Part 24
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 nobody 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. Roeper 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 nobleman, 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 passed 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 orb 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 petition 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 petition 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 embarrassment 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 passed 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 snatched 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 butterfly 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 passage 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 bloody 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!
Spare me this grave-digger's scene! You know not what autumnal remembrances, in connection with it, make my blood creep as funereally slow as my pen. Ah! besides, I write into this story a leaf, a leaf of sorrow, whose broad, black border hardly leaves for lines and lamentations blotted with tears a narrow strip of white--this scene also I spare you, for I also know not, ye readers with the tenderer heart, whom ye have already lost; I know not what dear departed form, whose grave is already sunk as deep as itself, I may not, like a dream, raise up on its burial place and show anew to your tearful eyes, and of how many dead a single grave may be the reminder.
Vanished Amandus! in the vast army, which from century to century life sends to meet the last enemy, thou, too, didst march a few steps; often and early did he wound thee; thy comrades laid earth upon thy great wounds and on thy face,--they continue their warfare; in the heat of the conflict they will forget thee more and more from year to year--tears will come into their eyes, but none any longer for thee, but for them who are yet to die and be buried--and when thy lily-white mummy has crumbled to pieces, none will think of thee any longer; only the dream-genius will still gather up thy pastel-figure out of the earth into which it is incorporated, and will adorn with it, in the gray head of thy aged Gustavus, the meadows of his youth that repose behind the past years, and which, like the planet Venus, are the _morning star_ in the heaven of life's morning and the _evening star_ in the sky of life's evening, and glitter and tremble and replace the sun.... I would not say to thy soul's sheath, the corpse: Amandus! lie softly. Thou didst not lie softly in it; oh! even now I still pity thy immortal soul, that it had to live more in its narrow nerve-wrappage than in the wide building of the universe, that it could not lift its noble glance to sun-globes, but had to stoop to its tormenting blood-globules, and seldomer feel its emotions stirred by the grand harmony of the macrocosm, than by the discords of its own macrocosm! The chain of necessity cut into thee deeply; not merely its _drag_, but also its _pressure_, left upon thee scars.... So miserable is the living! How can the dead desire to be remembered by the living man when already even the very speaking of him makes the heart sink within us....
When Gustavus was at home again he wrote a letter to the Doctor; the agonizing grief, wherein the latter had stood leaning and holding on to the pyramid, affected him unspeakably; and in the letter he fell upon this wounded and shattered breast and aggravated its pangs by his love-pressure, as he begged him to accept him as his son and to be his paternal friend.
Let the high tide of sorrow be Gustavus's excuse that he, who had hitherto always concealed the paroxysms of his sensibilities for the good of another, now let them break out at another's expense. His grief went so far, that he desired of the father the every-day coat and hat of the deceased instead of his full-length picture; he felt, as I do, that one's every-day clothes are the best profiles, plaster-casts and crayon likenesses of a man whom one has loved and who has gone out of them and out of the body. The Doctor's answer runs thus:
* * * * *
"I have often leaned against the cushion of my medical carriage and represented and prefigured to myself, when I should one day have gray eyebrows and gray hair, or none at all; when all seasons should appear to me to grow shorter and all nights longer and longer, which is a symptom of the approach of the longest--if, then, I should go out in the first days of spring into the Still Land, to sun my cold, interpolated body--and I should then see in the outer world the clinging, forth-putting buds, beneath which lies a whole summer, and feel within me the eternal leaf-dropping and drooping, which no earthly spring can cure--then when I should still remember my own youth, my promenades and gallopades around Scheerau, and those in Pavia, and the people who went with me--then when I naturally looked round after those who might still be left standing as lofty ruins of the fallen temple of my youth--and then when, as I turned about to see, whether out of woods, across meadows, down from mountains, on so fair a day, no one would come to meet me, the thought should come upon me like a heart-beat, that in all the four corners of the world, toward which my sight was directed, lay church-yards and churches, in which they, who should now console and companion me, were lying under the opaque earth-crust and its flower-work, hid and imprisoned, with their arms laid straight by their side, and that I alone remained in this upper world and here in the spring-time carried round the autumn in my breast:--then I should not go at all into the Still Land, but go home all lonely and shut myself up and lay my head and bury my eyes on my arm, and wish my heart would break, as had those of my dear ones; I mean, I should wish it were all over. Then, beloved son, beloved friend, (thou who, as the youngest of my friends, wilt long survive me), then will thy form come before my sated and weary eyes; then will I wipe them dry and remind myself of all the past, and thy hand shall still conduct me into the Still Land. I shall enjoy the earthly spring so long as I can see it, and with a pressure of the hand I shall say to thy face: It does my heart good to-day, that I many years ago adopted thee as a son....
