Through Night to Light: A Novel

by Friedrich Spielhagen

Where there are lights there must be shadows, and where there are shadows there is never a lack of people who take pleasure in painting everything in the darkest and blackest of colors. Thus it was with the little foibles of the excellent man, which his rivals and enemies subjected to pitiless criticism. Some declared he was a charlatan, who understood his business tolerably well, but the necessary bragging and boasting about it still better; others declared his bon-mots were better than his prescriptions, and a good story more welcome to him than the most famous case in his practice. Still others said that the essence of his nature was a restless vanity, which induced him to try all the arts and to play the Mæcenas for all travelling artists and spoilt men of genius. Still others--so-called practical men, who laid no claim to any opinion in matters of art and science, but who demanded in return that everybody should comply with their standard of morality--shook their heads when people spoke of the councillor's hospitality, and said: "If everybody would sweep the dust before his own door, many things would be seen that are hidden now; and if certain folks would remember the old saying: 'Save in time and you'll have in need,' they would be better off than they were."

Of all these reproaches none really affected the distinguished professor, except the last. Money was to him what it is to Saladin in Lessing's great drama, Nathan: "the most trifling of trifles;" he looked upon it, as Saladin did, as "perfectly superfluous when he had it," much as he appreciated the necessity of being provided with it whenever he was reminded of it by his liberality, his generosity, and his intense antipathy against all bargaining and all haggling. If he had lived economically he might have become a very rich man, for his income was considerable; but Mammon would not stay in his hands, which were ever open to all who were poor and suffering. He never could force himself to accept money from the hard hand of a mechanic, even if the sum had been ever so small. "It is bad enough," he used to say, "that Nature has not wisdom enough to allow only such people to be sick as have leisure and money enough for it; but for the poor, sickness itself is a punishment severe enough, not to sentence them moreover into the payment of costs." Thus it happened to him very often that he poured the golden reward he had earned by his attention and his skill in the palace of rich Sinbad a few minutes later into the open hand of poor Hinbad, and reached home with a lighter purse than he had carried out.

His house also was an expensive one, although the whole family consisted but of himself and his daughter. A nature as richly endowed and as productive as his own was not made to be content with meagre fare and thin beer; he was fond of rich, savory dishes and fiery old wines; above all he loved to share the pleasures of his table with others who were as willing to be pleased as he himself with the good things of this world, and especially with one of the best among the good--a pleasant table-talk.

All this might have been accomplished without causing a deficit in the budget of the privy councillor, if a careful, sensible housewife had managed the whole, and spent what was coming in properly and economically. His wife, however, an exceedingly amiable, intelligent woman, died the second year after their marriage; and her husband, who had loved her above all things, could not summon resolution to fill the place in his heart which death, inexorable death, had made vacant, and to give a stepmother to his daughter, in whom he soon concentrated all his affections. He remembered too well the old saying, apud novercam queri! He had seen the fairy tale of Cinderella repeat itself in too many families. Thus he left his child in the hands of nurses and governesses whom he paid magnificently, and sent her, when she was old enough, to Miss Bear's boarding-school, in case anything should have been forgotten in her outward polish or her inner culture. In the meantime he kept a kind of bachelor's hall, which soon became a very costly life, owing to the thievishness of his servants and the incapacity of a housekeeper in whom he placed implicit confidence. He comforted himself, however, whenever Mrs. Bartsch had forced him into a very uncomfortable discussion about credit and debt, with the prospect of the time when his daughter could relieve him of all this misère, and of the answer to the question: what shall we have for dinner, etc., which ought not to be allowed to trouble a good Christian's peace of mind.

The time came at last, but Miss Sophie's return to the paternal home did not exactly mend matters. Sophie was too young and too inexperienced to see the cause of the evil and to reform the abuses, which were deeply rooted after so many years' toleration. Mrs. Bartsch, who could not adapt herself at all to the new regime, was dismissed, it is true; but--as the doctor said, "the bad one is gone, the bad ones have stayed"--the servants stole just as before, and the privy councillor did not know yet "what in all the world could have become of the miserable money?" As it could not well be otherwise under such circumstances, the accounts agreed less and less every year, and instead of saying, "I must learn to be more economical hereafter," he only said, "I must work harder." He felt himself yet in the full vigor of his strength. He saw before him yet long years of energetic activity, during which he might make up what had been so long neglected.

