JOURNEY THROUGH FANTAISIE--RE-UNION ON THE BINDLOCHER MOUNTAIN--
BERNECK--MAN-DOUBLING--GEFREES--EXCHANGE OF CLOTHES--MUNCHBERG--
SOLO-WHISTLING--HOF--THE STONE OF GLADNESS AND DOUBLE-PARTING.
Henry now plied more wings than any seraph, that he might fly up
with his friend as soon as possible. He packed up the latter's
manuscripts in haste, and addressed them to Vaduz. The sealed will and
testament was lodged with the proper authorities, from whom, also, the
necessary certificate of death was obtained to show the Prussian
Widows' Fund that it was not being defrauded. And then he got fairly
afloat, and pushed off, having first bestowed some weighty grounds
for consolation--as well as some weighty ducats--upon the downcast
straw-widow, who mourned in the striped calico-dress, as was right and
proper.
Let us now overtake and accompany his departed friend, even before he
himself does so. During the first hour of his night-journey, vague and
disordered pictures of the past and of the future struggled in
Firmian's heart; and it seemed to him as if, _for him_, there were no
such thing as a present, but that a wilderness stretched between the
past and the future. But the fresh, rich harvest month of August soon
gave him back the life he had (so to speak) played away; and when the
gleaming morning was come in earnest, the earth was lying all lighted
up with a new-fallen thunderstorm, now emitting lovely lightning only
from drops hanging on the corn-ears, as if over-silvered by the moon.
It was a new earth; he was a new creature, just burst, with ripened
pinions, through the egg-shell of the coffin. Oh! a broad, marshy,
overshadowed desert-waste, where a long, long troubled dream had kept
driving him to and fro, had vanished _with_ that dream, and he was
awake, and gazing deep into Eden. The last week (and that last week
especially) had stretched out to enormous length those twisted
convolutions of suffering which give to our brief lives a false
appearance of being much too long (as we make the short walks of a
garden seem longer by laying them out in curves and sweeps). On the
other hand, his lightened breast, now free from all its old burdens,
was heaved by a great sigh, which was partly both sorrow and joy. He
had been too far into the Trophonius cave of the tomb--had looked death
too closely in the face--and it seemed to him that all our country
mansions, our pleasure-castles and vineyards, were built and laid out
upon the verge of the crater of the volcano of the grave-hillock, and
that the next night they would be shaken into dust. He felt alone,
upheaved, a dead man come back to life, but scarce alive; wherefore
every human face he met beamed upon him like that of a new-found
brother. "These are my brethren whom I left on earth," said his heart;
and a fruit-bearing love, warm like the spring, expanded all its veins
and fibres; and it crept and grew round every _other_ heart with
tender, clinging, ivy-like filaments. But the one he loved best was
still--too long--away; and he went on as slowly as he could, that so
Leibgeber (of whom he was in advance both in distance and time) might
overtake him before he got to Hof. A hundred times, on his journey, he
almost involuntarily looked round _for_ this overtaking, as if it were
already a thing to be actually seen.
At length he came to the Fantaisie of Bayreuth, on a morning when the
whole world gleamed and glittered from the drops of dew up to the
little silver cloudlets. But stillness was over all. The breezes were
asleep; nor had August, in air or in thicket, one single songster left.
It seemed to him as though, having left this mortal life, he was
wandering in a second, transfigured world, where the form of his
Nathalie might move by his side, with love in her eyes--and, in words
straight from the soul, no longer fettered by earthly bonds, say to
him, "_Here_ you looked up in gratitude to the starry night; _here_ I
gave you my wounded heart; here we spoke our earthly parting-vow; and
here I came, often, alone, and thought of the brief, bright vision."
"And this is the spot," he said to himself, when he came to the
château, "where she wept her last tears when she said farewell to her
lady-friend."
And now, again, it seemed that only _she_ was the one transfigured.
