"If thou hast become my friend again, then hasten to thy friend who is soon to die. Make thy peace with me, ere I go to the eternally Silent Land, as we did the last time, before we went out into the earthly one. Ah, thou inexpressibly beloved one! I have indeed often offended, but always loved thee! O come, let not the short breath of my breaking heart, which has consisted on this earth of nothing butunsatisfiedsighs, vanish with a last vain sigh for thee. Thou saw'st me for the first time when my eyes were blind; see me for the last time, when they are becoming so once more!"
This leaf, coming at an hour when the love of a human being was such a blessed thing for him, hurried him away from the palace, but the parts of his heart in which it touched him, were bleeding. Such a journey through the night bows down the soul, and on this short passage he saw his friend die more than ten times over. Every bird he chased out of its bed made him think, how will they in the darkness find their little bough again? Every dissolving light that trailed about at a distance through the gloom, made him think for what sighs, for what painful steps, will it just now illumine the weary ascent; and it seemed to him as if he saw the human life going. It did not make him more cheerful when he saw several chariots set round with a halo of torches, filled with the idle guests of thesouper, which they, like himself, were leaving, roll along as hurriedly as if they were hasting to visit a dying friend. At last the slumbering city unswathed itself out of the shadows; the Pharos-lamp of the warder and a few widely scattered lights, which probably were measuring off with their sad and untrimmed beams the night of some invalid, fell on the mourning-ground of his soul.
Softly he knocked at the door of the sick house, softly it was opened, softly he went up the stairs; nothing broke the silence but the sound of the clock, pealing like a funeral knell into the dumb house of sorrow, with its twelve strokes, a voice which he had so often heard there. Ah! there lay suffering in bed a form, which one will forgive all, and which one hastens to love and to cheer a little longer, ere it shall stir no more. Not the unclean, shriveled sick face, not the hue of life corroded by fever, not the wrinkles of the lip--not all of these was it in Amandus (nor is it in other invalids) which rent utterly Gustavus's heart and hopes, but the heavily rolling, spasmodically flashing, wild and yet burnt-out glassy sick eye, upon which all sufferings of past nights and the nearness of the last were so legibly written.
Amandus stretchedhisdead hand far out to meet him, as if it were possible that any one else than he still remembered the black dyer's hand ofanother, which he had lately reached out to him. For him the reunion was sweeter than to Gustavus, who saw waiting behind it the long separation.
The morning and the joy arrested a little the curtain of his life as it fell. Gustavus took the place of the nurse; first, because she knew how to do everything so well and with so many circumstances and marginal notes, that she poured gall into his very last minutes; secondly, because, surely, in the hour when all nature in the company of death tears off from men with stern hand all finery and all articles of raiment which she had lent him, the only remaining solace for the impotent friends who cannot hold back this inexorable hand, is, during the unclothing, freezing and sinking to sleep of the friend, by unconditional compliance to all his whims, by indulgence of his capriciousness, to be still. Upon such services of heart and love toward poor dying men one looks back after many years with more satisfaction than upon those rendered to all well persons together--and yet the two classes are separated from each other by only a few hours; for thou dost not climb in and out of thy bed many times before thou ceasest to rise from it....
Dear Death! I think now of myself. If thou enterest one day into my lodging-room, pray do me the favor to shoot me down at mysecretaireor writing-table dead on the spot; lay me not, dear Death, behind the curtains of the sick-bed, nor hunt slowly with thy ripping knife after every vein to amputate it from life, so that I shall be compelled to gaze whole nights' long into the dissecting face, or that during thy long unraveling of my souls raiment all shall be stepping up and looking on in good health: the Captain, the Pestilentiary and my good sister. But if the Evil One possesses thee, so that thou canst not listen to reason, then, dear Death, as no hell lasts forever, I will not, after a thousand vexations, vex myself about the last.
Doctor Fenk had not in his face the apprehension of a coming loss, but grief for a present one; he regarded his son as a shattered porcelain vase, whose shards one sets up again in its old combination on the toilet-table and which at the least agitation thereof will fall asunder. He therefore no longer forbade him anything. He even received some male patients, "because he had one in his house and would faincure awaythe thought of him." The patient himself already heard the murmur of the evening-wind of his life. A few weeks before he had indeed still believed that in the spring he might drink the Scheerau mineral waters in Lilienbad, and then it would be quite different with him. (Poor, sick man! it has become different with thee sooner than that!) Only a certain fever-vision, which he did not reveal, pronounced sentence upon his sick life; and his superstitious reliance upon this dream was so firm that since that he had no longer watered his flower-bushes, had given away his birds, and extinguished all wishes excepting the wish for Gustavus.
The very next day happened to be market day. This tumult had too much life in it for years consecrated to the stillness of death, and Gustavus had to sit by his bed that during the talking and listening he might not be able to lend an ear to the din below. Gustavus was startled when at length he asked him suddenly and eagerly, did he still love Beata? He evaded the "Yes," but Amandus summoned up the little life that still glowed in his nerves, and said, though with long pauses after every sentence: "Ah, take not thy heart from her--O, if thou knowest her as I do--I was often with her father--I saw with what mute patience she bore his heat--how she took upon herself the faults of her mother--full of goodness, full of gentleness, full of tenderness, full of lowliness, full of intelligence--such she is--all, but for her image there had been little joy in my life--give me thy hand and say that thou lovest her more than me." He himself took it; but the taking pained his friend.
