In Maienthal there dwelt a madman whom they called by no other name than that of the crazy skeleton. For three reasons he was called so: first, because he was an anatomical preparation of leanness; secondly, because he carried round the fixed idea, that Death was after him and wanted to seize and abduct him by the left hand, which he therefore concealed; thirdly, because he gave out that he could see when any one was going to die soon by the look of the face, which in that case was already overspread with the indentations and abscesses of corruption. In Moritz's experimental psychology[[151]] a similar man is described, who is also said to be able to detect the forerunners of death and its triturating hand on faces which appear to others smooth and ruddy, whereas he sees them seamed with the lunar caustic of corruption.—This skeleton it was, which, on the night of the fourth Whitsuntide day, when Clotilda was in the churchyard, cried out, Death! I am already buried.[[152]]—Victor and Emanuel went home during the striking of the twelfth hour, and on their way passed a hill, whereon the skeleton sat agitated; the left hand, at which Death grasped, buried itself deep into the opposite arm-pit: "Brrr!" it said, shaking its head at Emanuel, "he has thee, but not me! Nothing but mould is hanging on thee! The eyes are gone! Brr!"
The words of the insane are, to a man who listens at the gate of the invisible world, more memorable than those of the wise man, just as he listens more attentively to sleepers than to the waking, to the sick than to the well. Victor's blood stiffened under the ice-cold clutch at his warm life. The crazy skeleton ran off, shielding the left hand with the right. Victor took his friend's left, looked up at the warm sun, and sought to conceal and to warm himself and could say nothing. Down near the margin of the deep-blue heaven little clouds smoked up, the germs of an evening tempest; and in the sultry air nothing but vermin flew abroad.
Emanuel was more quiet and almost troubled, but it was not the anxiety of fear, but that uneasiness of expectation with which we always look upon the folds and flutterings of the curtain of great scenes. The stinging sun kept the couple at home. To Emanuel, oppressed by the sultry atmosphere, the last afternoon was almost too long. But his friend saw all the time hanging in this atmospheric vault a mouldering countenance, which seemed to work its way into the beloved fresh one, and he continually heard the crazy skeleton repeating in his ear, "His eyes are out!"
In the sultry stillness, when the sun dug and charged the mining pits of the thunder, and when the two friends ventured before the ears of the blind Julius to speak only with looks of to-day's future, towards four o'clock a fanning, evening-breeze came up, which refreshed all drooping wings and heads. Emanuel let in these cool waves, which ran lullingly and comfortingly over the bent flowers at the window, and flowed down along the wavering folds of the curtains, and strayed and plashed through the fragrant foliage of the room. Then came an infinite stillness, a dissolving bliss, an inexpressible yearning into Emanuel's heart. The joys of his childhood, the features of his mother, the images of Indian fields, all beloved, mouldering forms, the whole gliding reflection of his youth's morning, flowed along glimmeringly before him;—a melancholy longing for his native land, for his dead friends, distended his bosom with sweet, distressful emotions. That evergreen palm-grove of youthful memory he laid as a cooling herb around his own and Horion's brows, and brought over the whole first circle of his existence out of the Indian Eden into this narrow housing before the two latest objects of his affection. But as he thus heaped up the ashes of the Phœnixes of joy on the altar of the evening-sun,—as he thus at his exodus looked back over all the Elysian fields of his life as they lay behind each other,—as the whole of earth and life, overspread with morning dew and morning redness, transformed themselves before him into the glimmering playground of humanity;—then was he unable to master any longer his emotion and his melted heart, and in a blissful agitation, in a trembling gratitude to the Eternal, he begged the blind youth to take his flute and let the Song of Ecstasy, which he always had played for himself on the morning of the new year and of his birthday, sound after him as an echo of his dying life.
Julius took the flute. Horion went out under a loud-rustling tree and looked into the setting sun. Emanuel placed himself at the breezy window opposite the purple stream of the evening light, and the song of rapture began and flowed in streams into his heart and round the sinking sun.
And as the tones of the spheres seemed to well out from the sun, which in the evening redness, like a swan dissolved in melodies, died of rapture before God in gold-haze and dew of joy,—and as all the flowers wherewith the Eternal goodness covers our heart, and all the blissful fields through which its gentle hand conducts uncertain man, flew by before Emanuel like angels,—and as he saw the future heavens, into which the way of life leads, drawing nearer,—and as he saw these infinite arms cover all wounded hearts, stretch over all millenniums, bear all worlds and yet even him too, him, puny son of earth;—O then was it impossible for him longer to restrain his full heart; it burst with gratitude, and from his eyes again fell the first tear-drops after long, long years. These holy drops he wiped not away; in them the evening-red ran to a blazing sea; the flute died away; Victor found his eyes still glistening; Emanuel said, "O see, I weep for joy at the thought of my Maker!"—Then were there between these exalted men, on this holy spot, no more words,—death had lost his form,—a sublime sorrow deadened the pangs of separation,—the sun, over which the earth had rolled, touched with his erect beams the heavens and the night and the bottom of the clouds,—the earth glimmered magically like a dream-landscape, and yet it was easy to quit it, for the other dream-landscapes covered the sky.
The earths of night (the planets) had already come out, the suns of night (the fixed stars) had already come forth after them, the moon had already enveloped itself in the southeast storm: when Emanuel saw that it was time to end the scenes of the valley and go up to his Tabor, to give Death the wing-casing of his soul. Hesitating, he begged Victor to go forward a little, that he might not see his parting with the blind one, and haply betray himself by sympathy; for Victor had represented: to the blind one the journey into the other world as only one upon this earth. He stationed himself unhappily out before the hushed sultry fields through which once had passed the rivers of paradise of his love, on which he had once at Clotilda's side seen fairer evenings; on the earth was the stillness of death, as in a church by night, only a leaden cloud, bent down toward the earth, blustered round the heavens, and Death seemed to go from cloud to cloud and array them for battle.
At last he heard Julius weeping. Emanuel came flying out, but in his eyes stood heavier drops than his former ones. And as the forsaken blind one turned away his dark head from his friends in the house-door-way, either because he knew not which way they had gone or would listen to know, then was Victor barely able, for inward sadness, to call back to the bowed form, which dwelt in a double night, that he would return after twelve o'clock.
In the bald evening greeting, "Good night, a pleasant sleep," which Emanuel gave and received, there was more stuff for tears than in whole elegies and farewell-speeches; so true it is that words are only the inscriptions upon our hour,[[153]] and the ripieno[[154]]-voices of the scoring of our keynotes.
So soon as Emanuel came out before the night heavens, before the hurricane chained thereto and before his death-mountain, angels lifted up again his softened soul,—he saw death descend from heaven and set up the liberty-tree on his grave,—he saw the friendly stars draw nearer, and they were the heavenly eyes of his friends and of all blessed beings. Victor dared not disturb his poetic hopes by any reasons; much rather was he himself from hour to hour drawn deeper into the belief of his death; at least he feared that to-day's storm of rapture might rend asunder the frail dwelling of this fair heart and of its sighs, and that death would creep about the noble soul till by its very wings, as it rose in its ecstasy, he could pluck it away from life, as children go round and round the butterfly till at last it lifts its wings folded on one another into their predatory fingers.