Clotilda's Letter.--The Night-Express.--Rents and Gashes
in the Band of Friendship.
I was going to have inserted in the Magazine of Literature, that I
needed _Herrnschmidt's osculologia_[64] for my (learned) labors,--that
is for this Chapter. I wanted to find out from it, how in
Herrnschmidt's times they managed with women. In Jean Paul's times,
they treat them miserably, that is to say in romances. Only an
Englishman can portray excellent women. In the hands of most German
romance-founders, the women turn out men, the coquettes w----, the
statues lumps, the flower-pieces kitchen-pieces. That the fault lies
more with the artists than with the models, not only the models
themselves know, but also the Mining-Superintendent, even from the
fact, that the female readers of romances are all even more romantic
than the heroines of them,--more refined and reserved. The
Mining-Superintendent will here--without any design of having eight
distinguished women in Mayence bear him to the grave, as they did the
women's minstrel and meister-singer, Henry Frauenlob--swear a printed
oath (or simply _swear_ in print) that he has found most of his
contemporaries better than the good, open, but empty and rough head of
the author of the Alcibiades and Nordenschild[65] can draw them. In
fact, if women did not forgive men everything, even authors, (and in
truth they do it seventy times a day, and offer the other cheek, when
one has been offended by a kiss,) then no circulating-library keeper
could explain how it is that human beings, whose head nevertheless is
heavier, whose pineal gland is smaller, and who have six more annular
cartilages to the windpipe,--that is, in all, twenty, probably for the
sake of their more speaking,--whose breast-bone is shorter, and whose
breast-bones are softer than men's,--how such human beings of the
female sex can still send their maid or footman to a circulating
library with the commission: "A romance of chivalry for my
mademoiselle!" My colleagues of the quill--in reference to women I am,
according to miners' language, one of the _feather_,[66] not of _fire_
nor of _leather_--are elected for the education of female readers, as,
according to Lessing, the Jews were for the education of the nations,
for the simple reason that they are ruder than their pupils.
Every woman is finer than her station. She gains more by culture than
the man. The female angels (but so also the female devils) are kept
only in the highest and finest human drawers; they are butterflies, on
whom the velvet-wing between two rough man's-fingers becomes a naked,
skinny flap; they are tulips, whose colored leaves a single grasp of
fate rubs down into a smutty leather.----
I bring forward all this, in order that Herr Kotzebue and the shameless
Poets'-corner in Jena[67] and the whole romantic crew may not take it
ill of my Clotilda that she imitates more her own sex than the
aforesaid tribe, and so much the more, as she can allege in her
defence, that she has not yet read this.
Through Agatha came very soon an answer from Clotilda, superscribed by
Emanuel, which was inwardly sealed in the style of ambassadors,
geometrically cut, and calligraphically written, because ladies execute
all things that require the attention of the senses better than we, and
because they--for hardly four of my acquaintance need I except--are
exactly the opposite of men, in that the better they think, the finer
they write. Lavater says the handsomest painter produces the handsomest
pictures; and I say, fair hands write a fair hand.
Clotilda's letter sets itself with an ornamental belt and a live hedge
full of blossoms across our Doctor's path and shuts him off from
Maienthal. For it runs thus:--
"MOST WORTHY FRIEND,--
"Perhaps no maiden is so happy as a poetess; and I think, here in this
charming valley one at last becomes both. You are happy everywhere, for
you can be a poet even at a court, as your beautiful poetic epistle
shows me. But fancy loves to paint from paint-boxes,--the true
Maienthal cannot give yours so much as you know how to put into the
three landscape-pictures of it. As often as you and I are obliged to
make good the absence of the same things by imagination: only with you
is the compensation greater than the sacrifice.
"If I could by persuasion have procured you the pleasure of seeing Herr
Emanuel, gladly would I have done it; but I was at last, from
conscientious scruples, not eloquent enough to induce him to make the
journey, which would expose his weak breast to the danger of bleeding
to death. Regard him as a Spring, for which every year one must wait
nine months.
