Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; / or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel.

by Jean Paul

END OF BOOK III.

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER XV.

ROSA VON MEYERN—TONE-ECHOES AND AFTER BREEZES FROM THE LOVELIEST OF ALL NIGHTS—LETTERS OF NATHALIE AND FIRMIAN—TABLE-TALK BY LEIBGEBER.

If on some dewy, warm and starry night of spring the miners in some salt mine were to have their great penthouse-roof of earth lifted away from over their heads, and find themselves thus, of a sudden, brought out from their confined, candle-lit cellar into the wide, dim, sleeping-hall of nature—out of their subterranean stillness in among the breezes, the perfumes, the whisperings of the spring—these miners would be exactly in Firmian’s case, whose heretofore prisoned, silent, and serene soul the night just past had driven out of its prison with might, darkening it with new sorrows and joys, and a whole new world. Heinrich maintained a most speaking silence concerning the night in question, and, on the other hand, Firmian betrayed a mute hunting after speech. Strive as he might to fold those wings of his (which had been stretched all moist from under their wing-covers on that foregoing night for a first time), they would not fold quite short enough to go back under them again. Matters got to feel very oppressive and sultry for Leibgeber after a time. On that previous night they had come back in perfect silence to Bayreuth and to bed, and he wearied at the thought of all the demi-shades and demi-tints which would have to be got ready on the palette before so much as four bold touches could be given to the picture of the night.

Perhaps there is nothing more regrettable than that we do not all have the hooping-cough at one and the same time—or are not all suffering the sorrows of Werther—or are not all twenty-one, or sixty-one—or have not all hypochondria—or are not all spending our honeymoons—or indulging in games of banter. How charming it would be (were we all choristers singing in the same coughing-tutti) to find everybody else in just the same condition as ourselves—and put up with them therefore, and forgive in them that in which they were just like us! But as things really are—now when the one coughs to-day, and the other not till to-morrow (the simultaneous company-coughing in church always excepted); when one has to be taking dancing-lessons while another is saying his prayers in the conventicle; when one father’s daughter is being held up at the font while the other’s son is being lowered into his little grave;—now, when destiny is always striking on the hearts about us chords quite unrelated to the key of our own, or, at any rate, superfluous sixths, major sevenths, minor seconds;—now, as things are, in this universal lack of unison and harmony, what can be expected but a screeching cat-charivari—and, if we can’t have a little melody, we must be content with a little arpeggio-ing up and down.

By way of a fever for conversation, or pump-handle wherewith to force a drop or two up from the heart, Leibgeber caught hold of Firmian’s hand, and embraced it softly and warmly with all his fingers. He put one or two unimportant questions concerning what walks and expeditions they should think of for the day. But he had not foreseen that this hand-clasp would be the means of landing him in deeper difficulties of embarrassment,—for he found that it was now incumbent on him to keep a control on his hand as well as on his tongue—and he couldn’t let Firmian’s hand drop all in a moment, like a hot potato, but found it necessary to let it out of his clasp by a gradual diminuendo. This species of careful watch over his feelings was a process which made Leibgeber blush with shame, and drove him nearly frantic; and, indeed, he would have thrown even this description of mine of it into the fire. I am given to understand that he never could bring himself to utter the word “heart” even to women—who always have their heart (namely the word) on their tongues, like a kind of globus hystericus. He said, “It is the bullet-screw of their real hearts,—the button on their fanfoil; and, to me, it is a poison bolus, a pitch-ball for the Bel of Babel.”

So his hand escaped, on a sudden, from its close arrest; he seized his hat and stick, and cried: “I see you are just as great a goose as I am myself: instanter, instantius, instantissime, in three words, did you talk to her about the Widows’ Fund? Yes or no—not another syllable. I go Out at that door this instant!” Siebenkæs brought out all his items of news on this subject as rapidly as possible, so as to be quit of each and all of them for ever. “She is certain to agree to it. I said nothing to her about it. I can NOT. But you can quite easily. And you must. I am going no more to Fantasie. And we shall have a grand time of it this afternoon, Heinrich! The music of our lives shall be of a sounding sort. The pedals of the joy-notes are all ready on our harps to be pressed down; and we’ll press them!” Heinrich, partly recovering his equanimity, said, as he went out, “The Cremona strings of the human instrument are made of living membrane, the breast is only the sounding board—and the head is the damper.”

Solitude lay around our friend like some beautiful country—all the echoes, driven away from him, and wandering, lost and astray, could find their way back to him now athwart it. And on the crape-veil, woven of the twelve past hours, which had laid itself over his life’s loveliest historical picture, he could tremblingly trace that picture’s lines with crayon-pencil, and trace, and trace them over again, a thousand and a thousand times! But a visit to the beautiful Fantasie—blooming richer and fairer as the hours went by—this he must deny himself; for he must not be a living hedge, to fence and bar Nathalie from that Valley of Blossom. He must pay for bliss with privation. The charms of the town and neighbourhood had still their bright, many-tinted skins—but their sweet kernels were gone. Everything was to him as some dessert dish which had, in the older time, had coloured sugar sprinkled over it, which was now, somehow, turned to coloured sand. All his hopes—all the flowers and fruit of his life (as is the case with our higher ones)—now grew and matured beneath the ground, like those of the subterranean vetch;[^[78]] I mean, in the sham grave into which he was going. How little he had—and yet, how much! His feet were upon prickly rose branches, and all round the Elysian fields of his future he saw thorny bushes, bristly undergrowth, and a wall built, beginning at his grave. His Leipzig rose valley was dwindled into the one green rosebud-twig, which had been transplanted, unblown, from Nathalie’s heart to his. And yet, how much he had. A forget-me-not, from Nathalie, for all his life to come (the silken ones she gave him were but the hulls of that whose blossom was immortal and eternal); a springtime in his soul at last, at last after all these many springs—to be so beloved, for the first time by a woman as an hundred dreams and poets had pictured to him that men might be beloved. To pass, in an instant, at a single step, from his dingy lumber room of old law papers and books into the fresh, green, flowery, golden age of love,—for the first time, not only to gain a rare and priceless love like this, but to take away with him such a parting kiss, like a sun into all his coming life, to light and warm it through and through for ever! This was bliss for one who had had his cross to bear in former days. But, more than this, he was free to let himself be borne along upon the beauteous waves of this river of Eden without care or constraint, inasmuch as Nathalie never could be his, nor should he ever see her more. In Lenette he had loved no Nathalie as in the latter no Lenette. His wedded love was a prosaic summer day of sultry hay-making, but this was a poetic spring night of starlight and flowers, and his new world was like the name of the spot where it was created—Fantaisie. He did not deceive himself as to the fact that, as he was going to die before Nathalie, he was loving, in her, merely a departed spirit, and that as a departed spirit—nay, while yet in this life, of a truth, for him, a pure and glorified risen soul; and he freely put the question to himself whether there were any reason why he should not love this Nathalie (thus departed into the past, for him) as truly and fondly as any other, departed long since into a yet remoter past—the Heloise of an Abelard or St. Preux, or a poet’s Laura, or a Werther’s Lotte for whom his dying was not even to be as real as Werther’s.

With all his efforts, he could not manage to say more to Leibgeber than, “She must have been very, very fond of you, this rare, exceptional soul—for it is only to my resemblance to you that I can ascribe her heavenly kindness to me—who am so little like other men—and have never been cared for by women.” Leibgeber—and he himself as soon as he said it—laughed at this almost idiotic statement; but what is any and every lover, during his May month, but a dear, genuine, simple sheep?

Leibgeber soon came back to the hotel with the news that he had seen the English lady on her way to Fantaisie. Firmian was very glad of it. She rendered his resolve to shut himself out of the entire circle of delight easier to execute. For she was the Count von Vaduz’s daughter, and consequently must not see him (Siebenkæs) at present, having to believe him hereafter to be Leibgeber. Heinrich botanised, however, the whole day on the flowery slope of Fantaisie, with the view of discovering and observing the flower goddess, rather than the flowers, with his botanical glasses (to wit, his eyes). But no goddess appeared. Alas! our poor wounded Nathalie had so many reasons for keeping aloof from the ruins of her loveliest hours—for fleeing the scene of conflagration (now overgrown with flowers) where she might encounter him whom she meant to meet no more.

A few days after this, the Venner Rosa von Meyern honoured the company at the table d’hôte in the ‘Sun’ with his.... If the author’s calculations as to dates do not wholly mislead him, he was at dinner there on that occasion himself. But I have only an indistinct recollection of the two advocates, and none at all of the Venner—because coxcombs of his description are an uninteresting species of animals, and there are whole game-preserves and zoological gardens full of them to be met with at all times. I have more than once met with characters, in the body, whom I have subsequently taken careful wax casts of from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their boots, and then exhibited them about the country in my collection of wax-work figures. But I wish I always knew beforehand exactly which of the people whom I happen to be dining or travelling with chances to be the one who is going to have his portrait painted in this way. I should note down, and store up a thousand trifling, minute peculiarities, and lay them down in my epistolary cellars. As it is, I sometimes find myself obliged (and I confess it freely) to set to work and coolly lie a number of matters of minor importance—for instance, that a thing takes place about six o’clock, or about seven—if I happen to be wholly without documentary evidence on the point. Wherefore it is a moral certainty that if three other authors had sat down, on the same morning with me, to give the world an account of Siebenkæs’s wedded life derived from the same historical sources as mine, that we four, however great our devotion to truth, would have produced family histories containing much the same amount and description of inaccuracy as we find in those which the four Evangelists have given us; so that our tetrachord would have stood in need of a good tuning with a tuning-pipe in the shape of a “Harmony” of our Gospels.

Meyern dined at the ‘Sun,’ as we have said. He told Siebenkæs with a triumph, which was not without a dash of menace, that he was going back to Kuhschnappel next day. He was vainer than ever—probably he had offered his hand to some fifty of the fair sex of Bayreuth, as though he had been the giant Briareus, with fifty wedding-rings on his hundred hands. He was as greedy of the fair sex as cats are of marum verum; which is why both are surrounded with metallic guards by their possessors. When the clergy rivet poachers of this description, alive, to one particular animal of their chase by means of a strong wedding-ring, and the animal of the chase in question drags them through every thicket till they are scratched and bled to death, philanthropic weekly-papers would say that it is too severe a punishment; and it is so, no doubt, for the poor animal of the chase.

On the following day Rosa really did send to ask whether Siebenkæs had any message to send to his wife, as he was going back to see her.

Nathalie was invisible still. All that Firmian saw of her was a letter for her which he saw shaken out of the post-bag when he went (as he did every day) to see if there was one from his wife. Lenette did not require more hours to write a letter than Isocrates did years for a panegyric on the Athenians—no more, but just the same number, namely about ten. Judging by the handwriting and the seal, the letter for Nathalie was from the (step) father of his country, Herr von Blaise. “Thou darling girl,” thought Firmian, “with what deliberation he will pass the burning focus of his burning-glass (formed of the ice of his heart) over every wound of thy soul! How many secret tears wilt thou weep—and no one to count them; and thou hast no hand now to dry them and hide them, except thine own!”

One exquisite, blue afternoon he went alone to the only pleasure garden which was not barred against him—the Hermitage. Memories met him every where—all painfully sweet memories. At every spot he had lost, or renounced, something of life or heart—had become a hermit, in accordance with the place’s name. Could he forget the great, dim glade where, beside his kneeling friend, and before the setting sun, he had sworn to die, and part from his wife and from all the world he knew?

He left the joy-place, turned his face to the setting sun (which almost hid, in its brightness, the prospect from his sight), and strolled in circles round the town. With a deeply moved heart he gazed after the gently radiant luminary as it sank, amid the glowing cloud-embers, towards that distant spot where his widowed Lenette would be standing in her silent room, with her face lighted up by the evening red. “Ah! dear, good Lenette,” the voice within him cried, “why can I not press thee to this full, tender heart, here in this paradise, in bliss? I should love thee better here, and forgive thee easier.”

Yes, of a truth, it is thou, kind Nature—never ending Love, who changest, in us, distance of body into nearness of soul. It is thou who, when we are utterly happy in some distant spot, bringest to us from afar, in fancy, the beloved forms of those whom we have had to leave—they come like beautiful music, or like happy years—and we stretch out our arms to the clouds that go soaring over the hills beyond which lie the dwellings of those whom we love the best. Our severed hearts open to those distant ones as the flowers which open to the sun unfold their petals even on days when there are clouds between them.

The splendour died away, leaving the blood-like track of the sunken sun in the blue; the earth with her gardens seemed to stand out brighter and clearer. Then suddenly Firmian came on the green Tempè Vale of Fantaisie, lying before him all loveliness of sight and of sound, tinted with the red of the evening clouds and with the white of blossoming boughs. But over it stood an angel with a gleaming cloud streak for sword, saying, “Here enter thou not! Knowest thou not the Eden from whence thou hast gone out?”

Firmian turned him about, and there, in the gloaming of spring, leaned upon the wall of the first of the Bayreuth houses he reached on his homeward way; so that the wounds of his eyes might have a chance to grow whole—that he might not meet his friend bearing scars which would have to be “explained.” Leibgeber was not in, however, but there was something there of a very unexpected kind—a letter from Nathalie to him.

Ye who have keenly felt—or deeply regretted—that there is a Moses-veil, an altar-railing, a prison-grating, made both of body and earth—stretched out for ever and aye, between one soul and another—ye cannot well blame this poor, deep-touched, solitary FRIEND, that he took up the cold paper unseen, and pressed it to his burning lips, and to his trembling heart. For of a truth, every body—even the human body, is, from the soul’s point of view, merely the sacred reliquiæ of an invisible spirit; and not only the letter, which you kiss, but the hand which wrote it, too, is, like the lips, whose kiss you think, assures you—(but it is a deceptive assurance)—of the closeness of your union, your flowing or fusing into one, only the sacred outward and visible sign of a something higher and dearer; and these deceptions differ only in their sweetness.

Leibgeber came in, opened the letter, and read it aloud:

“To-morrow morning at five o’clock, I shall be turning my back upon your beautiful town. I am going to Schraplau. But I cannot leave this lovely valley, oh dear friend, without once again giving you the assurance of my unchanging friendship, and conveying to you my thanks and wishes for yours. I should so have liked to say good-bye to you in a more living manner; but my long leave-taking from my English friend is not yet over, and I have now her wishes to combat (as I had my own before) before I can bury myself in, or rather, wing my flight to my village solitude. This beautiful spring has sorely wounded me, and that with joys as well as with sorrows. But (if I may go so far afield for a comparison), my heart, like Cranmer’s, is left for those I love, unconsumed amid the ashes of my funereal pyre. May all go well! well! with you—better than can ever be the case with me, a woman. Fate cannot take much from you, nay, nor give you much either. There are smiling eternal rainbows playing around all the waterfalls for you; but the rain-clouds of a woman’s heart must drop for many a long day ere they are brightened by the sad, yet cheering tints of the Iris which memory casts upon them at length. Your friend is with you still, no doubt. Press him warmly to your heart, and tell him, all that yours wishes, and gives him, mine wishes him; and never will he, or you, whom he loves, be forgotten by me. Always

“Your Nathalie.”

During the reading of this, Firmian stood with his face pressed to the window, and lifted towards the evening sky. Heinrich, with a true friend’s delicacy of perception, took the answer out of his lips, and said, looking to him, “Yes, this Nathalie is good and kind, in very truth, and a thousand times better than thousands of other people are; but I will let myself be driven over by her carriage, and crushed beneath the wheels of it, if I don’t wait for her at four o’clock in the morning, get into the carriage, and sit down beside her. Ay, verily! I will get her to lend me both her ears, and I will fill them full—or my own are longer than any elephant’s, though he does use his for fly-flappers.”

“Yes, do, dear Henry,” said Firmian, in the most cheerful tones he could force from his oppressed throat. “I shall give you three lines to take in your hand, just that you may have something to give her, since I am never to see her again.”

There is a certain lyric intoxication of heart, during which people never ought to write letters, because, in the course of fifty years or so they may, perhaps fall into the hands of people who are without either the heart or the intoxication. However, Firmian wrote, and did not seal; and Leibgeber did not read.

“I bid you farewell, too! But I cannot say ‘Don’t forget me.’ Ah! forget me! But leave me the forget-me-not which you gave me—to keep for evermore. Though Heaven is past and over, death has yet to come. And mine is now very near, and it is for this reason alone that I, and my dear Leibgeber even more urgently, have a favour to beg of you; but such a strange favour. Nathalie, do not refuse. Your soul’s sphere is far, far above that of the feminine souls which are shocked and frightened at everything out of the commonplace track. You can dare, and can venture, nor need you fear to risk that great heart of yours (and happiness) on any cast. And now, as I spoke to you on that night, for the last time, this is the last time I shall write to you.

“But Eternity remains for thee and me!

“F. S.”

His sleep was nothing but dreams all night, that he might be sure to awaken Leibgeber in the morning. But as early as three o’clock, the latter, in his capacity of letter-carrier, and Maître des Requêtes, was posted under a great linden-tree, whose hanging beds, thronged with a sleeping world of inhabitants, overhung the alley by which Nathalie was to come. Firmian, in bed, enacted Henry’s part along with him, in fancy, thinking to himself, “Now she is bidding the English lady good-bye; now she is getting into the carriage; now she is passing the tree, and he is taking her horses by the bridle.” He phantasised himself into dreams which stabbed his heart with pictures of her repeated refusals of his petition. What a quantity of dark and cloudy weather is born of one single, bright, starry night, in the physical world as well as in the moral. At last he dreamed that she stretched her hand to him, from her carriage, with tears in her eyes, and the green rose-twig on her breast, and said, in low sweet tones, “I must say no! Could I live long, if you were dead?” She pressed his hand so warmly that he awoke. The pressure was there, and lasted, and before him was the beaming daylight, and his beaming friend, who said, “She has agreed, while you’ve been snoring here.”

He had been within a hair’s breadth of missing her. She had not taken so much time to dress and depart as others do to undress and arrive. A rose-branch, wet with dew, whose leaves pricked sharper than its thorns, was on her heart, and the long parting had tinted her lids with red. She was delighted to see him, though a little frightened, and anxious to hear. He gave her Firmian’s open letter, to begin with, by way of credential. Her eager eyes shone out once more through two tear-drops, and she asked, “What am I to do?” “Nothing,” said Leibgeber, in an artful manner, half jest, half earnest, “except allow the Prussian Treasury to remind you of his death twice a-year, as if you were his widow.” She answered, “No!” pronouncedly, on one note, behind which, however, there was only a comma, not a full stop. He once more went through his petitions, and his reasons, adding, “Do it, at least, for my sake, if for no other reason. I can’t bear to see him baulked of a wish, or disappointed in a hope. He is a bear whom that bear-leader, the State, keeps dancing all the winter, without a wink of winter sleep, whereas I seldom take my paw out of my mouth, but suck away continually. He kept awake all last night, so as to make sure of calling me in time, and he is counting the moments anxiously at home now.” She read the letter again, syllable by syllable. He did not ask for a final answer, but spun out a talk on other subjects—the morning, her journey, the village of Schraplau. The morning had already raised her pillar of fire beyond Bayreuth, the town kept adding pillars of smoke; in a few minutes he must out of the carriage and back. “And so, fare you well,” he said, in the softest of tones, with one foot on the carriage-step; “may your future grow brighter and brighter, like the day about us. And now, what last word am I to carry to my good, dear beloved Firmian?” (I shall make a remark in a minute or two.) She lowered her travelling-veil like the drop curtain of a drama which is done, and said in low and stifled accents, “If I must, I must; so let this be, also. But you are giving me another great sorrow to take with me on my way.” Here he jumped down, and the carriage, bearing this poor soul—poor now in so many ways—rolled on with her over the shattered ruins of her youthful life.

If he had got a “No” instead of this hard wrung-out “Yes,” he would have caught her again on the other side of the town, and been her fellow-traveller for another fragment of her journey.

I said above, that I should “make a remark;” it is this: that the friendship or love which a woman has for a man is fed by that which she sees existing between him and his friends, and grows visibly in consequence—converting it, polyp-fashion, into its own substance. It was for this reason that Leibgeber, by instinct, had given such warm expression to his. In the case of us, masculine lovers, again, this sort of electric coating, or magnetic armature of our love with the friendship of our beloved object with other women is most uncommon. What pleases us, is to see her shrinking from everybody else, growing hard and frozen to them on our account, handing them nothing but ices and cold pudding, but serving us with glowing goblets of love. This process of making the heart, like wine, more fiery and strong, and generous, by freezing it at the boiling-point, may please a short-sighted selfish soul; but never a clear-seeing, kindly, loving one. At all events, the author declares that, whenever he has caught a glimpse—in a mirror or in water—of the reverse side of the Janus-head, of which the other side has been smiling in love upon him, frowning in dislike upon the rest of the world, he has made a face or two of the same disliking sort on the spot—at the Janus-head. For the mere contrast’s sake, a girl should never slander, find fault, or dislike, at all events, while she is a lover; when she is a married woman, the mistress of a house, and has children, and cows, and servants, of course no reasonable man or husband, can possibly object to a moderate amount of bad temper, and a little scolding now and then.

Nathalie had acceded to the strange proposal for many reasons; just because it was a strange one; and then the word “widow” would, to her romantic heart, be constantly weaving a mourning-band of sorrow, binding her and Firmian together, and winding in charming and fanciful wreaths round the events, and the vows, of the night of their good-bye. Besides, to-day, she had been gradually ascending from one emotion to another, and had reached a height where her head began to reel. Moreover, she was boundlessly unselfish, and consequently never troubled herself to think whether a thing had the appearance of selfishness or not. And, lastly, she cared less about appearances in general, and the conclusions people drew from them than, perhaps, a young lady should care.