Suddenly there darted into the veins of his sunken cheeks perhaps the last flush of shame, which often, like a flush of morning redness, comes as the swift forerunner of a good deed; he asked for his father to be brought to him. To him he, with so much fire, with so much longing in eyes and lips, made the request--to fetch Beata, who surely could not refuse the last prayer of a dying man, that the father himself could not refuse it; but promised (despite the sense of impropriety) to drive over to her mother, and through her to persuade the daughter, and to bring them both. Fenk knew that in his whole sickness no refusal had done any good--that, if he should see his son lying there dead from the frustration of his last wish, he should not be able to bear the thought of having embittered for that dead one the dying moments which he still drained from the cup of life, and that mother and daughter were too good not to act toward his son like himself. In short, he started.
When the father was gone, the sick man looked upon his and our friend with such a stream of smilingly promising love, that Gustavus was fain to take of this faithful, gentle soul, whose departure was so near, the longest farewell in this life: "My lips," thought he, "shall only yet once be pressed to his and my bosom to his--only yet once will my arms clasp the warm corpse, while yet there is a soul therein to feel my embrace--only this once will I call after his retreating spirit, while I can still reach it, and tell him how I have loved and shall still love him." Amidst these wishes the fairest holy water man knows consecrated his eyes. But, nevertheless, he suppressed all, because he feared that under such a storm of closing life the rent bonds of the body might let loose the agitated soul and the weak one die on his lips....
This self-sacrificing tenderness, which will not come forth from the nun's-cell of the heart, pleases me more than a belles-lettrical and theatrical finale-tempest, where one feels in order to show it, in order to have a weeping and writing-fistula, as well as other people, in order to let a tip of his emotions, as well as of the handkerchief with which one dries them, hang out of his pocket.
The Doctor, whom nobody in Maussenbach had ever yet seen with a mournful face, had already gained by the veil that overspread his usual gaiety, his sad request. My landlord, who always forcibly dammed up his innate sympathy, because, like a parrot, it ran away with his money, surrendered everything in this case so much the more willingly to another's kindly stream of tears, because it carried away from him nothing except--his wife and daughter for an hour. The meaner man has a greater pleasure in a good deed which has been wrung from him than the better man. Röper wrote himself to his daughter the order to join the party, and briefly contributed the best reasons for it out of natural and theological ethics. But the best reason which the Doctor brought with him to the new palace to Beata was her mother; without her he would hardly have overcome her shy, politic and feminine apprehensions.
They arrived with prayerful emotions at the dying chamber, that sacristy of an unknown temple, which stands not on this earth. I proceed, although so much of what belongs here is too great for my heart and my speech.... When the sick man saw the beloved of his dying heart, then did his sunken youthful days, with their golden hopes, gleam up from far below the horizon, like the evening glow of a June sun toward the North; he pressed once more the hand of beauteous life, his pale cheeks glimmered once more with the breath of the last joy, and the angel of joy, with the cord of love, let him slowly down into the grave. A dying man sees men and their doings diminished in a low distance; to him our little rules of courtesy are no longer of much consequence--all is to him indeed henceforth nothing. He begged to be left alone with Gustavus and Beata; his soul still upheld the self-bowing body; with a broken, but healthy voice he addressed the trembling maiden: "Beata, I shall die, perhaps to-night--in my fairer days I have loved thee; thou hast not known it--I go with my love into eternity--O good soul! reach me thy hand" (she did so) "and weep not, but speak; it is so long that I have not seen nor heard thee--Nay, but weep both of you, if you will; your tears no longer weaken me; into my hot eyes, so long as I have I am here, none have ever come--O weep much by me; when one dreams that tears fall on a dead man, it means gain--Aye, ye two fair souls, ye find none like you, who can deserve your love, you are alone--O, Beata, Gustavus also loves you, and does not tell it--If thou still hast thy fair heart, give it to him--thou wilt make him and me happy, but give me no sign, if thou canst not love him." ... Then grasping the hand of Gustavus, whose feelings were conflicting tempests, he said, with uplifted eyes, as of Virtue herself in the act of benediction: "Thou infinite and gracious Being, that takest me to Thyself, bestow upon these two hearts all the lovely days which perhaps had been appointed me here--nay, deduct them from my future life, if haply I had in this world no more to expect!" ... Here the sinking body drew back the soaring soul; a drop in his eye revealed the sad memory of his shattered days; three hearts were intensely agitated; three tongues were struck dumb; it was too sublime a minute for the thought oflove--the feeling offriendshipand the sense of the other world were alone great enough for the great moment....
I am not just now in a condition to speak of the consequences of that hour, nor of any other person than the dying one. His unstrung nerves kept on quivering in an enervating slumber. Beata, exhausted and stunned, went away with her mother. Gustavus no longer saw anything, hardly her. The father had no consolation and no comforter. The feverish doze lasted on till after midnight. A total eclipse of the moon exalted the heavens and attracted upward the affrighted eyes of men. Gustavus, agitated and agonized, looked up with wet eyes to the heaven-reaching shadow of the earth which lay upon the moon as on a profile-board. He bade farewell to the earth, it was to him itself a shadow: "Ah!" thought he, "in this lofty, flying shadow-pyramid thousands of red eyes, wounded hands and disconsolate hearts will at this moment be waiting to be buried in it, that the dead may lie still more gloomily than the living. But does not, then, this shadowy Polyphemus (with the moon for its one eye) move daily around this earth, only we do not perceive it except when it lies upon our moon?... So, too, we think, death comes not upon our earth, till it mows downourgarden ... and yet not a century, but every second is his scythe...." In this way he worried and consoled himself under the veiled moon--Amandus woke up in distress; the two were alone; the moon's glimmer fell upon his sick eye; "who, then, has cut the moon in pieces," he said in the heat of the death-agony, "she is dead all but one little sliver." All at once the ceiling of the chamber and the opposite houses grew flaming-red, because the funeral torches surrounding the body of a nobleman, which they were bearing to its burial, just then moved through the silent street. "A fire! a fire!" cried the dying man and sought to spring out of bed. Gustavus would fain conceal from him how like him was the one who for the last time passed through the street down below; but Amandus, as if the agony of death were already upon him, staggered half way across the chamber in Gustavus's arms ... but ere he could see the corpse, a nervous spasm laid himdeadin those arms....