"Ah, my anxiety for my unforgettable and irreplaceable teacher casts a
shadow over the whole present Spring, as a monument does over a
flower-garden. I have never looked upon a Spring so gladly and joyfully
as on this.--I can often, even by moonlight, go out along the brooks,
and look for a flower which trembles beside the liquid mirror, and
around which a moon above and another below fling their lustre, and I
represent to myself the floral festival in the East, at which (as they
say) a mirror and two lights are placed by night around every
garden-flower. And yet I cannot look over to the flower-beds of my
teacher, without being too much affected by the thought, Who knows
whether his tulips will not stand longer than his crippled form? Has
then the whole medical art no remedy that shall frustrate his hope of
death?--It seems to me he is gradually attuning me to his melancholy
tone, whereby I should make myself ridiculous before any other than the
friend of Emanuel; but a still, hidden joy loves to break out even into
melancholy. 'Only in the cold, not in the fair season of our destiny,'
you once said, 'do the warm drops pain us, which fall from the eyes
upon the soul, just as only in winter one must not sprinkle flowers
with warm water.' And why should I not disclose to your open heart all
the weaknesses of mine? This chamber, wherein my Giulia ended her
beautiful life, even this looking-glass which, when I turned away for
pain from her dying, showed me once more my pale and fading sister, the
windows, from which my eye so many times a day must fall upon a mournful,
thornful rose-bush, and on an eternally closed mound, all these may,
indeed, cause my heart some sighs more than a happy one should
otherwise have. I know not whether you or Emanuel said, 'The thought of
death must be only our means of improvement, not our end and aim; if
the earth of the grave falls into the heart, just as when it falls into
the heart-leaves of a flower, it destroys instead of fructifying
it';--but on my leaves fate and Giulia have already thrown some
earth.--And I gladly bear it, as I can now, since gaining your
friendship, flee for refuge to a heart, before which I may dare to open
mine, in order to show it therein all the woes, all the sighs, all the
doubts, all the questions of an oppressed soul. O, I thank the
All-Gracious, that as much as he threatens to snatch from me in the
person of my _teacher_, so much he gives me again already in advance in
the person of his _friend_.--My friendship will reach after our Emanuel
even into the next world, and will accompany his darling through this;
and if one day the double stroke of his death should fall on us both,
then would we shed more patiently our united tears, and I should
perhaps say, Ah! his friend Sebastian has lost more than his friend
CLOTILDA!"
* * * * *
The beating of my own heart, a stranger's, is to me a measure of the
beating of the happier one. But before I relate what at the outset
disturbed, and then doubled Victor's joy over this letter, let me be
allowed to make two good observations. The first is: the enhanced
sensibility, in a proud bosom (such as Clotilda's), which otherwise
would call back sighs and send out only female satires at us lords of
the creation, is the fairest token that her heart is melting in the
sunshine of love. For this sentiment reverses women; it makes out of a
Columbine a female Young, out of an orderly a disorderly one, out of a
fine woman a frank one, out of a maker and wearer of finery a female
philosopher, and so _vice versâ_. And do thou, dear Philippina, prove
the second remark, for thou answerest here as well as thy own brother:
Is not the concealment of love the sweetest confession of it? Does not
a veil--a moral one, I mean--show the whole face, and is it not
permeable to everything except the wind,--the moral wind, I mean?--Does
not the glass case of a lady's watch reveal the whole varnished
watch-portrait at the bottom, and exclude merely _soiling_, not
_seeing_? And what observations wilt thou make, when I rehearse to thee
these two!
The letter strengthened at once Victor's wish to be about Clotilda, and
his power to give it up,--until, the next day at supper-time, an
accident changed all. Matthieu, who paid almost more visits to enemies
than to friends, came up from the Apothecary's. He saw the views of
Maienthal and the crape hat; and as he knew that his sister Joachime
had both, he said jokingly, "I fancy, you are going to dress yourself up
in borrowed robes, or somebody has been disrobing." Victor fluttered
away over the subject with a gay, vacant "Both." He was unwilling to
take upon his lips the name of love or of a woman before a man who had
no faith in virtue, least of all in woman's, who, to be sure, as other
spiders do on other music, let himself down by his threads upon love,
but who, as mice do, from love for the tones, crept over the strings
and snapped them. Victor never loved (before his court-life) to be with
such philosophical defamers among blameless maidens, because it pained
him even to be reminded of their point of view. "They must not," said
he, "learn so much as the existence of a daughter of mine, because they
insult a father in the very act of imagining her to themselves."
