"Wife!" he said, "I"m reviewing for money now, recollect." She went on with her sc.r.a.ping. "I have got Professor Lang before me here--the seventh chapter of him, in which he treats of the sixth of the Superintendents-General of Bayreuth, Herr Stockfleth." She was going to stop in a minute or two, but just then, you know, she really _could_ NOT. Women are fond of doing everything "by and bye"--they like putting a thing off just for a minute or two, which is the reason why they put off even their arrival in this world a few minutes longer than boys do.[54] "This essay," he continued, with forced calmness, "ought to have been reviewed in the "Messenger" six months ago, and it"ll never do for the "Messenger" to be like the "Universal German Library" and the Pope, and canonise people a century or so after date."
If he had only been able to maintain his forced calmness for one minute longer, he would have got to the end of Lenette"s buzzing din; however, he couldn"t. "Oh! the devil take me, and you, too, and the "Messenger of the G.o.ds" into the bargain," he burst out, starting up and dashing his pen on the floor. "I don"t know," he went on, suddenly resuming his self-control, speaking in a faint, piteous tone, and sitting down, quite unnerved, feeling something like a man with cupping-gla.s.ses on all over him--"I don"t know a bit what I"m translating, or whether I"m writing Stockfleth or Lang. What a stupid arrangement it is that an advocate mayn"t be as deaf as a judge. If I were deaf, I should be exempt from torture then. Do you know how many people it takes to const.i.tute a tumult by law? Either ten, or you by yourself in that washing academy of music of yours." He was not so much inclined to be reasonable as to do as the Spanish innkeeper did, who charged the noise made by his guests in the bill. But now, having had her way, and gained her point, she was noiseless in word and deed.
He finished his critique in the forenoon, and sent it to Stiefel, his chief, who wrote back that he would bring the money for it himself in the evening, for he now seized upon every possible opportunity of paying a visit. At dinner Firmian (in whose head the sultry, f[oe]tid vapour of ill-temper would not dissolve and fall), said, "I can"t understand how you come to care so very little about cleanliness and order. It would be better even if you rather _overdid_ your cleanliness than otherwise. People say, what a pity it is such an orderly man as Siebenkaes should have such a slovenly kind of wife!" To irony of this sort, though she knew quite well it _was_ irony, she always opposed regular formal arguments. He could never get her to enjoy these little jests instead of arguing about them, or join him in laughing at the masculine view of the question. The fact is, a woman abandons her opinion as soon as her husband adopts it. Even in church, the women sing the tunes an octave higher than the men that they may differ from them in all things.
In the afternoon the great, the momentous, hour approached in which the ostracism, the banishment from house and home, of the checked calico gown was at last to be carried out--the last and greatest deed of the year 1785. Of this signal for fight, this Timour"s and Muhammed"s red battle-flag, this Ziska"s hide, which always set them by the ears, his very soul was sick: he would have been delighted if somebody would have stolen it, simply to be quit of the wearisome, threadbare idea of the wretched rag for good and all. He did not hurry himself, but introduced his pet.i.tion with all the wordy prolixity of an M.P. addressing the house (at home). He asked her to guess what might be the greatest kindness, the most signal favour which she could do him on this last day of the old year. He said he had an hereditary enemy, an Anti-Christ, a dragon, living under his roof; tares sown among his wheat by an enemy, which she could pull up if she chose; and, at last, he brought the checked calico gown out of the drawer, with a kind of twilight sorrow: "_This_," he said, "is the bird of prey which pursues me; the net which Satan sets to catch me; his sheep-skin my martyr-robe, my Ca.s.sim"s slipper. Dearest, do me but this one favour--send it to the p.a.w.n-shop!"
"Don"t answer just yet," he said, gently laying his hand on her lips; "let me just remind you what a stupid parish did when the only blacksmith there was in it was going to be hanged in the village. This parish thought it preferable to condemn an innocent master-tailor or two to the gallows, because they could be better spared. Now, a woman of your good sense must surely see how much easier and better it would be to let me take away this mere piece of tailor"s st.i.tch-work, than metal things which we eat out of every day; the mourning calico won"t be wanted, you know, as long as I"m alive."
"I"ve seen quite clearly for a long while past," she said, "that you"ve made up your mind to carry off my mourning dress from me, by hook or by crook, whether I will or no. But I"m not going to let you have it.
Suppose I were to say to you, p.a.w.n your watch, how would you like that?" Perhaps the reason why husbands get into the way of issuing their orders in a needlessly dictatorial manner is, that they generally have little effect, but rather confirm opposition than overcome it.
"d.a.m.nation!" he cried; "that"ll do, that"s quite enough! I"m not a turkey-c.o.c.k, nor a bona.s.sus neither, to be continually driven into a frenzy by a piece of coloured rag. It goes to the p.a.w.n-shop to-day, as sure as my name"s Siebenkaes."
"Your name is Leibgeber as well," said she.
"Devil fly away with me, if that calico remains in this house!" said he. On which she began to cry, and lament the bitter fortune which left her nothing now, not even the very clothes for her back. When thoughtless tears fall into a seething masculine heart, they often have the effect which drops of water have when they fall upon bubbling molten copper; the fluid ma.s.s bursts asunder with a great explosion.
"Heavenly, kind, gentle Devil," said he, "do please come and break my neck for me. May G.o.d have pity on a woman like this! Very well, then, keep your calico; keep this Lenten altar-cloth of yours to yourself.
