St. Thomas's-Day and Birthday.
An Author is a sort of bee-keeper for his reader-swarm; in whose behalf
he separates the Flora kept for their use into different seasons, and
here accelerates, and there retards, the blossoming of many a flower,
that so in all chapters there be blooming.
The goddess of Love and the angel of Peace conducted our married pair
on tracks running over full meadows, through the Spring; and on
footpaths hidden by high corn-fields, through the Summer; and Autumn,
as they advanced towards Winter, spread her marble leaves under their
feet. And thus they arrived before the low, dark gate of Winter, full
of life, full of love, trustful, contented, sound, and ruddy.
On St. Thomas's-day was Thiennette's birthday as well as Winter's.
About a quarter past nine, just when the singing ceases in the church,
we shall take a peep through the window into the interior of the
parsonage. There is nothing here but the old mother, who has all day
(the son having restricted her to rest, and not work) been gliding
about, and brushing, and burnishing, and scouring, and wiping; every
carved chair-leg, and every brass nail of the waxcloth-covered table,
she has polished into brightness;--everything hangs, as with all
married people who have no children, in its right place, brushes,
fly-flaps, and almanacs;--the chairs are stationed by the room-police
in their ancient corners;--a flax-rock, encircled with a diadem, or
scarf of azure riband, is lying in the Schadeck-bed, because, though it
is a half-holiday, some spinning may go on;--the narrow slips of paper,
whereon heads of sermons are to be arranged, lie white beside the
sermons themselves, that is, beside the octavo paper-book which
holds them, for the Parson and his work-table, by reason of the cold,
have migrated from the study to the sitting-room;--his large furred
doublet is hanging beside his clean bridegroom-nightgown; there is
nothing wanting in the room but He and She. For he had preached her
with him to-night into the empty Apostle's-day church, that so
her mother, without witnesses,--except the two or three thousand
readers who are peeping with me through the window,--might arrange
the provender-baking, and whole commissariat department of the
birthday-festival, and spread out her best table-gear and
victual-stores without obstruction.
The soul-curer reckoned it no sin to admonish, and exhort, and
encourage, and threaten his parishioners, till he felt pretty
certain that the soup must be smoking on the plates. Then he led
his birthday helpmate home, and suddenly placed her before the altar
of meat-offering, before a sweet title-page of bread-tart, on which
her name stood baked, in true _monastic characters_, in tooth-letters
of almonds. In the background of time and of the room, I yet conceal
two--bottles of Pontac. How quickly, under the sunshine of joy, do thy
cheeks grow ripe, Thiennette, when thy husband solemnly says: "This is
thy birthday; and may the Lord bless thee, and watch over thee, and
cause his countenance to shine on thee, and send thee, to the joy of
our mother and thy husband especially, a happy, glad _recovery_.
Amen!"--And when Thiennette perceived that it was the old mistress who
had cooked and served up all this herself, she fell upon her neck, as
if it had been not her husband's mother, but her own.
Emotion conquers the appetite. But Fixlein's stomach was as strong as
his heart; and with him no species of movement could subdue the
peristaltic. Drink is the friction-oil of the tongue, as eating is its
drag. Yet, not till he had eaten and spoken much, did the pastor fill
the glasses. Then indeed he drew the corksluice from the bottle, and
set forth its streams. The sickly mother, of a being still hid beneath
her heart, turned her eyes, in embarrassed emotion, on the old
woman only; and could scarcely chide him for sending to the city
wine-merchant on her account. He took a glass in each hand, for each of
the two whom he loved, and handed them to his mother and his wife, and
said: "To thy long, long life, Thiennette!--And your health and
happiness, Mamma!--And a glad arrival to our little one, if God so
bless us!" "My son," said the gardeneress, "it is to thy long life that
we must drink; for it is by thee we are supported. God grant thee
length of days!" added she, with stifled voice, and her eyes betrayed
her tears.
I nowhere find a livelier emblem of the female sex, in all its
boundless levity, than in the case where a woman is carrying the angel
of Death beneath her heart, and yet in these nine months full of mortal
tokens thinks of nothing more important than of who shall be the
gossips, and what shall be cooked at the christening. But thou,
Thiennette, hadst nobler thoughts, though these too along with them.
The still hidden darling of thy heart was resting before thy eyes like
a little angel sculptured on a gravestone, and pointing with its small
finger to the hour when thou shouldst die; and every morning and every
evening thou thoughtest of death with a certainty of which I yet knew
not the reasons; and to thee it was as if the Earth were a dark mineral
cave, where man's blood, like stalactitic water, drops down, and in
dropping raises shapes which gleam so transiently, and so quickly fade
away! And that was the cause why tears were continually trickling from
thy soft eyes, and betraying all thy anxious thoughts about thy child;
but thou repaidst these sad effusions of thy heart by the embrace in
which, with new-awakened love, thou fellest on thy husband's neck, and
saidst: "Be as it may, God's will be done, so thou and my child are
left alive!--But I know well that thou, Dearest, lovest me as I do
thee." ... Lay thy hand, good mother, full of blessings, on the two;
and thou, kind Fate, never lift thine away from them!--
It is with emotion and good wishes that I witness the kiss of two fair
friends, or the embracing of two virtuous lovers; and from the fire of
their altar sparks fly over to me; but what is this to our sympathetic
exaltation when we see two mortals, bending under the same burden,
bound to the same duties, animated to the same care for the same little
darlings, fall on one another's overflowing hearts, in some fair hour?
