CHAPTER XVI.THE HOMEWARD JOURNEY, WITH ALL ITS PLEASURES—THE ARRIVAL AT HOME.Firmian took his departure. He was sorry to leave the hotel, which had been a royal “Sans Souci” and “mon repos” to him, and turn his face away from its comfortable chambers towards his own bare comfortless rooms. To him who had never known any of the comforts—the softpaddings, so to speak, of this hard life of ours—who had never had any other Jack but the boot-jack, it had been an enormous pleasure and enjoyment to have the power of ringing that leading actor, John the waiter, up from hiscoulisseswith such facility, and that too with plates and glasses in his hand, out of which said actor enjoyed nothing, only Siebenkæs and the public so doing. Just at the door of the hotel, he made to Mr. Feldmann, the landlord, the following eulogistic address, which shall be made him once more in print by me, by way of an additional blazon to his coat of arms, the moment it gets through the press. “There is only one thing which your guests have to desire, that they have not got, and that is the most important of all things—time. May your sun reach the sign of the crab, and remain in it.” Several Bayreuthians who were standing by thought this was a miserable satire.Henry went with Firmian some thirty paces beyond the Reformation church, as far as the church-yard, and tore himself away from him with less difficulty than usual, for he expected to see him again in a few weeks’ time—on his death-bed. He would not go as far as Fantaisie with him, wishing to allow him to sink, in silence and undisturbed, and lose himself in the enjoyment of the magic echoes of the spirit-harmonies of that night of bliss wherewith all the garden would be vocal.Alone, then, Firmian entered into the valley as into some holy temple, all sacredness and awe. Every thicket seemed, to his eyes, glorified with super-earthly light, the stream, a stream flowing out of Arcadia, and the whole valley a Vale of Tempè, transported thither and unveiled to view. And when he came to the dear and holy spot where Nathalie had prayed him to “think of that night,” it seemed to him that the sun was shedding a heavenlier brightness; and that the hum of bees in the blossoms was music of spirit-voices wafted on the air, and that he must needs prostrate himself and press his heart upon the dewy sward. Upon this trembling sound-board he once more retraced the old path by which he had walked with Nathalie, and, now in a rose espalier, now from some streamlet, now from the balcony, now from some leafy nook or trembling stem, string after string, breaking from silence, gave forth once more its old lovely tone. His enraptured heart swelled, even to pain; a moist transparent shimmer was over his eyes, and dissolved into a great tear-drop. His eyes, drunken with weeping, distinguished nothing save the brightness of the morning and the whiteness of the flowers; details were hid by the flowery vail of dreaming, in whose lily perfume his soul sank down, soothed to a restful sleep. It was as if hitherto, in the enjoyment of being with his Leibgeber he had only felt half the real strength of his love for Nathalie; with such a new might and breeze of heaven did that love come breathing upon him in this solitude with ethereal tire. A world all youth burst into blossom in his heart.Of a sudden the bells of Bayreuth came ringing into this world, striking for him the hour of his farewell to it; and there fell on him that anxious sadness with which we linger, too long, beside a place where we have been happy, when the time has come when we must say Adieu. He went upon his way.What a brightness fell upon all the hills and meadows, with the thought of Nathalie, and that imperishable kiss! The green world, which had been but a series of pictures for him, as he came, was now all speech and language. There was a light-magnet of happiness all day long in the dimmest corner of his being; and when, in the thick of distractions, conversations and the like,en route, he cast a sudden glance into himself, he found a continual sense of blissfulness within him.How often he turned back to the Bayreuth hills, beyond which he had lived real days of youth, for the first time in his existence! Behind him Nathalie was journeying on towards the east, and breezes from that quarter—airs which had breathed gently around the distant, lonely one—came wafting back to him, and he drunk the æther-stream like the breath of one beloved.The hills sunk low on the horizon; his paradise was whelmed in the blue of heaven. His west and Nathalie’s east flowed asunder, and parted wider, faster and faster as the moments sped. One beautiful