Matthieu spoke of the next Patriotic Club (on the 4th of May, the
birth-day of the Parson) and asked whether he would be there. Agatha,
however, had already reminded him of it yesterday (the last day but one
of April). At last Mat proposed his question, "Whether he would not
also be of the party at Whitsuntide. He had planned a little excursion
with the Regency-Councillor (Flamin), who always needed holidays for
that purpose, to Grosskussewitz to the Count of O.'s. He had business
there, to pay for some lodgings of the court to the Kussewitzers, and
put the Count of O. in tune for an amicable adjustment of the recent
misunderstanding; therefore he must have the lawyer with him. Perhaps
the Englishmen would be at this Congress,--the travelling corps might
then have as great entertainment as a _corps diplomatique_, after
having first had just such occupation as theirs. The Count of O., in
fact, loved Englishmen very much, though he did not like to ride
English horses,--for he had been very sorry that he had lately talked
with the distinguished Court-Physician at the Princess's without
knowing you." Sebastian had concluded his long, dumb attention with a
cold "No!" because the perspiration of this false, flying cat[68]
overspread his unprotected heart with an eating poison. "What have I
done to this man," thought he during that invitation, "that he pursues
me eternally,--that with a knife, of which one side is poisoned, or
both, he cuts away, amidst the double pangs of both of us, my youth's
friend from my soul,--that he runs out his mines even to strange
places, in order in all situations to have me over his powder?" Victor
had, namely, after all, reason to fear that the Whitsuntide journey was
a voyage of discovery, upon which Joachime might propound to her
brother, as Chevalier Michaelis[69] did to the Oriental travellers,
questions about the case of the watch-letter, about Tostato, &c., in
order, perhaps, to form out of it all an impeachment before the Prince.
He held the lower side of his card, i. e. of his _virtuous pain_, in
such a way that Matthieu could not quite see it, so as to deprive him
of a _malicious pleasure_. The latter, who wore not a lace mask, but an
iron one, and besides one with a neck, showed often such coldness, that
one did not comprehend his furious wrath and _vice versâ_,--but the one
(the coldness) he had in camp, the other (the wrath) in the fight
against the foe. If any one immediately enraged him, it was a good
sign, and meant that he had no design against him.
After the evacuation of the Evangelist,--when he had done scolding at
himself for letting him find the crape hat, which, in fact, he would
have kept more concealed if Flamin had came oftener,--he looked round
for Clotilda's profile, that the charming shadow might cool his wrath.
It was not to be found: his first hypothesis was that Mat had quietly
stolen it, which was the more likely, as he had cut it. If he has
really pocketed the profile, then must the Evangelist--for, as is well
known, the silhouette was made over _to me_ at the very beginning of
this story--be actually my corresponding fellow-member Knef, and it is
he who sent me the advice-boat,--namely, the Pomeranian dog.--Odd
enough it is that my correspondent himself by such intelligence sets me
upon the suspicion.
While Victor took the dear crape hat into his hand as a compensation
for the likeness, and dreamily contemplated it, there sprang forth on
the hat wholly new, fresh flowers for his soul. "What!" he said to
himself, "must I then have only the profile to look at? Can I not
choose the--original itself for that purpose?" In short, the hat became
an urn of fortune, from which he drew a joyous hour, that is the
determination to travel on Whitsuntide, but to--Maienthal. He seriously
reflected, that for him and Clotilda this excessive indulgence of a
jealous brother, whose mistaken hopes no sister indeed was obliged to
strengthen, was besides aggravated and frustrated by the misanthropic
suggestions of Matthieu,--that, therefore, their separation was as
little of an alleviation as their meeting was a crime,--that,
meanwhile, it would be a fine thing to spare the brother and to take
merely the time of his absence for a suspicious excursion, till one day
the drawing down of the bandage should disclose in the unfaithful one
the sister, and in the rival the forbearing friend,--and that it was at
all events better to talk with her in Maienthal than, at his return,
when he was near,--and that a brother enlightened in regard to his
origin would certainly one day have nothing to reproach him with,
except that he had taken from him no other illusions than, at most,
disagreeable ones.--O, Love and Virtue have a naked conscience, and
apologize for their heavenly pleasures longer and more than other
qualities do for their infernal ones!
When Victor further thought on _this_, how soon leaf and blossom drop
off from the days of love, and that Emanuel, and even Clotilda, were
two flowers moved close to the brink of the grave, whose loose, naked
roots already hung down dead, then was his resolution fixed, and he
wrote to Emanuel the intelligence of his intended arrival at
Whitsuntide, in order not to anger Clotilda by a surprise, and in
order, besides, to allow her the opportunity of a countermand. The way
in which he put it was this: "If his Socratic genius would allow it
(i. e. Clotilda), who always told him what he must _not_ do, then he
was coming on Whitsuntide, as, besides, the town would then be
deserted, as Flamin was to be gone for four or five days to Kussewitz,
&c."
