Lenette

“ See how we men behave in matrimonial life, young ladies!
From all which it will readily appear how perfectly happy the advocate was during his honeymoon, when Lenette, in the most delightful manner, did all those things for him which he used previously to have to do for himself in a most miserable fashion and against the grain, making by unwearied sweepings and brushings his dithyrambic chartreuse as clean and level and smooth as a billiard-table. ”

“ When one has at last managed to creep up a steep Alp with the hands of a tree-frog, one very often finds that, what one looks down at from the summit is a fresh yawning abyss. Firmian saw a new one under his feet; he had to abandon the resolution he had taken. I mean, he did not now dare to say a word to Nathalie about his resurrection from the charnel-house—his immortality after death. Alas! the happiness of his Lenette, who (in the utmost innocence) had two husbands, would then be hanging on the tip of a tongue. The blame would be his, the misery Lenette’s. ”

“ At this the warm blood rushed to Lenette’s heart. Firmian merely answered, “More Saviours than one have died for this world and mankind, and I am convinced that Christ will one day take many a good man by the hand, and say, ‘You have suffered under your Pontius Pilate too!’ And for that matter many a seeming Pilate is very likely a Messiah, if the truth were known.” Lenette’s secret dread was that her husband was really an absolute Atheist, or at all events a “philosopher.” ”

“ The Schulrath swore by the Almighty that he would never leave her, and he took her hand and pressed it (without looking at her) as she wept, and hung, with eyes raining down with tears, upon the face of his friend, whose voice was so soon to be mute for ever. But Lenette forced him away from her husband’s breast, and liberated her hand, and sunk down upon the lips which had so deeply touched her heart. Firmian clasped her with his left arm, and stretched his right hand to his friend—thus holding to his oppressed bosom the two things on earth that are nearest heaven, friendship and love. ”

“ When a shivering heart is thus all shorn of its leaves and standing bare, every breeze that touches it is a freezing blast. With what a soft, warm, gentle touch Lenette would have had to touch it so as not to startle it. A heart in this condition is like a clairvoyante, who feels a chill as of death in every hand which touches from beyond the charmed circle.
He determined to join the corpse-lottery (as it was called) that very day, so as to be able at all events to pay the toll or tax on his departure for the next world. ”

“ Such seemed Lenette. But why was she thus to-day? Stiefel’s ignorance and delight at it were great; Firmian’s very small. Before I explain it, I will say, “I pity thee, poor husband, and thee, too, poor wife. For why must the smooth flow of the stream of your life (and of our own) be always broken by sorrows or by sins, and why cannot it fall into its grave in the Black Sea, without having to pass over thirteen cataracts, like the river Dnieper?” ”

“ Furboots had been the tourniquet which stopped the hemorrhage of Lenette’s open, streaming artery; but his departure had taken the German tinder stopping from her eyes and now they streamed unstanched.
Siebenkæs went often to the window, and up and down in the room, that she might not see that he was following her example, and that her sorrow, little reasonable as it was, infected him by sympathy. We can more easily bear, and forgive pain of our own causing than of another’s. ”

“ Lenette, bashful and trembling, glowed red with shame at this discovery of (what she had believed to be) the mystery of her poverty and her pawnings. With the view of pouring a few drops of oil on the troubled waters, he began, by way of preamble, to make some disparaging remarks concerning his fiancée at Bayreuth. “She reads too much, and doesn’t work enough. I only wish she could have the benefit of a few lessons from you in housekeeping. ”

“ He led them by snaky windings and corkscrew paths to the churchyard; but suddenly his eyes grew moist, as one’s do when passing through a thick mist, when he thought of the mother’s grave with the flowers on it, and on Lenette who gave no sign of ever becoming one. He strove to expel the sadness from his heart by philosophic speeches. He said human beings and watches stop while they are being wound up for a new long day ”

