The Sick Bed.--Eclipse of the Moon.--The Pyramid.
"If thou hast become my friend again, then hasten to thy friend who is soon to die. Make thy peace with me, ere I go to the eternally Silent Land, as we did the last time, before we went out into the earthly one. Ah, thou inexpressibly beloved one! I have indeed often offended, but always loved thee! O come, let not the short breath of my breaking heart, which has consisted on this earth of nothing but unsatisfied sighs, vanish with a last vain sigh for thee. Thou saw'st me for the first time when my eyes were blind; see me for the last time, when they are becoming so once more!"
This leaf, coming at an hour when the love of a human being was such a blessed thing for him, hurried him away from the palace, but the parts of his heart in which it touched him, were bleeding. Such a journey through the night bows down the soul, and on this short passage he saw his friend die more than ten times over. Every bird he chased out of its bed made him think, how will they in the darkness find their little bough again? Every dissolving light that trailed about at a distance through the gloom, made him think for what sighs, for what painful steps, will it just now illumine the weary ascent; and it seemed to him as if he saw the human life going. It did not make him more cheerful when he saw several chariots set round with a halo of torches, filled with the idle guests of the souper, which they, like himself, were leaving, roll along as hurriedly as if they were hasting to visit a dying friend. At last the slumbering city unswathed itself out of the shadows; the Pharos-lamp of the warder and a few widely scattered lights, which probably were measuring off with their sad and untrimmed beams the night of some invalid, fell on the mourning-ground of his soul.
Softly he knocked at the door of the sick house, softly it was opened, softly he went up the stairs; nothing broke the silence but the sound of the clock, pealing like a funeral knell into the dumb house of sorrow, with its twelve strokes, a voice which he had so often heard there. Ah! there lay suffering in bed a form, which one will forgive all, and which one hastens to love and to cheer a little longer, ere it shall stir no more. Not the unclean, shriveled sick face, not the hue of life corroded by fever, not the wrinkles of the lip--not all of these was it in Amandus (nor is it in other invalids) which rent utterly Gustavus's heart and hopes, but the heavily rolling, spasmodically flashing, wild and yet burnt-out glassy sick eye, upon which all sufferings of past nights and the nearness of the last were so legibly written.
Amandus stretched his dead hand far out to meet him, as if it were possible that any one else than he still remembered the black dyer's hand of another, which he had lately reached out to him. For him the reunion was sweeter than to Gustavus, who saw waiting behind it the long separation.
The morning and the joy arrested a little the curtain of his life as it fell. Gustavus took the place of the nurse; first, because she knew how to do everything so well and with so many circumstances and marginal notes, that she poured gall into his very last minutes; secondly, because, surely, in the hour when all nature in the company of death tears off from men with stern hand all finery and all articles of raiment which she had lent him, the only remaining solace for the impotent friends who cannot hold back this inexorable hand, is, during the unclothing, freezing and sinking to sleep of the friend, by unconditional compliance to all his whims, by indulgence of his capriciousness, to be still. Upon such services of heart and love toward poor dying men one looks back after many years with more satisfaction than upon those rendered to all well persons together--and yet the two classes are separated from each other by only a few hours; for thou dost not climb in and out of thy bed many times before thou ceasest to rise from it....
Dear Death! I think now of myself. If thou enterest one day into my lodging-room, pray do me the favor to shoot me down at my secretaire or writing-table dead on the spot; lay me not, dear Death, behind the curtains of the sick-bed, nor hunt slowly with thy ripping knife after every vein to amputate it from life, so that I shall be compelled to gaze whole nights' long into the dissecting face, or that during thy long unraveling of my souls raiment all shall be stepping up and looking on in good health: the Captain, the Pestilentiary and my good sister. But if the Evil One possesses thee, so that thou canst not listen to reason, then, dear Death, as no hell lasts forever, I will not, after a thousand vexations, vex myself about the last.
Doctor Fenk had not in his face the apprehension of a coming loss, but grief for a present one; he regarded his son as a shattered porcelain vase, whose shards one sets up again in its old combination on the toilet-table and which at the least agitation thereof will fall asunder. He therefore no longer forbade him anything. He even received some male patients, "because he had one in his house and would fain cure away the thought of him." The patient himself already heard the murmur of the evening-wind of his life. A few weeks before he had indeed still believed that in the spring he might drink the Scheerau mineral waters in Lilienbad, and then it would be quite different with him. (Poor, sick man! it has become different with thee sooner than that!) Only a certain fever-vision, which he did not reveal, pronounced sentence upon his sick life; and his superstitious reliance upon this dream was so firm that since that he had no longer watered his flower-bushes, had given away his birds, and extinguished all wishes excepting the wish for Gustavus.
