After the concluding grace, which is too long, we both of us set to
entering the charitable subsidies and religious donations, which our
parishioners have remitted to the sinking or rather rising fund of the
church-box for the purchase of the new steeple-globe, into two ledgers;
the one of these, with the names of the subscribers, or (in case they
have subscribed for their children) with their children's names
also, is to be inurned in a leaden capsule, and preserved in the
steeple-ball; the other will remain below among the parish Registers.
You cannot fancy what contributions the ambition of getting into the
Ball brings us in; I declare, several peasants, who had given and well
once already, contributed again when they had baptisms; must not little
Hans be in the Ball too?
After this book-keeping by double entry, my gossip took to engraving on
copper. He had been so happy as to elicit the discovery, that, from a
certain stroke resembling an inverted Latin S, the capital letters of
our German Chancery-hand, beautiful and intertwisted as you see them
stand in Law-deeds and Letters-of-nobility, may every one of them be
composed and spun out.
"Before you can count sixty," said he to me, "I take my
fundamental-stroke and make you any letter out of it."
I merely inverted this fundamental-stroke, that is, gave him a German
S, and counted sixty till he had it done. This line of beauty, when
once it has been twisted and flourished into all the capitals, he
purposes, by copperplates which he is himself engraving, to make more
common for the use of Chanceries; and I may take upon me to give the
Russian, the Prussian, and a few other smaller Courts, hopes of proof
impressions from his hand; to under-secretaries they are indispensable.
Now comes evening; and it is time for us both, here forking about with
our fruit-hooks on the literary Tree of Knowledge, at the risk of our
necks, to clamber down again into the meadow-flowers and pasturages of
rural joy. We wait, however, till the busy Thiennette, whom we are now
to receive into our communion, has no more walks to take but the one
between us. Then slowly we stept along (the sick lady was weak) through
the office-houses; that is to say, through stalls and their population,
and past a horrid lake of ducks, and past a little milk-pond of carps,
to both of which colonies, I and the rest, like princes, gave bread,
seeing we had it in view, on the Sunday after the christening, to--take
them for bread for ourselves.
The sky is still growing kindlier and redder, the swallows and the
blossom-trees louder, the house-shadows broader, and men more happy.
The clustering blossoms of the acacia-grove hang down over our cold
collation; and the ham is not stuck (which always vexes me) with
flowers, but beshaded with them from a distance....
And now the deeper evening and the nightingale conspire to soften me;
and I soften in my turn the mild beings round me, especially the pale
Thiennette, to whom, or to whose heart, after the apoplectic crushings
of a down-pressed youth, the most violent pulses of joy are heavier
than the movements of pensive sadness. And thus beautifully runs our
pure transparent life along, under the blooming curtains of May; and in
our modest pleasure, we look with timidity neither behind us nor
before; as people who are lifting treasure gaze not round at the road
they came, or the road they are going.
So pass our days. To-day, however, it was different; by this time,
usually, the evening meal is over; and the Shock has got the
osseous-preparation of our supper between his jaws; but to-night
I am still sitting here alone in the garden, writing the Eleventh
Letter-Box, and peeping out every instant over the meadows, to see if
my gossip is not coming.
For he is gone to town, to bring a whole magazine of spiceries; his
coat-pockets are wide. Nay, it is certain enough that oftentimes
he brings home with him, simply in his coat-pocket, considerable
flesh-tithes from his Guardian, at whose house he alights; though
truly, intercourse with the polished world and city, and the refinement
of manners thence arising--for he calls on the bookseller, on
school-colleagues, and several respectable shop-keepers--does, much
more than flesh-fetching, form the object of these journeys to the
city. This morning he appointed me regent-head of the house, and
delivered me the _fasces_ and _curule chair_. I sat the whole day
beside the young, pale mother; and could not but think, simply because
the husband had left me there as his representative, that I liked the
fair soul better. She had to take dark colors, and paint out for me the
winter landscape and ice region of her sorrow-wasted youth; but often,
contrary to my intention, by some simple elegiac word, I made her still
eye wet; for the too full heart, which had been crushed with other than
sentimental woes, overflowed at the smallest pressure. A hundred times
in the recital I was on the point of saying: "O yes, it was with
winter that your life began, and the course of it has resembled
winter!"--Windless, cloudless day! Three more words about thee the
world will still not take amiss from me!
I advanced nearer and nearer to the heart-central-fire of the woman;
and at last they mildly broke forth in censure of the Parson; the best
wives will complain of their husbands to a stranger, without in the
smallest liking them the less on that account. The mother and the wife,
during dinner, accused him of buying lots at every book-auction; and,
in truth, in such places, he does strive and bid, not so much for good
or for bad books--or old ones--or new ones--or such as he likes to
read--or any sort of favorite books--but simply for books. The mother
blamed especially his squandering so much on copperplates; yet some
hours after, when the Schultheis, or Mayor, who wrote a beautiful hand,
came in to subscribe for the steeple-ball, she pointed out to him how
finely her son could engrave, and said that it was well worth while to
spend a groschen or two on such capitals as these.
They then handed me--for when once women are in the way of a full,
open-hearted effusion, they like (only you must not turn the stop-cock
of inquiry) to pour out the whole--a ring-case, in which he kept a
Chamberlain's key that he had found, and asked me if I knew who had
lost it. Who could know such a thing, when there are almost more
Chamberlains than picklocks among us?--
At last I took heart, and asked after the little toy-press of the
drowned son, which hitherto I had sought for in vain over all the
house. Fixlein himself had inquired for it, with as little success.
Thiennette gave the old mother a persuading look full of love; and the
latter led me up-stairs to an outstretched hoop-petticoat, covering the
poor press as with a dome. On the way thither, the mother told me she
kept it hid from her son because the recollection of his brother would
pain him. When this deposit-chest of Time (the lock had fallen off) was
laid open to me, and I had looked into the little charnel-house, with
its wrecks of a childlike, sportful Past, I, without saying a word,
determined, some time ere I went away, to unpack these playthings of
the lost boy before his surviving brother. Can there be aught finer
than to look at these ash-buried, deep-sunk, Herculanean ruins of
childhood, now dug up and in the open air?
Thiennette sent twice to ask me whether he was come. He and she,
precisely because they do not give their love the weakening expression
of phrases, but the strengthening one of actions, have a boundless
feeling of it towards one another. Some wedded pairs eat each others
lips and hearts and love away by kisses; as in Rome, the statues of
Christ (by Angelo) have lost their feet by the same process of kissing,
and got leaden ones instead; in other couples, again, you may see, by
mere inspection, the number of their conflagrations and eruptions, as
in Vesuvius you can discover his, of which there are now forty-three;
but in these two beings rose the Greek fire of a moderate and
everlasting love, and gave warmth without casting forth sparks, and
flamed straight up without crackling. The evening-red is flowing back
more magically from the windows of the gardener's cottage into my
grove; and I feel as if I must say to Destiny: "Hast thou a sharp
sorrow, then throw it rather into my breast, and strike not with it
three good souls, who are too happy not to bleed by it, and too
sequestered in their little dim village not to shrink back at the
thunderbolt which hurries a stricken spirit from its earthly
dwelling."----
Thou good Fixlein! Here comes he hurrying over the parsonage-green.
What languishing looks full of love already rest in the eye of thy
Thiennette!--What news wilt thou bring us to-night from the town!--How
will the ascending steeple-ball refresh thy soul to-morrow!--