"To-morrow I will come to take my friend with me on a journey for some days to come, that we may go out of the way of those that are past."--The next morning it was done.
THIRTY-SECOND, OR SIXTEENTH OF NOVEMBER, SECTION.
Consumption.--Funeral Sermon in the Church of the Still Land.--Ottomar.
It were perhaps even better for me, if I should endeavor to overtake the two travelers less with the pen than on foot. The reading world can now feast and junket on my things, while I await, with a cough, the Easter fair, because while at work upon these things as I sat crooked up at the writing-desk, I have written a fine, full-formed hectic case into the two lobes of my lungs. Not one of the whole public says to me, Thank you! that I have by thought and emotion deprived myself of my healthy breathing and my _sedes_: almost everything about me is shut up, and by reason of the double _blockade_ little can in either of two opposite directions _pass_ through me. I trudge along behind the plough-shares of the Auenthalers, in order to inhale the steam of the furrows, as the best British hectic patients do,[73] as a remedy for my air-stoppage and other stoppages. Nevertheless the simple public, in whose service I have made myself so miserable, would laugh at me if they should see me stalking like a crow after the ploughing oxen. Is that justice?--Must I not besides sleep all night between the arms of two poodles, whom I propose to infect with my consumption, like a married man of rank? But am I then, when I have by morning-and-evening-presents endowed the two bedfellows with my malady, myself rid of the _malum_, or does not rather M. Nadan de la Richebaudiere tell me I must buy and infect new dogs, because half a canine menagerie is needed as the lighter of a single man? In this way I may spend my whole pay upon mere dogs. I will even worry down the injury which my honesty suffers in the matter, because I must show myself as friendly toward the poor sucking dogs, whose lungs I propose to lame and cripple, as great folks do toward the victims of their salvation.
Meanwhile _this_ is still the most annoying scandal, that I am at this present in a--cow-barn: for this (according to modern Swedish books) is said to furnish a dispensary and seaport against short breath. Mine has not yet, however, shown a disposition to grow longer, though I have been sitting here for three Trinities and given the world three long sections (as if so many Joseph's-children) at the birthplace of much stupider beings. One must himself have labored at such a place for consumption's sake in the juristic or aesthetic departments (and I am both belles-lettrist and counsellor at law) to know from experience, that there, oftentimes, the most tolerable ideas have much _stronger voices_ against them than those of the literary and legal judges, and are thereby consigned to the devil.
While Fenk and Gustavus were working off in their journey more sorrow than money, although they did not stay away so long as all my filed papers, Oefel also went on, namely in his romantic Grand Sultan, and painted in with the greatest delight the affliction of his friend. Oefel thanked God for every misfortune, which would go into a verse, and he wished that, in order to the flourishing of polite literature, pestilence, famine and other horrors occurred oftener in Nature, so that the poet might work after these models, and thereby secure a greater illusion, as already the painters, who would paint beheaded people or blown up vessels, have had the archetypes fly to their assistance. As it was, however, he often had to be, for want of Academies, his own Academy, and was once compelled, for a whole day, to have virtuous emotions, because the like were to be depicted in his work--nay, often, he was compelled, for the sake of a single chapter, to go several times into B----, [Baireuth] which annoyed him exceedingly.
With other people also it fares just so; the object of knowledge remains no longer an object of feeling. The injuries under which the man of honor overflows and boils, are to the jurist a proof, a gloss, an illustration for the Pandect-title of injuries. The hospital physician calmly repeats, at the bedside of the patient over whom the flames of fever are raging and roaring, the few clippings from his clinic which may suit the case. The officer who, on the battle-field--the butcher's-block of humanity--strides away over mangled men, is thinking only of the evolutions and quarter-wheelings of his school of cadets, who were needed to cut out whole generations into physiognomic fragments. The battle-painter, who goes behind him, thinks and looks, indeed, upon the mangled men and upon every wound exposed to view there; but he is bent upon copying all for the Dusseldorf gallery, and the purely human feeling of this misery he only awakens by and by, through his battle-piece, in others and perhaps also in--himself. Thus does every kind of science spread a stony crust over our hearts, not the philosophic alone.