The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

Namely Beata--she came. She could not know either of his return or of his last station. The recentness of the funeral-ceremonies for Ottomar, the withdrawal of Gustavus, whose image since that last scene had been impressed so deeply upon and almost through her heart, and the retiring of Summer, who daily rolled up her many-colored blooming picture some inches further,--all this had compressed itself in Beata's bosom to an oppressive sigh, which the noisy hunting-seat with its close atmosphere painfully confined, and with which she sought purer spheres of ether, in order to breathe it out upon a grave, and therefrom to breathe-in material for now ones. Enthusiastic heart! with thy feverish throbbings thou dost, indeed, send thy blood coursing in too torrent-like a circle and with thy gushing washest away shores, flowers and lives; but surely thy fault is fairer than if, with phlegmatic movement, thou shouldest, out of the stagnant water of the blood, cast up only a residuum of fatty slime!

The night-walker was startled when she saw the fair sleeper; she had not in all the garden, through which in these still minutes she had been roving, anticipated or found anyone. He lay, as he had sunk softly down, upon one knee; his pale face was irradiated by a lovely dream, by the rising moon and by Beata's eye. It did not occur to her that he was perhaps only feigning slumber; with trembling she therefore drew half a step nearer, in order, in the first place, to be certain who it was, and, secondly, to let her eye rest full upon the form, at which she had hitherto only ventured a side glance. During the gaze she could not properly tell just when she should end it. At last she turned her back upon her paradise, after she had once more stepped quite up to him; but while slowly walking backward it occurred to her (without alarm). "He surely cannot be actually dead." She therefore turned back again and heard his increasing respirations. Near him lay two small sharp stones about as large as my inkstand. She bent down twice close by him (she would not do it at once, or even with her foot) in order to remove them, that he might not fall upon their points....

Really I should have filled an alphabet, or twenty-three sheets, with this scene; fortunately it does not properly go on, until he awakes, and the reader is to-day the happiest of men....

By this time she had already, as a veteran, become more familiar with the danger, and was so sure he would not wake that she ceased to fear it, and almost began to wish it, for it occurred to her "the night-air might be injurious to him." It further occurred to her how sublime a thing it was that the two friends should so rest side by side; and her blue eye relieved itself of a dewdrop, as to which I know not whether it fell for the heart that beat above the ground or the one that lay motionless beneath it. At last she made serious arrangements to withdraw, in order, upon the whole, at a distance to awaken him by a rustling, and in order to indulge her emotions without fear of his waking. She would merely just pass by him (for she stood four and a half paces distant), because she must go down on the other side of the mountain (unless she chose the reverse). His smiles betrayed even increasing raptures, and she was, of course, curious to observe how the play of his features would end, but she must needs leave the smiling dreamer. When, therefore, she had approached two hesitating steps nearer to him, in order to withdraw to a distance of several, all at once the organ of the solitary church of the resting-place where Ottomar had to-day been buried, began to sound in the middle of the night so solemnly and sadly, as if Death were playing it; and the countenance of Gustavus became suddenly transfigured by the reflection of an inner Elysium, and he stood erect with closed eyes, snatched the hand of the motionless Beata, and said to her in the intoxication of drowsiness: "O take me wholly, blessed soul! Now I have thee, beloved Beata; I, too, am dead!"

