I answered: Mr Governor could do what he liked. It was all the same to me.
Twenty-Three
Simplicius becomes a pageboy; also, how the hermit’s wife went missing
The priest kept me in his rooms until ten o’clock before escorting me to the governor to tell him what I’d decided. He knew the governor held open table, you see, so with any luck he’d be asked to stay for lunch. The fortified town of Hanau was under blockade at the time. A lot of folk had taken refuge there, and things were tight for the common man. Even people who’d once had pretensions stooped to pick up the now frozen turnip peelings that the wealthy might have tossed out in the street. So well did the priest’s plan succeed, in fact, that he got to sit at the head of the table, beside the governor himself. Meanwhile I, with a serving dish in my hand, waited on the company as instructed by the steward – a job I performed with all the skill of a donkey playing chess. However, the priest made up with his tongue for what my limbs lacked in dexterity. As he pointed out, I’d grown up in the forest, had never been among people, and could be excused on the grounds that I didn’t yet know how to behave. The admirable loyalty I’d shown towards the hermit, together with the harsh life I’d survived while with him, merited not only that my ineptitude be overlooked but also that I be ranked higher than a child of noble birth. The priest went on to relate how the hermit had taken such delight in me because (and this he said repeatedly) I bore a close facial resemblance to his beloved. Also, he’d often been amazed by the fidelity I’d evinced in staying at the man’s side – as well as by the many other virtues he found to praise in me. In brief, the priest couldn’t adequately express how, on a visit shortly before his death, the hermit had commended me to him with burning sincerity, saying he loved me as much as if I’d been his own child.
This gave me a warm tingle in the ears. I felt well compensated for all I’d put up with at the hermit’s. The governor asked if his late brother-in-law had known he was currently in command in Hanau. ‘Of course,’ the priest replied. ‘I told him so myself. However, he reacted as coolly as if he’d never heard the name “Ramsay” before in his life. Such strength of will! He’d not only renounced the world; he’d also, on hearing that his best friend was so close, shown that he’d dismissed the man entirely from his thoughts!’ The governor, not given to soft-hearted, womanish emotions but a tough, even heroic soldier, had tears in his eyes. ‘Had I known,’ he said, ‘that he was still alive and where he was to be found, I’d have had him brought to me (by force, if necessary) so that I might reciprocate his good deeds. However, since fate has denied me that pleasure, I’ll take care of his Simplicius instead. Oh dear!’ he went on, ‘the brave soul was right to mourn his pregnant wife, for during the chase, before even leaving the Spessart, a troop of Imperial horse took her prisoner. When I heard, thinking my brother had died in the fighting near Höchst, I sent a herald to the enemy camp to ask after my sister and offer a ransom for her return. I learnt only that the aforementioned troop of horse, routed by a bunch of peasants (still in the Spessart, this was), had lost her again. I’ve no idea where she is now.’
That was the gist of the governor’s and the priest’s table talk: my hermit, his beloved and how their separation and disappearance were all the more regrettable for their having enjoyed only a year of marriage. Anyway, I became page to the governor and quite a lad – one whom folk, notably the locals I had to announce to the governor, were soon addressing as ‘Young Master’. Come to think of it, you rarely find a youngster who is also a master, whereas all masters were once young men.
Twenty-Four
Simplicius finds fault with people, seeing many false gods in the world
My only admirable qualities at the time were a clear conscience and an honest, godly cast of mind in the context of a noble innocence and simplicity. I knew nothing of sin, except what I’d heard and read, and when I saw a sin actually being committed I found the sight scary and totally unusual. I’d been brought up to think of God as present all the time, and I was used to living in strict obedience to his holy will. Moreover, knowing what God’s will dictated, I gauged a person’s character and conduct accordingly. When I did this out in the world, everything I saw struck me as an abomination. Heavens above! Imagine my surprise when I looked at the law and the prophets, coupled with Christ’s own consistent warnings, and compared them with the actions of his professed disciples and followers. Instead of the straightforwardness that proper Christians ought to show, I saw a lot of hypocrisy, not to say boundless idiocy on the part of everyone I came across. I wondered: are these Christians or not? Obviously, most folk were familiar with God’s solemn will, but where was the solemn determination to bring it about?
That made my head buzz with strange thoughts, and I began to have serious doubts about Christ’s command: ‘Judge not, and ye shall not be judged.’ I recalled Paul’s words in Galatians V, where he writes, ‘Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you now, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.’ It made me think: most people do these things openly, so why shouldn’t I also, in all honesty, conclude from the apostle’s words that not everyone finds salvation?
