On the last morning, which was to give our Siebenkæs “Notice to quit,” arrived the casa santa of mankind, our chambre garnie, our last seed capsule—the coffin for which we have to pay whatever is demanded. “This is the last building grant of life,” said Henry, “the carpenter’s final piece of cheatery.”
At half an hour after midnight—when neither bat nor night-watchman, nor beer-guest from the public-house, nor night-light was any longer to be seen; and only a field-cricket here and there could be heard in the sheaves, and a mouse or two in the houses—Leibgeber said to his sad and anxious friend, “March, now! Since you shuffled off this mortal coil, and entered into eternity, you have not known a moment of happiness or peace. All the rest is my affair. Wait for me at Hof on the Saale. We must see each other yet once more after death.” Firmian fell in silence on his burning face, and wept. In this twilight hour he once more revisited all the flowery places of the past, behind which he was sinking as into a grave. His softened heart took delight in depositing a parting tear upon every piece of dress belonging to his sorrowing, bereaved Lenette—on every piece of her work—on every trace of her housewifely hand. He pressed her betrothal wreath of roses and forget-me-nots hard to his burning bosom, and placed Nathalie’s rosebuds in his pocket. And thus—mute, oppressed, with stifled sobs, and like one cast out by an earthquake from this earth on to the icy coasts of a strange world—he crept down the steps after his friend; pressed his helping hand once more at the door; and then night built the funeral vault of her gigantic shadow all over him. Leibgeber wept heartily as soon as he was lost to view. Tears fell on every stone which he pocketed, and upon the old block which he took in his arms, to imbed in the coffin-shell so as to give it the due weight of a corpse. He filled up that haven of our bodies, and closed that ark of the covenant, hanging the coffin-key, like a black cross, upon his breast. And now for the first time he slept in peace in the house of mourning. All was done.
In the morning he made no secret of it, before the bearers and Lenette, that he had placed the body in the coffin with his own two arms, and not without considerable effort. She sighed to see her departed husband once again, but Henry had thrown away the door-key of the painted house in the darkness. He helped most diligently in the search for it (he had it about him all the time), but it was in vain, and many of the bystanders soon guessed that Henry was only deceiving, anxious to spare the widow’s weeping eyes any further sight of the cause of her sorrow. So they went forth, with the mock passenger in the quasi coffin, to the churchyard which lay glistening in dew beneath the fresh blue sky. An icy thrill crept to Henry’s heart as he read the words on the gravestone. It had been lifted from off the flat, Moravian-like grave of Siebenkæs’s great-grandfather, and turned over, and on the smooth side glittered the newly-graven inscription—
“STAN: FIRMIAN SIEBENKÆS, Departed this life, 24th August, 1786.”
This name had once been Henry’s own, and on the reverse side of the monument was his present name, Leibgeber. Henry reflected that in a few days he would fall (with his name cast away from him) as a little brook into the world’s great ocean, and flow there without shores, and be lost amongst strange and unknown billows. He felt as though he himself with his old name, and his new, were going down to the grave. So strangely mingled were his feelings that he seemed to himself as if he were sticking fast in the frozen stream of life, while overhead a burning sun was beating upon the ice-field, and he was lying between the glow and the frost. In addition to this, the Schulrath just then came running (with his handkerchief to his eyes and nose), and, in stammering accents of sorrow, imparted the news which had just reached the town—that the old King of Prussia had died on the 17th of the month.
The first thing that Leibgeber did was to look up to the morning sun, as though Frederick’s eye was beaming morning fire from it over the earth. It is easier to be a great king than a just one; it is easier to be admired than justified. A king lays his little finger upon the long arm of the monstrous lever, and, like Archimedes, lifts ships and countries with the muscles of his fingers; but it is only the machine that is great—and the machinist, Fate—not he who works it. The voice of a king re-echoes like a peal of thunder amongst the numberless valleys around him; and every gentle ray he emits is reflected in the form of a burning beam condensed into a focus, from the countless plane-mirrors which are upon his throne. But Frederick could, at most, only be lowered by a throne, by having to sit upon it. His head would only have been greater without the close-binding crown (its crown of thorns) and magic circle. And happy, thou great spirit, couldst thou still less become! For, although thou hadst broken down within thee the Bastilles and the prison-walls of all ignoble passions—although thou hadst given thy spirit what Franklin gave to earth, namely, lightning-conductors, musical glasses, and freedom—although no kingdom was to thee so lovely as that of truth, and there was none which thou so lovedst to enlarge—although thou didst permit the emasculate philosophy of French encyclopædists to hide from thee eternity only, but not divinity, only the belief in virtue, but not thine own—yet did thy loving bosom accept nothing from friendship and humanity but the echoes of their sighs—the flute. And thy spirit, which, with its great roots like the mahogany-tree, often shivered the rocks it grew upon—thy spirit, in the fell battle of thy wishes with thy doubts, in the contest of thy ideal world with the real one, and the one in which thou didst believe, felt a painful discord which no mild faith in a second softened to harmony. And therefore there was upon thy throne no place of rest but that which thou hast now attained.
Some men bring all humanity before our eyes at a glance, as certain events bring our whole lives. There fell upon Henry’s breast strong splinters of the fallen mountain whose crash he heard.
He placed himself before the open grave, and delivered this speech more to invisible than to visible hearers:—
“So, then, the epitaph on the tomb is versio interlineario of this small, small printed life of ours. The heart does not rest until, like the head, it is set in gold.[[93]] Thou hidden Infinite one! make, for me, the grave a prompter’s tube, and tell me what I am to think of the whole theatre. Indeed, what is there in the grave? Some ashes, a few worms, coldness, and night—by Heaven! there is nothing better above it either, except that one feels it. Mr. Schulrath, Time sits behind us, and reads the calendar of life so cursorily, and turns over the page of month after month at such a rate, that I can fancy this grave—this moat here about our castles in the air—this fortress trench—lengthening out and extending till it reaches my bed, and I am shaken out of the bedclothes into this cooking-hole, like a heap of Spanish flies. ‘Go on,’ I would say, ‘Go on. I shall come either to old Fritz, or to his worms—and therewith Basta! ‘By Heaven! one is ashamed of life when the greatest of men no longer possess it. And so holla!”