plain receded, flying behind him, after another; and he hastened past the flower-decked limbs of Spring as she lay outstretched on earth, alternating between looking and enjoying, as in early days gone by.Thus he came at evening to the village in the valley by the Jaxt, where on his journey to Bayreuth, he had passed in review, with tears, his loveless days; but he came with a new heart, full to the brim with love and happiness; and tears flowed this time too. Here where, amid the melting magic lights of evening, he had asked himself, “What womanly soul has ever lovedyouas your old dreams have so often pictured to your heart youmightbe loved by one,” and had given himself so sad an answer; here he could think on that Bayreuth night, and say, “Yes! Nathalie has loved me!” And then the old sorrow rose again, but glorified, from the dead. He had made to her a vow of invisibility here on earth; he was now journeying on towards his own death; he was to die, and never see her more. She was gone before him—haddiedfirst, as it were; she had merely taken away with her into the long, dim, coming years of her life the grief of having loved and lost,twice. “And I look into my own life here, and weep, away from her,” he said, wearily, and closed his eyes undried.Another world altogether opened upon him in the morning—not a new world by any means—the old, old familiar one. Just as if the concentric magic circles which surrounded Nathalie and Leibgeber reached no further than the little Valley of Longing on the Jaxt, and could include nothing beyond it. Every step towards home translated the poetry which had come into his life to poetic prose. The Imperial market-town (that frigid zone of his life) was nearer to him; his torrid zone, over which the faded petals of his ephemeral joy-flowers were fluttering still, was far away behind him.But, on the other hand, the pictured imagery of his domestic life kept growing clearer and brighter, taking the form of a picture-bible, while the paintings of his month of bliss died away into a dark picture gallery. I think the weather, which was rainy, had some connection with this.Towards the end of the week the weather, as well as penitents and churchgoers, puts on other shirts and clothes.It was Saturday, and cloudy. Damp weather affects the walls of our brains as it does the walls of our rooms; the paperings of both imbibe the moisture, and get curled up into clouds, until the next dry day smooths both out again. Under a blue sky, I long for eagles’ pinions; under a cloudy one, I only want a goose’s wing to write with. In the former case we are eager to be off and out, into the wide world; in the latter, all we want is to sit comfortably down in our arm-chair. In short, clouds, when they drop, make us domestic, citizenish, and hungry, while blue skies make us thirsty, and citizensof the world.These clouds of this Saturday formed a kind of palisade about the Eden of Bayreuth. Every big drop which fell on the leaves made him think longingly of the wifely, wedded heart, which was his lawful property (and which he was soon to lose), and of his poor little lodging. At last when the ice-floes of the rugged-clouds melted into grey foam, and the setting sun was drawn like a sluice, out of this suspended mill-pond, and it poured down in consequence, Kuhschnappel came in sight.Discordant, jarring fancies clanged in contention within him. The commonplace, narrow-minded, provincial town, seemed, when contrasted with freer and more liberal places and societies, so crowded and crushed together, so official in style, and full of Troglodytes—with doggrel, and table-verses by way of poetry—that he felt it would be a satisfaction to drag out his green trellis-bed into the market-place in broad daylight, and go to sleep beneath the very windows of the local “quality,” without minding a brass-farthing what the upper council might think, or the lower council either. The nearer he came to the stage he was to die upon, the more difficult did this first rôle of his (and last but one) appear to him.Awayfrom home we are bold and daring: we resolve, and undertake;athome, we pause and hesitate, and delay.Yes, and the smoke and smells of the mean streets gnawed into him, matters which, of themselves unaided, so sorely affect and depress us that there are very few indeed who can raise their heads wholly beyond these effluvia. For in man there nestles an accursed tendency towards still-sitting ease and comfort; like a big dog he lets himself be poked and pinched a thousand times before he takes the trouble to get up, rather than growl. Once fairly on his legs, however, he is not in a hurry to lie