perfumed breath ere we know it. On the whole, we journeyed along very pleasantly; and what between the fresh morning air, the brisk exercise, and the novelty of the situation, I felt in a train of spirits that made me delighted with everything. “This, after all,” thought I, “is more like the original plan I sketched out for myself. This is the true mode to see life and the world. The student of nature never begins his studies with the more complicated organizations; he sets out with what is simplest in structure, and least intricate in function; he begins with the extreme link of the chain; so, too, I start with the investigation of those whose lives of petty cares and small ambitions must render them easy of appreciation. This poor Mollusca Vaterchen, for instance,—to see is to know him; and the girl, how absurd to connect such a guileless child of nature as that with those stereotyped notions of feminine craft and subtlety!” I then went on to imagine some future biographer of mine engaged on this portion of my life, puzzled for materials, puzzled still more to catch the clew to my meaning in it “At this time,” will he say, “Potts, by one of those strange caprices which often were the mainspring of his actions, resolved to lead a gypsy life. His ardent love of nature, his heartfelt enjoyment of scenery, and, more than even these, a certain breadth and generosity of character, disposed him to sympathize with those who have few to pity and fewer to succor them. With these wild children of the roadside he lived for months, joyfully sharing the burdens they carried, and taking his part in their privations. It was here he first met Catinka.” I stopped at this sentence, and I slowly repeated to myself, “It was here he first met Catinka!” “What will he have next to record?” thought I. “Is Potts now to claim sympathy as the victim of a passion that regarded not station, nor class, nor fortune; that despised the cold conventionalities of a selfish world, and asked only a heart for a heart? Is he to be remembered as the faithful believer in his own theory,—Love, above all? Are we to hear of him clasping rapturously to his bosom the poor forlorn girl?” So intensely were my feelings engaged in my speculations, that, at this critical pass, I threw my arms around Catinka's neck, and kissed her. A rebuke, not very cruel, not in the least angry or peevish, brought me quickly to myself; and as Vaterchen was fortunately in front and saw nothing of what passed, I speedily made my peace. I do not know how it happened, but in that same peace-making I had passed my arm round her waist, and there it remained,—an army of occupation after the treaty was signed,—and we went along, side by side, very amicably, very happily.
We are often told that a small competence—the just enough to live on—is the bane of all enterprise; that men thus placed are removed from the stimulus of necessity, and yet not lifted into the higher atmosphere of ambitions. Exactly in the same way do I believe that equality is the grave of love. The passion thrives on difficulty, and requires sacrifice. You must bid defiance to mankind in your choice, or you are a mere fortune-hunter. Show the world the blushing peasant-girl you have made your wife, and say, “Yes, I have had courage to do this.” Or else strive for a princess,—a Russian princess. Better, far better, however, the humble-hearted child of nature and the fields, the simple, trusting, confiding girl, who, regarding her lover as a sort of demi-god, would, while she clung to him—
“You press me so hard!” murmured Catinka, half rebukingly, but with a sort of pouting expression that became her marvellously.
“I was thinking of something that interested me, dearest,” said I; but I 'm not sure that I made my meaning very clear to her, and yet there was a roguish look in her black eye that puzzled me greatly. I began to like her, or, if you prefer the phrase, to fall in love with her. I knew it—I felt it just the way that a man who has once had the ague never mistakes when he is going to have a return of the fever. In the same way exactly, did I recognize all the premonitory symptoms,—the giddiness, the shivering, increased action of the heart—Halt, Potts! and reflect a bit; are you describing love, or a tertian?
How will the biographer conduct himself here? Whether will he have to say, “Potts resisted manfully this fatal attachment; had he yielded to the seductions of this early passion, it is more than probable we would never have seen him this, that, and t' other, nor would the world have been enriched with—Heaven knows what;” or shall he record, “Potts loved her, loved her as only such a nature as his ever loves! He felt keenly that, in a mere worldly point of view, he must sacrifice; but it was exactly in that love and that sacrifice was born the poet, the wondrous child of song, who has given us the most glorious lyrics of our language. He had the manliness to share his fortune with this poor girl. * It was,' he tells us of himself, in one of those little touching passages in his diary, which place him immeasurably above the mock sentimentality of Jean Jacques,—'it was on the road to Constance, of a bright and breezy summer morning, that I told her of my love. We were walking along, our arms around each other, as might two happy, guileless children. I was very young in what is called the world, but I had a boundless confidence in myself; my theory was, “If I be strengthened by the deep devotion of one loving heart, I have no fears of failure.”' Beautiful words, and worthy of all memory! And then he goes on: 'I drew her gently over to a grassy bench on the roadside, and, taking my purse from my pocket, poured out before her its humble contents, in all something less than twenty sovereigns, but to her eyes a very Pactolus of wealth.'”
