Lenette went three times to church that day, not that there was anything extraordinary in that. It is not so much with respect to the church-goers that the words “three times” in this connection, alarming as they are, horrify one. The church-goers may sometimes, perhaps, be all the better for going so often; but it is for the sake of the unfortunate clergy who are obliged to preach so many times in one day, that they may think themselves lucky if all that happens to them is that they go to the devil and don’t lose their voices into the bargain. The first time a man preaches, he certainly moves himself more than anybody else, and becomes his own proselyte; but when it comes to the millionth time or so of his laying down the moral law, it must be much the same with him as with the Egerian peasants, who drink the Egerian waters every day, and consequently cease to be susceptible to their derivative qualities, however visitors may be affected by them.
At dinner our melancholy pair sat silent, except that the husband, seeing the wife preparing to go to the afternoon service at church, which she had not been in the habit of attending for some time, asked her who was going to preach. “Most probably Schulrath Stiefel,” she said, although he usually preached only in the morning, but just now the evening preacher couldn’t preach, he had received “a chastisement from God—he had put out his collar-bone.” At another time Siebenkæs would have had a good deal to say as touching the latter clause of her sentence; but on the present occasion (circumstances being as they were), all he did was to strike his plate with one of the prongs of his fork, and then hold it up to one of his ears, while he stopped the other; this droning bass, this humming harmony, bore his tortured soul away upon the waves of music, and this echoing sound-board, this vibrating bell-tongue, seemed to be singing to him (by way of new year’s greeting), “Hearest thou not the distant bell ringing at the close of thy chill life’s high mass? The question is, shalt thou, when next new year’s day comes, be able to hear; or lying, by that time, crumbling into dust?”
After dinner he looked out of window, directing his gaze less to the street than to the sky. There, as it chanced, he saw two mock suns, and almost in the zenith the half of a rainbow with a paler one intersecting it. These tinted stars began strangely to sway his soul, making it sad, as if he saw in them the reflected image of his own dim, pale, shattered life. For to man, when swayed by emotion, Nature is ever a great mirror, all emotion too; it is only to him who is satisfied and at rest that she seems nothing but a cold, dead window between him and the world beyond.
When he was alone in the room after dinner, and the jubilant hymns from the church, and the glad song of a canary in a neighbour’s room came upon his weary soul like the movement and the tumult of all the joy of his youth, now buried alive in the tomb; and when the bright magic sunshine broke into his chamber, and light cloud-shadows slid athwart the spot of light upon the floor, questioning his sick, moaning heart in a thousand melancholy tropes, and saying, “Is it not thus with all things? Are not your own days fleeting by like vapours through a chilly sky, above a dead earth, floating away towards the night?”—he could but open his swelling heart by means of the soft-edged sword of music, that so the nearest and heaviest of the drops of his sorrow might be set free to flow. He struck a single triad chord upon his piano, and struck it once again, letting it gradually die away; the tones floated away as the clouds had, the sweet harmony trembled more slowly and more slowly, grew fainter and fainter, and ceased at last; silence, as of the grave, was all that was left. As he listened, his breath and his heart stopped, a faintness came over him which extended to his very soul; and then—and then—as floods wash the dead from out of the churches and the graves, in this morbid hour of dreams, the stream of his heart came flowing again, and bearing upon its billows a new corpse from out the future, torn all unshrouded from its earthly bed; it was his own body; he was dead. He looked out of window towards the comforting and reassuring light and star of life, but the voice within him cried on still, “Do not deceive thyself; before the new year’s wishes are said again, thou wilt have departed hence.”
When a shivering heart is thus all shorn of its leaves and standing bare, every breeze that touches it is a freezing blast. With what a soft, warm, gentle touch Lenette would have had to touch it so as not to startle it. A heart in this condition is like a clairvoyante, who feels a chill as of death in every hand which touches from beyond the charmed circle.