(_He_ seemed to his fancy to be the one left behind.) He _felt_ that he
should never see her more on earth; "but" (he said) "people must be
able to _love_, though they cannot meet or see each other." All his
meagre future was to be illuminated by transfigured and glorified
dream-pictures only. But as the tree (according to Bonnet) is planted
as much in the air above it as it is in the earth beneath it, and
derives nourishment quite as much from the one as from the other, so it
is with every true human-creature. And thus Firmian lived in the
future with more vivid life than in the past--only with fewer of his
root-fibres in the visible ground. The whole tree, top-shoot, branches,
and all, stood under the open sky, drinking the free breeze of heaven
with its every blossom--where all he had to invigorate and cheer him
were two invisible friends--the one a woman, the other a man.
At length the thin, beautiful vapour of his dreams thickened to a fog.
Nathalie's sorrow for his death came hovering over him, and his
lonesomeness struck heavy on his heart, which longed unutterably for
some living being which should stand there and love him with all its
heart. But this being was still behind him, doing its best to overtake
him--Henry, to wit.
"Mr. Leibgeber," the voice of some one coming up after him suddenly
cried, "stop a moment, please. Here is your handkerchief; I picked it
up down below there."
He looked round, and there was the girl whom Nathalie had helped out of
the water, coming running up with a white handkerchief. But as he had
his own in his pocket, and the girl, gazing at him in astonishment,
said he had dropped it near the basin about an hour before (though he
had not then had so long a coat on)--a gush of gladness streamed into
his heart. Leibgeber had arrived, and had been down by the basin.
He hastened to Bayreuth as fast as he could, all in a whirl, with the
handkerchief in his hand. It was moist, as if his friend's weeping eyes
had rested on it. He pressed it warmly to his own, but it would not dry
them, for he thought how Henry passed his life in solitude,
exemplifying the truth of his own saying, "He who spares his feelings,
and puts armour upon them, keeps them most delicately sensitive--just
as the skin under the nails is the easiest hurt of all." At the Sun
Hotel, Firmian learned from John the waiter that Leibgeber had actually
arrived, and was gone on about half-an-hour ago. Firmian ran off after
him, up and down the streets of Hof, blind and deaf, in such
tempestuous pursuit of his friend that he forgot all about the moist
handkerchief.
After a long while, he caught sight of him climbing the long hill
behind the village of Bindloch, a mountain-road, in the true sense of
the words, not to be either ascended or descended at any great speed.
Leibgeber was straining up it as fast as he could, however, with the
view of unexpectedly overtaking Firmian before he got to Hof, perhaps
in Münchberg, or in Gefrees, if not in Berneck itself (which is at no
very great distance from Bayreuth).
But was not everything destined to turn out ten times better? Did not
Siebenkæs, at the bottom of the hill, at last catch sight of him near
the level place on the summit, and call out his name--which he did not
hear? Did not Siebenkæs then run at an extraordinary pace after his
ascending friend (with the handkerchief in his hand), and did not the
latter chance to turn round, by accident, to have a glance at the sunny
landscape, and see all Bayreuth, and--at long and at last--his friend
hastening after him? And finally, did they not rush together, the one
down the hill, the other up (not like two hostile armies, however, but
like two wreathed and foaming goblets of joy and friendship)?
Henry speedily perceived that in his friend's breast there was much of
a powerful and dissolvent kind--belonging both to past and to future
times--at work, wherefore he sought to appease and calm all the "Naiads
of the rivers of tears."
"Everything went off divinely," he said, "and everybody is well. Now you
are as free as I am. Your chains are off--the world is before you--so
in you plunge into it, fresh and merry, like me, and begin to live your
_real_ life, for the first time _in_ your life." "You are right," said
Firmian, "this is like meeting you again after death. Heaven is above
us, peaceful and quiet, gladsome, serene, and warm." For that very
reason, he had not the courage to ask after those he had left behind,
particularly his widow. Leibgeber expressed great joy that he had
caught him up four post-stations on that side of Hof, and all the more
that, this being so, they could be together for a good long while
before they must part in Hof (which latter was the very point which he
was anxious to establish and emphasise).
