The Invisible Lodge. Jean Paul
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head which would pave his way or frame his staircase to the bridal chamber. He advised him to appear distrait and inattentive, so as not to detect and disturb her in the hatching of her secret plan. He asked him: "Do you understand perfectly the minor offices of love?" No German comprehended metaphors less than the Captain. "I mean," he continued, "can you not, then, be out and out the most crafty vocativus? Can you not retain hold for a long time of the piece you mean to move, so as to keep your hand a long time over your chess-militia, and with your hand make the Generalissima fall into agitation and love? Can you not change every minute your attitudes towards this fair foe, and especially contrive to lift yourself up, because a man standing seems better looking to a woman who is sitting than to one who stands? I and she should see you now leaning back in your chair, now stretching forward, now to the left, now to the right, now in the shade, now with your eyes fixed on her hand, now on her lips, during the game. Nay, you should knock three or four pawns over on to the floor merely that you may have to stoop over to pick them up, so that your swelling facial veins might make an impression on her heart, and that you might drive the blood up into your own head and hers at the same time. Let your queue be buckled an eighth of an ell nearer the occiput or farther from it, in case such buckling and such distance has hitherto counteracted your marriage prospects." The poor Captain neither understood nor performed a single iota of the whole service-regulation, and the Doctor was quite as well satisfied, for it was a part of his humor that he loved no party to talk to better than the wind.
Ernestina goes on with her letter:
"To-morrow, thank God, my Passion weeks come to an end; and it is fortunate for the Captain, who grows daily more sensitive, that no one is present but the Doctor, who has a pat joke for every move that is made. His wit, he says, proves he himself is a miserable player, because good players never make a bonmot upon or during their play.
"June 20, 3 o'clock.--This evening at 12 o'clock I shall be unlocked from the foot-block of the chess-board. He will play all day at the rubber, the Definitive match--Fenk calls it--but at night, as he guesses from his day's campaign the result of the nightly one, he has ordered his coachman to drive up with his carriage, so that, like a corpse, he may mournfully depart. Only he should not expect me to play as badly as he does. But he is in all things so hasty, and stops his ears against all remonstrances.
"12 o'clock at night.--I am beside myself. Who would have believed it of my father? My game could hardly have stood better--by my father's second-hand watch, which lay near the chess-board, it was already considerably more than half-past eleven--he had only two officers and I still had all mine; one flying streak of red after another darted across his whole face. It grew at last really oppressive, and even the Doctor no longer spoke a playful word--only my white pussy marched round purring on the table. Naturally no human being is thinking of the cat, and for the first time in the game he gives me check. Just then he (or was it I, for I sometimes beat such little trills on the table) might have made some such slight drumming with his fingers on the edge of the board. Like lightning the creature flew at it, thinking probably it was a mouse, and knocked our whole game into pi and there we sat. Imagine the scene:--I half glad that this middle person had relieved him of the shame of the formal basket; he with a face full of disconsolateness and wrath; my father with one full of wrath and confusion; and the Doctor looking round the room and snapping his fingers and swearing: 'The Captain would have beaten as sure as Amen!' Not a foot budged from the spot; the Doctor did not stay a minute on his, and finally in a fit of enthusiasm which our embarrassed silence more and more intensified, threw himself on his knees before a white bust of Cupid, before a miniature of my father, and before his own image in the looking-glass, and prayed: 'Holy Herr von Knör! holy Cupid! holy Fenk! pray for the Captain, and strike the cat dead! Ah! were you three images alive, then would Cupid surely assume the form of Dr. Fenk, and Cupid who had thus come to life would grasp the hand of the now animated Knör, and place in it that of the female player; then would his give hers to still a third. Ye saints! pray, I beseech you, for the Captain, who would have won the game!' But that is not true; only, unfortunately, the interval was too short to begin a new one."
