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‘I see you are sorry,’ said he, tenderly while he took my hand within both of his; ‘but you would not blame me – indeed you would not – if you knew all.’
‘What, then, was the cause of this quarrel? How came you to an open rupture?’
He turned round, and as he did so his face was purple, the blood suffused every feature, and his very eyeballs seemed as if about to burst. He tried to speak; but I only heard a rushing noise like a hoarse-drawn breath.
‘Be calm, my dear Eisendecker,’ said I. ‘Cannot this be settled otherwise than thus?’
‘No, no!’ said he, in the voice of indignant passion I used to hear from him long before, ‘never!’ He waved his hand impatiently as he spoke, and turned his head from me. At the same moment one of his companions made a sign with his hand towards me.
‘What!’ whispered I in horror – ‘a blow?’
A brief nod was the reply. Alas! from that minute all hope left me. Too well I knew the desperate alternative that awaited such an insult. Reconciliation was no longer to be thought of. I asked no more, but followed the group along the path towards the mill.
In a little garden, as it was called – we should rather term it a close-shaven grass-plot – where some tables and benches were placed under the shade of large chestnut-trees, Adolphe von Muhry stood, surrounded by a number of his friends. He was dressed in his costume as a member of the Prussian club of the Landsmanschaft – a kind of uniform of blue and white, with a silver braiding on the cuffs and collar – and looked handsomer than ever I saw him. The change his features had undergone gave him an air of manliness and confidence that greatly improved him, and his whole carriage indicated a degree of self-reliance and energy which became him perfectly. A faint blush coloured his cheek as he saw me enter, and he lifted his cap straight above his head and saluted me courteously, but with an evident effort to appear at ease before me. I returned his salute mournfully – perhaps reproachfully, too, for he turned away and whispered something to a friend at his side.
Although I had seen many duels with the sword, it was the first time I was present at an affair with pistols in Germany; and I was no less surprised than shocked to perceive that one of the party produced a dice-box and dice, and placed them on a table.
Eisendecker all this time sat far apart from the rest, and, with folded arms and half-closed eyelids, seemed to wait in patience for the moment of being called on.
‘What are they throwing for, yonder?’ whispered I to a Saxon student near me.
‘For the shot, of course,’ said he; ‘not but that they might spare themselves the labour. Eisendecker must fire first; and as for who comes second after him – ’
‘Is he so sure as that?’ asked I in terror; for the fearful vision of blood would not leave my mind.
‘That is he. The fellow that can knock a bullet off a champagne bottle at five-and-twenty paces may chance to hit a man at fifteen.’
‘Mühry has it,’ cried out one of those at the table; and I heard the words repeated from mouth to mouth till they reached Eisendecker, as he moved his cane listlessly to and fro in the mill-stream.
‘Remember Ludwig,’ said his friend, as he grasped his arm with a stronger clasp; ‘remember what I told you.’
The other nodded carelessly, and merely said, ‘Is all ready?’
‘Stand here, Eisendecker,’ said Mühry’s second, as he dropped a pebble in the grass.
Mühry was already placed, and stood erect, his eyes steadily directed to his antagonist, who never once looked towards him, but kept his glance fixed straight in front.
‘You fire first, sir,’ said Mühry’s friend, while I could mark that his voice trembled slightly at the words. ‘You may reserve your fire till I have counted twenty after the word is given.’
As he spoke he placed the pistol in Eisendecker’s hand, and called out —
‘Gentlemen, fall back, fall back; I am about to give the word. Herr Eisendecker, are your ready?’
A nod was the reply.
‘Now!’ cried he, in a loud voice; and scarcely was the word uttered when the discharge of the pistol was heard. So rapid, indeed, was the motion, that we never saw him lift his arm; nor could any one say what direction the ball had taken.
‘I knew it, I knew it,’ muttered Eisendecker’s friend, in tones of agony. ‘All is over with him now.’
Before a minute elapsed, the word to fall back was again given, and I now beheld Von Mühry standing with his pistol in hand, while a smile of cool but determined malice sat on his features.
While the second repeated the same words over to him, I turned to look at Eisendecker, but he evinced no apparent consciousness of what was going on about him; his eyes, as before, were bent on vacancy; his pale face, unmoved, showed no signs of passion. In an instant the fearful ‘Now’ rang out, and Mühry slowly raised his arm, and, levelling his pistol steadily, stood with his eye bent on his victim. While the deep voice of the second slowly repeated one – two – three – four – never was anything like the terrible suspense of that moment. It seemed as if the very seconds of human life were measuring out one by one. As the word ‘ten’ dropped from his lips, I saw Mühry’s hand shake. In his revengeful desire to kill his man, he had waited too long, and now he was growing nervous; he let fall his arm to his side, and waited for a few seconds, then raising it again, he took a steady aim, and at the word ‘nineteen’ fired.