When he had finished the letter, it occurred to him that this very day
a year ago; on the 29th of April, he had travelled all night, in order
with the first of May in the morning to enter through the mist into the
parsonage. "I can, verily, again spend the sultry zephyr-night, not
under the coverlet, but under the stars. I can take one steady gaze
into the evening-red towards Maienthal's mountains. I can, indeed,
better still, go half the way over them,--or in fact the whole. I can
post myself on a hill and look down into the hamlet. Truly I can then
deliver my billet here incognito to some Maienthaler, and take flight
again before it is yet day."
At seven o'clock in the evening he went, like the sea, from east to
west. Orion, Castor, and Andromeda glisten in the west, not far from
the evening-red, over the fields of the loved one, and, like her, will
soon sink from one heaven into another. His heart agitated by nothing
but hopes, the _heated_ chambers of his brain, on whose walls Maienthal
sketched with _sympathetic_ ink came forth in ever clearer outlines and
brighter colors, this inner and almost painful din of joy deprived him
at first of the power of taking in the temple of Spring, built up in
Grecian beauty, with a still, luminous soul. Nature and Art are best
enjoyed only with a clean eye, from which both kinds of tears have been
wiped away.
But at last the outspread _night-piece_ covered over his hot
_fever-images_, and heaven with its lights, and earth with its shadows,
made their way into his expanded heart. The night was without
moonlight, but without clouds. The temple of nature, like a Christian
temple, was sublimely dimmed. Victor could not make his way up out of
the trenches of long valleys, out of the glooms of woods, and out of
the mists of meadows with their play of colors, till the midnight hour,
when he climbed a mountain like a throne, and there lay down on his
back in order to plunge his eyes into the heavens, and cool off from
his dreaming and racing. The low-hanging blue of heaven seemed to him
to be a thin blue cloud, a sea dashed into blue mists, and one sun
after another with its long rays slightly parted this blue flood.
Arcturus, who stood over against the reclining man, was already
descending from the battlements of heaven, and three great
constellations, the Lynx, the Bull, and the Great Bear, marched far in
the van under the western gate.--These nearer suns were encircled by
remote milky-ways with a swimming halo, and thousands of vast heavens
flung into eternity stood in our heaven as white vapors a span in
length, as faintly luminous snow-flakes out of immensity, as silver
circles of hoar-frost.--And the strata of suns crowded together, which
only before the thousand-eyed eye of Art let fall their misty veil,
played like streaks of _our_ little particles of sun-dust in the
glowing sunbeam of the Eternal that burned through the immeasurable
space. And the reflection of his throne, glowing through and through,
lay bright on all the suns.----
--Suddenly, nearer at hand, molten cloudlets of light, nearer mists,
which had flown upward out of dew, take their stations, during their
silvering, low down before the suns, and the silvery gleam of heaven
comes on apace with scattered dark fleeces.----Victor cannot comprehend
the supernatural kindling, and starts up, enchanted, to his feet....
and lo, our good neighbor and kinsman, the moon, the sixth grand
division of our little earth, had silently, and without the morning's
cry of joy, entered _beside_ the triumphal gate of the sun into the
night of her mother earth with her _half-day_.
And now, when the shadows ran off from all the mountains, and glided
through the discovered landscapes only in brooks between trees, and
when the moon gave the whole dark spring a little morning in the
midnight,--then did Victor, not with nightly melancholy, but with
morning rejuvenescence take the great round play-room of the annual
creation into his awakened eyes, into his awakened soul; and he
surveyed the spring with an internal cry of joy in the midst of the
wide realm of profound silence, with the feeling of immortality in the
circle of sleep.----
Earth also, and not Heaven only, makes man great!
