How often he turned back to the Bayreuth hills, beyond which he had lived real days of youth, for the first time in his existence! Behind him Nathalie was journeying on towards the east, and breezes from that quarter—airs which had breathed gently around the distant, lonely one—came wafting back to him, and he drunk the æther-stream like the breath of one beloved.
The hills sunk low on the horizon; his paradise was whelmed in the blue of heaven. His west and Nathalie’s east flowed asunder, and parted wider, faster and faster as the moments sped. One beautiful plain receded, flying behind him, after another; and he hastened past the flower-decked limbs of Spring as she lay outstretched on earth, alternating between looking and enjoying, as in early days gone by.
Thus he came at evening to the village in the valley by the Jaxt, where on his journey to Bayreuth, he had passed in review, with tears, his loveless days; but he came with a new heart, full to the brim with love and happiness; and tears flowed this time too. Here where, amid the melting magic lights of evening, he had asked himself, “What womanly soul has ever loved you as your old dreams have so often pictured to your heart you might be loved by one,” and had given himself so sad an answer; here he could think on that Bayreuth night, and say, “Yes! Nathalie has loved me!” And then the old sorrow rose again, but glorified, from the dead. He had made to her a vow of invisibility here on earth; he was now journeying on towards his own death; he was to die, and never see her more. She was gone before him—had died first, as it were; she had merely taken away with her into the long, dim, coming years of her life the grief of having loved and lost, twice. “And I look into my own life here, and weep, away from her,” he said, wearily, and closed his eyes undried.
Another world altogether opened upon him in the morning—not a new world by any means—the old, old familiar one. Just as if the concentric magic circles which surrounded Nathalie and Leibgeber reached no further than the little Valley of Longing on the Jaxt, and could include nothing beyond it. Every step towards home translated the poetry which had come into his life to poetic prose. The Imperial market-town (that frigid zone of his life) was nearer to him; his torrid zone, over which the faded petals of his ephemeral joy-flowers were fluttering still, was far away behind him.
But, on the other hand, the pictured imagery of his domestic life kept growing clearer and brighter, taking the form of a picture-bible, while the paintings of his month of bliss died away into a dark picture gallery. I think the weather, which was rainy, had some connection with this.
Towards the end of the week the weather, as well as penitents and churchgoers, puts on other shirts and clothes.
It was Saturday, and cloudy. Damp weather affects the walls of our brains as it does the walls of our rooms; the paperings of both imbibe the moisture, and get curled up into clouds, until the next dry day smooths both out again. Under a blue sky, I long for eagles’ pinions; under a cloudy one, I only want a goose’s wing to write with. In the former case we are eager to be off and out, into the wide world; in the latter, all we want is to sit comfortably down in our arm-chair. In short, clouds, when they drop, make us domestic, citizenish, and hungry, while blue skies make us thirsty, and citizens of the world.
These clouds of this Saturday formed a kind of palisade about the Eden of Bayreuth. Every big drop which fell on the leaves made him think longingly of the wifely, wedded heart, which was his lawful property (and which he was soon to lose), and of his poor little lodging. At last when the ice-floes of the rugged-clouds melted into grey foam, and the setting sun was drawn like a sluice, out of this suspended mill-pond, and it poured down in consequence, Kuhschnappel came in sight.
Discordant, jarring fancies clanged in contention within him. The commonplace, narrow-minded, provincial town, seemed, when contrasted with freer and more liberal places and societies, so crowded and crushed together, so official in style, and full of Troglodytes—with doggrel, and table-verses by way of poetry—that he felt it would be a satisfaction to drag out his green trellis-bed into the market-place in broad daylight, and go to sleep beneath the very windows of the local “quality,” without minding a brass-farthing what the upper council might think, or the lower council either. The nearer he came to the stage he was to die upon, the more difficult did this first rôle of his (and last but one) appear to him.
Away from home we are bold and daring: we resolve, and undertake; at home, we pause and hesitate, and delay.