JOURNEY TO FLÄTZ. (continued 2)

I, for my share, full of true tedium, while gliding after her through her various marts, with their long cheapenings and chafferings, merely acted the Philosopher hid within me. I weighed this empty Life, and the heavy value which is put upon it, and the daily anxiety of man lest it, this lightest down-feather of the Earth, fly off', and feather him, and take him with it. These thoughts, perhaps, I owe to the street-fry of boys, who were turning their market-freedom to account, by throwing stones at one another all round me; for in the midst of this tumult I vividly figured myself to be a man who had never seen war; and who, therefore, never having experienced that often of a thousand bullets not one will hit, feels apprehensive of these few silly stones lest they beat in his nose and eyes. O, it is the battle-field alone that sows, manures, and nourishes true courage, courage even for daily, domestic, and smallest perils. For not till he comes from the battle-field can a man both sing and cannonade; like the canary-bird, which, though so melodious, so timid, so small, so tender, so solitary, so soft-feathered, can yet be trained to fire off cannon, though cannon of smaller calibre.

After dinner (in our room) we issued from the Purgatory of the market-tumult,--where Berga, at every booth, had something to order, and load her attendant maid with,--into Heaven, into the Dog Inn, as the best Flätz public and pleasure-house without the gates is named, where, in market time, hundreds turn in, and see thousands going by. On the way thither, my little wife, my elbow-tendril, as it were, had extracted from me such a measure of courage, that, while going through the Gate (where I, aware of the military order, that you must not pass near the sentry, threw myself over to the other side), she quietly glided on, close by the very guns and fixed bayonets of the City Guard. Outside the wall, I could direct her, with my finger to the bechained, begrated, gigantic Schabacker-Palace, mounting up even externally on stairs, where I last night had called and (it may be) stormed: "I had rather take a peep at the Giant," said she, "and the Dwarf; why else are we under one roof with them?"

67. Individual Minds, nay, Political Bodies, are like organic bodies; extract the interior air from them, the atmosphere crushes them together; pump off under the bell the exterior resisting air, the interior inflates and bursts them. Therefore let every State keep up its internal and its external resistance both at once.

In the pleasure-house itself we found sufficient pleasure; encircled as we were, with blooming faces and meadows. In my secret heart, I all along kept looking down, with success, on Schabacker's refusal; and till midnight made myself a happy day of it. I had deserved it, Berga still more. Nevertheless, about one in the morning, I was destined to find a windmill to tilt with; a windmill, which truly lays about it with somewhat longer, stronger, and more numerous arms than a giant, for which Don Quixote might readily enough have taken it. On the market place, for reasons more easily fancied than specified in words, I let Berga go along some twenty paces before me; and I myself, for these foresaid reasons, retire without malice behind a covered booth, the tent most probably of some rude trader; and lingered there a moment according to circumstances. Lo! steering hither with dart and spear, comes the Booth-watcher, and coins and stamps me on the spot, into a filcher and housebreaker of his Booth-street; though the simpleton sees nothing but that I am standing in the corner, and doing anything but--taking. A sense of honor without callosity is never blunted for such attacks. But how in the dead of night was a man of this kind, who had nothing in his head--at the utmost beer, instead of brains--to be enlightened on the truth of the matter?

I shall not conceal my perilous resource; I seized the fox by the tail, as we say; in other words, I made as if I had been muddled, and knew not rightly, in my liquor, what I was about. I therefore mimicked everything I was master of in this department; staggered hither and thither; splayed out my feet like a dancing-master; got into zigzag in spite of all efforts at the straight line; nay, I knocked my good head (perhaps one of the clearest and emptiest of the night) like a full one, against real posts.

However, the Booth-bailiff, who probably had been oftener drunk than I, and knew the symptoms better, or even felt them in himself at this moment, looked upon the whole exhibition as mere craft, and shouted dreadfully: "Stop, rascal; thou art no more drunk than I! I know thee of old. Stand, I say, till I speak to thee! Wouldst have thy long finger in the market, too? Stand, dog, or I'll make thee!"

8. In great Saloons, the real stove is masked into a pretty ornamented sham stove; so, likewise, it is fit and pretty that a virgin Love should always hide itself in an interesting virgin Friendship.

You see the whole nodus of the matter. I whisked away zigzag among the booths as fast as possible, from the claws of this rude Tosspot; yet he still hobbled after me. But my Teutoberga, who had heard somewhat of it came running back; clutched the tipsy market-warder by the collar, and said (shrieking, it is true, in village wise): "Stupid sot, go sleep the drink out of thy head, or I'll teach thee! Dost know, then, whom thou art speaking to? My husband, Army-chaplain Schmelzle under General and Minister von Schabacker at Pimpelstadt, thou blockhead!--Fie! Take shame, fellow!" The watchman mumbled, "Meant no harm," and reeled about his business. "O thou Lioness!" said I, in the transport of love, "why hast thou never been in any deadly peril, that I might show thee the Lion in thy husband!"