He determined to join the corpse-lottery (as it was called) that very day, so as to be able at all events to pay the toll or tax on his departure for the next world. He told Lenette so, but she thought this was only another of his harpings on the subject of the mourning dress. Thus cloudily passed the first day of the year, and the first week was even more rainy. The garden-hedge and fencing round Lenette’s love for Stiefel were completely cut down and pulled up now, and the love was to be clearly seen of every passer-by. Every evening at the time when the Schulrath used formerly to come, vexation and regret graved a deeper furrow on her round young face, which as time went on turned wholly into a piece of carving fretted by the hand of grief. She found out the days when he was to preach, so that she might go and hear him, and whenever a funeral passed, she went to the window to see him. The bookbinder’s wife was her “corresponding member,” from whom she constantly drew fresh discoveries concerning the Schulrath, and repeated the old ones with her over and over again. What an amount of warmth the Schulrath must have gained by reason of his focal distance, and her husband have lost on account of his proximity will be at once apparent; just as the earth derives least warmth from the sun when they are nearest together, i. e. in winter! Moreover another event came just then to pass which increased Lenette’s aversion. Von Blaize had secretly circulated a report that Siebenkæs was an atheist and no Christian. Respectable old maiden ladies and the clergy, form a charming contrast to the vindictive Romans under the Empire, who often accused, the most innocent people possible of being Christians, in order that they might obtain a martyr’s crown. The old maids and parsons aforesaid rather take the part of a man who is in a position of this kind, and deny that he is a Christian; and in this they contrast, likewise with the Romans and Italians of the present day, who always say “there are four Christians here,” when they mean “four men.” In St. Ferieux, near Besançon, the most virtuous girl used to be presented with a lace veil of the value of five shillings by way of a prize; and people like Blaize are fond of throwing a prize for virtue of this kind, namely, a moral veil, over the good. This is why they are fond of calling thinking men infidels, and the heterodox wolves, whose teeth help to smooth and polish,—which is the reason why wolves are engraved upon the best steel blades.
When Siebenkæs first told his wife this report of Blaize’s (that he was no Christian, if not, indeed, altogether an infidel), she didn’t pay very much attention to it, inasmuch as it seemed out of the question such a thing could be true of a man to whom she had united herself in the holy state of matrimony. It was not until sometime afterwards that she remembered that, one month when there had been a long period of dry weather he had spoken disparagingly (without the least hesitation), not only of the Roman Catholic processions (for she did not think THEY WERE of very much use herself), but concerning the Protestant’s prayers for rain, inquiring, “Do the processions, miles long, in the Arabian deserts, which go by the name of caravans, ever lead to the production of a single cloud in the sky, let them pray for rain as hard as they choose?” And “Why do the clergy get up processions only for rain or fine weather? why not to get rid of a severe winter, when at all events those who took part in the processions would feel a little warmer; or, in Holland, for bright sunny weather and the dispersion of fog; or against the aurora-borealis in Greenland?” “But what he wondered at most,” he said, “was why those converters of the heathen, who pray so often, and with so much success for the sun when he’s only behind a cloud or two, should not supplicate for him in circumstances of infinitely greater importance—in the polar regions, namely, where for months at a time he never appears even when the sky is altogether cloudless? Or why,” he asked in the last place, “do they take no steps to petition against the great solar eclipses (which are seldom very enjoyable occurrences), suffering themselves to be outdone by savage nations in this respect, for as the latter do howl and pray them away?” Many speeches, in themselves innocuous at first, nay sweet, acquire poisonous properties in the storehouse of time, as sugar does when kept for thirty years in a warehouse.[[56]] These few words, candidly spoken out in the course of common conversation, took a great hold upon Lenette now that she sate under Stiefel’s pulpit (made of apostles all carpentered up together), and heard him offering up one prayer after another, for, or against (as the case might be), sickness, government, child-birth, harvest, &c., &c.! How dear, on the other hand, Peltzstiefel grew to her; his very sermons became, in the most charming manner, regular love-letters to her heart. And indeed clericality does, at all times, stand in a very close relation to the feminine heart; that’s why “hearts” formerly meant the clergy on German playing cards.
