[7. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Great Parsonage-Park.—Orangery.—Flamin's Promotion.—Festal Afternoon of Domestic Love.—Rain of Fire.—Letter to Emanuel.
His Lordship excepted, all are now sitting and waiting for me in the parsonage-garden; but the garden itself not a mortal soul is yet acquainted with. It is a Chrestomathy[[76]] of all gardens, and yet no larger than the church. Many gardens resemble it in being at once kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, and orchards; but it is also a jardin des animaux, as it contains in fact the whole Fauna of St. Luna, and a botanical garden, too; it is overgrown with the entire Flora of the village; and it is a garden of honey-bees and humble-bees also, as often as they happen to fly into it. Meanwhile such minor merits are really hardly worth naming, when a garden once has, like this, the merit of being the greatest English garden through which a man ever strode. It hides not only its end,—as every park, like every purse, must do,—but even its beginning, and seems to be merely the terrace from which one can see into that which one cannot see over, but, like Cook, may well circumnavigate. In the English parsonage-garden there are not single ruins, but whole broken-up cities, and the greatest princes have rivalled each other in their passion for furnishing it with romantic wildernesses and battle-fields and gallows-trees, to which (and that carries the illusion still higher) real rogues are tied, into the bargain, as fruit-pendants. The buildings and shrubs of different parts of the world are there, not huddled together into an absurd neighborhood, but neatly kept apart from each other by regular seas or water-scapes, which its size easily makes possible, since it contains over nine million square miles; and with what taste, in fact, these masses are brought together, the reader may estimate from the fact that all lords and all reviewers in the literary periodicals, and the readers themselves, are drawn into the garden and often stay therein sixty years.—
The Parson thinks also to get some credit from it as a Dutch garden, particularly by a peruke made of water, which hangs not on a wig-stand, but on a tin pipe, and which leaps so in curls that already several city-parsons have wished they could wear it. Butterfly-show-glasses kept off the night-chills from precocious roses of silk and early cucumbers of wax. Cucumbers which consisted of real cucumbers, he was the first among all pastors to put in, in order to worry himself with the fear that they might freeze; for this fear he must have, in order to rejoice whenever a glass bottle was broken in his house: he could then carry this ice- or glass-mountain (which, in the case of wines, unfortunately heightens every year as our thirst does) into the garden, and with this manure-bell cover the heart-leaves. Round more important beds he ran a motley, mosaic border of crockery; his family was his verge-tool,—I mean, they had to break for him the few porcelain cups which he needed, in order with this motley powdered sugar to set off the more considerable patches, as a prince enchases and berings himself with the variegated order-ribbons drawn through the button-holes of his antechambers. As he could not set whole cups round the beds, but must first analyze them by his chemists, a reviewer who eats with him must avail himself of my hint to understand how it happens, if such a consumptive patient is not beside himself for rage, when some very valuable vessel is broken; for only when it happens to worthless ones is he no longer master of himself. Every housewife should set off such a bed as an Arndt's garden of Paradise, as a Golgotha for porcelain whereof the fashion is changed, for the good of her soul, in order that she may not lose her senses when a cup falls. "Dearest!" I would say, "bear up under this misfortune like a Christian woman; it, will turn out for thy advantage either in eternity yonder, or here in the garden."
Near a house, Dutch garden-ornaments, with their homely minuteness, make a better figure than thrilling Nature, with her eternal majesty. Eymann's clipped and carved parsonage-garden was in fact merely a continued family-room without roof or partition.
As the Parson twitched our Victor round through the garden, the guest almost forgot to praise the garden as a magazine of ideas, simply because he was looking forward too curiously and warmly to the arrival of Clotilda, and her demeanor towards his friend. Fortunately it occurred to him that the Parson counted upon incense-offerings and censers; he was so unwilling to defraud a laurel-hoping heart, that he for that very reason loved to attach himself to people of some merit, that so he might indulge his humane disposition to praise, without expense to the truth. Victor rejoiced at the prospect of Flamin's and Clotilda's meeting: how beautifully, he thought, will the moonlight of soft love fall upon his and her proud faces! And he held in store a rich tolerance and love for their love. For he not only had so much insight into the fleeting nature of our pleasures, that he could hardly be angry over the maddest, but he could even be present at the journeyman's greeting (or methodology) of—two lovers with real pleasure. "It is very foolish,"—he said in Göttingen,—"every good-hearted man opens his arms in sympathy, when he sees friends, brothers and sisters, or parents embrace each other; but if a couple of monkeys in love dance round before us at the end of Cupid's string, and though it were on the stage, not a devil of us will take any interest in them, unless they dance in a romance. But why? Certainly not from selfishness, otherwise the wooden heart in the human block would also in the presence of friendship between others, or filial love, remain nailed fast; but, because the love of lovers is selfish, we are so too; and because in a romance it is not so, we are not so either. I, for my part, go on in my thinking, and make believe to myself in regard to every span of lovers I meet, that they were printed and bound, and I had them from the circulating library for paltry reading money. It belongs to the higher disinterestedness to sympathize even with its opposite. And by all means with you, poor women! Would you or I, then, oftentimes, with this life of yours so frittered away in sewing, cooking, washing, know that you had a soul, unless it fell in love? Many of you through long tearful years have never lifted your head except in the short, sunny day of love, and after it your bereft heart sank back again into the cool depths; so water-plants lie all the year drowned in water, only at the time of their bloom and love do their ascending leaves sit upon the water and sun themselves gloriously, and—then fall down again."