“ We now hear the two vicars of the empire go into their homes. The friseur’s sole punishment to his wife is a narrative of the whole affair, and a sight of the hat; while the advocate rewards Lenette with the kiss which she had refused to other lips. If her story did not please him, the teller of it did, and on the whole the only thing she omitted was the flower-wreath, and the allusions made to it. She would not cloud the happiness of his evening, nor bring back upon him the pain and the reproaches of that other evening when she had pawned it. ”

“ His hopes rose high, as he laid his flowery, sorrow-laden head upon his hands, down into her lap.
But Lenette jumped up with such a suddenness that it nearly knocked him over altogether. She gazed inquiringly into his eyes. Upright women must, I think, have some instinct of their own concerning the lightnings of the eye, by means of which they can distinguish between the lurid flashes of hell and the pure coruscations of heaven. This profligate was as little aware of the flashes of his eyes as was Moses of the brightness of his countenance. Her glance shrunk before his scorching gaze ”

“ Let us not fix our eyes too long, or too magisterially, upon this heat-rash or purulent fever of poor Lenette’s. For my part, I am going to leave her alone, but make an onslaught on her entire sex at once. I shall be doing so, I trust, when I assert that women never paint with more caustic colours (Swift’s black art is but weak water-colour in comparison) than when they have to portray the bodily unlovelinesses of other women. ”

“ So he pulled out of his second pocket a ballad (it is, no doubt, printed long ago) in which an innocent child murderess, with a tearful adieu to her lover, throws herself upon a sword. This ballad (very unlike his other poetical children) had real poetic merit, for luckily (for the poem at least) he was a lover of that kind himself, so that he could speak from the heart to the heart. It is not easy to portray the emotion and the melting pitying tears on Lenette’s face; all her heart rose to her tear-dimmed eyes. ”

“ Lenette answered her tautologies with equivalent ones, paying her back to the full in her own coin. Scarce was the housemaid out at the door, when the reviewer said—
“I haven’t written a word while that windmill was clacking. Lenette, tell me, is it really a positive impossibility for a woman to say, ‘It’s four o’clock,’ instead of ‘The four quarters to four have gone?’ Can no woman say, ‘The head-clout will be ready to-morrow,’ and then an end of the matter? Can no woman say, ‘I want a dollar for it,’ and there an end of the story? ”

“ Women, good souls, have always to carry and hold up the Jacob’s ladder by which the male sex mount into the blue æther and into the evening-red; this call of the Venner came as an extra freight loaded on to Lenette’s two burden-poles of arms. The laving of all moveable property, and the aspersion of all immoveable, recommenced. Meyern, the false lover of the poor child-murderess, Lenette detested with all her heart ”

“ He hurried away, to escape the answer which was sure to come eventually; his absence would, in the circumstances, be the most eloquent kind of oratory. All persons are better than their outbreaks (or ebullitions) —that is, than their bad ones; for all are worse than their noble ones, also—and when we allow the former an hour or so to dissipate and disperse, we gain something better than our point—we gain our opponent. He left Lenette a very grave subject for cogitation, however,—the stag’s horns and his word of honour. ”

“ But what said Lenette to all this? I shall be better able to answer this question after relating what follows here. There was only one occasion on which he spoke in this deaf and dumb institution of a house of his; it was while he was eating salad out of an earthenware-dish, which had poetical as well as pictorial flowers on it by way of ornament. Lifting the salad with his fork, he disclosed to view the little carmen which bordered this dish, and which ran as follows:—
“Peace feeds, but strife
Consumes our life.” ”

“ Though marmots and squirrels know how to plug up that particular hole in their dwellings which chances to be on the side from which the approaching storm is coming, men do not; Firmian thought if the hole in his purse was mended no more was necessary. Alas! a better thing than money now departed from him—Love. His good Lenette receded to a greater distance from his heart, as he did from hers, day by day. ”