Leibgeber, now that all his goals were reached, emitted a long, gladsome zodiacal light; and Firmian did not darken it with the full depth of his mourning night shadow, but only with the half-tints thereof. At the same time, he felt he could not visit either of Bayreuth’s pleasure-places, Eremitage or Fantaisie, which were Herculaneum and Portici to him now. Yet he must pass by the latter on his homeward way, and disinter many things that were buried. He did not care to delay his return much longer; not only was the moon set now, which had shed a new silvery radiance upon all the white flowers and blossoms of the spring, but Leibgeber, besides, was a death’s head memento mori, always saying, in the most unmistakable manner—though with neither lips nor tongue—“It must be borne in mind that thou hast got to die, in Kuhschnappel, in jest.” Leibgeber’s heart burned for the world without, the flames of his forest-conflagration were eager to dart and play uncontrolled over alps, islands, capital cities; the Vaduz water reservoir of acts of parliament—paper lit-de-parade and lit-de-justice—would have been to him a heavy, suffocating, feather-bed, such as people in a hopeless state of hydrophobia used to be smothered by out of compassion. In fact, a small town could as little endure him as he could endure a small town. Indeed, even in Bayreuth—a larger place—there were sundry Commissaires de Justice at the table d’hôte at the ‘Sun’ Hotel, who told me with their own lips, that when Leibgeber spoke his table-speech (reported in Chapter XII.) on the subject of Crown Princes, they thought it was a deliberate satire on a particular Margrave then reigning; whereas all his satires were really directed against the human race in general, not against individuals. Again, how thoughtlessly he conducted himself during the poor eight days which he spent in our good town of Hof im Voigtlande. Are there not credible “Varisker” (as according to some authorities the inhabitants of Voigtland were called in Cæsar’s time—though others consider “Narisker” to have been the word), who have assured me that he bought bergamot pears in the open market-place, near the court-house, and cakes at a baker’s stall, in his best suit of Sunday clothes? And are there not Nariskers of the fair sex, who, having observed his proceedings thereafter, are ready to depose that, though stall-feeding is a matter of universal enjoinment, he nevertheless ate this food-offering in the open air like a prince, and on the march, like a Roman army? There are witnesses, who waltzed with him, to testify that he went to masked balls in a robe de chambre and a cocked-hat and feathers, and that he had worn both all the previous day in earnest, before putting them on in the evening in jest. A Narisker not without some brains, and possessing a good memory, who was not aware that I had the fellow under my historical hands, repeated the following somewhat audacious utterances of Leibgeber’s.

“Every man is a born pedant. There are very few who are hung in chains after they are dead: but almost every one is hung, in most accursed chains, before death; and, therefore, in most countries, ‘Freeman’ means provost-marshal, or hangman. Jest, as such, ought to be serious; therefore, as long as one is only in jest, it is wrong to jest in the slightest degree. He held, that the spirit which brooded, creating, over the ink of colleges was (as many Fathers of the Church held that to be which, according to Moses, moved upon the face of the waters) wind. In his eyes, worshipful councils, conferences, deputations, sessions, processions, &c., were not, at bottom, wholly without a spice of comic salt, looked upon as grave parodies of stiff and empty seriousness, more especially as in general there was but one member of the conclave (or perhaps his wife) who really voted, decided, or ruled, the mystic corpus itself, sitting at the green table, chiefly for the joke of the thing; just as, in flute clocks, though there is a flute-player screwed on outside whose fingers work up and down upon the flute, which grows out of his mouth, and children are beyond themselves with delight at the talent of the wooden imposition, every clockmaker knows that it is inside that the wheels are which act on the hidden pipes with their pinions.” I answered that these sayings showed that Leibgeber was of a rather audacious and ironical turn of mind. It is, perhaps, to be desired, that everybody were in a position to do what the author does in this place, namely, beg all Nariskers to have the goodness to point to any single word or deed of his which can be called satirical, or not exactly adapted to fit on to the cap-block of a pays coutumier. If he is not speaking the truth, he begs that he may be contradicted without the slightest hesitation.

The winnowing-fan which blew Siebenkæs out of Bayreuth on the following day, was a letter from the Count von Vaduz, in which he expressed his friendly regret on account of Leibgeber’s cold-fever and tallowy appearance, at the same time begging him to hasten his entry upon the duties of his office. This letter was to Siebenkæs as a wing-membrane wherewith to hasten his flight to his seeming cocoon-grave, in order to issue forth from it a young full-fledged inspector. In our next chapter he turns him about, and quits the beautiful town. In what remains of this, he is taking private lessons in silhouette clipping from Leibgeber, whose rôle he is to succeed to by dying. The master-cutter, and scissorial-mentor did nothing, in this connection, worthy of being handed down to posterity by me save one thing, as to which I do not find a word in my documents, which was told me by Mr. Feldmann, the keeper of the hotel, who was carving at table when it occurred. It was only that a stranger who was dining there clipped out a profile of Leibgeber, among others; while Leibgeber, seeing what he was about, clipped out, under cover of the table-cloth, a silhouette of this supernumerary copyist’s own head and shoulders, and when the latter handed him his, Leibgeber returned the compliment, saying “al Pari!” thus paying him in his own coin. This stranger made airs of various kinds, as well as silhouettes, but succeeded best with the phlogistic sort, which he made with his lungs, without any difficulty to speak of, and in which he throve and took on colour, as plants do; this sort of air can be breathed, and is designated by the name of “wind,” to distinguish it from the other phlogistic gases which can not be inhaled. When this phlogistic wind-maker (who gave admirable lectures from town to town, on the other gases, from that portable professorial chair, his body) had departed with his cutter’s wages, Heinrich contented himself with the following remarks.

“Thousands of people ought to travel and teach both at once. He who limits himself to three days can certainly (as a species of private tutor extraordinary) in that time read excellent lectures on every kind of subject which he knows little or nothing about. Thus much I see already, that there are brilliant comets—shining wandering stars—revolving round me and others, and throwing flying lights upon us concerning electricity, gases, magnetism, in short natural science in general; but this is but a small matter. May this duck’s wing choke me if these rostrum carriers, and travelling professors (travelling scholars they are not), might not lecture upon science of every kind, with great advantage, at all events, upon the minuter branches. Could not one, for instance, travel and read lectures upon the first century after Christ’s birth, or the first millenary before it (which is no longer), I mean, tell ladies and gentlemen all about it in a lecture or two, a second undertaking the second, a third the third, an eighteenth our own? I can quite imagine travelling medicine-chests for the soul of this kind. But as far as I am concerned, I should by no means stop at this point—I should advertise myself as a peripatetic private tutor in branches of the minutest possible order; e. g., in electoral courts, I should give lessons concerning the obligations to be entered into by the nominees to government appointments; in all and every place I should give exegetical instruction concerning the first verse of the first book of Moses—the kraken, the devil (who may, perhaps, be more or less the same as the other), on Hogarth’s tail-piece, in connection with Vandyke’s headpieces, on coins and in portraits; on the true distinction between the Hippocentaur, and the Onocentaur, which is more like that between genius and German criticism than anything else; on the first paragraph of Wolf, or even of Pütter; on the funeral bier of Louis (XIV.) the be-grandised, and the public rejoicings under it; on the academic licences which a passing lecturer may allow himself to take, in addition to that of pocketing his fee—the greatest of which is often that of shutting the lecture-room door, (to make a long story short) on everything, in fact. If we go on in this way (I can’t help being struck), that when circulating high schools have got to be as common as village schools—when savants ply backwards and forwards like live shuttles between the towns (and they have begun to do so already), attaching Ariadne threads (of talk, at all events) everywhere, to everything, with the view of weaving them into something or other—if we go on on this road, I say, when each sun of a professor—on the Ptolemaic system, moves about among the dark orbs (fixed upon necks), which surround him, and casts his light upon each in turn (a state of things wholly opposed to the Copernican system, according to which the sun stands still on the professorial rostrum in the centre of the orbits of the revolving planets or students)—if we go on (I say once more, on this road), one may be pretty sure that the world will really come to be something at last; a learned world, at the very least and lowest—philosophers will obtain the true philosopher’s stone—gold; what fools will obtain will be the philosophers, and knowledge of every kind: and moreover the restorers of science will get set upon their legs. All soil would then be classic soil—so that people would of necessity have to plough, and fight on, classic soil. Every gallows hill would be a Pindus, every prince’s throne an oracle-cave of Delphi—and I should be obliged to anyone who should show me such a thing as a single ass in the whole of Germany, then. This is what would necessarily happen if all the world were to set out upon learned, and instructive, journeys—that portion of it being, of course, necessarily excepted which would be obliged to stay at home if there were to be anybody to listen and pay (like the point de vue, in military ‘evolutions,’ for which the adjutant is generally told off).”

Here he suddenly jumped up, and cried, “I wish to Heaven I could go to Bruckenau;[^[79]] there, on the bath tubs, should be my professorial chair, and seat of the Muses. The tradesman’s, the country gentleman’s wife or daughter should lie, like a shell fish, in her closed basin and relic-casquet, with nothing sticking out but her head (just as is the case in her ordinary costume), her head which it would be my business to instruct. What discourses, à la St. Anthony of Padua, should I not hold with these tender tench—or sirens—though they might better be described as fortresses protected by moats, or wet ditches. I should sit lecturing and teaching upon the wooden holsters of their glowing charms (phosphorus-like, kept in water!) But this would be nothing compared to the benefits I should bestow upon society were I to have myself cooped into an etui, or scabbard of the kind, and then be net a-going like a water-organ, and, like some water-god, devote my pedagogical talents to the edification of the class of students sitting on my tub-lid! True, I should have to make my illustrative gestures under the warm water, because the only part of me out of my sheath would be my head (like the hilt of a dagger), with my master’s cap on it. But the loveliest of doctrine,—luxuriant rice-ears, and succulent aquatic plants sprouting in the water—a play of philosophic water-works, and so forth, should be emitted from the bath, and send away all the beauties (whom, in fancy, I see thronging round my quaker’s and Diogenes’ tub) besprinkled with learning and instruction of the most superlative description. By Heaven! I ought to be off to Bruckenau this instant, not so much as a watering-place guest as in the capacity of a private tutor.”

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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 soft paddings, 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 his coulisses with 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 loved you as your old dreams have so often pictured to your heart you might be 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—had died first, 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 citizens of 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.

Away from home we are bold and daring: we resolve, and undertake; at home, 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, manned by two or three large heads, which, being cap-blocks, had on their Sunday bonnets, already, which would be transferred from them in their capacity of Curatores 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 but memories. Our feeble hearts are at all events glowing and right full of love in that hour when we come back and 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 which always love, and are never angry, these two twilights (when the morning star of meeting, and the evening star of parting shine) are too sad to bear for to them they seem like nights.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE BUTTERFLY ROSA IN THE FORM OF MINING CATERPILLAR—THORN-CROWNS, AND THISTLE-HEADS OF JEALOUSY.

The last chapter was as brief as our delusions. It was one itself, alas! poor Firmian. After the first stormy mutual catechisings, and particularly, after the giving and receiving of all the mutual news, he saw more and more clearly that Lenette’s invisible church, in which Stiefel filled the part of soul’s bridegroom, was become very much of a visible one. It was as if the earthquake of the recent happiness had rent in twain the veil of the Holy of Holies, the inmost sanctuary, wherein Stiefel’s head fluttered by way of cherub. But, to speak the truth, I am telling a lie here, because it was Lenette’s special object to show and display a particular liking for the Schulrath, who, in his delight thereat, went fluttering on from Arcadia to Otaheite, and from thence to Eldorado, and from thence to Walhalla, which was a certain indication, that, up to this point, his good fortune, during Firmian’s absence, had been less. He related that, “Rosa had broken with the Heimlicher; that the Venner, whom the latter had wanted to utilise as a spinning machine, had turned into an engine of war against him. The cause of all this had been the niece in Bayreuth, whose engagement the Venner had broken off, because he had caught her being kissed by a gentleman there.”

Firmian grew red as fire, and cried “Miserable cockroach! It was she who broke off her engagement with that wretched lying scoundrel, not he who broke off his with her. Ah! Herr Schulrath, be that poor lady’s true knight and champion, and run this wretched abortion of a lie through and through wherever you came across it. From whom did you get hold of this evil weed?” Stiefel pointed calmly to Lenette, saying, “From her!” “And where did you get hold of it?” Firmian cried to her in amazement. “Mr. Von Meyern,” she answered, with her face all glowing red, “was here calling, and told it me himself.” “But I was fetched immediately,” Stiefel interrupted, “and I skilfully sent him about his business.” Stiefel then asked for a correct version of what had happened. Firmian thereupon, timidly, and with many changes of tone, made a highly favourable report of the rose-maiden and her conduct of the matter (“rose-maiden” in a threefold sense, on account of the roses in her cheeks, of her victorious virtue, and the green rosebuds she had given to him). But on Lenette’s account he awarded her a proxima accessit only, not the gold medal. He had to bind the Venner, by way of sacrificial ram, to the horns of the altar in place of Nathalie, or, at all events, harness him by way of saddle-horse to her triumphal car, and relate without disguise how Leibgeber had been the person who broke off the engagement, and, as it were, dragged her back by the sleeve, as she was making the first step into the Minotaur’s cave—by means of his satiric sketches of Meyern.

“But it was you, of course,” said Lenette, without any tone of interrogation, “who told Leibgeber all about him, to begin with.”

“Yes,” said he.

We of the human race give to words of one syllable, to “Yes,” and “No,” at all events, more intonations, and shades of intonations, than the Chinese themselves. The yes in question was a rapid, toneless, cold yes, being merely meant for a “What then,” or “Suppose I did.” She interrupted a digressive speech of Stiefel’s with a point-blank, target, bull’s-eye question:

“When had you been with her V”

At last Firmian, with his battle-telescope, saw hostile movements of all kinds going on in her heart; he made a playful diversion, and said, “Herr Schulrath, when did you come to see Lenette?”

“Three times every week at least, and, very often, oftener than that; always about this time of the evening,” he answered.

“Very well,” said Firmian, in a kindly and playful fashion. “I’m not going to be jealous, but be good enough to remark—and my Lenette will please to do so too—that I was with Nathalie, along with Leibgeber, twice in all; once in the afternoon, once in the evening, walking about the grounds of Fantaisie.

“Well, Lenette?”

She parted her cherry lips, and her eyes were like Volta’s electric condensers.

Stiefel went away, and Lenette (from a countenance on which there seemed two fires burning, the fire of anger and a lovelier fire) flashed after him a spark of eye love, calculated to blow up the whole powder-mill of a jealous husband. The married pair were scarce alone, when, by way of propitiating her, he asked her if that confounded Venner had been plaguing her again; and then the firework which had been fixed ready on the scaffold of her face, went hissing off.

“Oh! of course you can’t endure him. You are jealous of him, on account of this beautiful, learned, INTELLECTUAL, Nathalie of yours. Do you suppose I don’t know quite well about you and her going about a whole night among the trees—and hugging and kissing! A pretty story! Ah fie! I never would have believed it of you. No wonder Mr. Meyern said ‘Good morning’ to her, learning and all. Oh yes! you’ll excuse yourself, no doubt.”

“I should have talked to you about all that most innocent affair,” answered Firmian, tranquilly, “while Stiefel was here, if I had not seen quite well that you knew of it. Am I annoyed because he kissed you while I was away?”

This irritated her still more; firstly, because it was impossible that Firmian could know of a certainty that it was true—(and it was!),—and secondly, because she thought “You can forgive it very easily now that you care more for another woman than you do for me.” But then, for the self-same reason (inasmuch as she cared more for another man than she did for him), she, of course, ought to have found no difficulty in forgiving him too. But, as usual, instead of answering his question, she put one herself: “Did I ever give anybody silk forget-me-nots, as somebody did to somebody? Thank goodness! mine are still in my drawer.”

Here two hearts contended within him—a tender heart which was pierced by this unintentional association of forget-me-nots so dissimilar—and a man’s heart, which was powerfully stirred and stung by this detestable defensive and offensive alliance with the fellow who, as was evident now, had sent the innocent child, whom Nathalie had rescued, to Fantaisie by way of a stalking-horse, behind which to conceal and mask himself, and the toils he had spun. As Siebenkæs now, with an outburst of anger, converted his judgment-seat into a stool of repentance for the Venner, whom he stigmatised as a canker-worm of feminine buds, a sparrowhawk, a housebreaker as regarded matrimonial treasures, and a crimp, trepanner, and soul-stealer of mated souls—vowing with the utmost warmth that it was Nathalie who had scornfully sent Rosa to the right-about, not Rosa who had rejected her: and as, of course, he interdicted her in the most peremptory terms from everything in the nature of dissemination or repetition of the Venner’s lying demi-romance, he turned his unfortunate wife into a sour, pungent, Erfurt radish, from head to foot.

Let us not fix our eyes too long, or too magisterially, upon this heat-rash or purulent fever of poor Lenette’s. For my part, I am going to leave her alone, but make an onslaught on her entire sex at once. I shall be doing so, I trust, when I assert that women never paint with more caustic colours (Swift’s black art is but weak water-colour in comparison) than when they have to portray the bodily unlovelinesses of other women. Further, that the prettiest of faces roughens and bristles into an ugly one, when it expresses anger with the feminine recruiting officer more than pity for the deserter. To speak accurately: Every woman is jealous of all other women, because—not, perhaps, her own husband (or lover, as the case may be), but—all other men are attracted by them, and are consequently not true to her. Therefore every woman takes the same vow concerning these vice-queens of this earth that Hannibal took concerning the Romans, and keeps it just as religiously. For which reason every woman has the power which Fordyce says all animal bodies possess—that of making all others cold; and, indeed, every woman must of necessity be an enemy and persecutor of a sex which consists entirely of rivals. And it is probable that many—for instance, nuns in their convents, and Moravians—call each other sisters, or sister-souls, with the view of giving some sort of expression to the nature of their sentiments for each other; since sisters are just the very people who quarrel the most. This is why Madame Bouillon’s parties quarrées consisted of three men and only one woman. It may be that it led St. Athanasius, Basilius, Scotus, and other teachers of the Church to entertain the belief that, with the single exception of the Virgin Mary, all women would rise as men at the Day of Judgment, in order that there may be no anger, or envy, or bickerings in heaven. There is but one queen who is beloved, nourished and cherished by many thousands of her own sex—the queen-bee of the workers (who are of the feminine gender, according to the most recent observations).

I shall close this chapter with a sort of preliminary word for Lenette. The foul fiend Rosa, by way of giving like for like (or rather worse for like) had emptied whole basketsful of the seed of evil-weeds into Lenette’s open heart, and unpacked compliments, to commence with, and news of her husband; then, afterwards, disparaging matter. She had believed him all the more readily because it was a clever, learned, and intellectual woman whom he was nigrifying, breaking with, and offering up as a sacrifice. What she most hated in Nathalie was her cleverness, her learning, and intellectualness; for it was the want of those that had brought herself to such shame. Like many women, she thought that the heads of Venuses were not “the true article” (as some connoisseurs think is the case with the Venus de Medici). What provoked her most of all was that Firmian should take another woman’s part more than his own wife’s—nay, at his own wife’s expense; and that Nathalie, in her conceit and pride, had got ready a sack to give such a nice, rich gentleman, instead of weaving a net to hold him with. She was also very much annoyed that her husband had admitted everything, as she considered his candour was only lordly indifference as to what she might feel on the subject.

What did Firmian do? He forgave. His two reasons for doing so were good ones—“Bayreuth” and “the grave.” The former had parted him from her so long; the latter was soon to part him from her for ever. A third reason might perhaps be this: Lenette, as regarded his love for Nathalie, was not so very utterly the reverse of right.

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CHAPTER XVIII.

AFTER SUMMER OF MARRIAGE—PREPARATIONS FOR DEATH.

Although Sunday was come, and the Vicar’s eyes were no more open than his congregation’s (because, like many of the clergy, he kept his physical eyes shut while preaching), my hero went to him to get his certificate of birth, because this was wanted for the Brandenburg Widows’ Fund.

Leibgeber had charged himself with the rest. Enough of the subject—for I don’t care to say more about it than I can help; because some years ago—long after all Siebenkæs’s pecuniary affairs had been settled up to the last farthing, and his debt to the Fund duly paid—the ‘Imperial Gazette’ publicly accused me of bringing discredit upon Integrity and Widows’ Funds by the last book of this story of mine, and considered it to be its (the ‘Gazette’s’) duty to take me pretty severely to task on the subject, according to its measure of ability. But are the advocate and I the same person? Does not everybody know that my proceedings as regards my married life in general, and the Prussian Widows’ Fund in particular, have been quite unlike those of Siebenkæs in every respect, and that to this very hour I have never departed this life, either in jest or in earnest, in all these years during which I have regularly paid a considerable annual contribution to the institution in question? Nay, do I not mean—(and I need have no hesitation in saying so)—to go on paying my yearly quotum for as many more years as I can—so that, when I die, the fund may have got more out of me than out of any other contributor?

These are my views on the subject; but I must do Siebenkæs the simple justice to state (to his credit) that the views by which he was actuated differed very, very little from my own. The only thing was, that, in Bayreuth, he had immolated his own truthful heart to the stormy urgency of his friend, Leibgeber, which had imbued and intoxicated him, in a moment of enthusiasm, with that cosmopolitan spirit of his which, in the boundless soul-transmigrations which, in the course of his never ending journeyings he passed through, had come to look upon life too much as a mere game at cards, and stage-play—as a Chicken-hazard, and Opera Buffa and Seria combined. And as, besides, he knew Leibgeber’s pecuniary circumstances, and his contempt for money (and his own into the bargain), he had undertaken a rôle which was anything but well suited to him, and as to which he had as little foreseen the torture of difficulty which it would cost him to act it, as the penitential sermon which was to be preached from Gotha concerning it.

At the same time it was a great piece of good luck that it was only Becker’s ‘Gazette’ that found out about Nathalie’s straw-widowhood, and not Lenette! Heavens, if the latter, with her silk “Forget-me” (for the “not” had altogether disappeared from it), in her hand, had got wind of Firmian’s adoptive marriage! I neither desire to judge the fair sex, nor to be judged by them. But at this point I would fain put to all my lady readers (and most particularly to one of them), two rather weighty and important questions.

