Part 10

I impute it to the elevating influences of the Pontac, that the Conrector plucked up courage to--turn, to come back, and employ the resuscitating means of coughing, sneezing, trampling, and calling to his Shock, in stronger and stronger doses on the fair sleeper. To take her by the hand, and with some medical apology, gently pull her out of sleep, this was an audacity of which the Conrector, so long as he could stand for Pontac, and had any grain of judgment left, could never dream.

However, he did awake her, by those other means.

Wearied, heavy-laden Thiennette! how slowly does thy eye open! The warmest balsam of this earth, soft sleep has shifted aside, and the night-air of memory is again blowing on thy naked wounds!--and yet was the smiling friend of thy youth the fairest object which thy eye could light on, when it sank from the hanging-garden of Dreams into this lower one round thee.

She herself was little conscious,--and the Conrector not at all,--that she was bending her flower-leaves imperceptibly towards a terrestrial body, namely, towards Fixlein. She resembled an Italian flower, that contains cunningly concealed within it a new-year's gift, which the receiver knows not at first how to extract. But now the golden chain of her late kind deed attracted her as well towards him, as him towards her. She at once gave her eye and her voice a mask of joy; for she did not put her tears, as Catholics do those of Christ, in relic-vials, upon altars, to be worshipped. He could very suitably preface his invitation to the Pontac festival with a long acknowledgment of thanks for the kind intervention which had opened to him the sources for procuring it. She rose slowly, and walked with him to the banquet of wine; but he was not so discreet, as at first to attempt leading her, or rather not so courageous; he could more easily have offered a young lady his hand (that is, with marriage ring) than offered her his arm. One only time in his life had he escorted a female, a Lombard Countess from the theatre; a thing truly not to be believed, were not this the secret of it, that he was obliged; for the lady, a foreigner, parted in the press from all her people, in a bad night, had laid hold of him as a sable Abbe by the arm, and requested him to take her to her inn. He, however, knew the fashions of society, and attended her no farther than the porch of his Quintus-mansion, and there directed her with his finger to her inn, which, with thirty blazing windows, was looking down from another street.

These things he cannot help. But to-night he had scarcely, with his fair, faint companion, reached the bank of the pond, into which some superstitious dread of water-spirits had lately poured the pure blood of her left arm,--when, in his terror lest she fell in, with the rest of her blood, over the brink, he quite valiantly laid hold of the sick arm. Thus will much Pontac and a little courage at all times put a Conrector in case to lay hold of a Fraeulein. I aver that at the banquet-board of the wine, at the window-sill, he continued in the same conducting position. What a soft group in the penumbra of the Earth, while Night, with its dusky waters, was falling deeper and deeper, and the silver-light of the Moon was already glancing back from the copper ball of the steeple! I call the group soft, because it consists of a maiden that in two senses has been bleeding; of a mother again with tears giving her thanks for the happiness of her child; and of a pious, modest man, pouring wine, and drinking health to both, and who traces in his veins a burning lava-stream, which is boiling through his heart, and threatening piece by piece to melt it and bear it away. A candle stood without among the three bottles, like Reason among the Passions; on this account the Conrector looked without intermission at the window-panes, for on them (the darkness of the room served as mirror-foil) was painted, among other faces which Fixlein liked, the face he liked best of all, and which he dared to look at only in reflection, the face of Thiennette.

Every minute was a Federation-festival, and every second a Preparation-Sabbath for it. The Moon was gleaming from the evening dew, and the Pontac from their eyes, and the bean-stalks were casting a shorter grating of shadow. The quicksilver-drops of stars were hanging more and more continuous in the sable of night. The warm vapor of the wine set our two friends (like steam-engines) again in motion.

Nothing makes the heart fuller and bolder than walking to and fro in the night. Fixlein now led the Fraeulein in his arm without scruple. By reason of her lancet-wound, Thiennette could only put her hand, in a clasping position, in his arm; and he, to save her the trouble of holding fast, held fast himself, and pressed her fingers as well as might be with his arm to his heart. It would betray a total want of polished manners to censure his. At the same time, trifles are the provender of Love; the fingers are electric discharges of a fire sparkling along every fibre; sighs are the guiding tones of two approximating hearts; and the worst and most effectual thing of all in such a case is some misfortune; for the fire of Love, like that of naphtha, likes to swim on water. Two tear-drops, one in another's, one in your own eyes, compose, as with two convex lenses, a microscope which enlarges everything, and changes all sorrows into charms. Good sex! I too consider every sister in misfortune as fair; and, perhaps, thou wouldst deserve the name of the Fair, even because thou art the Suffering sex!

