He who has tasted the bliss of sticking to the truth can understand the new delight with which Siebenkæs could now pour himself out unrestrained concerning everything—himself and Henry and Nathalie—inasmuch as it was not till now that he felt the full weight of the burden he had got relieved of—that of working the light, jest-falsehood of a moment into a yearly comedy, in 365 acts. With what ease he explained to the Count that, before Nathalie’s arrival (whom he could neither undeceive, nor go on deceiving), he must fly, and that straight to Kuhschnappel. As the Count listened, he told him all the reasons urging him to go; longing to see his tombstone, and unhallowed grave, so as to do penitence and expiation; longing to see Lenette, unseen, from afar, perhaps her child near; longing to hear from eye-witnesses a minute account of her happy married life with Stiefel (for Stiefel’s letter had wafted the flower ashes of bygone days into his eyes, and opened the leaves of the sleeping-flower of his conjugal love); longing to wander, romantically (erect now, and with his burden off), about the scenes of his old oppressed life; longing to hear, in the market-town, something of his Leibgeber, who had been there so recently; longing to celebrate August, the month of his death, in solitude—the month when it had been with him as with the vine, whose leaves are taken off in August, that the sun may shine more warmly on the grapes.
In three words, for why give many reasons—since when once there is a will, there can never be any lack of reasons—he set off.
CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST.
THE JOURNEY—THE CHURCHYARD—THE SPECTRE—THE END OF THE TROUBLE, AND OF THE BOOK.
I see more clearly every day that I and the other 999,999,999 human beings,[[114]] are nothing but so much skin-and-bone stuffed (like cooked chickens), full of a mass of incongruities, contradictions, inconsistencies, irremediable insufficiencies, and resolves, of which every one has its antagonist muscle (musc. antagonista). We do not contradict other people half as often as ourselves. This last Chapter is a fresh proof of it. Up to this point, the reader and I have been labouring together with the sole object of finishing this Book, and now that we see the shore, and have all but reached it, we are both sorry for it. I shall, at all events, be doing something—the most that I can—if I conceal, and hide away (so to speak) the end of it, as we do the end of a garden, and say several things which will help to lengthen out the work a little.
The Inspector sprang out into the open country, among the corn-ears, fortified with a muscular, full breast—the Alp of silence and deception no longer weighed upon him as it had done. The avalanche which had overwhelmed his life had melted to a third of its original size Tinder the sun of his present fair fortune. His electric Leyden-jar coating with a better income, and even the fact of his having a great deal more to do, had charged him with fire and courage. His appointment was a mountain permeated by so many veins of silver and gold, that even in this first year of it he had found he was enabled to send sundry anonymous contributions to the Prussian Widows’ Fund, so as to make amends for a good half of his fraud upon it, and see his way to finally clearing it off altogether. I should not lay this act of duty before the public gaze were it not that Kritter, in Göttingen—who reckons that this fund will be exhausted in the year 1804—or even calculators more moderate in their results, who think its extreme unction will be received in 1825, might take occasion, from these Flower-pieces of mine, to lay its death wholly at the Inspector’s door. If this should prove to be the case, I should very deeply regret having alluded to the subject, in the remotest manner, in my Flower-pieces.
He did not take his way by Hof or Bayreuth, or any of the old romantic journey-roads. He dreaded lest the hand of Fate (which sows behind the clouds) might bring his phantom-body before Nathalie’s eyes. And yet he hoped a little that this said hand might bring him just the least bit in contact with his Leibgeber, since he had been so recently cruising in these waters. As a matter of course, he had embodied himself, en route, in the said Leibgeber’s shirt, jacket, and complete exterior—the same which he had swopped with him in the inn at Gefrees and this costume was a mirror which continually showed him the absent one’s image. A “Saufinder,” like Leibgeber’s, who lifted his head up to him in a forest-cottage, sent a throb of joy through his heart; but the dog’s nose knew him as little as did the dog’s master.
And yet, the nearer he drew to the hills and woods, behind whose Chinese churchyard-wall stood his two empty houses—his grave and his old lodging—the tighter did Anxiety draw her drag-net about his heart. It was not the fear of being recognised; this, by reason of his resemblance to Leibgeber (particularly in his present dress), was an impossibility. Nay, people would sooner have taken him for his own wraith and Prophet Samuel than for Siebenkæs still in the body. But, besides love and anticipation, there was a something which made him anxious—a something which once hemmed in and oppressed myself when I came back among the Herculanean antiquities of my own childhood. There clasped themselves once more around my breast the iron bands and rings which had crushed it in my childhood—a time when the little human creature is still tremblingly helpless and comfortless in presence of the sorrows and sufferings of life and death—when we stand between the footstool we have cast away, the handcuffs and ankle-chains which we have burst asunder, and the great sighing and singing tree of philosophy which is to guide us to the free, open battle-arena and coronation city of this earth. In every thicket round which Firmian had wandered in his poverty-stricken, miserable winter-autumn, he saw the cast-off skins of the snakes sticking, which in former days had twined themselves about his feet. Remembrance (that after-winter of his hard, cruel days) fell into this lovelier time of his life, and the combination of these dissimilar feelings—the clasp of the old fetters, and the breeze of freedom of the present—generated a third sensation, which was bitter-sweet, as well as anxious and uneasy.
When it was twilight, he walked slowly and observantly through the streets, which were strewn with scattered ears of corn. Every child he met going home with the supper-beer, every familiar dog, and every well-remembered cling of a bell, was full of fossil-impressions of joy-roses and passion-flowers, the originals of which were all fallen to dust. As he passed the house where he used to live, he heard two stocking-looms clattering and rattling there.