“Would you not bend down from your judge’s seat, and hand my hero, if not a flower-wreath, an oak-wreath, at all events, for his good and kind behaviour to this feminine couple? Or (inasmuch as there are four female hands playing a duet sonata on his heart), a bouquet for his button-hole at the very least?” Dearest lady readers, you could not possibly have given a better verdict—although my surprise at it is not so great as my gratification. My second question nobody shall put to you but yourselves. Let each of you ask herself, “Suppose you had this fourth book of my story put into your hands, and were Lenette her very self, and consequently knew to a hair all about the whole business from beginning to end; what would you think of your husband Siebenkæs’ proceedings? What would you do?”

I will answer the question for you: “Weep, storm,[^[80]] chide, be very angry, not speak a word, break things, &c.” So terribly does selfishness falsify, corrupt and degrade the most delicate moral feelings, coercing them into the giving of two totally diverse verdicts upon one and the same case. Whenever I am wavering, or in any hesitation, concerning the worth of a character, or conclusion, I always find it helps me to come to a decision in a moment if I represent it to my mind’s-eye as coming wet from the press in a novel or biography. If it seems right then, it is certain to be right.

It was far better, and more becoming, for Graces to dwell hidden in the Satyrs of old, and in Socrates, than to reverse the process, so that Satyrs should dwell hidden within Graces. The Satyr who possessed Lenette butted about him in all directions with horns of very considerable sharpness. Her unreciprocated anger began to take the shape of sneering banter, for her husband’s present meekness and gentleness were so strikingly in contrast with his former Job’s-disputations, that she came to the conclusion that his heart was frozen altogether. In old times he had wanted to be served by mutes (like a Sultan), until his satirical fœtus, his book, should be brought to the light of day by help of the Roonhuysian lever and Cæsarian operation of the penknife; even as Zacharias was dumb until the child ceased to be so, and was born, and cried simultaneously with him. Formerly, their married life had been like most other people’s; for the majority of wedded pairs are like those twin-daughters,[^[81]] grown together as to their backs, but continually quarrelling (though they could never look each other in the face), and always trying to go towards opposite quarters of the globe, till the one succeeded in forcing the other in the direction in which she wanted to go. Now, on the contrary, Firmian allowed all Lenette’s discords to jar on as long as they pleased, without the slightest trace of irritation. A soft, peaceful light now fell upon all her angles, upon her works of supererogation in washing, on the water-sproutlings of her tongue; and the tint of the shadow which her heart (made of dark earth, like everybody else’s) cast, as a matter of course, was very much lost in the blue of heaven, as shadows cast in starlight are (according to Mariette) as blue as the sky overhead. And was there not always a grand, blue, starry sky spread out above his soul, in the shape of death? Every morning, every evening, he said to himself, “Why should I not go on always forgiving everything! We have such a very little while to be together now.” Every opportunity of forgiving did something to sweeten the bitterness of his voluntary farewell; and, as those who are going away, or going to die, are eager to pardon,—the deep, warm spring and fount of love in his heart was never chilled from morning till night. He was fain to pass along the brief, dark, alley of weeping willows, which led from his home to his empty grave (a full one, alas! as regarded his love), leaning only on beloved arms; and to rest on the mossy banks by its side, between his friend and his wife, with a beloved hand in each of his own. Thus it is that death not only beautifies our bodies when the soul has fled (as Lavater points out), but even in life the thought of death gives new beauty to our lineaments, and new strength to the heart, as rosemary both winds as a garland about the dead, and revives the fainting by its cordial essence.

“There is nothing surprising to me in this,” quoth the reader. “Everybody in Firmian’s position would have felt just as he did; at all events, I should.” But, dear reader, are we not all in Firmian’s position? Does the nearness or the remoteness of our everlasting good-bye make any difference? Ah! inasmuch as, here below, we are nothing but images, delusively firm, and red of colour, standing on the edges of our holes, into which (like the ancient princes) we totter, crumbling to dust, when the unknown hand gives the mouldering images a shake—why do we not say (like Firmian), “Why should I not forgive? We have so short a time to be together.” We should have four better fast-days, and prayer- and penitence-days, than we usually have if we had but four days of bitter, hopeless sickness to go through, one after the other, every year; because we should look down from our sick bed (that ice-region of life beside the crater) with loftier and sublimer glance upon the pleasure-gardens and pleasure-forests of life as they shrunk and shrivelled away; because there our wretched racecourses would seem shorter, and only the people larger, and we should there love nothing but hearts, magnify and detect no other faults but our own, and because we leave our sick beds with better resolutions than we take to them with. For the first day of convalescence of the body, after its winter of sickness, is the blossoming time of a lovelier soul, which issues forth as if transfigured from the earth’s cold crust into a mild warm Eden; longing to press all things to her breast (feeble yet, and short of breath)—mankind, and flowers, and spring breezes, and every other bosom which has sighed for her upon her bed of pain. Like all the newly risen from death, she longs to love all things throughout an eternity; and the whole heart is a warm and dewy spring-time, rich in buds, beneath a youthful sun.

How Firmian would have loved his Lenette, had she not constrained him to be always pardoning, instead of petting and caressing her! Ah! she would have rendered his approaching death a terribly difficult task for him if she had been like what she was in their honeymoon days!

But their byegone Paradise was now yielding a harvest of ripe Grains of Paradise (the old name for peppercorns). Lenette piled fuel on the fire of her hell’s ante-chamber of jealousy, brewing there, for him, the draught of the coming heaven of Vaduz. A jealous woman can be cured by no kind of speech or treatment; she is like the kettledrums, which are the most difficult of all instruments to tune, and the quickest to get out of tune when tuned. A loving, tender look was, to Lenette, a blister; for he had looked at Nathalie with one like it. If he seemed happy and glad, it was evident he was thinking of the past. If he looked unhappy and sad, he was thinking of the past too, but with longing. He had to consider his face in the light of an open warrant of caption, or billposter and placard, of the thoughts which were behind it. In short, her husband merely served her as fiddle rosin to roughen her horse-hair with, in order to bow her viole d’amour with it from morning till night. He dare not allow himself more than an occasional word about Bayreuth, scarce so much as the name of it; for if he did, she knew whom he was thinking of. Nay, he could not say anything at all strong in disparagement of Kuhschnappel without raising a suspicion that he was comparing it with Bayreuth, and thinking the latter much the better place (for reasons well known to her). Wherefore (and whether in earnest, or from consideration for her, I really do not know) he restricted his laudations of Bayreuth merely to the buildings there, not venturing to extend them to their inhabitants.

There was only one object of praise concerning the praising, whereof he ignored every idea of difficulty and miscomprehension, and this was Leibgeber, his friend. But—thanks to Rosa’s calumnies, and the fact of his having aided and abetted in affairs at Fantaisie—it so chanced that Leibgeber had come to be more unendurable by her now than he had been in the old days, by reason of his indecorous conduct, and his great dog. She knew, moreover, that Stiefel had several times expressed grave disapproval of him and his doings.

“My dear Henry will be here very soon now, Lenette,” said Firmian.

“And that horrible brute with him, I suppose, of course?” she asked.

“I do think,” he answered, “you might like my friend a little better than you do; if not because he is so very like myself, at any rate, on account of the faithfulness of his friendship. If you did, you wouldn’t be so terribly set against his dog; you used not to mind mine when I had one. He must have some faithful creature to follow him about on his everlasting journeys; through thick and thin, through good times and bad, as Saufinder does. And he looks upon me as just such another faithful creature, and is every bit as fond of me. But for that matter, the whole faithful trio of us are not likely to trouble Kuhschnappel very long.”

Meanwhile, no amount of love enabled him to gain his suit for love. It here strikes me that this was only a most natural matter, and that the recent warm proximity of the Schulrath had raised Lenette’s temperature (of love) to such a point that her husband’s felt like a blast of cold wind by comparison. The jealousy of hatred proceeds just like the jealousy of love. There is but one sign for the cypher of nothing and the circle of infinity.

The time had arrived when Siebenkæs had to pave the way, and give a colour to, his sham death, by a feigned sickness of some sort; but this voluntary bending over the grave, and drooping towards it, gave his conscience a pretext for trying to win back Lenette’s embittered heart. Thus it is that deceived, and deceiving, man always magnifies and elevates his false shows, his cheateries, and deceptions either into less ones than they really are, or into beneficently intended ones.

The Greek and Roman lawgivers invented dreams and prophecies, which contained the ground-plans and elevations of their projects, as well as the building-conditions, and building-materials of them. For instance, Alcibiades lied forth a prophecy of the conquest of Sicily. Firmian imitated this process, with alterations suitable to the circumstances of his case. He often said, in Stiefel’s presence (for Stiefel took a deep and tender interest in everything, and, consequently, so did she), that he should soon be going away for ever—that he should soon be playing in a game at hide-and-seek, and hide himself so effectually that no friendly eye should be able to find him again—that he would soon slip behind the bed-curtain of the coffin-pall, and vanish. He told them a dream (which, perhaps, was no invention). He said, “The Schulrath and Lenette were looking at a room in which a scythe was moving of its own accord;[^[82]] then, in a while, Firmian’s clothes were walking about in the room, empty, without any body in them. ‘He must have other clothes on,’ they both said. Then all at once the churchyard passed along the street, with a fresh grave in it, no grass on it as yet. But a voice cried, ‘Seek him not there; it is over and past now.’ And a second (softer) voice cried, Rest—rest—thou art worn and weary. And a third said, ‘Weep not, if ye love him.’ But a fourth cried out, in terrible tones, ‘Jest—jest—all human life and death.’” Firmian was the first to shed tears; his friend was the next, and his angry spouse wept, with the latter.

But now he looked with eager longing for the coming of Leibgeber, whose hand would lead him quicker and more pleasantly through the dark foreground, and the hot, reeking, sultry, breathless, forehell of his artificial death. For he himself was now too feeble and too tender to pass through them alone.

And upon one particular, unusually lovely, August evening he was so, more than ever before. There played and rested on his face that glorified and celestial bliss of self-devotion—that tearless depth of emotion and smiling gentleness, which sometimes come to us when pain and sorrow are—weary for the time, rather than over and past—something like the blue sky when the brightness of the rainbow falls in light athwart its radiant beauty. He resolved to bid good-bye, in solitude, that day to all the beautiful country which lay around the town.

The face of Nature was veiled (but not for his eyes, for his soul only), in a thin, soft mist, which went hovering before the breeze in ever-changing wreaths, like the tender vapouriness—not amounting to a shrouding—which Berghem’s and Wouvermanns’ pencils have cast upon their landscapes. As though to say farewell, he went and touched, and gazed upon, every leafy tree beneath whose branches he had been wont to read—each little darkling brooklet, purling on its way beneath its thickets of forest-roots, laved bare of earth by its ripples—each rocky crag, all green and sweet of scent with moss and flowers—each stair-way of rising hillocks which, in the days gone by, he had climbed to see the sun set (or gone down to watch his risings) many times instead of once—and every spot where wide creation had brought tears of rapture from his happy heart. But everywhere—amid the long harvest corn-ears, amid Creation’s oft-repeated tale in Nature’s brooding-oven with all its swarming life, in the seed-nursery of the ripe and endless garden—a hollow, broken voice cried out, in long-drawn tones which mingled with, and sounded clear above, the bright, rejoicing, trumpet-clang of Nature’s ‘Alexander’s Feast,’ “What are these dead men’s bones that move about amid this life of mine, defiling all my blossoms?” And to him it seemed as if, from out the glory of the red West sky, a something sang to him, “Wandering skeleton! with strings of nerves clasped in thy bony hand, thou playest not on thyself. The breath of endless life is breathing on the Æolian harp, which answers back in music, and thou art played upon.” But soon this mournful error fell away from him, and he thought thus: “I am both playing and answering back in music. I both think and am thought. It is not the green bark that holds my Dryad, my spiritus rector (the soul). The latter holds the former. The life of the body depends as intimately on the life of the soul, as that of the latter on that of the former. Life and force are at work, with power, everywhere. The grave hillock and the mouldering body are each a world of powers at work. We change our stage, but do not retire from it.”

When he got home, he found the following letter from Leibgeber for him:—

“I am on my way; set out on yours.—L.”

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CHAPTER XIX.

THE APPARITION—HOMECOMING OF THE STORMS IN AUGUST, OR THE LAST QUARREL—THE RAIMENT OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL.

One night, at about eleven o’clock, a tremendous blow was heard to strike the roof-tree, as if two or three hundredweights of Alps had come down upon it. Lenette went upstairs with Sophia to see whether it was the devil, or only a cat. They came back with wintry faces, the colour of flour, and as long as one’s arm; and Sophia cried out, “Oh! it’s the Poor’s Advocate (may the Lord have a care of him!) he’s lying up yonder on the camp-bed, like a corpse.” The live Poor’s Advocate, to whom this tale was being told, was sitting in his room. He said it could not be true, or he would have heard the noise as well as the others. From this deafness of his, all the women at once inferred what the occurrence really portended—to wit, his death. The cobbler Fecht (who, by right of royal succession, was night-watchman regnant that night), glad of an opportunity of showing the pluck that was in him, armed himself with the watchman’s spear-staff (his entire artillery-park), but, when nobody was looking, stuck a black leather hymn-book in his pocket—by way of a species of saintly host—in case it should turn out that it was the devil that was upstairs. On his way up he repeated a good many fragments of the Evening Service, which was more than could, perhaps, have been required of him on that evening when, as Archon of the Watch, his calling of the hours was, in fact, a species of expanded Evening Prayer, distributed in small modicums about the streets. He was marching bravely up to the camp-bed, when, alas! he too saw the white powdery face before him, and, behind the bed, a hell-hound with eyes of fire, watching the corpse in a grim and ferocious fashion. He stood still instantaneously, as if petrified—like a watchman carved out of alabaster, hard boiled (so to speak), in a perspiration of terror, with his weapon held out before him. He foresaw, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the moment he turned his back to go flying down the stairs, the thing would clasp its arms about him from behind, saddle him, and ride him down. By the greatest good luck, a voice from downstairs here fell into his heart like a cordial or courage-water, and he heaved up his boar-spear with the view of striking the thing dead, or, at all events, gauging the cubic contents of it. But when, at this juncture, the snowy-looking thing began to rise slowly up, as if growing—his head began to feel as if he had on a bonnet of pitch, and somebody were screwing this cap, and the hair inside it, tighter and tighter every moment; and he could not keep hold of his eel-spear because the top of it felt as heavy as if his biggest journeyman was hanging to it. So he let his sticking-iron go, and flew bravely from the topmost, three-ledger-lined octave of the stair, like a flash of lightning, down to the double-bass key or step.

When he got down, he swore, in presence of the master of the house and all the lodgers assembled, that he was going to do his watchman’s duty without his halberd, for the ghost had got hold of that; and in fact, he quivered like an aspen-leaf and his blood ran cold in his veins, every time his eye so much as rested for a moment on the Advocate’s face. Firmian was the only one of the company who had the courage to go upstairs for the weapon. When he got upstairs he found what he had expected to find, namely, his friend Leibgeber, who had whitened himself with the powder out of an old wig by way of gradually paving the way and preparing people’s minds for Siebenkæs’s artificial death. They quietly embraced, and Henry said he would come upstairs, in an orthodox fashion, next day.

When Firmian returned to his room, he said there was nothing upstairs but an old wig; here was the swift-footed spearman’s spear, and he counted here before him two timid hares of the female sex and one of the male. But the entire conventicle knew as well as possible what all this meant. Nobody, with as many brains as a turnip in his head, would give a halfpenny for Siebenkæs’ life; and these ghost-seers thanked Heaven most devoutly that they were thus frightened to death, since it was a proof that their own lives were in no immediate danger. Lenette could not bring herself to sit up in bed all night, for fear she should see her husband’s likeness.

When morning came, Henry mounted the stair (with his dog), in dusty boots. Siebenkæs felt as though his hat and his pockets must be full of flowers from the Bayreuth Eden; he was like a garden statue from the lost garden. To Lenette, just for this very reason, this palm-tree from Firmian’s East India possessions at Bayreuth (we shall say nothing of Saufinder), was nothing but a prickly holly-bush, and never less than now could she take any pleasure in such a gooseberry-bush, such a thistle-head—beautiful as if fresh from Hamilton’s pencil.[^[83]] I must admit, however (and I say it right out, without going about the bush), that his affection for Firmian made his mode of treating Lenette (who was in the wrong and in the right in about equal proportions) a little too reserved and cool. We never hate a woman so heartily as when she is torturing somebody who is very dear to us; just as, on the other hand, a woman is so grim to nobody as to the tormentor of her pet female friend.

The scene which I have now got to describe in a minute or two makes me feel, in the keenest degree, sensible of the depth of the chasm which lies between the novel-writer (who can skip annoying matters, and sugar up anything he wishes for himself, his hero, or his readers) and the mere biographer, or writer of actual history, like myself, who has to dish up everything in a strictly historical form, without asking whether it has got to be sugared or salted. If I formerly, then, excised and omitted the scene in question altogether, I was perhaps to blame: but there was nothing surprising in my doing so, seeing that in these days I preferred delighting my readers to instructing them, and thought more about pretty colouring than truthful drawing.

Leibgeber (and all belonging to him) had for some time been wholly unendurable in Lenette’s eyes, chiefly for this reason (amongst others) that he, a man without anything in the shape of an official title or appointment of any sort, should be on such very familiar and intimate terms with her husband—a man who had held the post of “Poor’s Advocate” of Kuhschnappel for a considerable time. Also that, like her said husband (by him misled and perverted), he went about without a pigtail, so that people pointed at the pair of them, and cried, “Ey! look at that nice couple!” or “Par nobile fratrum.” These sayings, and worse besides, Lenette could draw from the most authentic of all sources of history. Of course, it is true that, now-a-days, it requires about as much courage to put on a tail as it then did to take it off. A canon of a cathedral does not, now-a-days (as he did in bygone times), find it incumbent on him to make himself a pigtail, and pleasant society by help of it; consequently he has not got to cast it twice a year (as peacocks do their tails) that he may legally earn his salary of two thousand florins by appearing in the choir at vespers with close-cropped hair; the latter he wears at the card-table now, us well as in the pulpit. In the few countries where the pigtail still obtains, it is more in the nature of a duty-pendulum and state-perpendicular than anything else; and long hair (which formed part of the royal insignia of the Frank kings) is a badge of servitude in the case of soldiers, so long as it is worn tied up with a pigtail-ribbon, and not flying unbound and loose. The Frieslanders were long in the habit of taking hold of the pigtail when swearing an oath—calling this “the Bœdel Oath;” and to this day in many countries the military or standard oath presupposes the existence of a queue. And as among the ancient Germans a pigtail carried on a pole represented a parish, of course a company or regiment (of which each soldier has his own tail at the back of his head) must be considered to represent a company-queue of patriotic union and of German nationality.

Lenette now made little secret of it to her husband (and Stiefel stood by her in the background), that she was very little pleased, on the whole, with Leibgeber and his on-goings. “My dear poor father” (she said, in Leibgeber’s presence), “was copyist to the Council, but he was always just like other people in his dress, and everything else.”

“Well, dear!” Siebenkæs answered, “as he was a copyist, of course he had always to be copying, with pens, or coats, as the case might be. But my father loaded guns for princes, and did not trouble his head about what else might happen or not happen.” Ere this, when opportunity had offered, she had held up and measured the copying clerk as against the gun-charger, distantly suggesting, as it were, that Siebenkæs had not had anything like so great and distinguished a father as she had, and, as a consequence, had not received the sort of superior education which teaches people manners, and how they ought to behave. This preposterous and ludicrous looking down upon his genealogical tree so annoyed him always that he often laughed at himself. At the same time, the little by-blow at Leibgeber did not surprise him so much as her remarkable bodily repugnance and antipathy to him. Nothing would induce her to shake hands with him: “And I’m sure,” she said, “if he were ever to kiss me, it would be my death.” With all his laborious urgency and questions as to the reason of this, he could get no answer out of her but that she “would tell him after Leibgeber was gone.” Unfortunately, by that time he would be gone himself, too, and in his coffin, i. e. on the road to Vaduz.

And even this extraordinary obstinacy (as of an unyielding bonnet-block) he could endure at a time when one of his eyes warmed itself at his friend, while the other cooled itself at his grave.

At last something was superadded; and as I am sure that nobody can narrate it more faithfully than I, I beg that I may be believed. It was in the evening, before Leibgeber went back to his hotel (the Lizard, if I remember), and the deep black, half-orb of a thunder-cloud had gathered silently in the West, shrouding the sun, and mounting higher, and hanging more and more threateningly over the expectant world. The two friends were talking of what a glorious thing a thunderstorm was, and of the espousals of heaven and earth—the highest with the lowest—of the “descent of heaven to earth” (as Leibgeber put it); and Siebenkæs remarked how, properly speaking, it was only one’s “Fantasy” which pictured the storm, and “Fantasy” only which brought about the union of the highest and the lowest. I wish he had followed the advice of Campe and Kolbe, and used the home-grown word “Fancy” (or “Imagination”), instead of the foreign word “Fantasy;” for that word-purist Lenette pricked up her ears as soon as ever it passed his lips. She who had nothing in her breast but jealousy, and nothing in her head but the “Fantaisie” (at Bayreuth), put down to the score of the latter every word that the two men were saying in eulogy of “Fantasy” in man; for instance, how it (namely, “the Markgrave’s Fantaisie,” thought Lenette) blessed us through the beauty of its sublime creations—how, but for the enjoyment of its lovelinesses, a Kuhschnappel could not be borne with for a moment (of course, because he thinks of that Nathalie of his, thought she); how it clothes and adorns the bare spots of life with its beautiful flowers “two or three silk forget-me-nots,” said Lenette to herself; and how it (the Bayreuth Fantaisie) gilds, not only the pills of life, but also the nuts, nay, the Paris apples of beauty themselves.

Heavens! what double meanings in every corner, and on every side! For how triumphantly Siebenkæs could have refuted the error of confounding Fantasy with Fantaisie, if he had merely shown how little of the poetic Fantasy there was in the Fantaisie at Bayreuth, and how (in the latter) French “taste” had trimmed, behung, and begarlanded the lovely, romantic hills and valleys of Nature’s inventing with rhetoric edifices of flowers, periods, and antithesis; and that what Leibgeber said about Fantasy’s gilding the Paris apples of life, applied in quite another sense to the Bayreuth Fantaisie, because there the French Christmas silver-foil would have to be scraped off from Nature’s apples before they could be bitten.

