If in the foregoing night a strange, hostile spirit cruelly drove
against each other and away from each other human beings with bandaged
eyes, so will that spirit on the morning after, when from a cold cloud
he surveyed his battle-field with sparkling eyes, have almost smiled at
all the joys and harvests which lie prostrate round about him down
below there.
In Blumenbühl, Rabette, in lonely corners, wrings her hands with
trembling arms, and breathes upon the wall-plaster, to wipe away the
redness of wet eyes; out of Lilar comes Albano, gloomily looks upon the
earth instead of its inhabitants, and from the astronomical tower gazes
eagerly into the heavens, and seeks no friend; Roquairol musters up
horses and riders, and makes himself, out in the country, a merry,
drunken evening; Augusti shakes his head over letters from Spain,
and reflects upon them disagreeably, but deeply; Liana leans in an
easy-chair, all crushed, with her face falling towards her shoulder,
and nothing blooming in it any longer save innocence; her father
strides up and down, with a reddish-brown complexion; she answers but
faintly, lifting from time to time her folded hands a little. Before
the night-spirit on the cloud men's time goes swiftly by, as a fleeting
pair of wings without beak or tail; the spirit has near him the distant
week when Albano shall see by night from the observatory how in the
Blumenbühl church there burns an altar-light, how Liana kneels therein
with uplifted hands, and how an old man lays his own on her serene,
shining brow, which directs itself with tearless eyes toward heaven.
The spirit looks down deeper into the months; he writhes around himself
for delight, and grins over all dwelling-places and pleasure-haunts of
men which lie about him; often a laugh runs round along all his open
hell-teeth, only sometimes he gnashes them under the cover of the
lip-flesh.
Look away,--for he too sees and wills it,--and step down from the
wintry spectre among the warm children of men, and on the firm ground
of reality, where flying time, like the flying earth, seems to rest
upon steadfast roots, and where only eternity, like the sun, seems to
rise.
Albano's wound, which cut through his whole inner man, you can best
measure by the bandage which he sought to bind around it. Our grief may
be guessed from the solace and self-deception we resort to. The next
morning he let his griefs discourse across one another, and lay still,
before their funeral wail, as a corpse; then he rose up, and spoke thus
to himself: "Only one of two things is possible,--either she is still
true to me, and only her parents now constrain her,--then they again
must be constrained, and there is nothing at all to be lamented,--or
else, from some weakness or other, perhaps towards her tyrannical and
beloved parents, she is no longer true to me, or it may be out of
coldness toward me, or from religious scruples, error, and so on; in
that case I see," he continued, and tried to tread his two feet deeper
and firmer into the ground, without, however, having any _purchase_,
"nothing else to be done than to do nothing; not to be a crying
suckling, a groaning sickling, but an iron man; not to weep blood over
a past heart, over the ashes of death lying deep upon all fields and
plantations of my youth, and over my monstrous grief." Thus did he
delude himself, and mistake the necessity of consolation for its actual
presence.
Every evening he visited the star-tower out of the city, on the
Blumenbühl heights. He found the old, solitary, meagre,
eternally-reckoning, wifeless, and childless keeper, always friendly
and unembarrassed as a child, making no inquiries after war-news,
journals of fashion, and poesies, and never paying money for his
pleasure, except on the coach to Bode and Zach. But the old eye
sparkled when it looked from under the sparse eyebrows into heaven, and
his heart and tongue rose to poetry when he spoke of the highest
mundane spot, the light heaven over the dark, low earth,--of the
immense, universal sea without shore, wherein the spirit, which in vain
seeks to fly across it, sinks exhausted, and whose ebb and flow only
the Infinite One sees at the foot of his throne,--and of the hope of a
starry heaven after death, which then no earthly disk, as now, shall
intersect, but which shall arch itself around itself, without beginning
and without end.
If Socrates humbled the proud Alcibiades with a map of the world, so,
when this in turn is annihilated by a chart of the heavens, must our
pride and sorrow on the earth be still more put to the blush. Albano
was ashamed to think of himself, when he looked up into the immense
ascending night above him, wherein days and morning twilights abide and
move. He edified himself and his teacher when he spoke of _this_: how
even now overhead, in the immensity, spring-times and paradises of
new-born worlds and thundering[15] suns and earths burning up are flying
across each other's paths, and we stand here below like deaf men under
the sublime hurricane, and the roaring tempest and torrent shows itself
to us, so far off, only as a still, stationary, white rainbow on the
brow of night.
As often as Albano's great eye came back from heaven, it found the
earth brighter and lighter. But at length the night came, which the
hostile spirit had already so long lived in anticipation. It was
already very late, and the heavens quite serene; the nebulæ crowded
down nearer, as higher market-towns;[16] the sky seemed more white than
blue. Albano thought of the hidden loved one, who, were she by his
side, would still more consecrate the heavens and himself with her
heartful of unceasing prayers; when suddenly, through his lowered
telescope, he espied light in the Blumenbühl church,--the princely
vault open,--Liana kneeling at the altar, with uplifted hands,--and an
old man near her, as if blessing her. Fearfully stood the torch-flames
and Liana's face and arms upside down; for the telescope caused
everything to appear inverted.
Albano, shuddering, begged the astronomer to look that way. He too saw
the apparitions, to him, however, nameless. "There are probably people
in the church," said he, indifferently. But Albano rushed down,--hardly
allowing the astonished astronomer time to call out after him with an
invitation to the total eclipse of the sun tomorrow,--and ran toward
Blumenbühl. How his heart wore itself out in the race, and most of all
in the hollows, where he lost sight of the illuminated church, must
remain a secret, because it was hidden even from himself in the tempest
of his feelings. At last he saw the white church before him, but the
church-windows were without any light. He knocked hard at the iron
church-door, and cried, "Open!" he heard only the echo in the empty
church, and nothing more.
So he went back, with a stormy past in his bosom, through the sleeping
night: the earth was to him a spirit-island, the spirit-islands were to
him earths; his being, his city of God was burning up, he felt.
It lay on the morrow still in full glow, when the Lector came to him,
and brought him the incomprehensible message from Liana, that she
wished, about noon, to speak with him alone in Lilar. He was not this
time enraged against the suspected messenger, and said, full of wonder,
"Yes." With what bold, adventurous forms does our life-cloud rise to
heaven, ere it disappears!