Polar Fantasies.--The singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from
previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.
We are living now in the dark middle-ages of this Biography, and
reading on toward the enlightened eighteenth century or Dog's-day.
Still, even in this twelfth, as in the night before a fair day, great
sparks fly. "Spitz," said I, "eat me out of what thou wilt, only
enlighten the world."
Sebastian hastened on Saturday with joyful soul under an overclouded
heaven to the island of Union. He could arrive there, if he did not
delay, before the cloudiness was absorbed. Under a blue heaven, like
Schickaneder[146] he brought out the Tragedies, but under an ashen-gray
one the comedies, of his inner man. When it rained, he absolutely
laughed out. Rousseau built up in his brain an _emotional_ stage,
because he cared neither to go out of the coulisse nor into a box of
actual life; but Victor had in his pay between the bony walls of his
head a _comic_ theatre of the Germans, merely for the sake of not
ridiculing _actual_ men; his humor was as ideal as the virtue and
sensibility of other people. In this mood he delivered (like a
ventriloquist) purely internal discourses to all Potentates;--he posted
himself on the bench of Knights with church-visitation-discourses,--on
the bench of the cities with funeral-discourses,--in the Papal chair he
held forth in straw-wreath[147]-discourses to the _virgin_ Europe and
the Ecclesiastical _bride_. The potentates had all, to answer him
again, but one may imagine _how_--when he, like a minister from his
prompter's hole put everything into their mouths;--and then, to be
sure, he went his way and made fun of every one of them.
Mandeville says in his Travels, that at the North Pole in the
winter-half of the year every word freezes, but in the summer-half
thaws out again and is audible. This intelligence Victor pictured out
to himself on the way to the island; we will lay our ears to his head
and listen to the inner buzzing.
"Mandeville and I are not at all obliged to explain why at the North
Pole words, as well as spittle, turn to ice as they fall, just as
quicksilver does there; but we are obliged to reason from the
phenomenon. If a laughing heir wishes there long years to his testator:
the good man does not hear the wish sooner than the following spring,
which may already have laid him dead. The best Christmas sermons do not
edify good souls before haying-time. Vainly does the Polar court lay
its New-Year's wishes before _Serenissimo_; he hears them not, till
warm weather, and by that time half of them have already miscarried.
They ought, however, to place a _circular stove_ as speaking-trumpet in
the antechamber, so that one might hear in the _warmth_ the court
speaker. An oratorical brother, without a stove-heater, would there be
a defeated man. The faro-player, to be sure, vents his curses on St.
Thomas's day; but not until St. John's day, when he has already won
again, do they begin to travel;[148] and one might make summer-concerts
out of the winter ones without any instruments: all one has to do is to
seat one's self in the hall. From what other cause can it arise that
the Polar wars are often carried on half-years before the declaration
of war, except from this, that the declaration issued in winter does
not make itself heard till _good weather_?--And so, too, one cannot
hear anything of the winter-campaigns of the Polar armies till during
the summer-campaigns. I, for my part, should prefer to travel to the
Pole so as to be there only in winter, merely for the sake of uttering
real insults to the people's, particularly the court-retinue's, face;
by the time they came at last to hear them, the defamer would be snugly
ensconced again at Flachsenfingen.--Their winter-amusements are not to
blame for it, if the Northern administration fails to propose and
decide a multitude of the weightiest things: but only during the
canicular holidays is the voting to be heard; and then, too, can the
decisions of the chamber upon matters of grace and _forest-law_ take
shape in speech. But, O ye saints, if I at the Pole--while the sun was
in Capricorn and my heart in the sign of the Crab--should fall down
before the fairest woman, and in the longest night make to her
declarations of love all night long, which, however, in a third of
a third[149] assumed the form of ice and reached her in a frozen
state,--i. e. did not reach her ears at all,--what should I do in
summer, when I had already grown cold and already possessed her, if at
the very hour in which I was hoping to have a good quarrel with her,
now, in the midst of the scolding, my Capricorn-love-declarations
should begin to thaw out and to utter themselves? I could do nothing
with any composure, but to make the rule, Let any one be tender at the
Pole, but only in Aries or Cancer. And if, finally, the transfer of a
Princess should take place at the Pole, and, in fact, at that point
where the earth does not move, which is best suited to the twofold
inactivity of a Princess and a lady, and if the transfer should
actually occur in a hall, where every one, particularly Zeusel, had in
the long winter evenings slandered her; then, when the air in the hall
began to repeat the slanders, and Zeusel in his distress sought to
escape,--then would I pat his shoulder in a friendly manner and say,
Whither away, my friend?"--
"To Grosskussewitz, I help in the catching department," replied the
veritable beadle of St. Luna, who behind some masonry had with one hand
unclasped a book and with the other buttoned up a wallet. Victor felt a
happy pressure upon his heart at an antique from St. Luna. He asked him
about everything with an eagerness that seemed as if he had been away
for an eternity _a parte ante_.[150] The reader who buttoned up his
wallet became an author, and drew up at sight for the gentleman the
year-books, i. e. hour-books of what had since occurred in the village.
