CHAPTER XXII.
JOURNEY THROUGH FANTAISIE—RE-UNION ON THE BINDLOCHER MOUNTAIN—BERNECK—MAN-DOUBLING—GEFREES—EXCHANGE OF CLOTHES—MUNCHBERG—SOLO-WHISTLING—HOF—THE STONE OF GLADNESS AND DOUBLE-PARTING.
Henry now plied more wings than any seraph, that he might fly up with his friend as soon as possible. He packed up the latter’s manuscripts in haste, and addressed them to Vaduz. The sealed will and testament was lodged with the proper authorities, from whom, also, the necessary certificate of death was obtained to show the Prussian Widows’ Fund that it was not being defrauded. And then he got fairly afloat, and pushed off, having first bestowed some weighty grounds for consolation—as well as some weighty ducats—upon the downcast straw-widow, who mourned in the striped calico-dress, as was right and proper.
Let us now overtake and accompany his departed friend, even before he himself does so. During the first hour of his night-journey, vague and disordered pictures of the past and of the future struggled in Firmian’s heart; and it seemed to him as if, for him, there were no such thing as a present, but that a wilderness stretched between the past and the future. But the fresh, rich harvest month of August soon gave him back the life he had (so to speak) played away; and when the gleaming morning was come in earnest, the earth was lying all lighted up with a new-fallen thunderstorm, now emitting lovely lightning only from drops hanging on the corn-ears, as if over-silvered by the moon. It was a new earth; he was a new creature, just burst, with ripened pinions, through the egg-shell of the coffin. Oh! a broad, marshy, overshadowed desert-waste, where a long, long troubled dream had kept driving him to and fro, had vanished with that dream, and he was awake, and gazing deep into Eden. The last week (and that last week especially) had stretched out to enormous length those twisted convolutions of suffering which give to our brief lives a false appearance of being much too long (as we make the short walks of a garden seem longer by laying them out in curves and sweeps). On the other hand, his lightened breast, now free from all its old burdens, was heaved by a great sigh, which was partly both sorrow and joy. He had been too far into the Trophonius cave of the tomb—had looked death too closely in the face—and it seemed to him that all our country mansions, our pleasure-castles and vineyards, were built and laid out upon the verge of the crater of the volcano of the grave-hillock, and that the next night they would be shaken into dust. He felt alone, upheaved, a dead man come back to life, but scarce alive; wherefore every human face he met beamed upon him like that of a new-found brother. “These are my brethren whom I left on earth,” said his heart; and a fruit-bearing love, warm like the spring, expanded all its veins and fibres; and it crept and grew round every other heart with tender, clinging, ivy-like filaments. But the one he loved best was still—too long—away; and he went on as slowly as he could, that so Leibgeber (of whom he was in advance both in distance and time) might overtake him before he got to Hof. A hundred times, on his journey, he almost involuntarily looked round for this overtaking, as if it were already a thing to be actually seen.
At length he came to the Fantaisie of Bayreuth, on a morning when the whole world gleamed and glittered from the drops of dew up to the little silver cloudlets. But stillness was over all. The breezes were asleep; nor had August, in air or in thicket, one single songster left. It seemed to him as though, having left this mortal life, he was wandering in a second, transfigured world, where the form of his Nathalie might move by his side, with love in her eyes—and, in words straight from the soul, no longer fettered by earthly bonds, say to him, “Here you looked up in gratitude to the starry night; here I gave you my wounded heart; here we spoke our earthly parting-vow; and here I came, often, alone, and thought of the brief, bright vision.” “And this is the spot,” he said to himself, when he came to the château, “where she wept her last tears when she said farewell to her lady-friend.”
And now, again, it seemed that only she was the one transfigured. (He seemed to his fancy to be the one left behind.) He felt that he should never see her more on earth; “but” (he said) “people must be able to love, though they cannot meet or see each other.” All his meagre future was to be illuminated by transfigured and glorified dream-pictures only. But as the tree (according to Bonnet) is planted as much in the air above it as it is in the earth beneath it, and derives nourishment quite as much from the one as from the other, so it is with every true human-creature. And thus Firmian lived in the future with more vivid life than in the past—only with fewer of his root-fibres in the visible ground. The whole tree, top-shoot, branches, and all, stood under the open sky, drinking the free breeze of heaven with its every blossom—where all he had to invigorate and cheer him were two invisible friends—the one a woman, the other a man.
At length the thin, beautiful vapour of his dreams thickened to a fog. Nathalie’s sorrow for his death came hovering over him, and his lonesomeness struck heavy on his heart, which longed unutterably for some living being which should stand there and love him with all its heart. But this being was still behind him, doing its best to overtake him—Henry, to wit.
“Mr. Leibgeber,” the voice of some one coming up after him suddenly cried, “stop a moment, please. Here is your handkerchief; I picked it up down below there.”
He looked round, and there was the girl whom Nathalie had helped out of the water, coming running up with a white handkerchief. But as he had his own in his pocket, and the girl, gazing at him in astonishment, said he had dropped it near the basin about an hour before (though he had not then had so long a coat on)—a gush of gladness streamed into his heart. Leibgeber had arrived, and had been down by the basin.
He hastened to Bayreuth as fast as he could, all in a whirl, with the handkerchief in his hand. It was moist, as if his friend’s weeping eyes had rested on it. He pressed it warmly to his own, but it would not dry them, for he thought how Henry passed his life in solitude, exemplifying the truth of his own saying, “He who spares his feelings, and puts armour upon them, keeps them most delicately sensitive—just as the skin under the nails is the easiest hurt of all.” At the Sun Hotel, Firmian learned from John the waiter that Leibgeber had actually arrived, and was gone on about half-an-hour ago. Firmian ran off after him, up and down the streets of Hof, blind and deaf, in such tempestuous pursuit of his friend that he forgot all about the moist handkerchief.