“What if I were to try this experiment?” thought I; “what if I were, so to say, to anticipate my own biography?” The notion pleased me much. There was something novel in it, too. It was making the experiment in the carpore vili of accident, to see what might come of it.
“Come here, Catinka,” said I, pointing to a moss-covered rock at the roadside, with a little well at its base,—“come here, and let me have a drink of this nice clear water.”
She assented with a smile and a nod, detaching at the same time a little cup from the flask she wore at her side, in vivandière fashion. “And we 'll fill my flask too,” said she, showing that it was empty. With a sort of childish glee she now knelt beside the stream, and washed the cup. What is it, I wonder, that gives the charm to running water, and imparts a sort of glad feeling to its contemplation? Is it that its ceaseless flow suggests that “forever” which contrasts so powerfully with all short-lived pleasures? I cannot tell, but I was still musing over the difficulty, when, having twice offered me the cup without my noticing it, she at last raised it to my lips. And I drank,—oh, what a draught it was! so clear, so cold, so pure; and all the time my eyes were resting on hers, looking, as it were, into another well, the deepest and most unfathomable of all.
“Sit down here beside me on this stone, Catinka, and help me to count these pieces of money; they have got so mingled together that I scarcely know what is left me.” She seemed delighted with the project, and sat down at once; and I, throwing myself at her feet, poured the contents of my purse into her lap.
“Madonna mia!” was all she could utter as she beheld the gold. Aladdin in the cave never felt a more overwhelming rapture than did she at sight of these immense riches. “But where did it come from?” cried she, wildly. “Have you got mines of gold and silver? Have you got gems, too,—rubies and pearls? Oh, say if there be pearls; I love them so? And are you really a great prince, the son of a king; and are you wandering the world this way to seek adventures, or in search, mayhap, of that lovely princess you are in love with?” With wildest impetuosity she asked these and a hundred other questions, for it was only now and then that I could trace her meaning, which expressive pantomime did much to explain.
I tried to convince her that what she deemed a treasure was a mere pittance, which a week or two would exhaust; that I was no prince, nor had I a kingly father; “and last of all,” said I, “I am not in pursuit of a princess. But I 'll tell you what I am in search of, Catinka,—one trusting, faithful, loving heart; one that will so unite itself to mine as to have no joys or sorrows or cares but mine; one content to go wherever I go, live however I live, and no matter what my faults may be, or how meanly others think of me, will ever regard me with eyes of love and devotion.”
I had held her hand while I uttered this, gazing up into her eyes with ecstasy, for I saw how their liquid depth appeared to move as though about to overflow, when at last she spoke, and said,—
“And there are no pearls!”
“Poor child!” thought I, “she cannot understand one word I have been saying. Listen to me, Catinka,” said I, with a slow utterance. “Would you give me your heart for all this treasure?”
“Si, si!” cried she, eagerly.
“And love me always,—forever?”
“Si,” said she, again; but I fancied with less of energy than before.
“And when it was spent and gone, and nothing remaining of it, what would you do?”
“Send you to gather more, mio caro,” said she, pressing my hand to her lips, as though in earnest of the blandishments she would bestow upon me.
Now, I cannot affect to say that all this was very reassuring. This poor simple child of the mountains showed a spirit as sordid and as calculating as though she were baptized in May Fair. It was a terrible shock to me to see this; a dire overthrow to a very fine edifice that I was just putting the roof on! “Would Kate Herbert have made me such a speech?” thought I. “Would she have declared herself so venal and so worldly?—and why not? May it not be, perhaps, simply that a mere question of good-breeding, the usages of a polite world, might have made all the difference, and that she would have felt what poor Catinka felt and owned to? If this were true, the advantages were all on the side of sincerity. With honesty as the basis, what may not one build up of character? Where there is candor there are at least no disappointments. This poor simple child, untutored in the wiles of a scheming world, where all is false, unreal, and deceptive, has the courage to say that her heart can be bought. She is ready in her innocence, too, to sell it, just as the Indians sell a great territory for a few glass beads or bright buttons. And why should not I make the acquisition in the very spirit of a new settler? It was I discovered this lone island of the sea; it was I first landed on this unknown shore; why not claim a sovereignty so cheaply established?” I put the question arithmetically before me: Given, a young girl, totally new to life and its seductions, deeply impressed with the value of wealth, to find the measure of venality in a well-brought-up young lady, educated at Clapham, and finished at Boulogne-sur-Mer. I expressed it thus: D-y=T+a?, or an unknown quantity.