down again. The first heroic deed (like the first earned dollar, according to Rousseau) costs more than the next thousand. The prospect of the long, difficult, tedious and risky financial and surgical operation of a stage death stung our Siebenkæs on the domestic bolster.But the nearer he drew to the gallows-hill (that mouse-tower of his old, narrow life), the quicker and the clearer did the thoughts of the heart-oppressing stamping-mills of past days, and of his approaching salvation, vibrate in alternation in his mind. He kept thinking that he would have to suffer care, anxiety, and struggle of all sorts, as of old, because he kept losing sight of the open sky of his future, just as we go on suffering the pain and fear of a painful dream for some time after we have awakened from it.But when he saw the house where dwelt his Lenette, whose voice he had not heard for so many a day, the pain all vanished from his heart, the trouble from his eyes, nothing being left in them but affection and its warmest tears.“Ah! am I not going to tear myself, so soon, from her for ever, and make her shed tears of delusion, and wound her with the terrible wounds of a funeral and mourning? and then, poor darling soul, we shall see each other no more!” he thought.He quickened his pace. He squeezed close past the shop windows of his co-commandant, Meerbitzer, with his head thrown back, and his eyes fixed upon the up-stairs windows. Meerbitzer was in the house, splitting the Sunday wood; and Firmian signed to him not to give note of his presence by any sort of sentry-challenge. The old associate czar signed back to him, with outstretched fingers, that Lenette was alone in the room up-stairs. The old familiar ripieno voices of the house, the querulous scolding of the book-binder’s wife, the damper-pedal effect of the eternal prayer and curser, Fecht, met him like so much sweet provender, as he climbed the stairs. The waning moon of his movable pewter property shone silvery and glorious upon him from the kitchen, everything fresh from its font of regeneration; a copper fish-kettle, which poisoned no vinegar as long as it was unmended, glowed upon him through the kitchen smoke like the sun in a November fog. He opened the door of the sitting-room gently; he saw no one in it, but heard Lenette making the bed in the bed-room. With a whole iron foundry hammering in his breast, he made a long, noiseless stride into the room, which was all in apple-pie order, with its Sunday shirt of white sand on already (upon which the bed-making river goddess and water nymph had expended all her aquatic arts in the production, of a highly-finished masterpiece). Ah! everything was so full of rest and peace, so tranquilly reposing after the whirl and turmoil of the week. The rain stars had risen upon everything, except his ink bottle, which was quite dry.His writing-table was, so to speak,mannedby two or three large heads, which, being cap-blocks, had on their Sunday bonnets, already, which would be transferred from them in their capacity ofCuratores Sexus, next morning, to the heads of the ladies of the members of council.He pushed the bed-room door wider open, and there, after this long separation, he saw his dear wife, standing with her back to him.Just then he fancied he recognised Stiefel’s fulling-mill steps coming up stairs; and, that he might pass his first minute on her heart unseen by a stranger eye, he said twice, softly, “Lenette!”She started round, crying “Oh good gracious! is it you?” He had clasped her in his arms, before she got these words out, and rested on her kiss, saying, “Good evening, good evening, and how are you, and how have you been?”His lips stifled the answers. But suddenly she pushed him back and struggled out of his arms, while two other arms clasped him swiftly, and a bass voice said, “Here am I as well; you are welcome back, praise and thanks be to God.” It was the Schulrath.Poor, fevered human creatures that we are! driven back and repulsed asunder by our own lackings, and those of others, yet continually drawn together again by never-ceasing longings, in whom one hope of finding love falls away to dust after another, whose wishes come to nothing butmemories. Our feeble hearts are at all events glowing and right full of love in that hour when wecome backand meet again; and in that other hour when we part, disconsolate,—as every star seems milder, larger, and lovelier when it is rising, than when it is overhead. But to souls whichalwayslove, and areneverangry, these two twilights (when the morning star of meeting, and the evening star of parting shine) are too sad to bear for tothemthey seem likenights.