Gustavus, cold as the dead man himself, bore the mortal sleeper to the deserted bed--without a tear, without a sound, without a thought, he sat down in the obscured moonlight and the flickering corpse-light--the stiff, motionless friend lay before him--Amandus had flown sooner then the moon's orb out of theearth's shadow--Gustavus looked not at the dead, but at the moon (in the thickest gloom of the hour of bereavement one looks away from the proper object to the least one in the neighborhood): Stretch onward and upward (thought he) as thou wilt, shadow of this globe of dust! over me thou still hoverest ... buthimthy summit reaches not ... all suns lie bare before him ... O vanity! O vapor! shadow! wherein I still abide!...
Suddenly the flute-clock struck one and played a morning-song of the eternal morning, so uplifting, so wafted over out of meadows above the moon, so pain-stilling, that the tears in which his heart was drowned broke through on all sides the dam of sorrow and left a bed for softer, less deadly emotions ... It seemed to him, as if his body also lay untenanted beside the cold corpse, and his soul flew, on the broad luminous way which ran through all suns, after the soul that had hastened on before.... he saw it speeding forward ... he saw clearly through the haze of the few years that lay between it and himself....
And with his soul in his face he repaired from the death-chamber to the apartment of his father and said with earthly sadness in his eye and heavenly radiance in his countenance: "Our friend has fought out his last fight during the eclipse of the moon and is up yonder."
Ah, his life in his worm-eaten body was itself, indeed, a true total eclipse; his exit out of life was the exit from the earth's shadow and his tarry in the shadow was but short.
No persuasion could keep Gustavus in the house of mourning. When the heart finds the body itself too confining, the four walls of a room will be so too. He went to Marienhof. Beneath the blue arch hung with crystallized sun-drops, and beneath the struggling moon, who, like him, came out glowing-red from her overshadowing, thoughts met him, which are as far exalted above human colors as they are above the earth. Whoso in such hours does not feel the baldness of this life and the necessity of a second so vividly that the need becomes a firm hope--with such let no one dispute about the highest things in our low life.
Amidst the confusion of the death-day, which else would have driven him to an utterly dark solitude, he still went to Marienhof; the departed one had begged him to bring it about that he might secure winter quarters for his bones on the hermitage-mountain, which he had so often ascended, and whose phenomena are well known to us. Gustavus hoped easily to obtain permission from the Resident Lady; all the more so, as she visited, and that but seldom, only certain parts of the Still Land. Oefel, however,--on the morrow, when in his presence the petition was presented--spoke in precisely the opposite tone, and said, if she were concerned about the park and its architectural graces, she must certainly be glad to have some actual burial there, because the best English gardens were so very deficient in dead bodies and real mausoleums, that they had mere cenotaphs and sham mausoleums. Oefel offered to design some decorations for the monument in a style which would suit thegoutof the Court. Gustavus was simply in too tender a mood to-day to make a beginning of despising him. How very differently did the Resident Lady listen to his petition and his subdued voice, although he labored to give no sign of his sorrow! How sympathetically--with a look as of one who softly laid a rose in the dead man's hand--did she bestow upon the latter a little piece of ground for an anchorage! How sweetly did her full eyes accompany the gift with the gift out of her tender heart; and when another's grief gave back the victory to his own, with what sweet solace--never is woman's voice sweeter than in consoling--did she combat him. He felt here vividly the distinction between friendship and love; and he gave her the formerlyentirely. He was glad not to find there the object of thelatter, because he shrank from the embarrassment of the first glances. Beata lay sick.
He shut himself up; he opened his breast to that grief which does not pierce it with beneficent, bleeding wounds, but gives it dull blows--that grief, namely, which is our guest in the interval between the day of death and that of burial. This latter was a Sunday; the one when I sadly filled out my section with nothing but Ottomar's letter, and when I so mournfully closed. I did it exactly at the hour when the pale sleeper was borne from his little death bed to the great bed where all must lie, as the mother carries the children who have fallen asleep on benches to the larger resting-place. On Sunday Gustavus fled with veiled senses from the palace, where the noisy state-carriages and servants seemed as if they passed over his heart. He felt for the first time that he was a stranger on the earth; the sunlight seemed to him to be the twilight of a greater moon woven into our night. Although he could now no more on this earth either come near to the friend who was snatched away, or yet tear himself away from him, nevertheless his sorrow said it would be a consolation if it should embrace, though not the body, not the coffin, yet the bed of the grave which covered this seed of a fairer soil; and he therefore stationed himself on a distant hill, in order to see whether there were yet people on the hermitage-mountain.
His eye met the very greatest sorrow which this evening had for him here below; the white coffin was lifted out, gleaming through the dusk of evening. A rose dropping to pieces, a perforated chrysalis, a butterfly spreading his wings, who had, as caterpillar, just gnawed through it, were painted on the coffin-chrysalis and were lowered with their two archetypes into the earth; the childless father stood leaning his hand and head against the pyramid and heard behind his veiled eyes every clod of earth as if it were the flight of a downward piercing arrow--the cold night-wind came over to Gustavus from the mountain of the dead--birds of passage hurried away over his head like black specks, led by natural instinct, not by geographical knowledge, throughcold cloudsandnightsto a warmer sun--the moon worked her way up out of a bloody sea of vapors, shorn of her rays. At last the living left the mountain and the dead man; Gustavus alone remained with him on the other hill; the night stretched its heavy pall over both.... Enough!
