The Invisible Lodge Part 15

No. 10 was the Resident Lady, who tuned herself after every one else's tone, and yet by her own was distinguished from all women;--like King Mithridates, she spoke the _languages_ of all her _subjects_.

Nos. 11 and 12 were an abbess temporarily stopping on a journey and a widowed Princess von * *, who by virtue of their rank were monosyllabic and _hautain_.

No. 13 was the _Defaillante_ whose greatest charms and powers of attraction were reduced to her small feet, where they resided, as in the two feet of an armed magnet. The head, her second pole, repelled what the lower attracted.

Nos. 00000 do not interest me; they were old female visages pickled in the saltpetre of rouge, to whom nothing was left from the shipwreck of their sunken life but a hard board on which they still sit and cruise round--namely, the gaming-table.

Nos. 00000 also have no interest for me, they were a sheaf of court dames, trimmed wall-plants on the tapestry, or rather borders set around fruit-bearing beds--they had wit, beauty, taste and behavior, and when one was out of the folding-doors, one had already forgotten them.

Nos. 0000 were a company of courtiers intersected with the red and blue order ribbons, which served a similar purpose on them to that of the red and blue colors of the spirit in the thermometer, that one might better see the height to which they rose,--who, like silver, _shone_ and made everything they touched _black_--who could not imagine any higher or broader canopy of heaven than the throne canopy, or any greater day in the year than a court day--who were never in their lives fathers or children or husbands or brothers, but merely courtiers,--who had understanding without principles, knowledge without faith, pa.s.sions without powers, complaisance without love and free-thinking as a joke--whose genuineness is tested like that of the emerald, by remaining _cold_, when one would warm it with the lips--and whom, to tell the truth, Satan may depict, not I....

Oefel was wedged in between Beata and the Swooning Sister; Gustavus sat opposite to them between two little witty ladies: but he forgot the neighborhood of his arms in that of his eyes. From Oefel's limbs shot sparks of wit, as if the silk in which he was enclosed helped electrize him. The Swooning Sister was so sure of her liege lordship over him, that she counted it no violation of allegiance, if her va.s.sal said to Beata, his next-plate neighbor, the sweetest things; "He will," she thought, "be vexed enough, that out of politeness he cannot do otherwise." As to Herr von Oefel, he was concerned at bottom about nothing except Herr von Oefel; he praised, not in order to display his regard, but only his wit and taste; he suppressed neither flatteries nor satires, when they were good and groundless; he censured women, because he wanted to prove that he saw through them, and because he held that to be a difficult matter; and I held him to be a fool.

He generally applied to a maiden's heart three mountain-borers, in order to drill a hole into it, where he might insert the gunpowder with which he proposed to blow the mineralized vein of love into the air.

His first mining-pit which he to-day, as always, loaded in the female heart, in the case of Beata, was, to talk with her a long time about her dress--it is all one to them, he a.s.serted, whether one talks of their limbs or their clothes; but I affirm, the ugly woman wears her dress as her _fruit_, the coquette as the mere _garden-ladder_ or the _fruit-gatherer_, and the good woman as the protecting _foliage_, Beata, like Eve, wore hers as leaf-work.

Secondly, he set up around Beata the cloth-and-yarn-walls of metaphor, in order to chase her into them--he a.s.serted that maidens would _sing_ what they never would say, (like those who cease to stutter the moment they begin to sing); thus they suffer in figures and allegories all those confessions of their inner being to be wormed out of them, which one could never bring from them with literal words, although they meant the same thing--I, on the contrary a.s.sert that such women are good-for-nothings, and that those who are worth as much as Beata cannot be caught with words, because their thoughts are never worse than their words. Of course, from a chamber (or heart) where there is fire and smoke within, the flame will blaze out through the first opening you make for it.