But may the Devil fly away with me if I don"t c.o.c.k the old deer"s horns that belonged to my father on to my head this very day, like a poacher on the pillory, and hawk them about the streets for sale in broad daylight. Ay. _I give you my word of honour_ it shall be done, for all the fun it may afford every soul in the place. And I shall simply say that it is your doing; I"ll do it, as sure as there"s a devil in h.e.l.l."
He went, gnashing his teeth, to the window, and looked into the street, seeing vacancy. A rustic funeral was pa.s.sing slowly by; the bier was a man"s shoulder, and on it tottered a child"s rude coffin.
Such a sight is a touching one, when one thinks of the little, obscure, human creature, pa.s.sing over from the f[oe]tal slumber to the slumber of death, from the amnion-membrane in this life to the shroud, that amnion-membrane of the next; whose eyes have closed at their first glimpse of this bright earth, without looking on the parents who now gaze after it with theirs so wet with tears; which has been loved without loving in return; whose little tongue moulders to dust before it has ever spoken; as does its face ere it has smiled upon this odd, contradictory, inconsistent orb of ours. These cut buds of this mould will find a stem on which great destiny will graft them, these flowers which, like some besides, close in sleep while it is still early morning, will yet feel the rays of a morning sun which will open them once more. As Firmian looked at the cold, shrouded child pa.s.sing by, in this hour, when he was ign.o.bly quarrelling about the mourning dress (which should mourn for _him_)--now, when the very last drops of the old year were flowing so fast away, and his heart, now becoming so terribly accustomed to these pa.s.sing fainting fits, forbade him to hope that he could ever complete the new one--now, amid all these pains and sorrows, he seemed to hear the unseen river of Death murmuring under his feet (as the Chinese lead rushing brooks under the soil of their gardens), and the thin, brittle crust of ice on which he was standing seemed as if it would soon crack and sink with him into the watery depths. Unspeakably touched, he said to Lenette, "Perhaps you may be quite right, dear, after all, to keep your mourning dress; you may have some presentiment that I am not going to live. Do as you think best, then, dear; I would fain not embitter this last of December any more; I don"t know that it may not be _my_ last in another sense, and that in another year I may not be nearer to that poor baby than you. I am going for a walk now."
She said nothing; all this startled and surprised her. He hurried away, to escape the answer which was sure to come eventually; his absence would, in the circ.u.mstances, be the most eloquent kind of oratory. All persons are better than their outbreaks (or ebullitions)--that is, than their _bad_ ones; for all are worse than their _n.o.ble_ ones, also--and when we allow the former an hour or so to dissipate and disperse, we gain something better than our point--we gain our opponent. He left Lenette a very grave subject for cogitation, however,--the stag"s horns and his word of honour.
I have already once written it. The winter was lying on the ground all bare and naked, not even the bed-sheet and chrisom-cloth of snow thrown over it; there it lay beside the dry, withered mummy of the by-gone summer. Firmian looked with an unsatisfied gaze athwart unclothed fields (over which the cradle-quilt of the snow, and the white c.r.a.pe of the frost, had not yet been laid), and down at the streams, not yet struck palsied and speechless. Bright, warm days at the end of December soften us with a sadness in which there are four or five bitter drops more than in that belonging to the after-summer. Up to twelve o"clock at night, and until the thirty-first day of the twelfth month, the wintry, nocturnal, idea of dissolution and decay oppresses us; but as soon as it is one in the morning, and the first of January, a morning breeze, speaking of new life, moves away the clouds which were lying over our souls, and we begin to look for the dark, pure, morning blue, the rising of the star of morning and of spring. On a December day like this the pale, dim, stagnant world of stiffened, sapless, plants about us oppresses and hems us round; and the insect-collections lying beneath the vegetation, covered with earth; and the rafter-work of bare, dry, wrinkly trees; the December sun hanging in the sky at noon no higher than the June sun does at evening; all these combined shed a yellow l.u.s.tre as of death (like that of burning alcohol) over the pale, faded meadows; and long giant shadows lie extended, motionless, everywhere--_evening_ shadows of this evening of nature and of the year--like the ruined remains, the burnt-out ash-heaps of nights as long as themselves. But the glistening snow, on the other hand, spread over the blooming earth under us, is like the blue foreground of spring, or a white fog a foot or two in depth. The quiet dark sky lies above, and the white earth is like some white moon, whose sparkling ice-fields melt, as we draw nearer, into dark waving meadows of flowers.
The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet as he stood upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of nature. The daily-recurring pausings of his heart and pulse were (he thought) the sudden silences of the storm-bell in his breast, presaging a speedy end of the thunder, and dissolution of the storm-cloud, of life. He thought the faltering of his mechanism was caused by some loose pin having fallen in among the wheels somewhere; he ascribed it to polypus of the heart, and his giddiness he felt sure gave warning of an attack of apoplexy. To-day was the three hundred and sixty-fifth Act of the year, and the curtain was slowly dropping upon it already: what could this suggest to him save gloomy similes of his own epilogue--of the winter solstice of his shortened, over-shadowed life? The weeping image of his Lenette came now before his forgiving, departing soul, and he thought, "She is really not in the right; but I will yield to her, as we have not very long to be together now. I am glad for her sake, poor soul, that _my_ arms are mouldering away from about her, and that her friend is taking her to his."
