A Remarkable Adventure in Germany

by Robin Goodfellow

Mr. Frederick Leftwitch was corpulent. To speak euphoniously of the worthy man's helpmate, her condition was embonpoint. Yet, twenty years earlier, he had figured as an Apollo among cheese-mongers' assistants, whilst she had the reputation of being the most gracefully-shaped of milliners' apprentices. They had married, they had lived happily together, they had each grown fat at the same time, and remained so ever since. They had thriven, too, in no small degree, as appeared from the set of books just balanced by the gentleman, as the twain sat, an example of connubial felicity, one on each side of the domestic hearth, within a small parlor behind their shop, situate in a thoroughfare closely adjacent to Cheapside.

"What think you, old lady," said the husband, rubbing his legs in ecstacy, "of thirty thousand pounds to the good, as shown by the last stocktaking?"

The lady had not many words to say, but laughed in chorus with her husband.

"And, more than that. I am offered two thousand pounds for the goodwill of the business, and can leave it to-morrow."

"And the little villa you bought at Twickenham, and gave to me as a birthday gift, has doubled its value; has it not?"

"Yes; and the tenant's lease will soon be up."

"But not for three months yet; and then the house will have to be renovated and furnished. What are we to do in the meantime? I don't like lodgings. What say you to a quiet jaunt to the continent?"

"I was just thinking the same thing," said Mr. Leftwitch, with his usual hearty accompaniment of cacchinations. "Of all things, I should like to see the factories where they make the Gouda cheese and the Kiel butter. I don't care much about mere pleasure."

"And I," said the lady, "have been longing for years to mingle with the crowds on the Boulevards, and have a good look at the newest spring bonnets exhibited at the Palais Royal. I think we have by this time had quite enough of cheese and butter."

Now, the Dutch towns alluded to by the gentleman are a long way from the celebrated city of vanity, and the opinions of the two seemed nearly as far apart. The difficulty, however, was got over, as many another difficulty between them had been, by mutual concession. Mr. Leftwitch would go to Paris, to oblige his wife; she would visit Holland, willingly, to please her husband.

They visited Paris first. Mr Leftwitch, without any very great professed regard for the pleasures of gay life, laughed heartily at the mountebanks, enjoyed the opera, admired the dresses, was enthusiastically pleased with the drama, of which he did not understand a syllable; and considered the ballet perfection. The lady, by the way, altered slightly from her spouse in the latter particular.

In Holland matters were a little reversed. Mrs. Leftwitch was in this instance the conceding party. The cheese factories she considered especial objects of interest, and the dairies paradises of delight. She praised the fraus and honored mynheers with approving smiles. She declared the flat scenery of the Netherlands delightful, and the galliots on the Zuyder Zee models of symmetrical beauty. She even went so far as to taste, and signify her delight at tasting, schnapps because the same was offered her by an Amsterdam merchant, with whom Mr. Leftwitch had business transactions for more than a decade.

Never was there a happier couple, or rather a trio, for, as neither understood any language but their own, they had, while at Paris, engaged a courier to act for them as interpreter. As the two English travellers paid munificently, their pro tem companioin was, of course, delighted, as much with his proteges, as were the latter with all they saw.

As the courier spoke German as well as he did Dutch, French and English, the party resolved to include the Fatherland in their visit. They sailed, therefore, up the Rhine, gazed in awe upon the Drachenfels, extended their tour to Vienna, to Geneva, to Dresden, to every place of note to be arrived at by railway or steamer.

"As we are out on the spree," said the courier, facetiously, "well, we'd go to the Spree," which, by the way, is the noted river upon which stands the City of Berlin.

Now, at Berlin there is a museum in which some very fine specimens of sculpture are exhibited. The courier, being a man of refinement, her endeavoured to cultivate the artistic taste of his friends, and was so successful, at least with one of them, that, as Mr. Leftwitch stood one day for the twentieth time before a copy of Thorwalsden's Venus, he heaved a deep sigh and said:

"What a splendid figure!"

At this Mrs. Leftwitch grew jealous, fancying that the words were a reflection upon her own somewhat portly form.

