Part 12

After the evacuation of the Evangelist,--when he had done scolding at himself for letting him find the crape hat, which, in fact, he would have kept more concealed if Flamin had came oftener,--he looked round for Clotilda's profile, that the charming shadow might cool his wrath. It was not to be found: his first hypothesis was that Mat had quietly stolen it, which was the more likely, as he had cut it. If he has really pocketed the profile, then must the Evangelist--for, as is well known, the silhouette was made over _to me_ at the very beginning of this story--be actually my corresponding fellow-member Knef, and it is he who sent me the advice-boat,--namely, the Pomeranian dog.--Odd enough it is that my correspondent himself by such intelligence sets me upon the suspicion.

While Victor took the dear crape hat into his hand as a compensation for the likeness, and dreamily contemplated it, there sprang forth on the hat wholly new, fresh flowers for his soul. "What!" he said to himself, "must I then have only the profile to look at? Can I not choose the--original itself for that purpose?" In short, the hat became an urn of fortune, from which he drew a joyous hour, that is the determination to travel on Whitsuntide, but to--Maienthal. He seriously reflected, that for him and Clotilda this excessive indulgence of a jealous brother, whose mistaken hopes no sister indeed was obliged to strengthen, was besides aggravated and frustrated by the misanthropic suggestions of Matthieu,--that, therefore, their separation was as little of an alleviation as their meeting was a crime,--that, meanwhile, it would be a fine thing to spare the brother and to take merely the time of his absence for a suspicious excursion, till one day the drawing down of the bandage should disclose in the unfaithful one the sister, and in the rival the forbearing friend,--and that it was at all events better to talk with her in Maienthal than, at his return, when he was near,--and that a brother enlightened in regard to his origin would certainly one day have nothing to reproach him with, except that he had taken from him no other illusions than, at most, disagreeable ones.--O, Love and Virtue have a naked conscience, and apologize for their heavenly pleasures longer and more than other qualities do for their infernal ones!

When Victor further thought on _this_, how soon leaf and blossom drop off from the days of love, and that Emanuel, and even Clotilda, were two flowers moved close to the brink of the grave, whose loose, naked roots already hung down dead, then was his resolution fixed, and he wrote to Emanuel the intelligence of his intended arrival at Whitsuntide, in order not to anger Clotilda by a surprise, and in order, besides, to allow her the opportunity of a countermand. The way in which he put it was this: "If his Socratic genius would allow it (i. e. Clotilda), who always told him what he must _not_ do, then he was coming on Whitsuntide, as, besides, the town would then be deserted, as Flamin was to be gone for four or five days to Kussewitz, &c."

When he had finished the letter, it occurred to him that this very day a year ago; on the 29th of April, he had travelled all night, in order with the first of May in the morning to enter through the mist into the parsonage. "I can, verily, again spend the sultry zephyr-night, not under the coverlet, but under the stars. I can take one steady gaze into the evening-red towards Maienthal's mountains. I can, indeed, better still, go half the way over them,--or in fact the whole. I can post myself on a hill and look down into the hamlet. Truly I can then deliver my billet here incognito to some Maienthaler, and take flight again before it is yet day."

At seven o'clock in the evening he went, like the sea, from east to west. Orion, Castor, and Andromeda glisten in the west, not far from the evening-red, over the fields of the loved one, and, like her, will soon sink from one heaven into another. His heart agitated by nothing but hopes, the _heated_ chambers of his brain, on whose walls Maienthal sketched with _sympathetic_ ink came forth in ever clearer outlines and brighter colors, this inner and almost painful din of joy deprived him at first of the power of taking in the temple of Spring, built up in Grecian beauty, with a still, luminous soul. Nature and Art are best enjoyed only with a clean eye, from which both kinds of tears have been wiped away.