“What strange marks are you drawing there?” cried she, as I made these figures on the slate.
“A caprice,” said I, in some confusion.
“No,” said she; “I know better. It was a charm. Tell truth,—it was a charm.”
“A charm, dearest; but for what?”
“I know,” said she, shaking her head and laughing, with a sort of wicked drollery.
“You know! Impossible, child.”
“Yes,” she said with great gravity, while she swept her hand, across the slate and erased all the figures. “Yes I know, and I 'll not permit it.”
“But what, in Heaven's name, is trotting through your head, Catinka? You have not the vaguest idea of what those signs meant.”
“Yes,” she said, even more solemnly than before. “I know it all. You mean to steal away my heart in spite of me, and you are going to do it with a charm.”
“And what success shall I have, Catinka?”
“Oh, do not ask me,” said she, in a tone of touching misery. “I feel it very sore here.” And she pressed her hand to her side. “Ah me,” sighed she, “if there were only pearls!”
The ecstasy her first few words gave me was terribly routed by this vile conclusion, and I started abruptly, and in an angry voice, said, “Let us go on; Vaterchen will fear we are lost.”
“And all this gold; what shall I do with it?” cried she.
“What you will. Throw it into the well if you like,” said I, angrily; for in good sooth I was out of temper with her and myself and all mankind.
“Nay,” said she, mildly, “it is yours; but I will carry it for you if it weary you.”
I might have felt rebuked by the submissive gentleness of her words; indeed, I know not how it was that they did not so move me, and I walked on in front of her, heedless of her entreaties that I should wait till she came up beside me.
When she did join me, she wanted to talk immensely. She had all manner of questions to ask about where my treasure came from; how often I went back there to replenish it; was I quite sure that it could never, never be exhausted, and such-like? But I was in no gracious mood for such inquiries, and, telling her that I wished to follow my own thoughts without interruption, I walked along in silence.
I cannot tell the weight I felt at my heart I am not speaking figuratively. No; it was exactly as though a great mass of heavy metal filled my chest, forced out my ribs, and pressed down my diaphragm; and though I held my hands to my sides with all my force, the pressure still remained.
“What a bitter mockery it is,” thought I, “if the only false thing in all the world should be the human heart! There are diamonds that will resist fire, gold that will stand the crucible; but the moment you come to man and his affections, all is hollow and illusory!”
Why do we give the name worldliness to traits of selfish advancement and sordid gain, when a young creature like this, estranged from all the commerce of mankind, who knows nothing of that bargain-and-barter system which we call civilization, reared and nurtured like a young fawn in her native woods, should, as though by a very instinct of corruption, have a heart as venal as any hackneyed beauty of three London seasons?
Let no man tell me now, that it is our vicious system of female training, our false social organization, our spurious morality, laxity of family ties, and the rest of it. I am firmly persuaded that a young squaw of the Choctaws has as many anxieties about her parti as any belle of Belgravia, even though the settlements be only paid in sharks' teeth and human toupees.
And what an absurdity is our whole code on this subject! A man is actually expected to court, solicit, and even worship the object that he is after all called upon to pay for. You do not smirk at the salmon in your fishmonger's window, or ogle the lamb at your butcher's; you go in boldly and say, “How much the pound?” If you sighed outside for a week, you 'd get it never the cheaper. Why not then make an honest market of what is so salable? What a saving of time to know that the splendid creature yonder, with the queenly air, can only be had at ten thousand a year, but that the spicy article with the black ringlets will go for two! Instead of all the heart-burnings and blank disappointments we see now, we should have a practical, contented generation; and in the same spirit that a man of moderate fortune turns away from the seductions of turtle and whitebait, while he orders home his mutton chop, he would avert his gaze from beauty, and fix his affections on the dumpy woman that can be “got a bargain.”
Why did not the poet say, Venality, thy name is Woman? It would suit the prosody about as well, and the purpose better. The Turks are our masters in all this; they are centuries—whole centuries in advance of us. How I wish some Babbage would make a calculation of the hours, weeks, years, centuries of time, are lost in what is called love-making! Time, we are told, is money; and here, at once, is the fund to pay off our national debt. Take the “time that's lost in wooing” by a nation, say of twenty-eight or thirty millions, and at the cheapest rate of labor—take the prison rate if you like—and see if I be not right. Let the population who now heave sighs pound oyster-shells, let those who pick quarrels pick oakum, and we need no income-tax!
“I'll not sing any more,” broke in Catinka. “I don't think you have been listening to me.”
