Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple sounding-holes; and by the road courteously took off his hat before the empty windows of the Castle. Houses of quality were to him like persons of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and the god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every spare-penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise him in the good graces of the Fräulein; for women feel their hearts much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother some of their benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest, that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or even reposing tornadoes.
Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction, like an order of nobility, does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother; as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own. There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than that of the Echo; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into Resonance together.
It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and that instead of the whole dinner fragments which to-morrow might themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people, now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crumb of the precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday, and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he. Fixlein--the counterpart of great men and geniuses--was inclined to treat, to gift, to gratify a serving housemate, rather than a man who is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honor in him, and notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly gave it away in cases of honor, and unwillingly in cases of overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was exercising the jus compascui on the cake, and six arms were peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing, except Meusel's Gelehrtes Deutschland,[[39]] he could not figure; the Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he, by reading, as it were levied a tithe.
He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for he had still much to do.
After supper he was just about visiting the Fräulein, when he descried her in person, like a lily dipped in the red twilight, in the Castle garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern one being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever there, &c., &c.--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present Book.
Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed lower to a nobleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a nobleman was a nobleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat; for he had not risked taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He delivered her a long, neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man; they reverence us infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often like better--also by reason of our sublime air--if they can catch us in the dark too. Him Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the Quintus, in her will; her he edified by his Literary History, as relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among red bean-blossoms, red May-chafers, before the red of the twilight burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden; and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice, which opened in the bottom of a larger one.
To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his reasons, indeed. In the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a boundary tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by another nobler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the reader. Nevertheless--Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place! I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her intercourse with male vassals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise Auguste Timothé Eon de Beaumont,[[40]] but a smooth, fair-haired, white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own sex than ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather took shame than credit.--At the very first cheapening, I should, on these grounds, have been out with my heart.--Had I fully reflected, Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit, had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other before the glass, to see whether the two image-children would do it likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both sexes into the same muff, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly, considered that we were here standing before the glass-house, now splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this glass-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the glass,--then had I taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my heart, and encompassed her about with my eyes.
In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the above-mentioned nobler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him back. Softened, without knowing the cause,--(accordingly he gave his mother a kiss,)--and blessed without having had a literary conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist, and directly heart-addressing night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in dreaming....
Sleep, for to-day thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping, shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look into the breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!--