“But Eternity remains for thee and me!
“F. S.”
His sleep was nothing but dreams all night, that he might be sure to awaken Leibgeber in the morning. But as early as three o’clock, the latter, in his capacity of letter-carrier, and Maître des Requêtes, was posted under a great linden-tree, whose hanging beds, thronged with a sleeping world of inhabitants, overhung the alley by which Nathalie was to come. Firmian, in bed, enacted Henry’s part along with him, in fancy, thinking to himself, “Now she is bidding the English lady good-bye; now she is getting into the carriage; now she is passing the tree, and he is taking her horses by the bridle.” He phantasised himself into dreams which stabbed his heart with pictures of her repeated refusals of his petition. What a quantity of dark and cloudy weather is born of one single, bright, starry night, in the physical world as well as in the moral. At last he dreamed that she stretched her hand to him, from her carriage, with tears in her eyes, and the green rose-twig on her breast, and said, in low sweet tones, “I must say no! Could I live long, if you were dead?” She pressed his hand so warmly that he awoke. The pressure was there, and lasted, and before him was the beaming daylight, and his beaming friend, who said, “She has agreed, while you’ve been snoring here.”
He had been within a hair’s breadth of missing her. She had not taken so much time to dress and depart as others do to undress and arrive. A rose-branch, wet with dew, whose leaves pricked sharper than its thorns, was on her heart, and the long parting had tinted her lids with red. She was delighted to see him, though a little frightened, and anxious to hear. He gave her Firmian’s open letter, to begin with, by way of credential. Her eager eyes shone out once more through two tear-drops, and she asked, “What am I to do?” “Nothing,” said Leibgeber, in an artful manner, half jest, half earnest, “except allow the Prussian Treasury to remind you of his death twice a-year, as if you were his widow.” She answered, “No!” pronouncedly, on one note, behind which, however, there was only a comma, not a full stop. He once more went through his petitions, and his reasons, adding, “Do it, at least, for my sake, if for no other reason. I can’t bear to see him baulked of a wish, or disappointed in a hope. He is a bear whom that bear-leader, the State, keeps dancing all the winter, without a wink of winter sleep, whereas I seldom take my paw out of my mouth, but suck away continually. He kept awake all last night, so as to make sure of calling me in time, and he is counting the moments anxiously at home now.” She read the letter again, syllable by syllable. He did not ask for a final answer, but spun out a talk on other subjects—the morning, her journey, the village of Schraplau. The morning had already raised her pillar of fire beyond Bayreuth, the town kept adding pillars of smoke; in a few minutes he must out of the carriage and back. “And so, fare you well,” he said, in the softest of tones, with one foot on the carriage-step; “may your future grow brighter and brighter, like the day about us. And now, what last word am I to carry to my good, dear beloved Firmian?” (I shall make a remark in a minute or two.) She lowered her travelling-veil like the drop curtain of a drama which is done, and said in low and stifled accents, “If I must, I must; so let this be, also. But you are giving me another great sorrow to take with me on my way.” Here he jumped down, and the carriage, bearing this poor soul—poor now in so many ways—rolled on with her over the shattered ruins of her youthful life.
If he had got a “No” instead of this hard wrung-out “Yes,” he would have caught her again on the other side of the town, and been her fellow-traveller for another fragment of her journey.
I said above, that I should “make a remark;” it is this: that the friendship or love which a woman has for a man is fed by that which she sees existing between him and his friends, and grows visibly in consequence—converting it, polyp-fashion, into its own substance. It was for this reason that Leibgeber, by instinct, had given such warm expression to his. In the case of us, masculine lovers, again, this sort of electric coating, or magnetic armature of our love with the friendship of our beloved object with other women is most uncommon. What pleases us, is to see her shrinking from everybody else, growing hard and frozen to them on our account, handing them nothing but ices and cold pudding, but serving us with glowing goblets of love. This process of making the heart, like wine, more fiery and strong, and generous, by freezing it at the boiling-point, may please a short-sighted selfish soul; but never a clear-seeing, kindly, loving one. At all events, the author declares that, whenever he has caught a glimpse—in a mirror or in water—of the reverse side of the Janus-head, of which the other side has been smiling in love upon him, frowning in dislike upon the rest of the world, he has made a face or two of the same disliking sort on the spot—at the Janus-head. For the mere contrast’s sake, a girl should never slander, find fault, or dislike, at all events, while she is a lover; when she is a married woman, the mistress of a house, and has children, and cows, and servants, of course no reasonable man or husband, can possibly object to a moderate amount of bad temper, and a little scolding now and then.
Nathalie had acceded to the strange proposal for many reasons; just because it was a strange one; and then the word “widow” would, to her romantic heart, be constantly weaving a mourning-band of sorrow, binding her and Firmian together, and winding in charming and fanciful wreaths round the events, and the vows, of the night of their good-bye. Besides, to-day, she had been gradually ascending from one emotion to another, and had reached a height where her head began to reel. Moreover, she was boundlessly unselfish, and consequently never troubled herself to think whether a thing had the appearance of selfishness or not. And, lastly, she cared less about appearances in general, and the conclusions people drew from them than, perhaps, a young lady should care.