Into twenty questions Victor involved the one he had to put about
Clotilda, and learned that she had been hitherto every day at the
Parson's. This vexed him. "As if," thought he, "I had not strength of
soul enough to look upon a friend's love,--and then too, as if----." In
fact, he thought, at such a distance, he was the more at liberty to
think of her.
The reading constable was a reader under my jurisdiction: the book
which he carried about on his poaching-expeditions after thieves was
the _Invisible Lodge_.[151] Victor requested the First Part to be
handed to him: the Beadle was in the Second, just at the Pyramid, at
the moment of the first kiss. Our hero made more and more rapid strides
in reading and in walking, and ended book and walk together.
The island stood before him!--Here, on this island, my reader, open
both eyes and ears!... Not that any memorable things presented
themselves,--for these would of themselves make their way into
half-open ears and pupils,--but for the very reason that only everyday
matters are to be recorded.
His Lordship stood alone on the shore of the sea which flowed round the
island, and awaited and received him with a seriousness which veiled
his friendliness, and with an emotion which still wrestled with his
wonted coldness. He was going now to cross over to the island, and yet
Victor saw no means of transportation. There was no boat there; nor
would it have been practicable to get one off, because iron spikes
stood under the water in such numbers and direction that no boat could
move. The guard that had hitherto been stationed on the shore to
protect the island against the destructive curiosity of the populace
was to-day removed. The father went with his son slowly around the
shore, and dislodged out of their beds, one after another, twenty-seven
stones which lay at equal distances from each other. The island had
been constructed _before_ his Lordship's blindness, and _then_ was
not yet prohibited to strangers; but during that affliction he
had caused its interior to be completed and concealed by unknown
nocturnal workmen. During the tour round the island Victor saw its
fruit-espaliers of high tree-stems, which seemed to direct their
shadows and voices toward the interior of the island, and whose
foliage-work the tossing waves sprinkled with their broken suns and
stars; bean-trefoils clasped the pine-trees, and round the cones
ringlets of purple blossoms played their antics; the silver-poplar
bowed down under the enthroned oak; fiery bushes of Arabian beans
blazed from farther in out of leafy curtains; trees, grafted by
approach, on double stems latticed up the avenues from the eye; and by
the side of a fir, which overtopped all the summits, was a taller one,
which had been bent down by storms half over the water, and which
rocked itself above its grave. White columns lifted up in the middle of
the island a Grecian temple, immovable above all the wavering
treetops.--Sometimes a stray tone seemed to run through the green Holy
of Holies. A tall, black gate reached to the tops of the pines, and,
painted with a white sun-disk, looked toward the east, and seemed to
say to man, Pass through me; not only thy Creator, but thy brother, has
worked, here!--
Opposite to this gate lay the twenty-seventh stone. Victor's father
displaced it, took out a magnet, bent down, and held its _south_ pole
to the gap. Suddenly machines began to gnar, and the waves to whirl,
and an iron bridge rose out of the water. Victor's soul was overfilled
with dreams and expectations. Shuddering, he followed his father, and
set foot upon the magic island. Here his father touched a thin stone
with the _north_ end of the magnet, and the iron bridge sank down
again. Before they stepped up to the elevated gate a key turned itself
from within, and unlocked, and the gate flew open. His Lordship was
silent. On his face a higher soul had risen like a sun: one no longer
knew him; he seemed to be transformed into the genius of this magic
island.