“Listening to you!” said I, contemptuously; “certainly not. When I want a siren, I take a pit ticket and go to the opera; seven-and-sixpence is the price of Circe, and dear at the money.” With this rude rebuff I waved her off, and walked along once more alone.
At a sudden bend in the road we found Vaterchen seated under a tree waiting for us, and evidently not a little uneasy at our long absence.
“What is this?” said he, angrily, to Catinka. “Why have you remained so long behind?”
“We sat down to rest at a well,” said she, “and then he took out a great bag of money to count, and there was so much in it, so many pieces of bright gold, that one could not help turning them over and over, and gazing at them.”
“And worshipping them too, girl!” cried he, indignantly, while he turned on me a look of sorrow and reproach. I returned his stare haughtily, and he arose and drew me to one side.
“Am I, then, once more mistaken in my judgment of men? Have you, too, duped me?” said he, in a voice that shook with agitation. “Was it for this you offered us the solace of your companionship? Was it for this you condescended to journey with us, and deigned to be our host and entertainer?”
The appeal came at an evil moment: a vile, contemptible scepticism was at work within me. The rasp and file of doubt were eating away at my heart, and I deemed “all men liars.”
“And is it to me—Potts—you address such words as these, you consummate old humbug? What is there about me that denotes dupe or fool?”
The old man shook his head, and made a gesture to imply he had not understood me; and now I remembered that I had uttered this rude speech in English, and not in German. With the memory of this fact came also the consciousness of its cruel meaning. What if I should have wronged him? What if the poor old fellow be honest and upright? What if he be really striving to keep this girl in the path of virtue? I came close to him, and fixed my eyes steadfastly on his face. He looked at me fearlessly, as an honest man might look. He never tried to turn away, nor did he make the slightest effort to evade me. He seemed to understand all the import of my scrutiny, for he said, at last,—
“Well, are you satisfied?”
“I am, Vaterchen,” said I, “fully satisfied. Let us be friends.” And I took his hand and shook it heartily.
“You think me honest?” asked he.
“I do think so.”
“And I am not more honest than she is. No,” said he, resolutely, “Tintefleck is true-hearted.”
“What of me?” cried she, coming up and leaning her arm on the old man's shoulder,—“what of me?”
“I have said that you are honest, and would not deceive!”
“Not you, Vaterchen,—not you,” said she, kissing him. And then, as she turned away, she gave me a look so full of meaning, and so strange, withal, that if I were to speak for an hour I could not explain it. It seemed to mean sorrow and reproach and wounded pride, with a dash of pity, and above all and everything, defiance; ay, that was its chief character, and I believe I winced under it.
“Let us step out briskly,” said Vaterchen. “Constance is a good eleven miles off yet.”
“He looks tired already,” said she, with a glance at me.
“I? I'm as fresh as when I started,” said I. And I made an effort to appear brisk and lively, which only ended in making them laugh heartily.
Respectable reader, there is no use in asking you if you have ever been in the Hotel of the “Balance,” at Constance. Of course you have not. It is neither recorded in the book of John, nor otherwise known to fame. It is an obscure hostel, only visited by the very humblest wayfarers, and such poor offshoots of wretchedness as are fain to sleep on a truckle-bed and sup meanly. Vaterchen, however, spoke of it in generous terms. There was a certain oniony soup he had tasted there years ago whose flavor had not yet left his memory. He had seen, besides, the most delicious schweine fleiseh hanging down from the kitchen rafters, and it had been revealed to him in a dream that a solvent traveller might have rashers on demand.
Poor fellow! I had not the vaguest idea of the eloquence he possessed till he came to talk on these matters. From modest and distrustful, he grew assured and confident; his hesitation of speech was replaced by a fluent utterance and a rich vocabulary; and he repeatedly declared that though the exterior was unprepossessing, and the surface generally homely, there were substantial comforts obtainable which far surpassed the resources of more pretentious houses. “You are served on pewter, it is true,” said he; “but pewter is a rare material to impart relish to a savory mess.” Though we should dine in the kitchen, he gave me to understand that even in this there were advantages, and that the polite guest of the salon never knew what it was to taste that rich odor of the “roast,” or that fragrant incense that steamed up from the luscious stew, and which were to cookery what bouquet was to wine.
“I will not say that, honored sir,” continued he, “to you, in the mixed company which frequent such humble hearths there would be matter of interest and amusement; but, to a man like myself, these chance companionships are delightful. Here all are stragglers, all adventurers. Not a man that deposits his pack in the corner and draws in his chair to the circle but is a wanderer and a pilgrim of one sort or other.” He drew me an amusing picture of one of these groups, wherein, even without telling his story, each gave such insight into his life and travels as to present a sort of drama.