At last Clotilda entered, in conversation with the Parson's wife. She had on a crape hat, with a black lace portcullis, which at once beautified, divided, and concealed with a pierced shadow her beautiful face. But her eye avoided Flamin's eye, and only at times stole thoughtfully after it. He proved that precisely people of the greatest courage have the least with regard to beauty; he advanced not towards her one step. She asked our Victor eagerly about the arrival and the health of his Lordship. She then proposed to him, with the usual medical uncertainty of her sex, whether such an operation often transpired so easily, and whether he had already restored to many so much as he had to his father: he answered both questions in the negative, and she sighed openly. His respectful distance towards her would have increased by that at which his friend kept himself from her, had he not had something to hand her,—Emanuel's note. He could not steal it, as he had already repeated to her the first line; secondly, he must present it under four eyes (he could not through Agatha, for example), because he knew how she carried discretion to the extreme limits. Clotilda was one of those persons—troublesome to this biographer and his hero—who love to conceal all trifles: e. g. what they eat, where they are going to-morrow; who are furious with a friend if he blabs out how on St. Thomas's day last year they had a slight headache. With Clotilda it arose not from fear, but from a dark presentiment that he who babbled indifferent mysteries might at last tell weighty ones. He felt towards her, notwithstanding her pride, a mighty drawing to sincerity. He led her aside to the pomegranate-tree, and there—sparing her by his open-hearted lightness of manner the burdensome obligation she might feel with regard to a secret—handed her back the leaf. She was astonished, but said at once, her surprise related merely to her own negligence; i. e. she trusted him, but had some suspicion or other of her house-mates, and of the manner in which it got into the arbor. She took advantage of the orangery, and bent her inspired face close to the pomegranate blossoms. Victor could not possibly stand there alone so stupid; he, still a little struck with her astonishment, and at last with her almost too great pride, felt also a hankering after the pomegranate incense, and held his face down in it toward hers. He should have known, however, that any one who smells of anything does not look at the thing, but straight before him. Hardly, then, had he applied his olfactory nerves to the blossoms, when he opened his eyes, and Clotilda's large eyes stood opened full upon him; they were just at the highest and most effective elevation, of 45°, whether you speak of eyes or bow-shots. He turned his pupils forcibly down toward the leaves; she, still more prudently, stepped back from the bewildering orangery.
However, she was not embarrassed. He thought it unjust toward Flamin to observe her sentiments towards himself; but still he remarked this much,—that the observatory on which one would watch the occultations of her heart must be higher than is necessary in regard to other women. The custom of being admired had made her proof against that showing up, as in a glass, the impression of her charms with which men so often win to themselves the attention of woman's vanity. She was, as I have said, not embarrassed, but went on to tell her listener something further of Emanuel's character, which she lately, out of respect for her teacher, had not been willing to lay before such unholy ears,—namely, that he firmly believed he should die a year hence in the midnight of St. John's day.[[77]] Victor could easily guess that she herself believed it; but what he did not guess was, that this proud one, from pure tenderness of heart, had hastened her purpose of leaving Maienthal on St. John's day, in order not to meet the beloved man on the anniversary of the future day of his death. According to her account, this Emanuel had had a painfully exalted position among men; he was alone; he had had great friends on his bosom, but all had passed into the grave, and therefore he would also hide there his own head. Years give to stormy, over-vigorous men a finer harmony of the heart, but from refined, cold natures they take more than they give. Those strong hearts resemble English gardens, which age always makes greener, fuller, more leafy; whereas the man of the world, like a French one, is covered by years with dried-up and disfigured boughs.
Victor grew more troubled; every word which he won from her he regarded as a sacrilege upon his friend, the more so as the latter did not understand so well as he the art of opening a conversation with a lady. He had not the heart to shine, because he feared thereby to be a rival of his friend for her good graces. His Flamin seemed to him to-day taller, more beautiful, and better than ever, and he himself shorter and more stupid. He wished a thousand times his father had already come, that he might deliver to him with the greatest ardor Flamin's prayer for his aid in obtaining Clotilda.
At last he came, and Victor drew a full breath again. The good youth often seeks, by acts of sacrifice, to reconcile his conscience again with his thoughts. With heart-beatings of enthusiasm he awaited the moment of solitude. A garden detaches and draws together people in the easiest manner, and only in such a place should one impart secrets; Victor could soon, in an arbor which wove itself on four chestnut-trees with its blooming vein-work nest-wise over their heads, embrace his father with trembling emotion, and speak and glow for his friend with tongue and heart. His Lordship's surprise was greater than his emotion. "Here," said he, "is something which has long since fulfilled thy prayer in a different way; but I wished to reserve for thee the joy of bearing the message";—and therewith he gave him a most gracious autograph, wherein the Prince called the practising Advocate Flamin into the Administrative Council.