A slight movement of Eisendecker’s head at this instant brought his face full front; and the bullet, which would have transfixed his head, now merely passed along his cheek, tearing a rude flesh-wound as it went.
A half-cry broke from Mühry: I heard not the word; but the accent I shall never cease to remember. It was now Eisendecker’s time; and as the blood streamed down his cheek, and fell in great drops upon his neck and shoulders, I saw his face assume the expression it used to wear in former days. A terrible smile lit up his dark features, and a gleam of passionate vengeance made his eye glow like that of a maniac.
‘I am ready – give the word,’ cried he, in frantic impatience.
But Mühry’s second, fearful of giving way to such a moment of passion, hesitated; when Eisendecker again called out, ‘The word, sir, the word!’ and the bystanders, indignant at the appearance of unfairness, repeated the cry.
The crowd fell back, and the word was given. Eisendecker raised his weapon, poised it for a second in his hand, and then, elevating it above his head, brought it gradually down, till, from the position where I stood, I could see that he aimed at the heart.
His hand was now motionless, as if it were marble; while his eye, riveted on his antagonist, seemed to be fixed on one small spot, as though his whole vengeance was to be glutted there. Never was suspense more dreadful, and I stood breathless, in the expectation of the fatal flash, when, with a jerk of his arm, he threw up the pistol and fired above his head; and then, with a heart-rending cry of ‘Mein bruder, mein brader!’ he rushed into Mühry’s arms, and fell into a torrent of tears.
The scene was indeed a trying one, and few could witness it unmoved. As for me, I turned away completely overcome; while my heart found vent in thankfulness that such a fearful beginning should end thus happily.
‘Yes,’ said Eisendecker, as we rode home together that evening, when, after a long silence, he spoke; ‘yes, I had resolved to kill him; but when my finger was even on the trigger, I saw a look upon his features that reminded me of those earlier and happier days when we had but one home and one heart, and I felt as if I was about to become the murderer of my brother.’
Need I add that they were friends for ever after?
But I must leave Göttingen and its memories too. They recall happy days, it is true; but they who made them so – where are they?
CHAPTER XXII. SPAS AND GRAND DUKEDOMS
It was a strange ordinance of the age that made watering-places equally the resort of the sick and the fashionable, the dyspeptic and the dissipated. One cannot readily see by what magic chalybeates can minister to a mind diseased, nor how sub-carbonates and proto-chlorides may compensate to the faded spirit of an ennuyée fine lady for the bygone delights of a London or a Paris season; much less, through what magnetic influence gambling and gossip can possibly alleviate affections of the liver, or roulette be made a medical agent in the treatment of chronic rheumatism.
It may be replied that much of the benefit – some would go farther, and say all – to be expected from the watering-places is derivable from change of scene and habit of living, new faces, new interests, new objects of curiosity, aided by agreeable intercourse, and what the medical folk call ‘pleasant and cheerful society.’ This, be it known, is no chance collocation of words set down at random; it is a bona fide technical – as much so as the hardest Greek compound that ever floored an apothecary. ‘Pleasant and cheerful society!’ they speak of it as they would of the latest improvement in chemistry or the last patent medicine – a thing to be had for asking for, like opodeldoc or Morison’s pills. A line of treatment is prescribed for you, winding up in this one principle; and your physician, as he shakes your hand and says ‘good-bye,’ seems like an angel of benevolence, who, instead of consigning you to the horrors of the pharmacopoeia and a sick-bed, tells you to pack off to the Rhine, spend your summer at Ems or Wiesbaden, and, above all things, keep early hours, and ‘pleasant, cheerful society.’