Mr. Leftwitch endeavored to pacify his spouse by telling her that the figure was just such as was her own when he had first known her twenty years before.

Mrs. Leftwitch, however, knew that it was not her figure at the time of present speaking, and refused to be comforted.

There was a tiff; then a worse tiff still. When Mr. Leftwitch wanted to kiss his wife and make it up, she would not kiss him. When she, in turn, wished to kiss her husband, he would not return the salute. If Mr. Leftwitch embraced Mrs. leftwitch she flew at him, he said, like an infuriated tiger. If Mrs. Leftwitch clung to the neck of Mr. Leftwitch, the lady asserted that he bounced about just as would a mad bull at a five-bared gate.

The lady pined over this state of things in secret. The grief, however, did not seem to act upon her physical condition. She may have lost spirits, but she suffered no diminuation of weight or bulk. Not so Mr. Leftwitch. The trouble was evidently reducing him in a corporeal sense considerably. he gave way also to dissipation. Night after night, he might be seen frequenting bier gartens, smoking saloons, herren abends, and shooting galleries, at which latter place he was growing to be such an expert as to be able to hit a target the size of a soup plate at five paces distance. He allowed his moustache to grow, and adopted the semi-military costume of the modern Teutons. Mr. Frederick Leftwitch was evidently on the high road to the dogs, the courier being his well-paid leader. So, therefore, all was now discord. The tour had lost all its pleasure, but, thank goodness, it was almost over.

The last night had come, and Mr. Leftwitch invited the courier to a supper, and, as he said, a stirrup cup at parting.

The two, or rather the three—for the lady had, after many refusals, consented to be present—sat down to a splendid repast of German delicacies—pate de fois gras, Strasbourg sausages, butter brod, caviare, saur kraut, &c., duly washed down with Rhine wine and lager bier. Mr. Leftwitch, who, until his recent troubles dawned upon him, had never previously smoked in his life, ventured upon a meerschaum of enormous dimensions, whilst the courier puffed away at so many cigars that finally the lady left the room in evident disgust.

Alone, together, the courier resolved to give a final touch to the aesthetic tastes of his protegés, and once more got Mr. Leftwitch to praise the statue that had caused all the jealousy.

"Yes," said the courier, "there is certainly no more elegant figure than that of woman, when symmetrically formed, just as there are few things so hideous when she loses her pristine shape and grows preternaturally fat."

Perhaps Mr. Leftwitch had drank a little too deeply, or smoked a little too long; maybe, he did not hear the remark, but unfortunately his wife, who had returned to the door to listen, heard the courier, and, as her once loving spouse did not reply, she immediately deemed the conversation a concerted insult to herself.

In a moment, therefore, she entered the room, seized the courier by the scruff of the neck, pushed him out of the door, and threw his hat after him down the stairs. This was how they parted company.

Having got rid of their visitor, the lady turning to her husband, soundly boxed his ears.

The latter, so assailed, either taking the matter in dudgeon or being a little too far gone to move, threw himself back in his chair, vowing he would stop there until morning. Upon which Mrs. Leftwitch went to bed in a towering passion.

It was the first night, for twenty years, the worthy couple had ever slept apart. It is doubtful whether they actually slept apart on that night, since it was the opinion of the gentleman that he never once closed his eyes. As for the lady, he heard her crying herself nearly blind until ten o'clock next day, and she was then found to be so ill that leaving for home was utterly out of the question.

She grew worse and worse every day, and in a week she died, as she said, and as Mr. Leftwitch afterwards confessed, "literally of a broken heart."

Having killed her, as he weepingly exclaimed, the grief of the husband knew no bounds. He had no heart to go to England now, and so he stopped and stopped week after week behind, going every night to shed his bitter tears over the grave of the departed.

He was doing so one night when he suddenly became aware of some one standing on the opposite side of the grave. It was an elegant female figure dressed in deep mourning, and with a thick crape veil drawn closely over her face.

"Have you lost a relative?" asked Mr. Leftwitch.

"Yes, my once kind husband," was the reply. "And you?"

"My once dear wife."

There was something so piteous in the tones of both that Mr. Leftwitch took the lady's hand in sympathy, and, in sorrow, the lady did not withdraw it.

Mr. Leftwitch, too, was reminded both by the lady's voice and figure of his deceased wife as he knew her in former days. Possibly the lady might have been reminded by the voice and figure of her late husband. At any rate, even in that solemn place and with such sorrowful surroundings both were deeply smitten with each other. They were so deeply smitten that Mr. Leftwitch had proposed, and been accepted without having seen the face of his betrothed, for by no intreaties could he persuade her to raise her veil.

"And our wedding day?" said the delighted lover.

"Our wedding night, you rather mean," said the lady. "After our late grief, what time so fitting for a new union as the hours of darkness?"

Suddenly Mr. Leftwitch looked round and saw that the church was brilliantly illuminated. Inspired by this circumstance, he said,

"And what time so fitted as this night?"

"Amen," said the lady, holding out her hand.

Mr. Leftwitch took the hand, and at the same moment the church door opened, and there emerged therefrom some twenty acolytes, clothed in sable garments.

When the happy pair entered the church, they found it hung with cloth of ebon hue. The priests were clothed in black, and the couple were wedded with a mourning ring. And still the lady would not raise her veil.

In the churchyard, all the crowd looked like the followers at a funeral, and all the flower girls, who strewed the bridal path, wore dresses of mournful crape.. A mourning coach, too, drawn by four horses having the color of the raven's wing, stood without the gate of the churchyard, while the bell of the church steeple rang out a solemn knell instead of the usual wedding peal.

"Whither go we now?" said the bridegroom.

"Home; to my house or to yours?" was the reply.

Mr. Leftwitch would have led his partner towards the coach, gloomy as it looked, but she, instead, led him towards the grave.

To the surprise of the bridegroom, the grave was now open, and, looking down into it, he saw that the coffin had its lid removed, and was quite empty.

"What is all this?" said Mr. Leftwitch, a shiver for the first time running through his body.

"That that coffin is our bridal bed;—that I, your bride, am your late plump wife. I am thin enough now to suit your taste. Behold!" And, for the first time raising her veil, the bride showed her astonished husband that beneath her bonnet was a grinning skull. Lifting her sleeve, she showed him further her fleshless arms. He had married his late wife, indeed, but it was her SKELETON!

Well might the bridegroom shudder, for the thought of Alonzo and the Fair Imogene, and of the corpse of the dead hussar who bore off on horseback the lost Lenore.

He tried to fly, but the skeleton form held him fast, and, throwing her arms round him, both sunk into the grave and into the coffin.

Suddenly, the mouth of the grave seemed to swarm with ghastly spectres, who closed down the coffin. Then the clods began to fall upon the lid.

"Stay!" said the lady, "you have yet to receive my bridal kiss." She bent over her, by this time almost lifeless, spouse, and, as she did so, a fat worm dropped from out her empty eyeballs upon the husband's cheek.

The event seemed to lend him the energy he lacked before, and with a shriek he tried to spring upwards.

And in that act he not only freed himself from the skeleton, but almost upset the real and still living Mrs. Leftwitch, who had left her bed, and was bending over the man who, as she thought, so cruelly used her. She had come back to wake him up; he had fallen asleep after his drinking bout, and was snoring dreadfully. As for the incident of the worm, it was easily explained. Mr. Leftwitch found something wet upon his face, and soon discovered, too, that the same was a tear dropped there by his still loving partner.

As everything was packed, and, indeed, already shipped on board the steamer, the pair, with all their renewed happiness, sailed for England that afternoon.

Arriving thereat, they speedily took up their abode at the Twickenham villa.

Maybe they took to Banting, and lost their respective corpulences—Mr. Leftwitch, if anything, was regaining his rotundity; possibly the husband's craving for perfect symmetry had departed; or, peradventure, they did as they had resolved to do at the commencement of their continental trip—that is, made mutual concessions. At all events, they have never had a tiff since, nor are they likely to have one any more.

Warragul Guardian and Buln Buln and Narracan Shire Advocate, Thursday 30 December 1880, supplement page 1-2.