red-chalk-drawings and red-letter-titles of joy, which it would bring
out on the cheeks of its drinker and drinkeresses,--with the
Evening-carnation of the last clouds about the Sun....
I declare, among all the spectators of this History, no one can be
thinking more about poor Thiennette than I; nevertheless, it is not
permitted me to bring her out from her tiring-room to my historical
scene, before the time. Poor girl! The Conrector cannot wish more warmly
than his Biographer, that, in the Temple of Nature as in that of
Jerusalem, there were a special door--besides that of Death--standing
open, through which only the afflicted entered, that a Priest might give
them solace. But Thiennette's heart-sickness over all her vanished
prospects, over her entombed benefactress, over a whole life enwrapped
in the pall, had hitherto, in a grief which the stony Rittmeister rather
made to bleed than alleviated, swept all away from her, occupations
excepted; had fettered all her steps which led not to some task, and
granted to her eyes nothing to dry them or gladden them, save
down-falling eyelids full of dreams and sleep.
All sorrow raises us above the civic Ceremonial-law, and makes the
Prosaist a Psalmist: in sorrow alone have women courage to front
opinion. Thiennette walked out only in the evening, and then only in the
garden.
The Conrector could scarcely wait for the appearance of his fair friend,
to offer his thanks,--and tonight also--his Pontac. Three Pontac
decanters and three wine-glasses were placed outside on the projecting
window-sill of his cottage; and every time he returned from the dusky
covered-way amid the flower-forests, he drank a little from his
glass,--and the mother sipped now and then from within through the
opened window.
I have already said, his Life-laboratory lay in the south-west corner of
the garden or park, over against the Castle-Escurial, which stretched
back into the village. In the north-west corner bloomed an acacia-grove,
like the floral crown of the garden. Fixlein turned his steps in that
direction also; to see if, perhaps, he might not cast a happy glance
through the wide-latticed grove over the intervening meads to
Thiennette. He recoiled a little before two stone steps leading down
into a pond before this grove, which were sprinkled with fresh blood. On
the flags, also, there was blood hanging. Man shudders at this oil of
our life's lamp where he finds it shed: to him it is the red
death-signature of the Destroying Angel. Fixlein hurried apprehensively
into the grove; and found here his paler benefactress leaning on the
flower-bushes; her hands with their knitting-ware sunk into her bosom,
her eyes lying under their lids as if in the bandage of slumber; her
left arm in the real bandage of blood-letting; and with cheeks to which
the twilight was lending as much red, as late woundings--this day's
included--had taken from them. Fixlein, after his first terror--not at
this flower's-sleep, but at his own abrupt entrance--began to unrol the
spiral butterfly's-sucker of his vision, and to lay it on the motionless
leaves of this same sleeping flower. At bottom, I may assert, that this
was the first time he had ever looked at her: he was now among the
thirties; and he still continued to believe, that, in a young lady, he
must look at the clothes only, not the person, and wait on her with his
ears, not with his eyes.
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 newyear'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 worshiped. 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 tonight he had scarcely, with his fair
faint companion, reached the bank of the pond, into which some
superstitious dread of water-sprites 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 vapour 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 dischargers 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 teardrops, 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 vapours of life, hung motionless and flaming 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-path 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, tonight
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,[48] 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."
[48] In St. Paul's Church at London, where the slightest whisper
sounds over across a space of 143 feet.
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
sympathising 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 dusk 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 dewdrops 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 program 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 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 downstairs
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 colour 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 calfskin and
half a dozen hareskins dressed, they are lying upstairs."--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 appear 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.