Spare me this grave-digger's scene! You know not what autumnal remembrances, in connection with it, make my blood creep as funereally slow as my pen. Ah! besides, I write into this story a leaf, a leaf of sorrow, whose broad, black border hardly leaves for lines and lamentations blotted with tears a narrow strip of white--this scene also I spare you, for I also know not, ye readers with the tenderer heart, whom ye have already lost; I know not what dear departed form, whose grave is already sunk as deep as itself, I may not, like a dream, raise up on its burial place and show anew to your tearful eyes, and of how many dead a single grave may be the reminder.
Vanished Amandus! in the vast army, which from century to century life sends to meet the last enemy, thou, too, didst march a few steps; often and early did he wound thee; thy comrades laid earth upon thy great wounds and on thy face,--they continue their warfare; in the heat of the conflict they will forget thee more and more from year to year--tears will come into their eyes, but none any longer for thee, but for them who are yet to die and be buried--and when thy lily-white mummy has crumbled to pieces, none will think of thee any longer; only the dream-genius will still gather up thy pastel-figure out of the earth into which it is incorporated, and will adorn with it, in the gray head of thy aged Gustavus, the meadows of his youth that repose behind the past years, and which, like the planet Venus, are themorning starin the heaven of life's morning and theevening starin the sky of life's evening, and glitter and tremble and replace the sun.... I would not say to thy soul's sheath, the corpse: Amandus! lie softly. Thou didst not lie softly in it; oh! even now I still pity thy immortal soul, that it had to live more in its narrow nerve-wrappage than in the wide building of the universe, that it could not lift its noble glance to sun-globes, but had to stoop to its tormenting blood-globules, and seldomer feel its emotions stirred by the grand harmony of the macrocosm, than by the discords of its own macrocosm! The chain of necessity cut into thee deeply; not merely itsdrag, but also itspressure, left upon thee scars.... So miserable is the living! How can the dead desire to be remembered by the living man when already even the very speaking of him makes the heart sink within us....
When Gustavus was at home again he wrote a letter to the Doctor; the agonizing grief, wherein the latter had stood leaning and holding on to the pyramid, affected him unspeakably; and in the letter he fell upon this wounded and shattered breast and aggravated its pangs by his love-pressure, as he begged him to accept him as his son and to be his paternal friend.
Let the high tide of sorrow be Gustavus's excuse that he, who had hitherto always concealed the paroxysms of his sensibilities for the good of another, now let them break out at another's expense. His grief went so far, that he desired of the father the every-day coat and hat of the deceased instead of his full-length picture; he felt, as I do, that one's every-day clothes are the best profiles, plaster-casts and crayon likenesses of a man whom one has loved and who has gone out of them and out of the body. The Doctor's answer runs thus:
* * * * *
"I have often leaned against the cushion of my medical carriage and represented and prefigured to myself, when I should one day have gray eyebrows and gray hair, or none at all; when all seasons should appear to me to grow shorter and all nights longer and longer, which is a symptom of the approach of the longest--if, then, I should go out in the first days of spring into the Still Land, to sun my cold, interpolated body--and I should then see in the outer world the clinging, forth-putting buds, beneath which lies a whole summer, and feel within me the eternal leaf-dropping and drooping, which no earthly spring can cure--then when I should still remember my own youth, my promenades and gallopades around Scheerau, and those in Pavia, and the people who went with me--then when I naturally looked round after those who might still be left standing as lofty ruins of the fallen temple of my youth--and then when, as I turned about to see, whether out of woods, across meadows, down from mountains, on so fair a day, no one would come to meet me, the thought should come upon me like a heart-beat, that in all the four corners of the world, toward which my sight was directed, lay church-yards and churches, in which they, who should now console and companion me, were lying under the opaque earth-crust and its flower-work, hid and imprisoned, with their arms laid straight by their side, and that I alone remained in this upper world and here in the spring-time carried round the autumn in my breast:--then I should not go at all into the Still Land, but go home all lonely and shut myself up and lay my head and bury my eyes on my arm, and wish my heart would break, as had those of my dear ones; I mean, I should wish it were all over. Then, beloved son, beloved friend, (thou who, as the youngest of my friends, wilt long survive me), then will thy form come before my sated and weary eyes; then will I wipe them dry and remind myself of all the past, and thy hand shall still conduct me into the Still Land. I shall enjoy the earthly spring so long as I can see it, and with a pressure of the hand I shall say to thy face: It does my heart good to-day, that I many years ago adopted thee as a son....
"To-morrow I will come to take my friend with me on a journey for some days to come, that we may go out of the way of those that are past."--The next morning it was done.
It were perhaps even better for me, if I should endeavor to overtake the two travelers less with the pen than on foot. The reading world can now feast and junket on my things, while I await, with a cough, the Easter fair, because while at work upon these things as I sat crooked up at the writing-desk, I have written a fine, full-formed hectic case into the two lobes of my lungs. Not one of the whole public says to me, Thank you! that I have by thought and emotion deprived myself of my healthy breathing and mysedes: almost everything about me is shut up, and by reason of the doubleblockadelittle can in either of two opposite directionspassthrough me. I trudge along behind the plough-shares of the Auenthalers, in order to inhale the steam of the furrows, as the best British hectic patients do,[73]as a remedy for my air-stoppage and other stoppages. Nevertheless the simple public, in whose service I have made myself so miserable, would laugh at me if they should see me stalking like a crow after the ploughing oxen. Is that justice?--Must I not besides sleep all night between the arms of two poodles, whom I propose to infect with my consumption, like a married man of rank? But am I then, when I have by morning-and-evening-presents endowed the two bedfellows with my malady, myself rid of themalum, or does not rather M. Nadan de la Richebaudiere tell me I must buy and infect new dogs, because half a canine menagerie is needed as the lighter of a single man? In this way I may spend my whole pay upon mere dogs. I will even worry down the injury which my honesty suffers in the matter, because I must show myself as friendly toward the poor sucking dogs, whose lungs I propose to lame and cripple, as great folks do toward the victims of their salvation.
Meanwhilethisis still the most annoying scandal, that I am at this present in a--cow-barn: for this (according to modern Swedish books) is said to furnish a dispensary and seaport against short breath. Mine has not yet, however, shown a disposition to grow longer, though I have been sitting here for three Trinities and given the world three long sections (as if so many Joseph's-children) at the birthplace of much stupider beings. One must himself have labored at such a place for consumption's sake in the juristic or æsthetic departments (and I am both belles-lettrist and counsellor at law) to know from experience, that there, oftentimes, the most tolerable ideas have muchstronger voicesagainst them than those of the literary and legal judges, and are thereby consigned to the devil.
While Fenk and Gustavus were working off in their journey more sorrow than money, although they did not stay away so long as all my filed papers, Oefel also went on, namely in his romantic Grand Sultan, and painted in with the greatest delight the affliction of his friend. Oefel thanked God for every misfortune, which would go into a verse, and he wished that, in order to the flourishing of polite literature, pestilence, famine and other horrors occurred oftener in Nature, so that the poet might work after these models, and thereby secure a greater illusion, as already the painters, who would paint beheaded people or blown up vessels, have had the archetypes fly to their assistance. As it was, however, he often had to be, for want of Academies, his own Academy, and was once compelled, for a whole day, to have virtuous emotions, because the like were to be depicted in his work--nay, often, he was compelled, for the sake of a single chapter, to go several times into B----, [Baireuth] which annoyed him exceedingly.
With other people also it fares just so; the object of knowledge remains no longer an object of feeling. The injuries under which the man of honor overflows and boils, are to the jurist a proof, a gloss, an illustration for the Pandect-title of injuries. The hospital physician calmly repeats, at the bedside of the patient over whom the flames of fever are raging and roaring, the few clippings from his clinic which may suit the case. The officer who, on the battle-field--the butcher's-block of humanity--strides away over mangled men, is thinking only of the evolutions and quarter-wheelings of his school of cadets, who were needed to cut out whole generations into physiognomic fragments. The battle-painter, who goes behind him, thinks and looks, indeed, upon the mangled men and upon every wound exposed to view there; but he is bent upon copying all for the Dusseldorf gallery, and the purely human feeling of this misery he only awakens by and by, through his battle-piece, in others and perhaps also in--himself. Thus does every kind of science spread a stony crust over our hearts, not the philosophic alone.
Beata almost sacrificed her eyes to the intense interest which she felt in no one else (as she thought) than the one who had gone hence. Her heavy looks were often turned toward the hermitage-mountain; at evening she herself visited it, and brought to the sleeper the last offering which friendship has then to give, in overmeasure. Thus, then, do the fangs of misfortune strike into tender hearts the most deeply; thus are the tears which man sheds so much the greater and swifter the less the earth can give him and the higher he stands above it, as the cloud which hangs higher than others over the earth, sends down the biggest drops. Nothing raised Beata up but the redoubling of the alms which she gave certain poor people weekly or after every pleasure, and her solitary intercourse with the Resident Lady, with her Laura and the two children of the gardener.
The two travelers were better off. As Doctor Fenk visited,ex-officio, the government physicians, who made medicines, together with the apothecaries, who employed reprisals and made receipts, he fortunately was so often vexed that he had no convenient season for indulging grief; in this way government physicians, who were always in the country (except just when epidemics happened to be prevalent), and midwives, who in extreme baptism still better provide for the regeneration of young non-Christians than for their birth, and whom Pharaoh ought to have had,--these two classes brought the afflicted Pestilentiary in some measure upon his legs again. Anger is so grand a purgative of sorrow, that legal persons, who seal and inventory for widows and orphans, cannot vex them enough; hence I shall hereafter leave by will to my heirs, whom my death will too sorely afflict, nothing but the remedy for that affliction--exasperation at the deceased!
At last the two came back with mutually opposite emotions, and their way led them by the resting-place, the manor of Ottomar and near the orphaned temple of the park. The temple, however, was lighted; it was far into the night. Around the temple hung a buzzing bee-swarm of hunting-dresses, in which were encased half the Court. Fenk and Gustavus elbowed their way therefore through greater and greater personages and horses, swept like comets by one star after another, and into the church: therein were one or two unexpected things--the Prince and a dead body--for the fighting thing behind at the altar was nothing unexpected, but the parson. Gustavus and Fenk had ensconced themselves in the confessional. Gustavus could hardly tear his eye away from the Prince, who, with that look of noble indifference which is seldom wanting in people oftonor from large cities and funeral-bidders, glanced far over the dead man--the Prince had that heart peculiar to the great folk, which is a petrifaction in the good sense, and is with them the first among their solid parts, and which betrays in the finest manner that they hold to the immortality of the soul, and that when they have one of their own connection buried, they are not at home--[are out of their element.]
All at once the Doctor laid his head upon the cushion of the confessional and covered his face; he stood up again and gazed with an eye which he could not keep dry, toward the uncovered corpse and sought in vain to see. Gustavus also looked that way and the form was known to him, but not the name, which he vainly asked of the speechless Doctor--at last the funeral preacher named the name. I need not, as if for the first time, say in double-black-letter, that the dead man on whom just now so many hard eyes and a pair of disconsolate ones rested, looked just like the Player Reinecke, whose noble figure also the heavy grave-stone crushes into confusion. I need not repeat after the pastor the name ofOttomar. The poor Doctor seemed for some time to have been determined that the anguish of his nerves should resolve itself into anervous preparation, and was practising in that direction. Singularly enough, Gustavus took no interest in the dead, but only in the mourning friend.