He now commenced a series of jokes on the subject of dying (with the
view of preventing anything in the shape of an _expression_ of the
emotions which they both felt), and these jokes recurred like
milestones, or stone-benches, all along the turnpike-road to Hof; we
have no way of escaping them on the journey, unless we turn back. He
asked him if the diet had been sufficient which he had given him, as
the old Germans, Romans, and Egyptians did to their dead. He said that
Firmian must be excessively pious, inasmuch as he had risen from the
dead when he had barely shuffled off this mortal coil, confirming
Lavater's doctrine that there are two resurrections, a first for the
good, and a later one for the bad. He said, further, that he could not
have had a better Archimimus[94] after his departure from this life
than himself. Leibgeber's spirit and body _sprang_ rather than walked.
"I am always in high spirits, and free, while I am in the open air.
Beneath the clouds, I have no clouds. When we are young, the raw north
wind of life whistles only on our backs, and, by Heaven! I am younger
than any reviewer."
They passed the night in Berneck, between the lofty bridge-piers of
mountains, through which once streamed those seas which have overspread
our globe with fields. Time and Nature--grand and almighty--were
reposing side by side on the confines of two kingdoms--between the
steep, lofty, memorial-pillars of creation--amongst firm mountains,
empty castles crumbling into ruin, rock-barriers and stone-tumuli lying
about the rounded green hills, like broken tables of the law of earth's
first creation.
When they arrived here, Henry said, "The clergy between this and Vaduz
must not find out that you have exchanged time for eternity, or they
will ask you for the surplice fees which every corpse has to pay in
each parish which it passes through. If we were in old Rome (and not in
Berneck)," said he, before the inn, "the landlord would never let you
into his house except down the chimney. And if we were in Athens, you
would be obliged to creep through a hoop-petticoat just as if you were
going into holy orders."[95] On an occasion of this sort, he never
could cease from his witticisms, in which he differed (to his
disadvantage) from me; and he said that metaphors and similes were like
gold pieces, of which Rousseau says that the first is harder to get
than the next thousand.
Therefore it was beyond his power not to be struck with an idea when,
in the evening, he saw Firmian paring his nails. "I can't understand,"
he said "(now that I see it in your case), why Katherine Bieri--whose
nails had to be cut 250 years after she was dead--couldn't have done it
just as well herself as _you_ do after having given tip the ghost." And
when he saw him turn over on his left side in bed, he simply observed
that he made his bed-quilt rise and fall in the same manner as St. John
the Evangelist does _his_ earthen one--the grave--to the present
hour.[96]
In the morning, it rained a little upon these flowers of humour. As
Leibgeber was laving that lion's breast of his with cold water, Firmian
noticed that he pushed aside a little key, and asked what it opened.
"It _un_fastens nothing," he said; "but it _fastened_ the leaden
_cenotaphium_."[97] Firmian was obliged to lean out of window with his
eyes, and dry them unobserved. Then (with his head still outside) he
said, "Give me the key. It is the wax-impression of a future one. I
want to make it the music-key of my inner music. I shall hang it up,
and look at it every day; and if ever my resolution to be better should
run down, I shall wind it up again with this watch-key." He got it.
Then Leibgeber chanced to look into the mirror; and he cried, "I seem
almost to see myself double, not to say triple. _One_ of me must be
dead, the one in there or the one out here. Which of us in this room is
it that is the real dead man appearing to the other? Or are we only
appearing to ourselves? Heh! you my three _me's_, what say you to the
fourth?"--he asked, and turned to the two-reflected images, then to
Firmian--and said, "_Here I_ am, too!"
