The Invisible Lodge. Jean Paul

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СКАЧАТЬ can no more be heated. Ernestina was one of those daughters who are on hand when one gives the order: "Next Sunday, God willing, at four o'clock, when Herr A. or Z. comes, you are to fall in love with him." The Captain, in the article of love, bit neither into the fermenting pumpernickel or rye-bread of the physical sensation, nor into the white, weak flour-bread of the Parisian sentiment, nor into the quiddany (the quince marmalade) and heaven's bread of the Platonic, but into a fine slice of the home-made brown-bread of conjugal affection; he was thirty-seven years old. Sixteen years before he had cut off a bit of the aforesaid pumpernickel: his mistress and his and her son were afterward married by the respectable commercial agent, Röper.

      We Belletrists, on the contrary, can make it of great practical use in our romances, that it agrees right well with our maw and the coat of our stomach, when in the same afternoon we cut for ourselves from those four sorts of bread at once; for we must ourselves be old Harrys to depict old Harrys; how could we manage it otherwise, when, in the self-same month, out of the self-same heart, as well as the self-same bookstore (I shall be vexing Herr Adelung^[5] here by the word "self-same"--nämlich), we have to issue satires and eulogies--night-thoughts--night-scenes--war-songs--idyls--bawdy ditties and solemn dirges, so that behind and before us people stand astonished to see Pantheon and Pandemonium under one roof--more than they were over the postmortem stomach of the galley-slave Bazile, in which was found a household property of thirty-five effects, such as pipe-heads, leather, and bits of glass.

      When the two young people sat down at the chessboard, which was to be either their partition-wall or their bridge, the father stood by all the time as marker; it was, however, quite unnecessary--not merely because the Captain played so miserably and his antagonist so Philidorically; but for the additional reason, that the female laws of etiquette forbade her to be mated or to fall in love (for women and oarsmen always turn their backs to the shore toward which they are seeking to propel themselves)--but for a still more remarkable reason the auxiliary forester might have been dispensed with, namely, that Ernestina wanted above all things to be checkmated, and for that very reason she played so well. For out of spite against dilatory fate, one sets himself on purpose to work against the very things that depend upon him, and desires them nevertheless. The two warring powers grew, indeed, more and more fond of each other, even in proportion as they were afraid of forfeiting each other; nevertheless it was not in the power of the female party to omit a single move which contravened her two-fold desire: in five weeks the recruiting officer could not once say: Check to the queen! Besides, women play this king's game admirably well (as they do other games of kings).... But as this seems to be a digression of nature, though it is none; still an authorial one can be made out of it, only not until the Twentieth Sector; because I must first have written two or three months, till I have so spun up the reader into my web, that I can pluck or pull him just as I please.

      Had the Captain's love been of the modern gigantic sort, which, not like a gently unfolding zephyr, but like a shaking tempest, grasps the green, thin flowrets, that cannot at all adapt themselves to the belletrical hurricane, then the least he could have done would have been to be at once a very devil; but as it was he was merely angry, not with the father, but with the daughter; and that not because she did not make the chess-board a presentation-dish of her hand and heart, or because she played well against him, but because she played so very well. Such is man! and I beseech fellow-men not to laugh at my Captain. To be sure, if I had had the female charms of Ernestina, and had looked into his puzzled face, as he meditated his counter-approaches, and seen how on its rounded mouth stood that pain at undeserved affliction which wears such a touching aspect in men of spirit, where it is not distorted by the arthritic knots and cutaneous eruptions of revenge, I should have grown red and should verily have plunged with my queen, (and myself too), into check: for what could I have loved in that case but a stern self-sacrifice?

      By the 16th of June, Ernestina could herself almost have delighted in such sacrifice, as will presently be seen from a letter of hers. For a woman is certainly capable of maintaining for twice 24 hours one and the same sentiment towards a man (though not towards any other object), provided she has nothing of this man before her but his image in her fair little head; but, let the man himself, uncopied, stand, five feet high, before her, she can no longer achieve it; her feelings, playing like a column of gnats in a sunbeam, the merest trifle about the aforesaid man will chase them away from each other, and against each other, in among each other, e. g., a thimble-full too much or too little of powder upon him, a stoop of the upper part of his body, a finger-nail cut to the quick, a scurfy, self-peeling under-lip, the powder-margin and play-ground of the queue on the back of his coat, long side-whiskers--in fact anything. I have a hundred reasons for breaking open here before the eyes of the indiscreet reader Ernestina's letter to a retired court-lady in the residence-city of Scheerau; she had to write to her every week, because there was an expectation of inheriting in that quarter, and because Ernestina herself had once been with her and in the city long enough to be well able to bring away with her eleven thousand city notions--that is, three weeks.

      "Last week I had really nothing to write you but the old song. Our playing is infinitely tedious to me and I only pity the Captain; but no talking avails anything with my father, so long as he can have any one to see play. Were it not better, the good Captain should wake up his coachman, who sits snoring all day long in the servants' room, and harness up and drive off? Ever since Sunday we have been in one round of torment over a single game, and I have already leaned one elbow sore--to night must end it.

      "Twelve o'clock at night.--He loses his knights every time and by my queen. When he has once married, I will show him his mistakes and my strokes of art, I am bored to death, gracious Aunt.

      "June 16th.--In four days I am free from my player and chess-board, and I will not seal this, till I can write you how he behaved towards his tired and innocent basket-maker. To-day we played up in the little Chinese pavilion. As the ruddy evening-twilight, which fell directly into his face, threw confused shadows among the pieces, and as I looked with pity at his right fore-finger, which had a red line left by a sabre-stroke and which lay on the rim of the chess-board; in my absence of mind I actually lost my queen, and the abominable baptismal tolling of the Chinese chime almost deprived me of the power of forming a plan--fortunately my father came back and helped me a little. Afterward I took him round through the improvements in our grove and he told me, I fancy, the history of his marked finger; he is very wild towards his equals, but withal uncommonly obliging to ladies.

      "June 18th.--Since yesterday we have all been somewhat merrier. In the evening two under-officers brought five recruits, and as we were told that there was a man among them who could set a whole defeated army to laughing, we all went down in a body. Down below there the man was just whispering half aloud into another recruit's ear that he had a row of false teeth set in his jaw and they all fell out except a corner tooth when he bit off a cartridge; but all he wanted was to secure the bounty money. At our request he screwed the hat off of his head, but a white cap, which reached down so as to cover the eyebrows, he pulled down still lower. If he should take that off, he said, he should never in his life get to the command of a regiment. One of the subalterns began to laugh, and said, he does it merely because he has, underneath, three abominable birthmarks, nothing more--and a comrade stepped up behind him and slyly whisked off the cap from his head. Hardly had there sprung forth, to our astonishment, a head which showed on both temples two flaming birthmarks, a silhouette with a natural queue, and, opposite, two pole-cats' tails, when to our still greater astonishment the Captain clasped the figured head and kissed it as passionately as if it were his own bodily brother, and seemed as if he would laugh himself to death for joy. 'Thou art forever Dr. Fenk and nobody else!' said he. He must be very intimate with the Captain and comes direct from Upper-Scheerau. Don't you know him? The Prince has him travel to Switzerland and Italy as botanist and companion to his natural son, Captain Von Ottomar, as you will have already known. He perpetrates crazy jokes, if it is true, as he swears, that this is his 21st disguise and that he is just so many years old. He looks badly; he says himself, his broad chin turns up like a beaver's tail and that the barber really shaves the half wilderness for him gratis, equal to two beards--his lips are slit away to the СКАЧАТЬ