The good Medical Counsellor shut to with a violent slam the hymn-book which lay in his hands; he heard not when the Prince, (who had been there only three minutes) rode away to get the death-certificate, but every word of the pastor he caught, for the sake of learning something of the history of his friend's last sickness; but he learned nothing except the cause of his death (burning fever). At last all was over, and he walked mutely and with staring eyes in between the funeral torches and up to the bier, shoved aside with his left hand without look or sound whatever might hinder him, and clutched at the sleeper's with his right. When at last he once held in his grasp the hand which Alps and years had torn from his, without however being any nearer to him for whom he had so long yearned, and without the joy of reunion, then did his anguish grow dense and dark, and spread heavily and formlessly over his whole soul. But when he found again on that hand two warts, which he had so often felt in grasping it, then did his sorrow assume the veiled form of the past; Milan passed before him with the bloom of its vineyards and the summits of its chestnut-trees and the lovely days spent among both, and looked mournfully on the two men, to whom nothing was left. And now he would have fallen with his two streaming eyes on the two that were dry, if the undertaker had not said: "One does not like to do that, it is not well." A lock was all the grave gave back of the whole friend of whom it had robbed him, a lock which for the eye is so little and for the touch of the finger so much. He tenderly laid down again the hand which had so sadly closed the last letter, upon the untouched one and took a last leave of his Ottomar for this world.
He had not observed that the dead man's Pomeranian dog and two tonsured strangers were there, one of whom had six fingers.--Once out of the church and on the road, one branch of which ran toward the palace of Ottomar and the other around the hermitage-mountain, Gustavus and Fenk looked upon each other with a mute, inconsolable inquiry--they answered each other by a leave-taking. The Doctor turned about and continued his journey--Gustavus went into the park and there at the foot of hermitage-mountain, reflected upon the fate--not of his friend, nor his own, but--that of all men....
And when am I writing this? On this 16th day of November, which is the baptismal day of the encoffined Ottomar.
In the soul of Gustavus the highest lights passed slowly over from the friend's image to that of the beloved. Now, for the first time, did her face, which at the death-bed had beamed eternal rays upon him, come forth out of the cypress-shadow. The solitary pyramid stood sublimely, as angel-watcher beside the buried one. He climbed the hill with still sad, but softened feelings; he had now, indeed, the indescribably sweet consolation of never having harmed the man lying under the ground there, and having often forgiven him; he wished Amandus had still oftener given occasion for his forgiveness; eventhiswrapped his wounded bosom in warm solace, that he at this moment so loved, so lamented him, unseen, unrequited.
At the summit he still trod upon some thorns of anguish, which make one cry out aloud; but soon, on the bridge of light, which ran from a lamp out of Beata's chamber across the garden over to the mountain, his yearning eyes flew like other butterflies toward her bright windows. He saw nothing except now the light and now a head which eclipsed it; but this head he dressed up within his far more beautifully than any woman does her own. He lay and leaned, half-kneeling and half-standing, with his eyes turned toward the long stream of light, on the pedestal of the pyramid. Weariness and sleepless nights had filled his tear-glands with those oppressive and yet enrapturing tears, which often without occasion and so bitterly and so sweetly stream out shortly before sickness or after exhaustion.--The same causes spread between him and the outer world the semblance of a dark misty day or yellow fog; his inner world on the contrary grew, without effort of his own, from a pen-and-ink-sketch to a glistening oil-painting, then to a mosaic, at last to analto relievo.--Worlds and scenes moved up and down before him--at last dream shut up the whole outer world of sight with his eye-lids, and opened behind them a new-created paradisiacal one; like a dead man lay his slumbering body beside a grave-mound and his spirit in a heavenly meadow stretching over the whole abyss. I will presently relate the dream and its end, when I have shown the reader the person by whom the dream was at once prolonged and ended.
Namely Beata--she came. She could not know either of his return or of his last station. The recentness of the funeral-ceremonies for Ottomar, the withdrawal of Gustavus, whose image since that last scene had been impressed so deeply upon and almostthroughher heart, and the retiring of Summer, who daily rolled up her many-colored blooming picture some inches further,--all this had compressed itself in Beata's bosom to an oppressive sigh, which the noisy hunting-seat with its close atmosphere painfully confined, and with which she sought purer spheres of ether, in order to breathe it out upon a grave, and therefrom to breathe-in material for now ones. Enthusiastic heart! with thy feverish throbbings thou dost, indeed, send thy blood coursing in too torrent-like a circle and with thy gushing washest away shores, flowers and lives; but surely thy fault is fairer than if, with phlegmatic movement, thou shouldest, out of the stagnant water of the blood, cast up only a residuum of fatty slime!
The night-walker was startled when she saw the fair sleeper; she had not in all the garden, through which in these still minutes she had been roving, anticipated or found anyone. He lay, as he had sunk softly down, upon one knee; his pale face was irradiated by a lovely dream, by the rising moon and by Beata's eye. It did not occur to her that he was perhaps only feigning slumber; with trembling she therefore drew half a step nearer, in order, in the first place, to be certain who it was, and, secondly, to let her eye rest full upon the form, at which she had hitherto only ventured a side glance. During the gaze she could not properly tell just when she should end it. At last she turned her back upon her paradise, after she had once more stepped quite up to him; but while slowly walking backward it occurred to her (withoutalarm). "He surely cannot be actually dead." She therefore turned back again and heard his increasing respirations. Near him lay two small sharp stones about as large as my inkstand. She bent downtwice close by him(she would not do it at once, or even with her foot) in order to remove them, that he might not fall upon their points....
Really I should have filled an alphabet, or twenty-three sheets, with this scene; fortunately it does not properly go on, until he awakes, and the reader is to-day the happiest of men....