What a scene! So soon as the gate was opened there ran to and fro
through all twigs an harmonious murmur; breezes flew in through the
gate, and absorbed the sounds into themselves, and floated on with
them, trembling, and reposed only on bended blossoms.--Every step
opened farther a great, sombre stage.--Round about the scene lay marble
fragments, on which the blacksmiths' coals had drawn forms of
Raphael's, sunken Sphinxes, map-stones, whereon dim Nature had etched
little ruins and effaced cities, and deep openings in the earth, which
were not so much graves as moulds for bells that had been cast therein.
Thirty poisonous trees stood twined round with roses, as if they were
signs of the thirty years of man's passionate madness. Three-and-twenty
weeping birches had bent themselves down to form a low bush-work, and
were crowded into each other; into this bush ran all the paths of the
island. Behind the bushes ninefold crape-veils, in waves that mutually
swallowed each other, obscured the sight of the high temple; through
the veils five lightning-rods rose into the heavens, and a rainbow,
formed of two shoots of water that leaped up and arched over into each
other, hovered glittering over the twigs, and evermore the two streams
arched themselves aloft, and evermore they shivered each other to
pieces overhead by their contact.
As Horion led his son, whose heart was grasped, affrighted, oppressed,
kindled, chilled, by invisible hands, into the low birch thicket, the
stammering dead-man's-tongue of an organ-trill began to speak, through
the lone silence, to the sigh of man, and the tremulous tone sank too
deeply into a soft heart.--There stood the two on a grave darkly built
over with bush-work; on the grave lay a black marble, on which were
chiselled a bloodless white heart, with a veil over it, and the pale
words, "_It is at rest_." "Here," said his Lordship, "my second eye
became blind; _Mary's_[152] coffin lies in this grave; when that
arrived at the island from England, the diseased eye was too severely
inflamed, and never saw again."--Never did Victor shudder so; never did
he see on a face such a chaotic, shifting world of flying, coming,
conflicting, vanishing emotions; never did such an ice of brow and
eyes congeal upon convulsive lips;--and so a father looked, and a son
felt every sensation repeated in himself.
"I am unhappy," said his father, slowly; a more bitter, biting tear
burned on the pupil of his eye; he hesitated a little, and placed his
five open fingers upon his heart, as if he would grasp and pluck it
out, and looked upon the pale stone one as if he would say, Why is not
mine resting too? The good, dying Victor, crushed with the anguish of
affection, melting into pity, longed to--fall upon the dear, desolated
bosom, and to say more than the sigh, "O God, my good father!" But his
Lordship gently repelled him, and the tear of gall, unshed, was stifled
by the eyelids. His Lordship resumed, but more coldly: "Think not that
I am specially affected; think not that I desire a joy or deprecate a
sorrow: I live now without hope, and without hope I die."
His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by
frost.
He continued: "When I have, perhaps, made _seven_ human beings happy,
then must it be inscribed on _my_ black marble, _It rests_.... Why dost
thou wonder so? Art thou even _now_ at peace?"--The father stared at
the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as
if a shape had risen out of the grave,--the freezing eye laid and
turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he
drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, "Look in, but embrace me
immediately after!" ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a
shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,--the face of his
teacher _Dahore_; his knees smote together, but still he did not look
over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope.
"Thou tremblest far too violently," said his Lordship; "but ask me not,
my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no
more the old breast, full as it may be."
