Reluctantly do I tear myself away for a night from this virtuous pair.
May I get many more days of Maienthal to paint, and may Victor spend there many days more!
15. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Parting.
Ah, he goes this very day! The emotions and conversations which we have described had shattered too severely the tender casing which enclosed, as a tulip does the bee, Emanuel"s fair spirit; he rose pale and languid; and the blind one was the happiest, who saw neither this paleness nor the white handkerchief which he, during the night, instead of staining with tears, had stained with blood. He himself had still the pale evening red of yesterday"s joy on his face; but this very indifference to the gradual extinguishing of his days, this growing feebleness and faintness of tone in his conversation, caused Victor to turn away his eyes from him whenever they had for some time rested upon him. Emanuel looked down calm as an eternal sun on the autumn of his bodily life; nay, the more the sand fell from his life"s hourgla.s.s, so much the more clearly did he look through the empty gla.s.s. And yet the earth was to him a beloved place, a fair meadow for our earliest plays of childhood; and he still hung upon this mother of our first life with the love wherewith the bride spends the evening full of childish remembrances on the bosom of her beloved mother, before on the morrow she goes to meet the bridegroom of her heart.
Victor reproached himself with every drop of blood shed by Emanuel, and resolved to go to-day, because this Psyche, with her great wings, could no longer stir herself in her web without tearing it. In Emanuel"s eyes there shone an inexpressible love for his sympathizing scholar. He began of himself to speak of his dying-day, in order to comfort him, and represented to him that he could not go hence till after a year. He based his enthusiastic prediction on two grounds;--first, that most of his male relatives had died on the selfsame day and in the selfsame climacteric[175] of life; secondly, that several consumptive patients before him had read in their diseased breast, as in a magic mirror, their last day. Victor disputed him; he showed that the foretelling of one"s last appearance, as if the hectic man could easily feel beforehand, from the regular and gradual failing of the vital energy, the last step or freezing-point, was false, because feelings of the future in the present were contradictions (_in adjecto_), and because in the midst of life we could as little have a presentiment of the arrival of death as in our waking hours we can (notwithstanding a parallel gradation of steps in this case also) that of sleep. Victor represented all this to him; and yet he did not fairly believe it himself; he was overmastered by the lofty man who could announce his entrance into the shadow of death as calmly and confidently as an entrance of the moon into the shadow of the earth.... We will forgive the sick man, and not hold ourselves wiser than he is, because he is more enthusiastic than we.--Victor was most consoled by Emanuel"s notion that his deceased father would appear to him for the first time just before his death.
Victor lingered, and tried not to linger; forbade, as physician, Emanuel"s talking, in order to make the excuse to himself of a harmless postponement, and became more and more troubled, for the very reason that he cared little to speak himself.--How canst thou, good Victor, this very day hurry away from him, from this angel, who will perhaps disappear over the next grave?--It must be a sore thing for thee, since it is already so hard to quit a Maienthal full of blossoms, a blind one full of soft tones; painful is here the last pressure of hands, Victor, and sweet every delay!
He resolved to take leave at night, because a parting in the morning begets too long a sadness, and the place in the heart from which the beloved object was torn away continues bleeding all day long. Emanuel would of course, at evening, have betaken himself to the seminary, as he did yesterday; then would Victor, before the blind one, whom he would beg for the saddest melody in the world, be able to let his full eyelids, with which he always had to go out in order to relieve the anguish, stream down to his heart"s content.
When at evening he had eaten his last meal, and the evening-bell began, his heart felt as if the breast had been lifted away from it, and needle-points of ice were blown upon it.[176] Full of love, he clasped the blind youth, whom he was not permitted to recognize as the playmate of his childhood, and who with his tones had given more raptures than he had in this night of his blindness received in return; and he let tears have their way, whose twofold, perhaps threefold, source Emanuel did not guess; for the sight of these eyes, which were nevermore to be opened, awoke in him now, since Clotilda"s wish for their healing, much more sorrow. Emanuel he still begged, with a voice that hurried away over the incidental meaning, to accompany him a short distance, till Maienthal should be out of sight.
Out in the darkling and still country, all his sorrows lingered in his breast beside their sighs. "When the moon glimmers in upon this valley of blossoms," thought he, "I shall have left it for a long time." Only the altar-lights, the stars, burned in the great temple. He proposed to himself to part with his teacher on the mountain where their union had taken place; but he went up by circuitous ways,--Emanuel gladly following whithersoever he led,--in order during the circuit to overmaster his taciturnity and his tears.