Scarce was Leibgeber gone out from the house, and off into the storm (which, according to his custom, he enjoyed in the open air), when Lenette’s storm broke, ere the atmospherical one did. “There, you see, I heard with my very own ears,” she said, “how that Unbeliever and Kill-joy there goes about coupling and marrying you in the Fantaisie at Bayreuth; and this is the fellow an honest woman is expected to shake hands with, or touch with the tip of one of her fingers.” She let a few more peals of thunder roll—but it is my duty to the poor woman (turned into a fermenting vat by the addition to her of such a quantity of mash) not to give too accurate a record of all her frothings. Meantime, all the acid matter in her husband began to effervesce in its turn. To find fault with his friend to his face, no matter what misunderstanding this might arise from (and he did not trouble himself to ask what the misunderstanding was, inasmuch as none could be any excuse)—was, in his eyes, a sin against the Holy Ghost of his friendship. Accordingly, he thundered most roundly in reply. It is some excuse for the husband, and for the wife, too, for that matter, that the storm in the air fanned the fuel in his head into a brighter blaze, so that he strode up and down the room like a man demented, and instantly, and on the spot, blew to the four winds of heaven his resolve not to be put out with anything Lenette might do till after he was dead; for he would not, and could not, suffer that “his last friend in life and death should be wrongfully accused by the inheritress of his name, either in his sayings or in his doings.” It will give some idea of the violence of his volcanic eruptions (all of which, for his sake, I mean to pass by in silence), if I say that, vieing in loudness of thundering with the sky itself, he shouted—

“Such a man as he!” and with the words, “you are a female head, too, curse you!” administered a ringing box on the ear to a bonnet-block, which had a grand hat, with feathers upon it. As this head was Lenette’s favourite Sultana of all the blocks—one which she often fondled—nothing was to be expected but an outbreak as violent as if he had given the box to her very self, just as Siebenkæs stormed at the insult to his friend. Nothing came, however, but a gentle shower of bitter tears. “Oh! good heavens! don’t you hear what a terrible storm?” was all she said. “Thunder here, thunder there!” cried Siebenkæs (who, once set rolling down from the lofty peak where he had been reposing, went on, according to both the moral and the physical laws of falling bodies, increasing in velocity and momentum, until he reached the bottom). “I wish the lightning would shatter all the rag-tag and bob-tail in Kuhschnappel that dare to say a syllable against my Henry.”

As the storm grew fiercer she spoke more and more gently, saying, “Ah! gracious, what a peal! Oh, please repent! Suppose it were to strike you in your sin?” “My Henry is out in it,” he said. “Oh that the lightning would strike us both dead, him and me, with the same flash! I should be spared all this miserable business of dying, and we should always be together then.”

His wife had never seen him so angry, or so contemptuous of life and religion, and consequently, could only expect the lightning to fall on the Merbitzer’s house, and strike both him and her dead, by way of an “example.”

And at this moment, a flash of such brilliance illumined the heavens, and such a shattering peal of thunder followed close upon it, that, stretching out her hand to him, she said, “I will do anything and everything you wish me to do; only, for Heaven’s sake, be a God-fearing man again! I will even give Leibgeber my hand; yes, and a kiss too, if I must—no matter whether he has washed his face after the dog’s licking it, or not—and I shall neither listen, nor mind, when you say what a delightful, beautiful place the silvery, flowery Bayreuth Fantaisie is.”

Heavens! how this lightning-flash illumined the depths of two of Lenette’s labyrinths for him, letting him see her innocent confounding of Fantasy and Fantaisie (already noticed), and his own confounding of her strong, personal, idiosyncratic repugnance to (what she considered) uncleanness, with real dislike. The latter was on this wise. Inasmuch as her feminine proclivity for excessive cleanness and beautifying and polishing were more akin to the feline race than to the canine (which cares little about either, or about the feline race, for that matter), Leibgeber’s hand, after Saufinder’s tongue had touched it, was to her as a thumbscrew, and Esau’s hand all Chiragra. Her sense of cleanliness shrunk from touching it; and as for Henry’s lips! though ten days had elapsed since the dog had jumped up to them with his, they would have been considered the most fearful bugbears, and scarecrows, which abhorrence could set up for her. Even time itself was no lipsalve in her eyes.[^[84]]

This time, however, the discovery of the error did not bring about peace (as it used to do in former times), but only a renewal of the decree of separation. Tears came to his eyes, indeed, and he gave her his hand, saying, “Forgive me! It is the last time! As the proverb says, ‘The storms come home in August.’” But he could neither offer nor receive a kiss of reconciliation. This, his latest falling away from his warm resolves to be patient, irrevocably proclaimed how wide their inner separation had become. What is the use of seeing one’s errors, when the causes of them are still in force? What is the good of clipping a ripple or two away from the ocean, when there are still clouds and billows? The crime against the bonnet-block was what rankled most in his breast; it became a Gorgon’s head to him, continually threatening and avenging.

He sought his friend with a renewal of affection, for he had suffered for him; and with new eagerness, that he might arrange the place for his death with him.

“Of what dangerous malady do you think you would prefer to give up the ghost,” said Henry, commencing the medical consultation. “Would inflammation of the lungs be to your taste? or inflammation of the bowels, or of the uvula; or would phrenitis be more in your line, or bronchitis; or would you prefer a quinsy, a colic, the devil and his grandmother? We have got all the requisite miasmata and materia epidemica ready to our hands; and when we throw in the month of August—harvest-month of reapers and doctors—by way of poison-powder, you certainly never can get over it all.” Firmian answered: “You are a sort of master-beggar with all kinds of ailments for sale;[^[85]] blindness, palsy, and the rest. But for my part, I am for apoplexy, that volti subito, that extra post of death. I have had more than my share of legal prolixities, verbosities, and delays of all sorts.” “Well,” said Leibgeber, “apoplexy probably is the summarissimum of death. At the same time, we must be guided by the best pathological works, and make up our minds for three attacks of it. We can’t go by Nature here, we must be guided by the laws of medicine; and by them, death has to forward a set of three bills of exchange before one of them is accepted and honoured in the next world. He knocks three times with his auctioneer’s hammer. I know too well, the doctors are not the men to listen to reason on this point; you will have to make up your mind to the three apoplectic strokes.” “But what the deuce!” said Siebenkæs, with comic warmth, “If apoplexy gives me two pretty powerful strokes, what more can a doctor desire? The only thing is, I can’t be attacked for the next three or four days, because I must wait for a cheaper coffin-builder.” The right of coffin-building (it should perhaps be explained) goes its round in a migratory manner among the carpenters, and one has got to pay these shipwrights of our last ark whatever they demand, because the property we leave behind us at death has to be given over as plunder by our executors and administrators, to the undertaker, (that excise officer of death) like the palace of a dead doge or pope.

“There may be another advantage in this short reprieve, too,” said Leibgeber. “I have an old collection of family sermons here, which I bought for somewhere about half the amount of a police-court fine. I do not know anywhere else but in this work where such impressive sermons are delivered—it is more especially in the binding that they are preached. The binding is wood, you perceive, and there is a live preacher in there, preaching as finely as any preacher that can be found in a pulpit.” This preacher in the wooden boards of the old book in question, was the beetle which goes by the name of the death-watch, wood-borer, or Ptinus pertinax, because when he is touched he keeps up the appearance of a sham death, torture him as you will—and because the little blows he strikes, which are nothing but knocks at his sweetheart’s door, are supposed to be Death’s knocks at ours. For which reason any piece of furniture in which he was wont to knock used to be thought a valuable article of commerce, or heirloom.

Leibgeber added that, as there was nothing he so detested as a man who tried to outwit God and the Devil (from fear of death) by a sudden repentance, he was fond of hiding this sermon-book amongst the furniture of a hell-fearing individual of this description, so as to give him a good sound terrifying with the beetle’s funeral sermons (although the insect, for his part, was, in fact, thinking solely of mundane matters during his preaching—like many other preachers). “So, could I not put the sermon-book, with its funeral preacher, in amongst your books, that your wife might hear him, and think of death—of yours, that is to say—and so get more used to the idea of it?”

“No, no,” said Firmian, “she shall not suffer so much for me before her time. She has suffered quite enough already.”

“Just as you please,” said Henry; “but my beetle and you would have gone together capitally. You are going to simulate death, just as the Ptinus pertinax does.”

For the rest, he was delighted that everything had worked together so well, and that it was just a year since he had stamped upon Blaise’s glass periwig, and insulted, or blackguarded, him. Because (as we have seen) libels of this sort are not actionable after the lapse of a year, except libels by a critic—which (like the Rector in Ragusa) only reign for a month—that is to say, the time during which the journal in which they appear circulates in the reading society. And a book—which may be said to hold the rank of dictator in the realm of letters—cannot reign, with all its influence, more than a Roman dictator, namely, six months—that is to say, from its birth-fair to its death-fair—and, like Grub Street scribblers, it dies either in spring or in autumn.

They went back into a new-dressed, freshly-arranged room. Lenette did what she could to paint the cracks of her housekeeping over with flowers (like the flaws in porcelain), and always opened pieces of music in which that particular string (of an article of furniture), which chanced to be broken, did not require to be touched. Firmian, on this occasion, sacrificed a greater number of the good and entertaining ideas (which struck him) than usual to her efforts to place Spanish screens between the company and the steppes and fallow-fields of her poverty; and more than Henry did even then. All women—even those without brains—are the sharpest and most delicately-observant of augurs and clairvoyante prophetesses concerning matters which closely concern themselves. Lenette was an instance. Stiefel was there in the evening—a good deal of argument was going on, and Stiefel openly declared that he (with Salvian and other able theologians) was of opinion that the children of Israel (whose garments never wore into the minutest hole during all the forty years they passed in the wilderness) always continued of exactly the same size (so as always to fit their clothes exactly) with the exception of children, in whose cases the clothes, which had been cut to fit them out of the wardrobes of the dead, grew with their bodies in length and breadth. “In this way,” he added, “all the difficulties of the great miracle are got over easily, by means of lesser accessory-miracles.”

Leibgeber answered (with sparkling eyes), “I knew that while I was yet in my mother’s womb. There was not a hole in all the hosts of Israel, except those which they brought with them out of Egypt—and these never got any bigger. Even suppose anybody made a hole in his cheek, or in his coat, when he was mourning—these holes stitched themselves together in a trice, of their own accord. What a shameful and deplorable thing it is, though, that the host of Israel should have been the first, and the last, army whose uniform was a sort of delightful over-body, which grew with the soul it enveloped—and where the frock-coat developed into an electoral mantle, and from a Microvestis to a Macrovestis! I see that eating was cloth manufacturing (in the wilderness), manna was English wool, and the stomach the loom. An Israelite who fed himself up to the proper pitch was, by so doing, yielding the produce of the land, and of the wilderness. If I had been in the recruiting-service in those days, I should simply have hung the recruit’s jackets on to the recruit’s measure. But how go matters in our wilderness here—which leads to Egypt, not to the promised land? In our regiments, the privates grow every year, but the coats do not. Nay, the uniforms are made for dry seasons only, and for lean men—in wet years the clothes contract like hygrometers, and perspiration steals more cloth than the tailor does, or even the contractor. A commanding officer who should expect his uniforms to stretch—who should reckon upon a Periphrasis of them—going by the example, not only of the Israelites, but likewise of the clothes-moths, and the snails (who do not expand to suit their shells, but whose shells expand to suit them)—this commanding officer, I say, would go out of his mind—for his men would be fighting in the condition of the athletes of old—and the men themselves would be in a nice frame of mind on the subject.”

This innocuous sermon (wholly addressed to the account of Stiefel’s piece of exegetic absurdity) Lenette supposed was directed against her wardrobe. She was like the Germans in general, who search after some special satiric kernel hidden in every rocket and firework serpent of humour. Wherefore Siebenkæs begged him to pardon this poor wife of his (over whose heart so many a sharp sorrow besides was strewn) the inevitable and invincible ignorance of her exegesis—or rather, to spare her the knowledge of it altogether.

At length a Kuhschnappel bath-keeper departed this life, and fell under the plane of the costly carpenter. “I have not a minute to waste over my apoplexy now,” said Firmian, in Latin; “who is to be my warrant that nobody shall die before I do, and so the cheap carpenter slip through my fingers?” So it was arranged that he should be taken ill the following evening.

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CHAPTER XX.

APOPLEXY—THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF HEALTH—THE NOTARY-PUBLIC—THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT—THE KNIGHT’S MOVE—REVEL, THE MORNING PREACHER—THE SECOND APOPLECTIC ATTACK.

In the evening Henry drew up the curtain upon this tragedy (full of comic gravedigger business), and discovered Firmian lying on his bed speechless, with apoplectic head, and all his right side paralysed. The only mode in which the patient could bring himself to endure the torture of the deception, and of the pain he was causing Lenette, was by making a mental vow to send her the half of his yearly income as inspector at Vaduz, anonymously, and by remembering that by his death she would obtain happiness, freedom, and her lover. The occupants of the house formed a circle about the apoplectic patient, but Leibgeber drove them out of the room, saying, “the sufferer must have quietness and rest.” It delighted him beyond expression to be able to go on uttering humourous lies without cessation. He assumed the office of Imperial Hereditary Doorkeeper, and shut the door in the doctor’s face (whom people insisted upon prescribing). “I am going to prescribe a little prescription for the patient myself,” he said, “but, little as it is, it will restore his speech for a time. These cursed death-rivers, doctors’ potions, Mr. Schulrath,” (for that gentleman had been fetched immediately) “are like those rivers which demand a dead body every year.” So he wrote a recipe for a simple sedative powder, as follows, reading aloud as he wrote;—

Rx Conch: Citratæ Sirup: j.
Nitri Crystallisatæ gr. x.
D.S. “The Sedative Powder.”

“But above all things,” he added, in the most imperative tones, “we must place the patient’s feet in warm water.”

However, everybody in the house knew well enough that nothing would be of the slightest avail, as his death had been but too unmistakably foretold by the floury face; and Fecht felt a kind of sympathising satisfaction that he had hit the mark.

Scarcely had the sick man swallowed the powder, than, to the astonishment of the Death-Assurance Association in his bedroom, he found himself able to speak, intelligibly, if not very loud. The domestic Vehmgericht was not, perhaps, altogether pleased with this. But our good Henry had a pretext now for resuming his cheerful mien. He comforted Lenette by reminding her that “here below pain was but an initiation ceremony to something higher—the box-on-the-ear, or sword-accolade whereby a man is dubbed a knight.”

The patient had a very fair night after his sedative powder, and began to have some slight hopes of himself. Henry would not allow Lenette (whose eyes were heavy with tears and sleep) to sit up by his bed during the night. He said he would prefer to be at hand himself, in case there should be any danger; of which, however, there was no great risk, as they made their agreement together (doing so in Latin, like princes) that Death, the fifth act of this tragic interlude, (only one of the scenes of the tragedy of Life,) should take place on the evening of the following day. “Even till to-morrow,” said Firmian, “is too long to wait. I am so unspeakably grieved for my poor Lenette’s sorrow. Like David, alas! I have to make a melancholy choice between famine, war, and pestilence, and have no way out of it but his. You, dear brother, are my Cain, and send me on my journey, and believe in the world to which you despatch me not a bit more than he did.[^[86]] Before you prescribed the sedative power which obliged me to talk, I was really wishing, in my silent gloom, that the jest might become earnest. For I must one day pass through that underground portal which opens into the fortress of futurity, in which we shall be safe. Ah! it is not the dying that is painful, it is the parting—I mean from those we love.” Henry said, in reply, “Nature holds a broad Achilles-shield before us to protect us from that final bayonet-thrust of life. On our death-beds we grow cold morally before we do so physically, a strange courtier-like indifference towards all we are leaving creeps frostily through the dying nerves. Sapient spectators say, ‘See, nobody but a Christian can die with such resignation and trust.’ Never mind, dear Firmian; the two or three painful burning minutes which you have to bear till to-morrow arrives are a capital warm bath of Aix water for the sick spirit. It has an infernal smell of rotten eggs now, no doubt, but that will go away completely as the bath grows cool.”

Next day Henry eulogised him as follows. “As Cato the younger slept quietly the night before his death, (history heard him snore,) so you appear to have afforded these debilitated, unnerved, and degenerate days a fresh example of a similar magnanimity. If I were your Plutarch I should record the circumstance.”

“In sober seriousness, though,” answered Firmian, “I should be rather pleased if, several years hence, when Death has presented his second of exchange, some literary West, the historical painter, should honour this odd first death of mine by describing it for the press.” This, we see a biographical West has now actually done, but I beg to be permitted to confess, without hesitation, that it has afforded me sincere gratification to find among the documents this death-bed speech and wish, which I am so completely carrying out. Leibgeber answered, “The Jesuits in Löwen once published a little book in which the terrible end of Luther was minutely described in Latin. Old Luther got hold of the book and translated it, as he did the Bible, merely adding at the end, ‘I, Dr. M. Luther, have read and translated this narrative myself.’ If I were you, when I translated my death into English, I should write that at the end of it too.” Do please write it, dear Siebenkæs, as you are still in life—but translate me, at all events.

Morning brings refreshing to the laid corn of humanity, whether it be laid upon the hard bed of sickness, or on the softer mattress of ordinary health; its breezes lift the bowed heads of both flowers and men: but our sick man remained prostrate. Things seemed distinctly worse with him—he could not disguise from himself that he was losing ground; at all events he resolved to “set his house in order.” This first quarter of the hour of death which the death bell tolled, smote like a sharp and heavy bell-hammer upon Lenette’s heart, whence the warm stream of the old love burst forth in bitter tears. Firmian could not bear the sight of this disconsolate weeping; he stretched his arms beseechingly, and the suffering creature laid herself between them in gentle obedience, on to his breast, their tears, their sighs, and their hearts mingled in the warmest affection, and thus they rested in happiness (though only upon wounds) at this brief distance from the boundary-hill of parting.

For this poor soul’s sake, then, he grew visibly better. Another improvement in his condition was necessary, moreover, to account for the happy frame of mind in which he executed his last will and testament. Leibgeber expressed satisfaction that the patient was able to take some dinner on the table-cloth of the bed-quilt, and swallow the contents of a sick man’s soup-dish about the size of a pond. “The good spirits,” said Leibgeber to Peltzstiefel, “which our invalid is beginning to exhibit again, give me very considerable hopes indeed; though it was evidently only to please his wife that he took the soup.”

Nobody was fonder of lying, or lied oftener, out of satire or humour, than Leibgeber and no one more utterly detested serious untruthfulness than he. He could tell a thousand lies in fun, but not two in a case of serious necessity. For the former he had at his finger’s end every possible deceptive trick of face and language; for the latter not one.

In the forenoon the Schulrath and Merbitzer, the landlord, were summoned to the bedside. “Gentlemen,” began the sick man, “I am thinking of having my last will this afternoon—of declaring, at Nature’s place of execution, the three things which I desire—as the condemned in Athens were allowed to do; but what I wish to do at the present moment is to open one of my testaments before I make my second, or (to speak more accurately) the codicil of my first. I wish my friend Leibgeber to pack up, and keep possession of, all my scribblings as soon as I myself am stuck into my last addressed envelope. Further (and in this I follow the precedent of the Danish Kings, the old Dukes of Austria, and the noble Spaniards—of whom the first were interred in their armour, the second in lion’s skins, the third in miserable Capuchins’ gowns)—I will and ordain that there shall be no hesitation about planting me in the bed of the next world in the very self-same old pod and shell in which I have vegetated in this; in brief, exactly as I am while now testating. This injunction necessitates my making my third that the woman who comes to lay me out shall be paid, and at once sent about her business, because all my life through I have had a most special antipathy to two women—the woman who washes us into life, and the woman who washes us out of it (though in a bigger bath-tub)—the midwife and the woman who lays out the corpse. She is not to lay a finger upon me, nor is anybody except my Henry there.” His hatred of these servants of life and death may probably have proceeded from the same causes as my own, namely the imperious and rapacious nature of the controlling power which these she-planters and caterers for the cradle and the bier exercise in squeezing us just in the two unarmed and weaponless hours of our deepest gladness and our deepest sorrow.

“I further will that as soon as my face has made the signal of adieu, Henry shall roof it over and shield it for ever with our long-necked mask, which I brought down from the box upstairs. I also desire that, when I take my departure from all the fields and plains of my youthful days, and hear nothing behind me but the rustle of the haycocks of the aftermath, I may, at all events, have my wife’s silken garland laid upon my breast, by way of game-counter to mark the joys I have lost. A man can’t go more suitably than with mock insignia, such as that, out of a life which has dished him up such a number of pasteboard pasties full of nothing but wind. Lastly, I will that, when I am gone on my journey, nobody shall clang after me from the church-steeple (like the people of Carlsbad), for we sick and transient watering-place visitors of life (like those of Carlsbad) are received and sent on our way with music from the steeples, especially as the Church’s servants are more expensive than the Carlsbad steeple-man, who only asks three pieces for blowing people in and out.”

At this point he asked that Lenette’s profile-portrait might be given him in bed, and he said, in a faltering voice, “I should like my dear Henry and the landlord to leave the room for a minute, and let me be alone with the Schulrath and my wife.”

When this was done he gazed fondly, a long while, in silence, upon the little likeness. His eyes ran over with sorrow like a broken river-bank. He gave the picture to the Schulrath, paused, overcome by emotion, and said at length: “To you, my faithful friend, and to you alone, can I give this beloved portrait: you are her friend, as well as mine. Oh God! there is not a soul in the great, wide world that will take care of my dear Lenette if you forsake her. Don’t cry so bitterly, my darling; he will be everything to you. Ah! dearest of friends, this helpless, innocent heart will break in desolate loneliness of sorrow unless you protect it and console it. Oh! never abandon it, as I am doing!”