He went up on to the scaffold of blood and sorrow where _his_ friend, Heinrich, had taken his farewell. From that eminence, as often as his heart was heavy, his glance would follow Leibgeber"s path as far as the hills; but to-day his eyes were moister than before, for he had no hope that he would see the spring again. This spot was to him the hill which the Emperor Adrian permitted the Jews to go up twice in the year, that they might look towards the ruins of the holy city and weep for the place wherein their steps might tread no more. The sun was now a.s.sembling the shadows which were to close in upon the old year, and as the stars appeared--the stars which rose at evening now being those which in spring adorn the morning--fate snapped away the loveliest and richest in flowers of the liana-branches from his soul, and from the wound flowed clear water. "I shall see nothing of the coming spring,"
he thought, "except her blue, which, as in enamel-painting, is the first laid on of all her colours." His heart--one educated to be loving--could always fly for rest from his satires and from dry details of business-duty, sometimes, too, from Lenette"s indifference and lack of sympathy, to the warm breast of the eternal G.o.ddess Nature, ever ready to take us to her heart. Into the free, unveiled, and blooming out-door world, beneath the grand wide sky, he loved to repair with all his sighs and sorrows, and in this great garden he made all his graves (as the Jews made them in smaller ones). And when our fellows forsake and wound us, the sky and the earth, and the little blooming tree, open their arms and take us into them; the flowers press themselves to our wounded hearts, the streams mingle in our tears, and the breezes breathe coolness into our sighs. A mighty angel troubles and inspires the great ocean-pool of Bethesda; into its warm waves we plunge, with all our thousand aches and pains, and ascend from the water of life with our spasms all relaxed and our health and vigour renewed once more.
Firmian walked slowly home with a heart all conciliation, and eyes which, now that it was dark, he did not take the pains to dry. He went over in his mind everything which could possibly be adduced in his Lenette"s excuse. He strove to win himself over to her side of the question by reflecting that she could not (like him) arm herself against the shocks, the stumbling-stones, of life by putting on the Minerva"s helm, the armour of meditation, philosophy, authorship. He thoroughly determined (he had determined the same thing thirty times before) to be as scrupulously careful to observe in all things the outside _politesses_ of life with _her_ as with the most absolute stranger;[55] nay, he already enveloped himself in the fly-net or mail-shirt of patience, in case he should really find the checked calico untranslated at home. This is how we men continually behave--stopping our ears tight with both hands, trying our hardest to fall into the siesta, the mid-day sleep, of a little peace of mind (if we can only anyhow manage it); thus do our souls, swayed by our pa.s.sions, reflect the sunlight of truth as one dazzling spot (like mirrors or calm water), while all the surrounding surface lies but in deeper shade.
How differently all fell out! He was received by Peltzstiefel, who advanced to meet him, all solemnity of deportment, and with a church-visitation countenance full of inspection-sermons. Lenette scarcely turned her swollen eyes towards the windward side of her husband as he came in at the door. Stiefel kept the strings tight which held the muscles of his knit face, lest it might unbend before Firmian"s, which was all beaming soft with kindliness, and thus commenced: "Mr. Siebenkaes, I came to this house to hand you the money for your review of Professor Lang; but friendship demands of me a duty of a far more serious and important kind, that I should exhort you and constrain you to conduct yourself towards this poor unfortunate wife of yours here like a true Christian man to a true Christian woman." "Or even better, if you like," he said. "What is it all about, wife?" She preserved an embarra.s.sed silence. She had asked Stiefel"s advice and a.s.sistance, less for the sake of obtaining them than to have an opportunity of telling her story. The truth was, that when the Schulrath came unexpectedly in, while her burst of crying was at its bitterest, she had really just that very moment sent her checked, spiny, outer caterpillar-skin (the calico-dress, to wit) away to the p.a.w.nshop; for her husband having pledged his honour, she felt sure that, beyond a doubt, he would stick those preposterous horns on his head and really go and hawk them, all over the town, for she well knew how sacredly he kept his word, and also how utterly he disregarded "appearances,"--and that both of these peculiarities of his were always at their fellest pitch at a time of domestic difficulty like the present. Perhaps she would have told her ghostly counsellor and adviser nothing about the matter, but contented herself with having a good cry when he came, if she had had her way (and her dress); but, having sacrificed both, she needed compensation and revenge. At first she had merely reckoned up difficulties in indeterminate quant.i.ties to him; but when he pressed her more closely, her bursting heart overflowed and _all_ her woes streamed forth. Stiefel, contrarily to the laws of equity (and of several universities), always held the complainant in any case to be in the right, simply because he spoke _first_: most men think impartiality of heart is impartiality of head. Stiefel swore that he would tell her husband what he ought to be told, and that the calico should be back in the house that very afternoon.
So this father-confessor began to jingle his bunch of binding-and-loosing keys in the advocate"s face, and reported to him his wife"s general confession and the p.a.w.ning of the dress. When there are two diverse actions of a person to be given account of--a vexatious and an agreeable one--the effect depends on which is spoken of the first; it is the first narrated one which gives the ground-tint to the listener"s mind, and the one subsequently portrayed only takes rank as a subdued accessory figure. Firmian should have heard that Lenette p.a.w.ned the dress _first_, while he was still out of doors, and of her tale-bearing not till afterwards. But you see how the devil brought it about, as it really did all happen. "What!" (Siebenkaes _felt_, if not exactly _thought_) "What! She makes my rival her confidant and my judge! I bring her home a heart all kindness and reconciliation, and she makes a fresh cut in it at once, distressing and annoying me in this way, on the very last day of the year, with her confounded chattering and tale-telling." By this last expression he meant something which the reader does not yet quite understand; for I have not yet told him that Lenette had the bad habit of being--rather ill-bred; wherefore she made common people of her own s.e.x, such as the bookbinder"s wife, the recipients of her secret thoughts--the electric discharging-rods of her little atmospheric disturbances; while, at the same time, she took it ill of her husband that, though he did not, indeed, admit serving-men and maids and "the vulgar" into his own mysteries, he yet accompanied them into theirs.