But at last the outspread _night-piece_ covered over his hot _fever-images_, and heaven with its lights, and earth with its shadows, made their way into his expanded heart. The night was without moonlight, but without clouds. The temple of nature, like a Christian temple, was sublimely dimmed. Victor could not make his way up out of the trenches of long valleys, out of the glooms of woods, and out of the mists of meadows with their play of colors, till the midnight hour, when he climbed a mountain like a throne, and there lay down on his back in order to plunge his eyes into the heavens, and cool off from his dreaming and racing. The low-hanging blue of heaven seemed to him to be a thin blue cloud, a sea dashed into blue mists, and one sun after another with its long rays slightly parted this blue flood. Arcturus, who stood over against the reclining man, was already descending from the battlements of heaven, and three great constellations, the Lynx, the Bull, and the Great Bear, marched far in the van under the western gate.--These nearer suns were encircled by remote milky-ways with a swimming halo, and thousands of vast heavens flung into eternity stood in our heaven as white vapors a span in length, as faintly luminous snow-flakes out of immensity, as silver circles of hoar-frost.--And the strata of suns crowded together, which only before the thousand-eyed eye of Art let fall their misty veil, played like streaks of _our_ little particles of sun-dust in the glowing sunbeam of the Eternal that burned through the immeasurable space. And the reflection of his throne, glowing through and through, lay bright on all the suns.----

--Suddenly, nearer at hand, molten cloudlets of light, nearer mists, which had flown upward out of dew, take their stations, during their silvering, low down before the suns, and the silvery gleam of heaven comes on apace with scattered dark fleeces.----Victor cannot comprehend the supernatural kindling, and starts up, enchanted, to his feet.... and lo, our good neighbor and kinsman, the moon, the sixth grand division of our little earth, had silently, and without the morning's cry of joy, entered _beside_ the triumphal gate of the sun into the night of her mother earth with her _half-day_.

And now, when the shadows ran off from all the mountains, and glided through the discovered landscapes only in brooks between trees, and when the moon gave the whole dark spring a little morning in the midnight,--then did Victor, not with nightly melancholy, but with morning rejuvenescence take the great round play-room of the annual creation into his awakened eyes, into his awakened soul; and he surveyed the spring with an internal cry of joy in the midst of the wide realm of profound silence, with the feeling of immortality in the circle of sleep.----

Earth also, and not Heaven only, makes man great!

Enter into my soul and into my words, ye May-feelings that throbbed in the bosom of my Victor, as he looked over the budding, swelling earth, covered with suns above his head, enclosed in a net of green life that reached from roots to tree-tops, from mountains to furrows, and borne up by a second spring under his feet, as he imagined to himself behind the transpierced earth-crust the sun standing with a day of splendor under America.--Climb higher, moon, that he may see more easily the gushing, swollen, dark-green spring, which with little pale spears crowds upward out of the earth, till it has lifted itself out, full of glowing flowers, full of waving trees,--that he may descry the plains which lie under rich leaves, and on whose green track the eye ascends from the upright flowers on which the cloven charms of light grow and fix themselves to the bushes bursting into blossoms, and to the slow trees whose glistening buds sway up and down in the spring-winds.----Victor had sunk into dreams, when all at once the cold fanning of the spring-air, which could now play more with little clouds than with flowers, and the murmur of the spring brooks, which darted away beside him from all the hills and over every patch of darker green, woke and bestirred him.--There was the moon that had gone up unseen, and all the fountains glistened, and the lilies of the valley came out in white bloom from the green, and round the lively water-plants danced silver-points. Then did his bliss-burdened look lift itself in order to rise to God from the earth and from the green borders of the brooks, and climb up the curved woods, out of which the iron-sparks and smoke columns[70] leaped above the summits, and far up the white mountains where winter sleeps in clouds;----but when his holy sight was in the starry heaven, and was about to look up to God, who has created night and spring and the soul,--then, weeping and reverent and lowly and blissful, he fell back with drooping wing.... His heavy soul could only say, He is!--

But his heart drank its fill of life from the endless, welling, breathing world around him, above him, under him, wherein force reaches to force, blossom to blossom, and whose fountains of life shoot from one earth to another, and whose void spaces are only the paths of the finer powers and the residence of the lesser ones,--the whole immeasurable world stood before him, whose distended cataract, spraying into fragrances and streams, into milky-ways and hearts, between the _two_ thunders of the summit and the abyss, rapid, starry, flaming, descends out of a past eternity, and leaps down into a future one,--and when God looks upon the cataract, then the circle of eternity paints itself thereon as a rainbow, and the stream does not discompose the hovering circle....