The dream, which expired with these words, had been this: He sank away into an immense meadow, which extended away over fair earths placed one after another. A rainbow of suns, which had been strung in the manner of a pearl-necklace, encircled the earths and revolved around them. The circle of suns, going down, sank to the horizon and on the rim of the great round landscape stood a girdle of brilliants, composed of a thousand red suns, and the loving heaven had opened a thousand mild eyes.--Groves and alleys of giant flowers, as tall as trees, intersected the meadow in transparent zig-zag; the high-stemmed rose flung over it a gold-red shadow, the hyacinth a blue one, and the mingling shadows of all tinged it with a silver-hue. A magic evening glimmer hovered over the landscape like a flush of gladness between the shores of shadow and the stems of the flowers, and Gustavus felt that this was the evening of eternity and the rapture of eternity.--Blessed souls, far away from him and nearer the receding suns, plunged in the commingling evening rays, and a muffled murmur of joy hung in dying cadence, like an evening bell, over the heavenly Arcadia;--Gustavus alone lay forsaken in the silvery shadow of the flowers, with an endless yearning, but none of the exulting souls came over to him. At last two bodies in the air dissolved into a thin evening cloud and the falling cloud revealed two spirits, Beata and Amandus--the latter would fain lead the former into the arms of Gustavus, but could not gain an entrance into the silver shadow--Gustavus would fain fall into her arms, but could not extricate himself from the silver shadow--"Ah, it is only that thou art not yet dead;" (cried the soul of Gustavus) "but when the last sun is gone down, then will thy silver shadow float over all and thy earth will flutter away from thee, and thou will sink on the bosom of thy friend,"--one sun after another dissolved--Beata spread down her arms--the last sun sank from view--an organ-peal that might have shaken the worlds and their coffins to atoms, rang down like a flying heaven and by its far-reaching tremor loosed from him the fibrous wrappage and over the outspread silver-shadow floated a rapture which bore him upward and he took--the actual hand of Beata and said to her while he woke and still dreamed and saw not, these words: "O take me wholly, blessed soul; I have thee now, beloved Beata; I, too, am dead!" He held her hand as fast as the good man does virtue. Her endeavors to tear herself away drew him at last out of his Eden and his dream; his blessed eyes opened and exchanged heavens; before him stood sublimely the white ground flooded with moonlight, and the park-lawn and the thousand suns diminished to stars, and the beloved soul which until the setting of all the suns he could not reach.--Gustavus must needs think that the dream had passed over out of his sleep into real life, and that he had not slept; his spirit could neither move nor unite the great precipitous ideas before him. "What world are we in?" he said to Beata, but in an exalted tone, which almost answered the question. His hand had clung so that it almost grew to her struggling one. "You are still in a dream," said she softly, and trembling. This you and the voice thrust his dream at once away from the present into the background; but the dream had made the form which contended with his hand more dear and familiar to him, and the dreamed dialogue acted in him like a real one, and his spirit was a still vibrating chord into which an angel had struck his rapturous emotion--and now when, in the deserted temple over yonder, the organ by a fresh peal raised the scene above the earthly ground, on which the two souls now were; when Beata's position swayed to and fro, her lip quivered, her eye gave way--then again it seemed to him, as if the dream were true, as if the mighty tones drew him and her from the earth into the land of the embrace, his being reached on every side its limits: "Beata," he said to the lovely form dying away under conflicting emotions, "Beata, we are dying now--and when we are dead, I will tell thee my love and embrace thee--the dead man beside us has appeared to me in a dream and has again given me his hand...." She would fain have sunk down upon the grave--but he held up the falling angel in his arms--he let her head which had sunk to slumber fall under his and beneath her motionless heart glowed the throbs of his--it was a sublime moment, when, with his arm folded around a slumbering blessedness, he looked out alone upon the sleeping night of earth, was the sole listener to the organ, the only voice in the solitude, was the sole watcher in the circle of sleep....

The sublime moment passed, the most blissful began; Beata raised her head and showed to Gustavus and to heaven upon her backward bent face the wandering and wept-out eye, the exhausted soul, the transfigured features and all that Love and Virtue and Beauty can compress into one heaven on this earth.... Then came on the supernal moment, descending through thousand heavens upon the earth, in which the human heart lifts itself to the highest love and beats for two souls and two worlds--that moment united forever the lips on which all earthly words were extinguished, the hearts which wrestled with the oppressive rapture, the kindred souls which like two lofty flames pulsated into each other....

--Ask not of me any landscape picture of the blooming worlds they passed over, at a moment which hardly our feelings, not to say words, can grasp. I could as well give a silhouette of the sun.--After that moment Beata, whose body already collapsed under a great tear as a flowret under a rain-drop, sought to seat herself upon the grave; she softly waved him off from her with one hand, while she resigned to him the other. In this situation he opened to her his large soul, and told her all, his history and his dream and his conflicts. Never was a man more sincere in the hour of his fortune than he; never was love more coy after the moment of embrace than here with Beata, the oil of joy floated, as ever, thinly upon the water of tears; a coming sorrow stood before her and looked upon her with steady, dry eyes, but no remembered one nor any coming joy. She had now hardly the courage to speak, hardly the courage to recollect herself, hardly the courage to be enraptured. To him she only lifted up her shy glance, when the moon, that climbed up over a broken stairway of clouds stood overshadowed behind a little white cloudlet. But when a thicker cloud buried the lunar torch, then the two ended the loveliest day of their life, and in their parting they felt that there was for them no more parting forever.

