Part 23

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, passions 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 vassal 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 asserted, 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 asserted 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 assert 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 assertion and artifice was, that men felt the value of simplicity and the sublimity of ingenuousness and of the direct assurance: "I am in love with thee;" whereas maidens wanted tournure and refinement and circumlocution to be worked into this assurance; 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, assert 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 unobserved, 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 glass," he said with double meaning; "but a lovelier sheep," said the _Defaillante_, meaning him.

This mirror-plate with its shepherdess, looking across a flowery shore into the glassy 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 embarrassment 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 culasse_;[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 assumed, 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 assault 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-glass 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-glass, 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 latitudinarian 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 circumstance in my story, that Gustavus at last, because he had to succumb 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 passed along before the four-cornered reflections which the chandeliers threw upon the grass 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 passage 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 glassy 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 circumstances 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 classes 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 hell 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, pronounced sentence upon his sick life; and his superstitious 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....