Now what all this time did Stanislaus Siebenkæs think and do? Two contradictory things. If a hard word escaped him, he was sorry for the feeble, forsaken soul, whose whole rose-border of enjoyment had been hoed up, whose first love for the Schulrath lay languishing in sorrow and famine; for the thousand charms of that imprisoned nature of hers would have opened in all their beauty to some heart she loved, which his was not. “And can I not see,” he said further, “how impossible it is that the pin’s or needle’s point can act as a lightning conductor to the sultry, lightning-charged clouds of her life, in the same way that the pen’s point does for mine. One can WRITE a good deal of one’s mind, but one can’t stitch very much off it. And when I consider what swimming-belts and cork-jackets for the deepest floods I am prepared with, in the shape of the self-contemplation of the Emperor Antoninus and in Arrianus Epictetus, of neither of whom she knows even the binding, let alone the name (to say nothing of my astronomy and psychology); and what splendid hands at the fire engine-pumps they are to me when I blaze up in a conflagration of anger as I did just now, while she has to let her anger burn itself out, verily I ought to be ten times more gentle with her, instead of being ten times more irritable.” If it happened, on the other hand, that he had not given but had received a few hard words, he thought of her warm longing for the Schulrath which she could so readily increase and magnify in secret during her wholly mechanical work, to any extent; and of the continual yielding of his own too soft heart; a thing for which his strong-souled Leibgeber would have scolded him, while his wife would have done so for the contrary defect, which she was not likely to encounter in her stiff unyielding Stiefel, judging by the recent unceremoniousness of style in which he, the other day, gave his notice of the calling in of his capital of Regard.
In this frame of mind, one day when his spirit was heavy with anger, he put to her, as she was starting again to go to the Schulrath’s evening sermon, the simple little question, why it was she used formerly to go so seldom to the evening service, and now went so often? She answered that it was because the evening preacher, Mr. Schalaster, always used to preach in the evenings, but that since he had put out his collar-bone the Schulrath had taken his duty. Heaven forbid that she should go to the evening services when Mr. Schalaster’s collar-bone was well again. By slow degrees he drew out of her that she considered this young Mr. Schalaster a most dangerous disseminator of false doctrine, a man who by no means adhered to Luther’s bible, but believed in Mosheh, and in Jesos Christos, Petros and Paulos, and, in fact, os’d all the Apostles in such a manner as to be an offence to all Christian folks; nay he had gone the length of naming the Holy Jerusalem in such an extraordinary way that she couldn’t so much as say it after him; it was soon after this that he had put out his collar-bone, but far be it from her to judge the man. “No, don’t, dear,” her husband said, “perhaps the young gentleman may be a little nearsighted, or he mayn’t know his Greek Testament so well as he ought, the u’s in it are sometimes a good deal like o’s. Ah! how many Schalasters there are who do in their several sciences and doctrines, say Petros for Petrus, and where there’s not the slightest occasion, and nothing in the shape of a stumbling-block in the path, breed dissension among mankind by means of consanguineous vowels.”
On this particular occasion, however, Schalaster drew our couple a little nearer together again. It was a satisfaction to Siebenkæs to find that he had been a little mistaken up to this point, and that it was not only love to Stiefel which had taken her to evening church, but that regard for purity of doctrine had something to do with it as well. The distinction was fine, it is true; but in time of need one catches at the minutest fragment of comfort; and Siebenkæs was delighted that his wife wasn’t quite so deeply in love with the Schulrath as he had been supposing. Let no one hear speak despairingly of the delicate gossamer web which supports us and our happiness. If we do spin and draw it out of ourselves, as the spider does hers, yet it bears us pretty firmly up, and, like the spider, we hang safe and sound in the middle of it, while the storm-wind rocks both our web and us uninjured to and fro.