Henry gently led her weeping away; and he cried himself, too; and cursed his plot; and signed to the Schulrath, saying, “Firmian needs rest now.” The latter turned his face, swollen and drawn with pain, to the wall. Lenette and Stiefel were mourning together in the other room. Henry waited till the greater billows had subsided somewhat, and then quietly put the question: “Now?” Firmian gave the signal, and Henry yelled out, “Oh! he is gone!” like a man beside himself; and threw himself down upon the motionless body (to prevent anybody from touching it), with genuine, bitter tears at the thought of the nearness of parting. An inconsolable couple came bursting from the next room. Lenette would have thrown herself upon her husband (whose face was turned away), and she cried, in agony, “I must see him; I must bid my husband good-bye once more.” But Henry told the Schulrath (confidentially) to take hold of her, and support her, and get her away out of the room. The two former things he was able to accomplish (although his own self-control was only an artificial one, assumed with the view of demonstrating the victory of religion over philosophy), but get her out of the room he could not. When she saw Henry take up the mask of death, “No, no,” she cried; “I insist upon being allowed to see my husband once more.” But Henry took the mask, gently turned Firmian’s face (on which the tears of parting were scarce yet dry), and covered it up, thus hiding it for ever from his wife’s weeping eyes. This grand scene lifted up his heart; he gazed upon the mask and said, “Death lays a mask like this over all our faces; and a time will come when I shall stretch me out in death’s midnight sleep as he has done, and grow longer and heavier. Ah! poor Firmian! has that war game of yours been worth the candles and the trouble? We are not the players, it is true; we are the things played with: and old Death sends our heads and hearts rolling like balls over the green billiard-table, and pockets them in his corpse-sack; and every time one of us is pocketed there, the death-bell gives a toll. It is true you go on living in a sense[[90]] (if the frescoes of ideas can be detached from the walls of the body), and oh! may you be happier in that postscript life than in this. But what is it, this postscript life, after all? It will go out too; every life, on every world-ball, will burn out one day. The planets are licensed only to retail liquor to be drunk on the premises. They can’t board and lodge us; they merely pour us out a glass of quince-wine, currant-juice, spirits; but for the most part gargles of good wine (which we must not swallow), or else sympathetic ink (i. e. liquor probatorius), sleeping-draughts, and acids; and then, on we go, from one planet-inn to another; and so from millennium to millennium. Oh! thou kind heaven; and whither, whither, whither?
“However, this earth is the wretchedest village tap-room of the lot; a place where mostly beggars, rogues, and deserters turn in, and which we have always to go five steps away from to enjoy our best pleasures; that is to say, either into memory or into imagination.
“Ah! peaceful being there at rest, may it fare better with you in other taverns than here; and may some restaurateur of life open the door of a wine-cellar for you in lieu of this vinegar-cellar!”
CHAPTER XXI.
DR. ŒLHAFEN AND MEDICAL BOOT AND SHOEMAKING—THE BURIAL SOCIETY—A DEATH’S HEAD IN THE SADDLE—FREDERICK II. AND HIS FUNERAL ORATION.
As a step preliminary to everything else, Leibgeber quartered the sorrowing widow down stairs with the hairdresser, with the view of rendering the intermediate state after death easier to the dead man. “You must emigrate,” he told her, “and keep out of the sight of these sad memorials round us here, until he has been taken away.” Superstitious terror made her consent, so that he had no difficulty in giving the dear departed his food and drink. He compared him to a walled-up vestal, finding in her cell a lamp, bread, water, milk, and oil (according to Plutarch, in ‘Numa’); and added, “Unless you are more like the earwig, which, when cut in two, turns about and devours its own remains.” By jokes like these he brightened (or, at all events, strove to brighten) the cloudy and autumnal soul of his dear friend, who could see nothing all around him save ruins of his bygone life, from the widowed Lenette’s clothes to her work. The bonnet-block, which he had struck on the day of the thunder-storm, had to be put away in a corner out of his sight, because he said it made Gorgon faces at him.
Next day, our good corpse-watcher, Leibgeber, had to perform the labours of a Hercules, an Ixion, and a Sisyphus combined. Congress after congress, picket after picket, came to see the dead man and speak well of him—for it is not until they make their exit that we applaud men and actors, and we think people are morally beautified by death as Lavater thought they were physically. But Leibgeber drove everybody away from the death-chamber, saying it had been one of his friend’s last requests that he should do so.
Then came the woman to lay out the corpse (Death’s Abigail), and wanted to begin washing and dressing it. Henry tussled with her, paid her, and banished her. Then (in presence of the widow and Peltzstiefel), he had to pretend to be pretending to hide a bleeding heart behind outward resignation. “But I see through him,” said Stiefel, “without the slightest trouble. It is because he is not a Christian that he is striving to play the Stoic and the Philosopher.” Stiefel was here alluding to that specious, empty, and frivolous hardness which is exhibited by Zenos of the world and of the court, who are like those wooden figures which are made to look like stone statues and pillars by being smeared over with a coating of stone-dust. Also the share, or dividend, of the burial-fund was got together (by being collected on a plate from the members of that body), and this led to its coming to the knowledge of our old acquaintance Dr. Œlhafen, who was one of the paying members. He took occasion, on his morning round of visits, to drop in at the house of mourning, with the view of provoking his brother in science to as great an extent as he could. He therefore affected not to have heard a word about the death, and began by asking how the invalid was getting on. “According to the latest bulletins,” said Henry, “he is not getting on at all—he has got on; in a word, Herr Protomedicus Œlhafen, he is gone. August, March, and December are months when Death sends out his pressgang and gathers in his vintage.”
“That lowering powder of yours,” said the vindictive Doctor, “seems to have lowered his temperature pretty effectively; he’s cool enough now, eh?” This pained Leibgeber, and he answered, “I am sorry to say, he is. However, we did our best with him. We got your emetic down his throat, but the only thing he got rid of was that most terribly morbific of all matters in man—his soul. You, Mr. Protomedicus, are judge in a criminal court, having the power of life and death; whereas, you see, I am only an advocate, and possessed of a jurisdiction so far inferior that I didn’t dare meddle with anything, least of all the fellow’s life; a nice face he would have made if I had.”