There was something in these sayings calculated to cause a shudder for
his future. Firmian, whose calmer reason made him dread a dangerous
growth of this metamorphic self-reflecting during the solitude of
Leibgeber's wanderings, said, with tender anxiety, "My dear Henry, if
you are going to be always so much alone upon your eternal journeys, I
can't help fearing it will do you harm. God himself is not alone. He
beholds His universe." "I can always triple myself, in the profoundest
solitude, not excepting that of the universe itself," answered
Leibgeber, strangely moved by the coffin-key--and he went to the
looking-glass, and pressed his eyeball sideways with his finger, so as
to see his reflection double; "but _you_ can't see the third person
there." Then he went on in a merrier tone, with the view of cheering
Firmian (who was _not_ much cheered by what he said, nevertheless),
leading him to the window. "But it is a far finer affair as regards
the street. I have a much larger company there. I put my finger to my
eye, and produce the twin of everybody, be he who he may; double the
landlord, as well as his chalk-score. Not a president on his way
to his meeting but 'finds his fellow' and meets his match. I provide
him with his Orang Utang, and the pair of them march past me,
_tête-à-tête_. Does a genius want an imitator? I take my finger--and
hey! presto!--a living facsimile of him on the spot. Every learned
collaborator has a collaborator collaborating with him. Associates
have associates associated with them. Only sons are made out in
duplicate, because, as you see, I carry my plastic nature, author, and
embossing-instrument--my finger to wit--always about with me. And I
seldom let a solo-dancer caper with fewer than four legs; he has to
hang in air as a _pair_ of men. But it would amaze you to see how much
I can make out of a single fellow and his limbs by this sort of
grouping. Try to form some idea (by way of wind-up) of the crowds and
masses of people I have when I double such things as funerals and other
processions, with _doppelgänger_, and strengthen every regiment with an
entire regiment of flügelmen, repeating and imitating everything. For
(as we have been saying), like a grasshopper, I have my ovipositing
instrument--my finger--always with me. From all which, Firmian, you may
at all events draw the consolation that I enjoy more society than any
of you--_just as much again_, in fact. And, moreover, it consists
entirely of people who afford me endless amusement without trouble or
inconvenience, by aping their own gestures and proceedings."
Hereupon they looked each other in the face, full of joyful affection,
and wholly freed from any unpleasant traces of their recent wilder mode
of jesting. A third person would have been almost terrified at their
bodily resemblance in this hour, for each was a plaster-of-Paris cast
of the other; but their affection for each other made their faces seem
_un_like to themselves. Each saw in the other only that which he liked,
because it was not in himself; and it was with their features, as with
good deeds, which inspire us with, emotion and admiration in others,
but not in ourselves.
When they were out in the air again, and on their way to Gefrees, and
the coffin-key, as well as their recent conversation, continually
brought to mind their parting (whose death sickle bent, closer around
them with every milestone on their road), Henry endeavoured to cast a
rosy beam or two into Firmian's mist by putting into his hands an
accurate protocol of everything he had arranged and agreed upon with
the Count von Vaduz concerning his duties. "The Count," he said, "would
of course think you had merely forgotten the conversation; but it is
better thus. Like a negro slave, you have killed yourself to obtain
your freedom and reach the _Gold Coast_ of your silver coast; and it
_would_ be damnable, indeed, if you were to be damned now after your
decease." "I can never thank you enough, you dear friend," said
Firmian; "but you should not make things harder for me than they are,
and draw yourself back like a hand from the clouds the moment you
have emptied yourself. _Why_ is it that I am not to see you again
after we have said good-bye? Tell me." "First," he answered, "because
people--the Count, the Widow's Fund, your widow--might find out that I
was extant in two editions, and that would be an accursed misfortune in
a world where a fellow can hardly be allowed to sit and sleep in peace
in his _first_ original edition. Secondly, I intend to make my
appearance in several of the broad comedy characters which there are so
many of to be played on this ship of fools of an earth; and as long as
not a single devil among the audience knows me, I shall not be ashamed
of my parts. Ah! I could give you plenty more reasons into the bargain.
Besides, it delights _me_ to come down with a flop, as if out of the
moon on to this earth; and in among mankind, unknown, uprooted,
untrammelled; a _lusus naturæ_, a _diabolus ex machina_, a monstrous
moon-_lithopædium_. Firmian, it is a settled thing. Perhaps in a few
years' time I may send you a letter now and then, more particularly as
the Galatians[98] placed upon the funeral pyre letters directed to the
dead, as they might have put them in a post-office. Hut it really is a
settled thing now--positively." "I should not give in to all this so
quietly," said Siebenkæs, "if I did not feel convinced that I shall
very soon see you again. I am not like you. _I_ look forward to _two_
meetings with you--one here below, one there above. And would to God
that I could bring you to die as you did me, and we met afterwards on a
Bindloch hill, but were going to be longer together."
If these wishes chance to remind the readers of Schoppe in Titan, they
may consider in what sense Fate often interprets and fulfils our
wishes. Leibgeber merely answered, "People must love, though they may
not be able to see each other; and, when all's done, it is only Love
that we can love after all, and _that_ we can each see in the other
every day."
