"I know this people well enough," thought he; "they never open or wind up a watch in their life!" Ha, Sebastian! what will my reader or thy lady reader think?
She started this very evening for the country she had obtained by marriage, the future string-floor of her sceptre. Our Victor felt almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court. Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were carried round on a peculiar vis-à-vis, called a thensa,[[134]]—or in a portrait-box, called [Greek: ναος, naos],[[135]]—or in a cage, called [Greek: kadiskon].[[136]]
Thereupon Victor went with his commercial consul round behind the coulisses of the benefit theatre. He untied the silken demarcation-line and barring-chain,—drew it up like a disgusting hair,—felt of it,—held it first far from his eye, then near to it,—and pulled it apart, before he said: "The power may lie where it will,—a silk ribbon may insulate bodies politic as well as electrical, or it may be with princes as with cocks, who never can get a step farther, if one takes chalk and draws therewith a straight line from their bill to the ground,—nevertheless this much you see, partner,—if an Alexander should displace the boundary-stones, such a string would be, in opposition thereto, the best epitome of the natural law and a barrière-alliance of the same nature." He went into her bedroom, to the empty sepulchre,—that is, to the bed of the risen bride,—into which the sponsus could look down as he lay at anchor on the wall. Whole divisions of conceits marched mutely through his head, which, thus full, he pressed sidewise with his cheek against a silken pillow, as large as a lap-dog's, or the side-cushion of a carriage. Thus reclining and kneeling, he said, speaking half into the feathers:[[137]] "Would that on the other pillow also there lay a face looking into mine! Dear Heaven! two human faces opposite each other,—each drawing the other into its eyes,—listening to each other's sighs,—breathing away from each other the soft, transparent words,—that were what you and I absolutely could not stand, partner!"—He sprang up, gently patted down his hare's form smooth again, and said, "Lay thyself softly around the heavy head which sinks upon thee; smother not its dreams; betray not its tears." Had even the Count of O—, with his fine, ironical look, come in at this moment, he would not have minded this. It is unfortunate for us Germans that we alone—while to the Englishman even a world's-man sets down his hare's leaps, caprioles, and gambols as so many elegant pas, forward capers and backward capers and side-capers—cannot possibly march along with sufficient gravity and composure.
At evening he ran in again to the harbor of his beekeeper; and his tossing heart threw out its anchor into the tranquil, blooming nature around him. The old man had meanwhile mustered up all his old papers, baptismal and marriage-certificates, and private documents of reference for the Nuremberg Bee-father's case, and said, "Let the gentleman read them!" He wanted himself to hear it all over again. He showed also his "Trinity-ring" from Nuremberg, in which was inscribed:
"Here, by this ring, you see,
Father, Son, Spirit, three,
Make one sole Deity."
The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly, before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been able to believe in the Trinity; "but now one must be a beast, if he could not comprehend it."—The morning before his departure, Victor was in a double embarrassment,—he was very desirous of having a present; secondly, of making one. What he wanted to have was a plump hour-watch,[[138]] won at a raffle where the ticket was twenty kreutzers. This piece of work, whose thick hand had measured off the thread of the old man's life on the dirty dial-plate in nothing but gay, joyous bee-hours, he wanted as a Laurence's-box,[[139]] an amulet, an Ignatius's-plate,[[140]] against hours of Saul. "A manual laborer," said he, "needs really only a little sun, to go warmly and contentedly through life; but we, with our fantasy, are often as badly off on the sunny side as on the stormy side,—man stands more firmly in mud than on ether and morning-redness." He wanted to press upon the acceptance of the happy veteran of life, as purchase-money for the hour-watch and prize-medal for his lodgings, his own watch that told the seconds. Lind had not the heart for it, but grew red. At last Victor represented to him that the second-watch was a good fire-ball[[141]] for the Trinity-ring, a thesis-image of that article of faith, for the threefold hands made, after all, only one hour.—Lind swapped.
Victor could neither be the mocker nor the Bunclish[[142]] reformer of such an erring soul, and his sympathetic whimsicality is nothing but a doubting sigh over the human brain, which has its seventy normal years, and over life, which is an interim of faith, and over the theological doctors'-rings, which are just such Trinity-rings, and over the theological lecture-rooms and recitation-rooms, wherein just such second-telling watches indicate and strike.
—At last he leaves Kussewitz at six o'clock in the morning. A very beautiful daughter of the Count of O— did not come back until seven o'clock; that is fortunate for us all, for otherwise he would be still sitting there.
The Dog-post-day is run out. I know not whether I should make an extra-leaf or not. The Intercalary Day is at the door; I will therefore let it be, and only insert a Pseudo-extra-leaf, which, as is well known, differs from a canonical merely in this,—that in the apocryphal I do not give notice by any superscription, but only slip off from the history in an underhand way to mere irrelevant things.
I take up my historical thread again, and ask the reader what he thinks of Sebastian's flirtations. And how does he explain them to himself?—He replies, and philosophically indeed: "Through Clotilda; she, by her magnetizing, has put him en rapport with the whole female world; she has knocked at this swarm of bees, and now there is no more peace.—A man may sit for twenty-six years cold and sighless in his book-dust; but when he has once breathed the ether of love, then is the oval hole of the heart forever shut, and he must go forth into the air of heaven and be continually gasping at it, as I see by the coming dog-post-days plainly enough." The reader has accustomed himself to a quaint philosophical style, but what he says is true; hence a maiden never sues so eagerly for a second lover for her stage as after the decease of the first, and after her vows to throw away her recruiting-license.