Читать книгу Problematic Characters - Spielhagen Friedrich - Страница 39

"Of course, I know," said the obliging minister. "But I, for my part, I have too long enjoyed the honor and the happiness of being intimate with wealthy families, noble in the true sense of the word, not to be a warm adherent of the aristocracy of the land. Besides which, I have had too many sad experiences of the fatal effect which large property often has upon the minds of plebeians, to use the historic expression; I mean the vanity, pride, and worldliness which it begets."

"I am sorry to hear such things of my friends."

"Of your friends?" asked the minister in astonishment.

"Yes, of my friends. For, without any purpose of mine, and often without, exactly knowing why, I have always found myself on the plebeian side, whenever in history the conflict between patricians and plebeians has become marked. I was a sworn adherent of the Gracchi and other Roman demagogues; I fought with the Independents against the Cavaliers, and I confess that even in the terrible peasants' wars I felt more sympathy for the poor oppressed serfs, whom brutal treatment had brutalized, than for the high-mighty, all-powerful barons and counts, who were not a whit less brutal for all their splendor and power."

The minister listened to these words with a smile of incredulity, as if he were listening to the rhodomontades of goslings who assume the air of accomplished roués.

"Very good! very good!" he said "You clever people are fond of paradoxes. You bring that home with you from the æsthetic teas in the great city, and you wish not to get out of practice, although nobody may listen to you but a poor country parson."

"I assure you, sir----"

"Never mind, never mind. But when you have lived five years among the rustics-- Do you believe it, I have never been able to induce these people even to buy a bell for the church, although they are bound by law to provide for the house of God? But when they are called upon to provide for a merry-making, or to carry out some worldly purpose, they have always an abundance of money."

"Well," said Oswald, "the nobles of this neighborhood are not exactly famous for their repugnance to merry-making, as you call it."

"The nobles? My dear sir, that is a very different thing. Their device is and must be: Live and let live! But, you know, the same thing does not suit all."

"And many things are not suitable for anybody," added Oswald.

"Ah, here comes my Gustava," cried the minister, glad to be able to break off a conversation which he liked less and less every moment.

The minister's wife, who just then came into the room, was a lady of about forty, with sandy hair, very light blue eyes, and a face which, at that moment, was rather red from the kitchen-fire and the hurry in which she had dressed; ordinarily she looked pale, faded, and old-maidish. She wore a dress of yellow raw silk, with a gold watch in the belt, and a cap with yellow ribbons, so that on the whole she made upon Oswald the impression of an elderly, unhealthy canary-bird, hung up in a room which looks towards the north. She, too, could hardly find words--and yet they came in crowds--to express her joy at seeing the friend of the great house under her lowly roof--evidently a stereotype phrase common to husband and wife. She felt so grateful for the visit, as her poor man had no well-educated neighbor at all, and now, she knew, the want was at once supplied by Oswald's arrival.

"My poor Jager"--that was the husband's name--"my poor Jager will become a hypochondriac here," she exclaimed, fixing her watery blue eyes with great tenderness upon the object of her apprehensions. "I do what may be in my feeble power to make him miss the society of clever and learned men as little as possible, but a poor ignorant woman cannot do much in that direction."

"You will compel me to contradict you," said Oswald, in whom the sense of the humorous had been getting the better of the disgust with which the hypocrisy of the worthy couple had at first filled him. "I shall insist upon it that ignorance and Mrs. Jager have never yet met, much less can they ever have made acquaintance with each other."

"You are very kind; I am sure you are too kind," said the delighted lady. "I cannot deny that I have all my life endeavored to relieve myself, for one, of the popular reproach that women are unfit for the sphere of highest----"

"Dinner's ready!" cried the parlor-maid in at the door.

"Now you see; that is the way our daily life is always asserting its rights as soon as we try to rise a little higher," said the dweller in the spheres of highest cultivation. Oswald offered her politely his arm, and the minister laid his cigar carefully aside, so that he might easily find it again after dinner.