In Gefrees, Leibgeber proposed that, as there was such ample leisure
(there being nothing to see in, or out of, the one street of the town),
they should exchange clothes, and that particularly in order that the
Count of Vaduz (who had not for years seen him in any other dress than
the one he now wore) should not find anything to be struck with about
Siebenkæs, but that everything about him should be exactly as it always
had been, even to the nails on the heels of his shoes. The thought of
being, in future, embraced (so to speak) by Henry's sleeves, and
clasped and warmed by all his external _reliquia_, fell like a broad
ray of warm February sun on Siebenkæs's breast. Leibgeber went into the
next room, and, to begin with, threw his short green jacket through the
half-open door, crying, "Come in, coat with skirts!" then followed up
with necktie and waistcoat, and long trousers with leather stripes,
saying, "Come in, breeches!" and ended up with his shirt, and the
words, "Here with the winding-sheet!"
The shirt thus thrown in was, to Siebenkæs, as an astrologer (or
interpreter of signs), with respect to Leibgeber. He saw that he
had a higher motive in view in this bodily transmigration into clothes
than mere dressing for a certain character at Vaduz; to wit, the taking
up of his abode in the shell, or cocoon, which had contained his
friend. Not in a whole volume of Gellert's or Klopstock's 'Letters
on Friendship,' not in a whole week of Leibgeberian days of
self-sacrifice, did there seem anything so beloved and delicious as in
thus falling heir to his clothes. He would not profane this surmise
which made him so happy by alluding to it in words, but he was
confirmed in it when Leibgeber came out transformed into a Siebenkæs,
looked at himself in a satisfied manner in the mirror, and then laid
his three fingers, in silence, on Firmian's forehead. This was his
highest token of love; wherefore, to my own and Firmian's great joy, I
mention, that he repeated this sign more than three times during dinner
(the conversation running on wholly indifferent subjects). What
different and interminable jokes would he not have made upon this
moulting at another time, and under the influence of other feelings!
Merely to guess at a few. How much he would have made of the rebinding
of their two folio volumes, so as to involve Herr Lochmüller (the
landlord at Gefrees) in the deepest and most diverting embarrassment,
which that polite gentleman could by no means have extricated himself
from one minute before this, my fourth book, came to his aid, which at
this moment is only in Bayreuth, and not even gone to press! But
Leibgeber did nothing of all this; and even of witticisms he only
delivered himself of a few weak ones; about their being changelings,
about the sudden French transition of people _en longue robe_ into
people _en robe courts_. And he said he would no longer call Siebenkæs
a transfigured being in boots, but one in shoes, which was more
befitting, as well as sounding somewhat more sublime. It was with
particular pleasure that he saw how his dog, Saufinder--between the old
bodies and the new clothes, as if between two fires of love--could not
properly make out the matter in the least degree, and often went from
one to the other with a most uneasy face. The _concordat_ between the
two parties--the shortening of the one, and the lengthening of the
other--puzzled the creature, and he could make neither head nor tail of
it all. "I like him twice as much as I did," said Leibgeber; "believe
me. If he is faithful to you, that is not being unfaithful to me." He
could not possibly have said anything more complimentary than this.
All the bleak way from Gefrees to Muenchberg, Firmian, from gratitude,
took the greatest pains to reflect back on Leibgeber that sunshine of
cheerfulness into which Henry was continually trying to lead him. It
was no easy matter, especially when he saw him striding after him in
the long coat. He concentrated himself to an extreme effort in
Muenchberg, the last post-station before Hof, where the corporeal arms
with which they clasped each other were, so to speak, to be cut off by
a long separation.
As they were going along the road to Hof, more silent than before,
Leibgeber being first, and feeling refreshed by the pine-covered
mountain on his right, began (as he usually did on his journeys) to
whistle national airs, both merry and sad, for the most part in minor
keys. He said he thought there were many worse town-and-street-fifers,
and that he performed on the foot-passenger's post-horn which Nature
had given him in a manner deserving of some applause. To Firmian,
however (now that their parting was so near), these tones, which seemed
to come echoing back from Henry's long journeys of the past, and
forward from his coming lonely ones as well, were as a kind of Swiss
_Ranz des Vaches_, which went to his very heart; and it was well he was
walking last, for he could scarce restrain his tears. Ah! take music
away when the heart is full and must not overflow!