Whether it was that my companion had drawn too freely on his imagination, or that we had fallen on an unfortunate moment, I cannot say; but, though we found the company at the “Balance” numerous and varied, there was none of the sociality I looked for, still less of that generous warmth and good greeting which he assured me was the courtesy of such places. The men were chiefly carriers, with their mule-teams and heavy wagons, bound for the Bavarian Tyrol. There was a sprinkling of Jew pedlers, on their way to the Vorarlberg; a deserter from the Austrian army, trying to get back to Hesse Cassel; and an Italian image carrier, with a green parrot and a well-filled purse, going back to finish his days at Lucca.
Now none of these were elements of a very exalted or exclusive rank; they were each and all of them taken from the very base of the social pyramid; and yet, would it be believed that they regarded our entrance amongst them as an act of rare impudence!
A more polished company might have been satisfied with averted heads or cold looks; these were less equivocal. One called out to the landlord to know if he expected any gypsies; another, affecting to treat us as solicitors for their patronage, said he had no “batzen” to bestow on buffoonery; a third suggested we should get up our theatricals under the cart-shed outside, and beat the drum when we were ready; and the deserter, a poor weak-looking, mangy wretch with a ragged fatigue-jacket and broken boots, put his arm round Catinka's waist, to draw her on his knee, for the which she dealt him such a slap on the face as fairly sent him on the floor, in which ignoble position.
Vaterchen kicked him again and again. In an instant all were upon us. Carters, pedlers, and image men assailed us furiously. I suppose I beat somebody; I know that several beat me. The impression left upon me when all was over was of a sort of human kaleidoscope, where the people turned every way without ceasing. Now we seemed all on our feet, now on our heads, now on the floor, now in the air, Vaterchen flying about like a demon, while Tinte-, fleck stood in a corner, with a gleaming stiletto in hand, saying something in Calabrian, which sounded like an invitation to come and be killed.
The police came at last; and, after a noisy scene of accusation and denial, the weight of evidence went against us, and we were marched off to prison, poor old Vaterchen crying like a child, for all the disgrace and misery he had brought on his benefactor: and while he kissed my hand, swearing that a whole life's devotion would not be enough to recompense me for what he had been the means of inflicting on me, Catinka took it more easily, her chief regret apparently being, that nobody came near enough to give her a chance with her knife, which she assured us she wielded with a notable skill, and could, with a jerk, send flying through a door, like a javelin, at full six paces' distance; nor, indeed, was it without considerable persuasion she could be induced to restore it to its sheath, which truth obliges me to own was inside her garter. Our prison, an old tower adjoining the lake, had been once the dungeon of. John Huss, and the torture chamber, as it was still called, continued to be used for mild transgressors, such as we were. A small bribe induced the jailer's wife to take poor Tintefleck for the night into her own quarters, and Vaterchen and I were sole possessors of the gloomy old hall, which opened by a balcony, railed like a sort of cage, over the lake.
If the torture chamber had been denuded of its flesh pincers and thumb-screws, and the other ingenious devices of human cruelty, I am bound to own that its traditions as a place of suffering had not died out, as the fleas left nothing to be desired on the score of misery. Whether it was that they had been pinched by a long fast, or that we were more tender, cutaneously, than the aborigines, I know not, but I can safely aver that I never passed such a night, and sincerely trust that I may never pass such another. Though the air from the lake was cold and chilly, we preferred to crouch on the balcony to remaining within the walls; but even here our persecutors followed us.
Vaterchen slept through it all; an occasional convulsive jerk would show, at times, when one of the enemy had chanced upon some nervous fibre; but, on the whole, he bore up like one used to such martyrdom, and able to brave it. As for me, when morning broke, I looked like a strong case of confluent smallpox, with the addition that my heavy eyelids nearly closed over my eyes, and my lips swelled out like a Kaffir's. How that young minx, Catinka, laughed at me. All the old man's signs, warnings, menaces, were in vain; she screamed aloud with laughter, and never ceased, even as we were led into the tribunal and before the dread presence of the judge.
The judgment-seat was not imposing. It was a long, low, ill-lighted chamber, with a sort of raised counter at one end, behind which sat three elderly men, dressed like master sweeps,—that is, of the old days of climbing-boys. The prisoners were confined in a thing like a fold, and there leaned against one end of the same pen as ourselves, a square-built, thick-set man of about eight-and-forty, or fifty, dressed in a suit of coarse drab, and whom, notwithstanding an immense red beard and moustache, a clear blue eye and broad brow proclaimed to be English. He was being interrogated as we entered, but from his total ignorance of German the examination was not proceeding very glibly.