As well as arrogance and avarice and their esteemed retinue, among the well-to-do the pairs fornication/uncleanness and drunkenness/revellings were practised on a daily basis. But one thing shocked me to the core: the appalling way in which many troopers in particular (the army isn’t famous for coming down hard on sin) tend in their godlessness and by their complete disregard of God’s holy will to treat such matters as a joke. For instance, I once heard an adulterer, keen to show off what he’d done, make this totally profane remark: ‘It serves the gutless cuckold right that he’s wearing horns on my account. Frankly, it was more to hurt the man that I humped the woman. I wanted to take revenge on him.’ ‘Such barefaced spite!’ protested one honest hearer. ‘Fancy staining one’s conscience, solely to gain the shameful name of marriage-breaker!’ ‘What do you mean – “marriage-breaker”?’, the boaster replied with a dry chuckle. ‘That doesn’t make me a marriage-breaker. I may have dented the marriage a little; those who break marriages are the ones the commandment talks about: a person should never climb into another’s garden to pick cherries that belong to the householder himself.’ He promptly went on to say that, according to his devil’s catechism, the same applies to the next commandment, which brings this view out more clearly when it says, ‘Thou shalt not steal’ etc. He said more of the same, making me groan inwardly and think: blasphemous sinner! You’re only a marriage-denter, you say; the good Lord is the actual marriage-breaker in parting husband and wife by death. ‘Don’t you see?’ I asked him in my over-heated, over-zealous state. ‘Your heathen words are an even worse sin than your adultery?’ ‘Pinhead!’ he retorted. ‘Want your ears boxed?’ I think he’d have done it, too, if he hadn’t been scared of my master. It shut me up, though – as well as opening my eyes to how often you see singletons eyeing marrieds and vice versa.
Back when I’d been studying the road to eternal life with my hermit, it had been a mystery to me why God had banned his people quite so harshly from worshipping false gods. Surely, having once come to know the true, eternal God, a person would no longer bow the knee to any other? You see, I’d got it into my thick head that the relevant commandment was unnecessary, ergo superfluous. What a twit I’d been! Since entering society I’d come to see that (despite the relevant commandment) most folk had a special little god of their own. Many had more of these minor deities than the ancient heathens or than latter-day pagans do now, I reckon. Some kept theirs in strongboxes, which they swore by utterly. Others had someone at court who’d made a sweeping offer of shelter in time of trouble but was often a sorrier specimen
than the idolater himself. As a mere favourite, this idol stood on dodgy ground, being dependent on the fickle favour of a particular high-up. Other folk worshipped fame, imagining that anyone who became famous was a demigod in human form. Yet others kept theirs upstairs, as it were. If the true God had given them a sound mind and allowed them to shine in some craft or branch of knowledge, they’d soon forget about the kind donor and rely entirely on the gift to bring in all the well-being required. Then there were folk who worshipped their stomachs, sacrificing to them daily as the heathen did to Bacchus and Ceres, and when the belly proved unreceptive or some other human frailty showed itself the poor things deified the doctor, gulping remedies that often hastened their demise. Certain clowns made goddesses of downright whores (calling them by other names, of course). These they adored day and night, sighing deeply and penning eulogies in their honour – eulogies filled with praise, of course, but sometimes including a humble plea that, in the light of the devotee’s clowning, might they consider becoming clownesses themselves? Then again there were women who idolized their own loveliness. This’ll get me a man, they thought – never mind what God says. Such false gods were not sacrificed to so much as smeared with various lotions, ointments, powders, creams and other kinds of slap. I met folk who worshipped houses in nice locations. Ever since moving in, they’d enjoyed happiness and good health, they said, with money blowing in at the window (nonsense I was surprised to hear, knowing where such blessings came from). I came across one bloke who hadn’t slept properly in years, having invested heart and soul (both of which should be dedicated to God) in the tobacco trade. He’d spent entire days and nights working at and worrying about the source of his prosperity, only for what to happen? The man passed away – disappeared in a puff of smoke, you might say. ‘Poor fellow!’ was my reaction. ‘If you’d set as much store by your soul’s bliss and the true God’s honour as you did by the idol (a painting of a Brazilian tobacco farmer with a sheaf of leaves held under one arm and a pipe stuck in his mouth) that graces your shop sign, you’d undoubtedly have worn a magnificent wreath in the afterlife.’ Another bloke had less exalted idols: I’d once, when everyone was boasting how little they’d had to eat when things got really tough, heard him say loud and clear that frogs and snails had been his god; he’d have starved to death otherwise. I asked him what he’d thought of God himself at the time, making him eat such stuff. The fellow had no answer, which truly amazed me. I’d never read of anyone, from the heathen ancient Egyptians to modern-day Americans, placing such filth on a pedestal and bowing and scraping to it the way this twit had.
I recall on one occasion examining a cabinet of curios with its high-born owner. The collection contained some fine rarities, but my favourite was an Ecce homo painted with such pathos that the viewer was quite drawn into it. Hanging beside it was a large painting on paper showing various Chinese idols in all their majesty, some depicted as devils. The nob asked me which piece in his cabinet pleased me most. I pointed to the Ecce homo, but he said I was wrong: the Chinese painting was rarer, ergo more precious; he wouldn’t swap it for ten such Ecce homos. I replied, ‘Sir, does your heart speak as your tongue does?’ ‘Certainly,’ he said. I went on, ‘You mean, the God of your heart is also the one whose portrayal your tongue claims to be worth most?’ ‘Get real!’ he retorted. ‘I’m talking about the rarity value.’ My rejoinder: ‘What could be rarer or more worthy of wonder than that God’s son suffered on our behalf, as depicted here?’