THE HOMEWARD JOURNEY, WITH ALL ITS PLEASURES—THE ARRIVAL AT HOME.
Firmian took his departure. He was sorry to leave the hotel, which had been a royal “Sans Souci” and “mon repos” to him, and turn his face away from its comfortable chambers towards his own bare comfortless rooms. To him who had never known any of the comforts—the softpaddings, so to speak, of this hard life of ours—who had never had any other Jack but the boot-jack, it had been an enormous pleasure and enjoyment to have the power of ringing that leading actor, John the waiter, up from hiscoulisseswith such facility, and that too with plates and glasses in his hand, out of which said actor enjoyed nothing, only Siebenkæs and the public so doing. Just at the door of the hotel, he made to Mr. Feldmann, the landlord, the following eulogistic address, which shall be made him once more in print by me, by way of an additional blazon to his coat of arms, the moment it gets through the press. “There is only one thing which your guests have to desire, that they have not got, and that is the most important of all things—time. May your sun reach the sign of the crab, and remain in it.” Several Bayreuthians who were standing by thought this was a miserable satire.
Henry went with Firmian some thirty paces beyond the Reformation church, as far as the church-yard, and tore himself away from him with less difficulty than usual, for he expected to see him again in a few weeks’ time—on his death-bed. He would not go as far as Fantaisie with him, wishing to allow him to sink, in silence and undisturbed, and lose himself in the enjoyment of the magic echoes of the spirit-harmonies of that night of bliss wherewith all the garden would be vocal.
Alone, then, Firmian entered into the valley as into some holy temple, all sacredness and awe. Every thicket seemed, to his eyes, glorified with super-earthly light, the stream, a stream flowing out of Arcadia, and the whole valley a Vale of Tempè, transported thither and unveiled to view. And when he came to the dear and holy spot where Nathalie had prayed him to “think of that night,” it seemed to him that the sun was shedding a heavenlier brightness; and that the hum of bees in the blossoms was music of spirit-voices wafted on the air, and that he must needs prostrate himself and press his heart upon the dewy sward. Upon this trembling sound-board he once more retraced the old path by which he had walked with Nathalie, and, now in a rose espalier, now from some streamlet, now from the balcony, now from some leafy nook or trembling stem, string after string, breaking from silence, gave forth once more its old lovely tone. His enraptured heart swelled, even to pain; a moist transparent shimmer was over his eyes, and dissolved into a great tear-drop. His eyes, drunken with weeping, distinguished nothing save the brightness of the morning and the whiteness of the flowers; details were hid by the flowery vail of dreaming, in whose lily perfume his soul sank down, soothed to a restful sleep. It was as if hitherto, in the enjoyment of being with his Leibgeber he had only felt half the real strength of his love for Nathalie; with such a new might and breeze of heaven did that love come breathing upon him in this solitude with ethereal tire. A world all youth burst into blossom in his heart.
Of a sudden the bells of Bayreuth came ringing into this world, striking for him the hour of his farewell to it; and there fell on him that anxious sadness with which we linger, too long, beside a place where we have been happy, when the time has come when we must say Adieu. He went upon his way.
What a brightness fell upon all the hills and meadows, with the thought of Nathalie, and that imperishable kiss! The green world, which had been but a series of pictures for him, as he came, was now all speech and language. There was a light-magnet of happiness all day long in the dimmest corner of his being; and when, in the thick of distractions, conversations and the like,en route, he cast a sudden glance into himself, he found a continual sense of blissfulness within him.
How often he turned back to the Bayreuth hills, beyond which he had lived real days of youth, for the first time in his existence! Behind him Nathalie was journeying on towards the east, and breezes from that quarter—airs which had breathed gently around the distant, lonely one—came wafting back to him, and he drunk the æther-stream like the breath of one beloved.
The hills sunk low on the horizon; his paradise was whelmed in the blue of heaven. His west and Nathalie’s east flowed asunder, and parted wider, faster and faster as the moments sped. One beautiful plain receded, flying behind him, after another; and he hastened past the flower-decked limbs of Spring as she lay outstretched on earth, alternating between looking and enjoying, as in early days gone by.
