"Has he been travelling?" asked Oswald, with assumed indifference.
"He has been travelling these ten years," replied Mr. Bemperlein. "Three years ago Frau von Berkow, the two Barnewitz, met him in Rome, and then they travelled together through Southern Italy. In Sicily they parted again. My friends prepared to return home, but the baron went on to Egypt, Arabia, and heaven knows where else his restless spirit has driven him. But we have again lost sight of our subject."
Mr. Bemperlein began his tale once more with his inexhaustible fund of details; but if Oswald had before only listened with one ear, his thoughts now were far away. That, then, was the man who had played so prominent a part in Melitta's life! So great a part! How great a part? She had never really loved him--perhaps--no, certainly never loved him--but is true love always the last reward of a woman's highest favor? Is there no such thing as desire without love? Or love without desire? Only a wish to hold him captive by all means, among them, by the memory of pleasure enjoyed. Has she ever been happy by the side of this man, at whose cradle the graces had failed to appear; happy, though not perfectly so, not as happy as she had hoped, but still? Oh! that thought brought intolerable torment!
The demon of jealousy was whispering and hissing bad thoughts in his ear, which made his blood boil and big drops of perspiration to break out on his forehead--no wonder, then, that he heard Mr. Bemperlein's tale only in a dream. This only he understood, that the strange man had only now begun to think of his so-called science, his long-cherished profession only now, when all the troubles of life seemed to be ended, and he could breathe, a free man, in the green solitude of Berkow. He had now only begun to make the acquaintance of the heroes of modern literature, especially of Shakespeare; and from the poets he had passed to the philosophers, here again above all in Spinoza finding a new world opening before him which he had not suspected in his scholastic studies. Under such influence he had been led to the study of nature, to botany, mineralogy, and physics; he had built himself, with old Baumann's aid, a small laboratory, where he had industriously pursued his new sciences, and there, alas! he had found, amid phials and retorts, that his orthodox faith, as far as the reading of the philosophers had not destroyed it already, had altogether evaporated!
"Thus matters went on for a while," said Mr. Bemperlein, "but the moment came when it was my duty to decide whether I should openly avow my apostasy from the faith of my fathers or not. A very lucrative cure in this region, which was in the hands of an uncle of Frau von Berkow, became vacant by the death of the incumbent. The gentleman thought he would please his niece by offering the place to me; I had nothing to do but to go the following Sunday and preach my trial-sermon. Now, you must know that when the thing was first mentioned to me I was so much overwhelmed by surprise and by fright, and so unwilling to hurt the kind man's feelings, that I said: 'Yes.' You know Frau von Berkow intended to send Julius to Grunwald, and thus I could not have stayed at Berkow any longer at best. I also sat down to compose my sermon. I had so far succeeded in avoiding every call to show my theological talent of declamation, and now I felt, to my horror, that I had completely forgotten the pulpit-talk, and, what was worse, the pulpit logic. Three nights in succession I began my Sisyphus work, but I never got farther than 'My dear brethren!' In the third night, when I had gone to bed quite in despair, and had fallen asleep in great sorrow, thinking what my good father and my worthy grandfather, whom I had known still, would have said if they could see their son and grandson in full incredulity, after he had been so carefully trained in orthodoxy, I had the following curious dream, which no doubt partly arose from an animated description Frau von Berkow had given me of the Louvre.