And if these, moreover, are two mortals who already wear the mourning
weeds of life, I mean old age, whose hair and cheeks are now grown
colorless, and eyes grown dim, and whose faces a thousand thorns have
marred into images of Sorrow;--when these two clasp each other with
such wearied, aged arms, and so near to the precipice of the grave, and
when they say or think: "All in us is dead, but not our love--O we have
lived and suffered long together, and now we will hold out our hands to
Death together also, and let him carry us away together,"--does not all
within us cry: O Love, thy spark is superior to Time; it burns neither
in joy nor in the cheek of roses; it dies not, neither under a
thousand tears nor under the snow of old age, nor under the ashes of
thy--beloved. It never dies; and Thou, All-good! if there were no
eternal love, there were no love at all....
To the Parson it was easier than it is to me to pave for himself a
transition from the heart to the digestive faculty. He now submitted to
Thiennette (whose voice at once grew cheerful, while her eyes time
after time began to sparkle) his purpose to take advantage of the
frosty weather and have the winter meat slaughtered and salted. "The
pig can scarcely rise," said he; and forthwith he fixed the
determination of the women, further the butcher, and the day, and all
_et ceteras_; appointing everything with a degree of punctuality,
such as the war-college (when it applies the cupping-glass, the
battle-sword, to the overfull system of mankind) exhibits on the
previous day, in its arrangements, before it drives a province into the
baiting-ring and slaughter-house.
This settled, he began to talk and feel quite joyously about the course
of winter, which had commenced to-day at two-and-twenty minutes past
eight in the morning; "for," said he, "new-year is close at hand; and
we shall not need so much candle to-morrow night as to-night." His
mother, it is true, came athwart him with the weapons of her five
senses; but he fronted her with his Astronomical Tables, and proved
that the lengthening of the day was no less undeniable than
imperceptible. In the last place, like most official and married
persons, heeding little whether his women took him or not, he informed
them, in juristico-theological phrase: "That he would put off no
longer, but write this very afternoon to the venerable Consistorium,
in whose hands lay the _jus circa sacra_, for a new Ball to the
church-steeple; and the rather, as he hoped before new-year's day to
raise a bountiful subscription from the parish for this purpose. If God
spare us till spring," added he, with peculiar cheerfulness, "and thou
wert happily recovered, I might so arrange the whole that the ball
should be set up at thy first churchgoing, dame!"
Thereupon he shifted his chair from the dinner and dessert table to the
work-table; and spent the half of his afternoon over the petition for
the steeple-ball. As there still remained a little space till dusk, he
clapped his tackle to his new learned _Opus_, of which I must now
afford a little glimpse. Out of doors among the snow, there stood near
Hukelum an old Robber-Castle, which Fixlein, every day in Autumn, had
hovered round like a _revenant_, with a view to gauge it,
ichnographically to delineate it, to put every window-bar and every
bridle-hook of it correctly on paper. He believed he was not expecting
too much, if thereby--and by some drawings of the not so much vertical
as horizontal walls--he hoped to impart to his "_Architectural
Correspondence of two Friends concerning the Hukelum Robber-Castle_"
that last polish and labor _limae_ which contents Reviewers. For towards
the critical Star-chamber of the Reviewers he entertained not that
contempt which some authors actually feel--or only affect, as, for
instance, I. From this mouldered Robber-_Louvre_, there grew for him
more flowers of joy than ever in all probability had grown from it of
old for its owners.--To my knowledge, it is an anecdote not hitherto
made public, that for all this no man but _Buesching_ has to answer.
Fixlein had, not long ago, among the rubbish of the church letter-room,
stumbled on a paper wherein the Geographer had been requesting special
information about the statistics of the village. Buesching, it is true,
had picked up nothing,--accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his
_Geography_, is still omitted altogether;--but this pestilential letter
had infected Fixlein with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his
palpitating heart was no longer to be stilled or held in check, except
by the assaf[oe]tida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as
with love; both of them for decades long one may equally desire and
forbear; but is the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine,
it burns to the end of the chapter.
Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be
larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bear-skin caps,
were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this
fair _chiaroscuro_ of the day, this colored foreground of the night, he
lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas
discourses therein; and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he
was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine
word-seeds hung round his shoulder,--hold up to him a spoonful of
alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether
she should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though
fonder of roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the
herring-barrel, because his good-wife liked it better?--
Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing
his glass-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his
snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold,
which he pleasantly named his cold collation; namely, the description
of some unutterably frosty land. On the present occasion, it was the
winter history of the four Russian sailors on Nova Zembla. I, for my
share, do often in summer, when the sultry zephyr is inflating the
flower-bells, append certain charts and sketches of Italy, or the East,
as additional landscapes to those among which I am sitting. And yet
to-night he further took up the _Weekly Chronicle_ of Flachsenfingen;
and amid the bombshells, pestilences, famines, comets with long tails,
and the roaring of all the Hell-floods of another Thirty Years' War, he
could still listen with the one ear towards the kitchen, where the
salad for his roast-duck was just a-cutting.
Good-night, old Fixlein! I am tired. May kind Heaven send thee, with
the young year 1794, when the Earth shall again carry her people, like
precious night-moths, on leaves and flowers, the new steeple-ball, and
a thick, handsome--boy, to boot!