Leibgeber, now that all his goals were reached, emitted a long, gladsome zodiacal light; and Firmian did not darken it with the full depth of his mourning night shadow, but only with the half-tints thereof. At the same time, he felt he could not visit either of Bayreuth’s pleasure-places, Eremitage or Fantaisie, which were Herculaneum and Portici to him now. Yet he must pass by the latter on his homeward way, and disinter many things that were buried. He did not care to delay his return much longer; not only was the moon set now, which had shed a new silvery radiance upon all the white flowers and blossoms of the spring, but Leibgeber, besides, was a death’s head memento mori, always saying, in the most unmistakable manner—though with neither lips nor tongue—“It must be borne in mind that thou hast got to die, in Kuhschnappel, in jest.” Leibgeber’s heart burned for the world without, the flames of his forest-conflagration were eager to dart and play uncontrolled over alps, islands, capital cities; the Vaduz water reservoir of acts of parliament—paper lit-de-parade and lit-de-justice—would have been to him a heavy, suffocating, feather-bed, such as people in a hopeless state of hydrophobia used to be smothered by out of compassion. In fact, a small town could as little endure him as he could endure a small town. Indeed, even in Bayreuth—a larger place—there were sundry Commissaires de Justice at the table d’hôte at the ‘Sun’ Hotel, who told me with their own lips, that when Leibgeber spoke his table-speech (reported in Chapter XII.) on the subject of Crown Princes, they thought it was a deliberate satire on a particular Margrave then reigning; whereas all his satires were really directed against the human race in general, not against individuals. Again, how thoughtlessly he conducted himself during the poor eight days which he spent in our good town of Hof im Voigtlande. Are there not credible “Varisker” (as according to some authorities the inhabitants of Voigtland were called in Cæsar’s time—though others consider “Narisker” to have been the word), who have assured me that he bought bergamot pears in the open market-place, near the court-house, and cakes at a baker’s stall, in his best suit of Sunday clothes? And are there not Nariskers of the fair sex, who, having observed his proceedings thereafter, are ready to depose that, though stall-feeding is a matter of universal enjoinment, he nevertheless ate this food-offering in the open air like a prince, and on the march, like a Roman army? There are witnesses, who waltzed with him, to testify that he went to masked balls in a robe de chambre and a cocked-hat and feathers, and that he had worn both all the previous day in earnest, before putting them on in the evening in jest. A Narisker not without some brains, and possessing a good memory, who was not aware that I had the fellow under my historical hands, repeated the following somewhat audacious utterances of Leibgeber’s.
“Every man is a born pedant. There are very few who are hung in chains after they are dead: but almost every one is hung, in most accursed chains, before death; and, therefore, in most countries, ‘Freeman’ means provost-marshal, or hangman. Jest, as such, ought to be serious; therefore, as long as one is only in jest, it is wrong to jest in the slightest degree. He held, that the spirit which brooded, creating, over the ink of colleges was (as many Fathers of the Church held that to be which, according to Moses, moved upon the face of the waters) wind. In his eyes, worshipful councils, conferences, deputations, sessions, processions, &c., were not, at bottom, wholly without a spice of comic salt, looked upon as grave parodies of stiff and empty seriousness, more especially as in general there was but one member of the conclave (or perhaps his wife) who really voted, decided, or ruled, the mystic corpus itself, sitting at the green table, chiefly for the joke of the thing; just as, in flute clocks, though there is a flute-player screwed on outside whose fingers work up and down upon the flute, which grows out of his mouth, and children are beyond themselves with delight at the talent of the wooden imposition, every clockmaker knows that it is inside that the wheels are which act on the hidden pipes with their pinions.” I answered that these sayings showed that Leibgeber was of a rather audacious and ironical turn of mind. It is, perhaps, to be desired, that everybody were in a position to do what the author does in this place, namely, beg all Nariskers to have the goodness to point to any single word or deed of his which can be called satirical, or not exactly adapted to fit on to the cap-block of a pays coutumier. If he is not speaking the truth, he begs that he may be contradicted without the slightest hesitation.
The winnowing-fan which blew Siebenkæs out of Bayreuth on the following day, was a letter from the Count von Vaduz, in which he expressed his friendly regret on account of Leibgeber’s cold-fever and tallowy appearance, at the same time begging him to hasten his entry upon the duties of his office. This letter was to Siebenkæs as a wing-membrane wherewith to hasten his flight to his seeming cocoon-grave, in order to issue forth from it a young full-fledged inspector. In our next chapter he turns him about, and quits the beautiful town. In what remains of this, he is taking private lessons in silhouette clipping from Leibgeber, whose rôle he is to succeed to by dying. The master-cutter, and scissorial-mentor did nothing, in this connection, worthy of being handed down to posterity by me save one thing, as to which I do not find a word in my documents, which was told me by Mr. Feldmann, the keeper of the hotel, who was carving at table when it occurred. It was only that a stranger who was dining there clipped out a profile of Leibgeber, among others; while Leibgeber, seeing what he was about, clipped out, under cover of the table-cloth, a silhouette of this supernumerary copyist’s own head and shoulders, and when the latter handed him his, Leibgeber returned the compliment, saying “al Pari!” thus paying him in his own coin. This stranger made airs of various kinds, as well as silhouettes, but succeeded best with the phlogistic sort, which he made with his lungs, without any difficulty to speak of, and in which he throve and took on colour, as plants do; this sort of air can be breathed, and is designated by the name of “wind,” to distinguish it from the other phlogistic gases which can not be inhaled. When this phlogistic wind-maker (who gave admirable lectures from town to town, on the other gases, from that portable professorial chair, his body) had departed with his cutter’s wages, Heinrich contented himself with the following remarks.