Oh, why has no martyr to the miseries of a ‘liver’ or the sorrows of ‘nerves’ ever asked his M.D. where – where is this delightful intercourse to be found? or by what universal principle of application can the same tone of society please the mirthful and the melancholy, the man of depressed, desponding habit, and the man of sanguine, hopeful temperament? How can the indolent and lethargic soul be made to derive pleasure from the hustling energies of more excited natures, or the fidgety victim of instability sympathise with the delights of quiet and tranquillity? He who enjoys ‘rude health’ – the phrase must have been invented by a fashionable physician; none other could have deemed such a possession an offensive quality – may very well amuse himself by the oddities and eccentricities of his fellow-men, so ludicrously exhibited en scene before him. But in what way will these things appear to the individual with an ailing body and a distempered brain? It is impossible that contrarieties of temperament would ever draw men into close intimacy during illness. The very nature of a sick man’s temper is to undervalue all sufferings save his own and those resembling his. The victim of obesity has no sympathies with the martyr to atrophy; he may envy, he cannot pity him. The man who cannot eat surely has little compassion for the woes of him who has the ‘wolf,’ and must be muzzled at meal times. The result, then, is obvious. The gloomy men get together in groups, and croak in concert; each mind brings its share of affliction to the common fund, and they form a joint-stock company of misery that rapidly assists their progress to the grave; while the nervously excited ones herd together by dozens, suggesting daily new extravagances and caprices for the adoption of one another, till there is not an air-drawn dagger of the mind unfamiliar to one among them; and in this race of exaggerated sensibility they not uncommonly tumble over the narrow boundary that separates eccentricity from something worse.
This massing together of such people in hundreds must be ruinous to many, and few can resist the depressing influence which streets full of pale faces suggest, or be proof against the melancholy derivable from a whole promenade of cripples. There is something indescribably sad in these rendezvous of ailing people from all parts of Europe – north, south, east, and west; the snows of Norway and the suns of Italy; the mountains of Scotland and the steppes of Russia; comparing their symptoms and chronicling their sufferings; watching with the egotism of sickness the pallor on their neighbour’s cheek, and calculating their own chances of recovery by the progress of some other invalid.
But were this all, the aspect might suggest gloomy thoughts, but could not excite indignant ones. Unhappily, however, there is a reverse to the medal. ‘The pleasant and cheerful society,’ so confidently spoken of by your doctor has another representation than in the faces of sick people. These watering-places are the depots of continental vice, the licensed bazaars of foreign iniquity, the sanctuary of the outlaw, the home of the swindler, the last resource of the ruined debauchee, the one spot of earth beneath the feet of the banished defaulter. They are the parliaments of European blackguardism, to which Paris contributes her escrocs, England her ‘legs’ from Newmarket and Doncaster, and Poland her refugee counts – victims of Russian cruelty and barbarity.
To begin – and to understand the matter properly, you must begin by forgetting all you have been so studiously storing up as fact from the books of Head, Granville, and others, and merely regard them as the pleasant romances of gentlemen who like to indulge their own easy humours in a vein of agreeable gossip, or the more profitable occupation of collecting grand-ducal stars and snuff-boxes.
These delightful pictures of Brunnens, secluded in the recesses of wild mountain districts inaccessible save to some adventurous traveller; the peaceful simplicity of the rural life; the primitive habits of a happy peasantry; the humble but contented existence of a little community estranged from all the shocks and strife of the world; the lovely scenery; the charming intercourse with gifted and cultivated minds; the delightful reunions, where Metternich, Chateaubriand, and Humboldt are nightly to be met, mixing among the rest of the company, and chatting familiarly with every stranger; the peaceful tranquillity of the spot – an oasis in the great desert of the world’s troubles, where the exhausted mind and tired spirit may lie down in peace and take its rest, lulled by the sound of falling water or the strains of German song – these, I say, cleverly put forward, with ‘eight illustrations taken on the spot,’ make pretty books – pleasant to read, but not less dangerous to follow; while exaggerated catalogues of cures and recoveries, the restoration from sufferings of a life long, the miraculous list of sick men made sound ones through the agency of sulphurates and sub-carbonates, are still more to be guarded against as guides to the spas of Germany.
Now, I would not for a moment be supposed to throw discredit on the efficiency of Aix or Ems, Wiesbaden or Töplitz, or any of them. In some cases they have done, and will do, it may be hoped, considerable benefit to many sufferers. I would merely desire to slide in, amidst the universal paen of praise, a few words of caution respecting the morale of these watering-places; and in doing so I shall be guided entirely by the same principle I have followed in all the notes of my ‘Loiterings,’ rather to touch follies and absurdities than to go deeper down into the strata of crimes and vices; at the same time, wherever it may be necessary for my purpose, I shall not scruple to cut into the quick if the malady need it.