Ah, I pity thee! For _those_ wounds which can be disclosed are not
deep; _that_ grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand
alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see,
because he cannot take it away,--that woe which sometimes rises into
the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle
which the averted face smothers,--_this_ hangs in secret more and more
heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it
under the healing sod. So are iron balls tied to man when he dies on
the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.--
He continued: "I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon
these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and
from him thou must conceal it."
Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He
remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the
promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely,
they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he
said, "But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?"
"Canst thou know when that will be?" said his father.
"But in case--?"
"Then!" said his father, coldly and curtly.--
Victor swore, and trembled at the future import of the oath.
He also had to promise not to visit this dark island before his
Lordship's return.
They passed out of the leafy mausoleum, and sat down on an overturned
stalactite. At times, during the conversation, a strange harmonica-tone
fell from leaf to leaf, and, at a great distance, the four rivers of
Paradise seemed to go sounding away under a zephyr that trembled with
it.
The father began: "Flamin is Clotilda's brother, and the Prince's
son."--
Only such a lightning-flash of thought could now have penetrated into
Victor's already dazzled soul; a new world now started up within him,
and snatched him away from the great one before his senses.--
"Furthermore," continued Horion, "January's three other children still
live in England,--only the fourth, on the Seven Islands, is invisible."
Victor comprehended nothing; his Lordship rent away all veils from the
past, and introduced him to a new outlook into the life immediately
before him, and into that which had flown away. I shall, in the sequel,
communicate all his Lordship's disclosures and secrets to the reader;
at present I will first relate the leave-taking of father and son.
While his Lordship accompanied his son into the dusky, subterranean
passages of former times, and told him all that he concealed from the
world, tears started from Victor's eyes at many a trifle which could
not deserve any; but the stream of these soft eyes,--it was not the
narrative, but the returning contemplation of his unhappy father
and the neighborhood of the buried and mouldering fair form and of
the funereal marble, that wrung it out of the incessantly weeping
heart.--At last all tones on the island ceased,--the black gate seemed
to shut to,--all was still,--his Lordship came to an end with his
revelations, and said, "Fulfil thy purpose of going to-day to
Maienthal, and be cautious and happy!"--But although he took his leave
with that refined reserve which in his rank guides and governs the
hands and arms of even parents and children, still Victor pressed his
childish bosom, so big with sighs and emotions, to his father's, with
such an intensity as if he would fain crush in two his impoverished
heart for the sake of the tears which he was compelled to let rise to
sight ever hotter and larger. Ah, the forsaken one! When the bridge
which clove asunder the father's and the son's days had risen up,
Victor went over it alone, staggering and speechless; and when it had
sunk into the water again, and the father had disappeared into the
island, pity weighed him down to the ground; and when he had drawn all
his tears, like arrows, out of his suffering heart, slowly and dreamily
he quitted the still region of riddles and sorrows, and the dark
funeral garden of a dead mother and a gloomy father, and his whole
agitated soul cried incessantly, "Ah, good father! hope at least, and
come back again, and forsake me not!"--
And now all that in the foregoing part of the story has created
obscurities, all that his Lordship exposed to his son, we will explain
to ourselves also. It will still be remembered that, at the time when
he set out for France to fetch away the Prince's children,--the
so-called Welshman, Brazilian, and Asturian, and the _Monsieur_,--the
dark intelligence of their abduction came to hand. This abduction,
however, he had (as he now confessed) himself arranged,--only the
disappearance of the _Monsieur_ on the Seven Islands had occurred
without his knowledge, and he could therefore with his untruth mix some
truth, as mouth-glue. These three children he caused secretly to be
taken to England, and educated at Eton for scholars, and in London
for civilians,[153] in order to give them back to their father as
blood-related assistants of his tottering administration. Hence he had
helped the so-called Infante (Flamin) become an administrative
councillor. So soon as he once gets the whole infant colony together,
he means to surprise and bless the father with the delightful
apparition. The (at present) invisible son of the Chaplain, who before
the embarkation took the small-pox and blindness, he therefore keeps in
the dark, because otherwise it would be too easily guessed to whom
Flamin properly belonged.
