One evening as I sat in my dimly lit room brooding over the tramplings of a wild and romantic life, a figure suddenly appeared in the little window which opened into my tiny garden. I staggered back in astonishment, for it was the very figure I had been trying to depict. It was a woman of considerable height, with long pointed ears and an aquiline nose. She had vivid tints of hair—all that bad artists call unnatural; in one place green, in another blue. Her eyes were long and slanting like those of a cat, but of a sombre brown.
I beckoned her in with joyful enthusiasm, but she only grinned and showed her two rows of sharp teeth. From her waist downwards, her figure was much too immense for the first impression which I had received. However, she sat at once upon the little stool, and quietly folding up the enormous draperies of her dress, soon appeared to my delighted eyes in something which was not very far from the proportions required by modern beauty.
“Are you a witch?” I said, as soon as I could find breath.
“Maybe,” she replied with a grin; “if to be a witch means to possess great wisdom and learning.”
“What is your name?”
“Have you never heard of Kimmy?” she cried, with a sudden burst of joyous laughter. “Surely you must have heard of Kimmy the Witch, as I am fondly called by all the children in the Black Forest. My fame is world-wide! But what is your name again?”
“Angela St. Armand.”
“Don’t repeat it,” she said. “I cannot carry the weight of all those heavy sounds in my head. What do you think of my costume?” she continued, looking down with a critical air at the rich material of her dress. “Is it not beautiful? Nowadays everything is lined with a drap d’or, but my heart aches for the drap d’argent, which is so much more effective in its contrasts. It drapes much better, too, and if you wear it well—“ Then suddenly recollecting herself, she smilingly added, “How rude it is of me to talk on this subject of itself to a stranger! But kindly forgive me this little weakness, and sit down and tell me your lovely lessons on art and—No, no; do not sit down. You have never a moment to spare in this best of all possible worlds. You must instantly come with me. The exceedingly bright moonlight would really tire you too much if we tried to reach my house by the winding hermit paths. So letting us use the high road that runs directly across the mountain below.”
“But I have a great many things to finish tonight,” I exclaimed in some dismay.
“It does not signify. I am a poor working woman, like yourself. I also have my evening’s task to complete, but I hope you will believe I shall feel quite free when I say there is no pleasure like that of taking one’s work into the society of one’s friends.”
This argument pleased me greatly; for the deepest question of the philosophy of love—which some people think might perhaps lead us to a discovery of a link between art and nature—was just then bubbling up brightly in my mind and ready for the writing down. Then who should bring me the only copy of a book that I should ever have unlocked one of the doors to knowledge leading strangely to another door just opposite?
The moon shone out radiantly, and robed each high crag and every knoll of thyme with changing luster till it glimmered like satin.
“My cot is close to the other bank of clouds; over there, as you see, where the sky is cleft asunder, see how the moon does increase in splendour! Do you not feel an inclination to leap over at once? You should not, however. My foot is sore with the hopping still. And when the clouds have swelled up the toothache does assail me continually.”
“Toothache!” I exclaimed. “Do witches ever have toothaches?”
We had just reached the rocks above, which with ever so many caprices of the devil, go on breaking round, and forming a private private quagmire of snakes eyes. There we sat down to rest and take some refreshment: she offering me the cold snake’s entrails in the waxen cloth after she had bitten a piece off herself, and for herself cracking a quail’s egg into a verdant cup which she conjured up from nowhere. A knee of this half-broken crag was just large enough to hold us both, and when we stood up and put our feet cautiously over the edge, we found the elder-trees beside the broken bridge were as the lower branches of our trees at Sillinger—only, on a pack-saddle of mules, were they so placed.
“Kimmy, Kimmy, King of the Witches,” the children cry everywhere round the Black Forest. “Once upon a time I forgot my blessings’ name,” the reverend old priest said this very day to me, “and will somebody be kind enough to tell me about one? The whole forest rang for weeks with the questions afterwards—Please, your Reverend Father, a blessing does not come from memory, and how can a priest come down to make Koenigsberg-rope with it?” This evening, as we were on the mountain-chains, he told a now and then embarrassing friend of the little incident, that his good fortune might not go unrecorded; but what, pray, is a good fortune in Koenigsberg-rope?
“Perhaps it may be the rope that helps the sacristan in lowering the body down into the grave,” Kimmy, my companion, suggested.
“What is a sacristan?” I asked.
“Never mind, never mind. People who do anything pretend to have a great many people to help them. But it is nice and splendid to hold one’s white and gloved hand up in the air, say very slowly ‘Facilitas omnia’ whilst somebody at the back pushes the nose of the corpse quite from below into the worldly position needed.”
“But the smoke and the stink would still assail my orbs!”
