The Man of Order
So far as I am concerned, I must confess that I am not greatly interested either in painted Empresses, or in Cardinals, or in Pashas. My attention was riveted upon a lank, lean man, who must have been of unusual length when he was standing up, a man with white hair and a grey beard, round blue glasses before his eyes, beneath them a nose shaped like a potato, and a thin-lipped mouth drawn down at the corners in a sardonic smile. On his head there was a straw hat, the brim of which was of a width such as I had never before met with. This person sat upon a camp-stool, holding with his left hand a parasol lined with green over the afore-mentioned straw hat, and with his right hand guiding a small telescope screwed to a stick, which was fastened in the ground. There is no need to say that the ruler and guider of this telescope was reconnoitring the châlet across the way. What pleased me best was the fussiness, the apparatus, and the intensity of research which served the man’s curiosity. Surely this was the last of the Mohicans, one of the last original characters which are disappearing more and more out of the insipid level of our most modern mediocrity and uniformity. Who was the man? The dear old village of Ragaz has, by no means to the delight of everybody, grown into a “fashionable” resort, and one meets queer enough figures there every summer. But one like the man with a telescope and camp-stool, who had improvised an observatory on the spur of the moment, is an exotic plant, even in the Ragaz of to-day, and is well worth the trouble of observation.
What a pity, I thought, that Amadeus Hoffmann is no more among the living, or Edgar Poe. For either of them this fellow would have been a find.
Gradually the spectators dispersed, as neither the empress, who had been turned out of her empire, nor the cardinal, who had taken the hint that he was superfluous, condescended to show themselves, and as it was getting rather dull to gaze upon the red fez of the pasha, which was just visible above the railing of the verandah at the right. At last there were only two left: the telescope man, who continued his observations, and my worthy self observing the obdurate observer.
Finally, we both accomplished our purpose—he in seeing Madonna Eugenia and the Prince-Cardinal leave the house in quick succession, I in being a witness to the geometrical correctness with which the discoverer took down his observatory.
His motions were as measured as if he felt it incumbent upon him to keep time to the music of the spheres. His very manner of getting up showed a man who never puts one foot before the other without having incontestably assured himself where he was about to tread. When his long bony figure had drawn itself out to its full length his first object was to see clearly. For this purpose he cautiously removed his spectacles from his potato-shaped nose and wiped the large, round blue glasses emphatically with a piece of soft leather he produced out of his right vest-pocket. Having put back the piece of leather and the spectacles to their original place, he commenced the work of packing up, without haste and without delay. At first the telescope was unscrewed, reduced to its smallest dimensions, wiped on all sides with a large red silk handkerchief, and enclosed in a leather case, out of which he had carefully blown the dust, and which he now laid down gently upon the camp-stool. Hereupon he pulled out the stick which had served as a holder for his telescope until now, but which, upon nearer acquaintance, proved to be a perfect miracle, a very encyclopædia of a stick, so to say. It was evidently the pride and joy of its happy possessor. There could be no doubt of that from the satisfaction with which he touched the various springs of the complicated apparatus to display the countless metamorphoses which made the stick appear in turn as a common cane, as an umbrella, as a hoe, as a geological hammer, as a pocket-dagger, as a candle-snuffer, as a reading-desk, as a corkscrew, as a cup, as a chisel, as an inkstand, and as various other things. At last I should really not have been surprised if this Chinese puzzle had suddenly put on the garb of a speaker in Parliament.
The man could read open admiration, the most unselfish of human sympathy, from my countenance, and consequently felt impelled to say, as he pointed to his stick, having reduced it to its most primitive form: “It is the result of five years of theoretic studies and three years of practical constructive experiments. Ay, sir, with genius and order one can accomplish some pretty good things upon this disorderly earth.”
With that he leaned his miraculous staff carefully against a tree, buckled his telescope-case to a broad strap which hung across his right shoulder like a bandoleer, took up his camp-stool, devoted himself assiduously to reducing it to infinitesimal dimensions, and buckled the object, which in its present shape no person would ever have suspected of being a chair, to his strap. He then took up his encyclopædic stick, lightly pricked the ground with the point, and remarked, in the full consciousness of work well done: “All’s in order! Cardinal, Pasha, Ex-empress, all done up in good order.”
“Heilige Ordnung, segensreiche,” I began, quoting Schiller.