And to begin – imagine in the first place a Grand-Duchy of such moderate proportions that its sovereign dare not take in the ‘Times’ newspaper; for if he opened it, he must intrude upon the territory of his neighbours. His little kingdom, however, having all the attributes of a real state, possesses a minister for the home and a minister for the foreign department; it has a chancellor of the exchequer and a secretary-at-war; and if there were half a mile of seaboard, would inevitably have a board of admiralty and a ministre de la marine. It is also provided with a little army, something in the fashion of Bombastes Furioso’s, where each arm of the service has its one representative, or that admirable Irish corps, which, when inquired after by the General of the District, ‘Where is the Donegal Light Horse?’ was met by the answer of, ‘Here I am, yer honour!’ And though certainly nothing could possibly be more modestly devised than the whole retinue of state, though the fantassins be fifty, and the cavalry five, still they must be fed, clothed, and kept in tobacco – a question of some embarrassment, when it is considered that the Grand-Duchy produces little grain and less grass, has neither manufacture nor trade, nor the means of providing for other wants than those of a simple and hard-working peasantry. There is, however, a palace, with its accompaniments of grand maréchal, equerries, cooks, and scullions – a vast variety of officials of every grade and class, who must be provided for. How is this done? Simply enough, when the secret is once known – four yards of green baize, with two gentlemen armed with wooden rakes, and a box full of five-franc pieces. Nothing more is wanting. For the mere luxury of the thing, as a matter of pin-money to the grand-duchess, if there be one, you may add a roulette-table; but rouge et noir will supply all the trumpery expedients of taxation, direct and indirect. You neither want collectors, custom-houses, nor colonies; you may snap your fingers at trade and import duties, and laugh at the clumsy contrivances by which other chancellors provide for the expenditure of other countries.
The machinery of revenue reduces itself to this: first catch a Jew. For your petty villainies any man will suffice; but for your grand schemes of wholesale plunder, there is nothing like an Israelite; besides, he has a kind of pride in his vocation. For the privilege of the gambling-table he will pay munificently, he will keep the whole grand-ducal realm in beer and beetroot the year through, and give a very respectable privy purse to the sovereign besides. To him you deliver up all the nations of the earth outside your own little frontier, none of those within it being under any pretext admitted inside the walls of the gambling-house; for, like the sick apothecary, you know better than to take anything in the shop. You give him a carte-blanche, sparing the little realm of Hesse-Homburg, to cheat the English, pigeon the Russians, ruin French, Swedes, Swiss, and Yankees to his heart’s content; you set no limits to his grand career of roguery; you deliver, bound, into his hands all travellers within your realm, to be fleeced as it may seem fit. What care you for the din of factories or the clanking hammers of the foundries? The rattle of the dice-box and the scraping of the croupier’s mace are pleasanter sounds, and fully as suggestive of wealth. You need not descend into the bowels of the earth for riches; the gold, ready stamped from the mint, comes bright and shining to your hand. Fleets may founder and argosies may sink, but your dollars come safely in the pockets of their owners, and are paid, without any cost of collection, into the treasury of the State. Manchester may glut the earth with her printed calicoes, Sheffield may produce more carving-knives than there are carvers. Your resources can suffer no such casualties as these; you trade upon the vices of mankind, and need never dread a year of scarcity. The passion for play is more contagious than the smallpox, and unhappily the malady returns after the first access. Every gambler who leaves fifty napoleons in your territory is bound in a kind of recognisance to return next year and lose double the sum. Each loss is but an instalment of the grand total of his ruin, and you have contracted for that.
But even the winner does not escape you. A hundred temptations are provided to seduce him into extravagance and plunge him into expense – tastes are suggested, and habits of luxury inculcated, that turn out sad comforters when a reverse of fortune compels him to a more limited expenditure; so that when you extinguish the unlucky man by a summary process, you reserve a lingering death for the more fortunate one. In the language of the dock, it is only ‘a long day’ he obtains, after all.
How pleasant, besides, to reflect that the storms of political strife, which agitate other heads, never reach yours. The violence of party spirit, the rancour of the press, are hushed before the decorous silence of the gaming-table and the death-like stillness of rouge et noir. There is no need of a censorship when there is a croupier. The literature of your realm is reduced to a card, to be pricked by the pin of a gamester; and men have no heads for the pleasures of reading, when stared in the face by ruin. Other states may occupy themselves with projects of philanthropy and benevolence, they may project schemes of public usefulness and advantage, they may advance the arts of civilisation, and promote plans of national greatness; your course is an easier path, and is never unsuccessful.
But some one may say here, How are these people to live? I agree at once with the sentiment – no one is more ready to assent to that excellent adage – ‘Il faut que tout le monde vive, even grand-dukes.’ But there are a hundred ways of eking out subsistence in cheap countries, without trenching on morality. The military service of Austria, Prussia, and Russia is open to them, should their own small territories not suffice for moderate wants and wishes. In any case I am not going to trouble my head with providing for German princes, while I have a large stock of nephews and nieces little better off. All I care for at present is to point out the facts of a case, and not to speculate how they might be altered.