But they arrived at the foot of the weeping-birch, and grief still held possession of his eye and his voice. "Ah!" thought he, "how great and glad was the first night here, and how painful is this!" They reclined on the earth beside each other on the gra.s.sy bank, solitary, silent, sad, before the darkly glimmering universe. Victor could hear the labored breathing of the diseased breast, and the future grave on this mountain seemed to open at his side. Oh! if it is bitter to stand by the bed wherein a loved and fading countenance lies with the hues of death, far more bitter is it, in the midst of the scenes of health, behind the erect form of the dear one, to hear the grave-digger Death softly at his work, and to think, as often as the loved face looks joyful, "Ah, be still more joyful! in a short time he will have gnawed round the roots of thy life, and thou wilt have pa.s.sed away with thy joys and with mine!"--But ah! there is indeed no friend, man or woman, with whom we should not be obliged to think the same!--
He knew not why Dah.o.r.e was so long silent.--He foresaw not that the moon would illumine the mountain sooner than the valley. The moon, that Pharos on the coast of the second world, now encircled men with pale fields, taken from dreams, with wan, gleaming meadows born of a super-terrestrial perspective, and the Alps and woods it resolved into immovable mists; _above_ the hemisphere of earth stood deep the Lethe-flood of slumber, _below_ the green crust stood the dead sea, and two loving men lived between the wide domains of sleep and death.... At this moment Victor thought to himself, indeed, still more keenly, "Here, beside this birch-tree, under this cold sod, will _his_ crumbling breast be forever hidden, and his heart will bleed no more; but ah! it will beat no more." He thought, indeed, upon gloomy resemblances, as the _immovable_ stars appeared to go _up_ and _down_, merely because the playing _earth_ turned itself about them, now _showing_ and now _hiding_ them; he turned, indeed, his melancholy glance away from the _ignes fatui_, that, gliding over valleys, danced only on the solemn darkness and on the graves, and which described round a solitary powder-house their deceptive circles.----
But still he was silent, and thought, "Ah, well! we have each other yet."
But then it was too much for his bleeding heart when the flute-wails of the blind one stole out from the solitary house into the night, and pa.s.sed over the mountain and over the future grave.--Then were voices given to the sighs and death-bells to the future, and his sadness grew too oppressive, as he thought, amidst the flute-murmurs, how this unique, this irreplaceable man, who cherished so much love for him in his great heart, was going hence never to reappear.--Ah! and when, besides, just at this moment, Emanuel, who had been lying beside him silently lost in gazing on the heavens and like a departed one, changed his position on account of his painful and oppressed breathing, but with a countenance whose serenity was undisturbed by the pains in his breast, then a cold hand glided into Victor"s swollen heart and turned itself about therein, and his blood curdled on it, and he said, without the power of looking upon him, in faint, supplicating, broken accents, "Do not die in a year, my dear Emanuel,--do not wish to die!"
The genius of night had stood till now, invisibly, before Emanuel, and poured high raptures into his bosom, but no pa.s.sions; and he said: "We are not alone,--my soul feels the pa.s.sing by of its kindred, and lifts itself up,--_under_ the earth is sleep, _above_ the earth is dream, but between sleep and dream I see luminous eyes move along like stars,--a cool breath comes from the sea of eternity over the glowing earth,--my heart mounts up, and will break away from life,--all around me is as great as if G.o.d pa.s.sed through the night.--Spirits! grasp my spirit,--it climbs to your embrace,--and bear it up yonder...."
Victor turned round and looked imploringly into the beautiful, joyous, tearless countenance: "Thou _wilt_ die?"
Emanuel"s ecstasy soared above life: "The dark streak in the next world is only a meadow of flowers,[177]--suns shine to light us onward,--flying heavens come to meet us with spring-breezes. With only empty graves the earth flies round the sun; for her dead stand remote on brighter suns."--
"Emanuel?" said Victor, in a questioning tone, weeping aloud, and with a voice of the most fervent yearning,--and the flute-notes sank sorrowfully into the broad night,--"Emanuel?"
Emanuel, returning to himself, looked on him, and said, calmly: "Yes, my beloved!--I can no more accustom myself to the earth; the water-drop of life has become flat and shallow,--I can no longer move round therein,--and my heart yearns to be among the great men who have left this drop behind them.--O beloved, listen, I pray,"--and here he pressed to soreness the heart of his Victor,--"and hear this heavy breath going. See, I pray, this shattered body, this thick casing,--how it wraps round my spirit, and obstructs its pa.s.sage.--
"See, here my spirit and thine cleave frozen to the ice-cake, and yonder the night opens all her heavens, reposing one behind the other; yonder in the blue, glimmering abyss dwells all the greatness which has disrobed itself on the earth, all the truth that we guess, all the goodness that we love.--
"See, how still is all up there in immensity,--how softly the worlds move, how silently the suns glow! The great Eternal reposes as a fountain, with his overflowing, infinite love, in the midst of them, refreshing and tranquillizing all; and around G.o.d lies no grave."