The Schulrath swore by the Almighty that he would never leave her, and he took her hand and pressed it (without looking at her) as she wept, and hung, with eyes raining down with tears, upon the face of his friend, whose voice was so soon to be mute for ever. But Lenette forced him away from her husband’s breast, and liberated her hand, and sunk down upon the lips which had so deeply touched her heart. Firmian clasped her with his left arm, and stretched his right hand to his friend—thus holding to his oppressed bosom the two things on earth that are nearest heaven, friendship and love.

And it is even this very matter which is an endless source of comfort and delight to me in you deluded and disagreeing mortals—that you all love one another heartily and utterly when you only get a chance of seeing one another divested of coverings and fogs—that when we fear we are growing blind we are only growing cold—and that, as soon as ever Death has raised our brothers and sisters up clear of the clouds of our own errors, our hearts melt into bliss and love when we see them soaring as beautiful human creatures, no longer distorted by the mists and concave mirrors of this world, up in the translucent æther; and cannot but sigh forth, “Ah! I should never have misunderstood you if I had always seen you thus.” This is why every loving soul stretches its arms out to those whom poets exhibit to our low-placed eyes, as geniuses, in their cloud-built heaven, though, could he let them sink down upon our breasts, they would lose their beauteous transfiguration in a few short days upon the dirty earth of our necessities and mistakes: as the crystal glacier-water which refreshes, without chilling, must be caught in the air as it drips from its ice-diamond, because it is made impure by the air the moment it touches the earth.[^[87]]

The Schulrath went out, but only to the doctor. This distinguished Generalissimo of Friend Death (who did not bear the title of “Councillor of the Supreme Board of Health” for nothing, but for money) was very willing to come and see the patient: firstly, because the Schulrath was a man of means and consideration; and, secondly, because Siebenkæs in his capacity of a member of the Corpse Lottery (of which the doctor also was a corresponding member and frère servant), ought not to be allowed to die. For this burial-fund was, in one of its more important aspects, a species of Government Savings’ Bank, or Imperial Treasury for members of the better classes. The sight of this Supreme Councillor of Health, advancing in battle-array, terrified Leibgeber to death. He could not but fear that the advent of the doctor might make matters take a more serious turn, so that Siebenkæs might transmit to posterity a celebrity like that of Molière, who died on the stage while performing the part of the ‘Malade Imaginaire.’ The relation between doctor and patient seemed to him as indeterminate as that between woodpeckers, or bark-beetles, and trees; inasmuch as it is still a moot question whether the trees wither in consequence of these creatures boring into them, and laying their eggs in them, or if (on the contrary) it is because the bark is worm-eaten and the trunk dead, that the beetles come flying to the trees. My opinion as regards beetles and woodpeckers (and doctors as well) is that each is alternately cause and effect; and that there is no such thing as a living creature whose existence can possibly be taken as pre-supposing decay, because, if so, at the creation of the world there would have had to be a dead horse created for the bluebottles, and a rotten cheese for the mites.

Well, Dr. Œlhafen (of the Supreme Board of Health) marched straight up to the sick man (shooting past the one who was not sick, with angry rudeness), and instantly swooped upon life’s seconds’-hand, the medical divining-rod, the pulse. Leibgeber set the plough of satirical anger into the soil of his face, ploughed crooked furrows, and determined upon a course of deep subsoil-ploughing.

“This,” said the professor of the healing art, “is a case of genuine nervous apoplexy, supervening on an undue determination of blood to the head, and a plethora of the vessels. There ought to have been medical attendance at a much earlier stage of the case; the full, hard pulse threatens a repetition of the attack. An emetic powder, which I shall prescribe, will, in the circumstances, produce the best possible effect.” And with this he pulled out some emetic billets-doux, wrapped up like bonbons. This preparation was one which he kept for sale himself, hawking it about from house to house like a Jew pedlar. There were few diseases to which he did not apply these emetics of his by way of “means of grace,” screwjacks, pump handles, and purgatorial fire; but he worked them most assiduously of all in apoplexy chest-inflammation, headache, and bilious fever. What he said was that he “began by clearing the principal passages,” and in so doing he occasionally cleared the proprietor of said principal passages out of this world, so that he found himself passing through the final “passage” of all flesh.

Leibgeber kneaded his odd visage into a new form, and said, “There seems nothing, Doctor Œlhafen (my colleague and protomedicus), to prevent our holding our concilium, or consilium, or collegium medicum, here where we stand. I cannot but think that my sedative powder had a good effect, seeing that it restored apoplectico there the power of speech, yesterday.” The protomedicus took Leibgeber for some quack, and without so much as letting his eyes touch his colleague, said to Peltzstiefel, “Will you get them to bring some warm water, and I will give him the powder myself.” “He and I will take it both together,” burst in Leibgeber, in anger; “both our gall-bladders are acting at present; the patient shan’t, won’t, and mustn’t.”

“Are you a regular practitioner, Sir?” asked the Councillor of the Supreme Board of Health, with contempt.

“I am a Jubilee Doctor, or Doctor Jubilant, and have been so ever since I ceased being a fool. You no doubt remember in Haller the case of the fool who thought his head was off, until they cured him by putting a lead hat on to him. A head roofed and insulated with lead has about as distinct a sense of individuality as one cast in that metal. I was very nearly in the same boat with that fool myself, brother colleague. I had inflammation of the brain, and did not find out so soon as I should have done that it had been put out, and cured. To make a long tale short, I fancied that my head had peeled away (or shall I call it ‘exfoliated,’ or ‘desquamated’), just as one’s feet moulder and drop off, like crab’s claws, when one takes too much ergot. When the barber came in, and threw down his purple tool-bag, or quiver, I said, ‘My dear Surgeon-General Spœrl, it may be perfectly true that flies, tortoises, and adders have been known to go on living after their heads were off, as I do, but there wasn’t much on them to shave. A man of your sense must see that it is as impossible to shave me as to shave the Torso at Rome—where were you thinking of soaping me, Mr. Spœrl? Scarce was he out of the door when in came the wig-maker. ‘Another time, Mr. Peisser,’ said I, ‘unless you propose to curl the circumambient air around me, or the hair on my chest, you can put your combs back into your waistcoat pocket. Since twelve o’clock last night I have been carrying on existence without either frieze or cornice, and, like the tower of Babel, I have no cupola. But if you will go and see whether you can find my head in the next room there, and put a queue and a toupée on to that caput mortuum of mine, I should have no objection to that, and I don’t mind wearing the head by a way of a queue-wig.’ By good luck in came the Rector Magnificus. He was a doctor, and saw what distress I was in, when I smote my hands together and cried, ‘Where are my four brain chambers and my corpus callosum, my anus cerebri, and my uniform centrum (which, according to Gläser, is the seat of the imagination)? How can a Rump Parliament wear spectacles, or use ear trumpets? The reasons are obvious. Is it come to this with the monæcius head of the world, that it has no head left for a seed-vessel?’ But the Rector Magnificus sent to the University wardrobe for an old, tight-fitting, doctor’s hat; he put it on me with a gentle push, and said, ‘The faculty never places a doctor’s hat on anything but a head; it could not possibly put it on to a nothing.’ And this hat made a new head grow on to my imagination, like a decapitated snail’s. And ever since I was cured myself. I have taken to curing other people.”

The Board of Health councillor turned a basilisk’s eyeball away from Leibgeber, and lowered himself downstairs by the ribbon of his cane like a bale of merchandize, omitting to pocket his emetic permit for the world to come, which the patient had, consequently, to pay for.

But our good Henry had another war to wage with Stiefel and Lenette, until Firmian threw himself between them as mediator, with the assurance that he would have sent the powder packing in any case, because it would have been anything but good for an old pain in his heart (alas! he spoke figuratively), and two or three Gordian knots in his lungs (the “knots of the plot of his earthly drama”).

But all this time, however good a face he might put on matters, there was no concealing the fact that he was steadily growing worse. The ricochet of the apoplectic shot was clearly imminent, and to be looked for at any moment. “It is time I made my will,” he said. “I long ardently for the Notary Public.” This functionary, as is well known, has the drawing up of all last wills and testaments, according to the laws of Kuhschnappel. At length he arrived, Bærstel by name, a shrivelled and dried-up snail of a man, with a round, shy, listening button-face, all hunger, anxiety, and attention. Many people thought his flesh was merely smeared over his bones, like the new Swedish carton pierre. “What is it your pleasure to have written to-day, Sir?” began Bærstel. “One of my pretty little codicils,” said Siebenkæs. “But before we begin hadn’t you better try me with a catch-question or two, as is usually done with testators, to find out (without letting me know what you are at, you understand) whether I am all right in my head?” “Do you know who I am, Sir?” said Bærstel. “You are Mr. Bærstel, Notary Public,” answered the patient. “Not only is that quite correct,” answered Bærstel, “but it renders it quite clear that you are wandering very little, if at all, and we may proceed at once to draw up your testament.”

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF SIEBENKÆS,
POOR’S ADVOCATE.

“The undersigned, now yellowing and falling from the tree with the rest of the August apples, desires, being thus nigh to death, which looses the spirit from the thraldom of the body, to execute a few more merry back-steps, sidesteps, and Sir-Roger-de Coverleys, three minutes before the Basle dance of Death begins.”

The notary paused, and asked in amazement, “Am I to put this stuff, and more like it, down upon paper?”

“Imprimis, I, Firmian Siebenkæs, alias Heinrich Leibgeber, do hereby will and ordain that my guardian the Heimlicher von Blaise shall (and must) pay over, within a year and day after my decease, to my friend, Mr. Leibgeber, inspector in Vaduz,[^[88]] the 12,000 florins of trust money whereof he has godlessly defrauded me, his ward: the said Mr. Leibgeber making over the same hereafter faithfully to my beloved wife. In the event of the said Herr von Blaise declining so to do, I here lift up my hand and swear, upon my dying bed, that after I have departed this life I will pursue him, not legally, but spiritually, and will terrify him by appearing to him, either as the devil or as a tall white man, or by my voice merely, according as my circumstances, after my decease, may permit.”

The notary’s feathered arm hovered in air, and he ceased not to shrink and shudder with terror. “All I am afraid of,” he said, “is that if I write down things of this kind, the Heimlicher will get hold of me.” But Leibgeber, with face and body, barred his retreat through that hell-gate, the door of the room.

“Further, as reigning sovereign of the shooter’s company, I will and ordain that no war of succession shall convert my testament into a powder of succession for innocent people. Further, that the republic of Kuhschnappel (into the office of Gonfaloniere and Doge whereof I was balloted with rifle bullets) shall wage no defensive war, seeing that it cannot defend itself if it does—but offensive wars only, with the object of enlarging the boundaries of its territories, they not being easy to protect. And that its members may, in their generation, be as wood-economising as their country and royal burgh’s father has been in his. Now-a-days, when forests are burned to charcoal faster than they grow again, the only thing to be done is to warm the climate a good deal, and turn it into a great brooding-oven, kiln, and field-oven, so as to save the trouble, and obviate the necessity, of having stoves in the houses. And this has been in some measure attended to by careful Commissioners of Woods and Forests, who have cleared away the forests as much as they could, they being full of late winter. When one thinks how very beautifully modern Germany contrasts with that which Tacitus mapped, warmed as it is by the mere cutting down of the forests, we have little difficulty in feeling convinced that a time will come when, there being no more timber at all, we shall arrive at such a temperature that the atmosphere itself shall be our fur pelisse. The reason the present superfluity is burnt to ashes as rapidly as possible is, that the price of raft-wood may be raised, just as a million livres’ worth of nutmegs were publicly burnt at Amsterdam in 1760, to prevent the price from falling.

“Moreover, as King of the Kuhschnappelian Jerusalem, it is my desire that the senate and people thereof (senatus, populusque Kuhschnappeliensis) be not damned, but contrariwise blessed, particularly in this present world. Further, that the town magnates may not devour the Kuhschnappelian nests (houses) as they do the Indian ones, and that the taxes, though they have to pass through the four stomachs of the tax-gatherers,[^[89]] may nevertheless issue thence converted from milky chyle into red blood (from silver into gold), and after circulating through the lacteals and the thoracic duct, be impelled in due course into the veins of the body politic. Further, I will and appoint that the greater and the lesser council——”

The notary would fain have stopped here, and shook his head most energetically, but Leibgeber was playing with the rifle with which the testator had elevated himself to the throne of the marksman (whereas it is upon leaping-poles consisting of other men’s ramrods that thrones are usually attained to), and Bærstel wrote on in the sweat of his brow.

“That the mayor, the treasurer, the Heimlicher, the eight members of council, and the serjeant of court, may listen to reason, and reward no merit but that of other people. And that the rascal Blaise, and the scoundrel Meyern may daily lay castigatory hands upon each other, as relations, so that there may at all events always be one to punish the other.”

Here the notary jumped up, declared it took his breath away, and went to the window to get a little air. And as he saw that there was a pile of tanner’s bark within easy shot of the window-sill, his terror, shoving at him from behind, impelled him up on to the sill in question. Having taken this first step, before a testament witness could seize him by the coat-tails, he made a second (and long) one out into the open air, so as to be in a position to reach that modelling-table the heap of bark. Being thus a falling artist (not a rising one), he could do no better on his arrival there than make use of his face as a graving-tool, plastic “form,” and copying machine, and execute therewith a faint bas-relief impression of himself upon the heap of tan. His fingers worked busily as graving-tools, making copies of themselves, whilst, as a matter of pure accident, he countersigned this, his report of the incident, with his notarial seal, which he had taken with him in his descent. So easy is it for one notary to create another, like a Count Palatine. But Bærstel left his co-notary and the entire lusus naturæ behind him, thinking on his homeward way of matters of a wholly different kind. Stiefel and Leibgeber, again, looked out of window, and (the notary having vanished, bag and baggage,) gazed upon his second outward man as it lay outstretched before them upon its anatomical theatre, smelling of Russia leather. Concerning which the author will not add another word of his own, but only these of Henry’s.

“The notary wished to seal the testament with a larger seal than usual—one which nobody might forge—so he sealed it with his own body, and there we see the sphragistic impression all complete.”

The will, such as it was, was duly subscribed by the witnesses and by the testator, and anything but a demi-military testament of this kind was scarcely to be expected in the circumstances. Evening was now drawing on,—the time when sick and sorry man turns him from the sun (as does the earth he dwells on), and towards the twilight evening star of the other world,—when the sick pass away to the latter, and the well gaze at the former—and when Firmian thought to give his wife the long kiss of parting, and then begin slowly sinking. But unfortunately Deacon Revel (the assistant preacher) came rustling in in an electrically stormy fashion. He came arrayed in his ecclesiastical armour, gorget, sash, and all, to administer a befitting rebuke to the invalid (round whose neck he had tied the band of matrimony in a double knot) for trying to evade payment of the confession fee—that toll for the communion of the sick and sound on the highway between heaven and hell. As (on the authority of Linnæus) the ancient botanists—a Croll, Porta, Helvetius, Fabricius—thought that certain plants which had more or less resemblance to particular illnesses were remedies for these complaints, prescribing yellow plants, such as saffron and turmeric, for jaundice, dragon’s-blood and catechu for dysentery, cabbage-heads for headache (as well as prickly things, such as fish-bones, for stitches in the side), so, in the hands of able Gospel ministers, the spiritual materia medica, such as sermons and admonitions, assume the appearance of the spiritual maladies for whose cure they are administered—anger, pride, avarice, and so on. Thus there is often no difference, but one of condition, between the bed-ridden patient and his physician. This was the case with Revel. One of his great objects in life was, in an age when people are so prone to defame the Lutheran clergy by calling them mere Jesuits in disguise, or monks, to give the most unmistakable proof, more by deeds than by words, that he was, at all events, none of the latter (who call nothing their own, and are not allowed to possess property), and for that reason to be at all times on the hunt, and on the snatch, after worldly possessions. Hoseas Leibgeber did his best to make himself a barrier-rope and turnstile for the parson, and stopped him on the threshold, saying, “I fear it won’t be of much use; I tried my own hand yesterday at converting and recoining him flying, (if I may use the expression,) post-haste, volti subito citissime, but all that came of it was that he threw it in my teeth that I wasn’t converted myself—and no more I am. There are whole flocks of heretical singing-birds pecking away at the summer rape-seed of my opinions.” Revel answered (vacillating between a major mode and a minor), “A servant of the Lord bides his time, keeps diligent watch, and does the duty of his sacred calling, striving to save souls—from atheism, as well as from other sin. The event concerns the sinner, and the sinner only.”

So this black storm cloud, charged to the brim with Sinai-lightnings, rolled on into the dim-lit chamber; the parson waved his great, flapping gown-sleeve, like a standard of spiritual healing and rehabilitation, over the atheist (as he thought him) stretched on his bed, and told him in a “sick-bed exhortation” (which is generally the very antipodes of a funeral sermon)—in a “sick-bed exhortation” (I say) such as may one day overtake me and my reader under our last bed-cover, and which I shall therefore avoid sending all the way from Bayreuth to Heidelberg to be put in type, since it may be heard en route going on in any sick-chamber. At the same time he told him, in the said sick-bed exhortation to his face, like a plain-speaking, straight-forward man, that he was a roast for the devil’s table, just done to a turn, and ready to be dished and served. The roast (thus pronounced to be done to a turn), closed his eyes, and endured it. But Henry, whom it pained to see the parson pinching the ears and the heart whom he loved with red-hot pincers, and who was furious at the thought that it was done solely to frighten the sick man into the Confessional—Henry seized his waving arm, and gently reminded him—

“I did not think it would have been very polite, Mr. Kevel, to mention it before—but the patient’s hearing is a good deal impaired. You will find you will be obliged to scream. He has not heard a syllable you have said up to this point. Mr. Siebenkæs, do you know who this is? You see how little he hears. Set to work now at converting me, over a glass of beer—I should prefer that very much, and I hear a great deal better. I’m very much afraid he has a touch of delirium, and, if he sees you at all, thinks you are the devil—for it is with him that the dying have to fence their last bout. It’s a pity he didn’t know what you were saying. He would have been very angry and annoyed—(for confess he will not)—and on the authority of Haller, in the 8th volume of his ‘Physiology, a proper amount of annoyance and vexation has often been known to add weeks to a dying person’s life. But, after all, he is a kind of a true Christian, after a fashion, when all’s said, although he no more dreams of confessing than any of the Apostles did, or the fathers either. When he is gone, you shall hear from my own lips how peacefully a true Christian passes away—no convulsions—no contortions—no agonies of death. He is as completely at home in the world of spirits as the screech-owl is in the village steeple—and just as the owl sits in the belfry while the bells are ringing, I will be bound that our Advocate will never stir when the death-bell tolls for him—for he has acquired, from your sermons, the conviction that he will go on living after he dies.”

In the above speech there was some pretty hard hitting, in the shape of jest, at Firmian’s mock death, as well as at his faith in immortality; such jests, in fact, as none but a Firmian could both understand and pardon. But Leibgeber was, at the same time, making an attack, in all seriousness, on those good people who believe accidental, physical tranquillity in dying to be tranquillity of soul, and bodily struggles to be storms of conscience.

Revel contented himself with replying, “You are of those who sit in the seat of the scorner—whom the Lord will find. I have washed my hands.” But as he would have infinitely preferred filling them, and, moreover, could not succeed in transforming this child of the devil into a confessing penitent, he took his departure, red and silent, escorted downstairs by Lenette and Stiefel with many deferential curtseys and bows.

Let us not make out Henry’s gall-bladder (which is likewise his swimming-bladder, and, alas! often his ascending globus hystericus) to be any bigger than it really is. Let us form a judgment, all the more favourable, of this natural foible of his from considering than Henry had, in the course of his previous career, seen spiritual frères terribles, and gallows preachers of this sort, strewing salt upon the faint, withered hearts on so many deathbeds; and because it was his belief (as it is mine) that of all the hours of a man’s life his last must be the most indifferent as regards religion, inasmuch as it the most unfruitful, and no seed can sprout in it which will bear any fruit of action.

During the brief absence of the courteous couple, Firmian said, “Oh! I am sick, sick, and weary of it all. I cannot carry on the joke any longer. In ten minutes more I intend to lie my last lie, and die—and would to GOD it were not a lie. Don’t let them bring in any lights, but cover me up at once with the mask, for I see very plainly that I shall not be able to control these eyes of mine, and when the mask is on, I shall, at all events, be able to let them weep as much as they like. Ah! Henry, my good, kind friend!”

The infusory chaos of Revel’s exhortation had made this weary figurant and mimicker of Death tender and grave. Henry—out of his delicate and loving solicitude—had undertaken all the lying parts of the rôle, and enacted those himself. He therefore (as the couple were coming back into the room), cried out, in a loud, anxious voice, “Firmian, how do you feel now?” “Better,” said Firmian, in a voice of emotion. “There are stars shining in this world’s night, though I, alas! am clamped to the dust, and cannot soar up to them. The bank of the lovely spring-time of eternity is steep, and, close as we day-flies are swimming to the shore of Life’s Dead Sea, we have not got our wings yet.” Yes! Death—sublime and glorious after sunset-sky of our St. Thomas’s Day—grand amen of our hope, spoken to our ears from the other world—would come to our beds in the likeness of a beautiful giant, with a garland on his brow, and lift us gently up into the æther, and rock us there to rest, were it not that we go to him only as maimed, stunned creatures, who are thrown into his giant arms. What robs Death of his glory is sickness; the pinions of the soul when it rises on its heavenward flight are heavy, and stained with blood, and tears, and mire. The only time when death is a flight—not a fall—is when some hero is smitten by one, single, mortal wound, when, as he stands like a spring-world, all new blossom, and old fruit, the next world suddenly flashes by him, like some comet, bearing him (miniature world as he is) all unwithered, along with it in its flight, to soar with it beyond the sun.

But this mental exaltation of Firmian’s would have been an indication of reviving strength and returning health to sharper eyes than Stiefel’s. It is upon the looker-on only—not upon the victim who is smitten down—that the battle-axe of Death casts a flash of light. It is with the death-bell as with other bells; it is those who are at a distance who hear the solemn, inspiring boom and music—not those who are within the sounding hemisphere. And as every bosom grows more sincere and more transparent in the hour of death—like the Siberian glass-apple, the kernel of which, when ripe, is covered only by a crystal case formed of sweet, transparent flesh—so Firmian, in this dithyrambic hour—near as he was to the bare edge of Death’s sickle—could have gladly sacrificed (that is, discovered) all the mystery and blossom of his future, but that by so doing he would have broken his word and grieved his friend. But nothing was left him now, save a patient heart, dumb lips, and weeping eyes.