Now, to proceed. In proportion as vice is more prevalent, the decorum of the world would appear to increase, and internal rottenness and external decency bear a due relation to each other. People could not thus violate the outward semblance of morality, by flocking in hundreds and tens of hundreds to those gambling states, those rouge et noir dependencies, those duchies of the dice-box. A man’s asking a passport for Baden would be a tacit averment, ‘I am going to gamble.’ Ordering post-horses for Ems would be like calling for ‘fresh cards’; and you would as soon confess to having passed a few years in Van Diemen’s Land as acknowledge a summer on the Rhine.
What, then, was to be done? It was certainly a difficulty, and might have puzzled less ingenious heads than grand-ducal advisers. They, however, soon hit upon the expedient. They are shrewd observers, and clever men of the world. They perceived that while other eras have been marked by the characteristic designation of brass, gold, or iron, this, with more propriety, might be called the age of bile. Never was there a period when men felt so much interested in their stomachs; at no epoch were mankind so deeply concerned for their livers; this passion – for it is such – not being limited to the old or feeble, to the broken and shattered constitution, but extending to all age and sex, including the veteran of a dozen campaigns and the belle of a London season, the hard-lined and seasoned features of a polar traveller, and the pale, soft cheek of beauty, the lean proportions of shrunken age, and the plump development of youthful loveliness. In the words of the song —
‘No age, no profession, no station is free.’
It is the universal mania of our century, and we may expect that one day, our vigorous pursuit of knowledge on the subject will allow us to be honourably classed with the equally intelligent seekers for the philosopher’s stone. With this great feature of the time, then, nothing was easier than to comply. The little realm of Hesse-Homburg might not have attractions of scenery or society; its climate might, like most of those north of the Alps, be nothing to boast of; its social advantages being a zero, what could it possess as a reason – a good, plausible reason, for drawing travellers to its frontier? Of course, a Spa! – something very nauseous and very foul smelling, as nearly as possible like a warm infusion of rotten eggs, thickened with red clay. Germany happily abounds in these; Nature has been kind to her, at least underground, and you have only to dig two feet in any limestone district to meet with the most sovereign thing on earth for stomachic derangements.
The Spa discovered, a doctor was found to analyse it, and another to write a book upon it. Nothing more were necessary. The work, translated into three or four languages, set forth all the congenial advantages of pumps and promenades, sub-carbonates, tables d’hôte, waltzing, and mineral waters. The pursuit of health no longer presented a grim goddess masquerading in rusty black and a bald forehead, but a lovely nymph, in a Parisian toilette, conversing like a Frenchwoman, and dancing like an Austrian.
Who would not be ill, I wonder? Who would not discover that Hampshire was too high and Essex too low, Devon too close and Cumberland too bracing? Who would not give up his village M.D., and all his array of bottles, with their long white cravats, for a ramble to the Rhine, where luxurious living, belles, and balls abounded, and where soit dit en passant, the rouge et noir table afforded the easy resource of supplying all such pleasures, so that you might grow robust and rich at once, and while imbibing iron into your blood, lay up a stock of gold with your banker? Hence the connection between Spas and gambling; hence the fashionable flocking to those healthful spots by thousands who never felt illness; hence the unblushing avowal of having been a month at Baden by those who would flinch at acknowledging an hour in a ‘hell’; and hence, more important than all, at least to one individual concerned, the source of that real alchemy by which a grand-duke, like Macheath, can
‘Turn all his lead to gold.’
Well may he exclaim, with the gallant captain —
‘Fill every glass!’
Were the liquor champagne or tokay, it could not be a hundredth part as profitable; and the whole thing presents a picture of ‘hocussing’ on the grandest scale ever adopted.
The fifteen glasses of abomination demand a walk of half an hour, or a sojourn in the Cursaal. The Cursaal is a hell! there is no need to mince it. The taste for play is easily imbibed – what bad taste is not? – and thus, while you are drawing the pump, the grand-duke is diving into your pocket. Here, then – I shall not add a word – is the true state of the Spas of Germany. As I believe it is customary to distinguish all writers on these ‘fountains of health’ by some mark of princely favour proportionate to their services of praise, I beg to add, if the Gross Herzog von Hesse-Homburg deems the present a suitable instance for notice, that Arthur O’Leary will receive such evidence of grand-ducal approbation with a most grateful spirit, and acknowledge the same in some future volume of his ‘Loiterings,’ only requesting to mention that when Theodore Hook – poor fellow! – was dining once with a London alderman remarkable for the display and the tedium of his dinners, he felt himself at the end of an hour and a half’s vigorous performance only in the middle of the entertainment; upon which he laid down his knife, and in a whisper uttered: ‘Eating more is out of the question; so I ‘ll take the rest out in money.’
