Lenette was working in her room in silence, for her wounded heart shrunk from a word or a look as from a cold fierce wind. It was now very dark, she wanted no light. On a sudden, a wandering street-singing woman began to play a harp, and her child to accompany her on a flute, somewhere in the house downstairs. At this our friend’s bursting heart seemed to have a thousand gashes inflicted on it to let it bleed gently away. As nightingales love to sing where there is an echo, so our hearts speak loudest to music. As these tones brought back to him his old hopes, almost irrecognisable now,—as he gazed down at his Arcadia now lying hidden deep, deep, beneath the stream of years, and saw himself down in it, with all his young fresh wishes, amid his long lost friends, gazing with happy eyes round their circle, all confidence and trust, his growing heart hoarding and cherishing its love and truth for some warm heart yet to be met in the time to come: and as he now burst into that music with a dissonance, crying, “And I have never found that heart, and now all is past and over,” and as the pitiless tones brought pictures of blossomy springs and flowery lands, and circles of loving friends to pass, as in a camera obscura, before him—him who had nothing, not one soul in all the land to love him; his steadfast spirit gave way at last, and sank down on earth to rest as quite overdone, and nothing soothed him now but that which pained. Suddenly this sleep-walking music ceased, and the pause clutched, like a speechless nightmare, tighter at his heart. In the silence he went into the room and said to Lenette, “Take them down what little we have left.” But over the latter words his voice broke and failed, for he saw (by the flare of some potash-burning which was going on opposite) that all her glowing face was covered with streaming, undried tears, though when he came in she pretended to be busily wiping the windowpane dimmed by her breath. She laid the money down on the window. He said, more gently yet, “Lenette, you will have to take it to them now, or they will be gone.” She took it; her eyes worn with weeping met his (which were worn with weeping too); she went, and then their eyes grew well-nigh dry, so far apart were their two souls already.
They were suffering in that terrible position of circumstances when not even a moment of mutual and reciprocal emotion can any longer reconcile and warm two hearts. His whole heart swelled with overflowing affection, but hers belonged to his no more; he was urged at once by the wish to love her, and the feeling that it was now impossible, by the perception of all her shortcomings and the conviction of her indifference to him. He sat down in the window seat, and leaned his head upon the sill, where it rested, as it chanced, upon a handkerchief which she had left there, and which was moist and cold with tears. She had been solacing herself after the long oppression of the day, with this gentle effusion, much as we have a vein opened after some severe contusion. When he touched the handkerchief, an icy shudder crept down his back, like a sting of conscience, but immediately after it there came a burning glow as the thought flashed to his mind that her weeping had been for another person than himself altogether. The singing and the flute now began again (without the harp this time), and floated in the rising, falling waves, of a slow-timed song, of which the verses ended always with the words, “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.” Sorrow now clutched him in her grasp, like some mantle-fish, casting around him her dark and suffocating folds. He pressed Lenette’s wet handkerchief to his eyes hard, and heard (but less distinctly), “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.” Then of a sudden his whole soul melted and dissolved at the thought that perhaps that halting heart of his would let him see no other new year save that of the morrow, and he thought of himself as dying; and the cold handkerchief, wet with his own tears now as well as hers, lay cool upon his burning brow, while the notes of the music seemed to mark like bells each stroke of time, so that its rapid flight was made distinguishable by the ear, and he saw himself asleep in a quiet grave, like one in the Grotto of the Serpents, but with worms in place of the serpents, licking off the burning poison of life.
The music had ceased. He heard Lenette moving in the next room and getting a light; he went to her and gave her her handkerchief. But his heart was so pained and bleeding that he longed to embrace some one, no matter whom; he was impelled to press his Lenette to his heart, his Lenette of the past if not of the present, his suffering, if no longer his loving, Lenette; at the same time he could not utter one word of affection, neither had he the slightest wish to do so. He put his arms round her slowly, unbent, and held her to him, but she turned her head quickly and coldly away as from a kiss which was not proffered. This pained him greatly, and he said, “Do you suppose I am any happier than you are yourself?” He laid his face down on her averted head, pressed her to him again, and then let her away; and this vain embrace at an end, his heart cried, “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.”
The silent room in which the music and the words had ceased to sound was like some unhappy village from whence the enemy has carried off all the bells, and where there is nothing but silence all the day and night, and the church tower is mute as if time itself were past.