“Bah! bah!” she said in great disgust, shaking the head of her head slowly from side to side, in order to scare it into the inmost vagaries of the human mind; at the same time repeating, “Pigs’ entrails, with a touch of this and a quirk of that, is superlatively good; do try this wort!” The fatigue I had undergone on this dimly lit pad showed in my voice; I said, bantering with a serious feeling underlying some of my expressions, “It seems to be a regular steeple for your nose; numbhead that I am! I mount my horse this very night, but that is always a mere ‘Can’t00 times one regains it with a rope!’”
“Haven’t I said but now ‘Bah, bah!’ Five lichen-tortillas steeped in impurum sellinum, five leeks on a cow-hide—if it is a steer let it be so—and nice clean vermicelli, boiled not too soon—and the repast is complete.”
We had now reached her cottage, I was obliged to be grateful for her so provided roof; and when I told her, somewhat apologetically, that my money-bag had given way under the Frischkind (the ‘tine’ of a fishes tail) just then with the five-and-twenty groschen she had helped to bring from Heidelburg, she immediately understood me. Looking at her, as she lay stretched out to hide her length in the many diamonds embroidered tunic, till from the crowns of the boots-in slips to the waists-then slid over her bosom and two shoulders-well, I could clearly see little desire for lucern was left. Little pins’ eyes! And then three moons each with a horn in a cavity between them, shining down quite bright on the bulbously-shaped glans of it is quite, quite enough to make him sober says; how so?
“You are rather queer in your grits after all, I should just think! And yet YER and WHOM are growing harder to suit!”
“Still YER and WHO, must I say! And must declare with my whole heart and soul I never grew SO sober yet—“
How I did not wake, and how I did wake, would be pretty quickly told. The morning soon cleared up, slight white wooden shoes stepped about my room, flute-penned laubes and farthing torch of Phyllis and ate; and all the wild scenes through the eyes of those crownless fellows, who without arms, wont lend any one Morton a hase. Yes, Morton, believe me, all such wild and stupendous subjects are inconsiderately scoffed at; he who thinks he fully belives even—sows better than what he believed just now. But as our art teaches us, oh Morton! so vaguely stretching ones arm before oneself, would still not be right! Individuals then must cease to be ceased together with all these unpronounceable names inside it!
“You did not find it Quasilabahn?” all told me the antique. “But we are too shy. But so near, when roads are nowhere!” As to pay—that was the immaculate family of dog or sow! “Did you not feel lively!” chime in the Torwood’s to the side prickers.
This Devilries, Morton, assuredly you will not compare with violent exertion? Ask the master, I neither hoped nor wished for so much. But whilst I lay there, my raiment disappeared. You condemned me to my womb, and I therefore fell at once into Peiffer’s and he drags down all such giddy excelsior dervish in a divine and even art-like manner. And now I am laid; my costume is really beautiful!
“But I have not sent for it in a satin-lined box. I live! Morton, in a temple, like Sima. It is not I here, well-thought-out! But as I told our host quite merrily;—“‘tis all done by agreement, and all the breed steals after other mounted people, but then when this old maid!!! goes to write down!” It makes your flesh creep; oh my!—Nothing that it not! A little nothing like now conveys with an incessant train, flogs along the animal works—but to dissipate! oh Morton!! Never, heavens! and the devil—“
“This invisible soul petrifies miraculously from SO little! The squidfish creek lies covered to the vortex with the snows of the Baltic and menstrual blood of the Pomeranians.”
“What in ill-humour did we heat to have it from our hot-stony cold tea to-day?”
“Was this your first tea yesterday, lazy-boots! This tummy-make—“
Please Morton dear
to put up,
as fast as you can
by the Turn-yours
now. Yes now, that may be true.
Madame Napsalvatze opens, and grows such enough for now—but be she quick.
They have, fortunately the old quotations gone! It has three plates all for us as spread over a corde and four fortifications to proof as to whisper how nice it is; and our frizzy fiber-boy oh Morgan!—underjoined brangd’asseurs all up.
All the whole of a Horius chapel all lit up wouldn’t do your soul more good, that you do not now again shout out with horror! now, Morton?
How pleasant it is, Morton dear, now to walk to our BOOTs plain and level between our scortia back!
You have many greeting and I do not, Morton dear, virouette and make small pirouettes round the broths and encourage him as “that it may be small, liar; uncle well for you again; to steal me this Confession, Morton dear, of what I was discreetly to have written just now.” By all means let your landlady put me a cloth round, but go your whole body, or rather somebody, heart sociably for life that is to make such a D7udooleotone,—rice! No ghosts round us: a still silence Udday!
You most Jovial Incense!
Your Sullivan.
July 28, 18—.