Victor asked him how he would convince the Prince of a relationship to
four or five strangers. "By my word," was Horion's first reply; then he
subjoined the remaining evidences,--in Flamin's case, the testimony of
his mother (the niece), who would come with him; in the case of the
others; their resemblance to their pictures, which he still possessed,
and finally the maternal mark of a Stettin apple.
Victor had already often heard from the Parson's wife that all
January's sons had a certain mother's or father's mark on the left
shoulder-blade, which looked like nothing, except in autumn, when the
Stettins ripen; then it also grew red, and resembled the original. The
reader himself must remember, in the annals of the curious and learned
societies, whole fruit-basketfuls of cherries, whose red pencilling was
only faint on children, and heightened in redness not until the
ripening of the prototypes on the twigs. If I could believe a
fellow-bather of mine, I myself should have such a Stettin fruit-piece
hanging on my shoulder; the thing is not probable nor important;
meanwhile next autumn,--for I have proposed it to myself several
autumns, but now Knef, through his dog, reminds me of it,--so soon as
the Stettins mature, I might, to be sure, take a looking-glass and
examine myself behind.--And on the same ground this Stettin festoon
puts off the return of his Lordship, at least the transfer and
recognition of the children, till the autumnal season of its
reddening.--
I make no scruple of communicating here a satirical note from my
correspondent. "Make believe," he writes, "in regard to this
intelligence, as if you did it at my behest, and, when you have once
related his Lordship's _exposé_ and revelation, very quietly relate it
over to your reader a second time; so that he may not forget, or get it
confused. One cannot cheat readers enough, and a clever author will be
fond of leading them into marten-traps, wolf-pits, and deer-nets." I
confess, for such tricks I always had a poor talent; and, in fact, will
it not be more creditable, both to me and to the reader, if he fixes it
at once in his mind, at first hearing, that Flamin is January's natural
and Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
apparent,--that three or four other children of January's, from the
Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow;--more creditable, I say,
than if I should now have to chew it over for him a second time, (in
fact, it would be a third time,) that Flamin is January's natural and
Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
apparent,--and that three or four other children of January's, from the
Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow?
The reason why his Lordship required of his son the oath of silence
towards Flamin was, that the latter, by his native honesty, kept all
secrets, but in a heat of passion betrayed all; because in such a case
he would make his birth tell, merely for the sake of backing himself in
a quarrel with an adversary; because he might the very next day, on
account of this revelation, become, instead of a fencing-master with
the sword of Themis, a fencing-scholar with the war-blade; and because,
in fact, a secret, like love, fares still better between two partners
than among three. His Lordship thought, too, that out of a man to whom
you gave money in order that he might become something, more would be
made than out of one who should be something because he had money, and
who looked upon the coins as his hereditary arms, and not as the
prize-medals laid out for his future redemption of them.
After all these developments, his Lordship made to our Victor still one
more, and a weighty one, upon which he was always to look back on the
icy career of his future court-life as to a warning-tablet.
When his Lordship was struck blind before the house that held the ashes
of his beloved, his whole correspondence with England, with the niece
and with the tutors of the princely children, was embarrassed, or at
least changed. He was obliged to have the letters received by him read
to him by a friend whom he could trust: but he could trust no one. Only
one female friend he found out who deserved the distinguished
preference of his confidence, and that was none else than Clotilda. He
who did not, like a youth, squander his secrets, could nevertheless
venture to put Clotilda in possession of his greatest, and to make
her book-keeper and reader to him of the letters of her mother, the
so-called niece. In fact, he held women's power of keeping a secret to
be greater than ours,--at least in weighty matters and in the concerns
of men whom they love.--But just hear what the Devil did last winter:
to me it is memorable.
