Problematic Characters Part 34

"I accept your kind offer very thankfully."

"_Eh bien, partons!_"

In the hall they met their host, who was evidently scarcely able any longer to perform his duties as such. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice had become most unpleasantly rough and hoa.r.s.e. He talked of all sorts of things incoherently, while he made an effort to dismiss every one of his guests with a civil little speech, as he saw them to their carriage. "Want to go already--well, stay at home well--John, your carriage for your mistress--My respects to your husband! Ah!

Poggendorf! old boy! Had not seen you here at all! Don't let that wife of yours go home alone! Gla.s.s champagne? Eh?--Oldenburg, doctor, not already? Nonsense! Glad to make your acquaintance--shoot devilish well--all right that you put down that Cloten--all right--famous fellow, doctor (tender embrace)--you are my bosom friend (sobbing)--my best friend (another embrace)--you ought to have killed him--the blackguard."

"Come, Barnewitz, I have to tell you something," said Oldenburg, slapping his host vigorously on the shoulder, and leading him a few steps aside from the carriage; "Excuse me a moment, doctor; Charles!

make room, so the other carriages can come up!"

The two men walked up and down for some time in eager conversation, now disappearing in the dark part of the courtyard, and now visible again in the illuminated semicircle before the door. Oswald could readily imagine the subject of their conversation. Several times Barnewitz raised his voice, but he lowered it instantly upon a 'St! or a Hush! as a wild beast in a menagerie breaks out in a howl or a growl, and is instantly hushed by the look or the whip of the keeper. "That man has a magic power over others," said Oswald to himself, as he watched the tall, grim form of the baron walking alongside of Barnewitz, who was a head shorter, like Conscience in person by the side of a poor sinner.

"I feel something of his dominion myself. There is a demon in that man, a demon which one must either love or hate, or rather love and hate at once; for I feel disposed to hate that man and I cannot do it. And what is he to me after all? If he still loves Melitta, as I think he does, I am more of an enemy to him than he to me. But why did Melitta never tell me how she stands with regard to that long ghost there? I would not have offended her to-day. Poor Melitta! How she looked at me--and what would she say if she had witnessed the scene in the window? Oh, that sweet, charming girl! And her eyes, too, were full of tears, as she sat in the carriage and looked at me so fixedly! Oh! who can be cruel enough to refuse the love of such a heart? And yet

'All this blending of heart with heart Brings but pain to us from the start.'

Ah, Goethe! Goethe! What have you not to answer for? You also did not disdain the lily because the rose was so fair, and that is why they surround your head so often with a wreath of lilies and roses. You too would have accepted Emily's great heart, and you would have smoothed her brown hair and kissed her tenderly on her tender eyes! Oh, ye everlasting stars, how lovely the child was at that moment! For, all in all, she is but a child, and to-morrow she will awake in her soft little bed and think she has dreamt the scene in the bay-window during her sleep."

Thus Oswald tried to silence the voice of his conscience--for the moment he was successful.

"Will you get in now, doctor?" the baron said, as he came up with his host. "You understand, Barnewitz?"

"Rely upon it, I'll do what I promised," said the latter, who seemed to be very much benefited by the conversation with his Mentor and the cool night air. "Rely upon it, I give you my word of honor, that I----"

"Hush! Are you comfortable, doctor? Good-by, Barnewitz! All right, Charles!"

CHAPTER III.

The horses started; the light wagon rattled over the rough road across the court-yard. In an instant the chateau, with its still brilliantly lighted windows, the dark barns and stables, and the little cottages all lay behind them, and they were far off between waving grain-fields and mist-covered meadows. The short summer night was already waning. In the East a faint streak of light announced the new day; the early dawn covered the whole landscape as with a thin veil. From the North, however, came sheet lightning, and rent from time to time the thick fog. All was silent yet in the fields; even the lark, the herald of day, was still asleep. Oswald was leaning back in his corner and looked dreamily into the twilight; only at times, when the smoke from the baron's cigar floated by him, he looked at the latter, who seemed to be lost in thought as he sat there, with his hat pushed back a little, the collar of his coat drawn up, and his long legs stretched out to their full length. They might have been sitting thus for a quarter of an hour, when the baron suddenly said:

"You don't smoke?"

"No."

"May I offer you a cigar?"

"Thanks! I never smoke."

"That is strange."

"Why so?"

"Because I cannot understand it, how a man can endure this nineteenth century of ours without smoking tobacco or opium, without eating hasheesh, or trying in some other way to deaden the desperate disgust with which this age fills our hearts. And I understand this least of all in your case."

"Why just in my case?"

"Because, if I am not totally mistaken, you are affected with the poet's deadly disease--the longing after the Blue Flower--and will die one of these days of your unsatisfied longing. You recollect the beautiful story in Novalis' works? The Blue Flower, after which the great Minnesinger was longing? The Blue Flower! Do you know what that is? That is the flower which mortal eye has never yet seen, and the fragrance of which fills the whole world. Not every creature is delicately enough made to be able to perceive the perfume; but the nightingale is intoxicated with it when it sings and sobs and sighs in the moonlight or at early daybreak; and all foolish men have been and are drunk with it when they cry in prose and in poetry to heaven, pouring out their sorrow and their grief; and all the countless millions to whom the gift was denied to utter what they suffer, and who in their speechless sorrow look up to merciless Heaven. Ah! and there is no cure for that malady! No cure but death! He who has once breathed the perfume of the Blue Flower, has no more peace and quiet in this life. As if he were an accursed murderer, as if the angel with the flaming sword were after him, he is driven on and on, although his sore feet pain him and he yearns to lay down his weary head to rest. He asks, in his torments of thirst, for a drink at this or that cottage door, but he returns the emptied cup without thanks, for there was a fly in the water, or the cup was not quite clean, or--well, well, he was not refreshed by the drink. Refreshed! Where is the eye which satisfies us so that we would never like to look into another again, more brilliant, more fiery than the first? Where is the bosom on which we have once rested, which keeps us from desiring to listen to the beating of another heart, more ardent, more burning with love? Where? I ask you where?"

The baron paused: Oswald was strangely moved. What the eccentric man by his side had been saying, more to himself than to be heard, in an almost elegiac tone, which contrasted strikingly with his ordinarily sharp, strident voice--it was his own thoughts, which he had had often and often, from early boyhood up, so that he was almost frightened by the close resemblance of his Double. He had no answer for the baron's question, which he seemed to have propounded to himself.

"I have always been thinking about the necessity," continued the baron, "which forces men first to forget their own existence more or less, before they reach the condition which we call happiness, for want of a better word, and that they are the happier, the more fully they can forget it. 'The best of life is but intoxication,' says Byron. Yes indeed! The love of Romeo and Juliet, for which we face death as readily, as we go to a feast, is also but intoxication. 'To sleep is better than to be awake,' says the wisdom of the East; but the best of all is death."

"And yet comparatively few men kill themselves," said Oswald.

"Yes, and that is remarkable enough," replied the baron; "especially in our day, when most people are not afraid any more even of Hamlet-dreams that might trouble us in our eternal sleep."

"Might not that be a proof that, after all, the much talked of unhappiness of such people is not so very great?"

"Perhaps so; but perhaps, also, it only proves that man is very reluctant to abandon his last hope. Why does the wanderer who has lost his way drag himself forward through the deep snow? Why does the poor shipwrecked mariner strain his eyes for half a century gazing over the wild waste of waters? Why does the criminal condemned for life not dash his brains out against his prison walls? Why does the poor fellow who is to be hanged on the morrow not hang himself the night before? Before their unhappiness is not so very great? Pshaw! You do not believe that.

Simply because a faint glimmer of hope still shines through the h.e.l.l of their suffering, like the pale streak there in the east. If that faint gleam too should fade away, then, yes, then old Mother Night would have to take back her poor lost child, the mild, good, loving Night of Death."

After a short pause, during which the baron had been puffing great clouds of smoke from his cigar, he continued in a somewhat calmer tone:--

"I am several years older than you, and Fate has allowed me to see in a short time more of life than is commonly given to man. I have that, of which Goethe's friend in gray wished him the greatest possible amount: Experience. I might have learnt, and I ought to have learnt, therefore, that there is no hope in life for me and people like me; but, although I say: I have no more hope! I still go on hoping in secret that some happiness will come, as the consumptive ever hopes to be cured. Take for instance a party like that which we have just left. I know how hollow the joys of these people are; how many care-worn faces, how many guilty blushes are hid behind the smiling company-masks; I know that this pretty girl will be, ten years hence, an unhappy wife, if she is not an idiot; that this handsome fellow, who carries his head so high, and looks as if he could perform the twelve labors of Hercules in a single day, will be a coa.r.s.e country b.u.mpkin, who ill-treats his tenants and strikes his wife; I know that, and I know more than that, and I have seen it a thousand and ten thousand times in life, and yet I am not blase for all that. This treacherous Fata Morgana has yet charms for me; every budding girl-flower awakens the hope in me, I might really for once love and be loved; every fine manly fellow makes me believe once more in friendship. Would you have believed me such a fool?"

"I should not have thought you could think and feel thus."

"And you were perfectly right," said the baron. "I only think and feel so when I am dead drunk, as now.--What was that?"

A loud cry came from a little distance through the silent morning--and once more, louder, desperate, as if a woman, for it was a woman's voice, sees the murderer's knife raised in his hand. Before them lay a piece of woodland; the road went around it; the cry must have come from the other side, which was hid from them by a few detached oak-trees and thick underwood.

"Go on, Charles, faster!" cried the baron.

The coachman whipped his horses. The n.o.ble creatures, as if amazed at such undeserved treatment, rushed headlong forward, so that the two men in the carriage began to tremble. In an instant they were at the corner. As soon as they could see the other side they beheld a strange sight--A strangely dressed, dark-complexioned woman, with a piece of red stuff twisted like a turban around her bluish-black hair, ran shrieking after three hors.e.m.e.n, who spurred their horses to make their best speed, and instantly disappeared behind another turn in the road.

As the baron's carriage came thundering up, the woman jumped aside and cried, with screaming voice, lifting her hands as if in prayer: "My child--my child! they have robbed me of my child!"

The coachman found it hard to stop the horses. Oswald, who had at once recognized the Brown Countess in the woman, had jumped down from the carriage.

"Save my child, sir, save my child!" cried the gypsy, throwing herself down before him and embracing his knees.

The baron laughed.

"A very romantic situation, doctor," he said from the wagon. "Morning dawning, woods whispering, gypsy, the king's highway--really, quite a novel! In the mean time, while you console the bereft mother I will pursue the robbers, who are probably only sheep in wolf's clothing, a couple of empty-headed gentlemen of our neighborhood, who look upon the whole as capital fun."

"The one on the gray horse was Baron Nadelitz," said the coachman, who could hardly hold his horses, turning half around.

"Drive on!" said the baron. "We'll give them a lesson."

The carriage went off thundering.

The gypsy had raised herself again. She looked after the carriage, which flew with mad speed over the rough forest road and now disappeared behind some trees. A strange smile pa.s.sed over her face as she stood there, listening in breathless excitement. Then, as her ear ceased to hear the rolling of the wheels, she crossed her bare arms on her full bosom, the restless heaving of which alone spoke of the violent storm which had just shaken her whole system, and stared rigidly before her. Suddenly she raised her head and said, fixing her glittering eyes on Oswald:

"Do you know the dark man who brings me my Czika back?"

"Yes, Isabel."