Alas! and were not all his ostensible farewells real ones after all? As he drew his Henry and the Schulrath to his heart with trembling hands, was that heart not oppressed by the mournful certainty of losing the Schulrath on the morrow, and Henry in a week’s time, for ever? So that the following address which he made to them was nothing but the plain truth, mournful though it was. “Alas! we shall be scattered asunder by the four winds of heaven in a very, very little time. Ah! human arms are rotten bands. How short a time they hold! May all be well with you—and better than I ever deserved it might be with me. May the chaotic stone-heaps of your lives never come rolling down about your feet, or about your ears—may spring overspread the crags and cliffs around you with berries, and the freshest green! Good night for ever, dearly loved Schulrath, and you, my Henry!” He pressed the latter to his heart in silence, thinking how near the veritable parting was.

But he should have avoided stimulating his heart into feverish excitement by these pricks and stings of farewell, for he heard Lenette mourning out of sight behind the bed, and (with a deep death-wound in his overflowing heart) said, “Come, my beloved Lenette, and bid me good-bye;” and stretched out his arms in a wild manner to receive her. She came tottering, and sank into them, and on to his heart, while he was speechless under the crushing weight of his emotions; till at length, as she lay there trembling, he said, in a low voice, “Ah! poor, patient, faithful, tortured soul! how constantly and unceasingly have I caused you sorrow! Will you forgive me? Will you forget me?” (A spasm of sorrow clasped her closer to him.) “Ah! do but forget me, and forget me quite; for heaven knows you have never been happy with me!” Their voices were lost in sobs, only their tears could flow. A drawing, thirsting grief was grinding at his weary heart, and he went on: “No, no; with me you have truly had nothing, nothing but tears; but there are happy days coming for you, when I shall be gone from you.” He gave her his parting kiss, saying, “Live happy now, and let me be gone!” “But you are not going to die,” she cried again and again, with a thousand tears. He put his arms about her, he gently raised her fainting form from his breast, and said, very solemnly, “It is over now. Fate has sundered us; it is over and past.”

Henry gently led her weeping away; and he cried himself, too; and cursed his plot; and signed to the Schulrath, saying, “Firmian needs rest now.” The latter turned his face, swollen and drawn with pain, to the wall. Lenette and Stiefel were mourning together in the other room. Henry waited till the greater billows had subsided somewhat, and then quietly put the question: “Now?” Firmian gave the signal, and Henry yelled out, “Oh! he is gone!” like a man beside himself; and threw himself down upon the motionless body (to prevent anybody from touching it), with genuine, bitter tears at the thought of the nearness of parting. An inconsolable couple came bursting from the next room. Lenette would have thrown herself upon her husband (whose face was turned away), and she cried, in agony, “I must see him; I must bid my husband good-bye once more.” But Henry told the Schulrath (confidentially) to take hold of her, and support her, and get her away out of the room. The two former things he was able to accomplish (although his own self-control was only an artificial one, assumed with the view of demonstrating the victory of religion over philosophy), but get her out of the room he could not. When she saw Henry take up the mask of death, “No, no,” she cried; “I insist upon being allowed to see my husband once more.” But Henry took the mask, gently turned Firmian’s face (on which the tears of parting were scarce yet dry), and covered it up, thus hiding it for ever from his wife’s weeping eyes. This grand scene lifted up his heart; he gazed upon the mask and said, “Death lays a mask like this over all our faces; and a time will come when I shall stretch me out in death’s midnight sleep as he has done, and grow longer and heavier. Ah! poor Firmian! has that war game of yours been worth the candles and the trouble? We are not the players, it is true; we are the things played with: and old Death sends our heads and hearts rolling like balls over the green billiard-table, and pockets them in his corpse-sack; and every time one of us is pocketed there, the death-bell gives a toll. It is true you go on living in a sense[^[90]] (if the frescoes of ideas can be detached from the walls of the body), and oh! may you be happier in that postscript life than in this. But what is it, this postscript life, after all? It will go out too; every life, on every world-ball, will burn out one day. The planets are licensed only to retail liquor to be drunk on the premises. They can’t board and lodge us; they merely pour us out a glass of quince-wine, currant-juice, spirits; but for the most part gargles of good wine (which we must not swallow), or else sympathetic ink (i. e. liquor probatorius), sleeping-draughts, and acids; and then, on we go, from one planet-inn to another; and so from millennium to millennium. Oh! thou kind heaven; and whither, whither, whither?

“However, this earth is the wretchedest village tap-room of the lot; a place where mostly beggars, rogues, and deserters turn in, and which we have always to go five steps away from to enjoy our best pleasures; that is to say, either into memory or into imagination.

“Ah! peaceful being there at rest, may it fare better with you in other taverns than here; and may some restaurateur of life open the door of a wine-cellar for you in lieu of this vinegar-cellar!”

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CHAPTER XXI.

DR. ŒLHAFEN AND MEDICAL BOOT AND SHOEMAKING—THE BURIAL SOCIETY—A DEATH’S HEAD IN THE SADDLE—FREDERICK II. AND HIS FUNERAL ORATION.

As a step preliminary to everything else, Leibgeber quartered the sorrowing widow down stairs with the hairdresser, with the view of rendering the intermediate state after death easier to the dead man. “You must emigrate,” he told her, “and keep out of the sight of these sad memorials round us here, until he has been taken away.” Superstitious terror made her consent, so that he had no difficulty in giving the dear departed his food and drink. He compared him to a walled-up vestal, finding in her cell a lamp, bread, water, milk, and oil (according to Plutarch, in ‘Numa’); and added, “Unless you are more like the earwig, which, when cut in two, turns about and devours its own remains.” By jokes like these he brightened (or, at all events, strove to brighten) the cloudy and autumnal soul of his dear friend, who could see nothing all around him save ruins of his bygone life, from the widowed Lenette’s clothes to her work. The bonnet-block, which he had struck on the day of the thunder-storm, had to be put away in a corner out of his sight, because he said it made Gorgon faces at him.

Next day, our good corpse-watcher, Leibgeber, had to perform the labours of a Hercules, an Ixion, and a Sisyphus combined. Congress after congress, picket after picket, came to see the dead man and speak well of him—for it is not until they make their exit that we applaud men and actors, and we think people are morally beautified by death as Lavater thought they were physically. But Leibgeber drove everybody away from the death-chamber, saying it had been one of his friend’s last requests that he should do so.

Then came the woman to lay out the corpse (Death’s Abigail), and wanted to begin washing and dressing it. Henry tussled with her, paid her, and banished her. Then (in presence of the widow and Peltzstiefel), he had to pretend to be pretending to hide a bleeding heart behind outward resignation. “But I see through him,” said Stiefel, “without the slightest trouble. It is because he is not a Christian that he is striving to play the Stoic and the Philosopher.” Stiefel was here alluding to that specious, empty, and frivolous hardness which is exhibited by Zenos of the world and of the court, who are like those wooden figures which are made to look like stone statues and pillars by being smeared over with a coating of stone-dust. Also the share, or dividend, of the burial-fund was got together (by being collected on a plate from the members of that body), and this led to its coming to the knowledge of our old acquaintance Dr. Œlhafen, who was one of the paying members. He took occasion, on his morning round of visits, to drop in at the house of mourning, with the view of provoking his brother in science to as great an extent as he could. He therefore affected not to have heard a word about the death, and began by asking how the invalid was getting on. “According to the latest bulletins,” said Henry, “he is not getting on at all—he has got on; in a word, Herr Protomedicus Œlhafen, he is gone. August, March, and December are months when Death sends out his pressgang and gathers in his vintage.”

“That lowering powder of yours,” said the vindictive Doctor, “seems to have lowered his temperature pretty effectively; he’s cool enough now, eh?” This pained Leibgeber, and he answered, “I am sorry to say, he is. However, we did our best with him. We got your emetic down his throat, but the only thing he got rid of was that most terribly morbific of all matters in man—his soul. You, Mr. Protomedicus, are judge in a criminal court, having the power of life and death; whereas, you see, I am only an advocate, and possessed of a jurisdiction so far inferior that I didn’t dare meddle with anything, least of all the fellow’s life; a nice face he would have made if I had.”

“Well, so he has made a face at it, and a long face, too—the hippocratic face,” answered the Doctor, not wholly without wit. “I can’t but believe you,” answered Leibgeber, in a gentle manners “I have not the least doubt you are perfectly right. We laymen, you see, have so few opportunities of seeing those faces, whereas doctors can study the hippocratic countenance in their patients every day of their lives. And, of course, an experienced doctor is always distinguished by a quickness of eye which enables him to tell at a glance if a patient be going to die—which is an impossibility to other people, who, not being doctors in practice, have not many opportunities of seeing people depart this life.”

“A medical connoisseur of your cultivation and experience as a matter of course put mustard poultices to the patient’s feet? Only, I presume, it was too late for them to be of any use, was it?”

“I did manage to hit upon the notion of trying that trick of soling my poor friend’s feet with mustard and vinegar” (answered Leibgeber), “and paper-hanging the calves of his legs with blisters; but the patient (at all times rather fond of his joke, as you know), called that sort of thing ‘medical boot and shoemaking,’ and called us doctors ‘Death’s shoemakers,’ who, when Nature has cried to a poor fellow ‘Look out! Mind your head!’ go and put Spanish flies on to him by way of Spanish boots, mustard-plasters by way of Cothurni, and cupping-glasses by way of leg-irons: as if a man could not make his appearance in the next world without red heels consisting of mustard-blister marks, and red cardinal stockings of plaster blisters. And so saying, the deceased aimed a skilful kick at my face and the plaster, and said the connoisseurs were like stinging-flies, which always fasten upon the legs.”

“He wasn’t far wrong, I suspect, as regarded you. A ‘shoemaker of Death’ might perhaps put something on just under that caput tribus insanabile of yours which wouldn’t fit so badly,” said the Doctor, and made off as fast as he could.

I have already said a few words concerning those emetic powders of his, and I now wish to add what follows. If he does send people to their long homes by means of them, the chief difference between him and a fox[^[91]] is that (according to the ancient naturalist), the latter imitates the distant sound of a man being sick to make the dogs run to him, that he may attack them. At the same time even those whose opinion of the members of the medical profession is the highest conceivable must admit that there are certain limits to their criminal jurisdiction. As by European International Law, no army can shoot down another with glass bullets, or poisoned ones, but only with leaden ones—further, as no nation may put poison into the enemies’ food, or wells, but only dirt—so, although the medical police allow a practising physician (of the higher jurisdiction) the utmost freedom in the administration of narcotics, drastics, emetics, diuretics, and the whole pharmacopœia, in a word (so that it would be a breach of the police regulations to attempt to prevent him), yet were the most celebrated of doctors, town or country, within the limits of his jurisdiction to set to work and give people poison-balls in place of pills, or ratsbane by way of a strong emetic, the upper courts of justice would take a pretty serious view of the matter—unless it were for ague that he prescribed the mouse-poison. Nay, I suspect that an entire medical collegium would scarce escape some judicial inquiry if it were to take a sword and run a man through with it (though it might open his veins with a lancet at any hour of the day or night if it pleased), or if it were to knock him down with a warlike but nonsurgical instrument. Thus we find in the criminal records that doctors who threw people into the water from bridges have by no means got clear off—that being a different affair altogether from putting them into a smaller bath, mineral or otherwise.

When the hairdresser heard that the corpse-lottery money had safely arrived in its harbour of refuge, he came upstairs and offered to curl his deceased lodger’s hair, make him a pigtail, and let his comb and pomatum accompany him under the sod. Leibgeber was obliged to be economical on the poor widow’s account, for more than half her feathers were plucked out of her already by the innumerable insect-feelers, vultures’-talons, and boars’-tusks of the domestics of death, and he said the most he could do was to buy the comb and put it in the deceased’s waistcoat-pocket, so that he might do it himself after his own taste. He said the same to the barber, and added that, of course, as hair goes on growing in the grave, the whole secret society (and fruit-bearing society) therein is adorned with fine beards, like Swiss of the age of sixty. These two collaborateurs in hair (who revolve round the same central-sphere like two of the satellites of Uranus) went off with abbreviated hopes, and elongated faces and purses, the one wishing, in the excess of his gratitude, that he had at that moment the shaving of the undertaker Henry, the other wishing he had the cutting of his hair. On the stairs they grumbled out, “It would be no wonder if the dead man should not be able to rest in his grave, but went about frightening people.”

Leibgeber thought of the risk there was of losing the reward of all this long process of deception, should anybody go to have a look at the deceased gentleman while he was in the next room (for whenever he was going further he locked the door). So he went to the churchyard, took a skull out of the charnel-house, and brought it home under his coat. He handed it to Siebenkæs, saying, “If we were to shove this head in beneath the green trellis-bed whereon defunctus is lying, and keep it connected with his hand by means of a green-silk thread, it might be brought into play (in the dark, at all events), as a species of Belidor’s globe of compression, or jawbone of an ass as against Philistines, who have got to be frightened away if they come disturbing the repose of the warm dead.” To be sure (had the most extreme necessity to do so arisen) Siebenkæs would have come to himself, revived out of his prolonged insensibility, and repeated his apoplectic seizure for the third time—much to the gratification of medical systems of theory. However, the death’s head was better than the fit. The sight of this garret-lodging of a soul, this cold hatching-oven of a spirit, made Siebenkæs sad. He said, “No doubt the wall-creeper finds a quieter and safer nest here than did the bird-of-paradise,[^[92]] which has flown away from it.”

Leibgeber now chaffered with the servants of the Church and School, and (with whispered curses) paid the necessary surplice-fees and bridge-tolls, saying, “The day after tomorrow we will lay the deceased to rest as quietly as we may, without fuss or ceremony.” It was a matter of indifference to them; all they cared about being the pocketing of the postage which franks people into the next world, which they were all glad enough to do—all except one old and poor School-servant, who said he thought it a sin to take a farthing from the poor widow, for he knew what poverty was. But this was exactly what the rich could not know.

In the morning, Henry went down to the hairdresser and Lenette, leaving the key in the door—for, since the recent ghost story, the lodgers who lived upstairs were too frightened to put so much as their heads out of their own doors. The hairdresser, who was still annoyed that he had not been allowed to curl the deceased’s hair, bethought him that it would at least be something if he were to slip upstairs, and cut and carry off the entire hair-forest. The demand for hair and firewood is in excess of the supply (now that the former is made into rings and twisted into letters), and we should never leave any dead person a coffin or a single hair. Even the ancients sheared off the latter for the altars of the subterranean gods; so Meerbitzer crept on tiptoe into the room, and opened his scissor-feelers. Siebenkæs could easily look askew into the room through the eye-holes of the mask, and from the scissors and general aspect of his landlord, he divined the impending misfortune and ‘Rape of the Lock.’ He saw that in his strait he could reckon more upon the bare head under the bed than upon his own. The landlord, who, in his timidity, had carefully left the door wide open behind him to secure his retreat, drew near to the plantation of human pot-plants, with intent to play the part of reaper in the harvest-month—to combine the rôles of beard-shearer and hair-curler, and avenge them both. Siebenkæs wound up the thread as well as he could upon his covered fingers, so as to roll out the skull; but as the latter came much too slowly, and Meerbitzer far too quickly, he was obliged to come to his own assistance in the meantime (and this because evil spirits so often breathe upon men, or inspire them) by breathing out of the mouth-hole of his mask a long night-breeze upon the landlord. Meerbitzer could not explain to himself this most suspicious blast, which blew real azote, and a deadly simoom-wind, upon him; and all his warm constituent principles began to shoot into icicles. But, unluckily, the dead man had soon shot all his breath away, and was obliged to re-load his air-gun slowly. This suspension of hostilities brought the lock-raper to himself, and to his legs again; so that he made fresh preparations to take hold of the nightcap-tassel, and remove that gossamer (said nightcap) from the field of hair. But just as he was in the act of taking hold of it, he became aware that a something was beginning to move under the bed; he paused, and waited quietly (for it might be a rat) to see what this noise would turn out to be caused by. But, as he thus waited, it was all of a sudden borne in upon his mind that a round thing was rolling up his legs, and coming higher and higher. In one instant he made a clutch at it with his empty hand (the other held the scissors), and, powerlessly as a pair of callipers, that hand rested on the ascending, slippery ball, which kept pressing it up and up. Meerbitzer grew visibly stiff in the legs, and his blood ran cold; but a fresh upward shove of his hand, and a glance at the ascending head, administered to him (ere he was felled to earth, wholly curdled to cheese), such a kick of terror that he flew like a feather across the floor, and out of the door like a cannonball shot straight at the bull’s eye by the cannon-powder of fear. He landed in the room downstairs with the open scissors in his hand, his mouth and eyes wide open, and a pallid spot on his face, compared to which his hair-powder and his shirt were court-mourning. Nevertheless, in this novel situation (I am glad to say it to his honour) he had the presence of mind not to say a word about what had happened; partly because ghost-stories cannot be related till nine days are over without the greatest danger to the narrator, partly because he could not well talk about his hair-shearing and privateering on any day at all.

At one in the morning, Firmian told this tale to his friend with the same fidelity as I have endeavoured to observe in recounting it to the reader. This gave Leibgeber a useful hint to set a trusty body-guard over the noble corpse; and to this office, in the absence of chamberlains and other court officials, he could appoint no other than Saufinder.

On the last morning, which was to give our Siebenkæs “Notice to quit,” arrived the casa santa of mankind, our chambre garnie, our last seed capsule—the coffin for which we have to pay whatever is demanded. “This is the last building grant of life,” said Henry, “the carpenter’s final piece of cheatery.”

At half an hour after midnight—when neither bat nor night-watchman, nor beer-guest from the public-house, nor night-light was any longer to be seen; and only a field-cricket here and there could be heard in the sheaves, and a mouse or two in the houses—Leibgeber said to his sad and anxious friend, “March, now! Since you shuffled off this mortal coil, and entered into eternity, you have not known a moment of happiness or peace. All the rest is my affair. Wait for me at Hof on the Saale. We must see each other yet once more after death.” Firmian fell in silence on his burning face, and wept. In this twilight hour he once more revisited all the flowery places of the past, behind which he was sinking as into a grave. His softened heart took delight in depositing a parting tear upon every piece of dress belonging to his sorrowing, bereaved Lenette—on every piece of her work—on every trace of her housewifely hand. He pressed her betrothal wreath of roses and forget-me-nots hard to his burning bosom, and placed Nathalie’s rosebuds in his pocket. And thus—mute, oppressed, with stifled sobs, and like one cast out by an earthquake from this earth on to the icy coasts of a strange world—he crept down the steps after his friend; pressed his helping hand once more at the door; and then night built the funeral vault of her gigantic shadow all over him. Leibgeber wept heartily as soon as he was lost to view. Tears fell on every stone which he pocketed, and upon the old block which he took in his arms, to imbed in the coffin-shell so as to give it the due weight of a corpse. He filled up that haven of our bodies, and closed that ark of the covenant, hanging the coffin-key, like a black cross, upon his breast. And now for the first time he slept in peace in the house of mourning. All was done.

In the morning he made no secret of it, before the bearers and Lenette, that he had placed the body in the coffin with his own two arms, and not without considerable effort. She sighed to see her departed husband once again, but Henry had thrown away the door-key of the painted house in the darkness. He helped most diligently in the search for it (he had it about him all the time), but it was in vain, and many of the bystanders soon guessed that Henry was only deceiving, anxious to spare the widow’s weeping eyes any further sight of the cause of her sorrow. So they went forth, with the mock passenger in the quasi coffin, to the churchyard which lay glistening in dew beneath the fresh blue sky. An icy thrill crept to Henry’s heart as he read the words on the gravestone. It had been lifted from off the flat, Moravian-like grave of Siebenkæs’s great-grandfather, and turned over, and on the smooth side glittered the newly-graven inscription—

“STAN: FIRMIAN SIEBENKÆS, Departed this life, 24th August, 1786.”

This name had once been Henry’s own, and on the reverse side of the monument was his present name, Leibgeber. Henry reflected that in a few days he would fall (with his name cast away from him) as a little brook into the world’s great ocean, and flow there without shores, and be lost amongst strange and unknown billows. He felt as though he himself with his old name, and his new, were going down to the grave. So strangely mingled were his feelings that he seemed to himself as if he were sticking fast in the frozen stream of life, while overhead a burning sun was beating upon the ice-field, and he was lying between the glow and the frost. In addition to this, the Schulrath just then came running (with his handkerchief to his eyes and nose), and, in stammering accents of sorrow, imparted the news which had just reached the town—that the old King of Prussia had died on the 17th of the month.

The first thing that Leibgeber did was to look up to the morning sun, as though Frederick’s eye was beaming morning fire from it over the earth. It is easier to be a great king than a just one; it is easier to be admired than justified. A king lays his little finger upon the long arm of the monstrous lever, and, like Archimedes, lifts ships and countries with the muscles of his fingers; but it is only the machine that is great—and the machinist, Fate—not he who works it. The voice of a king re-echoes like a peal of thunder amongst the numberless valleys around him; and every gentle ray he emits is reflected in the form of a burning beam condensed into a focus, from the countless plane-mirrors which are upon his throne. But Frederick could, at most, only be lowered by a throne, by having to sit upon it. His head would only have been greater without the close-binding crown (its crown of thorns) and magic circle. And happy, thou great spirit, couldst thou still less become! For, although thou hadst broken down within thee the Bastilles and the prison-walls of all ignoble passions—although thou hadst given thy spirit what Franklin gave to earth, namely, lightning-conductors, musical glasses, and freedom—although no kingdom was to thee so lovely as that of truth, and there was none which thou so lovedst to enlarge—although thou didst permit the emasculate philosophy of French encyclopædists to hide from thee eternity only, but not divinity, only the belief in virtue, but not thine own—yet did thy loving bosom accept nothing from friendship and humanity but the echoes of their sighs—the flute. And thy spirit, which, with its great roots like the mahogany-tree, often shivered the rocks it grew upon—thy spirit, in the fell battle of thy wishes with thy doubts, in the contest of thy ideal world with the real one, and the one in which thou didst believe, felt a painful discord which no mild faith in a second softened to harmony. And therefore there was upon thy throne no place of rest but that which thou hast now attained.