Stiefel (like all people who have little knowledge of the world, and are not gifted with much tact,--who never a.s.sume anything as granted in the first place, but always go through every subject _ab initio_)--now delivered a long, theological, matrimonial-service sort of exhortation concerning love as between Christian husband and wife, and ended by insisting on the recall of the calico (his Necker, so to say). This address irritated Firmian, and that chiefly because (irrespectively of _it_) his wife thought he had not any religion, or, at all events, not so much as Stiefel. "I remember" (he said) "seeing in the history of France that Gaston, the first prince of the blood, having caused his brother some little difficulties or other of the warlike sort on one occasion, in the subsequent treaty of peace bound himself, in a special article, to love Cardinal Richelieu. Now I think there"s no question but that an article to the effect that man and wife shall love one another ought to be inserted as a distinct, separate, secret clause, in all contracts of marriage; for though love, like man himself, is by origin eternal and immortal, yet, thanks to the wiles of the serpent, it certainly becomes mortal enough within a short time. But, as far as the calico"s concerned, let"s all thank G.o.d that _that_ apple of discord has been pitched out of the house." Stiefel, by way of offering up a sacrifice, and burning a little incense before the shrine of his beloved Lenette, _insisted_ on the return of the calico, and did so very firmly; for Siebenkaes"s gen tie, complaisant readiness to yield to him, up to this point, in little matters of sacrifice and service, had led him to entertain the deluded idea that he possessed an irresistible authority over him. The husband, a good deal agitated now, said, "We"ll drop the subject, if you please." "Indeed, we"ll do nothing of the kind," said Stiefel; "I must really _insist_ upon it that your wife has her dress back." "It can"t be done, Herr Schulrath." "I"ll advance you whatever money you require," cried Stiefel, in a fever of indignation at this striking and unwonted piece of disobedience. It was now, of course, more impossible than ever for the advocate to retire from his position; he shook his head eighty times. "Either _you_ are out of your mind," said Stiefel, "or _I_ am; just let me go through my reasons to you once more." "Advocates," said Siebenkaes, "_were_ fortunate enough, in former times, to have private chaplains of their own; but it was found that there was no converting any of them, and therefore they are now exempt from being preached at."
Lenette wept more bitterly--Stiefel shouted the louder on that account; in his annoyance at his ill success, he thought it well to repeat his commands in a ruder and blunter form; of course Siebenkaes resisted more firmly. Stiefel was a pedant, a cla.s.s of men which surpa.s.ses all others in a bare-faced, blind, self-conceit, just like an unceasing wind blowing from all the points of the compa.s.s at once (for a pedant even makes an ostentatious display of his own personal idiosyncrasies).
Stiefel, like a careful and conscientious player, felt it a duty to thoroughly throw himself into the part he was representing, and carry it out in all its details, and say, "Either" "Or" Mr. Siebenkaes; "either the mourning gown comes, or _I_ go, _aut-aut_. My visits cannot be of much consequence, it"s true, still they have I consider, a certain value, if it were but on Mrs. Siebenkaes"s account." Firmian, doubly irritated, firstly at the imperious rudeness and conceit of an alternative of the sort, and secondly at the lowness of the market price for which the Rath abandoned their society, could but say, "n.o.body can influence your decision on that point now but yourself. _I_ most certainly cannot. It will be an easy matter for you, Herr Schulrath, to give up our acquaintance--though there is no real reason why you should--but it will not be easy for me to give up yours, although I shall have no choice." Stiefel, from whose brow the sprouting laurels were thus so unexpectedly shorn--and that, too, in the presence of the woman he loved--had nothing to do but take his leave; but he did it with three thoughts gnawing at his heart--his vanity was hurt, his dear Lenette was crying, and her husband was rebellious and insubordinate, and resisting his authority.
And as the Schulrath said farewell for ever, a bitter, bitter sorrow stood fixed in the eyes of his beloved Lenette--a sorrow which, though the hand of time has long since covered it over, I still see there in its fixity; and she could not go down stairs, as at other times, with her sorrowing friend, but went back into the dark, unlighted room, alone with her overflowing breaking heart.
Firmian"s heart laid aside its hardness, though not its coldness, at the sight of his persecuted wife in her dry, stony grief at this falling to ruin of every one of her little plans and joys; and he did not add to her sorrow by a single word of reproach. "You see," was all he said, "that it is no fault of mine that the Schulrath gives up our acquaintance; he ought never to have been told anything about the matter,--however, it"s all over now." She made no reply. The hornet"s sting (which makes a triple stab), the dagger, thrown as by some revengeful Italian, was left sticking firm in her wound, which therefore could not bleed. Ah! poor soul; thou hast deprived thyself of so much! Firmian, however, could not see that he had anything to accuse himself of; he being the gentlest, the most yielding of men under the sun, always ruffled all the feathers on his body up with a rustle in an instant at the slightest touch of _compulsion_, most especially if it concerned his honour. He _would_ accept a present, it is true, but only from Leibgeber, or (on rare occasions) from others in the warmest hours of soul communion; and his friend and he both held the opinion that, in friendship, not only was a farthing of quite as much value as a sovereign, but that a sovereign was worth just as little as a farthing, and that one is bound to accept the most splendid presents just as readily as the most trifling; and hence he counted it among the unrecognised blessings of childhood that children can receive gifts without any feeling of shame.