“Yes, sir; that is the wisest word ever the immortal Marbach sage pronounced. To say that, he must have been a man of order himself. And that he was so is proved to-day by his printed note-book. Unfortunately his collection of pill-bills has not yet been published. Nor Goethe’s Rhine-wine bills. Neither, I am sorry to say, have we as yet any printed proofs of the number of pipe-lighters which were twisted for Johann Heinrich Voss by his prudent housewife Ernestine. At the same time I must admit that gradually we are reducing our history of literature to something like order. There is nothing like a basis of scientific research. This alone will bring light into chaos. When we have once succeeded in establishing the relation of Goethe’s digestion to his poetic production, then we may set to work to discover the relation of the first part of Faust to the second. Happily there are men living and working who know that the so-called minutiæ and bagatelles of life are in reality the most important things. I know a Leipsic professor who has brought together scientific proof to show that true literature is that which has been contemptuously dubbed waste-paper-basket-literature. I know another Alexandrian ditto of Leipsic who is to edit a work which his friends have signalled in advance as about to create a new epoch in literature, the title of which will be, ‘The Wash-bills of our Classic and Romantic Poets, being a Collection of Records and Documents for a Prospective Inductive Analytical History of German Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.’ I know a third Byzantian of Leipsic, who plans to bring the art of writing diplomatic history up to the acme of perfection. He has made the different kinds of snuff which Frederick the Great indulged in the objects of his preliminary investigations, in order to be able to furnish proof of the effect which each individual sort had upon the brain-nerves of said Frederick, and consequently upon the destiny of the human race. Do you see, sir, that is what I call a truly scientific spirit, a healthy realism that, a spirit of sterling accuracy! Three groans for anything like disorder! It is incredible what a mischief-maker disorder is in these days! There was a fellow the other day had the audacity to spell Goethe G-ö-t-h-e throughout an entire book! Would you believe it? Fortunately he got his fingers whacked right heartily with the academical rattan. ‘Göthe’! what do you think of it? Of course it is idiotic in German to write the diphthongs ä, ö, ü as if they were æ, œ, ue—I’ll admit that, and I dare say Goethe himself would to-day save himself the trouble of putting in the extra e, but the orthography of G-o-e-t-h-e has once been established, and in the interest of order I would advise none but anarchists and rebels to be so godless as to leave out the e. The law of order is supreme, in great and in the greatest, in small and in the smallest.”
He stopped exhausted and gasped for breath. “On earth and in the heavens,” I added at haphazard.
“In the heavens? Not that I know of!” he said, drawing down the corners of his mouth. At the same time he touched his lifted cane, allowing the candle-snuffers to protrude for a moment, as if he were about to snuff out all anarchic stars in the firmament. “Do you know, in the so-called heavens there is not much order? The disorderly conduct of the comets should have been interfered with long ago. And then this transit of Venus, what do you say to that? Do you call that order? Venus should go in a decent and orderly manner above or below the sun, but certainly not straight before his Majesty’s very nose. Why, it is like snapping his fingers at the sun; it’s disrespectful, it’s opposed to all decorum, to all order.”
So saying he darted away from me—we had meanwhile reached the hotel “Hof Ragaz,” and entering the right wing had walked upstairs—and like a whirlwind he pounced upon a table standing in the hall, about which evidently there was something not in order.
“There it is again!” he muttered, slowly passing the tip of his fore-finger over the top of the table until upon the dusty surface the word “Dust” appeared in large type capitals.
“Hang those women!” grumbled the owner of the magic staff. “Will you believe me when I tell you that yesterday I wrote the same cry of warning upon the top of this table? All in vain!”
And setting down his elaborately-constructed cane with well-tempered force upon the first step of the staircase leading to the third storey, he continued: “Tell me, dear sir, did you ever in the course of your experience meet with a person of the feminine sex, be it child, girl, or matron, who could ever be prevailed upon by means of exhortation, kindness, severity, diplomacy, or force to fully shut the latch of a door, or turn down the bolt of a window-sash?”
“No, to tell the truth, I have never met a feminine person of that description.”
“I thought so!” he continued, with a triumphant smile. “Oh, if you knew all the trouble, all the untold trouble, I have taken for years to teach the women-folks at home to properly shut doors and windows. All in vain! But do you know how I punish the disorderly batch at home? Whenever I find a door left upon the latch, or a window with the bolt but half-turned, I at once lift the door or the sash out of the hinges and lean it against the wall. This has the desired effect of vexing the women and giving them additional work, especially in winter. There’s nothing like the law of order. But do you call that order, eh?”
And with a degree of moral indignation he pointed to a row of milk-stains upon the stairs. One of the chamber-maids, hastening up or down stairs with a breakfast-tray, had not kept an eye properly upon the milk-pitcher.
What did our fanatic in the cause of order? Something I had never seen before. He pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket, and step by step he marked a neat circle round about each drop of milk.
“You see,” he said, “this is the way I do at home to call the attention of the women to such offences against all sense of decency and modesty, which of course they never see and correct of their own accord. Oh, disorder, thy name is woman.”
Johannes Scherr.