“You 're an Englishman, ain't you?” cried he, as I came in. “You can speak High Dutch, perhaps?”
“I can speak German well enough to be intelligible, sir.”
“All right,” said he, in the same free-and-easy tone. “Will you explain to those old beggars there that they 're making fools of themselves. Here's how it is. My passport was made out for two; for Thomas Harpar, that's me, and Sam Bigges. Now, because Sam Rigges ain't here, they tell me I can't be suffered to proceed. Ain't that stupid? Did you ever hear the like of that for downright absurdity before?”
“But where is he?”
“Well, I don't mind telling you, because you 're a countryman; but I don't like blackening an Englishman to one of those confounded foreigners. Rigges has run.”
“What do you mean by 'run'?”
“I mean, cut his stick; gone clean away; and what's worse, too, carried off a stout bag of dollars with him that we had for our journey.”
“Whither were you going?”
“That's neither here nor there, and don't concern you in any respect What you 've to do is, explain to the old cove yonder,—the fellow in the middle is the worst of them,—tell him it's all right, that I 'm Harpar, and that the other ain't here; or, look here, I 'll tell you what's better, do you be Rigges, and it's all right.”
I demurred flatly to this suggestion, but undertook to plead his cause on its true merits.
“And who are you, sir, that presume to play the advocate here?” said the judge, haughtily. “I fancied that you stood there to answer a charge against yourself.”
“That matter may be very easily disposed of, sir,” said I, as proudly; “and you will be very fortunate if you succeed as readily in explaining your own illegal arrest of me to the higher court of your country.”
With the eloquence which we are told essentially belongs to truth, I narrated how I had witnessed, as a mere passing traveller, the outrageous insult offered to these poor wanderers as they entered the inn. With the warm enthusiasm of one inspired by a good cause, I painted the whole incident with really scarcely a touch of embellishment, reserving the only decorative portion to a description of myself, whom I mentioned as an agent of the British government, especially employed on a peculiar service, the confirmation of which I proudly established by my passport setting forth that I was a certain “Ponto, Chargé des Dépêches.”
Now if there be one feature of continental life fixed and immutable, it is this: that wherever the German language be spoken, the reverence for a government functionary is supreme. If you can only show on documentary evidence that you are grandson of the man who made the broom that swept out a government office, it is enough. You are from that hour regarded as one of the younger children of Bureaucracy. You are under the protection of the state, and though you be but the smallest rivet in the machinery, there is no saying what mischief might not ensue if you were either lost or mislaid.
I saw in an instant the dread impression I had created, and I said, in a voice of careless insolence, “Go on, I beg of you; send me back to prison; chain me; perhaps you would like to torture me? The government I represent is especially slow in vindicating the rights of its injured officials. It has a European reputation for long-suffering, patience, and forbearance. Yes, Englishmen can be impaled, burned, flayed alive, disembowelled. By all means, avail yourselves of your bland privileges; have me led out instantly to the scaffold, unless you prefer to have me broken on the wheel!”
“Will nobody stop him!” cried the president, almost choking with wrath.
“Stop me; I suspect not, sir. It is upon these declarations of mine, made thus openly, that my country will found that demand for reparation which will one day cost you so dearly. Lead on, I am ready for the block.” And as I said this, I untied my cravat, and appeared to prepare for the headsman.
“If he will not cease, the court shall be dissolved,” called out the judge.
“Never, sir. Never, so long as I live, shall I surrender the glorious privileges of that freedom by which I assert my birthright as a Briton.”
“Well, you are as impudent a chap as ever I listened to,” muttered my countryman at my side.
“The prisoners are dismissed, the court is adjourned,” said the president, rising; and amidst a very disorderly crowd, not certainly enthusiastic in our favor, we were all hurried into the street.
“Come along down here,” said Mr. Harpar. “I 'm in a very tidy sort of place they call the 'Golden Pig.' Come along, and bring the vagabonds, and let's have breakfast together.”
I was hurt at the speech; but as my companions could not understand its coarseness, I accepted the invitation, and we followed him.
“Well, I ain't seen your like for many a day,” said Harpar, as we went along. “If you 'd have said the half of that to one of our 'Beaks,' I think I know where you 'd be. But you seem to understand the fellows well. Mayhap you have lived much abroad?”
“A great deal. I am a sort of citizen of the world,” said I, with a jaunty easiness.
“For a citizen of the world you appear to have strange tastes in your companionship. How did you come to forgather with these creatures?”
I tried the timeworn cant about seeing life in all its gradations,—exploring the cabin as well as visiting the palace, and so on; but there was a rugged sort of incredulity in his manner that checked me, and I could not muster the glib rudeness which usually stood by me on such occasions.