In a mental torpor he now sat down in the arm-chair, and covered his eyes with his hand; and then the mists which hid the future all rolled away, and showed in it a wide dreary tract of country, full of the black ashy ruins of burnt homesteads, and of dead bushes of underwood, and the skeletons of beasts lying in the sand. He saw that the chasm, or landslip, which had torn his heart and Lenette"s asunder, would go on gaping wider and wider; he saw, oh! so clearly and cheerlessly, that his old beautiful love would never come back, that Lenette would never lay aside her self-willed pertinacity, her whims, the habits of her daily life; that the narrow limits of her heart and head would remain fixed firmly for ever; that she would as little learn to understand him, as get to love him; while, again, her repugnance to him would get the greater the longer her friend"s banishment endured, and that her fondness for the latter would increase in proportion. Stiefel"s money, and his seriousness, and religion, and attachment to herself combined to tear in two the galling bond of wedlock by the pressure of a more complex and gentle tie. Sorrowfully did Siebenkaes gaze into a long prospect of dreary days, all constrained silence, and dumb hostility and complaint.
Lenette was working in her room in silence, for her wounded heart shrunk from a word or a look as from a cold fierce wind. It was now very dark, she wanted no light. On a sudden, a wandering street-singing woman began to play a harp, and her child to accompany her on a flute, somewhere in the house downstairs. At this our friend"s bursting heart seemed to have a thousand gashes inflicted on it to let it bleed gently away. As nightingales love to sing where there is an echo, so our hearts speak loudest to music. As these tones brought back to him his old hopes, almost irrecognisable now,--as he gazed down at his Arcadia now lying hidden deep, deep, beneath the stream of years, and saw himself down in it, with all his young fresh wishes, amid his long lost friends, gazing with happy eyes round their circle, all confidence and trust, his growing heart h.o.a.rding and cherishing its love and truth for some warm heart yet to be met in the time to come: and as he now burst into that music with a dissonance, crying, "And I have never found that heart, and now all is past and over," and as the pitiless tones brought pictures of blossomy springs and flowery lands, and circles of loving friends to pa.s.s, as in a camera obscura, before him--_him_ who had nothing, not one soul in all the land to love him; his steadfast spirit gave way at last, and sank down on earth to rest as quite overdone, and nothing soothed him now but that which pained. Suddenly this sleep-walking music ceased, and the pause clutched, like a speechless nightmare, tighter at his heart. In the silence he went into the room and said to Lenette, "Take them down what little we have left." But over the latter words his voice broke and failed, for he saw (by the flare of some potash-burning which was going on opposite) that all her glowing face was covered with streaming, undried tears, though when he came in she pretended to be busily wiping the windowpane dimmed by her breath. She laid the money down on the window. He said, more gently yet, "Lenette, you will have to take it to them now, or they will be gone." She took it; her eyes worn with weeping met his (which were worn with weeping too); she went, and then their eyes grew well-nigh dry, so far apart were their two souls already.
They were suffering in that terrible position of circ.u.mstances when not even a moment of mutual and reciprocal emotion can any longer reconcile and warm two hearts. His whole heart swelled with overflowing affection, but hers belonged to his no more; he was urged at once by the wish to love her, and the feeling that it was now impossible, by the perception of all her shortcomings and the conviction of her indifference to him. He sat down in the window seat, and leaned his head upon the sill, where it rested, as it chanced, upon a handkerchief which she had left there, and which was moist and cold with tears. She had been solacing herself after the long oppression of the day, with this gentle effusion, much as we have a vein opened after some severe contusion. When he touched the handkerchief, an icy shudder crept down his back, like a sting of conscience, but immediately after it there came a burning glow as the thought flashed to his mind that her weeping had been for another person than himself altogether. The singing and the flute now began again (without the harp this time), and floated in the rising, falling waves, of a slow-timed song, of which the verses ended always with the words, "Gone is gone, and dead is dead." Sorrow now clutched him in her grasp, like some mantle-fish, casting around him her dark and suffocating folds. He pressed Lenette"s wet handkerchief to his eyes hard, and heard (but less distinctly), "Gone is gone, and dead is dead." Then of a sudden his whole soul melted and dissolved at the thought that perhaps that halting heart of his would let him see no other new year save that of the morrow, and he thought of himself as dying; and the cold handkerchief, wet with his own tears now as well as hers, lay cool upon his burning brow, while the notes of the music seemed to mark like bells each stroke of time, so that its rapid flight was made distinguishable by the ear, and he saw himself asleep in a quiet grave, like one in the Grotto of the Serpents, but with worms in place of the serpents, licking off the burning poison of life.
The music had ceased. He heard Lenette moving in the next room and getting a light; he went to her and gave her her handkerchief. But his heart was so pained and bleeding that he longed to embrace some one, no matter whom; he was impelled to press his Lenette to his heart, his Lenette of _the past_ if not of _the present_, his _suffering_, if no longer his loving, Lenette; at the same time he could not utter one word of affection, neither had he the slightest wish to do so. He put his arms round her slowly, unbent, and held her to him, but she turned her head quickly and coldly away as from a kiss which was not proffered. This pained him greatly, and he said, "Do you suppose I am any happier than you are yourself?" He laid his face down on her averted head, pressed her to him again, and then let her away; and this vain embrace at an end, his heart cried, "Gone is gone, and dead is dead."