At length he brought his voice sufficiently under command to be able to
say, without any apparent emotion, "Are you fond of whistling as you
go, and do you do it often?" In the tone of this question there was a
something as if the fluting was not quite so much of an enjoyment to
him as to the musician himself. "Always," answered Leibgeber. "I
whistle[99] away life, and the world's stage, and all there is upon
it--and all that sort of thing--a great many matters in the past; and,
like a steeple-warder at Carlsbad, I _whistle in_ the future. Do you
dislike it? Is my fuguing incorrect, or my whistling a breach of the
rules of pure composition?" "Oh! only too beautiful," answered
Siebenkæs.
And then Leibgeber began again, but with tenfold power, and performed
such a lovely and melting mouth-organ voluntary, that Siebenkæs came up
to him with four long strides, and, putting his handkerchief to his
eyes with his left hand, while he laid his right gently on Henry's
lips, he said in broken accents, "Henry, spare me! I don't know why,
but every note of music moves me too deeply to-day." The musician
looked at him--Leibgeber's whole inner world was in his eyes--then
nodded in a decided manner, and strode rapidly onwards in silence,
without looking round or letting his face be seen. But his hands,
perhaps involuntarily, went on making little movements, beating time in
continuation of the melody.
At length they arrived, oppressed and anxious, at the Grub-street
or Mint-city where I am now seated, pasting and colouring these
assignats--this paper-money for half the world--namely, Hof.[100] It is
by no means in my favour, indeed, that at that time I knew nothing
whatever of all these matters which half Europe is now being made
acquainted with through me. I was a good deal younger then--sitting
alone at home like a cabbage-lettuce, with the best will in the world
to close to a head--which process of closing, in men as well as in
lettuces, is hindered by nothing so much as by the contact of the
neighbouring salad-plants. It is easier, pleasanter, and more
advantageous, for a youngster to go from solitude into society (from
the seed-bed into the garden), than the converse--from the market-place
into the corner. Unmitigated solitude and unmitigated society are both
bad: and, with the exception of their _order_ of succession, nothing is
so important _as_ their succession.
In Hof, Siebenkæs engaged two rooms at the inn, thinking Leibgeber
would not part from him till the morning. However, _he_ (whom his own
pre-determination to say good-bye, and his dread of saying it, had
fretted and annoyed immensely for a considerable time) had taken a
mental vow that their two spirits should be torn asunder that day, and
that, immediately thereupon, he should be off into Saxony as hard as he
could, though it should want but a quarter of an hour to midnight; but,
at all events, before that particular day should come to a close. He
went into his room, smiling and pleasant, and thought of the airs he
had been whistling (which were still running in both their heads, if
not in their hearts). But he soon enticed him out of that empty
deaf-mute of a room into the diverting tumult and stir of the
coffee-room--not remaining long there, however, either--but as the
moon, in her first quarter, was standing like a lighted lamp just above
a post in the market-place, he asked him to go for a cruise round the
town with him. So they went, and climbed up the avenue, and looked down
at the gardens in the city-moat (which, perhaps, deserve to take the
_pas_ over other artificial meadows, inasmuch as they are more
specially sown for cattle than others). I presume this was the reason
why Leibgeber (who had been in Switzerland) remarked late at night
(when the country, adorned and adopted by Nature, but disinherited by
Art, lay extended before him) that the people of Hof were like the
Swiss, whose whole country was a garden, except the few gardens in it.
The pair went on drawing wider and wider parallels around the town.
They crossed a bridge, from which they saw a gallows-hill overgrown
with grass, which reminded them of that other ice-region, with its
crater, where, exactly a year ago, they had bidden each other good-bye
at night, but with the sweeter hope of an earlier meeting. Two friends
such as they are always struck with the same ideas in the same
circumstances. Each is--if not the unison--at all events the octave,
fifth, or fourth to the other. Henry tried to rekindle a little light
in his friend's dark house of sorrow and mourning by aid of the
bird-pole, which stood like a commandant's flag-staff, or a burning
stake, not far from the Supreme Criminal Court's place of judicature.