And if Professor Hunczogsky in Vienna modelled all the wounds of the human frame in wax, to teach his pupils how to cure them, I also, thou good sex, am representing in little figures the cuts and scars of thy spirit, though only to keep away rude hands from inflicting new ones....

Thiennette felt not the loss of the inheritance, but of her that should have left it; and this more deeply for one little trait, which she had already told his mother, as she now told him. In the last two nights of the Rittmeisterinn, when the feverish watching was holding up to Thiennette's imagination nothing but the winding-sheet and the mourning-coaches of her protectress; while she was sitting at the foot of the bed, looking on those fixed eyes, unconsciously quick drops often trickled over her cheeks, while in thought she prefigured the heavy, cumbrous dressing of her benefactress for the coffin. Once after midnight, the dying lady pointed with her finger to her own lips. Thiennette understood her not; but rose and bent over her face. The Enfeebled tried to lift her head, but could not,--and only rounded her lips. At last, a thought glanced through Thiennette, that the Departing, whose dead arms could now press no beloved heart to her own, wished that she herself should embrace her. O then, that instant, keen and tearful, she pressed her warm lips on the colder,--and she was silent like her that was to speak no more,--and she embraced alone and was not embraced. About four o'clock, the finger waved again; she sank down on the stiffened lips,--but this had been no signal, for the lips of her friend under the long kiss had grown stiff and cold....

How deeply now, before the infinite Eternity's-countenance of Night, did the cutting of this thought pass through Fixlein's warm soul: "O thou forsaken one beside me! No happy accident, no twilight hast thou, like that now glimmering in the heavens, to point to the prospect of a sunny day; without parents art thou, without brother, without friend; here alone on a disblossomed, emptied corner of the Earth; and thou, left Harvest-flower, must wave lonely and frozen over the withered stubble of the Past." That was the meaning of his thoughts, whose internal words were: "Poor young lady! Not so much as a half-cousin left; no nobleman will seek her, and she grows old so forgotten, and she is so good from the very heart,--Me she has made happy,--Ah, had I the presentation to the parish of Hukelum in my pocket, I should make a trial." ... Their mutual lives, which a straitcutting bond of Destiny was binding so closely together, now rose before him overhung with sable,--and he forthwith conducted his friend (for a bashful man may in an hour and a half be transformed into the boldest, and then continues so) back to the last flask, that all these upsprouting thistles and passion-flowers of sorrow might therewith be swept away. I remark, in passing, that this was stupid; the torn vine is full of water-veins as well as grapes; and a soft oppressed heart the beverage of joy can melt only into tears.

If any man disagree with me, I shall desire him to look at the Conrector, who demonstrates my experimental maxim like a very syllogism.--One might arrive at some philosophic views, if one traced out the causes, why liquors--that is to say, in the long run, more plentiful secretion of the nervous spirits--make men at once pious, soft, and poetical. The Poet, like Apollo his father, is _forever a youth_; and is, what other men are only once, namely, in love,--or only after Pontac, namely, intoxicated,--all his life long. Fixlein, who had been no poet in the morning, now became one at night; wine made him pious and soft; the Harmonica-bells in man, which sound to the tones of a higher world, must, like the glass Harmonica-bells, if they are to act, be kept _moist_.

He was now standing with her again beside the wavering pond, in which the second blue hemisphere of heaven, with dancing stars and amid quivering trees, was playing; over the green hills ran the white, crooked footpaths dimly along; on the one mountain was the twilight sinking together, on the other was the mist of night rising up; and over all these vapors of life hung motionless and naming the thousand-armed lustre of the starry heaven, and every arm held in it a burning galaxy....

It now struck eleven.... Amid such scenes, an unknown hand stretches itself out in man, and writes in foreign language on his heart, a dread _Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin_. "Perhaps by twelve I am dead," thought our friend, in whose soul the Cantata-Sunday, with all its black funeral piles, was mounting up.

The whole future Crucifixion of his friend lay prickly and bethorned before him; and he saw every bloody trace from which she lifted her foot,--she who had made his own way soft with flowers and leaves. He could no longer restrain himself; trembling in his whole frame, and with a trembling voice, he solemnly said to her: "If the Lord this night call me away, let the half of my fortune be yours; for it is your goodness I must thank that I am free of debts, as few Teachers are."

Thiennette, unacquainted with our sex, naturally mistook this speech for a proposal of marriage; and the fingers of her wounded arm to-night for the first time pressed suddenly against the arm in which they lay; the only living mortal's arm by which Joy, Love, and the Earth were still united with her bosom. The Conrector, rapturously terrified at the first pressure of a female hand, bent over his right to take hold of her left; and Thiennette, observing his unsuccessful movement, lifted her fingers, and laid her whole wounded arm in his, and her whole left hand in his right. Two lovers dwell in the Whispering-gallery,[51] where the faintest breath bodies itself forth into a sound. The good Conrector received and returned this blissful love-pressure, wherewith our poor, powerless soul, stammering, hemmed in, longing, distracted, seeks for a warmer language, which exists not; he was overpowered; he had not the courage to look at her; but he looked into the gleam of the twilight, and said (and here for unspeakable love the tears were running warm over his cheeks): "Ah, I will give you all; fortune, life, and all that I have, my heart and my hand."

