Hereupon they looked each other in the face, full of joyful affection, and wholly freed from any unpleasant traces of their recent wilder mode of jesting. A third person would have been almost terrified at their bodily resemblance in this hour, for each was a plaster-of-Paris cast of the other; but their affection for each other made their faces seem unlike to themselves. Each saw in the other only that which he liked, because it was not in himself; and it was with their features, as with good deeds, which inspire us with, emotion and admiration in others, but not in ourselves.
When they were out in the air again, and on their way to Gefrees, and the coffin-key, as well as their recent conversation, continually brought to mind their parting (whose death sickle bent, closer around them with every milestone on their road), Henry endeavoured to cast a rosy beam or two into Firmian’s mist by putting into his hands an accurate protocol of everything he had arranged and agreed upon with the Count von Vaduz concerning his duties. “The Count,” he said, “would of course think you had merely forgotten the conversation; but it is better thus. Like a negro slave, you have killed yourself to obtain your freedom and reach the Gold Coast of your silver coast; and it would be damnable, indeed, if you were to be damned now after your decease.” “I can never thank you enough, you dear friend,” said Firmian; “but you should not make things harder for me than they are, and draw yourself back like a hand from the clouds the moment you have emptied yourself. Why is it that I am not to see you again after we have said good-bye? Tell me.” “First,” he answered, “because people—the Count, the Widow’s Fund, your widow—might find out that I was extant in two editions, and that would be an accursed misfortune in a world where a fellow can hardly be allowed to sit and sleep in peace in his first original edition. Secondly, I intend to make my appearance in several of the broad comedy characters which there are so many of to be played on this ship of fools of an earth; and as long as not a single devil among the audience knows me, I shall not be ashamed of my parts. Ah! I could give you plenty more reasons into the bargain. Besides, it delights me to come down with a flop, as if out of the moon on to this earth; and in among mankind, unknown, uprooted, untrammelled; a lusus naturæ, a diabolus ex machina, a monstrous moon-lithopædium. Firmian, it is a settled thing. Perhaps in a few years’ time I may send you a letter now and then, more particularly as the Galatians[[98]] placed upon the funeral pyre letters directed to the dead, as they might have put them in a post-office. Hut it really is a settled thing now—positively.” “I should not give in to all this so quietly,” said Siebenkæs, “if I did not feel convinced that I shall very soon see you again. I am not like you. I look forward to two meetings with you—one here below, one there above. And would to God that I could bring you to die as you did me, and we met afterwards on a Bindloch hill, but were going to be longer together.”
If these wishes chance to remind the readers of Schoppe in Titan, they may consider in what sense Fate often interprets and fulfils our wishes. Leibgeber merely answered, “People must love, though they may not be able to see each other; and, when all’s done, it is only Love that we can love after all, and that we can each see in the other every day.”
In Gefrees, Leibgeber proposed that, as there was such ample leisure (there being nothing to see in, or out of, the one street of the town), they should exchange clothes, and that particularly in order that the Count of Vaduz (who had not for years seen him in any other dress than the one he now wore) should not find anything to be struck with about Siebenkæs, but that everything about him should be exactly as it always had been, even to the nails on the heels of his shoes. The thought of being, in future, embraced (so to speak) by Henry’s sleeves, and clasped and warmed by all his external reliquia, fell like a broad ray of warm February sun on Siebenkæs’s breast. Leibgeber went into the next room, and, to begin with, threw his short green jacket through the half-open door, crying, “Come in, coat with skirts!” then followed up with necktie and waistcoat, and long trousers with leather stripes, saying, “Come in, breeches!” and ended up with his shirt, and the words, “Here with the winding-sheet!”
The shirt thus thrown in was, to Siebenkæs, as an astrologer (or interpreter of signs), with respect to Leibgeber. He saw that he had a higher motive in view in this bodily transmigration into clothes than mere dressing for a certain character at Vaduz; to wit, the taking up of his abode in the shell, or cocoon, which had contained his friend. Not in a whole volume of Gellert’s or Klopstock’s ‘Letters on Friendship,’ not in a whole week of Leibgeberian days of self-sacrifice, did there seem anything so beloved and delicious as in thus falling heir to his clothes. He would not profane this surmise which made him so happy by alluding to it in words, but he was confirmed in it when Leibgeber came out transformed into a Siebenkæs, looked at himself in a satisfied manner in the mirror, and then laid his three fingers, in silence, on Firmian’s forehead. This was his highest token of love; wherefore, to my own and Firmian’s great joy, I mention, that he repeated this sign more than three times during dinner (the conversation running on wholly indifferent subjects). What different and interminable jokes would he not have made upon this moulting at another time, and under the influence of other feelings! Merely to guess at a few. How much he would have made of the rebinding of their two folio volumes, so as to involve Herr Lochmüller (the landlord at Gefrees) in the deepest and most diverting embarrassment, which that polite gentleman could by no means have extricated himself from one minute before this, my fourth book, came to his aid, which at this moment is only in Bayreuth, and not even gone to press! But Leibgeber did nothing of all this; and even of witticisms he only delivered himself of a few weak ones; about their being changelings, about the sudden French transition of people en longue robe into people en robe courts. And he said he would no longer call Siebenkæs a transfigured being in boots, but one in shoes, which was more befitting, as well as sounding somewhat more sublime. It was with particular pleasure that he saw how his dog, Saufinder—between the old bodies and the new clothes, as if between two fires of love—could not properly make out the matter in the least degree, and often went from one to the other with a most uneasy face. The concordat between the two parties—the shortening of the one, and the lengthening of the other—puzzled the creature, and he could make neither head nor tail of it all. “I like him twice as much as I did,” said Leibgeber; “believe me. If he is faithful to you, that is not being unfaithful to me.” He could not possibly have said anything more complimentary than this.
All the bleak way from Gefrees to Muenchberg, Firmian, from gratitude, took the greatest pains to reflect back on Leibgeber that sunshine of cheerfulness into which Henry was continually trying to lead him. It was no easy matter, especially when he saw him striding after him in the long coat. He concentrated himself to an extreme effort in Muenchberg, the last post-station before Hof, where the corporeal arms with which they clasped each other were, so to speak, to be cut off by a long separation.
As they were going along the road to Hof, more silent than before, Leibgeber being first, and feeling refreshed by the pine-covered mountain on his right, began (as he usually did on his journeys) to whistle national airs, both merry and sad, for the most part in minor keys. He said he thought there were many worse town-and-street-fifers, and that he performed on the foot-passenger’s post-horn which Nature had given him in a manner deserving of some applause. To Firmian, however (now that their parting was so near), these tones, which seemed to come echoing back from Henry’s long journeys of the past, and forward from his coming lonely ones as well, were as a kind of Swiss Ranz des Vaches, which went to his very heart; and it was well he was walking last, for he could scarce restrain his tears. Ah! take music away when the heart is full and must not overflow!
At length he brought his voice sufficiently under command to be able to say, without any apparent emotion, “Are you fond of whistling as you go, and do you do it often?” In the tone of this question there was a something as if the fluting was not quite so much of an enjoyment to him as to the musician himself. “Always,” answered Leibgeber. “I whistle[[99]] away life, and the world’s stage, and all there is upon it—and all that sort of thing—a great many matters in the past; and, like a steeple-warder at Carlsbad, I whistle in the future. Do you dislike it? Is my fuguing incorrect, or my whistling a breach of the rules of pure composition?” “Oh! only too beautiful,” answered Siebenkæs.
And then Leibgeber began again, but with tenfold power, and performed such a lovely and melting mouth-organ voluntary, that Siebenkæs came up to him with four long strides, and, putting his handkerchief to his eyes with his left hand, while he laid his right gently on Henry’s lips, he said in broken accents, “Henry, spare me! I don’t know why, but every note of music moves me too deeply to-day.” The musician looked at him—Leibgeber’s whole inner world was in his eyes—then nodded in a decided manner, and strode rapidly onwards in silence, without looking round or letting his face be seen. But his hands, perhaps involuntarily, went on making little movements, beating time in continuation of the melody.
At length they arrived, oppressed and anxious, at the Grub-street or Mint-city where I am now seated, pasting and colouring these assignats—this paper-money for half the world—namely, Hof.[[100]] It is by no means in my favour, indeed, that at that time I knew nothing whatever of all these matters which half Europe is now being made acquainted with through me. I was a good deal younger then—sitting alone at home like a cabbage-lettuce, with the best will in the world to close to a head—which process of closing, in men as well as in lettuces, is hindered by nothing so much as by the contact of the neighbouring salad-plants. It is easier, pleasanter, and more advantageous, for a youngster to go from solitude into society (from the seed-bed into the garden), than the converse—from the market-place into the corner. Unmitigated solitude and unmitigated society are both bad: and, with the exception of their order of succession, nothing is so important as their succession.