Thus he came at evening to the village in the valley by the Jaxt, where on his journey to Bayreuth, he had passed in review, with tears, his loveless days; but he came with a new heart, full to the brim with love and happiness; and tears flowed this time too. Here where, amid the melting magic lights of evening, he had asked himself, “What womanly soul has ever lovedyouas your old dreams have so often pictured to your heart youmightbe loved by one,” and had given himself so sad an answer; here he could think on that Bayreuth night, and say, “Yes! Nathalie has loved me!” And then the old sorrow rose again, but glorified, from the dead. He had made to her a vow of invisibility here on earth; he was now journeying on towards his own death; he was to die, and never see her more. She was gone before him—haddiedfirst, as it were; she had merely taken away with her into the long, dim, coming years of her life the grief of having loved and lost,twice. “And I look into my own life here, and weep, away from her,” he said, wearily, and closed his eyes undried.
Another world altogether opened upon him in the morning—not a new world by any means—the old, old familiar one. Just as if the concentric magic circles which surrounded Nathalie and Leibgeber reached no further than the little Valley of Longing on the Jaxt, and could include nothing beyond it. Every step towards home translated the poetry which had come into his life to poetic prose. The Imperial market-town (that frigid zone of his life) was nearer to him; his torrid zone, over which the faded petals of his ephemeral joy-flowers were fluttering still, was far away behind him.
But, on the other hand, the pictured imagery of his domestic life kept growing clearer and brighter, taking the form of a picture-bible, while the paintings of his month of bliss died away into a dark picture gallery. I think the weather, which was rainy, had some connection with this.
Towards the end of the week the weather, as well as penitents and churchgoers, puts on other shirts and clothes.
It was Saturday, and cloudy. Damp weather affects the walls of our brains as it does the walls of our rooms; the paperings of both imbibe the moisture, and get curled up into clouds, until the next dry day smooths both out again. Under a blue sky, I long for eagles’ pinions; under a cloudy one, I only want a goose’s wing to write with. In the former case we are eager to be off and out, into the wide world; in the latter, all we want is to sit comfortably down in our arm-chair. In short, clouds, when they drop, make us domestic, citizenish, and hungry, while blue skies make us thirsty, and citizensof the world.
These clouds of this Saturday formed a kind of palisade about the Eden of Bayreuth. Every big drop which fell on the leaves made him think longingly of the wifely, wedded heart, which was his lawful property (and which he was soon to lose), and of his poor little lodging. At last when the ice-floes of the rugged-clouds melted into grey foam, and the setting sun was drawn like a sluice, out of this suspended mill-pond, and it poured down in consequence, Kuhschnappel came in sight.
Discordant, jarring fancies clanged in contention within him. The commonplace, narrow-minded, provincial town, seemed, when contrasted with freer and more liberal places and societies, so crowded and crushed together, so official in style, and full of Troglodytes—with doggrel, and table-verses by way of poetry—that he felt it would be a satisfaction to drag out his green trellis-bed into the market-place in broad daylight, and go to sleep beneath the very windows of the local “quality,” without minding a brass-farthing what the upper council might think, or the lower council either. The nearer he came to the stage he was to die upon, the more difficult did this first rôle of his (and last but one) appear to him.
Awayfrom home we are bold and daring: we resolve, and undertake;athome, we pause and hesitate, and delay.
Yes, and the smoke and smells of the mean streets gnawed into him, matters which, of themselves unaided, so sorely affect and depress us that there are very few indeed who can raise their heads wholly beyond these effluvia. For in man there nestles an accursed tendency towards still-sitting ease and comfort; like a big dog he lets himself be poked and pinched a thousand times before he takes the trouble to get up, rather than growl. Once fairly on his legs, however, he is not in a hurry to lie down again. The first heroic deed (like the first earned dollar, according to Rousseau) costs more than the next thousand. The prospect of the long, difficult, tedious and risky financial and surgical operation of a stage death stung our Siebenkæs on the domestic bolster.
