The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

And with his soul in his face he repaired from the death-chamber to the apartment of his father and said with earthly sadness in his eye and heavenly radiance in his countenance: "Our friend has fought out his last fight during the eclipse of the moon and is up yonder."

Ah, his life in his worm-eaten body was itself, indeed, a true total eclipse; his exit out of life was the exit from the earth's shadow and his tarry in the shadow was but short.

No persuasion could keep Gustavus in the house of mourning. When the heart finds the body itself too confining, the four walls of a room will be so too. He went to Marienhof. Beneath the blue arch hung with crystallized sun-drops, and beneath the struggling moon, who, like him, came out glowing-red from her overshadowing, thoughts met him, which are as far exalted above human colors as they are above the earth. Whoso in such hours does not feel the baldness of this life and the necessity of a second so vividly that the need becomes a firm hope--with such let no one dispute about the highest things in our low life.

Amidst the confusion of the death-day, which else would have driven him to an utterly dark solitude, he still went to Marienhof; the departed one had begged him to bring it about that he might secure winter quarters for his bones on the hermitage-mountain, which he had so often ascended, and whose phenomena are well known to us. Gustavus hoped easily to obtain permission from the Resident Lady; all the more so, as she visited, and that but seldom, only certain parts of the Still Land. Oefel, however,--on the morrow, when in his presence the petition was presented--spoke in precisely the opposite tone, and said, if she were concerned about the park and its architectural graces, she must certainly be glad to have some actual burial there, because the best English gardens were so very deficient in dead bodies and real mausoleums, that they had mere cenotaphs and sham mausoleums. Oefel offered to design some decorations for the monument in a style which would suit the gout of the Court. Gustavus was simply in too tender a mood to-day to make a beginning of despising him. How very differently did the Resident Lady listen to his petition and his subdued voice, although he labored to give no sign of his sorrow! How sympathetically--with a look as of one who softly laid a rose in the dead man's hand--did she bestow upon the latter a little piece of ground for an anchorage! How sweetly did her full eyes accompany the gift with the gift out of her tender heart; and when another's grief gave back the victory to his own, with what sweet solace--never is woman's voice sweeter than in consoling--did she combat him. He felt here vividly the distinction between friendship and love; and he gave her the formerly entirely. He was glad not to find there the object of the latter, because he shrank from the embarrassment of the first glances. Beata lay sick.

He shut himself up; he opened his breast to that grief which does not pierce it with beneficent, bleeding wounds, but gives it dull blows--that grief, namely, which is our guest in the interval between the day of death and that of burial. This latter was a Sunday; the one when I sadly filled out my section with nothing but Ottomar's letter, and when I so mournfully closed. I did it exactly at the hour when the pale sleeper was borne from his little death bed to the great bed where all must lie, as the mother carries the children who have fallen asleep on benches to the larger resting-place. On Sunday Gustavus fled with veiled senses from the palace, where the noisy state-carriages and servants seemed as if they passed over his heart. He felt for the first time that he was a stranger on the earth; the sunlight seemed to him to be the twilight of a greater moon woven into our night. Although he could now no more on this earth either come near to the friend who was snatched away, or yet tear himself away from him, nevertheless his sorrow said it would be a consolation if it should embrace, though not the body, not the coffin, yet the bed of the grave which covered this seed of a fairer soil; and he therefore stationed himself on a distant hill, in order to see whether there were yet people on the hermitage-mountain.

His eye met the very greatest sorrow which this evening had for him here below; the white coffin was lifted out, gleaming through the dusk of evening. A rose dropping to pieces, a perforated chrysalis, a butterfly spreading his wings, who had, as caterpillar, just gnawed through it, were painted on the coffin-chrysalis and were lowered with their two archetypes into the earth; the childless father stood leaning his hand and head against the pyramid and heard behind his veiled eyes every clod of earth as if it were the flight of a downward piercing arrow--the cold night-wind came over to Gustavus from the mountain of the dead--birds of passage hurried away over his head like black specks, led by natural instinct, not by geographical knowledge, through cold clouds and nights to a warmer sun--the moon worked her way up out of a bloody sea of vapors, shorn of her rays. At last the living left the mountain and the dead man; Gustavus alone remained with him on the other hill; the night stretched its heavy pall over both.... Enough!

Spare me this grave-digger's scene! You know not what autumnal remembrances, in connection with it, make my blood creep as funereally slow as my pen. Ah! besides, I write into this story a leaf, a leaf of sorrow, whose broad, black border hardly leaves for lines and lamentations blotted with tears a narrow strip of white--this scene also I spare you, for I also know not, ye readers with the tenderer heart, whom ye have already lost; I know not what dear departed form, whose grave is already sunk as deep as itself, I may not, like a dream, raise up on its burial place and show anew to your tearful eyes, and of how many dead a single grave may be the reminder.

Vanished Amandus! in the vast army, which from century to century life sends to meet the last enemy, thou, too, didst march a few steps; often and early did he wound thee; thy comrades laid earth upon thy great wounds and on thy face,--they continue their warfare; in the heat of the conflict they will forget thee more and more from year to year--tears will come into their eyes, but none any longer for thee, but for them who are yet to die and be buried--and when thy lily-white mummy has crumbled to pieces, none will think of thee any longer; only the dream-genius will still gather up thy pastel-figure out of the earth into which it is incorporated, and will adorn with it, in the gray head of thy aged Gustavus, the meadows of his youth that repose behind the past years, and which, like the planet Venus, are the morning star in the heaven of life's morning and the evening star in the sky of life's evening, and glitter and tremble and replace the sun.... I would not say to thy soul's sheath, the corpse: Amandus! lie softly. Thou didst not lie softly in it; oh! even now I still pity thy immortal soul, that it had to live more in its narrow nerve-wrappage than in the wide building of the universe, that it could not lift its noble glance to sun-globes, but had to stoop to its tormenting blood-globules, and seldomer feel its emotions stirred by the grand harmony of the macrocosm, than by the discords of its own macrocosm! The chain of necessity cut into thee deeply; not merely its drag, but also its pressure, left upon thee scars.... So miserable is the living! How can the dead desire to be remembered by the living man when already even the very speaking of him makes the heart sink within us....

When Gustavus was at home again he wrote a letter to the Doctor; the agonizing grief, wherein the latter had stood leaning and holding on to the pyramid, affected him unspeakably; and in the letter he fell upon this wounded and shattered breast and aggravated its pangs by his love-pressure, as he begged him to accept him as his son and to be his paternal friend.

Let the high tide of sorrow be Gustavus's excuse that he, who had hitherto always concealed the paroxysms of his sensibilities for the good of another, now let them break out at another's expense. His grief went so far, that he desired of the father the every-day coat and hat of the deceased instead of his full-length picture; he felt, as I do, that one's every-day clothes are the best profiles, plaster-casts and crayon likenesses of a man whom one has loved and who has gone out of them and out of the body. The Doctor's answer runs thus: