The Parting.
Ah, he goes this very day! The emotions and conversations which we have
described had shattered too severely the tender casing which enclosed,
as a tulip does the bee, Emanuel's fair spirit; he rose pale and
languid; and the blind one was the happiest, who saw neither this
paleness nor the white handkerchief which he, during the night, instead
of staining with tears, had stained with blood. He himself had still
the pale evening red of yesterday's joy on his face; but this very
indifference to the gradual extinguishing of his days, this growing
feebleness and faintness of tone in his conversation, caused Victor to
turn away his eyes from him whenever they had for some time rested upon
him. Emanuel looked down calm as an eternal sun on the autumn of his
bodily life; nay, the more the sand fell from his life's hourglass, so
much the more clearly did he look through the empty glass. And yet the
earth was to him a beloved place, a fair meadow for our earliest plays
of childhood; and he still hung upon this mother of our first life with
the love wherewith the bride spends the evening full of childish
remembrances on the bosom of her beloved mother, before on the morrow
she goes to meet the bridegroom of her heart.
Victor reproached himself with every drop of blood shed by Emanuel, and
resolved to go to-day, because this Psyche, with her great wings, could
no longer stir herself in her web without tearing it. In Emanuel's eyes
there shone an inexpressible love for his sympathizing scholar. He
began of himself to speak of his dying-day, in order to comfort him,
and represented to him that he could not go hence till after a year. He
based his enthusiastic prediction on two grounds;--first, that most of
his male relatives had died on the selfsame day and in the selfsame
climacteric[175] of life; secondly, that several consumptive patients
before him had read in their diseased breast, as in a magic mirror,
their last day. Victor disputed him; he showed that the foretelling of
one's last appearance, as if the hectic man could easily feel
beforehand, from the regular and gradual failing of the vital energy,
the last step or freezing-point, was false, because feelings of the
future in the present were contradictions (_in adjecto_), and because
in the midst of life we could as little have a presentiment of the
arrival of death as in our waking hours we can (notwithstanding a
parallel gradation of steps in this case also) that of sleep. Victor
represented all this to him; and yet he did not fairly believe it
himself; he was overmastered by the lofty man who could announce his
entrance into the shadow of death as calmly and confidently as an
entrance of the moon into the shadow of the earth.... We will forgive
the sick man, and not hold ourselves wiser than he is, because he is
more enthusiastic than we.--Victor was most consoled by Emanuel's
notion that his deceased father would appear to him for the first time
just before his death.
Victor lingered, and tried not to linger; forbade, as physician,
Emanuel's talking, in order to make the excuse to himself of a harmless
postponement, and became more and more troubled, for the very reason
that he cared little to speak himself.--How canst thou, good Victor,
this very day hurry away from him, from this angel, who will perhaps
disappear over the next grave?--It must be a sore thing for thee, since
it is already so hard to quit a Maienthal full of blossoms, a blind one
full of soft tones; painful is here the last pressure of hands, Victor,
and sweet every delay!
He resolved to take leave at night, because a parting in the morning
begets too long a sadness, and the place in the heart from which the
beloved object was torn away continues bleeding all day long. Emanuel
would of course, at evening, have betaken himself to the seminary, as
he did yesterday; then would Victor, before the blind one, whom he
would beg for the saddest melody in the world, be able to let his full
eyelids, with which he always had to go out in order to relieve the
anguish, stream down to his heart's content.
When at evening he had eaten his last meal, and the evening-bell began,
his heart felt as if the breast had been lifted away from it, and
needle-points of ice were blown upon it.[176] Full of love, he clasped
the blind youth, whom he was not permitted to recognize as the playmate
of his childhood, and who with his tones had given more raptures than
he had in this night of his blindness received in return; and he let
tears have their way, whose twofold, perhaps threefold, source Emanuel
did not guess; for the sight of these eyes, which were nevermore to be
opened, awoke in him now, since Clotilda's wish for their healing, much
more sorrow. Emanuel he still begged, with a voice that hurried away
over the incidental meaning, to accompany him a short distance, till
Maienthal should be out of sight.
Out in the darkling and still country, all his sorrows lingered in his
breast beside their sighs. "When the moon glimmers in upon this valley
of blossoms," thought he, "I shall have left it for a long time." Only
the altar-lights, the stars, burned in the great temple. He proposed to
himself to part with his teacher on the mountain where their union had
taken place; but he went up by circuitous ways,--Emanuel gladly
following whithersoever he led,--in order during the circuit to
overmaster his taciturnity and his tears.