But it was not to be so, and the beautiful fruit-bearing tree, in whose broad, hospitable shade so many who suffered from the burning heat of life sought shelter and refreshment, and found it too, was to be irreparably injured by a flash of lightning which fell from a clear sky. Like wildfire the news flew one morning all over town that Privy Councillor Roban had had a stroke of paralysis over night, and was now laid up without hope. People told it one to another with grave faces, and said it would be an irreparable loss to science, especially as far as the university was concerned, which had had in Roban its only really great man since Berger had become insane. But of all who suffered by the loss, the poor were most seriously threatened, since they lost in the privy councillor their generous friend and protector. For many and many a day one might have seen old women dragging themselves painfully along on crutches, men so old and feeble that they had to be led by a boy, young pale mothers with a baby in their bosom--all sitting on the steps of the house, bathed in tears, and asking every one who came out whether things were not going a little better with the privy councillor, or whether there was really no hope at all that the good old gentleman would recover?

In the meantime the patient was lying in that terrible state which is neither night nor day, but a painful twilight, when the sun is about to set, and the darkness is rising full of threatenings on all sides. For a long time it remained uncertain whether life or death would be the end, and when at last the cruel conflict was decided in favor of life, death only yielded after having marked his victim unmistakably forever. One might even have said, that he had taken all the reality away with it, and left only the shadow of existence.

To-day was the first time that the privy councillor had risen for a few hours; they had rolled him in his large easy-chair from his bed-chamber, before the fire-place in the sitting-room. He had insisted upon it that his daughter, who since the beginning of his sickness had scarcely left his bed, should go out to her little party; and he had dismissed his son-in-law, who had taken his practice provisionally in hand and came to see him every evening--for he wished to be alone. He felt the necessity of availing himself of the first hour in which the pressure on his brain was less overwhelming, for the purpose of thinking over his situation. As a physician, he would probably have warned his patient against such an injurious excitement; but now he was physician and patient at once, and made the experience in himself that the physician may very often demand certain things which the patient is unable to do with the best will in the world.

Poor, unfortunate man; doubly and trebly poor, because you have been doubly and trebly rich and happy before, in the fulness of your mental and physical strength, in the elasticity of your sanguine temper, nay even in the easy humor which bore you like a bird high over the greatest difficulties! Where is now your restless activity, which formerly made it impossible for you to sit still in one and the same place for any length of time, which induced you even at table frequently to change your place among your guests? Where is your sharp, penetrating mind, which used to solve the hardest problems as in play? Where your brilliant fancy, which threw even upon every-day occurrences a bewitching light? Where, above all, your Olympian cheerfulness, which made it so easy for you not to be angry or excited, but allowed you to fight at most with a humorous smile and satirical wit against the misery and wretchedness of life, against the stupidity and vulgarity of men? Where are the thousand arguments with which you often nearly overwhelmed the pessimist views of your friend Berger, when you tried to persuade him that this earth was by no means a vale of tears from the rising to the setting of the sun, but a wide, fair landscape, in which hill and dale, waste deserts and Elysian fields alternated very wisely, and that in most cases man was not only at liberty but even commanded to avoid the one and to enjoy the other? Have you all at once changed your views? Has a brutal blow of fate suddenly reduced you in the discussion to an absurdum? Has the pressure which weighs on your brain and paralyzes the elasticity of your mind transformed you all of a sudden from an optimist into a pessimist, so that you see the world and your own situation in dark colors, as you are counting the beats of your pulse mechanically, and sit there, rolled in a ball in your easy-chair, glaring in dull thoughts at the dying embers of the fire-place?

And indeed there were reasons why it was hard for the privy councillor to drive away the gray shadowy form of care, as it pressed more and more closely upon him the darker the room grew. He who had himself observed so many similar cases, could least of all disguise from himself how precarious his physical condition was. He knew but too well that he was doomed to be henceforth a cripple in body and mind, that he was only a pensioner on life, and that death might come at any moment to collect the debt which was long since due. And yet, much as he was attached to life, this was his least sorrow. The physician did not struggle against omnipotent fate, which had never yet granted him one of its victims; the pupil of Epicure knew that joy and grief, delight and suffering, are inseparably interwoven in our life. But what made his heart particularly heavy, was the thought of his inability to arrange his circumstances, that he should have to leave life a bankrupt, and that after all he should have to rob his creditors of their rights by his death. Had he not always referred them to the future, and now the future refused to accept the draft; now the credulous man was to be denied credit at the very bank on whose credit he had so implicitly relied.