“ Firmian, on this occasion, sacrificed a greater number of the good and entertaining ideas (which struck him) than usual to her efforts to place Spanish screens between the company and the steppes and fallow-fields of her poverty; and more than Henry did even then. All women—even those without brains—are the sharpest and most delicately-observant of augurs and clairvoyante prophetesses concerning matters which closely concern themselves. Lenette was an instance. ”

“ I further relate (doing so, moreover, without any very marked blush for the mutability of the human heart) that at this point Firmian’s compressed thoracic cavity grew several inches wider, so as to give admission to a considerable modicum of happiness, for no other reason but that Lenette had kept such a tight grasp of her marriage-wreath, and had endured the Venner for so short a time. “She is faithful, at all events, although she may be rather cool; in fact, I don’t really believe she is a bit cool, either, after all.” ”

“ The old guest gone—another there in his place—and near the latter his wife in tears. When he came into the room, Lenette went to one of the windows, and a fresh torrent of tears fell down. “Madame Siebenkæs,” said the Schulrath, continuing his address to her, and keeping hold of her hand, “submit yourself to the will of God, I beseech you; nothing has happened but what can be put to rights without difficulty. ”

“ But on Lenette’s account he awarded her a proxima accessit only, not the gold medal. He had to bind the Venner, by way of sacrificial ram, to the horns of the altar in place of Nathalie, or, at all events, harness him by way of saddle-horse to her triumphal car, and relate without disguise how Leibgeber had been the person who broke off the engagement, and, as it were, dragged her back by the sleeve, as she was making the first step into the Minotaur’s cave—by means of his satiric sketches of Meyern. ”

“ How is a man to get a coherent idea, fit to go to the printer and publisher, into his head with all this sweeping and scrubbing going on?”
Lenette did what every good wife, and her lap dog, would have done; she left off the noise by degrees. At last she laid down the besom, and merely whisked three straws and a little feather fluff gently with the hair-broom, from under the bed, not making as much noise even as he did with his writing. However the editor of the ‘Devil’s Papers’ managed to hear it, in a manner beyond his fondest hopes. ”

“ It is some excuse for the husband, and for the wife, too, for that matter, that the storm in the air fanned the fuel in his head into a brighter blaze, so that he strode up and down the room like a man demented, and instantly, and on the spot, blew to the four winds of heaven his resolve not to be put out with anything Lenette might do till after he was dead ”

“ At last the following words were forced out of him: “You are quite as unjust as I should be were I to attribute this document of Blaise’s to your behaviour to the Venner.” Nothing irritates women so much as derogatory comparisons; they apply them indiscriminately, without distinction. Lenette’s ears lengthened to tongues, like those of Rumour ”

“ I shall not here withhold from little girls a golden rule of war made by myself, “Don’t argue long with a man, whatever it may be about—warmth is always warmth, even if it only be warmth of argument—one forgets one’s self, and ultimately takes to proving by syllogistic figures, and this is just what the enemy wants—he converts these figures into poetical figures—ultimately even into plastic figures.”
Lenette, a little giddy with the rapid whirl of events, good naturedly stood up to serve as recruit measure for her recruit Rosa; he leant his back to hers. ”

“ This innocuous sermon (wholly addressed to the account of Stiefel’s piece of exegetic absurdity) Lenette supposed was directed against her wardrobe. She was like the Germans in general, who search after some special satiric kernel hidden in every rocket and firework serpent of humour. Wherefore Siebenkæs begged him to pardon this poor wife of his (over whose heart so many a sharp sorrow besides was strewn) the inevitable and invincible ignorance of her exegesis—or rather, to spare her the knowledge of it altogether. ”

“ The world— (which expression can only mean the collection of female tongue-threshers of empty straw belonging to Kuhschnappel) —may undoubtedly conclude, if it be so minded, the Venner to be a regular Henry the Fowler with respect to more women than one in the house, the latter being a feminine Volière to him; but I want proofs of this. Lenette, however, didn’t trouble herself about any proofs, but piously fled out of the way of Rosa the birdcatcher. ”