Thus lovingly we both reached home; and perhaps in the sequel of this Fair day might still have enjoyed a glorious after-midnight, had not the Devil led my eye to the ninth volume of Lichtenberg's Works, and the 206th page, where this passage occurs: "It is not impossible, that, at a future period, our Chemists may light on some means of suddenly decomposing the Atmosphere by a sort of Ferment. In this way the world may be destroyed." Ah! true indeed! Since the Earth-ball is lapped up in the larger Atmospheric ball, let but any chemical scoundrel, in the remotest scoundrel-island, say in New Holland, devise some decomposing substance for the Atmosphere, like what a spark of fire would be for a powder-wagon; in a few seconds, the monstrous devouring world-storm catches me and you in Flätz by the throat; my breathing, and the like, in this choke-air is over, and the whole game ended! The Earth becomes a boundless gallows, where the very cattle are hanged; worm-powder, and bug-liquor, Bradly ant-ploughs, and rat-poison, and wolf-traps are, in this universal world-trap and world-poison, no longer specially needful; and the Devil takes the whole, in the Bartholomew-night, when this cursed "Ferment" is invented.

12. Nations--unlike rivers, which precipitate their impurities in level places and when at rest--drop their baseness just whilst in the most violent motion; and become the dirtier the farther they flow along through lazy flats.

From the true soul, however, I concealed these deadly Night Thoughts; seeing she would either painfully have sympathized in them, or else mirthfully laughed at them. I merely gave orders that next morning (Saturday) she was to be standing booted and ready, at the outset of the returning coach; if so were she would have me speedily fulfil her wishes in regard to that stock of Rathships which lay so near her heart. She rejoiced in my purpose, gladly surrendering the market for such prospects. I too slept sound, my great toe tied to her finger the whole night through.

The Dragoon next morning twitched me by the ear, and secretly whispered into it that he had a pleasant fairing to give his sister; and so would ride off somewhat early, on the nag he had yesterday purchased of the horse-dealer. I thanked him beforehand.

28. When Nature takes the huge old Earth-round, the Earth-loaf and kneads it up again, for the purpose of introducing, under this piecrust, new stuffing and Dwarfs--she then, for most part, as a mother when baking will do to her daughters, gives in jest a little fraction of the dough (two or three thousand square leagues of such dough are enough for a child) to some Poetical or Philosophical, or Legislative polisher, that so the little elf may have something to be shaping and manufacturing beside its mother. And when the other young ones get a taste of sisterkin's baking, they all clap hands, and cry, "Aha, Mother! canst bake like Suky here?"

At the appointed hour all gayly started from the Staple, I excepted; for I still retained, even in the fairest daylight, that nocturnal Devil's-Ferment and Decomposition (of my cerebral globe as well as of the Earth-globe) fermenting in my head; a proof that the night had not affected me, or exaggerated my fear. The Blind Passenger, whom I liked so ill, also mounted along with us, and looked at me as usual, but without effect; for on this occasion, when the destruction not of myself only, but of worlds, was occupying my thoughts, the Passenger was nothing to me but a joke and a show; as a man, while his leg is a-sawing off, does not feel the throbbing of his heart; or amid the humming of cannon, does not guard himself from that of wasps; so to me any Passenger, with all the firebrands he might throw into my near or distant Future, could appear but ludicrous, at a time when I was reflecting that the "Ferment" might, even in my journey between Flätz and Neusattel, be, by some American or European man of science, quite guiltlessly experimenting and decomposing, lighted upon by accident and let loose. The question, nay prize-question now, however, were this: "In how far, since Lichtenberg's threatening, it may not appear world-murderous and self-murderous, if enlightened Potentates of chemical nations do not enjoin it on their chemical subjects,--who in their decompositions and separations may so easily separate the soul from their body and unite Heaven with Earth,--not in future to make any other chemical experiments than those already made, which hitherto have profited the State rather than harmed it?"

Unfortunately, I continued sunk in this Doomsday of the Ferment with all my thoughts and meditations, without, in the whole course of our return from Flätz to Neusattel, suffering or observing anything, except that I actually arrived there, and at the same time saw the Blind Passenger once more go his ways.

My Bergelchen alone had I constantly looked at by the road, partly that I might still see her, so long as life and eyes endured; partly that, even at the smallest danger to her, be it a great, or even all-over-sweeping Deluge and World's-doom, I might die, if not for her, at least by her, and so, united with that stanch, true heart, cast away a plagued and plaguing life, in which, at any rate, not half of my wishes for her have been fulfilled.

So then were my Journey over--crowned with some Historiola; and in time coming, perhaps, still more rewarded through you, ye Friends about Flätz, if in these pages you shall find any well-ground pruning-knives, whereby you may more readily outroot the weedy tangle of Lies, which for the present excludes me from the gallant Schabacker--Only this cursed Ferment still sits in my head. Farewell, then, so long as there are Atmospheres left us to breathe. I wish I had that Ferment out of my head. Yours always,

Attila Schmelzle.

P. S.--My brother-in-law has kept his promise well, and Berga is dancing. Particulars in my next!