The very next day happened to be market day. This tumult had too much life in it for years consecrated to the stillness of death, and Gustavus had to sit by his bed that during the talking and listening he might not be able to lend an ear to the din below. Gustavus was startled when at length he asked him suddenly and eagerly, did he still love Beata? He evaded the "Yes," but Amandus summoned up the little life that still glowed in his nerves, and said, though with long pauses after every sentence: "Ah, take not thy heart from her--O, if thou knowest her as I do--I was often with her father--I saw with what mute patience she bore his heat--how she took upon herself the faults of her mother--full of goodness, full of gentleness, full of tenderness, full of lowliness, full of intelligence--such she is--all, but for her image there had been little joy in my life--give me thy hand and say that thou lovest her more than me." He himself took it; but the taking pained his friend.
Suddenly there darted into the veins of his sunken cheeks perhaps the last flush of shame, which often, like a flush of morning redness, comes as the swift forerunner of a good deed; he asked for his father to be brought to him. To him he, with so much fire, with so much longing in eyes and lips, made the request--to fetch Beata, who surely could not refuse the last prayer of a dying man, that the father himself could not refuse it; but promised (despite the sense of impropriety) to drive over to her mother, and through her to persuade the daughter, and to bring them both. Fenk knew that in his whole sickness no refusal had done any good--that, if he should see his son lying there dead from the frustration of his last wish, he should not be able to bear the thought of having embittered for that dead one the dying moments which he still drained from the cup of life, and that mother and daughter were too good not to act toward his son like himself. In short, he started.
When the father was gone, the sick man looked upon his and our friend with such a stream of smilingly promising love, that Gustavus was fain to take of this faithful, gentle soul, whose departure was so near, the longest farewell in this life: "My lips," thought he, "shall only yet once be pressed to his and my bosom to his--only yet once will my arms clasp the warm corpse, while yet there is a soul therein to feel my embrace--only this once will I call after his retreating spirit, while I can still reach it, and tell him how I have loved and shall still love him." Amidst these wishes the fairest holy water man knows consecrated his eyes. But, nevertheless, he suppressed all, because he feared that under such a storm of closing life the rent bonds of the body might let loose the agitated soul and the weak one die on his lips....
This self-sacrificing tenderness, which will not come forth from the nun's-cell of the heart, pleases me more than a belles-lettrical and theatrical finale-tempest, where one feels in order to show it, in order to have a weeping and writing-fistula, as well as other people, in order to let a tip of his emotions, as well as of the handkerchief with which one dries them, hang out of his pocket.
The Doctor, whom nobody in Maussenbach had ever yet seen with a mournful face, had already gained by the veil that overspread his usual gaiety, his sad request. My landlord, who always forcibly dammed up his innate sympathy, because, like a parrot, it ran away with his money, surrendered everything in this case so much the more willingly to another's kindly stream of tears, because it carried away from him nothing except--his wife and daughter for an hour. The meaner man has a greater pleasure in a good deed which has been wrung from him than the better man. Röper wrote himself to his daughter the order to join the party, and briefly contributed the best reasons for it out of natural and theological ethics. But the best reason which the Doctor brought with him to the new palace to Beata was her mother; without her he would hardly have overcome her shy, politic and feminine apprehensions.