Some men bring all humanity before our eyes at a glance, as certain events bring our whole lives. There fell upon Henry’s breast strong splinters of the fallen mountain whose crash he heard.

He placed himself before the open grave, and delivered this speech more to invisible than to visible hearers:—

“So, then, the epitaph on the tomb is versio interlineario of this small, small printed life of ours. The heart does not rest until, like the head, it is set in gold.[^[93]] Thou hidden Infinite one! make, for me, the grave a prompter’s tube, and tell me what I am to think of the whole theatre. Indeed, what is there in the grave? Some ashes, a few worms, coldness, and night—by Heaven! there is nothing better above it either, except that one feels it. Mr. Schulrath, Time sits behind us, and reads the calendar of life so cursorily, and turns over the page of month after month at such a rate, that I can fancy this grave—this moat here about our castles in the air—this fortress trench—lengthening out and extending till it reaches my bed, and I am shaken out of the bedclothes into this cooking-hole, like a heap of Spanish flies. ‘Go on,’ I would say, ‘Go on. I shall come either to old Fritz, or to his worms—and therewith Basta! ‘By Heaven! one is ashamed of life when the greatest of men no longer possess it. And so holla!”

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CHAPTER XXII.

JOURNEY THROUGH FANTAISIE—RE-UNION ON THE BINDLOCHER MOUNTAIN—BERNECK—MAN-DOUBLING—GEFREES—EXCHANGE OF CLOTHES—MUNCHBERG—SOLO-WHISTLING—HOF—THE STONE OF GLADNESS AND DOUBLE-PARTING.

Henry now plied more wings than any seraph, that he might fly up with his friend as soon as possible. He packed up the latter’s manuscripts in haste, and addressed them to Vaduz. The sealed will and testament was lodged with the proper authorities, from whom, also, the necessary certificate of death was obtained to show the Prussian Widows’ Fund that it was not being defrauded. And then he got fairly afloat, and pushed off, having first bestowed some weighty grounds for consolation—as well as some weighty ducats—upon the downcast straw-widow, who mourned in the striped calico-dress, as was right and proper.

Let us now overtake and accompany his departed friend, even before he himself does so. During the first hour of his night-journey, vague and disordered pictures of the past and of the future struggled in Firmian’s heart; and it seemed to him as if, for him, there were no such thing as a present, but that a wilderness stretched between the past and the future. But the fresh, rich harvest month of August soon gave him back the life he had (so to speak) played away; and when the gleaming morning was come in earnest, the earth was lying all lighted up with a new-fallen thunderstorm, now emitting lovely lightning only from drops hanging on the corn-ears, as if over-silvered by the moon. It was a new earth; he was a new creature, just burst, with ripened pinions, through the egg-shell of the coffin. Oh! a broad, marshy, overshadowed desert-waste, where a long, long troubled dream had kept driving him to and fro, had vanished with that dream, and he was awake, and gazing deep into Eden. The last week (and that last week especially) had stretched out to enormous length those twisted convolutions of suffering which give to our brief lives a false appearance of being much too long (as we make the short walks of a garden seem longer by laying them out in curves and sweeps). On the other hand, his lightened breast, now free from all its old burdens, was heaved by a great sigh, which was partly both sorrow and joy. He had been too far into the Trophonius cave of the tomb—had looked death too closely in the face—and it seemed to him that all our country mansions, our pleasure-castles and vineyards, were built and laid out upon the verge of the crater of the volcano of the grave-hillock, and that the next night they would be shaken into dust. He felt alone, upheaved, a dead man come back to life, but scarce alive; wherefore every human face he met beamed upon him like that of a new-found brother. “These are my brethren whom I left on earth,” said his heart; and a fruit-bearing love, warm like the spring, expanded all its veins and fibres; and it crept and grew round every other heart with tender, clinging, ivy-like filaments. But the one he loved best was still—too long—away; and he went on as slowly as he could, that so Leibgeber (of whom he was in advance both in distance and time) might overtake him before he got to Hof. A hundred times, on his journey, he almost involuntarily looked round for this overtaking, as if it were already a thing to be actually seen.

At length he came to the Fantaisie of Bayreuth, on a morning when the whole world gleamed and glittered from the drops of dew up to the little silver cloudlets. But stillness was over all. The breezes were asleep; nor had August, in air or in thicket, one single songster left. It seemed to him as though, having left this mortal life, he was wandering in a second, transfigured world, where the form of his Nathalie might move by his side, with love in her eyes—and, in words straight from the soul, no longer fettered by earthly bonds, say to him, “Here you looked up in gratitude to the starry night; here I gave you my wounded heart; here we spoke our earthly parting-vow; and here I came, often, alone, and thought of the brief, bright vision.” “And this is the spot,” he said to himself, when he came to the château, “where she wept her last tears when she said farewell to her lady-friend.”

And now, again, it seemed that only she was the one transfigured. (He seemed to his fancy to be the one left behind.) He felt that he should never see her more on earth; “but” (he said) “people must be able to love, though they cannot meet or see each other.” All his meagre future was to be illuminated by transfigured and glorified dream-pictures only. But as the tree (according to Bonnet) is planted as much in the air above it as it is in the earth beneath it, and derives nourishment quite as much from the one as from the other, so it is with every true human-creature. And thus Firmian lived in the future with more vivid life than in the past—only with fewer of his root-fibres in the visible ground. The whole tree, top-shoot, branches, and all, stood under the open sky, drinking the free breeze of heaven with its every blossom—where all he had to invigorate and cheer him were two invisible friends—the one a woman, the other a man.

At length the thin, beautiful vapour of his dreams thickened to a fog. Nathalie’s sorrow for his death came hovering over him, and his lonesomeness struck heavy on his heart, which longed unutterably for some living being which should stand there and love him with all its heart. But this being was still behind him, doing its best to overtake him—Henry, to wit.

“Mr. Leibgeber,” the voice of some one coming up after him suddenly cried, “stop a moment, please. Here is your handkerchief; I picked it up down below there.”

He looked round, and there was the girl whom Nathalie had helped out of the water, coming running up with a white handkerchief. But as he had his own in his pocket, and the girl, gazing at him in astonishment, said he had dropped it near the basin about an hour before (though he had not then had so long a coat on)—a gush of gladness streamed into his heart. Leibgeber had arrived, and had been down by the basin.

He hastened to Bayreuth as fast as he could, all in a whirl, with the handkerchief in his hand. It was moist, as if his friend’s weeping eyes had rested on it. He pressed it warmly to his own, but it would not dry them, for he thought how Henry passed his life in solitude, exemplifying the truth of his own saying, “He who spares his feelings, and puts armour upon them, keeps them most delicately sensitive—just as the skin under the nails is the easiest hurt of all.” At the Sun Hotel, Firmian learned from John the waiter that Leibgeber had actually arrived, and was gone on about half-an-hour ago. Firmian ran off after him, up and down the streets of Hof, blind and deaf, in such tempestuous pursuit of his friend that he forgot all about the moist handkerchief.

After a long while, he caught sight of him climbing the long hill behind the village of Bindloch, a mountain-road, in the true sense of the words, not to be either ascended or descended at any great speed. Leibgeber was straining up it as fast as he could, however, with the view of unexpectedly overtaking Firmian before he got to Hof, perhaps in Münchberg, or in Gefrees, if not in Berneck itself (which is at no very great distance from Bayreuth).

But was not everything destined to turn out ten times better? Did not Siebenkæs, at the bottom of the hill, at last catch sight of him near the level place on the summit, and call out his name—which he did not hear? Did not Siebenkæs then run at an extraordinary pace after his ascending friend (with the handkerchief in his hand), and did not the latter chance to turn round, by accident, to have a glance at the sunny landscape, and see all Bayreuth, and—at long and at last—his friend hastening after him? And finally, did they not rush together, the one down the hill, the other up (not like two hostile armies, however, but like two wreathed and foaming goblets of joy and friendship)?

Henry speedily perceived that in his friend’s breast there was much of a powerful and dissolvent kind—belonging both to past and to future times—at work, wherefore he sought to appease and calm all the “Naiads of the rivers of tears.”

“Everything went off divinely,” he said, “and everybody is well. Now you are as free as I am. Your chains are off—the world is before you—so in you plunge into it, fresh and merry, like me, and begin to live your real life, for the first time in your life.” “You are right,” said Firmian, “this is like meeting you again after death. Heaven is above us, peaceful and quiet, gladsome, serene, and warm.” For that very reason, he had not the courage to ask after those he had left behind, particularly his widow. Leibgeber expressed great joy that he had caught him up four post-stations on that side of Hof, and all the more that, this being so, they could be together for a good long while before they must part in Hof (which latter was the very point which he was anxious to establish and emphasise).

He now commenced a series of jokes on the subject of dying (with the view of preventing anything in the shape of an expression of the emotions which they both felt), and these jokes recurred like milestones, or stone-benches, all along the turnpike-road to Hof; we have no way of escaping them on the journey, unless we turn back. He asked him if the diet had been sufficient which he had given him, as the old Germans, Romans, and Egyptians did to their dead. He said that Firmian must be excessively pious, inasmuch as he had risen from the dead when he had barely shuffled off this mortal coil, confirming Lavater’s doctrine that there are two resurrections, a first for the good, and a later one for the bad. He said, further, that he could not have had a better Archimimus[^[94]] after his departure from this life than himself. Leibgeber’s spirit and body sprang rather than walked. “I am always in high spirits, and free, while I am in the open air. Beneath the clouds, I have no clouds. When we are young, the raw north wind of life whistles only on our backs, and, by Heaven! I am younger than any reviewer.”

They passed the night in Berneck, between the lofty bridge-piers of mountains, through which once streamed those seas which have overspread our globe with fields. Time and Nature—grand and almighty—were reposing side by side on the confines of two kingdoms—between the steep, lofty, memorial-pillars of creation—amongst firm mountains, empty castles crumbling into ruin, rock-barriers and stone-tumuli lying about the rounded green hills, like broken tables of the law of earth’s first creation.

When they arrived here, Henry said, “The clergy between this and Vaduz must not find out that you have exchanged time for eternity, or they will ask you for the surplice fees which every corpse has to pay in each parish which it passes through. If we were in old Rome (and not in Berneck),” said he, before the inn, “the landlord would never let you into his house except down the chimney. And if we were in Athens, you would be obliged to creep through a hoop-petticoat just as if you were going into holy orders.”[^[95]] On an occasion of this sort, he never could cease from his witticisms, in which he differed (to his disadvantage) from me; and he said that metaphors and similes were like gold pieces, of which Rousseau says that the first is harder to get than the next thousand.

Therefore it was beyond his power not to be struck with an idea when, in the evening, he saw Firmian paring his nails. “I can’t understand,” he said “(now that I see it in your case), why Katherine Bieri—whose nails had to be cut 250 years after she was dead—couldn’t have done it just as well herself as you do after having given tip the ghost.” And when he saw him turn over on his left side in bed, he simply observed that he made his bed-quilt rise and fall in the same manner as St. John the Evangelist does his earthen one—the grave—to the present hour.[^[96]]

In the morning, it rained a little upon these flowers of humour. As Leibgeber was laving that lion’s breast of his with cold water, Firmian noticed that he pushed aside a little key, and asked what it opened. “It unfastens nothing,” he said; “but it fastened the leaden cenotaphium.”[^[97]] Firmian was obliged to lean out of window with his eyes, and dry them unobserved. Then (with his head still outside) he said, “Give me the key. It is the wax-impression of a future one. I want to make it the music-key of my inner music. I shall hang it up, and look at it every day; and if ever my resolution to be better should run down, I shall wind it up again with this watch-key.” He got it. Then Leibgeber chanced to look into the mirror; and he cried, “I seem almost to see myself double, not to say triple. One of me must be dead, the one in there or the one out here. Which of us in this room is it that is the real dead man appearing to the other? Or are we only appearing to ourselves? Heh! you my three me’s, what say you to the fourth?”—he asked, and turned to the two-reflected images, then to Firmian—and said, “Here I am, too!”

There was something in these sayings calculated to cause a shudder for his future. Firmian, whose calmer reason made him dread a dangerous growth of this metamorphic self-reflecting during the solitude of Leibgeber’s wanderings, said, with tender anxiety, “My dear Henry, if you are going to be always so much alone upon your eternal journeys, I can’t help fearing it will do you harm. God himself is not alone. He beholds His universe.” “I can always triple myself, in the profoundest solitude, not excepting that of the universe itself,” answered Leibgeber, strangely moved by the coffin-key—and he went to the looking-glass, and pressed his eyeball sideways with his finger, so as to see his reflection double; “but you can’t see the third person there.” Then he went on in a merrier tone, with the view of cheering Firmian (who was not much cheered by what he said, nevertheless), leading him to the window. “But it is a far finer affair as regards the street. I have a much larger company there. I put my finger to my eye, and produce the twin of everybody, be he who he may; double the landlord, as well as his chalk-score. Not a president on his way to his meeting but ‘finds his fellow’ and meets his match. I provide him with his Orang Utang, and the pair of them march past me, tête-à-tête. Does a genius want an imitator? I take my finger—and hey! presto!—a living facsimile of him on the spot. Every learned collaborator has a collaborator collaborating with him. Associates have associates associated with them. Only sons are made out in duplicate, because, as you see, I carry my plastic nature, author, and embossing-instrument—my finger to wit—always about with me. And I seldom let a solo-dancer caper with fewer than four legs; he has to hang in air as a pair of men. But it would amaze you to see how much I can make out of a single fellow and his limbs by this sort of grouping. Try to form some idea (by way of wind-up) of the crowds and masses of people I have when I double such things as funerals and other processions, with doppelgänger, and strengthen every regiment with an entire regiment of flügelmen, repeating and imitating everything. For (as we have been saying), like a grasshopper, I have my ovipositing instrument—my finger—always with me. From all which, Firmian, you may at all events draw the consolation that I enjoy more society than any of you—just as much again, in fact. And, moreover, it consists entirely of people who afford me endless amusement without trouble or inconvenience, by aping their own gestures and proceedings.”

Hereupon they looked each other in the face, full of joyful affection, and wholly freed from any unpleasant traces of their recent wilder mode of jesting. A third person would have been almost terrified at their bodily resemblance in this hour, for each was a plaster-of-Paris cast of the other; but their affection for each other made their faces seem unlike to themselves. Each saw in the other only that which he liked, because it was not in himself; and it was with their features, as with good deeds, which inspire us with, emotion and admiration in others, but not in ourselves.

When they were out in the air again, and on their way to Gefrees, and the coffin-key, as well as their recent conversation, continually brought to mind their parting (whose death sickle bent, closer around them with every milestone on their road), Henry endeavoured to cast a rosy beam or two into Firmian’s mist by putting into his hands an accurate protocol of everything he had arranged and agreed upon with the Count von Vaduz concerning his duties. “The Count,” he said, “would of course think you had merely forgotten the conversation; but it is better thus. Like a negro slave, you have killed yourself to obtain your freedom and reach the Gold Coast of your silver coast; and it would be damnable, indeed, if you were to be damned now after your decease.” “I can never thank you enough, you dear friend,” said Firmian; “but you should not make things harder for me than they are, and draw yourself back like a hand from the clouds the moment you have emptied yourself. Why is it that I am not to see you again after we have said good-bye? Tell me.” “First,” he answered, “because people—the Count, the Widow’s Fund, your widow—might find out that I was extant in two editions, and that would be an accursed misfortune in a world where a fellow can hardly be allowed to sit and sleep in peace in his first original edition. Secondly, I intend to make my appearance in several of the broad comedy characters which there are so many of to be played on this ship of fools of an earth; and as long as not a single devil among the audience knows me, I shall not be ashamed of my parts. Ah! I could give you plenty more reasons into the bargain. Besides, it delights me to come down with a flop, as if out of the moon on to this earth; and in among mankind, unknown, uprooted, untrammelled; a lusus naturæ, a diabolus ex machina, a monstrous moon-lithopædium. Firmian, it is a settled thing. Perhaps in a few years’ time I may send you a letter now and then, more particularly as the Galatians[^[98]] placed upon the funeral pyre letters directed to the dead, as they might have put them in a post-office. Hut it really is a settled thing now—positively.” “I should not give in to all this so quietly,” said Siebenkæs, “if I did not feel convinced that I shall very soon see you again. I am not like you. I look forward to two meetings with you—one here below, one there above. And would to God that I could bring you to die as you did me, and we met afterwards on a Bindloch hill, but were going to be longer together.”

If these wishes chance to remind the readers of Schoppe in Titan, they may consider in what sense Fate often interprets and fulfils our wishes. Leibgeber merely answered, “People must love, though they may not be able to see each other; and, when all’s done, it is only Love that we can love after all, and that we can each see in the other every day.”

In Gefrees, Leibgeber proposed that, as there was such ample leisure (there being nothing to see in, or out of, the one street of the town), they should exchange clothes, and that particularly in order that the Count of Vaduz (who had not for years seen him in any other dress than the one he now wore) should not find anything to be struck with about Siebenkæs, but that everything about him should be exactly as it always had been, even to the nails on the heels of his shoes. The thought of being, in future, embraced (so to speak) by Henry’s sleeves, and clasped and warmed by all his external reliquia, fell like a broad ray of warm February sun on Siebenkæs’s breast. Leibgeber went into the next room, and, to begin with, threw his short green jacket through the half-open door, crying, “Come in, coat with skirts!” then followed up with necktie and waistcoat, and long trousers with leather stripes, saying, “Come in, breeches!” and ended up with his shirt, and the words, “Here with the winding-sheet!”

The shirt thus thrown in was, to Siebenkæs, as an astrologer (or interpreter of signs), with respect to Leibgeber. He saw that he had a higher motive in view in this bodily transmigration into clothes than mere dressing for a certain character at Vaduz; to wit, the taking up of his abode in the shell, or cocoon, which had contained his friend. Not in a whole volume of Gellert’s or Klopstock’s ‘Letters on Friendship,’ not in a whole week of Leibgeberian days of self-sacrifice, did there seem anything so beloved and delicious as in thus falling heir to his clothes. He would not profane this surmise which made him so happy by alluding to it in words, but he was confirmed in it when Leibgeber came out transformed into a Siebenkæs, looked at himself in a satisfied manner in the mirror, and then laid his three fingers, in silence, on Firmian’s forehead. This was his highest token of love; wherefore, to my own and Firmian’s great joy, I mention, that he repeated this sign more than three times during dinner (the conversation running on wholly indifferent subjects). What different and interminable jokes would he not have made upon this moulting at another time, and under the influence of other feelings! Merely to guess at a few. How much he would have made of the rebinding of their two folio volumes, so as to involve Herr Lochmüller (the landlord at Gefrees) in the deepest and most diverting embarrassment, which that polite gentleman could by no means have extricated himself from one minute before this, my fourth book, came to his aid, which at this moment is only in Bayreuth, and not even gone to press! But Leibgeber did nothing of all this; and even of witticisms he only delivered himself of a few weak ones; about their being changelings, about the sudden French transition of people en longue robe into people en robe courts. And he said he would no longer call Siebenkæs a transfigured being in boots, but one in shoes, which was more befitting, as well as sounding somewhat more sublime. It was with particular pleasure that he saw how his dog, Saufinder—between the old bodies and the new clothes, as if between two fires of love—could not properly make out the matter in the least degree, and often went from one to the other with a most uneasy face. The concordat between the two parties—the shortening of the one, and the lengthening of the other—puzzled the creature, and he could make neither head nor tail of it all. “I like him twice as much as I did,” said Leibgeber; “believe me. If he is faithful to you, that is not being unfaithful to me.” He could not possibly have said anything more complimentary than this.

All the bleak way from Gefrees to Muenchberg, Firmian, from gratitude, took the greatest pains to reflect back on Leibgeber that sunshine of cheerfulness into which Henry was continually trying to lead him. It was no easy matter, especially when he saw him striding after him in the long coat. He concentrated himself to an extreme effort in Muenchberg, the last post-station before Hof, where the corporeal arms with which they clasped each other were, so to speak, to be cut off by a long separation.

As they were going along the road to Hof, more silent than before, Leibgeber being first, and feeling refreshed by the pine-covered mountain on his right, began (as he usually did on his journeys) to whistle national airs, both merry and sad, for the most part in minor keys. He said he thought there were many worse town-and-street-fifers, and that he performed on the foot-passenger’s post-horn which Nature had given him in a manner deserving of some applause. To Firmian, however (now that their parting was so near), these tones, which seemed to come echoing back from Henry’s long journeys of the past, and forward from his coming lonely ones as well, were as a kind of Swiss Ranz des Vaches, which went to his very heart; and it was well he was walking last, for he could scarce restrain his tears. Ah! take music away when the heart is full and must not overflow!

At length he brought his voice sufficiently under command to be able to say, without any apparent emotion, “Are you fond of whistling as you go, and do you do it often?” In the tone of this question there was a something as if the fluting was not quite so much of an enjoyment to him as to the musician himself. “Always,” answered Leibgeber. “I whistle[^[99]] away life, and the world’s stage, and all there is upon it—and all that sort of thing—a great many matters in the past; and, like a steeple-warder at Carlsbad, I whistle in the future. Do you dislike it? Is my fuguing incorrect, or my whistling a breach of the rules of pure composition?” “Oh! only too beautiful,” answered Siebenkæs.

And then Leibgeber began again, but with tenfold power, and performed such a lovely and melting mouth-organ voluntary, that Siebenkæs came up to him with four long strides, and, putting his handkerchief to his eyes with his left hand, while he laid his right gently on Henry’s lips, he said in broken accents, “Henry, spare me! I don’t know why, but every note of music moves me too deeply to-day.” The musician looked at him—Leibgeber’s whole inner world was in his eyes—then nodded in a decided manner, and strode rapidly onwards in silence, without looking round or letting his face be seen. But his hands, perhaps involuntarily, went on making little movements, beating time in continuation of the melody.