His Lordship received a letter from Flamin's mother, in which she
renewed her old entreaties for a speedier promotion of the beloved
child, and her inquiries after his fortunes at the Parsonage. Luckily
just then Clotilda was making a visit at St. Luna, and saved him the
journey to Maienthal. He visited the Chamberlain, to hear the letter
from the mouth of his reader. He had great difficulty in securing in
Clotilda's chamber an hour free from eavesdroppers. When he at last got
it, and Clotilda began to read to him the letter, the latter was called
away from the reading by her step-mother. He hears her immediately come
back again, read the letter over in a sort of darkly murmuring tone,
and say softly that she was going away again, but would come back in a
moment. After some minutes Clotilda appears, and when his Lordship asks
why she went out the second time, she denies a second leaving,--his
Lordship insists,--she likewise persists,--finally Clotilda falls upon
the bitter conjecture whether Matthieu may not have been there, and
with his theatrical art and throat, which contained all human voices,
himself have mocked and travestied her, in order under her credentials
to read the important letter. Ah, there was too much in favor of the
conjecture and too little against it! To be sure Matthieu could not now
undertake upon Flamin, whose academic career had just expired, the
October-test of the shoulder-device; but he stuck (so it afterward
seemed to Clotilda and his Lordship) with his green-frog-feet to that
good soul, and, under the cloak of love for Agatha and for his friend,
hung out his threads, let the wind swing and stretch them across
between the princely palace and the Parsonage-house,--kept on spinning
one after another, until at last his father, the minister Schleunes,
should have woven the right web for the entangling of the prey.... I
confess, this conjecture throws light for me on a thousand things.--
Victor was even more astounded than we are, and proposed to his
Lordship whether he might not, without injury to his oath, reveal to
Clotilda his induction into these mysteries, as he had two reasons for
it: first, her delicacy would be spared embarrassment at the appearance
which her sisterly love must otherwise, in her opinion, have in his
eyes;[154] secondly, one keeps a secret better, if only _one_ more
person helps him hold his tongue about it, as is well known from the
case of Midas's barber and the reeds; the third reason was, that he had
several reasons. His Lordship naturally did not refuse.
For the rest, he introduced his Victor with no pedantic rules of march
to the ice-course and tilt-yard of the court. He merely advised him
neither intentionally to seek nor to shun any one, particularly the
house of Schleunes,--to unbridle his friend Flamin, who was in
Matthieu's leading-strings, and to guide him, instead of by the bit,
rather with a friendly hand,--and himself to covet the rank of a
doctor, and nothing more. He said, rules before experience were like
geometry before the operation for the cataract. Even after the harvest
of experience Gratian's _homme de cour_ and Rochefoucauld's Maxims were
not so good as the memoirs and history of courts, i. e. the experiences
of others. Finally he appealed to his own example, and said, it was
only within a few years that he had understood the following rules of
_his_ father's.
The greatest hatred, like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs, is
quiet.--Women have more _flow_, and fewer _overflows_, of emotion than
we.--There is nothing one hates so much in another as a _new_ fault,
which he does not show till after some years.--One commits the most
follies among people who are of no account.--It is the most common and
pernicious delusion, that one always takes one's self to be the only
one who remarks certain things.--Women and soft-hearted people are
timid only in their own dangers, and courageous in those of others,
where they have to save them.--Trust no one (and though it were a
saint) who in the smallest trifle leaves his honor in the lurch; and a
woman of that kind still less.--Most persons confound their vanity with
their sense of honor, and allege wounds inflicted on the one as wounds
inflicted on the other, and the reverse.--What we undertake from
humanity, we should always accomplish, if we mixed in no selfishness
with our motive.--The warmth of a man is by nothing more easily
misunderstood than by the warmth of a young man.
The last observation, which perhaps had a nearer reference, he had made
while he was already on the shore of the island in the attitude of
leave-taking, which he did with that considerate courtesy which in his
rank guides the hands and arms of even parents and children.[155]