“You 're not a man of fortune,” said he, dryly, as I finished; “one sees that plainly enough. You 're a fellow that should be earning his bread somehow; and the question is,—Is this the kind of life that you ought to be leading? What humbug it is to talk about knowing the world and such-like. The thing is, to know a trade, to understand some art, to be able to produce something, to manufacture something, to convert something to a useful purpose. When you 've done that, the knowledge of men will come later on, never be afraid of that. It's a school that we never miss one single day of our lives. But here we are; this is the 'Pig.' Now, what will you have for breakfast? Ask the vagabonds, too, and tell them there's a wide choice here; they have everything you can mention in this little inn.”
An excellent breakfast was soon spread out before us, and though my humble companions did it the most ample justice, I sat there, thoughtful and almost sad. The words of that stranger rang in my ears like a reproach and a warning. I knew how truly he had said that I was not a man of fortune, and it grieved me sorely to think how easily he saw it. In my heart of hearts I knew it was the delusion I loved best To appear to the world at large an eccentric man of good means, free to do what he liked and go where he would, was the highest enjoyment I had ever prepared for myself; and yet here was a coarse, commonplace sort of man,—at least, his manners were unpolished and his tone underbred,—and he saw through it all at once.
I took the first opportunity to slip away unobserved from the company, and retired to the little garden of the inn, to commune with myself and be alone. But ere I had been many minutes there, Harpar joined me. He came up smoking his cigar, with the lounging, lazy air of a man at perfect leisure, and, consequently, quite free to be as disagreeable as he pleased.
“You went off without eating your breakfast,” said he, bluntly. “I saw how it was. You did n't like my freedom with you. You fancied that I ought to have taken all that nonsense of yours about your rank and your way of life for gospel; or, at least, that I ought to have pretended to do so. That ain't my way. I hate humbug.”
It was not very easy to reply good humoredly to such a speech as this. Indeed, I saw no particular reason to treat this man's freedom with any indulgence, and drawing myself haughtily up, I prepared a very dry but caustic rejoinder.
“When I have learned two points,” said I, “on which you can inform me, I may be better able to answer what you have said. The first is: By what possible right do you take to task a person that you never met in your life till now? and, secondly, What benefit on earth could it be to me to impose upon a man from whom I neither want nor expect anything?”
“Easily met, both,” said he, quickly. “I'm a practical sort of fellow, who never wastes time on useless materials; that's for your first proposition. Number two: you're a dreamer, and you hate being awakened.”
“Well, sir,” said I, stiffly, “to a gentleman so remarkable for perspicuity, and who reads character at sight, ordinary intercourse must be wearisome. Will you excuse me if I take my leave of you here?”
“Of course, make no ceremony about it; go or stay, Just as you like. I never cross any man's humor.”
I muttered something that sounded like a dissent to that doctrine, and he quickly added, “I mean, further than speaking my mind, that 's all; nothing more. If you had been a man of fair means, and for a frolic thought it might be good fun to consort for a few days with rapscallions of a travelling circus, all one could say was, it was n't very good taste; but being, evidently, a fellow of another stamp, a young man who ought to be in his father's shop or his uncle's counting-house, following some honest craft or calling,—for you, I say, it was downright ruin.”
“Indeed!” said I, with an accent of intense scorn.
“Yes,” continued he, seriously, “downright ruin, There's a poison in the lazy, good-for-nothing life of these devils, that never leaves a man's blood. I 've a notion that it would n't hurt a man's nature so much were he to consort with housebreakers; there's, at least, something real about these fellows.”
“You talk, doubtless, with knowledge, sir,” said I, glad to say something that might offend him.
“I do,” said he, seriously, and not taking the smallest account of the impertinent allusion. “I know that if a man has n't a fixed calling, but is always turning his hand to this, that, and t' other, he will very soon cease to have any character whatsoever; he 'll just become as shifty in his nature as in his business. I 've seen scores of fellows wrecked on that rock, and I had n't looked at you twice till I saw you were one of them.”
“I must say, sir,” said I, summoning to my aid what I felt to be a most cutting sarcasm of manner,—“I must say, sir, that, considering how short has been the acquaintance which has subsisted between us, it would be extremely difficult for me to show how gratefully I feel the interest you have taken in me.”
“Well, I 'm not so sure of that,” said he, thoughtfully.
“May I ask, then, how?”
“Are you sure, first of all, that you wish to show this gratitude you speak of?”
“Oh, sir, can you possibly doubt it?”
“I don't want to doubt it, I want to profit by it.”