Enter into my soul and into my words, ye May-feelings that throbbed in
the bosom of my Victor, as he looked over the budding, swelling earth,
covered with suns above his head, enclosed in a net of green life that
reached from roots to tree-tops, from mountains to furrows, and borne
up by a second spring under his feet, as he imagined to himself behind
the transpierced earth-crust the sun standing with a day of splendor
under America.--Climb higher, moon, that he may see more easily the
gushing, swollen, dark-green spring, which with little pale spears
crowds upward out of the earth, till it has lifted itself out, full of
glowing flowers, full of waving trees,--that he may descry the plains
which lie under rich leaves, and on whose green track the eye ascends
from the upright flowers on which the cloven charms of light grow
and fix themselves to the bushes bursting into blossoms, and to
the slow trees whose glistening buds sway up and down in the
spring-winds.----Victor had sunk into dreams, when all at once the cold
fanning of the spring-air, which could now play more with little clouds
than with flowers, and the murmur of the spring brooks, which darted
away beside him from all the hills and over every patch of darker
green, woke and bestirred him.--There was the moon that had gone up
unseen, and all the fountains glistened, and the lilies of the
valley came out in white bloom from the green, and round the lively
water-plants danced silver-points. Then did his bliss-burdened look
lift itself in order to rise to God from the earth and from the green
borders of the brooks, and climb up the curved woods, out of which the
iron-sparks and smoke columns[70] leaped above the summits, and far up
the white mountains where winter sleeps in clouds;----but when his holy
sight was in the starry heaven, and was about to look up to God, who
has created night and spring and the soul,--then, weeping and reverent
and lowly and blissful, he fell back with drooping wing.... His heavy
soul could only say, He is!--
But his heart drank its fill of life from the endless, welling,
breathing world around him, above him, under him, wherein force reaches
to force, blossom to blossom, and whose fountains of life shoot from
one earth to another, and whose void spaces are only the paths of the
finer powers and the residence of the lesser ones,--the whole
immeasurable world stood before him, whose distended cataract, spraying
into fragrances and streams, into milky-ways and hearts, between the
_two_ thunders of the summit and the abyss, rapid, starry, flaming,
descends out of a past eternity, and leaps down into a future one,--and
when God looks upon the cataract, then the circle of eternity paints
itself thereon as a rainbow, and the stream does not discompose the
hovering circle....
The blessed mortal rose up and journeyed on in the feeling of
immortality through the spring-life pulsating around him; and he
thought that man, in the midst of so many examples of immutability,
erroneously translated the distinction between his sleep and waking
into the distinction between existence and non-existence. Now his
vigorous, exuberant feelings welcomed every noise, the stroke of the
trip-hammer in the woods, the rush of spring-waters and spring-winds,
and the whir of the partridge.--
At three o'clock in the morning he looked down on Maienthal. He came
upon the mountain relieved by five solitary fir-trees, on which one can
see through the whole village, and again over to the other mountain,
where the weeping birch shades his Emanuel. The embowered cell of the
latter he could not discern, but all the windows of the convent where
his loved one dreamed glistened in the sparkling moonlight. The rapture
of night was still in his breast, and the burning glow of dreams on his
countenance;--but the valley drew him out to the earth, and only gave
his flowers of joy a _firmer_ soil; and the morning-wind cooled his
breath, and the dew his cheeks. The tears rose into his eyes, when they
fell upon the white-curtained windows, behind which a lovely, a wise, a
loved and loving soul was completing its guileless morning-dreams. Ah!
dream, Clotilda, of thy friend, that he is near thee, that he is
turning his overflowing eyes toward thy cell, and that he will vanish,
if thou appearest, and that, nevertheless, he is growing more blessed
from moment to moment,--ah! he too, indeed, is dreaming, and when the
sun rises, the beloved vale will have sunk like thy dream with the
starry heaven.--O, the mountains, the woods, behind which dwells a
beloved soul, the walls which enclose her, look upon man with a
touching magic, and hang before him like sweet curtains of the future
and the past.
The mountain brought before him the image of the painter who had once
been here for the purpose of sketching Clotilda's charms, like a
golden age, as it were, only from a distance, and so of drawing them
nearer,--and this again led his eye into the days of her earlier youth
and her still, pure life at the convent, and it grieved him that a time
had once been, and been lost, in which he had not been able to love
her. As he looked around him, and thought to himself that on all these
paths, by these brooks, under these trees, she had walked, the whole
region became to him holy and living, and every bird that glided over
it seemed to seek his friend, and to love her as he did.