Here Emanuel, as if raised by an infinite blessedness, stood up and looked lovingly toward Arcturus, who still hung under the zenith of heaven, and said, directing his words toward the broad deep of brilliancy: "Ah, how inexpressibly do I yearn to come up to you! Ah, break in pieces, old heart, and hold me not so long in these bonds!"
"Die, then, great soul," said Victor, "and take thy way up yonder; but break with thy death my little heart also, and keep by thee the poor one who cannot forsake thee nor do without thee."
The flute had ceased; the two friends had sunk into each other"s arms to end their farewell. "Dear, beloved, never-to-be-forgotten one," said Emanuel, "thou movest me too deeply; but when, a year hence, I go up from this mountain, then shalt thou stand by me, and see how man is released from his bonds. Thy tears will be my last earthly pangs; but I shall say, what I say now, We part by night, but we meet again by day."
And so he went.
Victor had gently disengaged himself from the childlike lips,--he sought not to follow him on his night-track,--slowly he went along by one vast sleep.--Often he turned round and followed with eyes full of falling tears the falling stars over Maienthal; and at four of the morning he arrived with a heavenly soul at St. Luna, and entered the garden full of old scenes, and laid down in the familiar arbor his glowing head and his subdued heart in the dew of the morning for a cooling repose.
O rest thou, rest thou!--ah! sleep only, either on the earth or under the earth, can still the ever-agitated bosom of man....[178]
16. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Potato-form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The Thistle of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.
One would certainly want to sleep in one"s clothes, like old Fritz, so soon as ever one came to understand that in his shirt he is beset and attacked, as Victor and I sometimes are, by the vampires of midnight melancholy. They stay away when one sits up and has all his clothes on; especially do boots and hat retain for us the feeling of day in the greatest degree.--
A warm hand lifted up Victor"s bedewed head from the sleeping-board,[179] and directed it towards the whole surging flood of morning-light. His eyes opened (as always) with indescribable mildness, and without night-clouds, before Agatha, and beamed on her with full radiance. But she hurried him away with his radiance out of the leafy bedchamber; for he must look himself up a dressing-comb and a morning-blessing, and, secondly, the table-couch was to be a tea-table for Clotilda, who liked to take _warm_ drinks in _cool_ places.
--And so he stands out there between parsonage and palace in mid-morning. All seemed to him to have been just built and painted during his journey; for all that dwelt therein seemed to have changed and made him melancholy. "The parents in there," he said to himself, "have no son, my friend has no sweetheart, and I--no tranquil heart."
And now, when at last he entered the house, and became once more a bright triumphal arch of the loving family-circle,--when he was compelled to contemplate with sympathetic and yet enlightened eyes the tender illusions of the parents, the groundless hopes of his friend, and the coming up of stormy days,--then stood one fixed tear for the future in his eye; and it grew not less when his adoptive mother would justify it by tender glances.... Partly, however, this veil was wafted over his soul merely from the preceding night, whose glimmering scenes were separated from him only by a short interval of sleep; for a night spent in the watches of emotion always ends with a melancholy forenoon.
The Chaplain was just making b.u.t.ter-vignettes; I mean, he was cutting, with no other etching-tool than a penknife, and into no other copperplate except potatoes, printers" tail-pieces and quadrats, which were to be stamped on the July b.u.t.ter by way of ornament. One might have supposed that Victor would have helped himself out greatly by having wit enough to remark that the _old printed things_ were, to be sure, quite worthy of long books upon them, and long universal German literary reviews of the books, but of no human thought, and were ten times more unenjoyable than these _newest_ b.u.t.ter-_incunabula_;[180]
for, if there could be anything wretcheder than the world"s history (i. e. the history of rulers), whose contents consisted of wars, as the theatre-journal of _other_ puppets does of cudgellings, it could only be the history of _litterateurs_ and printers.[181] This, too, must have stood him in stead,--that he was, finally, philosophical, and demanded that man should be called neither a _laughing_ nor a _reasoning_, but a _prinking_ animal; to which remark the Chaplain"s lady added nothing, except the application of it to her daughters.
But in men of his sort, sadness, satire, and philosophy have place beside each other. To the potato-medal-coiner and the Chaplainess, who reckoned all women on earth among her daughters, and p.r.o.nounced similar castigatory sermons against them all, he described his journey with as many satires and rasures as were needful for both parties; but when he heard the wishes of the family expressed that his Lordship might have a happy journey back with the beloved son of the Prince, and the intelligence that the Regency-Counsellor had already everything packed up to start for the city any hour that he might choose, then had Victor nothing to do but to take the secretive tear-ducts in his eye-sockets out of the way.