The blessed mortal rose up and journeyed on in the feeling of immortality through the spring-life pulsating around him; and he thought that man, in the midst of so many examples of immutability, erroneously translated the distinction between his sleep and waking into the distinction between existence and non-existence. Now his vigorous, exuberant feelings welcomed every noise, the stroke of the trip-hammer in the woods, the rush of spring-waters and spring-winds, and the whir of the partridge.--

At three o'clock in the morning he looked down on Maienthal. He came upon the mountain relieved by five solitary fir-trees, on which one can see through the whole village, and again over to the other mountain, where the weeping birch shades his Emanuel. The embowered cell of the latter he could not discern, but all the windows of the convent where his loved one dreamed glistened in the sparkling moonlight. The rapture of night was still in his breast, and the burning glow of dreams on his countenance;--but the valley drew him out to the earth, and only gave his flowers of joy a _firmer_ soil; and the morning-wind cooled his breath, and the dew his cheeks. The tears rose into his eyes, when they fell upon the white-curtained windows, behind which a lovely, a wise, a loved and loving soul was completing its guileless morning-dreams. Ah! dream, Clotilda, of thy friend, that he is near thee, that he is turning his overflowing eyes toward thy cell, and that he will vanish, if thou appearest, and that, nevertheless, he is growing more blessed from moment to moment,--ah! he too, indeed, is dreaming, and when the sun rises, the beloved vale will have sunk like thy dream with the starry heaven.--O, the mountains, the woods, behind which dwells a beloved soul, the walls which enclose her, look upon man with a touching magic, and hang before him like sweet curtains of the future and the past.

The mountain brought before him the image of the painter who had once been here for the purpose of sketching Clotilda's charms, like a golden age, as it were, only from a distance, and so of drawing them nearer,--and this again led his eye into the days of her earlier youth and her still, pure life at the convent, and it grieved him that a time had once been, and been lost, in which he had not been able to love her. As he looked around him, and thought to himself that on all these paths, by these brooks, under these trees, she had walked, the whole region became to him holy and living, and every bird that glided over it seemed to seek his friend, and to love her as he did.

But now with every star that sank back into heaven overhead, a flower and a bird woke down on the earth,--the way from night to day was already laid with half-colors,--little clouds came up on the coast of day,--and Victor was still on the mountain. His fear that the white window-veil might stir and betray him, was as great as his wish that the fear might grow greater and greater! Occasionally a curtain swayed, but none rose.--All at once the throats of the birds woke a magic flute at the foot of his mountain, and the still Julius came to meet the sun, that no more shone for him, with his morning-tones. Then, suddenly, Clotilda's window unveiled itself, and her fair, bright eyes took the freshened morning into her holy soul. Victor, not considering the distance, stepped behind one bush after another; but his flight from the beloved eyes led him nearer to the flute; he was, however, full as unwilling to appear before Emanuel, whom he supposed to be in the vicinity of the blind one, as before Clotilda herself. When now only a few bushes separated him from the tones, he espied on the mountain his friend Emanuel under the weeping birch. Now he hastened, glad and trembling, down to Julius, whom he found, with his lily-face, fair as the younger brother of an angel, with birds flying and singing around him, leaning against a birch-tree: "What forms, what hearts," thought he, "adorn this Paradise." How could he, on such a morning, on such a holy spot, toward so good a youth, have disguised himself, and handed to him, say, with the imitated voice of his Italian servant, the letter to Emanuel!--No, that he could not do; he said with a low voice, in order not to alarm him, "Dear Julius, it is I!"--Then he sank slowly upon the tender being, and embraced in one breast three hearts, and handed him the letter with the words, "Give it to thy Emanuel!" and with the warmest pressure of the dear hand flew farther down the mountain and away.--

Just at this hour, on this day, a year ago, Giulia also disappeared from Maienthal, and took nothing with her of the fair flowery ground but a--grave-mound.