They arrived with prayerful emotions at the dying chamber, that sacristy of an unknown temple, which stands not on this earth. I proceed, although so much of what belongs here is too great for my heart and my speech.... When the sick man saw the beloved of his dying heart, then did his sunken youthful days, with their golden hopes, gleam up from far below the horizon, like the evening glow of a June sun toward the North; he pressed once more the hand of beauteous life, his pale cheeks glimmered once more with the breath of the last joy, and the angel of joy, with the cord of love, let him slowly down into the grave. A dying man sees men and their doings diminished in a low distance; to him our little rules of courtesy are no longer of much consequence--all is to him indeed henceforth nothing. He begged to be left alone with Gustavus and Beata; his soul still upheld the self-bowing body; with a broken, but healthy voice he addressed the trembling maiden: "Beata, I shall die, perhaps to-night--in my fairer days I have loved thee; thou hast not known it--I go with my love into eternity--O good soul! reach me thy hand" (she did so) "and weep not, but speak; it is so long that I have not seen nor heard thee--Nay, but weep both of you, if you will; your tears no longer weaken me; into my hot eyes, so long as I have I am here, none have ever come--O weep much by me; when one dreams that tears fall on a dead man, it means gain--Aye, ye two fair souls, ye find none like you, who can deserve your love, you are alone--O, Beata, Gustavus also loves you, and does not tell it--If thou still hast thy fair heart, give it to him--thou wilt make him and me happy, but give me no sign, if thou canst not love him." ... Then grasping the hand of Gustavus, whose feelings were conflicting tempests, he said, with uplifted eyes, as of Virtue herself in the act of benediction: "Thou infinite and gracious Being, that takest me to Thyself, bestow upon these two hearts all the lovely days which perhaps had been appointed me here--nay, deduct them from my future life, if haply I had in this world no more to expect!" ... Here the sinking body drew back the soaring soul; a drop in his eye revealed the sad memory of his shattered days; three hearts were intensely agitated; three tongues were struck dumb; it was too sublime a minute for the thought of love--the feeling of friendship and the sense of the other world were alone great enough for the great moment....
I am not just now in a condition to speak of the consequences of that hour, nor of any other person than the dying one. His unstrung nerves kept on quivering in an enervating slumber. Beata, exhausted and stunned, went away with her mother. Gustavus no longer saw anything, hardly her. The father had no consolation and no comforter. The feverish doze lasted on till after midnight. A total eclipse of the moon exalted the heavens and attracted upward the affrighted eyes of men. Gustavus, agitated and agonized, looked up with wet eyes to the heaven-reaching shadow of the earth which lay upon the moon as on a profile-board. He bade farewell to the earth, it was to him itself a shadow: "Ah!" thought he, "in this lofty, flying shadow-pyramid thousands of red eyes, wounded hands and disconsolate hearts will at this moment be waiting to be buried in it, that the dead may lie still more gloomily than the living. But does not, then, this shadowy Polyphemus (with the moon for its one eye) move daily around this earth, only we do not perceive it except when it lies upon our moon?... So, too, we think, death comes not upon our earth, till it mows down our garden ... and yet not a century, but every second is his scythe...." In this way he worried and consoled himself under the veiled moon--Amandus woke up in distress; the two were alone; the moon's glimmer fell upon his sick eye; "who, then, has cut the moon in pieces," he said in the heat of the death-agony, "she is dead all but one little sliver." All at once the ceiling of the chamber and the opposite houses grew flaming-red, because the funeral torches surrounding the body of a nobleman, which they were bearing to its burial, just then moved through the silent street. "A fire! a fire!" cried the dying man and sought to spring out of bed. Gustavus would fain conceal from him how like him was the one who for the last time passed through the street down below; but Amandus, as if the agony of death were already upon him, staggered half way across the chamber in Gustavus's arms ... but ere he could see the corpse, a nervous spasm laid him dead in those arms....
Gustavus, cold as the dead man himself, bore the mortal sleeper to the deserted bed--without a tear, without a sound, without a thought, he sat down in the obscured moonlight and the flickering corpse-light--the stiff, motionless friend lay before him--Amandus had flown sooner then the moon's orb out of the earth's shadow--Gustavus looked not at the dead, but at the moon (in the thickest gloom of the hour of bereavement one looks away from the proper object to the least one in the neighborhood): Stretch onward and upward (thought he) as thou wilt, shadow of this globe of dust! over me thou still hoverest ... but him thy summit reaches not ... all suns lie bare before him ... O vanity! O vapor! shadow! wherein I still abide!...
Suddenly the flute-clock struck one and played a morning-song of the eternal morning, so uplifting, so wafted over out of meadows above the moon, so pain-stilling, that the tears in which his heart was drowned broke through on all sides the dam of sorrow and left a bed for softer, less deadly emotions ... It seemed to him, as if his body also lay untenanted beside the cold corpse, and his soul flew, on the broad luminous way which ran through all suns, after the soul that had hastened on before.... he saw it speeding forward ... he saw clearly through the haze of the few years that lay between it and himself....
And with his soul in his face he repaired from the death-chamber to the apartment of his father and said with earthly sadness in his eye and heavenly radiance in his countenance: "Our friend has fought out his last fight during the eclipse of the moon and is up yonder."