His third a.s.sertion and artifice was, that men felt the value of simplicity and the sublimity of ingenuousness and of the direct a.s.surance: "I am in love with thee;" whereas maidens wanted tournure and refinement and circ.u.mlocution to be worked into this a.s.surance; the Turkish mode of correspondence through natural flowers was more agreeable to them than that by flowers of poetic speech, a practical flattering more pleasing than a verbal--I, however, a.s.sert that--he is right. Hence, _e. g_., he made his repeating-watch always repeat before the Fainting Lady the hour of their last rendezvous, and pleased her thereby infinitely; hence he always looked upon a woman, when it was to be done and to be noticed, by peeping at her behind her back in the _mirror_--hence he was with Beata brimfull of deviltries, almost all of which I ought to name. I mention two only. In the first place he remembered that he had to forget himself, and in the fire of conversation to lay his hand on hers; thereupon he made believe recollect himself, and as if he reduced the weight of his hand half an ounce at a time with the intention of withdrawing it un.o.bserved, so soon as it weighed no more than a finger-joint--"thus," he says to himself, "the finer _delicatesse_ always manages; and I will see what it catches." His second piece of deviltry was, to squint at her face in the plate mirror at which he sat (his own he gave instead of the first prize only the second) and to admire it, when all the while, he had the original still nearer to him. Above the mirror a porcelain shepherdess was driving sheep: "I have never yet seen a lovelier shepherdess under gla.s.s," he said with double meaning; "but a lovelier sheep," said the _Defaillante_, meaning him.

This mirror-plate with its shepherdess, looking across a flowery sh.o.r.e into the gla.s.sy water, and with its lamb and shepherd, came very near to a likeness of Gustavus's childish play. Beata's eye involuntarily lost itself among these flowers, and took her ear with it, into which the Legation Counsellor with his military man[oe]uvres of wit sought vainly to effect a breach. Gustavus's eyes sought and shunned only--eyes, not scenes; out of the social whirl under which his inner wings lay buried, he could fling himself upward only by some outward leaping-pole. For all, except those who were like him, so sorely tore and teased his inner being with their table-talk, that he was never in greater agony of embarra.s.sment than to-day. I will set down the flying table-talk, so far as related to virtue, in divisions marked off by dashes, because several speakers joined in it, as in the peasant's table-grace the whole family pray antiphoniously.

"People have no virtue, but only virtues--Women have it, men wage war upon it--Virtue is nothing but an _unwonted civility_--Virtue is _un pen de pavilion joint a beaucoup de cula.s.se_;[71] _mats le moyen de n'etre que l'un ou que l'autre?_--It is, like Beauty, a different thing everywhere; here heads are peaked, there broad; so with the hearts that are below them--Beauty and Virtue scold and love each other like a pair of sisters and yet give each other their finery (an allusion)--One never thinks of Virtue with so much pleasure, as when one sees the rose-girls[72] in Salency." It is also _crowned_ in other places (a second allusion) etc. In short, every tone and glance, not proved, but simply a.s.sumed, that virtue was nothing more than--the economus of the stomach, the refectorist of the senses, the officiating priestess and daughter of the body. Love fared like virtue. "The Julie of Jean Jacques," said one, "is like a thousand Julies, or like Jean Jacques himself; she begins with enthusiasm, ends with piety, but the fall is between the two."

No one but he who has once been in Gustavus's situation, who has once endured the desolating storm of an a.s.sault upon the possibility and divinity of virtue in a circle of witty and dogmatic people of rank; who, under such agitations, each of which was a breach into his soul, has been sickened by his own powerlessness to shame, to say nothing of converting, such besiegers of virtue and the saints; who under these Herodian revilings of his Saviour has not had even that pride to uphold him, which indeed loves to eat with us in our private apartment, but hurries to the _table d'hote_ out of our inner sanctum--only he, then, who has gasped and panted in such conditions can conceive the Alpine load which lay upon Gustavus in his.

Even Beata's countenance, which took the part of love and virtue, could not shield him from the frosty faces of those men of persiflage, out of which, as from the fissures of the glaciers at a change of weather, came blasts of cutting wind, and which philosophized the heart to pieces and annihilated all self-respect. At Gustavus's age the Gustavuses make two fundamentally false inferences--they seek, in the first place, under every virtuous tongue a virtuous heart, but, secondly, also, under every bad tongue a bad heart.

Gustavus would have been very little troubled at not being able to answer much, to say nothing of counter-questioning, had there not been sitting opposite to him two ears, that deserved better things than what they were compelled to hear. He always slipped off from the right key and struck consonances where dissonances stood written on the score, and _vice versa_. Now he was astounded at other people's frank licenses, and anon his neighbors were astounded at his; and wit would have been easier for him than to hit a tone which seemed to him now too bold and now too cowardly. But this was not properly the trouble; his essential fault, which held his feet like the stocks, was--that his thoughts were logically correct.