By this time she had already, as a veteran, become more familiar with the danger, and was so sure he would not wake that she ceased to fear it, and almost began to wish it, for it occurred to her "the night-air might be injurious to him." It further occurred to her how sublime a thing it was that the two friends should so rest side by side; and her blue eye relieved itself of a dewdrop, as to which I know not whether it fell for the heart that beat above the ground or the one that lay motionless beneath it. At last she made serious arrangements to withdraw, in order, upon the whole, at a distance to awaken him by a rustling, and in order to indulge her emotions without fear of his waking. She would merely just pass by him (for she stood four and a half paces distant), because shemustgo down on the other side of the mountain (unless shechosethe reverse). His smiles betrayed even increasing raptures, and she was, of course, curious to observe how the play of his features would end, but she must needs leave the smiling dreamer. When, therefore, she had approached two hesitating steps nearer to him, in order to withdraw to a distance of several, all at once the organ of the solitary church of the resting-place where Ottomar had to-day been buried, began to sound in the middle of the night so solemnly and sadly, as if Death were playing it; and the countenance of Gustavus became suddenly transfigured by the reflection of an inner Elysium, and he stood erect with closed eyes, snatched the hand of the motionless Beata, and said to her in the intoxication of drowsiness: "O take me wholly, blessed soul! Now I have thee, beloved Beata; I, too, am dead!"
The dream, which expired with these words, had been this: He sank away into an immense meadow, which extended away over fair earths placed one after another. A rainbow of suns, which had been strung in the manner of a pearl-necklace, encircled the earths and revolved around them. The circle of suns, going down, sank to the horizon and on the rim of the great round landscape stood a girdle of brilliants, composed of a thousand red suns, and the loving heaven had opened a thousand mild eyes.--Groves and alleys of giant flowers, as tall as trees, intersected the meadow in transparent zig-zag; the high-stemmed rose flung over it a gold-red shadow, the hyacinth a blue one, and the mingling shadows of all tinged it with a silver-hue. A magic evening glimmer hovered over the landscape like a flush of gladness between the shores of shadow and the stems of the flowers, and Gustavus felt that this was the evening of eternity and the rapture of eternity.--Blessed souls, far away from him and nearer the receding suns, plunged in the commingling evening rays, and a muffled murmur of joy hung in dying cadence, like an evening bell, over the heavenly Arcadia;--Gustavus alone lay forsaken in the silvery shadow of the flowers, with an endless yearning, but none of the exulting souls came over to him. At last two bodies in the air dissolved into a thin evening cloud and the falling cloud revealed two spirits, Beata and Amandus--the latter would fain lead the former into the arms of Gustavus, but could not gain an entrance into the silver shadow--Gustavus would fain fall into her arms, but could not extricate himself from the silver shadow--"Ah, it is only that thou art not yet dead;" (cried the soul of Gustavus) "but when the last sun is gone down, then will thy silver shadow float over all and thy earth will flutter away from thee, and thou will sink on the bosom of thy friend,"--one sun after another dissolved--Beata spread down her arms--the last sun sank from view--an organ-peal that might have shaken the worlds and their coffins to atoms, rang down like a flying heaven and by its far-reaching tremor loosed from him the fibrous wrappage and over the outspread silver-shadow floated a rapture which bore him upward and he took--the actual hand of Beata and said to her while he woke and still dreamed and saw not, these words: "O take me wholly, blessed soul; I have thee now, beloved Beata; I, too, am dead!" He held her hand as fast as the good man does virtue. Her endeavors to tear herself away drew him at last out of his Eden and his dream; his blessed eyes opened and exchanged heavens; before him stood sublimely the white ground flooded with moonlight, and the park-lawn and the thousand suns diminished to stars, and the beloved soul which until the setting of all the suns he could not reach.--Gustavus must needs think that the dream had passed over out of his sleep into real life, and that he had not slept; his spirit could neither move nor unite the great precipitous ideas before him. "What world are we in?" he said to Beata, but in an exalted tone, which almost answered the question. His hand had clung so that it almost grew to her struggling one. "You are still in a dream," said she softly, and trembling. Thisyouand the voice thrust his dream at once away from the present into the background; but the dream had made the form which contended with his hand more dear and familiar to him, and the dreamed dialogue acted in him like a real one, and his spirit was a still vibrating chord into which an angel had struck his rapturous emotion--and now when, in the deserted temple over yonder, the organ by a fresh peal raised the scene above the earthly ground, on which the two souls now were; when Beata's position swayed to and fro, her lip quivered, her eye gave way--then again it seemed to him, as if the dream were true, as if the mighty tones drew him and her from the earth into the land of the embrace, his being reached on every side its limits: "Beata," he said to the lovely form dying away under conflicting emotions, "Beata, we are dying now--and when we are dead, I will tell thee my love and embrace thee--the dead man beside us has appeared to me in a dream and has again given me his hand...." She would fain have sunk down upon the grave--but he held up the falling angel in his arms--he let her head which had sunk to slumber fall under his and beneath her motionless heart glowed the throbs of his--it was a sublime moment, when, with his arm folded around a slumbering blessedness, he looked out alone upon the sleeping night of earth, was the sole listener to the organ, the only voice in the solitude, was the sole watcher in the circle of sleep....
The sublime moment passed, the most blissful began; Beata raised her head and showed to Gustavus and to heaven upon her backward bent face the wandering and wept-out eye, the exhausted soul, the transfigured features and all that Love and Virtue and Beauty can compress into one heaven on this earth.... Then came on the supernal moment, descending through thousand heavens upon the earth, in which the human heart lifts itself to the highest love and beats for two souls and two worlds--that moment united forever the lips on which all earthly words were extinguished, the hearts which wrestled with the oppressive rapture, the kindred souls which like two lofty flames pulsated into each other....