At length they arrived, oppressed and anxious, at the Grub-street or Mint-city where I am now seated, pasting and colouring these assignats—this paper-money for half the world—namely, Hof.[^[100]] It is by no means in my favour, indeed, that at that time I knew nothing whatever of all these matters which half Europe is now being made acquainted with through me. I was a good deal younger then—sitting alone at home like a cabbage-lettuce, with the best will in the world to close to a head—which process of closing, in men as well as in lettuces, is hindered by nothing so much as by the contact of the neighbouring salad-plants. It is easier, pleasanter, and more advantageous, for a youngster to go from solitude into society (from the seed-bed into the garden), than the converse—from the market-place into the corner. Unmitigated solitude and unmitigated society are both bad: and, with the exception of their order of succession, nothing is so important as their succession.

In Hof, Siebenkæs engaged two rooms at the inn, thinking Leibgeber would not part from him till the morning. However, he (whom his own pre-determination to say good-bye, and his dread of saying it, had fretted and annoyed immensely for a considerable time) had taken a mental vow that their two spirits should be torn asunder that day, and that, immediately thereupon, he should be off into Saxony as hard as he could, though it should want but a quarter of an hour to midnight; but, at all events, before that particular day should come to a close. He went into his room, smiling and pleasant, and thought of the airs he had been whistling (which were still running in both their heads, if not in their hearts). But he soon enticed him out of that empty deaf-mute of a room into the diverting tumult and stir of the coffee-room—not remaining long there, however, either—but as the moon, in her first quarter, was standing like a lighted lamp just above a post in the market-place, he asked him to go for a cruise round the town with him. So they went, and climbed up the avenue, and looked down at the gardens in the city-moat (which, perhaps, deserve to take the pas over other artificial meadows, inasmuch as they are more specially sown for cattle than others). I presume this was the reason why Leibgeber (who had been in Switzerland) remarked late at night (when the country, adorned and adopted by Nature, but disinherited by Art, lay extended before him) that the people of Hof were like the Swiss, whose whole country was a garden, except the few gardens in it.

The pair went on drawing wider and wider parallels around the town. They crossed a bridge, from which they saw a gallows-hill overgrown with grass, which reminded them of that other ice-region, with its crater, where, exactly a year ago, they had bidden each other good-bye at night, but with the sweeter hope of an earlier meeting. Two friends such as they are always struck with the same ideas in the same circumstances. Each is—if not the unison—at all events the octave, fifth, or fourth to the other. Henry tried to rekindle a little light in his friend’s dark house of sorrow and mourning by aid of the bird-pole, which stood like a commandant’s flag-staff, or a burning stake, not far from the Supreme Criminal Court’s place of judicature. He said, “A shooter-king has his Sinai, where he can both promulgate his laws and vindicate them, close at his hand here, in a delightful manner, beside his lever and leaping-pole, such as you heaved yourself up by to the dignity of Great Negus and Grand Mogul of Kuhschnappel. Button’s law—that every elevation has another of equal height and similar composition opposite to it—applies to a great number of eminences which correspond to one another; gallows-hills and thrones, for instance, in this case; the two sides of the choir in churches; the fifth story and Pindus: show-booths, and the Chairs of Professors Extraordinary.”

As Firmian did not speak, but remained sunk in sadder similes, Henry, too, held his peace. He led him towards another stone (for he was intimately acquainted with the whole country), one with a prettier name, the “Stone of Joy.” At last, while they were toiling up the hill towards this stone, Firmian took heart and said, “Tell me right out—I am quite prepared—tell me at once, on your honour, when are you going away from me for ever?” “Now,” answered Henry. On the pretence of its being easier so to climb the hill-side, all flowers and perfumed mountain-plants, they were holding each other by the hand, and as they went they pressed hands sometimes, as if from accidents of mechanical motion. But pain struck great roots that waxed amain into Firmian’s heart, roots that split it asunder as the roots of trees split rocks. Firmian laid himself down on the grey projecting rock, which divided the green slope like a boundary-stone, and he drew his departing friend down to his breast. “Sit down very close beside me this once more,” he said. As the manner of friends is, each pointed out to the other everything he saw. Henry showed him the camp of the town pitched all about the foot of the hill, and looking as if fallen into a deep sleep, nothing moving in it but some flickering lights. The river went coiling along beneath the moon round the town like a great serpent with a sparkling back, then stretched itself out through two bridges. The half-shimmer of the moon, and the white transparent vapour of the night, lifted the hills, the woods, and the earth, up to the heavens; and the water on the earth was spangled with stars like the blue night above, and the Earth, like Uranus, had a doubled moon, as it wore a child in either hand.

“In reality,” Leibgeber began, “we can both always see each other whenever we please. All we have to do is to look into a looking-glass. That is our moon-mirror.”[^[101]] “No,” said Firmian, “we will fix on a time when we will think of each other—on our birthdays—and on the day of my pantomime death, and on this.” “Very well,” said Leibgeber, “these shall be our four quarter-days.”

Of a sudden, the hand of the latter rested upon a dead lark, which had probably been shot. He clasped Firmian’s shoulders, and, raising him from the ground, said, “Stand up; we are men. What is all this fuss about? Fare you well! If ever I let you out of my head, or out of my heart, may God dash me to atoms with a thousand thunderbolts. You are and shall be for ever in my bosom as warmly as my own living heart. And so, good-bye, and all good attend you; and in all the Berghem Seapiece of your life may there not be a single wave the size of a tear. Farewell!” They clung together, and wept heartily, and Firmian did not answer as yet. His fingers stroked and pressed his Henry’s hair. At last he leaned his cheek against the beloved eyes; before his own eyes the wide abyss of night shimmered, and his lips uttered (but with no cadence in the tone), “‘Fare you well,’ do you say to me? Ah! that I cannot, when I have lost my truest, my oldest friend. The earth will always be as dark to me as it is now around us here. It will be hard for me when I am dying, and, in my feverish fancy, think I am only pretending to die again, and stretch out my hand in the darkness to feel for you, and say, ‘Henry, close my eyes again, I cannot die without you!’” Henry whispered, “Tell me what else to say to you, and then may God punish me if I utter another syllable.” Firmian stammered, “Will you always like me, and shall I see you soon again?” “Not soon; not for a long time,” he answered, “and I shall never cease to love you.” As he was starting to go, Firmian held him back. “We will look at each other once more,” he said. And they bent back, their faces channelled by streams of emotion, and looked at each other for the last time, while the night-wind, like the arm of a stream, mingled with the deep river, and then rushed on united with it in deeper billows, while the great mountain-range of creation trembled before the tearful eyes. But Henry tore himself away, made a sign with his hand as if to say all was over, and took his flight down the hill.

After a little, Firmian was impelled after him—not knowing why—by the goad of pain and sorrow. His inner man, compressed by the tourniquet into insensibility, did not feel the amputation of his limb just then. They both hurried along the same road, though separated by hills and valleys. Whenever Henry stopped and looked back, so did Firmian. Alas! after a sultry storm, such as this, the waves all freeze to spikes of ice, and the heart lies upon them transfixed. As Firmian went on broken-hearted, by unknown, darkling paths, it seemed to him as if all the death-bells on earth were tolling behind him, as if the stream of life were running dry before him fast; and when he saw the blue of the sky cut across by a black storm-tree[^[102]] which lay upon the stars like the bier of the future, a voice seemed to cry, “With this foot-rule of vapour, Fate is measuring you, your world, and your love, for your last coffin.”

From the circumstance that the distance between him and the other figure kept always the same, Henry at last became aware that it was following him, and halted only when he halted. So he made up his mind that he would lie in wait in the next village for the coming up of this form which was creeping after him. In the next village then, Töpen (which lies deep in a valley), he awaited, in the broad shadow of a gleaming church, the arrival of this unknown being which was on his track. Firmian came hastening along the broad white street, dazed with sorrow—blind in the moonlight—and stopped, as if frozen, close by Henry from whom he had so recently been severed. There they stood facing each other, like two spirits above their corpses, each taking the other for a ghost (just as the superstitious think the noises made by the buried-alive are caused by spirits). Firmian trembled lest Leibgeber should be vexed with him, and opened his arms and stammered out, “It is I, Henry,” and went to him. Henry gave a cry of pain, and threw himself upon the faithful breast; but his vow sealed his lips. And thus these two miserable, or blessed beings, speechless, blind and weeping, pressed their beating hearts close together once more. And when this moment—wordless, full of torture, full of bliss—was over and past, an iron, cold one, tore them asunder, and Fate seized them with two almighty arms, and hurled the one bleeding heart to the south, and the other to the north; while the dejected, bleeding corpses passed slowly and alone, along the widening path of parting, in the night.

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And why is it that my own heart breaks in twain with such a pang? Why should it be that, long ere I came to their parting, I could not keep my own tears back? Ah! my dear Christian, is it not because in this church those who once lay upon your heart and mine are mouldering into dust? No, no, I am used to it now; in the black magic of our lives to see skeletons suddenly start up in our friends’ places; that of every two who put their arms about each other one has to die;[^[103]] that an unknown breath blows the brittle glass which we call a human breast, and a cry, which we know not of, shatters it in a moment. It does not pain me now so much as of old, ye two brothers sleeping in the church, that the hard, cold hand of death struck you away so soon from the honey-dew of life, and that ye stretched your wings and have vanished away. Oh! either your sleep is sounder than ours, or your dreams are happier, or your awaking is blither. But what agonises us in every grave-hillock is this thought. “Alas! beloved heart, how I would have loved you had I known you were going to die!”

But, since none of us can take a corpse’s hand and say, “Pale one! at all events I have sweetened thy transitory life a little; I have, at any rate, never given that faded heart of thine anything but love and happiness;” and as when time, sorrow, and the loveless winter of life have beautified our hearts, at length we must all go up, with unavailing sighs, to the overthrown forms which are lying beneath the landslip of the grave, and say to them, “Oh! that, now that I am better and gentler, I have thee with me no longer, and can no longer love thee! Oh! that the beloved breast is transparent and broken in, and no heart in it which I would love more fondly, and gladden as I never did before.” What have we left but an unavailing sorrow, a dumb repentance, and never-ending bitter tears?

Yes, my Christian, we have something better left still—a warmer, truer, lovelier, love for every soul which we have not yet lost.

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CHAPTER XXIII.

DAYS IN VADUZ—NATHALIE’S LETTER—A NEW YEAR’S WISH—WILDERNESS OF DESTINY AND THE HEART.

We next meet our Firmian (promoted to higher rank on his retirement from the world, as officers are on theirs from the service, to that of Inspector, namely) in the Inspector’s quarters at Vaduz. He found he had to twist his way through so many thickets of prickly-pear and impenetrable thorn-hedges, that, amid his labours, he almost forgot that he was alone—so utterly alone—in the world. No one could endure and overcome solitude, if it were not for the hope of companionship in the future, or for the belief in invisible companionship in the present.

With the Count he had only to seem to be what he really was, and then he was most like the unconventional Leibgeber. He found the Count to be an old man of the world, living alone, with neither wife, sons, nor female servants—a man who filled up and adorned his grey years with the arts and sciences, the last, and most lasting, enjoyments of a life enjoyed to the end—and who cared for nothing on earth (saving always the amusement of jesting upon it) except his daughter, who (as we are aware) had been Nathalie’s greatest friend in the starry and flowery days of youth.

As he had devoted all his powers of body and soul, in early life, to climbing to the tops of all the slipperiest mats de cocagne of pleasure, and carrying off the prizes from them, he had come down to earth with both sides of his being a little wearied. His mental life was now a kind of nursing, and lying in a tepid bath, which it required a shower of cold water to make him raise himself from, and into which fresh warm water had to be constantly being poured. The point of honour of keeping his word, and the greatest possible happiness for his daughter, were the only unbroken reins by which moral laws had ever restrained him; for he looked upon all their other covenants more in the light of flower-chains, or strings of pearls—matters which a man of the world breaks and mends often enough in his career.

As it is easier to imitate lameness than straight walking, it was not difficult for Siebenkæs to enact the part of his beloved Diable Boiteux. The Count was somewhat struck with his white-painted face (which was natural to him), and with his melancholy, and a heap of nameless divergences (variations and aberrations) from Leibgeber. But the Inspector accounted for these to his patron by saying that he was so changed that he scarce recognised himself—that he seemed to have become the changeling of his former self since his illness, and since he had seen his college friend Siebenkæs depart this life in Kuhschnappel. In brief, the Count could not but believe what he was told; who would think of such an absurd story as the one I am telling here? And if the reader had been present in the room himself, I am sure he would have believed the Inspector in preference to me, if it were for no other reason than that he remembered more of his old conversations with the Count than the latter did himself. (’Tis true he got this knowledge out of Leibgeber’s diary.)

At the same time, as he had to speak, and act, in the capacity of chargé-d’affaires, or resident consul, and proxy of his beloved Leibgeber, there were two things which he was, in a high degree, constrained to be—cheerful and kindly. Leibgeber’s humour had a greater power of colour, a greater freedom of drawing, and a more poetic and citizen-of-the-world-ish, and ideal compass and range, than Firmian’s own[^[104]] and this assumed brightness of temper by and by became genuine. Moreover, his delicacy of feeling, and his friendship, kept constantly before his mental vision, as on a Moses-cloudy-pillar on his path of life, a shining, magnified image of Henry with a glory, and a crown of laurel on his brow and every thought within him cried, “Be glorious, be godlike, be a Socrates, to do honour to the spirit whose ambassador you are.” And which of us could assume the name of a beloved person, and go and act unworthily?

Nothing on earth is so often deceived—not even women or princes—as the conscience. Our Inspector tried to make his believe that his name had really been Leibgeber in early days—just as he signed it now—and that he really was helping the Count in his work. Moreover, who could be more ready than he to make a perfectly clean breast of the whole story to the Count as soon as ever the proper time came? It was easy to see that a humourous, juristic forgery, and pictorial illusion of this sort would please him better than any amount of truths founded upon reason, or responsa prudentum—to say nothing of his gratification at finding he could have his friend, humorist, and jurist, with two heads, two hearts, four legs and arms—in duplicate, in short. Besides, the fact must not be lost sight of that the lies he told were more unavoidable lies than lies for the amusement of the thing—inasmuch as he touched as seldom as he could upon Leibgeber’s previous conversations and relations, and as much as possible on his own, which involved no breaches of truth.

Thus it is with—not our Inspector only—but man in general. He has an indescribable fondness for halves, perhaps because he is a colossus and demi-god standing, with out-stretched legs, upon two worlds. He particularly delights in half-romances, half-postage of selfishness, half-proofs, half-scholars (smatterers in knowledge), half-holidays, half-spheres—and (consequently) better halves.

Siebenkæs’s new labours of various kinds concealed his own pains and sufferings from him for the first few weeks (at all events, when the sun was not shining). But what gave him his largest extra-ration of pleasure was the Count’s satisfaction with his legal knowledge, and careful and accurate style of doing his work. Once, when the Count said to him, “Friend Leibgeber, you are keeping your promise like a man. Your ability and accuracy over your work are deserving of all praise, and I do not conceal from you that I felt just the slightest shade of a misgiving on this very head, notwithstanding my high opinion of your other talents. For, like your Frederick II., I consider talk and work to be two wholly distinct things; and as regards the latter, I look for the most accurate and methodical attention to all its details in every one I have to deal with.” Firmian rejoiced within himself, as he thought, “At all events I have turned aside some little matter of blame from my dear Henry, and gained a little modicum of praise for him; though he could have done it all much better himself, if he had chosen.”

After a pleasure of self-sacrifice such as this, one always wants to go on enjoying fresh pleasures of self-sacrifice, and making new sacrifices, just as children, who, whenever they are given anything, cannot cease giving. He brought out his ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’ gave them to the Count, and told him plainly and openly that they were his own work. “This is not a deception in the slightest,” he thought; “though he supposes they are by Leibgeber; I have no other name now.” The Count never wearied of reading and praising these papers, and what particularly pleased him was, that, in the path of satire, he followed the guidance of his own two compatriots, the British Castor and Pollux of humour, Swift and Sterne. Siebenkæs listened to the encomiums on his book with such delight that he seemed exactly like a conceited author—whereas, in reality, he was nothing but a lover of his Henry, who had managed to conjure a few extra laurel-crowns on to his image in the Count’s mind.

This single enjoyment of his was, of a truth, necessary to him by way of consolation and cordial for a life which was flowing on, beshaded and chilled between two steep banks of legal business, week after week, month after month. Alas! with the exception of the good Count’s talk (whose extraordinary kindness to him would have made his heart beat even more warmly than it did, could he have thanked him for it in another’s name as well as his own),—he heard nothing better than an occasional murmur of the waves of his life. He found himself, every day, in his old, disagreeable post of a critic, compelled to read what he had to give judgment upon. Formerly it had been books—now it was lawyers. He saw into so many empty heads, into so many empty hearts—saw such darkness in the former, such blackness in the latter. He saw how very much the common-herd (when it comes to the Egeria-fountain of the juristic ink-bottle to benefit its calculi), is like Carlsbad bath-guests, in whose case the hot-springs bring all diseased matter to the surface of the skin. He saw that most of the oldest, and worst, members of the legal profession are, in only one beautiful respect, like poisonous plants—namely, that they are not half so poisonous, but more innocuous, while they are young. He saw that a just judgment often did as much harm as an unjust one, and that the one was appealed against just as much as the other. He saw that it was easier, and, at the same time, more distasteful, to be a judge than an advocate; although neither of them loses anything by an injustice—for a judge is paid for a judgment reversed on appeal, just as an advocate is for a case which he loses. He saw that, in dealing with defendants, the principle of grooms is applied (who look upon the currycomb as a good half of the forage). And, finally, he saw that nobody fares worse in the affair than he who sees it, and that the devil is the very last of all things that the devil takes.

Amid labours and views such as these, the tender fibres of the heart contract, and the open arms of the inner man are paralysed—the overweighted soul scarce has the strength to love, let alone the time. When we love, and seek after things, it must be at the expense of persons. If we work too much, we must love too little. There was but one place where poor Firmian gave vent, once in the twenty-four hours, to the longings and prayers of his tender soul—namely, his pillow; and its cover was the white handkerchief waiting for his weeping eyes. A deluge (made of tears) was over all his former world—nothing floating on its surface but the two withered funeral-garlands of departed days—the flowers which Lenette and Nathalie had worn on their breasts, like petrified medicine-flowers of his sick soul.

Living so far away, and so wholly outside the elliptical vault, he could hear as little of Kuhschnappel as of Schraplau—of Lenette and Nathalie not a word. He merely learned, from the ‘Messenger of the Gods and Advertiser of German Programmes,’ that he was dead, and that the critical profession was thereby deprived of one of its ablest and most zealous members. Thus our Inspector was honoured by the necrologium sooner than any other German scholar ever was—as soon, in fact, as the Olympic conqueror Euthymus,[^[105]] to whom, by a decree of the Delphic Oracle, sacrifice and divine worship was adjudged during his lifetime. I do not know which kind of ears—long ears or deaf—the German trump of fame prefers to blow to.

And yet, in the depths of this ice-month of his love-imploring heart, and in the wilderness of his loneliness, Firmian still had one living, resplendent flower—and that was Nathalie’s parting-kiss. Ah! ye who waste and pine because of our insatiableness, did ye but know how a kiss, which is a first and a last, blossoms and blooms throughout a life—imperishable double-rose of speechless lips and burning souls—ye would search for bliss more enduring—aye, and find it too! That kiss sealed, in Firmian, and confirmed the spirit-bond immortalising and eternising love at its loveliest and brightest hour of bloom. The speechless lips were still eloquent, to him. The spirit breathed between them as of old; and often as he saw, by night, behind the veil of his closed, tearful eyelids, Nathalie going away from him, with all her sacred sorrows, and vanishing down the darkling path—he never had enough of the parting, the anguish, and the love.

At last, when six months had passed, one beautiful winter morning, when the white hills with their snow-crystal woods lay bathed in the rose-blood of the sun, and Aurora was stretching her pinions more widely as she gently laid them down upon the glittering earth—there flew a letter into Firmian’s empty hand, as if borne upon the morning-breeze of a spring as yet among the things to be. It was from Nathalie, who, like the rest of the world, supposed him to be the Henry of former days.

“Dear Leibgeber,—I can restrain or control my heart no longer. Every day it longs to break in pieces before yours, and show you all its wounds. You were once my friend, I know; am I quite forgotten? Have I lost you too? Ah! surely not; it is only that you cannot speak to me for sorrow, since your Firmian died upon your breast, and still rests, vanishing into the frost of death, upon the aching spot. Ah! why did you persuade me to accept the fruit that grows upon his grave—and, as it were, open that grave anew every year?[^[106]] The first day I received this fruit was bitter—bitterer than any other. You will see from a little New Year’s Greeting, which I addressed to myself (and which I enclose), how I sometimes feel. One passage in it refers to a white rose in my room, from which I managed to gather a flower or two in December. My friend, now grant me a request, the making of which is really my object in writing this letter—my most earnest prayer for sorrow, a bitterer sorrow than is mine even now—for this will give me consolation. Tell me—for there is no one else who can—and I know no other—tell me everything about our dear one’s last hours and moments; what he said and what he suffered; how his eyes closed, and how his life ended? All this, everything, though it will pierce my heart, I must be told. What can it cost you and me but tears?—and tears soothe suffering eyes.

“I remain, your friend,

“NATHALIE A.

“P.S. If there were not so many causes to prevent me, I would go myself to his resting-place and gather relics for my soul; but, if you keep silence, I do not answer for anything. I send you my congratulations on your new appointment, and I hope I may be able to wish you joy some day by word of mouth; my heart may become so far whole once more that I shall be able to come and pay my dear friend a visit at her father’s, and see you without dying of sorrow, at the likeness you bear to your buried friend, unlike you now.”

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I venture to translate[^[107]] the pretty poem as follows: