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The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

IV. THE ELBERFELD HORSES

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I found Herr Krall in his goldsmith's shop, a sort of palace of Golconda, streaming and glittering with the most precious pearls and stones on earth. Herr Krall, it is well to remember, in order to dispel any suspicion of pecuniary interest, is a rich manufacturer whose family for three generations, from father to son, have conducted one of the most important jewelry businesses in Germany. His researches, so far from bringing him the least profit, cost him a great deal of money, take up all his leisure and some part of the time which he would otherwise devote to his business and, as usually happens, procure him from his fellow citizens and from not a few scientific men more annoyance, unfair criticism and sarcasm than consideration or gratitude. His work is preeminently the disinterested and thankless task of the apostle and pioneer.

For the rest, Herr Kraft, though his faith is active, zealous and infectious, has nothing in common with the visionaries or illuminati. He is a man of about fifty, vigorous, alert and enthusiastic, but at the same time well-balanced; accesible to every idea and even to every dream, yet practical and methodical, with a ballast of the most invincible common-sense. He inspires from the outset that fine confidence, frank and unrestrained, which instantly disperses the instinctive doubt, the strange uneasiness and the veiled suspicion that generally separate two people who meet for the first time; and one welcomes in him, from the very depths of one's being, the honest man, the staunch friend whom one can trust and whom one is sorry not to have known earlier in life.

We go together through the streets and along the bustling quays of Elberfeld to the stable, situated at a few hundred steps from the shop. The horses are taking the air outside the doors of their boxes, in the yard shaded by a lime-tree. There are four of them: Mohammed, the most intelligent, the most gifted of them all, the great mathematician of the party; his double, Zarif, a little less advanced, less tractable, craftier, but at the same time more fanciful, more spontaneous and capable of occasional disconcerting sallies; next, Hanschen, a little Shetland pony, hardly bigger than a Newfoundland dog, the street-urchin of the band, always quivering with excitement, roguish, flighty, uncertain and passionate, but ready in a moment to work you out the most difficult addition and multiplication sums with a furious scrape of the hoof; and lastly the latest arrival, the plump and placid Berto, an imposing black stallion, quite blind and lacking the sense of smell. He has been only a few months at school and is still, so to speak, in the preparatory class, but already does--a little more clumsily, but more good humouredly and conscientiously--small addition and subtraction sums quite as well as many a child of the same age.

In a corner, Kama, a young elephant two or three years old, about the size of an outrageously "blown" donkey, rolls his mischievous and almost knavish eye, under the shelter of his wide ears, each resembling a great rhubarb-leaf, and with his stealthy, insinuating trunk carefully picks up whatever he considers fit to eat, that is to say, pretty well everything that lies about on the stones. Great things were hoped of him, but hitherto he has disappointed all expectations: he is the dunce of the establishment. Perhaps he is too young still: his little elephant-soul no doubt resembles that of a sucking-babe which, in the place of its feet and hands, plays with the stupendous nose that must first explore and question the universe. It is impossible to grip his attention; and, when they set out before him his alphabet of movable letters, instead of naming those which are pointed out to him he applies himself to pulling them off their stems, in order to swallow them surreptitiously. He has disheartened his kind master, who, pending the coming of the reason and wisdom promised by the proboscidian legends, leaves him in a contented state of ignorance made more blissful by an almost insatiable appetite.