The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

The Resident Lady drew out to-day more than usual his shy talents to light, and easily graced the interest she took in him with the acknowledgment of his theatrical claims upon her gratitude. At length the third spectacle began, wherein more could shine than in either of the others--the ball came on. Dancing is to the female world what the play is to the great world--a fine vacation-time of tongues, which often become awkward, often dangerous. For a brain like Gustavus's, which to-day for the first time had experienced so many assaults upon his senses, a ball-room was a New Jerusalem. In fact any ball-room is something; look into this one, where Gustavus skips round! Every stringed and wind instrument becomes a lever which lifts the heart out of this niggardly, mistrustful, every-day life; dances shuffle men and women like cards in and out among each other, and the ringing atmosphere around them binds the intoxicated mass into one--so many human beings, and they linked together for such a joyous purpose, dazed by the surrounding chiaro-oscuro, inspired by their beating hearts, must at least commend the cup of joy which Gustavus drained, for he, to whom every lady is a Dogessa, was inspired by every touch of a hand, and the outer tumult so awoke one in his whole inner being that the music, as by reverberation, left its outward birthplace and seemed to spring up only in his own soul amidst and beside his thoughts, and from there to sound outward....

Verily, when one bears about his ideas around a blazing chandelier, they cast back a quite other light than when one crouches with them before an economical lamp! In men of lively fancy, as in hot lands or on high mountains, all extremes lie nearer together: with Gustavus rapture tended every moment to become melancholy; and joy, love, and all the emotions with which the fair dancers inspired him, he would fain bear to his one darling, who staid apart in solitude. It seemed to him, however, as if not all of these made her place good so much as the Resident Lady. Even the play, which was associated with her and in which he had acted for her coronation, made her more dear to him; nay, this her birthday was in his eyes one of her charms. Not otherwise, nor more reasonably than thus, do man's feelings ever act. In short, the Resident Lady gained in all respects in which the absence of Beata to-day bereaved him. To-day was the first time that he had touched anything more of the Resident Lady, for whom he had an extraordinary respect, than a glove--to-day he touched her arm and back, in other words the dress which covered them: on arm and back, but not on the hands, clothing is as good as none. Gustavus! philosophize and sleep rather....

The Bal Paré is over--but the devil's play now begins. Oefel's carriage followed the Bouse's; a neglected axle of the latter took fire from its unnecessary speed. Of course it was an accident, but certain men know no such thing as a mischance, and their plans use every one as a nucleus. Oefel had to offer her his carriage. The good Beata had been left in her sick chamber with a little circle of female attendants. He took a horse from the carriage of the Resident Lady; he left with her (I know not whether from gallantry toward her sex or from sharp-sightedness and friendship for his own and for his romance) my hero and hers. I would offer to prove before an academical senate that nothing is more critical, for one who is meaning yet to become an angel, than to drive home by night from a ball-room with a woman whom he regards as one already--nevertheless not a hair of my hero's head was hurt, nor did he hurt another's.

But he grew more in love, without knowing with whom.

Beata had not quite so dangerous a midnight or after-midnight; but I will despatch his first. He arrived with the Resident Lady at her apartment. He could not and would not tear himself away from to-day's scenes. This room represented to him all that had passed there, and in the strings of the harpsichord lurked a far-distant and beloved voice, and behind the foil of the mirror a far-distant and beloved form. Longing attached itself as a dark flower to the variegated festoon of joy: the Resident Lady gained a new charm by this dark flower also. She was not one of the coquettes who seek to move the senses before the heart; she fell upon this first with the whole array of her charms and from this afterward, as into an enemy's country, carried the war in to them. She herself was not to be conquered otherwise than according to her own tactics. If women of the upper class, like epigrams, are divisible into those that have wit and those that have sensibility, she resembled rather the Greek than the Gallic sententious poem, though the resemblance to the Greek grew daily less. The May air of her earlier life had once wafted a white blossom of noble love to her heart, as a blossom-leaf often comes fluttering down into the midst of the macerated feathers or flower-brilliants of a lady's hat--but her station soon metamorphosed her bosom into a pot pourri, on which are painted flowers of love and within a decaying heap of leaves. All her missteps kept, however, within those narrower and fairer limits to which the invisible hand of an inextinguishable sentiment restricted them. This sentiment the Minister's Lady had never had, and the tablets of her heart grew more and more soiled the more she wrote upon them and rubbed out again. The latter could never possibly delude a noble man; the former lady could.