This fault many have; and I myself have had to drill myself many a forenoon and go through ground and lofty tumblings of the soul, before I could in some degree think disconnectedly and with a hop-skip-and-jump, just as if I were half a fool. And even then it would at last all have come to nothing, had I not gone to school and sat on the seat of a pupil to women. They think far less logically, and whoso does not learn under them a good tone is one of whom nothing can be made--except a German metaphysician. Do they even, haply, answer Yes or No, instead of what does not pertain to the matter in hand? Do they express themselves upon the weightiest subject considerately and with lawyerlike diffuseness, or on the most frivolous subject frivolously? Do they dislike to use or to hear persiflage, or do they haply--ball-queens and governesses of the _bureaux d'esprit_ of course excepted--ever lay the least accent or sign of value on their table talk, after-dinner talk, looking-gla.s.s talk, and the like? Or do they lay any upon truths? Happily this refinement of tone, which is the faculty-seal and tradesman's-salutation of women, increases with the fineness of the materials one has on. One or two little German towns, such as an Unter-Scheerau, or the like, must not set themselves up as objections to my position, where, of course, the women of the place, who would rather be called ladies, give out no audible sound except with the articulated fan and sweeping train, like insects, whose voice whizzes forth not out of the mouth, but from the whirring wing-work and belly-tympanum.

Many will expect of me that I should demonstrate in detail this resemblance of the female- and the court-tones: indeed, I have the pen in my hand and need only to dip it into the inkstand. A sopranist in the good style (I shall for the sake of euphony use the terms court style and good style interchangeably) will always know how to lead off and exhaust by _points_ the lightning of truth, as the electric spark is by metallic ones. The practical sopranist cuts out of the eternal circle of truth fanciful arcs and segments, which hang and rest upon nothing, like the many-colored fragments cut out of a rainbow. He it is of whom one requires, that like the quicksilver of the looking-gla.s.s, he shall shadow forth in its shades of color all that glances by him; other people's characters and his own opinions; show everything without and hide everything within. Will it be enough for a man of the world--let it answer as it may for a man of learning--to be a field _stuck round_ with satirical thorns, and must not these rather, instead of the enclosing ditch, fill all furrows and be more the _fruit_ than the _hedge_ of the lot? And who else but he and the sulphurate of potash--which, however, confines itself solely to metals--must know how to precipitate all saints and all devils black? Only, people who dare to make such lofty demands, do not always consider, that only a lat.i.tudinarian and indifferentist to all truths can satisfy them, _i. e_., a man who perhaps for years keeps the same opinions and breeches. Nothing so narrows the playground of wit as when individual opinions and love of truth stand therein as fixed, solid pillars.

These are just the means whereby the world's people understand how to represent others as well as themselves in the finest ridiculous light.

The courtier can certainly make it a ground of reproach to the German theatrical managers, that they for the most part suffer the Attic salt and the fine comic element, which he contrives always to have about his person, to evaporate under their sweltering hands. He, the courtier, always makes himself ridiculous in a refined, never in a low way, and easily spices his person with a genuine high comic quality, suited to his high standing; but he may well ask, "Do the German dunces study me, or does Terence, whom they do study, salt his characters so delicately as I do my own?" ...

I think I have by my digressions adequately accounted for the circ.u.mstance in my story, that Gustavus at last, because he had to succ.u.mb to such quick-witted dames, and from his modest deference to other people's talents, and perhaps because the Resident Lady was withheld from him by her company, and Beata by her respected father--absolutely took himself away. But out of doors the drooping flower cannot revive itself under the cooling night-dew; in the Still Land he pa.s.sed along before the four-cornered reflections which the chandeliers threw upon the gra.s.s without yearning, and turned round and round to take in at a full glance all the walls of the broad darkly-painted ball-room, where fate propels the sun-ball into great, and the ball of earth into little circles. When he there felt the great _profile_ of day, the night, like that of a departed female friend, cool and comforting, on his bosom, then he thought, but without pride: "O to thee, great Nature, will I always come, when I am saddened in the midst of men; thou art my oldest friend and my truest, and thou shalt console me till I fall from thy arms at thy feet and need no solace more." ...

"Can you not inform me where young Herr von Falkenberg lodges hereabouts," a night-messenger accosted him. He handed him a letter, which he hurriedly ran through in the fixed-star-light of the far off chandeliers. But they seemed to-night to have to illumine only sad scenes. Amandus had therein written to him on the coverlet of his sick bed as follows:

THIRTY-FIRST, OR XXV TRINITATIS, SECTION.

The Sick Bed.--Eclipse of the Moon.--The Pyramid.