Ah, his life in his worm-eaten body was itself, indeed, a true total eclipse; his exit out of life was the exit from the earth's shadow and his tarry in the shadow was but short.
No persuasion could keep Gustavus in the house of mourning. When the heart finds the body itself too confining, the four walls of a room will be so too. He went to Marienhof. Beneath the blue arch hung with crystallized sun-drops, and beneath the struggling moon, who, like him, came out glowing-red from her overshadowing, thoughts met him, which are as far exalted above human colors as they are above the earth. Whoso in such hours does not feel the baldness of this life and the necessity of a second so vividly that the need becomes a firm hope--with such let no one dispute about the highest things in our low life.
Amidst the confusion of the death-day, which else would have driven him to an utterly dark solitude, he still went to Marienhof; the departed one had begged him to bring it about that he might secure winter quarters for his bones on the hermitage-mountain, which he had so often ascended, and whose phenomena are well known to us. Gustavus hoped easily to obtain permission from the Resident Lady; all the more so, as she visited, and that but seldom, only certain parts of the Still Land. Oefel, however,--on the morrow, when in his presence the petition was presented--spoke in precisely the opposite tone, and said, if she were concerned about the park and its architectural graces, she must certainly be glad to have some actual burial there, because the best English gardens were so very deficient in dead bodies and real mausoleums, that they had mere cenotaphs and sham mausoleums. Oefel offered to design some decorations for the monument in a style which would suit the gout of the Court. Gustavus was simply in too tender a mood to-day to make a beginning of despising him. How very differently did the Resident Lady listen to his petition and his subdued voice, although he labored to give no sign of his sorrow! How sympathetically--with a look as of one who softly laid a rose in the dead man's hand--did she bestow upon the latter a little piece of ground for an anchorage! How sweetly did her full eyes accompany the gift with the gift out of her tender heart; and when another's grief gave back the victory to his own, with what sweet solace--never is woman's voice sweeter than in consoling--did she combat him. He felt here vividly the distinction between friendship and love; and he gave her the formerly entirely. He was glad not to find there the object of the latter, because he shrank from the embarrassment of the first glances. Beata lay sick.
He shut himself up; he opened his breast to that grief which does not pierce it with beneficent, bleeding wounds, but gives it dull blows--that grief, namely, which is our guest in the interval between the day of death and that of burial. This latter was a Sunday; the one when I sadly filled out my section with nothing but Ottomar's letter, and when I so mournfully closed. I did it exactly at the hour when the pale sleeper was borne from his little death bed to the great bed where all must lie, as the mother carries the children who have fallen asleep on benches to the larger resting-place. On Sunday Gustavus fled with veiled senses from the palace, where the noisy state-carriages and servants seemed as if they passed over his heart. He felt for the first time that he was a stranger on the earth; the sunlight seemed to him to be the twilight of a greater moon woven into our night. Although he could now no more on this earth either come near to the friend who was snatched away, or yet tear himself away from him, nevertheless his sorrow said it would be a consolation if it should embrace, though not the body, not the coffin, yet the bed of the grave which covered this seed of a fairer soil; and he therefore stationed himself on a distant hill, in order to see whether there were yet people on the hermitage-mountain.
His eye met the very greatest sorrow which this evening had for him here below; the white coffin was lifted out, gleaming through the dusk of evening. A rose dropping to pieces, a perforated chrysalis, a butterfly spreading his wings, who had, as caterpillar, just gnawed through it, were painted on the coffin-chrysalis and were lowered with their two archetypes into the earth; the childless father stood leaning his hand and head against the pyramid and heard behind his veiled eyes every clod of earth as if it were the flight of a downward piercing arrow--the cold night-wind came over to Gustavus from the mountain of the dead--birds of passage hurried away over his head like black specks, led by natural instinct, not by geographical knowledge, through cold clouds and nights to a warmer sun--the moon worked her way up out of a bloody sea of vapors, shorn of her rays. At last the living left the mountain and the dead man; Gustavus alone remained with him on the other hill; the night stretched its heavy pall over both.... Enough!