"I dreamt, then, I was entering into a lofty, large hall, with pictures and statues on all the walls. There sat God the Father himself, a handsome, bearded old man, and held forth his hand and created heaven and earth; then came Adam and Eve, in white marble--Eve pretty well preserved, but Adam had lost his head; then 'Cain's Fratricide,' a large oil-painting, and by its side 'Adam and Eve find the corpse of murdered Abel,' on which the form of the deadly pale youth, who looked like broken white lilies, was deeply touching. Thus I went on and on, looking at statue after statue and painting after painting. I was not alone in the hall; on the contrary, a crowd of people was moving along the walls and amid the forest of statues. Large groups were standing before some of the most prominent works; for instance, the passage of the children of Israel through the Red Sea, a gigantic fresco, and smaller groups before other paintings, less remarkable for historic importance than for the piquancy of the scene they represented. Thus I was much annoyed by a crowd of young people who stood before 'Lot drunk,' and put their heads together and laughed. Altogether, the deportment of the company appeared to me highly improper. The women were laughing and talking and coquetting; the men chatted and ogled, and a few, with long legs and long teeth,--probably English,--actually kept their hats on. Almost all had a book in their hands, into which they looked conscientiously from time to time, when they wished for information about one of the works of art. This book seemed to be a catalogue of the Museum, and I wished to obtain one, because I had forgotten the order in which the prophets came, and thus could not tell whether the bearded man in No. 8 was Habakkuk, and the young man in No. 9 Zephaniah, or not; I turned, therefore, to an old gentleman whom I had seen busy with a fly-brush, and whom I therefore took to be one of the keepers. As I approached him the man turned round, and what was my surprise when I recognized my own grandfather. 'What do you desire, young man?' he asked, in a severe tone. I repeated timidly my question. 'Here is a catalogue,' he said, taking one of the books which lay in large numbers on the table and handing it to me, 'it costs half a dollar.' I opened the book; 'I wanted a catalogue,' said I, 'you have given me--' 'To be sure,' said the old man, in a melancholy tone of voice, 'this is the catalogue of the Old Museum; the door to the New Museum, in which you will find the works of art from the year one of our Christian Era till the year 1793, when the Christian religion was abolished, and the goddess Reason ascended the throne--is there.' He pointed towards a fine flight of broad stairs, which led up to the other halls. 'You will do well to buy another catalogue there. It costs much less, and you must speak about it to your father, who holds there the same office which I fill here.' And thereupon the old man turned his back to me and began once more to dust the statues and pictures with his tall fly-brush. 'Excuse me, dear grandfather,' I said.--'I am not your grandfather,' replied the old man, quietly going on with his occupation. 'Well, are you the keeper?' I asked. 'Yes, indeed, keeper of the Museum, nothing else.'--'And where have they put all the works of art which have been produced since that time?'--'Since that memorable year,' said the old man, 'nothing worth speaking of has been achieved. A few schools of art have been formed here and there, but they have produced nothing that can be called artistic. The artists lack the proper faith, and without faith nothing great can be painted or sculptured or written'--when he said this he looked at me reprovingly--'Or written,' I repeated, abated, thinking of my unsuccessful efforts--'Or written,' he continued, 'and then the world has become so indifferent, and critics have become so very sharp and severe, that they have lost that naïve simplicity and dreamy security without which, unfortunately--but now I must beg you to leave; the bell has been ringing for some time, and you are the very last.' He accompanied me to the entrance, showed me the door, and invited me with a stiff bow to walk out. I did so--the door closed with a crash and--I awoke.
"After that dream," continued Bemperlein, "I made no more efforts. Without faith no sermon can be written, I said to myself, and even if one could be written it could not be delivered, at least not by a man like yourself, who has a little conscience left, and neither chick nor child, such as have tempted many an honest man to write and say things which he can only on that plea defend before God and the world. I felt clearly that I could not become a minister of the gospel, and I therefore wrote this morning to the patron of that church, thanking him for the honor he had done me, and declining his offer, because I had decided to accompany Julius to Grunwald. For, as I was writing the sentence, the idea occurred to me. I went at once to Frau von Berkow to tell her of my resolution, and she seemed to be delighted. Now, my dear sir, after you have had the goodness to listen to this long story of mine, pray tell me, what would you do in my place? Consider that I am already twenty-eight years old, and that I still have all my twenty-eight teeth. The wisdom-teeth have not yet appeared, perhaps because Nature has forgotten them, or because of a wise provision of Fate, which remembered how little I would often have to bite in this life."
"What I would do in your place," said Oswald, "if I were such a brave, conscientious, excellent----"
"Pray don't, my dear sir," said Bemperlein, blushing all over.
"I say conscientious, excellent man? Well, that question can easily be answered. I would do what you have already done. I would cheerfully turn my back upon the paradise of naïve thoughtlessness and harmless orthodoxy, after having, tasted of the tree of knowledge. I would not allow myself to be cooped up in that stall in which the hypocrites, the vile dogs in the sheeps' clothing of humility, are whining and howling so fearfully."