And now when he had escaped behind bushy avenues from the place of the blessed, his nightly elation gave way to an uncontrollable sadness. The rising sun drew all the bright colors out of his nightly dream. "Have I then really seen Maienthal and Julius and all the loved ones, or is it all only a play of shadows that passed by before me on a cloud whose colors flickered in the moonlight, and which has melted away?" said he,--and the brooding day warmed the fresh night-air of his soul into the sultry fanning of a south-wind. Whereas man generally, like Raguel,[71] hews out graves in the midnight, and in the morning sun fills them up again, Sebastian today reversed it.----

Strictly speaking, it was not quite so: but the swift emerging and reabsorption of the beloved forms, the aggravated longing for them, the touching contrast between the din of morning and the pause of night, between the fire of the sun and the moon's twilight, and the dreary exhaustion of sleeplessness joined to the weariness of the fancy and the body, all these things wrung from the heart and the tear-glands of our somnambulist involuntary sweet tears, which had no object, which flowed neither for joy nor for sorrow, but for yearning.

All at once the fair, cloudless first May-day made to pass before him the remembrance of the one a year ago, when, like a spring and an Homeric god, he arrived in a cloud,--and the good man looked with dew-drops in his eyes upon the dew-drops in the flowers, and said, inexpressibly touched: "Ah! a year ago I came so happy, became so unhappy, and now am so happy again,--O ye flying, playing, echoing, trembling years of man!"--and the holiday-hum of bells from all the villages (it was St. Philip's and St. James's day) with the soft thrill of an echo set all his mourning-strings into a responsive quiver.

"O, a year ago," all the bells sang to him, "we escorted Giulia, as we now do thee, out of Maienthal." Then, as the sun unfolded his white blossoms in the sky, the warm thought dissolved his heart: "A year ago this morning thy Flamin went to meet thee, and shed on thy glowing breast so many tears of joy,--and at the end of this very day he drew thee again to his heart, and said as if with a presentiment, 'Forget me not, betray me not, and if thou wilt forsake me, then let me perish with thee!'--

"O thou faithful one," said all his thoughts, "how it consoles me to-day, that I once gladly sacrificed all my wishes to thine, in order to continue true to thee.[72]--No, I cannot conceal anything from him, I will go to him at once."--He went straight to Flamin, in order (though without perjury towards his Lordship, and with forbearance toward jealousy) to confess that he was going at Whitsuntide to Maienthal. His dismembered heart needed so much an eye that should weep responsive to it,--his delicate sense of honor scorned so much to make another's journey the screen of his own,--his renewed love was pained so at the thought of the least concealment from his friend,--Matthieu was so completely thrust out from this heavenly-blue Eden under the walls of the brain,--that the longer he thought and ran, the more would he lay open. He would, namely, even disclose to his Flamin that he had this very night delivered with his own hands the note of invitation to the blind youth: by an illusion, the future Whitsuntide journey was made more certain through to-day's, and this his own point of view he looked upon as another's.

But his dreamy and _night-intoxicated_ soul did not carry so far its dangerous effusion, which might do so much the more harm, as Flamin in his anger was unable to listen any longer to distinctions and justifications, and even rejected again old ones which he had before allowed. For at his entrance a May-frost on Flamin's face closed a little the opening blossom-cup of his heart. He begged Flamin with his contrasting warmth of face to take a walk on this bright day. Out of doors the contrast grew still more sharp, as Flamin thrust his cane into the ground even to the point of cracking it, beheaded flowers, whipped off leaves, stamped out footprints with the heel of his boot, while Victor sought to discourse in one steady stream, in order to maintain his soul in the warmth which he had brought with him.

One thing about him gratifies me, that he was going to pour out his heart, overrunning with to-day's renunciations, into the very one which he had to charge with those renunciations. At last he said, hurriedly, just for the sake of throwing off from his soul the confession which hall become so hard to utter, "At Whitsuntide I am going to Maienthal,"--and then flyingly passed over to the words, "O just a year ago to-day thou wentest with me."