He said, "A shooter-king has his Sinai, where he can both promulgate
his laws and vindicate them, close at his hand here, in a delightful
manner, beside his lever and leaping-pole, such as you heaved yourself
up by to the dignity of Great Negus and Grand Mogul of Kuhschnappel.
Button's law--that every elevation has another of equal height and
similar composition opposite to it--applies to a great number of
eminences which correspond to one another; gallows-hills and thrones,
for instance, in this case; the two sides of the choir in churches; the
fifth story and Pindus: show-booths, and the Chairs of Professors
Extraordinary."
As Firmian did not speak, but remained sunk in sadder similes, Henry,
too, held his peace. He led him towards another stone (for he was
intimately acquainted with the whole country), one with a prettier
name, the "Stone of Joy." At last, while they were toiling up the hill
towards this stone, Firmian took heart and said, "Tell me right out--I
am quite prepared--tell me at once, on your honour, when are you going
away from me for ever?" "Now," answered Henry. On the pretence of its
being easier so to climb the hill-side, all flowers and perfumed
mountain-plants, they were holding each other by the hand, and as they
went they pressed hands sometimes, as if from accidents of mechanical
motion. But pain struck great roots that waxed amain into Firmian's
heart, roots that split it asunder as the roots of trees split rocks.
Firmian laid himself down on the grey projecting rock, which divided
the green slope like a boundary-stone, and he drew his departing friend
down to his breast. "Sit down very close beside me this once more," he
said. As the manner of friends is, each pointed out to the other
everything he saw. Henry showed him the camp of the town pitched all
about the foot of the hill, and looking as if fallen into a deep
sleep, nothing moving in it but some flickering lights. The river went
coiling along beneath the moon round the town like a great serpent with
a sparkling back, then stretched itself out through two bridges. The
half-shimmer of the moon, and the white transparent vapour of the
night, lifted the hills, the woods, and the earth, up to the heavens;
and the water on the earth was spangled with stars like the blue night
above, and the Earth, like Uranus, had a doubled moon, as it wore a
child in either hand.
"In reality," Leibgeber began, "we can both always see each other
whenever we please. All we have to do is to look into a looking-glass.
That is _our_ moon-mirror."[101] "No," said Firmian, "we will fix on a
time when we will think of each other--on our birthdays--and on the day
of my pantomime death, and on _this_." "Very well," said Leibgeber,
"these shall be our four quarter-days."
Of a sudden, the hand of the latter rested upon a dead lark, which had
probably been shot. He clasped Firmian's shoulders, and, raising him
from the ground, said, "Stand up; we are men. What is all this fuss
about? Fare you well! If ever I let you out of my head, or out of my
heart, may God dash me to atoms with a thousand thunderbolts. You are
and shall be for ever in my bosom as warmly as my own living heart. And
so, good-bye, and all good attend you; and in all the Berghem Seapiece
of your life may there not be a single wave the size of a tear.
Farewell!" They clung together, and wept heartily, and Firmian did not
answer as yet. His fingers stroked and pressed his Henry's hair. At
last he leaned his cheek against the beloved eyes; before his _own_
eyes the wide abyss of night shimmered, and his lips uttered (but with
no cadence in the tone), "'Fare you well,' do you say to me? Ah! _that_
I _cannot_, when I have lost my truest, my oldest friend. The earth
will always be as dark to me as it is now around us here. It will be
hard for me when I am dying, and, in my feverish fancy, think I am only
_pretending_ to die again, and stretch out my hand in the darkness to
feel for you, and say, 'Henry, close my eyes again, I cannot die
without you!'" Henry whispered, "Tell me what else to say to you, and
then may God punish me if I utter another syllable." Firmian stammered,
"Will you always like me, and shall I see you soon again?" "Not soon;
not for a long time," he answered, "and I shall never cease to love
you." As he was starting to go, Firmian held him back. "We will look at
each other once more," he said. And they bent back, their faces
channelled by streams of emotion, and looked at each other for the last
time, while the night-wind, like the arm of a stream, mingled with the
deep river, and then rushed on united with it in deeper billows, while
the great mountain-range of creation trembled before the tearful eyes.
