The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

The two travelers were better off. As Doctor Fenk visited, ex-officio, the government physicians, who made medicines, together with the apothecaries, who employed reprisals and made receipts, he fortunately was so often vexed that he had no convenient season for indulging grief; in this way government physicians, who were always in the country (except just when epidemics happened to be prevalent), and midwives, who in extreme baptism still better provide for the regeneration of young non-Christians than for their birth, and whom Pharaoh ought to have had,--these two classes brought the afflicted Pestilentiary in some measure upon his legs again. Anger is so grand a purgative of sorrow, that legal persons, who seal and inventory for widows and orphans, cannot vex them enough; hence I shall hereafter leave by will to my heirs, whom my death will too sorely afflict, nothing but the remedy for that affliction--exasperation at the deceased!

At last the two came back with mutually opposite emotions, and their way led them by the resting-place, the manor of Ottomar and near the orphaned temple of the park. The temple, however, was lighted; it was far into the night. Around the temple hung a buzzing bee-swarm of hunting-dresses, in which were encased half the Court. Fenk and Gustavus elbowed their way therefore through greater and greater personages and horses, swept like comets by one star after another, and into the church: therein were one or two unexpected things--the Prince and a dead body--for the fighting thing behind at the altar was nothing unexpected, but the parson. Gustavus and Fenk had ensconced themselves in the confessional. Gustavus could hardly tear his eye away from the Prince, who, with that look of noble indifference which is seldom wanting in people of ton or from large cities and funeral-bidders, glanced far over the dead man--the Prince had that heart peculiar to the great folk, which is a petrifaction in the good sense, and is with them the first among their solid parts, and which betrays in the finest manner that they hold to the immortality of the soul, and that when they have one of their own connection buried, they are not at home--[are out of their element.]

All at once the Doctor laid his head upon the cushion of the confessional and covered his face; he stood up again and gazed with an eye which he could not keep dry, toward the uncovered corpse and sought in vain to see. Gustavus also looked that way and the form was known to him, but not the name, which he vainly asked of the speechless Doctor--at last the funeral preacher named the name. I need not, as if for the first time, say in double-black-letter, that the dead man on whom just now so many hard eyes and a pair of disconsolate ones rested, looked just like the Player Reinecke, whose noble figure also the heavy grave-stone crushes into confusion. I need not repeat after the pastor the name of Ottomar. The poor Doctor seemed for some time to have been determined that the anguish of his nerves should resolve itself into a nervous preparation, and was practising in that direction. Singularly enough, Gustavus took no interest in the dead, but only in the mourning friend.

The good Medical Counsellor shut to with a violent slam the hymn-book which lay in his hands; he heard not when the Prince, (who had been there only three minutes) rode away to get the death-certificate, but every word of the pastor he caught, for the sake of learning something of the history of his friend's last sickness; but he learned nothing except the cause of his death (burning fever). At last all was over, and he walked mutely and with staring eyes in between the funeral torches and up to the bier, shoved aside with his left hand without look or sound whatever might hinder him, and clutched at the sleeper's with his right. When at last he once held in his grasp the hand which Alps and years had torn from his, without however being any nearer to him for whom he had so long yearned, and without the joy of reunion, then did his anguish grow dense and dark, and spread heavily and formlessly over his whole soul. But when he found again on that hand two warts, which he had so often felt in grasping it, then did his sorrow assume the veiled form of the past; Milan passed before him with the bloom of its vineyards and the summits of its chestnut-trees and the lovely days spent among both, and looked mournfully on the two men, to whom nothing was left. And now he would have fallen with his two streaming eyes on the two that were dry, if the undertaker had not said: "One does not like to do that, it is not well." A lock was all the grave gave back of the whole friend of whom it had robbed him, a lock which for the eye is so little and for the touch of the finger so much. He tenderly laid down again the hand which had so sadly closed the last letter, upon the untouched one and took a last leave of his Ottomar for this world.

He had not observed that the dead man's Pomeranian dog and two tonsured strangers were there, one of whom had six fingers.--Once out of the church and on the road, one branch of which ran toward the palace of Ottomar and the other around the hermitage-mountain, Gustavus and Fenk looked upon each other with a mute, inconsolable inquiry--they answered each other by a leave-taking. The Doctor turned about and continued his journey--Gustavus went into the park and there at the foot of hermitage-mountain, reflected upon the fate--not of his friend, nor his own, but--that of all men....

And when am I writing this? On this 16th day of November, which is the baptismal day of the encoffined Ottomar.

THIRTY-THIRD, OR XXVI TRINITATIS, SECTION.

Great Aloe-blooming of Love; or, the Grave.--The Dream.--The Organ.--Together with my Apoplectic Attack, Fur-boots and Ice-liripipium.[^[74]]

In the soul of Gustavus the highest lights passed slowly over from the friend's image to that of the beloved. Now, for the first time, did her face, which at the death-bed had beamed eternal rays upon him, come forth out of the cypress-shadow. The solitary pyramid stood sublimely, as angel-watcher beside the buried one. He climbed the hill with still sad, but softened feelings; he had now, indeed, the indescribably sweet consolation of never having harmed the man lying under the ground there, and having often forgiven him; he wished Amandus had still oftener given occasion for his forgiveness; even this wrapped his wounded bosom in warm solace, that he at this moment so loved, so lamented him, unseen, unrequited.

At the summit he still trod upon some thorns of anguish, which make one cry out aloud; but soon, on the bridge of light, which ran from a lamp out of Beata's chamber across the garden over to the mountain, his yearning eyes flew like other butterflies toward her bright windows. He saw nothing except now the light and now a head which eclipsed it; but this head he dressed up within his far more beautifully than any woman does her own. He lay and leaned, half-kneeling and half-standing, with his eyes turned toward the long stream of light, on the pedestal of the pyramid. Weariness and sleepless nights had filled his tear-glands with those oppressive and yet enrapturing tears, which often without occasion and so bitterly and so sweetly stream out shortly before sickness or after exhaustion.--The same causes spread between him and the outer world the semblance of a dark misty day or yellow fog; his inner world on the contrary grew, without effort of his own, from a pen-and-ink-sketch to a glistening oil-painting, then to a mosaic, at last to an alto relievo.--Worlds and scenes moved up and down before him--at last dream shut up the whole outer world of sight with his eye-lids, and opened behind them a new-created paradisiacal one; like a dead man lay his slumbering body beside a grave-mound and his spirit in a heavenly meadow stretching over the whole abyss. I will presently relate the dream and its end, when I have shown the reader the person by whom the dream was at once prolonged and ended.