Flamin interrupted him, and his icy face, like a Hecla, was cloven with flames: "So! so!--at Whitsuntide? Thou dost not go with _us_ to Kussewitz!--Let me once for all speak right out, Victor!"--Then they stopped. Flamin stripped the blossoms and leaves from the branch of a wild plum-tree with bloody hand, and looked not at his gentle friend, lest he should be softened himself. "A year ago to-day, sayest thou? Yes, that very evening I went with thee up to the watch-tower, and we promised each other either truth or death. Thou sworest to me to throw thyself headlong with me, whenever thou shouldst have taken all from me, all,--or, say, _her_ love; for in thy presence she hardly looks at me any more.--By the Devil, am I then blind? Do I not see, then, that the machinery of her journey and thine has been all planned out?--What hast thou to do just now with the Maienthal landscapes? To whom does the _hat_ belong?--And what am I to infer from all this?--To whom, whom? say, say!--O God, if it were true!--Help me, Victor!"--In the eyes of the misused, to-day exhausted Victor stood the bitterest tears, which Flamin, however, who exasperated himself by his own talking, could now bear. Never did the latter in a rage accept remonstrances: nevertheless he expected them, and was astounded at his being in the right, and at the other party's silence, and desired to be contradicted. He crushed in his bleeding hand the sloe-thorns. His eye burned into the weeping one. Victor bewailed his firm oath to his father, and looked on the trembling balance wherein the oath and indulgent friendship hung in equipoise. He collected once more all his love into his breast, and spread his arms wide open, and fain would draw with them the struggling one to himself, and yet could say nothing but "I and thou are innocent; but till my father comes, before that I cannot justify myself."--Flamin repelled him from him: "What is this for?--So it was at the garden-concert, too, and thou hast since that been daily with her, and at Easter-balls and in sleighs, without me. Say rather outright, wilt thou marry _her_?--Swear that thou wilt not?--O God, hesitate not,--swear, swear!--Ay, ay, Matthieu!--Canst thou not yet!--Well, then, lie at least!"

"Oh!" said Victor,--and eclipsing blood-streams shot through his brain and over his face,--"thou shalt not insult me quite too much; I am as good as thou, I am as proud as thou,--before God my soul is pure"----But Flamin's blood on the sloe-bush repressed Victor's indignant exaltation, and he merely lifted a sympathetic eye full of the tears of friendship to the brighter, softer heaven.--"Only marriage, forsooth, dost thou not forswear?----Good, good, thou hast strangled me,--my heart hast thou trampled on, and my whole happiness.--I had none but thee, thou wast my only friend, now will I go to the Devil without one.--Thou dost not swear?--Oh, I tear myself away from thee bloody and wretched, and as thy foe--we part--only go--away! it is all up--all!--Adieu!" He rushed away, striking his stick into the ground as he went, and his distracted friend, lying at the feet of Truth, who lifts the flaming sword against Perjury, and dying in tears before Friendship, who casts upon the soft heart the melting look full of entreaties,--Victor, I say, cried, as with dying voice, after the fleeing friend of his soul: "Farewell, my faithful Flamin! my never-to-be-forgotten friend! I was indeed true to thee!--But an oath lies between us.--Dost thou still hear me?--do not hasten so!--Flamin, dost thou hear me? I love thee still, we shall find each other again, and come when thou wilt." ... He cried after him more vehemently, although with stifled, smothered tones: "Honest, precious, precious soul, I have loved thee very much, and do still and still,--only be right happy.--Flamin, Flamin, my heart breaks now that thou art my enemy."--Flamin looked round no more, but his hand seemed to be on his eyes. The friend of his youth vanished from his sight like youth itself, and Victor sank down _unhappy_ under the fairest heaven, with the consciousness of innocence, with all the feelings of friendship!--O, Virtue itself gives no consolation, if thou hast lost a friend, and the heart of a man, stabbed by _friendship_, bleeds on mortally, and all the balm of _love_ avails not to heal or to soothe!--

32. DOG-POST-DAY.