"If thou hast become my friend again, then hasten to thy friend who is soon to die. Make thy peace with me, ere I go to the eternally Silent Land, as we did the last time, before we went out into the earthly one.

Ah, thou inexpressibly beloved one! I have indeed often offended, but always loved thee! O come, let not the short breath of my breaking heart, which has consisted on this earth of nothing but _unsatisfied_ sighs, vanish with a last vain sigh for thee. Thou saw'st me for the first time when my eyes were blind; see me for the last time, when they are becoming so once more!"

This leaf, coming at an hour when the love of a human being was such a blessed thing for him, hurried him away from the palace, but the parts of his heart in which it touched him, were bleeding. Such a journey through the night bows down the soul, and on this short pa.s.sage he saw his friend die more than ten times over. Every bird he chased out of its bed made him think, how will they in the darkness find their little bough again? Every dissolving light that trailed about at a distance through the gloom, made him think for what sighs, for what painful steps, will it just now illumine the weary ascent; and it seemed to him as if he saw the human life going. It did not make him more cheerful when he saw several chariots set round with a halo of torches, filled with the idle guests of the _souper_, which they, like himself, were leaving, roll along as hurriedly as if they were hasting to visit a dying friend. At last the slumbering city unswathed itself out of the shadows; the Pharos-lamp of the warder and a few widely scattered lights, which probably were measuring off with their sad and untrimmed beams the night of some invalid, fell on the mourning-ground of his soul.

Softly he knocked at the door of the sick house, softly it was opened, softly he went up the stairs; nothing broke the silence but the sound of the clock, pealing like a funeral knell into the dumb house of sorrow, with its twelve strokes, a voice which he had so often heard there. Ah! there lay suffering in bed a form, which one will forgive all, and which one hastens to love and to cheer a little longer, ere it shall stir no more. Not the unclean, shriveled sick face, not the hue of life corroded by fever, not the wrinkles of the lip--not all of these was it in Amandus (nor is it in other invalids) which rent utterly Gustavus's heart and hopes, but the heavily rolling, spasmodically flashing, wild and yet burnt-out gla.s.sy sick eye, upon which all sufferings of past nights and the nearness of the last were so legibly written.

Amandus stretched _his_ dead hand far out to meet him, as if it were possible that any one else than he still remembered the black dyer's hand of _another_, which he had lately reached out to him. For him the reunion was sweeter than to Gustavus, who saw waiting behind it the long separation.

The morning and the joy arrested a little the curtain of his life as it fell. Gustavus took the place of the nurse; first, because she knew how to do everything so well and with so many circ.u.mstances and marginal notes, that she poured gall into his very last minutes; secondly, because, surely, in the hour when all nature in the company of death tears off from men with stern hand all finery and all articles of raiment which she had lent him, the only remaining solace for the impotent friends who cannot hold back this inexorable hand, is, during the unclothing, freezing and sinking to sleep of the friend, by unconditional compliance to all his whims, by indulgence of his capriciousness, to be still. Upon such services of heart and love toward poor dying men one looks back after many years with more satisfaction than upon those rendered to all well persons together--and yet the two cla.s.ses are separated from each other by only a few hours; for thou dost not climb in and out of thy bed many times before thou ceasest to rise from it....

Dear Death! I think now of myself. If thou enterest one day into my lodging-room, pray do me the favor to shoot me down at my _secretaire_ or writing-table dead on the spot; lay me not, dear Death, behind the curtains of the sick-bed, nor hunt slowly with thy ripping knife after every vein to amputate it from life, so that I shall be compelled to gaze whole nights' long into the dissecting face, or that during thy long unraveling of my souls raiment all shall be stepping up and looking on in good health: the Captain, the Pestilentiary and my good sister. But if the Evil One possesses thee, so that thou canst not listen to reason, then, dear Death, as no h.e.l.l lasts forever, I will not, after a thousand vexations, vex myself about the last.

Doctor Fenk had not in his face the apprehension of a coming loss, but grief for a present one; he regarded his son as a shattered porcelain vase, whose shards one sets up again in its old combination on the toilet-table and which at the least agitation thereof will fall asunder. He therefore no longer forbade him anything. He even received some male patients, "because he had one in his house and would fain _cure away_ the thought of him." The patient himself already heard the murmur of the evening-wind of his life. A few weeks before he had indeed still believed that in the spring he might drink the Scheerau mineral waters in Lilienbad, and then it would be quite different with him. (Poor, sick man! it has become different with thee sooner than that!) Only a certain fever-vision, which he did not reveal, p.r.o.nounced sentence upon his sick life; and his superst.i.tious reliance upon this dream was so firm that since that he had no longer watered his flower-bushes, had given away his birds, and extinguished all wishes excepting the wish for Gustavus.