After this digression the reader can no longer be perplexed, if the Bouse's behavior toward Gustavus is neither sincere nor dissembled, but both. She showed him the night-piece which the Russian-Prince had left with her, and which for the sake of better light she had hung in her cabinet. It represented simply a night, a rising moon, an Indian woman worshipping it on a mountain, and a youth also directing his prayer and his arms toward the moon, but his eyes upon the beloved suppliant at his side; in the background a glow faintly lighted a moonless spot. They remained in the cabinet; the Resident Lady was absorbed in the pictured night, Gustavus talked about it; at last she suddenly woke out of her gaze and silence with the drowsy words: "My birthday festivals always made me sad." In justification she disclosed to him almost all the darker parts of her history; the mournful picture took its colors from her eye and lip and its soul from her tone, and she ended by saying: "Here every one suffers alone." In the inspiration of sympathy he seized her hand and perhaps remonstrated by a slight pressure.

She left her hand in his with a look of entire indifference; but presently took up a lute lying near them, as an apparent pretext for drawing back the fair hand. "I was never unhappy," she continued with emotion, "while my brother still lived." She now drew forth, after a slight but unavoidable unveiling, the image of him which she wore on her sisterly bosom and allowed his eyes a partial view of it, but devoured it with her own. Although Gustavus at the unveiling of such different mysteries, looked merely at the painted bust--even this my Conrector and his fox-skin coat criticise in the most rational manner, for he conceives that there is no fairer rounding than that of his periods, and no more modern Eve's apple than that in the Old Testament. My skin-dressed Conrector may prescribe as he will; but Gustavus, sitting opposite to the mourning Resident Lady, who, formerly let only the form, never the color of that embowered forbidden fruit be divined, will have hard work to learn the lesson.

Very few would have been able, like me and the Conrector, to have hung the picture in its place again with their own hands.

"I love this cabinet," said she, "when I am sad. Here my Alban (name of the brother) surprised me, when he came from London--here he wrote his letters--here he wanted to die, but the doctor would not let him leave his chamber." Unconsciously she let a chord escape from her lute and die away in the air. She looked dreamily on Gustavus, her eyes assumed a more and more moist glimmer. "Your sister is still happy," said she in that sorrowful tone, which is omnipotent when one hears it for the first time from fair and usually laughing lips. "Ah!" said he with sympathetic sadness, "would that I had a sister!" She looked at him with a slightly searching glance of wonder, and said: "On the stage to-day you played the precisely reverse part toward the same person." She meant there he had falsely given himself out as a brother to Beata; here, falsely, as not her brother, or rather here he revealed to her his love. His inquiring look of astonishment hung on her lips and hovered anxiously between his tongue and his ear. She went on indifferently: "To be sure, they say, own brother and sister seldom love each other; but I am the first exception; you will be the second." His astonishment became amazement....

It would be just so with the public, did I not make a sudden break and inform them, that the Resident Lady may well have actually believed (in fact must have) the lie which she told him. People of her station, into whose ears the furioso of the concert of gaieties is ever sounding, hear un-contemporary news with only a deaf, if indeed with more than half an ear--she may therefore, even more easily than the reader (and who will answer for him?) have confounded the lost son of Madam Röper and Falkenberg with the present son of Falkenberg and the Captain's lady. Her behavior hitherto is no more against my supposition than that of the alleged brother and sister was against hers; however I may be mistaken.