The silent room in which the music and the words had ceased to sound was like some unhappy village from whence the enemy has carried off all the bells, and where there is nothing but silence all the day and night, and the church tower is mute as if time itself were past.
As Firmian laid him down on his bed, he thought, "A sleep closes the old year as if it were one"s last, and ushers in the new as it does, our own lives; and I sleep on towards a future all anxiety, vague of form, and darkly veiled. Thus does man sleep at the gate behind which the dreams are barred; but although his dreams are but a step or two--a minute or two--within that gate, he cannot tell _what_ dreams await him at its opening; whether in the brief unconscious night beasts of prey with glaring eyes are lying in wait to dash upon him, or smiling children to come trooping round him in their play; nor if, when the cloudy shapes beyond that mystic door come about him, their clasp is to be the fond embrace of love, or the murderous clutch of death."
CHAPTER X.
A LONELY NEW-YEAR"S DAY--THE LEARNED SCHALASTER--WOODEN-LEG OF APPEAL--CHAMBER POSTAL DELIVERY--THE 11TH OF FEBRUARY, AND BIRTH-DAY OF THE YEAR 1786.
I really cannot wish my hero a happy new year on a new year"s day when, on his awaking in the morning, he rolls his swollen eyeb.a.l.l.s heavily in their sockets towards the dawn, and then buries his worn and stupefied head deep again in his pillow, as he does now. A man who scarcely ever sheds a tear is always attacked in this way by physical, as a consequence of moral, pain. He lay in bed much later than usual, thinking over what he had done, and what he had now to do. He awoke, feeling; much cooler towards Lenette than he had done when he went to bed. When two hearts can no longer be brought together by the influence of some mutual, warm emotion, when the glow of enthusiasm no longer links them together, still less can they mingle and unite when the glow has pa.s.sed away, and chilly reserve has resumed its sway. There is a certain half-and-half state of partial reconciliation in which the vertical index of the jewel-balance, in its gla.s.s-case, is turned by the lightest breath from the tongue of a third person; to-day, alas!
the scale on Firmian"s side sunk a little, and that on Lenette"s went down altogether. He prepared himself, however, and dreaded at the same time, to give and to return the new year greetings. He took heart, and entered the room with his usual hearty step, as if nothing had happened. She had let the coffee-pot turn into a refrigerator rather than call him, and was standing with her back to him, at the drawer of the _commode_, tearing hearts to pieces, to see what was inside them.
The hearts in question were printed new year"s wishes in verse, which she had received, in happier days, from her friends in Augspurg; the kindly wishes were hidden behind groups of hearts clipped out and twined together in spiral lines. As the Holy Virgin gets behung with "_a.s.signat_" hearts of wax, so do other virgins with paper ones; for with these fair maidens all warmth and enthusiasm gets the name of "heart," much as map-makers fancy that the outline of burning Africa has a considerable resemblance to a heart.
Firmian could well divine how many a longing sigh the poor soul had heaved over so many a ruined wish and hope, and all her mournful comparisons of the present time--with those smiling days gone by--and all that sorrow and the memory of the past spake to the gentle, tender heart. Alas! since even the happy greet the new year with sighs, the wretched may well be allowed a tear or two. He said his "good morning"
gently, and had he received a gentle answer, would have gone so far as to add _his_ wishes to the stock of printed ones; but Lenette, who had been oftener hurt, and more deeply too, on the previous day, than he had, snarled back at him a cold and hasty reply. So that he could not offer any wishes; she offered none; and thus stonily and thus miserably they went elbowing one another through the gate of the new year.
I must say it; he had been looking forward for something like eight weeks to the happiness of this new year"s morning--to the blissful union of their hearts--to the thousands of loving wishes which he would offer--to their close embraces and happy silences of lips upon lips!
Ah! how different it all was; cold, deathly cold! On some other occasion, when I have more paper, I must explain at full length why and wherefore his satirical vein served the purpose of a ferment, a leaven or yeast, or, say a kind of irrigating engine to that sensitive heart of his of which he was both proud and ashamed at once. The royal burgh of Kuhschnappel itself had more to do with it than anything else. Upon this town, as upon some others in Germany, the dew of sensibility has never fallen (as if these places were made of metal), whilst their inhabitants have provided themselves with hearts of bone, on which, as on frozen limbs, and witches bearing the _stigmata_ of the devil, it is impossible to inflict wounds of any consequence to speak of. Amid a population possessed of this sort of frigidity, one is, of course, inclined to pardon--and even go out of one"s way in search of--a little warmth, even of an exaggerated kind,--whereas a man who had been living about 1785 in Leipzig, where nearly all hearts and arteries were injected full of the spirit of tears, might have been disposed to carry his humorous indignation at that circ.u.mstance a little too far, in the same way that cooks dish up watery vegetables with more pepper in wet weather than in dry.
Lenette went three times to church that day, not that there was anything extraordinary in that. It is not so much with respect to the church-goers that the words "three times" in this connection, alarming as they are, horrify one. The church-goers may sometimes, perhaps, be all the better for going so often; but it is for the sake of the unfortunate clergy who are obliged to preach so many times in one day, that they may think themselves lucky if all that happens to them is that they go to the devil and don"t lose their voices into the bargain.