Now, as at this point the pole-cat-Doctor (I, as author, resume my narrative) rose up and actually laid Knör's hand in that of Ernestina and said he was Cupid--and inasmuch as, after all, by the assurances of the Doctor and by the uncertainty of the game, the player, teased by men and cats, had quite as much to lose in the matter of honor as in that of love; and as I show in a whole Sector that Falkenberg was of the oldest nobility in the whole land; and as, luckily, in the Head-forester (as with many of the rural nobility) the manners of his rude breeding lay half-hid under the varnish of those derived from his more refined intercourse, just as his old furniture was under that of the new fashion; thus the electric enthusiasm of the Doctor passed over in great sparks into the bosom of the father, and Knör in transport laid the hand of Ernestina, who feigned astonishment, in that of the Captain, who really felt it; and the bridegroom rushed and threw himself in a tempest of gratitude upon the neck of the new-born father-in-law, even before--inasmuch as his honor triumphed more than his love--he somewhat more coldly kissed the clever hand which had hitherto snatched from him this double triumph.
For this the fair possessor of the hand blamed him; but I again impute the blame to her; with what reason can she expect it of the man who never divined a soul, hardly his own, and never that of a woman, that he should have had his wisdom-teeth and his philosophic beard grown as long as the indulgent reader has both, who, of course, does not need to learn for the first time, and to have it printed here beforehand--for he has already remarked it these three good hours--that behind the copulative cat there lay (or lied)[6] something, viz., Ernestina herself.
This is how it was. But I need hardly inform the reader of what he has long since known, that Ernestina had, privatissime, each of four evenings previous, placed the glue-and-stitch cat on the table, and instructed her to dart at the fingers when she heard them drumming; and I am glad the acuteness of the reader is as much above the ordinary as it is, because now he can go on and surmise still more: for she also on the final evening, made the paste-eel of a cat creep after her as a lime-rod, kept her till half-past eleven o'clock down in her lap, and at last with a movement of her knee threw up this feline terminus medius out of her lap on to the table, and the terminus after that did her part. Poor Captain!
But it is a matter for serious reflection. For if, in this way, women can transmute design into accident, and vice versâ--if, even before betrothal (consequently still more afterwards), they know how to place in the front rank against men (as Cambyses did against the Egyptians)[7], confederate cats, who, like inferior interposing Deities ex-machinâ upset the male game and set up the female--if in a hundred human beings there are only five men who can tolerate bestial cats or, in fact, human ones, and only ten women who can not--if, most manifestly, the best women carry under their arms terrible bundles of man-traps, hares'-nets, lark springes, night-nets, and draw-nets; what shall the uniped or one-leg[8] do who, on the very same day when he has begun writing a romance, begins at the same time to play one, and so would fain carry through both simultaneously as on a double harpsichord? The most remarkable thing for me to do, I see, is to let my wife stand all day by me bear-trap, and throw twigs on it, that I may stumble into it, but absolutely place no bear there, though no ape either. No! ye pliable, oppressed creatures! I once more propose to myself the undertaking, and publicly make the vow to one of you here, in print. Should it happen, nevertheless, that I wanted after the honeymoon to plague the one, then I merely read out aloud this Sector, and move my heart with the coming picture of your connubial Pilatus; which, for that reason, I here bring forward--namely, how the stupidest man accounts himself shrewder than the shrewdest wife; how before him, who, perhaps, out of the house lies on his knee, to be blest, before a goddess or idol, she must sink down on hers, like the camel, to be loaded; how he sweetens his Imperial Chancery decrees, and his Plebiscita, (after the mildest remonstrances have been ventured only in a doubtful and desperate voice of resignation, as if of a lost cause), with nothing better than a "but if I choose to have it so;" how the very tear which fascinated him in the free eye of the bride, now disenchants and makes him quite frantic, when it drops from that of the wedded wife, just as in the "Arabian Nights" all enchantments and disenchantments are effected by sprinkling with water--verily, the only good thing about it after all is just this,