The very next day happened to be market day. This tumult had too much life in it for years consecrated to the stillness of death, and Gustavus had to sit by his bed that during the talking and listening he might not be able to lend an ear to the din below. Gustavus was startled when at length he asked him suddenly and eagerly, did he still love Beata? He evaded the "Yes," but Amandus summoned up the little life that still glowed in his nerves, and said, though with long pauses after every sentence: "Ah, take not thy heart from her--O, if thou knowest her as I do--I was often with her father--I saw with what mute patience she bore his heat--how she took upon herself the faults of her mother--full of goodness, full of gentleness, full of tenderness, full of lowliness, full of intelligence--such she is--all, but for her image there had been little joy in my life--give me thy hand and say that thou lovest her more than me." He himself took it; but the taking pained his friend.

Suddenly there darted into the veins of his sunken cheeks perhaps the last flush of shame, which often, like a flush of morning redness, comes as the swift forerunner of a good deed; he asked for his father to be brought to him. To him he, with so much fire, with so much longing in eyes and lips, made the request--to fetch Beata, who surely could not refuse the last prayer of a dying man, that the father himself could not refuse it; but promised (despite the sense of impropriety) to drive over to her mother, and through her to persuade the daughter, and to bring them both. Fenk knew that in his whole sickness no refusal had done any good--that, if he should see his son lying there dead from the frustration of his last wish, he should not be able to bear the thought of having embittered for that dead one the dying moments which he still drained from the cup of life, and that mother and daughter were too good not to act toward his son like himself. In short, he started.

When the father was gone, the sick man looked upon his and our friend with such a stream of smilingly promising love, that Gustavus was fain to take of this faithful, gentle soul, whose departure was so near, the longest farewell in this life: "My lips," thought he, "shall only yet once be pressed to his and my bosom to his--only yet once will my arms clasp the warm corpse, while yet there is a soul therein to feel my embrace--only this once will I call after his retreating spirit, while I can still reach it, and tell him how I have loved and shall still love him." Amidst these wishes the fairest holy water man knows consecrated his eyes. But, nevertheless, he suppressed all, because he feared that under such a storm of closing life the rent bonds of the body might let loose the agitated soul and the weak one die on his lips....

This self-sacrificing tenderness, which will not come forth from the nun's-cell of the heart, pleases me more than a belles-lettrical and theatrical finale-tempest, where one feels in order to show it, in order to have a weeping and writing-fistula, as well as other people, in order to let a tip of his emotions, as well as of the handkerchief with which one dries them, hang out of his pocket.

The Doctor, whom n.o.body in Maussenbach had ever yet seen with a mournful face, had already gained by the veil that overspread his usual gaiety, his sad request. My landlord, who always forcibly dammed up his innate sympathy, because, like a parrot, it ran away with his money, surrendered everything in this case so much the more willingly to another's kindly stream of tears, because it carried away from him nothing except--his wife and daughter for an hour. The meaner man has a greater pleasure in a good deed which has been wrung from him than the better man. Roper wrote himself to his daughter the order to join the party, and briefly contributed the best reasons for it out of natural and theological ethics. But the best reason which the Doctor brought with him to the new palace to Beata was her mother; without her he would hardly have overcome her shy, politic and feminine apprehensions.

They arrived with prayerful emotions at the dying chamber, that sacristy of an unknown temple, which stands not on this earth. I proceed, although so much of what belongs here is too great for my heart and my speech.... When the sick man saw the beloved of his dying heart, then did his sunken youthful days, with their golden hopes, gleam up from far below the horizon, like the evening glow of a June sun toward the North; he pressed once more the hand of beauteous life, his pale cheeks glimmered once more with the breath of the last joy, and the angel of joy, with the cord of love, let him slowly down into the grave. A dying man sees men and their doings diminished in a low distance; to him our little rules of courtesy are no longer of much consequence--all is to him indeed henceforth nothing. He begged to be left alone with Gustavus and Beata; his soul still upheld the self-bowing body; with a broken, but healthy voice he addressed the trembling maiden: "Beata, I shall die, perhaps to-night--in my fairer days I have loved thee; thou hast not known it--I go with my love into eternity--O good soul! reach me thy hand" (she did so) "and weep not, but speak; it is so long that I have not seen nor heard thee--Nay, but weep both of you, if you will; your tears no longer weaken me; into my hot eyes, so long as I have I am here, none have ever come--O weep much by me; when one dreams that tears fall on a dead man, it means gain--Aye, ye two fair souls, ye find none like you, who can deserve your love, you are alone--O, Beata, Gustavus also loves you, and does not tell it--If thou still hast thy fair heart, give it to him--thou wilt make him and me happy, but give me no sign, if thou canst not love him." ... Then grasping the hand of Gustavus, whose feelings were conflicting tempests, he said, with uplifted eyes, as of Virtue herself in the act of benediction: "Thou infinite and gracious Being, that takest me to Thyself, bestow upon these two hearts all the lovely days which perhaps had been appointed me here--nay, deduct them from my future life, if haply I had in this world no more to expect!" ... Here the sinking body drew back the soaring soul; a drop in his eye revealed the sad memory of his shattered days; three hearts were intensely agitated; three tongues were struck dumb; it was too sublime a minute for the thought of _love_--the feeling of _friendship_ and the sense of the other world were alone great enough for the great moment....

I am not just now in a condition to speak of the consequences of that hour, nor of any other person than the dying one. His unstrung nerves kept on quivering in an enervating slumber. Beata, exhausted and stunned, went away with her mother. Gustavus no longer saw anything, hardly her. The father had no consolation and no comforter. The feverish doze lasted on till after midnight. A total eclipse of the moon exalted the heavens and attracted upward the affrighted eyes of men. Gustavus, agitated and agonized, looked up with wet eyes to the heaven-reaching shadow of the earth which lay upon the moon as on a profile-board. He bade farewell to the earth, it was to him itself a shadow: "Ah!" thought he, "in this lofty, flying shadow-pyramid thousands of red eyes, wounded hands and disconsolate hearts will at this moment be waiting to be buried in it, that the dead may lie still more gloomily than the living. But does not, then, this shadowy Polyphemus (with the moon for its one eye) move daily around this earth, only we do not perceive it except when it lies upon our moon?...

So, too, we think, death comes not upon our earth, till it mows down _our_ garden ... and yet not a century, but every second is his scythe...." In this way he worried and consoled himself under the veiled moon--Amandus woke up in distress; the two were alone; the moon's glimmer fell upon his sick eye; "who, then, has cut the moon in pieces," he said in the heat of the death-agony, "she is dead all but one little sliver." All at once the ceiling of the chamber and the opposite houses grew flaming-red, because the funeral torches surrounding the body of a n.o.bleman, which they were bearing to its burial, just then moved through the silent street. "A fire! a fire!"

cried the dying man and sought to spring out of bed. Gustavus would fain conceal from him how like him was the one who for the last time pa.s.sed through the street down below; but Amandus, as if the agony of death were already upon him, staggered half way across the chamber in Gustavus's arms ... but ere he could see the corpse, a nervous spasm laid him _dead_ in those arms....

Gustavus, cold as the dead man himself, bore the mortal sleeper to the deserted bed--without a tear, without a sound, without a thought, he sat down in the obscured moonlight and the flickering corpse-light--the stiff, motionless friend lay before him--Amandus had flown sooner then the moon's...o...b..out of the _earth's shadow_--Gustavus looked not at the dead, but at the moon (in the thickest gloom of the hour of bereavement one looks away from the proper object to the least one in the neighborhood): Stretch onward and upward (thought he) as thou wilt, shadow of this globe of dust! over me thou still hoverest ... but _him_ thy summit reaches not ... all suns lie bare before him ... O vanity! O vapor! shadow! wherein I still abide!...

Suddenly the flute-clock struck one and played a morning-song of the eternal morning, so uplifting, so wafted over out of meadows above the moon, so pain-stilling, that the tears in which his heart was drowned broke through on all sides the dam of sorrow and left a bed for softer, less deadly emotions ... It seemed to him, as if his body also lay untenanted beside the cold corpse, and his soul flew, on the broad luminous way which ran through all suns, after the soul that had hastened on before.... he saw it speeding forward ... he saw clearly through the haze of the few years that lay between it and himself....

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 pet.i.tion 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 pet.i.tion 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 embarra.s.sment 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 pa.s.sage 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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!