As Firmian laid him down on his bed, he thought, “A sleep closes the old year as if it were one’s last, and ushers in the new as it does, our own lives; and I sleep on towards a future all anxiety, vague of form, and darkly veiled. Thus does man sleep at the gate behind which the dreams are barred; but although his dreams are but a step or two—a minute or two—within that gate, he cannot tell what dreams await him at its opening; whether in the brief unconscious night beasts of prey with glaring eyes are lying in wait to dash upon him, or smiling children to come trooping round him in their play; nor if, when the cloudy shapes beyond that mystic door come about him, their clasp is to be the fond embrace of love, or the murderous clutch of death.”
CHAPTER X.
A LONELY NEW-YEAR’S DAY—THE LEARNED SCHALASTER—WOODEN-LEG OF APPEAL—CHAMBER POSTAL DELIVERY—THE 11TH OF FEBRUARY, AND BIRTH-DAY OF THE YEAR 1786.
I really cannot wish my hero a happy new year on a new year’s day when, on his awaking in the morning, he rolls his swollen eyeballs heavily in their sockets towards the dawn, and then buries his worn and stupefied head deep again in his pillow, as he does now. A man who scarcely ever sheds a tear is always attacked in this way by physical, as a consequence of moral, pain. He lay in bed much later than usual, thinking over what he had done, and what he had now to do. He awoke, feeling; much cooler towards Lenette than he had done when he went to bed. When two hearts can no longer be brought together by the influence of some mutual, warm emotion, when the glow of enthusiasm no longer links them together, still less can they mingle and unite when the glow has passed away, and chilly reserve has resumed its sway. There is a certain half-and-half state of partial reconciliation in which the vertical index of the jewel-balance, in its glass-case, is turned by the lightest breath from the tongue of a third person; to-day, alas! the scale on Firmian’s side sunk a little, and that on Lenette’s went down altogether. He prepared himself, however, and dreaded at the same time, to give and to return the new year greetings. He took heart, and entered the room with his usual hearty step, as if nothing had happened. She had let the coffee-pot turn into a refrigerator rather than call him, and was standing with her back to him, at the drawer of the commode, tearing hearts to pieces, to see what was inside them. The hearts in question were printed new year’s wishes in verse, which she had received, in happier days, from her friends in Augspurg; the kindly wishes were hidden behind groups of hearts clipped out and twined together in spiral lines. As the Holy Virgin gets behung with “assignat” hearts of wax, so do other virgins with paper ones; for with these fair maidens all warmth and enthusiasm gets the name of “heart,” much as map-makers fancy that the outline of burning Africa has a considerable resemblance to a heart.
Firmian could well divine how many a longing sigh the poor soul had heaved over so many a ruined wish and hope, and all her mournful comparisons of the present time—with those smiling days gone by—and all that sorrow and the memory of the past spake to the gentle, tender heart. Alas! since even the happy greet the new year with sighs, the wretched may well be allowed a tear or two. He said his “good morning” gently, and had he received a gentle answer, would have gone so far as to add his wishes to the stock of printed ones; but Lenette, who had been oftener hurt, and more deeply too, on the previous day, than he had, snarled back at him a cold and hasty reply. So that he could not offer any wishes; she offered none; and thus stonily and thus miserably they went elbowing one another through the gate of the new year.
I must say it; he had been looking forward for something like eight weeks to the happiness of this new year’s morning—to the blissful union of their hearts—to the thousands of loving wishes which he would offer—to their close embraces and happy silences of lips upon lips! Ah! how different it all was; cold, deathly cold! On some other occasion, when I have more paper, I must explain at full length why and wherefore his satirical vein served the purpose of a ferment, a leaven or yeast, or, say a kind of irrigating engine to that sensitive heart of his of which he was both proud and ashamed at once. The royal burgh of Kuhschnappel itself had more to do with it than anything else. Upon this town, as upon some others in Germany, the dew of sensibility has never fallen (as if these places were made of metal), whilst their inhabitants have provided themselves with hearts of bone, on which, as on frozen limbs, and witches bearing the stigmata of the devil, it is impossible to inflict wounds of any consequence to speak of. Amid a population possessed of this sort of frigidity, one is, of course, inclined to pardon—and even go out of one’s way in search of—a little warmth, even of an exaggerated kind,—whereas a man who had been living about 1785 in Leipzig, where nearly all hearts and arteries were injected full of the spirit of tears, might have been disposed to carry his humorous indignation at that circumstance a little too far, in the same way that cooks dish up watery vegetables with more pepper in wet weather than in dry.