The first time a man preaches, he certainly moves _himself_ more than anybody else, and becomes his own proselyte; but when it comes to the millionth time or so of his laying down the moral law, it must be much the same with him as with the Egerian peasants, who drink the Egerian waters every day, and consequently cease to be susceptible to their derivative qualities, however visitors may be affected by them.
At dinner our melancholy pair sat silent, except that the husband, seeing the wife preparing to go to the afternoon service at church, which she had not been in the habit of attending for some time, asked her who was going to preach. "Most probably Schulrath Stiefel," she said, although he usually preached only in the morning, but just now the evening preacher couldn"t preach, he had received "a chastis.e.m.e.nt from G.o.d--he had put out his collar-bone." At another time Siebenkaes would have had a good deal to say as touching the latter clause of her sentence; but on the present occasion (circ.u.mstances being as they were), all he did was to strike his plate with one of the p.r.o.ngs of his fork, and then hold it up to one of his ears, while he stopped the other; this droning ba.s.s, this humming harmony, bore his tortured soul away upon the waves of music, and this echoing sound-board, this vibrating bell-tongue, seemed to be singing to him (by way of new year"s greeting), "Hearest thou not the distant bell ringing at the close of thy chill life"s high ma.s.s? The question is, shalt thou, when next new year"s day comes, be able to hear; or lying, by that time, crumbling into dust?"
After dinner he looked out of window, directing his gaze less to the street than to the sky. There, as it chanced, he saw two mock suns, and almost in the zenith the half of a rainbow with a paler one intersecting it. These tinted stars began strangely to sway his soul, making it sad, as if he saw in them the reflected image of his own dim, pale, shattered life. For to man, when swayed by emotion, Nature is ever a great mirror, all emotion too; it is only to him who is satisfied and at rest that she seems nothing but a cold, dead window between him and the world beyond.
When he was alone in the room after dinner, and the jubilant hymns from the church, and the glad song of a canary in a neighbour"s room came upon his weary soul like the movement and the tumult of all the joy of his youth, now buried alive in the tomb; and when the bright magic sunshine broke into his chamber, and light cloud-shadows slid athwart the spot of light upon the floor, questioning his sick, moaning heart in a thousand melancholy tropes, and saying, "Is it not thus with all things? Are not your own days fleeting by like vapours through a chilly sky, above a dead earth, floating away towards the night?"--he could but open his swelling heart by means of the soft-edged sword of music, that so the nearest and heaviest of the drops of his sorrow might be set free to flow. He struck a single triad chord upon his piano, and struck it once again, letting it gradually die away; the tones floated away as the clouds had, the sweet harmony trembled more slowly and more slowly, grew fainter and fainter, and ceased at last; silence, as of the grave, was all that was left. As he listened, his breath and his heart stopped, a faintness came over him which extended to his very soul; and then--and then--as floods wash the dead from out of the churches and the graves, in this morbid hour of dreams, the stream of his heart came flowing again, and bearing upon its billows a new corpse from out the future, torn all unshrouded from its earthly bed; it was his own body; he was dead. He looked out of window towards the comforting and rea.s.suring light and star of life, but the voice within him cried on still, "Do not deceive thyself; before the new year"s wishes are said again, thou wilt have departed hence."
When a shivering heart is thus all shorn of its leaves and standing bare, every breeze that touches it is a freezing blast. With what a soft, warm, gentle touch Lenette would have had to touch it so as not to startle it. A heart in this condition is like a clairvoyante, who feels a chill as of death in every hand which touches from beyond the charmed circle.
He determined to join the corpse-lottery (as it was called) that very day, so as to be able at all events to pay the toll or tax on his departure for the next world. He told Lenette so, but she thought this was only another of his harpings on the subject of the mourning dress.
Thus cloudily pa.s.sed the first day of the year, and the first week was even more rainy. The garden-hedge and fencing round Lenette"s love for Stiefel were completely cut down and pulled up now, and the love was to be clearly seen of every pa.s.ser-by. Every evening at the time when the Schulrath used formerly to come, vexation and regret graved a deeper furrow on her round young face, which as time went on turned wholly into a piece of carving fretted by the hand of grief. She found out the days when he was to preach, so that she might go and hear him, and whenever a funeral pa.s.sed, she went to the window to see him. The bookbinder"s wife was her "corresponding member," from whom she constantly drew fresh discoveries concerning the Schulrath, and repeated the old ones with her over and over again. What an amount of warmth the Schulrath must have gained by reason of his focal distance, and her husband have lost on account of his proximity will be at once apparent; just as the earth derives least warmth from the sun when they are nearest together, i. e. in winter! Moreover another event came just then to pa.s.s which increased Lenette"s aversion. Von Blaize had secretly circulated a report that Siebenkaes was an atheist and no Christian. Respectable old maiden ladies and the clergy, form a charming contrast to the vindictive Romans under the Empire, who often accused, the most innocent people possible of being Christians, in order that they might obtain a martyr"s crown. The old maids and parsons aforesaid rather take the part of a man who is in a position of this kind, and deny that he is a Christian; and in this they contrast, likewise with the Romans and Italians of the present day, who always say "there are four Christians here," when they mean "four men." In St.