Spare me this grave-digger's scene! You know not what autumnal remembrances, in connection with it, make my blood creep as funereally slow as my pen. Ah! besides, I write into this story a leaf, a leaf of sorrow, whose broad, black border hardly leaves for lines and lamentations blotted with tears a narrow strip of white--this scene also I spare you, for I also know not, ye readers with the tenderer heart, whom ye have already lost; I know not what dear departed form, whose grave is already sunk as deep as itself, I may not, like a dream, raise up on its burial place and show anew to your tearful eyes, and of how many dead a single grave may be the reminder.
Vanished Amandus! in the vast army, which from century to century life sends to meet the last enemy, thou, too, didst march a few steps; often and early did he wound thee; thy comrades laid earth upon thy great wounds and on thy face,--they continue their warfare; in the heat of the conflict they will forget thee more and more from year to year--tears will come into their eyes, but none any longer for thee, but for them who are yet to die and be buried--and when thy lily-white mummy has crumbled to pieces, none will think of thee any longer; only the dream-genius will still gather up thy pastel-figure out of the earth into which it is incorporated, and will adorn with it, in the gray head of thy aged Gustavus, the meadows of his youth that repose behind the past years, and which, like the planet Venus, are the morning star in the heaven of life's morning and the evening star in the sky of life's evening, and glitter and tremble and replace the sun.... I would not say to thy soul's sheath, the corpse: Amandus! lie softly. Thou didst not lie softly in it; oh! even now I still pity thy immortal soul, that it had to live more in its narrow nerve-wrappage than in the wide building of the universe, that it could not lift its noble glance to sun-globes, but had to stoop to its tormenting blood-globules, and seldomer feel its emotions stirred by the grand harmony of the macrocosm, than by the discords of its own macrocosm! The chain of necessity cut into thee deeply; not merely its drag, but also its pressure, left upon thee scars.... So miserable is the living! How can the dead desire to be remembered by the living man when already even the very speaking of him makes the heart sink within us....
When Gustavus was at home again he wrote a letter to the Doctor; the agonizing grief, wherein the latter had stood leaning and holding on to the pyramid, affected him unspeakably; and in the letter he fell upon this wounded and shattered breast and aggravated its pangs by his love-pressure, as he begged him to accept him as his son and to be his paternal friend.
Let the high tide of sorrow be Gustavus's excuse that he, who had hitherto always concealed the paroxysms of his sensibilities for the good of another, now let them break out at another's expense. His grief went so far, that he desired of the father the every-day coat and hat of the deceased instead of his full-length picture; he felt, as I do, that one's every-day clothes are the best profiles, plaster-casts and crayon likenesses of a man whom one has loved and who has gone out of them and out of the body. The Doctor's answer runs thus:
* * * * *
"I have often leaned against the cushion of my medical carriage and represented and prefigured to myself, when I should one day have gray eyebrows and gray hair, or none at all; when all seasons should appear to me to grow shorter and all nights longer and longer, which is a symptom of the approach of the longest--if, then, I should go out in the first days of spring into the Still Land, to sun my cold, interpolated body--and I should then see in the outer world the clinging, forth-putting buds, beneath which lies a whole summer, and feel within me the eternal leaf-dropping and drooping, which no earthly spring can cure--then when I should still remember my own youth, my promenades and gallopades around Scheerau, and those in Pavia, and the people who went with me--then when I naturally looked round after those who might still be left standing as lofty ruins of the fallen temple of my youth--and then when, as I turned about to see, whether out of woods, across meadows, down from mountains, on so fair a day, no one would come to meet me, the thought should come upon me like a heart-beat, that in all the four corners of the world, toward which my sight was directed, lay church-yards and churches, in which they, who should now console and companion me, were lying under the opaque earth-crust and its flower-work, hid and imprisoned, with their arms laid straight by their side, and that I alone remained in this upper world and here in the spring-time carried round the autumn in my breast:--then I should not go at all into the Still Land, but go home all lonely and shut myself up and lay my head and bury my eyes on my arm, and wish my heart would break, as had those of my dear ones; I mean, I should wish it were all over. Then, beloved son, beloved friend, (thou who, as the youngest of my friends, wilt long survive me), then will thy form come before my sated and weary eyes; then will I wipe them dry and remind myself of all the past, and thy hand shall still conduct me into the Still Land. I shall enjoy the earthly spring so long as I can see it, and with a pressure of the hand I shall say to thy face: It does my heart good to-day, that I many years ago adopted thee as a son....
"To-morrow I will come to take my friend with me on a journey for some days to come, that we may go out of the way of those that are past."--The next morning it was done.