The Bride of the Nile — Complete by Georg Ebers (best historical fiction books of all time txt) 📖

Besa the Egyptian god, who, as I have been told by our old friend Horus, from whom we derive all our Egyptian lore, presided among those heathen over festivity, jesting, and wit, and also over the toilet of women. This shows the subtle observation of the ancients; for the hunchback whose body is bent, applies a crooked standard to things in general. His keen insight often enables him to measure life as the majority of men do, that is by a straight rule; but in some happy moments when he yields to natural impulse he makes the straight crooked and the crooked straight; and this gives rise to wit, which only consists in looking at things obliquely and—setting them askew as it were. You have only to talk to my hump-backed gardener Gibbus, or listen to what he says. When he is sitting with the rest of our people in an evening, they all laugh as soon as he opens his mouth.—And why? Because his conformation makes him utter nothing but paradoxes.—You know what they are?”

“Certainly.”

“And you, Pul?”

“No, Father.”

“You are too straight-nay, and so is your simple soul, to know what the thing is! Well, listen then: It would be a paradox, for instance, if I were to say to the Bishop as he marches past in procession: ‘You are godless out of sheer piety;’ or if I were to say to Paula, by way of excuse for all the flattery which I and your mother offered her just now: ‘Our incense was nauseous for very sweetness.’—These paradoxes, when examined, are truths in a crooked form, and so they best suit the deformed. Do you understand?”

“Certainly,” said Paula.

“And you, Pul?”

“I am not quite sure. I should be better pleased to be simply told: ‘We ought not to have made such flattering speeches; they may vex a young girl.’”

“Very good, my straightforward child,” laughed her father. “But look, there is the man! Here, good Gibbus—come here!—Now, just consider: supposing you had flattered some one so grossly that you had offended him instead of pleasing him: How would you explain the state of affairs in telling me of it?”

The gardener, a short, square man, with a huge hump but a clever face and good features, reflected a minute and then replied: “I wanted to make an ass smell at some roses and I put thistles under his nose.”

“Capital!” cried Paula; and as Gibbus turned away, laughing to himself, the physician said:

“One might almost envy the man his hump. But yet, fair Paula, I think we have some straight-limbed folks who can make use of such crooked phrases, too, when occasion serves.”

But Rufinus spoke before Paula could reply, referring her to his Essay on the deformed in soul and body; and then he went on vehemently:

“I call you all to witness, does not Baste, the lame woman, restrict her views to the lower aspect of things, to the surface of the earth indeed? She has one leg much shorter than the other, and it is only with much pains that we have contrived that it should carry her. To limp along at all she is forced always to look down at the ground, and what is the consequence? She can never tell you what is hanging to a tree, and about three weeks since I asked her under a clear sky and a waning moon whether the moon had been shining the evening before and she could not tell me, though she had been sitting out of doors with the others till quite late, evening after evening. I have noticed, too, that she scarcely recognizes men who are rather tall, though she may have seen them three or four times. Her standard has fallen short-like her leg. Now, am I right or wrong?”

“In this instance you are right,” replied Philippus, “still, I know some lame people...”

And again words ran high between the friends; Pulcheria, however, put an end to the discussion this time, by exclaiming enthusiastically:

“Baste is the best and most good-natured soul in the whole house!”

“Because she looks into her own heart,” replied Rufinus. “She knows herself; and, because she knows how painful pain is, she treats others tenderly. Do you remember, Philippus, how we disputed after that anatomical lecture we heard together at Caesarea?”

“Perfectly well,” said the leech, “and later life has but confirmed the opinion I then held. There is no less true or less just saying than the Latin motto: ‘Mens sana in corpore sano,’ as it is generally interpreted to mean that a healthy soul is only to be found in a healthy body. As the expression of a wish it may pass, but I have often felt inclined to doubt even that. It has been my lot to meet with a strength of mind, a hopefulness, and a thankfulness for the smallest mercies in the sickliest bodies, and at the same time a delicacy of feeling, a wise reserve, and an undeviating devotion to lofty things such as I have never seen in a healthy frame. The body is but the tenement of the soul, and just as we find righteous men and sinners, wise men and fools, alike in the palace and the hovel—nay, and often see truer worth in a cottage than in the splendid mansions of the great—so we may discover noble souls both in the ugly and the fair, in the healthy and the infirm, and most frequently, perhaps, in the least vigorous. We should be careful how we go about repeating such false axioms, for they can only do harm to those who have a heavy burthen to bear through life as it is. In my opinion a hunchback’s thoughts are as straightforward as an athlete’s; or do you imagine that if a mother were to place her new-born children in a spiral chamber and let them grow up in it, they could not tend upwards as all men do by nature?”

“Your comparison limps,” cried Rufinus, “and needs setting to rights. If we are not to find ourselves in open antagonism....”

“You must keep the peace,” Joanna put in addressing her husband; and before Rufinus could retort, Paula had asked him with frank simplicity:

“How old are you, my worthy host?”

“Your arrival at my house blessed the second day of my seventieth year,” replied Rufinus with a courteous bow. His wife shook her finger at him, exclaiming:

“I wonder whether you have not a secret hump? Such fine phrases...”

“He is catching the style from his cripples,” said Paula laughing at him. “But now it is your turn, friend Philippus. Your exposition was worthy of an antique sage, and it struck me—for the sake of Rufinus here I will not say convinced me. I respect you—and yet I should like to know how old....”

“I shall soon be thirty-one,” said Philippus, anticipating her question.

“That is an honest answer,” observed Dame Joanna. “At your age many a man clings to his twenties.”

“Why?” asked Pulcheria.

“Well,” said her mother, “only because there are some girls who think a man of thirty too old to be attractive.”