--Ask not of me any landscape picture of the blooming worlds they passed over, at a moment which hardly our feelings, not to say words, can grasp. I could as well give a silhouette of the sun.--After that moment Beata, whose body already collapsed under a great tear as a flowret under a rain-drop, sought to seat herself upon the grave; she softly waved him off from her with one hand, while she resigned to him the other. In this situation he opened to her his large soul, and told her all, his history and his dream and his conflicts. Never was a man more sincere in the hour of his fortune than he; never was love more coy after the moment of embrace than here with Beata, the oil of joy floated, as ever, thinly upon the water of tears; a coming sorrow stood before her and looked upon her with steady, dry eyes, but no remembered one nor any coming joy. She had now hardly the courage to speak, hardly the courage to recollect herself, hardly the courage to be enraptured. To him she only lifted up her shy glance, when the moon, that climbed up over a broken stairway of clouds stood overshadowed behind a little white cloudlet. But when a thicker cloud buried the lunar torch, then the two ended the loveliest day of their life, and in their parting they felt that there was for them no more parting forever.
Alone in her chamber, Beata could not think, nor feel, nor remember; she experienced what are tears of joy; she let them stream down, and when at length she would fain stay them, she could not, and when sleep came to close her eyes, they still lay glistening under heavenly drops....
Ye innocent souls, to you I can better say than to the dead one: sleep softly! We generally, that is I and the reader, take very little pleasure in the bravura and stilted parts of lovers in romances, because either the one party is not worthy to enjoy such rain-torrents of the light of joy, or the other to occasion them; but here we have neither of us anything to object.... If heaven would only, grant, ye loving ones, that your lame biographer could make his pen a Blanchard's wing and transport you thereby out of the mine-chambers and mine-damps of the court to some free poplar-island or other, whether in the Mediterranean or the Southern Seas!--As, however, I cannot do it, I nevertheless imagine it, and as often as I go to Auenthal or Scheerau, I picture it out to myself how much I should bestow upon you, if in that poplar or rose-vale, which I had set in water, you could, far from the German winter, amidst eternal blossoms, far from the cutting faces of the moral manufacturers, without any more dangerous murmur than that of the brooks, without any higher complications than those of intertangled flower bushes, or any influence of harder stars than the peaceful ones in heaven,--that you might draw breath in guiltless joy and peace--not, indeed, forever, but at least through the one or two flower-months of your first love.
But this is hard for mortals, and least of all am I the man for that. Such a bliss is hard to attain and for that very reason hard to keep. Rather let it be permitted here to bring forward a word upon the happiness of an authorial invalid, who, to be sure, would fain have one of his own also and who is the very describer of the foregoing felicity, I mean namely, a word about my own sick personality. From the cow barn I have come out again and of my lung complaint am happily cured; only symptoms of apoplexy have since set in, and it threatens to slay me like a mole, just when, as the latter does his hill, so I too am upheaving the Babel-tower of my literary fame. Fortunately I dabble a little just now in Haller's greater and lesser Physiology and in Nicolai's Materia Medica and in all the medical works of which I can get the loan, and can therefore keep up against the apoplexy a brisk fire of musketry (orcartridge-fire). The fire I make at my feet, by putting my long leg into a fur-boot as a purgatory and the shrunken one into a little laced boot. I have the oldest moon-doctors and Pestilentiaries on my side, in the idea, that I can like a Democrat, by these boots--and a broad mustard-plaster, wherewith, like sundry literati, I sole my feet--drive down themateria peccansout of the upper parts into the lower. Nevertheless I go farther, if I freeze. Namely: I scrape out and notch for myself a cap of ice[75]and think under the frozen night-cap; accordingly it can be no wonder if the apoplexy and its half-sister, the hemiplexy--attacking me throughout from above and below, at one pole through the hot sock of the foot, at the other through the icy knob or frozen martyr's-crown--should go back to where it came from, and give me to the earth, of which the one pole in like manner below has summer, while the other above has winter.... But let the reader for once turn from good books a philanthropic eye upon us, their authors. We authors make great exertions and produce catechisms, primers, funeral sermons upon murderers, periodicals or menstrua, extracts, and other confounded enlightening stuff; but in doing it we worry and wear away our worm-bags terribly--and yet no poor devil has a decent word for us. Thus I and the whole scribbling fraternity stand erect there and shoot off with gusto long rays across a whole hemisphere (for more than that, of worlds and other globes, cannot be illuminated at once,) and all America is lost to our keels (or quills) and all the while, nevertheless, we resemble the early Christians, by whom thelight, wherewith they, shrouded in tarred linen, as living pitch-pine torches, shone over Nero's gardens, was given out at the same time with their very fat and life....
"And here"--(romance manufacturers say)--"here ensued a scene, which the reader may imagine, but which I cannot describe." This appears to me too stupid. Nor can I describe it, nevertheless. Have then authors so little honesty, that, when it comes to a scene for which the readers have been long turning over the leaves ahead,e. g., a death, for which all, parents and children, have been waiting and watching as for a feudal vacancy or a hanging-day, they should then jump up from their chairs and say: do that yourselves? It is just as if Schikaneder's[76]troop, before the most heart-rending scenes of Lear, should come to the foot-lights and beseech the audience to imagine Lear's countenance, for they on their part could not imitate it. Surely what the reader can imagine, the author can also--in the full pulse of all his powers--and still more easily imagine and consequently depict; moreover the reader's fancy, into whose spokes the previous scenes have once caught and set them in motion, will easily be impelled to the swiftest by my description of the last scene--only not by the miserable one, that it is not to be described.
As to myself, on the contrary, one may be assured that I make myself equal to all emergencies. I have therefore negotiated already with my publisher at the Easter fair, to have ready several pounds extra of dashes, a pound of interrogation and exclamation points, for the setting up of the most intense scenes, because I should not in the least worry myself in this case about my apoplectic head.