But whither? Into the garden! That was not well-considered. Flamin followed, and they arrived together at the embowered closet in the presence of the tea-drinkers. Never did its branches overshadow a more embarra.s.sed face, softer eyes, fuller looks, and livelier or lovelier dreams than Victor carried with him beneath them. He thought of Clotilda as now a wholly new being, and thought, therefore,--as he knew not whether she loved him,--very stupidly. Man, when he has climbed over the mountain, always regards the coming hill as nothing; Flamin had been his mountain, and Clotilda was his hill.--In all the shallows of conversation, where one is already half stranding or sinking, there is no grander ship"s-pump than a story which one has to tell. Give me embarra.s.sment, and the largest circle, and only _one_ disaster,--that is, the anecdote of it, which no one knows but myself,--and I will soon save myself. Victor therefore brought out his, life-preserver,--that is, his log-book,--from which he made for the bower a practical extract. I confess, a newspaper-writer might have falsified more, might have been guilty of more sins of _commission_, but hardly of more sins of _omission_.
He gave himself, I fancy, a lift again with the Chaplainess, and injured himself unquestionably with Clotilda,--however much, out of good-will towards his hearers, and too strong a hatred of the court, he offended against Clotilda"s satire-embargo in her letter,--when, without reflecting, too, that maidens love only the jest, not the jesters, he represented the benefit-drama of the Princess, not on the sublime side, as I did, but on the comic side. Clotilda smiled, and Agatha laughed.
But when he named the name of Emanuel, and his house, and his mountain, then did friendship and memory diffuse over the fairest eye above which an eyebrow-arch, drawn by a line of beauty, ever yet flowed, a soft glimmer which wanted, every moment, to grow to a tear of joy. But it had to become one of another nature, when, in answer to the question about his health which Clotilda hopefully put to him as an adept in science, Victor was compelled to give the (faintly paraphrased) history of his nocturnal bleeding. He could not conceal the pang of sympathy, nor could Clotilda conquer it. O ye two good souls! what sore wounds will your hearts yet receive from your great friend!
Whither could she now turn her loving and sorrowing eye, but to her good brother Flamin, towards whom her demeanor, in consequence of the double constraint which her silence and his interpretations imposed upon her, had been hitherto so indescribably mild?--As, now, Victor saw all this with such wholly different eyes,--as he stood before his poor friend, who with his present happiness was perhaps acc.u.mulating the poisonous nourishment of his future jealousy, and gazed openly and fixedly into the firm countenance which some time bitter days might rend with agony,--and as, generally, _past_ or _future_ sorrows of another took a stronger hold of him than _present_ ones, because fancy had him more in its power than the senses,--in this state of things, he could not for a moment a.s.sert the mastery over his eyes, but they bent their look, encircled with compa.s.sionate tears, tenderly on his friend.
Clotilda was embarra.s.sed about the resting-place of his look; so was he too, because man is less ashamed of the most vehement signs of hatred than of the smallest signs of love. Clotilda understood not the coquettish double art of throwing others into embarra.s.sment or drawing them out of it; and the good Agatha always confounded the latter with the former.... "Ask him what ails him, brother!" said Agatha to Flamin....
The latter led him out with like good intention behind the nearest gooseberry-bushes, and asked him in his firm way, which always held an a.s.sertion as a question,--
"Something has happened to thee?"
"Just come this way!" said Victor, and pulled him along behind some higher Spanish walls[182] of foliage.
"Nothing has happened to me," he began, at last, with br.i.m.m.i.n.g eye-sockets and smiling features,--"nothing more than that I have been a fool for some twenty-six years" (that was his age). "I know thou art unfortunately a jurist, and perhaps a worse oculist than I myself am, and hast, perhaps, read very little in Herr Janin.[183]--Am I right?"
Flamin"s shaking of his head meant something more than No.
"Very naturally; but if thou hadst, thou couldst have it from himself, or from the translation by Selle, very finely shown, that not merely the lachrymal gland secretes our tear-drops, but also the crystalline body,[184] the Meibomian[185] glands, the lachrymal caruncle,[186]
and--our afflicted heart, I add to the rest.--Nevertheless, of these aqueous globules, which are made for the sorrows of poor, poor mortals, not more than (if things go rightly) four ounces are filtered in twenty-four hours.... But, my dear one, the fact is just this,--that things do not go rightly, especially with me; and it vexes me to-day, not that thou hast never peeped into Herr Janin, but that thou dost not observe my confounded, cursed, stupid way."
"What one?"