Ferieux, near Besancon, the most virtuous girl used to be presented with a lace veil of the value of live shillings by way of a prize; and people like Blaize are fond of throwing a prize for virtue of this kind, namely, a moral veil, over the good. This is why they are fond of calling thinking men infidels, and the heterodox wolves, whose teeth help to smooth and polish,--which is the reason why wolves are engraved upon the best steel blades.
When Siebenkaes first told his wife this report of Blaize"s (that he was no Christian, if not, indeed, altogether an infidel), she didn"t pay very much attention to it, inasmuch as it seemed out of the question such a thing could be true of a man to whom she had united herself in the holy state of matrimony. It was not until sometime afterwards that she remembered that, one month when there had been a long period of dry weather he had spoken disparagingly (without the least hesitation), not only of the Roman Catholic processions (for she did not think THEY WERE of very much use herself), but concerning the Protestant"s prayers for rain, inquiring, "Do the processions, miles long, in the Arabian deserts, which go by the name of caravans, ever lead to the production of a single cloud in the sky, let them pray for rain as hard as they choose?" And "Why do the clergy get up processions only for rain or fine weather? why not to get rid of a severe winter, when at all events those who took part in the processions would feel a little warmer; or, in Holland, for bright sunny weather and the dispersion of fog; or against the aurora-borealis in Greenland?" "But what he wondered at most," he said, "was why those converters of the heathen, who pray so often, and with so much success for the sun when he"s only behind a cloud or two, should not supplicate for him in circ.u.mstances of infinitely greater importance--in the polar regions, namely, where for months at a time he never appears even when the sky is altogether cloudless? Or why," he asked in the last place, "do they take no steps to pet.i.tion against the great solar eclipses (which are seldom very enjoyable occurrences), suffering themselves to be outdone by savage nations in this respect, for as the latter _do_ howl and pray them away?" Many speeches, in themselves innocuous at first, nay sweet, acquire poisonous properties in the storehouse of time, as sugar does when kept for thirty years in a warehouse.[56] These few words, candidly spoken out in the course of common conversation, took a great hold upon Lenette now that she sate under Stiefel"s pulpit (made of apostles all carpentered up together), and heard him offering up one prayer after another, for, or against (as the case might be), sickness, government, child-birth, harvest, &c., &c.! How dear, on the other hand, Peltzstiefel grew to her; his very sermons became, in the most charming manner, regular love-letters to her heart. And indeed clericality does, at all times, stand in a very close relation to the feminine heart; that"s why "hearts" formerly meant the clergy on German playing cards.
Now what all this time did Stanislaus Siebenkaes think and do? Two contradictory things. If a hard word escaped him, he was sorry for the feeble, forsaken soul, whose whole rose-border of enjoyment had been hoed up, whose first love for the Schulrath lay languishing in sorrow and famine; for the thousand charms of that imprisoned nature of hers would have opened in all their beauty to some heart she loved, which _his_ was not. "And can I not see," he said further, "how impossible it is that the pin"s or needle"s point can act as a lightning conductor to the sultry, lightning-charged clouds of her life, in the same way that the pen"s point does for mine. One _can_ WRITE a good deal of one"s mind, but one can"t _st.i.tch_ very much off it. And when I consider what swimming-belts and cork-jackets for the deepest floods _I_ am prepared with, in the shape of the self-contemplation of the Emperor Antoninus and in Arria.n.u.s Epictetus, of neither of whom _she_ knows even the binding, let alone the name (to say nothing of my astronomy and psychology); and what splendid hands at the fire engine-pumps _they_ are to me when I blaze up in a conflagration of anger as I did just now, while _she_ has to let _her_ anger burn itself out, verily I ought to be ten times more gentle with her, instead of being ten times more irritable." If it happened, on the other hand, that he had not given but had _received_ a few hard words, he thought of her warm longing for the Schulrath which she could so readily increase and magnify in secret during her wholly mechanical work, to any extent; and of the continual yielding of his own too soft heart; a thing for which his strong-souled Leibgeber would have scolded him, while his wife would have done so for the contrary defect, which she was not likely to encounter in her stiff unyielding Stiefel, judging by the recent unceremoniousness of style in which he, the other day, gave his notice of the calling in of his capital of Regard.
In this frame of mind, one day when his spirit was heavy with anger, he put to her, as she was starting again to go to the Schulrath"s evening sermon, the simple little question, why it was she used formerly to go so seldom to the evening service, and now went so often? She answered that it was because the evening preacher, Mr. Schalaster, always used to preach in the evenings, but that since he had put out his collar-bone the Schulrath had taken his duty. Heaven forbid that she should go to the evening services when Mr. Schalaster"s collar-bone was well again. By slow degrees he drew out of her that she considered this young Mr. Schalaster a most dangerous disseminator of false doctrine, a man who by no means adhered to Luther"s bible, but believed in _Mosheh_, and in Jesos Christos, Petros and Paulos, and, in fact, _os"d_ all the Apostles in such a manner as to be an offence to all Christian folks; nay he had gone the length of naming the Holy Jerusalem in such an extraordinary way that she couldn"t so much as say it after him; it was soon after this that he had put out his collar-bone, but far be it from her to judge the man. "No, don"t, dear," her husband said, "perhaps the young gentleman may be a little nearsighted, or he mayn"t know his Greek Testament so well as he ought, the _u_"s in it are sometimes a good deal like _o_"s. Ah! how many Schalasters there are who do in their several sciences and doctrines, say Petros for Petrus, and where there"s not the slightest occasion, and nothing in the shape of a stumbling-block in the path, breed dissension among mankind by means of consanguineous vowels."