To storm up the stairs, to burst open the door of joy, to fall upon the beloved breast, was the work of a single instant; and then the barren minutes of life passed unseen and unheard by the close, silent union of two human creatures, who lay clinging together on the waters of life, like two shipwrecked brothers floating, embracing and embraced, on the chill waves, with nothing left them save the heart they die upon....
As yet they had not said a word to one another. Firmian, whom a longer continuance of troubles had made the weaker of the two, wept without disguise at sight of the face of his newly recovered friend. Heinrich’s features were drawn as if by pain. They both had their hats still on. Leibgeber, in his embarrassment, could think of nothing to hold on to except the bell-rope. The waiter came running in. “Oh! it’s nothing!” said Leibgeber; “except, by the way, that I shan’t go out now. Heaven grant,” he added, “that we may get fairly into the thick of a long talk! Drag me into one, brother!”
He had no difficulty in beginning one with the pragmatic detailing of the Nouvelle du Jour—or rather de la Nuit—in short, the town (or, more properly speaking, the country) news of what had taken place on the previous day in the vicinity of the veil of the beautiful Je ne sais quoi.
“I know her” (Leibgeber answered), “as I know my own pulse; but I don’t intend to say anything whatever about her just now. I should be obliged to sit still and wait here for such a time. Put the whole thing off till we are sitting in Abraham’s warm bosom in the Hermitage, which is the second heaven of Bayreuth, next to Fantaisie,—for Fantaisie is the first heaven, and the whole country is the third.”
They then made an ascent into heaven in every fresh street they came to, and also in every subject of conversation which they fell upon. “You shall knock my head off its stalk like a poppy,” said Leibgeber, on Firmian’s betraying (I regret to say) as great a curiosity as the reader’s own to know the secret, “before I transform my mysteries into yours, either to-day, or to-morrow, or the day after that. Thus much I will tell you, that your ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ (your ‘Evening Journal’ contains matter more morbific) are perfectly divine, and very heavenly indeed, and not at all bad, and by no means without beauties; but, on the whole (let us say), passable enough.” Leibgeber then told him how delighted he was with the work, and how it surprised him that he, a lawyer in a little country town, with nobody in it but a parcel of shopkeepers and juristic souls, with a sprinkling of higher officialities, should have managed to rise in these satires to such a freedom and purity of art; and, indeed, when I first read the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’ I said, myself now and then, “I am sure I couldn’t have written anything of the kind in Hof in Voigtland, and I have written one or two pretty good things there, too.”
Leibgeber placed a crown on the top of the laurel wreath by declaring that it was much easier for him to laugh at the world aloud, and with both lips, than under his breath and with the pen, and this in accordance with well-tried rules of art. Siebenkæs was beyond himself with delight at his friend’s praise. But let no one grudge a pleasure of this sort to our advocate, or to any other worker who, in solitude, and without a single soul to give him a word of praise, has gone steadfastly forward along the path of art which he has honestly chosen, unsupported, unassisted by the smallest encouragement of any kind, whom, at last, on reaching the goal, the fragrance of a leaf or two of laurel from a friend’s hand, penetrates, strengthens, and recompenses, with an aroma as of Araby the Blest. If even the far-famed and the self-satisfied stand in need of a little of the warmth which is derived from other people’s opinions, how much more the diffident and the unknown! Ah! lucky Firmian! to what a distance in the far south-south-west did the passing thunder-storms of thy life now go drifting away. When the sun fell upon them, nothing of them was to be seen but a gentle fall of rain.
At the table d’hôte he observed with delight, in the case of Leibgeber, how wonderfully a constant intercourse with men and cities loosens the tongue though, at the same time, the heart puts on the bridle which has been taken from the lips. Leibgeber thought nothing of talking about himself, and this in the most humorous manner, before all sorts of grand councillors of state and chancery officials dining at the Sun—a thing which he, a cabined, cribbed, confined parish advocate would scarce have dared even after a good bottle of wine. As the discourse which he delivered on this occasion pleased the parish advocate, I shall build it into this history, and place over it the superscription—
LEIBGEBER’S DINNER SPEECH.