Twenty-Five
Oddly, Simplicius finds everything in the world peculiar – as the world finds him
The more such idols were venerated, the more the true majesty of God was ignored. I found few who aspired to keep his word and commandments but plenty who opposed him, even outdoing publicans/tax gatherers (barefaced sinners when Christ was on Earth) in their evilness and greed. Christ’s words are: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven […] For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?’ But not only did hardly anyone try to follow Christ’s commands; they all did the exact opposite. There’s a saying: ‘The bigger the family, the bigger the squabbles.’ And it was true, I found: never was there more aggro and backbiting than among siblings and in-laws, notably when it came to matters of inheritance. But more widely, too, folk who should have been fellow artisans were everywhere at one another’s throats. To me it was as plain as a pikestaff that such open sinners as publicans and tax-gatherers, widely loathed for their wickedness, put us present-day Christians to shame, for we have Christ’s own testimony that they loved one another. If we could expect no reward for loving our enemies, what awful punishment must be coming our way when we loathed our friends! Where the greatest love and loyalty should reign, I saw the greatest disloyalty and the most violent hatred. Lords slagged off their loyal servants; vassals called their pious lords turds. Many couples, I noticed, were constantly scrapping. Many a tyrant treated his wife worse than his mongrel, while many a slut called her honourable husband an ass. Sweet-talking lords and masters would swindle hard-working servants out of their proper wages – while at the same time cutting their rations, solid as well as liquid. Conversely, I saw plenty of faithless servants robbing good masters blind through negligence if not plain theft. Merchants and tradesmen competed at fleecing their clients, using all kinds of mean tricks to steal the farmer’s sour sweat from his brow. At the same time, certain peasants took godlessness to the length of acting stupid in order to bring others (folk by no means wicked through and through – their own masters, sometimes) into disrepute. Once, seeing a trooper give another a thick ear, I expected the victim to turn the other cheek (I’d never been at a fight before). I was wrong, wasn’t I? The man who’d been struck drew a sword, lunged, and bloodied the first trooper’s head. I cried out, over-loud: ‘Friend! What are you doing!’ ‘I’m no chicken!’ he snapped back. ‘I’d risk hell to have my revenge! Only a coward would take such an insult lying down!’ The noise swelled as people ran up to watch. Bystanders took sides and let fly at one another. I heard them swearing mindless oaths – ‘by God’ and ‘upon my soul!’. Surely a man’s soul was his highest possession? But that was nothing: not content with such childish curses they went on to roar things like, ‘Thunder strike me, lightning and hail confound me! Devil take me – no, not just one devil, hundreds of them, thousands! – and whisk me up into the clouds!’ Then they started on the sacraments. Seven weren’t enough for them: they wanted hundreds of thousands, barrels of them, boatloads, moatfuls, making my hair stand on end. I thought of Christ’s command: ‘But I say unto you, swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne: nor by the Earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.’ I weighed all this up, along with what I’d seen and heard, and in the end decided these brawlers were no Christians. I looked out other company.
What really shocked me was when loudmouths bragged about their sins. I often (every day, in fact) heard things like: ‘Bloody hell! Did we have a skinful yesterday! In the space of twelve hours I must have drunk myself legless three times – and puked as often. We certainly gave those peasants a thrashing, good heavens! Took some swag, too! Blimey! And how about those women? We had some fun there, eh!’ Or: ‘I cut him down as if a storm had hit him! My shot made the whites of his eyes turn up! A nifty trip, a blip on the bonce, and he was done for!’ Or: ‘That rock I chucked at him near broke his neck!’ Such heathen boasts filled my ears daily. Worse, sins were sometimes committed on God’s behalf. That can’t be right, surely? Here it was mostly soldiers
, saying things like, ‘Let’s sortie, for God’s sake! Let’s go out plundering!’ Or pilfering, shooting up, cutting down, jumping, nabbing, torching – whatever havoc they had in mind. Moneylenders too claimed to be acting in God’s name as they padded demands and trimmed payments to satisfy their hellish greed – always ‘by God!’. One evening I saw two rascals hanged for attempted burglary. They’d positioned the ladder and one was preparing to climb in the window (‘for heaven’s sake’) when the alert householder pushed him off in the devil’s name, as a result of which he broke a leg, got caught, and was hanged along with his friend a few days later. Every time I saw (and recounted) such a thing and afterwards, as was my custom, whipped out my Bible or otherwise dispensed friendly advice, I got called a fool. In fact, I was so often mocked for my good intentions that I eventually hesitated to say anything, which of course my Christian love would scarcely let me do. I wished everyone had been brought up by my hermit; then folk would see the world through my eyes (as those eyes were then). What I didn’t understand was that, in a world full of Simps, there’d be less sin to see. Conversely, of course, worldly persons who’d become accustomed to the world’s vice and stupidity and indulged in it themselves would be less likely to see what a wicked road they and their companions were travelling.
The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus Page 9