But Henry tore himself away, made a sign with his hand as if to say all
was over, and took his flight down the hill.
After a little, Firmian was impelled after him--not knowing why--by the
goad of pain and sorrow. His inner man, compressed by the tourniquet
into insensibility, did not feel the amputation of his limb just then.
They both hurried along the same road, though separated by hills and
valleys. Whenever Henry stopped and looked back, so did Firmian. Alas!
after a sultry storm, such as this, the waves all freeze to spikes of
ice, and the heart lies upon them transfixed. As Firmian went on
broken-hearted, by unknown, darkling paths, it seemed to him as if all
the death-bells on earth were tolling behind him, as if the stream of
life were running dry before him fast; and when he saw the blue of the
sky cut across by a black storm-tree[102] which lay upon the stars like
the bier of the future, a voice seemed to cry, "With this foot-rule of
vapour, Fate is measuring you, your world, and your love, for your last
coffin."
From the circumstance that the distance between him and the other
figure kept always the same, Henry at last became aware that it was
following him, and halted only when he halted. So he made up his mind
that he would lie in wait in the next village for the coming up of this
form which was creeping after him. In the next village then, Töpen
(which lies deep in a valley), he awaited, in the broad shadow of a
gleaming church, the arrival of this unknown being which was on his
track. Firmian came hastening along the broad white street, dazed with
sorrow--blind in the moonlight--and stopped, as if frozen, close by
Henry from whom he had so recently been severed. There they stood
facing each other, like two spirits above their corpses, each taking
the other for a ghost (just as the superstitious think the noises made
by the buried-alive are caused by spirits). Firmian trembled lest
Leibgeber should be vexed with him, and opened his arms and stammered
out, "It is I, Henry," and went to him. Henry gave a cry of pain, and
threw himself upon the faithful breast; but his vow sealed his lips.
And thus these two miserable, or blessed beings, speechless, blind and
weeping, pressed their beating hearts close together once more. And
when this moment--wordless, full of torture, full of bliss--was over
and past, an iron, cold one, tore them asunder, and Fate seized them
with two almighty arms, and hurled the one bleeding heart to the south,
and the other to the north; while the dejected, bleeding corpses passed
slowly and alone, along the widening path of parting, in the night.
* * * * *
And why is it that _my_ own heart breaks in twain with such a pang? Why
should it be that, long ere I came to their parting, I could not keep
my own tears back? Ah! my dear Christian, is it not because in this
church those who once lay upon your heart and mine are mouldering into
dust? No, no, I am used to it now; in the black magic of our lives to
see skeletons suddenly start up in our friends' places; that of every
two who put their arms about each other _one_ has to die;[103] that an
unknown breath blows the brittle glass which we call a human breast,
and a cry, which we know not of, shatters it in a moment. It does not
pain me now so much as of old, ye two brothers sleeping in the church,
that the hard, cold hand of death struck you away so soon from the
honey-dew of life, and that ye stretched your wings and have vanished
away. Oh! either your sleep is sounder than ours, or your dreams are
happier, or your awaking is blither. But what agonises us in every
grave-hillock is this thought. "Alas! beloved heart, _how_ I would have
loved you had I known you were going to die!"
But, since none of us can take a corpse's hand and say, "Pale one! at
all events I have sweetened thy transitory life a _little_; I have, at
any rate, never given that faded heart of thine anything but love and
happiness;" and as when time, sorrow, and the loveless winter of life
have beautified our hearts, at length we must all go up, with
unavailing sighs, to the overthrown forms which are lying beneath the
landslip of the grave, and say to them, "Oh! that, now that I am better
and gentler, I have thee with me no longer, and can no longer love
thee! Oh! that the beloved breast is transparent and broken in, and no
heart in it which I would love more fondly, and gladden as I never did
before." What have we left but an unavailing sorrow, a dumb repentance,
and never-ending bitter tears?
Yes, my Christian, we have something better left still--a warmer,
truer, lovelier, love for every soul which we have not yet lost.