“I think I may venture to say that of all the Christians and persons of name and title seated at this table, not one was made into one with such wonderful difficulty as I was. My mother, a native of Gascony, was on her way to Holland, by sea, from London, where she had left my father as diocesan of a German community. But, never since there has been such a thing on the face of the earth as a councillor of the German empire, did the German Ocean rage and insurge so terrifically as upon the occasion in question when it was my mother’s lot to be crossing it. Pour all hell, hissing lakes of brimstone, boiling copper, splattering devils, and all, into the cold ocean, and observe the crackling, the roaring, and the seething of the hell-flames and ocean-waves contending, till one of these hostile elements swallow up the other, and you have a faint (but, at dinner-time, a sufficient) idea of the infernal storm in which I came upon the sea, and into the world. When I tell you that the main braces, the topsail sheets, and the main topgallant stays (to say nothing of the crossjack braces and fore topgallant halyards, which were in a worse state still)—and when, moreover, the mizen topsail, and the foretop mast staysail rigging, and the flying jib (to say nothing of the spanker)—when things so accustomed to the sea as these (I say) felt as if their last hour was come, it was a real ocean miracle that a creature so tender as I was at that time should have managed to commence his first. I had about as much flesh on my body then as I have fat now, and may have weighed, at the outside, about four Nürnberg pounds, which (if we may credit the authority of the best anatomical theatres) is at the present moment about the weight of my brain alone. Besides which, I was the merest of beginners. I had seen absolutely nothing of the world, except this infernal gale. I was a creature, not so much of few years as of none at all (though everybody’s life commences some nine months sooner than the parish registers indicate), excessively tender and delicate—having been (in opposition to all the rules of hygiene) kept much too warm, swaddled, and coddled during these very first nine months in question, when I ought rather to have been undergoing a preparation of some kind to enable me to bear the chill atmosphere of this world. And thus, quarter-grown, a tender flower-bud, liquidly soft as first love, when I made my appearance during a storm such as was raging (I added one or two feeble squeaks, with some difficulty, to its roar), what was to be expected was, that I should be extinguished altogether, even before it calmed down. People didn’t like the idea of my going without something in the shape of a name—without some little vestige of Christianity of some kind—out of this world, which is a place whence we do carry away even less than we bring into it with us. But the grand difficulty experienced was that of standing godfather, in a rolling, plunging vessel, which pitched everything and everybody higgledy-piggledy that wasn’t made fast. The chaplain was (luckily) lying in a hammock, and he baptized down out of thence. My godfather was the boatswain, who held me for five whole minutes; but inasmuch as he couldn’t, without help, stand steady enough to enable the chaplain to touch my brow with the water without missing me, he was held by the barber’s mate, who was made fast to a marine, who was made fast to a boatswain’s mate, who was made fast to the master-at-arms, who sat upon the knee of an old bluejacket, who held on to him like grim death.
“However, neither the ship nor the child (as I afterwards ascertained) came to any detriment; but you all see, do you not, that, hard as it is for any one amid the storms of life, to become, and continue, a Christian, or to get a name—be it in a directory, in a literary gazette, in a herald’s college, or upon a medal—yet there are few who have had the same difficulty as I have had in acquiring the mere first elements of a name—the groundwork, the binomial root, of a Christian name, whereon, at a subsequent period, the other great name might be engrafted—and to get hold of a faint smattering of Christianity, as much as a catechumen and candidate as yet in a speechless and sucking condition might be capable of. There is but one thing more difficult to make; the greatest princes and heroes can only do it once in their lives—the mightiest geniuses—even the three electors of the Church, the Emperor of Germany himself, with all their united efforts, can’t do more, were they to sit for years, stamping in the mint with all the latest improvements in coining machinery.”