I made a bland bow that might mean anything, but did not speak.
“Here's the way of it,” said he, boldly. “Rigges has run off with all my loose cash, and though there 's money waiting for me at certain places, I shall find it very difficult to reach them. I have come down here on foot from Wild-bad, and I can make my way in the same fashion, to Marseilles or Genoa; but then comes the difficulty, and I shall need about ten pounds to get to Malta. Could you lend me ten pounds?”
“Really, sir,” said I, coolly, “I am amazed at the innocence with which you can make such a demand on the man whom you have, only a few minutes back, so acutely depicted as an adventurer.”
“It was for that very reason I thought of applying to you. Had you been a young fellow of a certain fortune, you 'd naturally have been a stranger to the accidents which now and then leave men penniless in out-of-the-way places, and it is just as likely that the first thought in your head would be, 'Oh, he's a swindler. Why has n't he his letters of credit or his circular notes?' But, being exactly what I take you for, the chances are, you 'll say: 'What has befallen him to-day may chance to me to-morrow. Who can tell the day and the hour some mishap may not overtake him? and so I 'll just help him through it.'”
“And that was your calculation?”
“That was my calculation.”
“How sorry I feel to wound the marvellous gift you seem to possess of interpreting character. I am really shocked to think that for this time, at least, your acuteness is at fault.”
“Which means that you 'll not do it.”
I smiled a benign assent.
He looked at me for a minute or more with a sort of blank incredulity, and then, crossing his arms on his breast, moved slowly down the walk without speaking.
I cannot say how I detested this man; he had offended me in the very sorest part of all my nature; he had wounded the nicest susceptibility I possessed; of the pleasant fancies wherewith I loved to clothe myself he would not leave me enough to cover my nakedness; and yet, now that I had resented his cool impertinence, I hated myself far more than I hated him. Dignity and sarcasm, forsooth! What a fine opportunity to display them, truly! The man might be rude and underbred; he was rude and underbred! and was that any justification for my conduct towards him? Why had I not had the candor to say, “Here 's all I possess in the world; you see yourself that I cannot lend you ten pounds.” How I wished I had said that, and how I wished, even more ardently still, that I had never met him, never interchanged speech with him!
“And why is it that I am offended with him,—simply because he has discovered that I am Potts?” Now, these reflections were all the more bitter, since it was only twenty-four hours before that I had resolved to throw off delusion either of myself or others; that I would take my place in the ranks, and fight out my battle of life a mere soldier. For this it was that I made companionship with Vaterehen, walking the high road with that poor old man of motley, and actually speculating—in a sort of artistic way—whether I should not make love to Tintefleck! And if I were sincere in all this, how should I feel wounded by the honest candor of that plain-spoken fellow. He wanted a favor at my hands, he owned this; and yet, instead of approaching me with flattery, he at once assails the very stronghold of my self-esteem, and says, “No humbug, Potts; at least none with me!” He opens acquaintance with me on that masonic principle by which the brotherhood of Poverty is maintained throughout all lands and all peoples, and whose great maxim is, “He who lends to the poor man borrows from the ragged man.”
“I 'll go after him at once,” said I, aloud. “I 'll have more talk with him. I 'm much mistaken if there's not good stuff in that rugged nature.”
When I entered the little inn, I found Vaterehen fast asleep; he had finished off every flask on the table, and lay breathing stertorously, and giving a long-drawn whistle in his snore, that smacked almost of apoplexy. Tintefleck was singing to her guitar before a select audience of the inn servants, and Harpar was gone!
I gave the girl a glance of rebuke and displeasure. I aroused the old man with a kick, and imperiously demanded my bill.
“The bill has been paid by the other stranger,” said the landlord; “he has settled everything, and left a trinkgeld for the servants, so that you have nothing to pay.”
I could have almost cried with spite as I heard these words. It would have been a rare solace to my feelings if I could have put that man down for a rogue, and then been able to say to myself, how cleverly I had escaped the snares of a swindler. But to know now that he was not only honest but liberal, and to think, besides, that I had been his guest,—eaten of his salt,—it was more than I well could endure.
“Which way did he take?” asked I.
“Round the head of the lake for Lindao. I told him that the steamer would take him there to-morrow for a trifle, but he would not wait.”
“Ah me!” sighed Vaterchen, but half awake, and with one eye still closed, “and we are going to St. Gallen.”
“Who said so?” cried I, imperiously. “We are going to Lindao; at least, if I be the person who gives orders here. Follow!” And as I spoke I marched proudly on, while a slip-shod, shuffling noise of feet, and a low, half-smothered sob told me that they were coming after me.