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....
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.