But they arrived at the foot of the weeping-birch, and grief still held
possession of his eye and his voice. "Ah!" thought he, "how great and
glad was the first night here, and how painful is this!" They reclined
on the earth beside each other on the grassy bank, solitary, silent,
sad, before the darkly glimmering universe. Victor could hear the
labored breathing of the diseased breast, and the future grave on this
mountain seemed to open at his side. Oh! if it is bitter to stand by
the bed wherein a loved and fading countenance lies with the hues of
death, far more bitter is it, in the midst of the scenes of health,
behind the erect form of the dear one, to hear the grave-digger Death
softly at his work, and to think, as often as the loved face looks
joyful, "Ah, be still more joyful! in a short time he will have gnawed
round the roots of thy life, and thou wilt have passed away with thy
joys and with mine!"--But ah! there is indeed no friend, man or woman,
with whom we should not be obliged to think the same!--
He knew not why Dahore was so long silent.--He foresaw not that the
moon would illumine the mountain sooner than the valley. The moon, that
Pharos on the coast of the second world, now encircled men with pale
fields, taken from dreams, with wan, gleaming meadows born of a
super-terrestrial perspective, and the Alps and woods it resolved into
immovable mists; _above_ the hemisphere of earth stood deep the
Lethe-flood of slumber, _below_ the green crust stood the dead sea, and
two loving men lived between the wide domains of sleep and death.... At
this moment Victor thought to himself, indeed, still more keenly,
"Here, beside this birch-tree, under this cold sod, will _his_
crumbling breast be forever hidden, and his heart will bleed no more;
but ah! it will beat no more." He thought, indeed, upon gloomy
resemblances, as the _immovable_ stars appeared to go _up_ and _down_,
merely because the playing _earth_ turned itself about them, now
_showing_ and now _hiding_ them; he turned, indeed, his melancholy
glance away from the _ignes fatui_, that, gliding over valleys, danced
only on the solemn darkness and on the graves, and which described
round a solitary powder-house their deceptive circles.----
But still he was silent, and thought, "Ah, well! we have each other
yet."
But then it was too much for his bleeding heart when the flute-wails of
the blind one stole out from the solitary house into the night, and
passed over the mountain and over the future grave.--Then were voices
given to the sighs and death-bells to the future, and his sadness grew
too oppressive, as he thought, amidst the flute-murmurs, how this
unique, this irreplaceable man, who cherished so much love for him in
his great heart, was going hence never to reappear.--Ah! and when,
besides, just at this moment, Emanuel, who had been lying beside him
silently lost in gazing on the heavens and like a departed one, changed
his position on account of his painful and oppressed breathing, but
with a countenance whose serenity was undisturbed by the pains in his
breast, then a cold hand glided into Victor's swollen heart and turned
itself about therein, and his blood curdled on it, and he said, without
the power of looking upon him, in faint, supplicating, broken accents,
"Do not die in a year, my dear Emanuel,--do not wish to die!"
The genius of night had stood till now, invisibly, before Emanuel, and
poured high raptures into his bosom, but no passions; and he said: "We
are not alone,--my soul feels the passing by of its kindred, and lifts
itself up,--_under_ the earth is sleep, _above_ the earth is dream, but
between sleep and dream I see luminous eyes move along like stars,--a
cool breath comes from the sea of eternity over the glowing earth,--my
heart mounts up, and will break away from life,--all around me is
as great as if God passed through the night.--Spirits! grasp my
spirit,--it climbs to your embrace,--and bear it up yonder...."
Victor turned round and looked imploringly into the beautiful, joyous,
tearless countenance: "Thou _wilt_ die?"
Emanuel's ecstasy soared above life: "The dark streak in the next
world is only a meadow of flowers,[177]--suns shine to light us
onward,--flying heavens come to meet us with spring-breezes. With only
empty graves the earth flies round the sun; for her dead stand remote
on brighter suns."--
"Emanuel?" said Victor, in a questioning tone, weeping aloud, and with
a voice of the most fervent yearning,--and the flute-notes sank
sorrowfully into the broad night,--"Emanuel?"
Emanuel, returning to himself, looked on him, and said, calmly: "Yes,
my beloved!--I can no more accustom myself to the earth; the water-drop
of life has become flat and shallow,--I can no longer move round
therein,--and my heart yearns to be among the great men who have left
this drop behind them.--O beloved, listen, I pray,"--and here he
pressed to soreness the heart of his Victor,--"and hear this heavy
breath going. See, I pray, this shattered body, this thick casing,--how
it wraps round my spirit, and obstructs its passage.--
"See, here my spirit and thine cleave frozen to the ice-cake, and
yonder the night opens all her heavens, reposing one behind the other;
yonder in the blue, glimmering abyss dwells all the greatness which has
disrobed itself on the earth, all the truth that we guess, all the
goodness that we love.--
"See, how still is all up there in immensity,--how softly the worlds
move, how silently the suns glow! The great Eternal reposes as a
fountain, with his overflowing, infinite love, in the midst of them,
refreshing and tranquillizing all; and around God lies no grave."
Here Emanuel, as if raised by an infinite blessedness, stood up and
looked lovingly toward Arcturus, who still hung under the zenith of
heaven, and said, directing his words toward the broad deep of
brilliancy: "Ah, how inexpressibly do I yearn to come up to you! Ah,
break in pieces, old heart, and hold me not so long in these bonds!"
"Die, then, great soul," said Victor, "and take thy way up yonder; but
break with thy death my little heart also, and keep by thee the poor
one who cannot forsake thee nor do without thee."
The flute had ceased; the two friends had sunk into each other's arms
to end their farewell. "Dear, beloved, never-to-be-forgotten one," said
Emanuel, "thou movest me too deeply; but when, a year hence, I go up
from this mountain, then shalt thou stand by me, and see how man is
released from his bonds. Thy tears will be my last earthly pangs; but I
shall say, what I say now, We part by night, but we meet again by day."
And so he went.
Victor had gently disengaged himself from the childlike lips,--he
sought not to follow him on his night-track,--slowly he went along by
one vast sleep.--Often he turned round and followed with eyes full of
falling tears the falling stars over Maienthal; and at four of the
morning he arrived with a heavenly soul at St. Luna, and entered the
garden full of old scenes, and laid down in the familiar arbor his
glowing head and his subdued heart in the dew of the morning for a
cooling repose.
O rest thou, rest thou!--ah! sleep only, either on the earth or under
the earth, can still the ever-agitated bosom of man....[178]