Read Ebook: The Ways of the Planets by Martin Martha Evans

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Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.-- Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.

Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.

Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart.

Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.--Courtiers, and a Noble Man.

The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate sitting on Music.

The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-Puff.-- Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.

The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.

Examinatorium And Dehortatorium Of Conscience.--The Studious Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer From Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First Intercalary Day.

A heavenly Morning; a heavenly Afternoon.--A House without Walls; a Bed without a House.

The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.

Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre ? Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.

Polar Fantasies.--The Singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.--Third Intercalary Day.

Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of Eden.-- Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.

The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's Confessions.

The Parting.

The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.-- Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.

Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors of the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the Flachsenfingeners.

The Hair-Dresser with a Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.

Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on Shoulders.--Walk to St. Luna.--Fifth Intercalary Day.

Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.

Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks, and Stabs.-A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.-- Giulia's dying Epistle.

First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The Race-Weeks.

Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play of Iphigenia.--Difference between Plebeian and Patrician Love.--Sixth Intercalary Day.

HESPERUS,

Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.-- Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.-- Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.

In the house of the Court-Chaplain Eymann, in the bathing-village of St. Luna, there were two parties: the one was glad on the 30th of April that our hero, the young Englishman, Horion, would return from G?ttingen the 1st of May to stay at the parsonage,--the other disliked it; they did not want him to arrive till the 4th of May.

His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into the envelope, saying: "We have now ample hope that to-morrow our Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;--fine tournaments and watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;--besides, we have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag a hair-bag,--and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of April made an April-fool of?" But the Chaplain's lady fell on his shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.

We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters, drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,--how he once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and true friend Hain,--how he would often, after a child's baptism, post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they wept,--and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.

In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,--a fragrant leaf-skeleton,--sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that he would--for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way--remove the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because his daughter was coming. "Esteemed Mr. Seebass!" answered the rat-controvertist, with emotion, "carry back my submissive compliments, and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assaftida and stuff the parsonage with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay, it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent rosewood-oil."

In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and Country, 1785, recommends this course."

Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too, and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the coucher.

The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys nothing about the whole thing except--May-butter, and from his mouth, amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but--spittle, and both, because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his throat and stomach.

Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;--with a round hat, with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and attacked him with intent to destroy,--less from hatred than from love. It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms, face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a second,--the first utterances were their two names.

The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck, around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love; he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long therein, and made all good again.

With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,--for Spring had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,--the two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom, laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.

The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal. Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army, "to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely, to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces, because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."

He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: "It is much better to make presents in articles than in money, because gratitude for the latter is spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons, gratitude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves."

I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father, Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings, who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.

Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this History dead.

For now it is actually gone,--not a word, not a syllable of it do I know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;--the Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better things to do and to lay open now, namely,

THE OVERTURE AND SECRET INSTRUCTIONS.

The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title, Dog-post-days.

It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore Island, that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those wing-casings of growing Spring,--the plain and coast around me looked like a tiring-room of the flower-goddess, and her finery lay scattered and hid in vales and bushes round about,--the moon lay as yet behind the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the whole rim of heaven,--the blue sky was at length pierced with silver spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was looking only at the heavens,--when something plashed on the earth....

It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean, and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.

How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.

I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this History to the learned world or not.

But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...

Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.

At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: "What is your name?--your character?--your business?"

Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion. What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court. Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers--from an excessive deference to political and domestic relations--throw an unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship, twenty-two years old, and her whole person was nothing but a single, tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.

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