But the nearer he drew to the gallows-hill (that mouse-tower of his old, narrow life), the quicker and the clearer did the thoughts of the heart-oppressing stamping-mills of past days, and of his approaching salvation, vibrate in alternation in his mind. He kept thinking that he would have to suffer care, anxiety, and struggle of all sorts, as of old, because he kept losing sight of the open sky of his future, just as we go on suffering the pain and fear of a painful dream for some time after we have awakened from it.
But when he saw the house where dwelt his Lenette, whose voice he had not heard for so many a day, the pain all vanished from his heart, the trouble from his eyes, nothing being left in them but affection and its warmest tears.
“Ah! am I not going to tear myself, so soon, from her for ever, and make her shed tears of delusion, and wound her with the terrible wounds of a funeral and mourning? and then, poor darling soul, we shall see each other no more!” he thought.
He quickened his pace. He squeezed close past the shop windows of his co-commandant, Meerbitzer, with his head thrown back, and his eyes fixed upon the up-stairs windows. Meerbitzer was in the house, splitting the Sunday wood; and Firmian signed to him not to give note of his presence by any sort of sentry-challenge. The old associate czar signed back to him, with outstretched fingers, that Lenette was alone in the room up-stairs. The old familiar ripieno voices of the house, the querulous scolding of the book-binder’s wife, the damper-pedal effect of the eternal prayer and curser, Fecht, met him like so much sweet provender, as he climbed the stairs. The waning moon of his movable pewter property shone silvery and glorious upon him from the kitchen, everything fresh from its font of regeneration; a copper fish-kettle, which poisoned no vinegar as long as it was unmended, glowed upon him through the kitchen smoke like the sun in a November fog. He opened the door of the sitting-room gently; he saw no one in it, but heard Lenette making the bed in the bed-room. With a whole iron foundry hammering in his breast, he made a long, noiseless stride into the room, which was all in apple-pie order, with its Sunday shirt of white sand on already (upon which the bed-making river goddess and water nymph had expended all her aquatic arts in the production, of a highly-finished masterpiece). Ah! everything was so full of rest and peace, so tranquilly reposing after the whirl and turmoil of the week. The rain stars had risen upon everything, except his ink bottle, which was quite dry.
His writing-table was, so to speak,mannedby two or three large heads, which, being cap-blocks, had on their Sunday bonnets, already, which would be transferred from them in their capacity ofCuratores Sexus, next morning, to the heads of the ladies of the members of council.
He pushed the bed-room door wider open, and there, after this long separation, he saw his dear wife, standing with her back to him.
Just then he fancied he recognised Stiefel’s fulling-mill steps coming up stairs; and, that he might pass his first minute on her heart unseen by a stranger eye, he said twice, softly, “Lenette!”
She started round, crying “Oh good gracious! is it you?” He had clasped her in his arms, before she got these words out, and rested on her kiss, saying, “Good evening, good evening, and how are you, and how have you been?”
His lips stifled the answers. But suddenly she pushed him back and struggled out of his arms, while two other arms clasped him swiftly, and a bass voice said, “Here am I as well; you are welcome back, praise and thanks be to God.” It was the Schulrath.
Poor, fevered human creatures that we are! driven back and repulsed asunder by our own lackings, and those of others, yet continually drawn together again by never-ceasing longings, in whom one hope of finding love falls away to dust after another, whose wishes come to nothing butmemories. Our feeble hearts are at all events glowing and right full of love in that hour when wecome backand meet again; and in that other hour when we part, disconsolate,—as every star seems milder, larger, and lovelier when it is rising, than when it is overhead. But to souls whichalwayslove, and areneverangry, these two twilights (when the morning star of meeting, and the evening star of parting shine) are too sad to bear for tothemthey seem likenights.