Alone in her chamber, Beata could not think, nor feel, nor remember; she experienced what are tears of joy; she let them stream down, and when at length she would fain stay them, she could not, and when sleep came to close her eyes, they still lay glistening under heavenly drops....

Ye innocent souls, to you I can better say than to the dead one: sleep softly! We generally, that is I and the reader, take very little pleasure in the bravura and stilted parts of lovers in romances, because either the one party is not worthy to enjoy such rain-torrents of the light of joy, or the other to occasion them; but here we have neither of us anything to object.... If heaven would only, grant, ye loving ones, that your lame biographer could make his pen a Blanchard's wing and transport you thereby out of the mine-chambers and mine-damps of the court to some free poplar-island or other, whether in the Mediterranean or the Southern Seas!--As, however, I cannot do it, I nevertheless imagine it, and as often as I go to Auenthal or Scheerau, I picture it out to myself how much I should bestow upon you, if in that poplar or rose-vale, which I had set in water, you could, far from the German winter, amidst eternal blossoms, far from the cutting faces of the moral manufacturers, without any more dangerous murmur than that of the brooks, without any higher complications than those of intertangled flower bushes, or any influence of harder stars than the peaceful ones in heaven,--that you might draw breath in guiltless joy and peace--not, indeed, forever, but at least through the one or two flower-months of your first love.

But this is hard for mortals, and least of all am I the man for that. Such a bliss is hard to attain and for that very reason hard to keep. Rather let it be permitted here to bring forward a word upon the happiness of an authorial invalid, who, to be sure, would fain have one of his own also and who is the very describer of the foregoing felicity, I mean namely, a word about my own sick personality. From the cow barn I have come out again and of my lung complaint am happily cured; only symptoms of apoplexy have since set in, and it threatens to slay me like a mole, just when, as the latter does his hill, so I too am upheaving the Babel-tower of my literary fame. Fortunately I dabble a little just now in Haller's greater and lesser Physiology and in Nicolai's Materia Medica and in all the medical works of which I can get the loan, and can therefore keep up against the apoplexy a brisk fire of musketry (or cartridge-fire). The fire I make at my feet, by putting my long leg into a fur-boot as a purgatory and the shrunken one into a little laced boot. I have the oldest moon-doctors and Pestilentiaries on my side, in the idea, that I can like a Democrat, by these boots--and a broad mustard-plaster, wherewith, like sundry literati, I sole my feet--drive down the materia peccans out of the upper parts into the lower. Nevertheless I go farther, if I freeze. Namely: I scrape out and notch for myself a cap of ice[^[75]] and think under the frozen night-cap; accordingly it can be no wonder if the apoplexy and its half-sister, the hemiplexy--attacking me throughout from above and below, at one pole through the hot sock of the foot, at the other through the icy knob or frozen martyr's-crown--should go back to where it came from, and give me to the earth, of which the one pole in like manner below has summer, while the other above has winter.... But let the reader for once turn from good books a philanthropic eye upon us, their authors. We authors make great exertions and produce catechisms, primers, funeral sermons upon murderers, periodicals or menstrua, extracts, and other confounded enlightening stuff; but in doing it we worry and wear away our worm-bags terribly--and yet no poor devil has a decent word for us. Thus I and the whole scribbling fraternity stand erect there and shoot off with gusto long rays across a whole hemisphere (for more than that, of worlds and other globes, cannot be illuminated at once,) and all America is lost to our keels (or quills) and all the while, nevertheless, we resemble the early Christians, by whom the light, wherewith they, shrouded in tarred linen, as living pitch-pine torches, shone over Nero's gardens, was given out at the same time with their very fat and life....