They kept our hero over there all day and half the evening.
Not once in the whole day was he able,—although the invisible eyes of his inner man stood full of tears at Clotilda's noble figure, at her secret grief for her cold, buried friend, at her thrilling voice when she merely spoke to Agatha,—for all that, he never found himself able to say so much as an earnest word: toward strangers his nature always impelled him in the beginning to make sundry satirical leaps and other caprioles. But in the evening, when they were in the festal garden, where his usual shudder at the emptiness of life was made more intense by merriment, as it always was,—whereas serious, sad, passionate conversations diminished it,—and when Clotilda granted him only a very cold civility, as if shown to him at a father's dictation, and did not divine in its full extent the difference between him and Matthieu, who assumed no second world, nor any inner man organically adapted to it: then was there a stifled feeling about his yearning heart; too many tears seemed to fill his whole breast and press for a passage; and as often as he looked up to the great, deep heavens, something whispered in his soul: Take not the least thought for the fine circle, but speak out!
But there was only one soul for him, to which Nature had attached those treadles, as to pedal-harps, which impart to every thought a higher tone of the spheres, to life a holy worth, and to the heart an echo from Eden: that soul was not his once so-loved Flamin, but his teacher, Dahore, in England, whom he had long ago lost from sight, but never from his dreams. The shadow of this great man stood, as it were, projected upon the night, hovering and erect before him, and saying, "Dear one, I see thy inward weeping, thy sacred longing, thy desolate heart, and thy outstretched, trembling arms; but all is in vain; thou wilt never find me, nor I thee." He gazed at the stars, whose exalting science his teacher had even then instilled into his youthful soul; he said to Clotilda: "The topography of the heavens should be a piece of our religion; a woman ought to learn the catechism and Fontenelle by heart." And then he described the astronomical lessons of his Dahore and the teacher himself.
From Clotilda's face there broke forth a great transfiguration, and she depicted with words and looks her own astronomical teacher at the Seminary,—how he was just as noble and just as quiet,—that he called himself Emanuel, and bore no surname, because he said, "With transitory man, with one whose genealogical tree so speedily sank into nothingness, the difference between family names and baptismal names was too slight";—that, unhappily, his noble soul inhabited a shattered body, which already bent low toward the grave,—that he was, according to the assurance of her Abbess, the gentlest and greatest man who had yet come from the East Indies (his native country), although there were some singularities of his way of life in Maienthal, which one had to overlook....
Matthieu, whose wit borrowed from the snake his line of beauty, his poisonous tooth, his leap, and his coldness, said, softly and composedly: "It is well for his withered body that he was not made astronomer and night-watchman here at once; he applied, several years ago, for a telescope and a horn."
Clotilda was, for the first time, suffused with a flush of angry redness, like the morning before the rain: "If," said she, quickly, "you know him merely from my portraiture, you cannot possibly seek this characteristic among his." But the Chamberlain came to the Page's assistance, and said that Emanuel had actually, five years before, been refused that application. Clotilda looked, as if for help, to the only one whose attentiveness was not ironical,—our Victor, on whom the reflection of her transfiguration threw its beauty,—and asked, more in the tone of hope than of assertion, "Should one expect anything like that of such a mind?" "Of mine sooner," he replied, by way of evasion; for he, who could have contradicted the Pope to his face, found it often impossible to gainsay fair lips, especially when they propounded a question with so much reliance on his negative. "As often as I walk through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred times wished me a horn and six verses."
The Chamberlain and his associé took this for clumsy persiflage; the latter—perhaps for the sake of displeasing Clotilda, to the advantage of his heart's czarina, armed with false bosom and false rump—went on unshamed with his, and asserted that the best method of making the aforenamed anonymous person sad was a very merry one, a comedy;—to be sure, a farce moved him still more strongly, as he himself witnessed in him at Goethe's moral puppet-play or fair.
Then flashed upon the surprised Victor a new face and a new relation; for he was exactly like Emanuel. A fair, with its human streams running up and down,—with its flitting of figures to and fro, as in a clock with images,—with its perpetually buzzing air, in which fiddle-squeak and human janglings and lowing of cattle conspire in one deafening roar,—and with the booths, crammed with commodities, offering a mosaic picture of our little life, patched up of varied necessities.... a village-fair, by all these reminiscences of the great, frosty New-Year's fair of Life, made Victor's noble bosom at once heavy and full; he sank away, sweetly overpowered, into the din, and the human ranks around him absorbed his soul into its stiller fantasies. That was the reason why Goethe's Hogarthian tail-piece of a village-fair (like Shakespeare) always left him melancholy; just as he was most fond, indeed, of finding in the low-comic the highest earnest (women are capable only of a reverse discovery), and a comic book, without any nobler trait or hint (e. g. Blumauer's Æneid), he could endure as little as La Mettrie's[[51]] disgustingly laughing face, or the faces on the frontispieces of the Vade Mecum.
Like a true youth, he forgot himself and all around him, half-stretched out his arms, and said, with an eye in which one saw a soul longingly laboring at a portrait of Emanuel: "Now I know thee, thou nameless one! thou art the lofty man, who is so rare.... I assure you, Herr Von Schleunes, this Mr. Emanuel has something in him ... No, amidst this life on the wing, a thing which darts so prestissimo out of one rain-shower into another,[[52]] and from cloud to cloud, should not keep its bill open on the stretch for one continued peal of laughter.... I have read today somewhere: Man has only two and a half minutes, and only one for a smile...." He had quite lost himself in the thicket of his feelings, else he would have kept back more than he did, especially the last line of the leaf found in the garden. Clotilda was startled at something or other. He would now gladly have read the leaf through. She related to him now those characteristics of her teacher into which she knew better how to enter; that he was a Pythagorean, went only in white robes, had himself put to sleep and waked with flute-music, ate no leguminous fruits or animal food, and often walked half the night under the stars.
Lost in mute rapture over the teacher, he hung with enthusiastic eyes upon the friendly lips of the pupil, who was ennobled by her interest in a sublime and singular genius. She found here the first man whom she had ever put into an unfeigned enthusiasm for her Pythagorean favorite; and all her chasms turned themselves, blooming, towards Emanuel's image, like flowers toward the sun. Two fair souls discover their affinity first of all by the like love which binds them to a third. The full, inspired heart loves to hush and hide itself in a finery-room, which holds only heterogeneous persons, but when it finds therein its second, then in its joy at that its silence and secrecy and the finery-room are all forgotten.