She was about to answer, but, casting a side glance, she cried, with a shriek: "Ah, Heaven!" He started round, and perceived the white muslin sleeve all dyed with blood; for in putting her arm into his, she had pushed away the bandage from the open vein. With the speed of lightning, he hurried her into the acacia-grove; the blood was already running from the muslin; he grew paler than she, for every drop of it was coming from his heart. The blue-white arm was bared; the bandage was put on: he tore a piece of gold from his pocket; clapped it, as one does with open arteries, on the spouting fountain, and bolted with this golden bar, and with the bandage over it, the door out of which her afflicted life was hurrying.--

When it was over, she looked up to him; pale, languid, but her eyes were two glistening fountains of an unspeakable love, full of sorrow and full of gratitude.--The exhausting loss of blood was spreading her soul asunder in sighs. Thiennette was dissolved into inexpressible softness; and the heart lacerated by so many years, by so many arrows, was plunging with all its wounds in warm streams of tears, to be healed, as chapped flutes close together by lying in water, and get back their tones. Before such a magic form, before such a pure, heavenly love, her sympathizing friend was melted between the flames of joy and grief; and sank, with stifled voice, and bent down by love and rapture, on the pale, angelic face, the lips of which he timidly pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its girdles round them, and drew the two closer and closer together, and their two souls, like two tears, melted into one. O now, when it struck twelve, the hour of death, did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing his soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life closed spasmodically round the last heart in this world, round the last rapture of existence.... Yes, happy man, thou didst express thy love; for in thy love thou thoughtest to die....

However, he did not die. After midnight, there floated a balmy morning air through the shaken flowers, and the whole spring was breathing. The blissful lover, setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded his delicate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers from night-cold; and himself of the longer night-cold of Death, which was now for long years passed over.--Innocent and blessed, they rose from the grove of their betrothment, from its dust broken by white acacia-flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without, they felt as if a whole wide Past had sunk away in a convulsion of the world; all was new, light, and young. The sky stood full of glittering dew-drops from the everlasting Morning; and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, and sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of men.--The Moon, with her fountain of light, had overspread and kindled all the garden, and was hanging above in a starless blue, as if she had consumed the nearest stars; and she seemed like a smaller wandering Spring, like a Christ's-face smiling in love of man.--

Under this light they looked at one another for the first time after the first words of love; and the sky gleamed magically down on the disordered features with which the first rapture of love was still standing written on their faces....

Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Paradise, innocent as in Paradise!

SIXTH LETTER-BOX.

Office-impost.--One of the Most Important of Petitions.

The finest thing was his awakening in his European Settlement in the giant Schadeck bed!--With the inflammatory, tickling, eating fever of love in his breast; with the triumphant feeling that he had now got the introductory programme of love put happily by; and with the sweet resurrection from his living, prophetic burial; and with the joy that now, among his thirties, he could, for the first time, cherish hopes of a longer life (and did not longer mean at least till seventy?) than he could ten years ago;--with all this stirring life-balsam, in which the living fire-wheel of his heart was rapidly revolving, he lay here, and laughed at his glancing portrait in the bed-canopy; but he could not do it long; he was obliged to move. For a less happy man, it would have been gratifying to have measured--as pilgrims measure with the length of their pilgrimage, not so much by steps as by body-lengths, like Earth-diameters--the superficial content of the bed. But Fixlein, for his own part, had to launch from his bed into warm, billowy life; he had now his dear good Earth again to look after, and a Conrectorship thereon, and a bride to boot. Besides all this, his mother down-stairs now admitted that he had last night actually glided through beneath the scythe of Death, like supple grass, and that yesterday she had not told him, merely out of fear of his fear. Still a cold shudder went over him--especially as he was sober now--when he looked round at the high Tarpeian Rock, four hours' distance behind him, on the battlements of which he had last night walked hand in hand with Death.

The only thing that grieved him was, that it was Monday, and that he must back to the Gymnasium. Such a freightage of joys he had never taken with him on his road to town. After four, he issued from his house, satisfied with coffee (which he drank in Hukelum merely for his mother's sake, who, for two days after, would still have portions of this woman's-wine to draw from the lees of the pot-sediment), into the _cooling_ dawning May-morning (for joy needs coolness, sorrow sun); his Betrothed comes--not indeed to meet him, but still--into his hearing, by her distant morning hymn; he makes but one momentary turn into the blissful haven of the blooming acacia-grove, which still, like the covenant sealed in it, has no thorns; he dips his warm hand in the cold-bath of the dewy leaves; he wades with pleasure through the beautifying-water of the dew, which, as it imparts color to faces, eats it away from boots ("but with thirty ducats, a Conrector may make shift to keep two pairs of boots on the hook"). And now the Moon, as it were the hanging seal of his last night's happiness, dips down into the West, like an emptied bucket of light, and in the East the other overrunning bucket, the Sun, mounts up, and the gushes of light flow broader and broader.

The city stood in the celestial flames of Morning. Here his divining-rod (his gold-roll, which, excepting one sixteenth of an inch broken off from it, he carried along with him) began to quiver over all the spots where booty and silver-veins of enjoyment were concealed; and our rod-diviner easily discovered that the city and the future were a true entire Potosi of delights.

In his Conrectorate closet he fell upon his knees and thanked God--not so much for his heritage and bride as--for his life; for he had gone away on Sunday morning with doubts whether he should ever come back; and it was purely out of love to the reader, and fear lest he might fret himself too much with apprehension, that I cunningly imputed Fixlein's journey more to his desire of knowing what was in the will, than of making his own will in presence of his mother. Every recovery is a bringing back and palingenesia of our youth; one loves the Earth and those that are on it with a new love. The Conrector could have found in his heart to take all his class by the locks, and press them to his breast; but he only did so to his adjutant, the Quartaner, who, in the first Letter-box, was still sitting in the rank of a Quintaner....

His first expedition, after school-hours, was to the house of Meister Steinberger, where, without speaking a word, he counted down fifty florins cash in ducats, on the table: "At last I repay you," said Fixlein, "the moiety of my debt, and give you many thanks."

"Ey, Herr Conrector," said the Quartermaster, and continued calmly stuffing puddings as before, "in my bond it is said, _payable at three months' mutual notice_. How could a man like me go on, else? However, I will change you the gold-pieces." Thereupon he advised him that it might be more judicious to take back a florin or two, and buy himself a better hat, and whole shoes. "If you like," added he, "to get a calf-skin and half a dozen hare-skins dressed, they are lying up-stairs." I should think, for my own part, that to the reader it must be as little a matter of indifference as it was to the Butcher, whether the hero of such a History appeared before him with an old tattered potlid of a hat, and a pump-sucker and leg-harness pair of boots, or in suitable apparel. In short, before St. John's day, the man was dressed with taste and pomp.

But now came two most peculiarly important papers--at bottom only one, the petition for the Hukelum parsonship--to be elaborated; in regard to which I feel as if I myself must assist.... It were a simple turn, if now at least the assembled public did not pay attention.

In the first place, the Conrector searched out and sorted all the Consistorial and Councillor quittances, or rather the toll-bills of the road-money, which he had been obliged to pay before the toll-gates at the Quintusship and Conrectorship had been thrown open; for the executor of the Schadeck testament had to reimburse him the whole, as his discharge would express it, "to penny and farthing." Another would have summed up his post-excise much more readily; by merely looking what he--owed; as these debt-bills and those toll-bills, like parallel passages, elucidate and confirm each other. But in Fixlein's case, there was a small circumstance of peculiarity at work, which I cannot explain till after what follows.

It grieved him a little that for his two offices he had been obliged to pay and to borrow no larger a sum than 135 florins, 41 kreuzers, and one halfpenny. The legacy, it is true, was to pass directly from the hands of the testamentary executor into those of the Regiments-Quartermaster; but yet he could have liked well had he--for man is a fool from the very foundation of him--had more to pay, and therefore to inherit. The whole Conrectorate he had, by a slight deposit of 90 florins, plucked, as it were, from the Wheel of Fortune; and so small a sum must surprise my reader; but what will he say, when I tell him that there are countries where the entry-money into school-rooms is even more moderate? In Scherau, a Conrector is charged only 88 florins, and perhaps he may have an income triple of this sum. Not to speak of Saxony (what, in truth, was to be expected from the cradle of the Reformation, in Religion and Polite Literature), where a schoolmaster and a parson have _nothing_ to pay,--even in Baireuth, for example, in Hof, the progress of improvement has been such that a Quartus,--a Quartus, do I say,--a Tertius--a Tertius, do I say,--a Conrector,--at entrance on his post, is not required to pay down more than:--

Fl.rhen. Kr.rhen. 30 49 For taking the oaths at the Consistorium. 4 0 To the Syndic for the Presentation. 2 0 To the then Burgermeister. 45 71/2 For the Government-sanction. --------------- Total, 81 fl. 561/2 kr.