But now with every star that sank back into heaven overhead, a flower
and a bird woke down on the earth,--the way from night to day was
already laid with half-colors,--little clouds came up on the coast of
day,--and Victor was still on the mountain. His fear that the white
window-veil might stir and betray him, was as great as his wish that
the fear might grow greater and greater! Occasionally a curtain swayed,
but none rose.--All at once the throats of the birds woke a magic flute
at the foot of his mountain, and the still Julius came to meet the sun,
that no more shone for him, with his morning-tones. Then, suddenly,
Clotilda's window unveiled itself, and her fair, bright eyes took the
freshened morning into her holy soul. Victor, not considering the
distance, stepped behind one bush after another; but his flight from
the beloved eyes led him nearer to the flute; he was, however, full as
unwilling to appear before Emanuel, whom he supposed to be in the
vicinity of the blind one, as before Clotilda herself. When now only a
few bushes separated him from the tones, he espied on the mountain his
friend Emanuel under the weeping birch. Now he hastened, glad and
trembling, down to Julius, whom he found, with his lily-face, fair as
the younger brother of an angel, with birds flying and singing around
him, leaning against a birch-tree: "What forms, what hearts," thought
he, "adorn this Paradise." How could he, on such a morning, on such a
holy spot, toward so good a youth, have disguised himself, and handed
to him, say, with the imitated voice of his Italian servant, the letter
to Emanuel!--No, that he could not do; he said with a low voice, in
order not to alarm him, "Dear Julius, it is I!"--Then he sank slowly
upon the tender being, and embraced in one breast three hearts, and
handed him the letter with the words, "Give it to thy Emanuel!" and
with the warmest pressure of the dear hand flew farther down the
mountain and away.--
Just at this hour, on this day, a year ago, Giulia also disappeared
from Maienthal, and took nothing with her of the fair flowery ground
but a--grave-mound.
And now when he had escaped behind bushy avenues from the place of the
blessed, his nightly elation gave way to an uncontrollable sadness. The
rising sun drew all the bright colors out of his nightly dream. "Have I
then really seen Maienthal and Julius and all the loved ones, or is it
all only a play of shadows that passed by before me on a cloud whose
colors flickered in the moonlight, and which has melted away?" said
he,--and the brooding day warmed the fresh night-air of his soul into
the sultry fanning of a south-wind. Whereas man generally, like
Raguel,[71] hews out graves in the midnight, and in the morning sun
fills them up again, Sebastian today reversed it.----
Strictly speaking, it was not quite so: but the swift emerging and
reabsorption of the beloved forms, the aggravated longing for them, the
touching contrast between the din of morning and the pause of night,
between the fire of the sun and the moon's twilight, and the dreary
exhaustion of sleeplessness joined to the weariness of the fancy and
the body, all these things wrung from the heart and the tear-glands of
our somnambulist involuntary sweet tears, which had no object, which
flowed neither for joy nor for sorrow, but for yearning.
All at once the fair, cloudless first May-day made to pass before him
the remembrance of the one a year ago, when, like a spring and an
Homeric god, he arrived in a cloud,--and the good man looked with
dew-drops in his eyes upon the dew-drops in the flowers, and said,
inexpressibly touched: "Ah! a year ago I came so happy, became so
unhappy, and now am so happy again,--O ye flying, playing, echoing,
trembling years of man!"--and the holiday-hum of bells from all the
villages (it was St. Philip's and St. James's day) with the soft thrill
of an echo set all his mourning-strings into a responsive quiver.
"O, a year ago," all the bells sang to him, "we escorted Giulia, as we
now do thee, out of Maienthal." Then, as the sun unfolded his white
blossoms in the sky, the warm thought dissolved his heart: "A year ago
this morning thy Flamin went to meet thee, and shed on thy glowing
breast so many tears of joy,--and at the end of this very day he drew
thee again to his heart, and said as if with a presentiment, 'Forget me
not, betray me not, and if thou wilt forsake me, then let me perish
with thee!'--
"O thou faithful one," said all his thoughts, "how it consoles me
to-day, that I once gladly sacrificed all my wishes to thine, in order
to continue true to thee.[72]--No, I cannot conceal anything from him,
I will go to him at once."--He went straight to Flamin, in order
(though without perjury towards his Lordship, and with forbearance
toward jealousy) to confess that he was going at Whitsuntide to
Maienthal. His dismembered heart needed so much an eye that should weep
responsive to it,--his delicate sense of honor scorned so much to make
another's journey the screen of his own,--his renewed love was pained
so at the thought of the least concealment from his friend,--Matthieu
was so completely thrust out from this heavenly-blue Eden under the
walls of the brain,--that the longer he thought and ran, the more would
he lay open. He would, namely, even disclose to his Flamin that he had
this very night delivered with his own hands the note of invitation to
the blind youth: by an illusion, the future Whitsuntide journey was
made more certain through to-day's, and this his own point of view he
looked upon as another's.
But his dreamy and _night-intoxicated_ soul did not carry so far its
dangerous effusion, which might do so much the more harm, as Flamin in
his anger was unable to listen any longer to distinctions and
justifications, and even rejected again old ones which he had before
allowed. For at his entrance a May-frost on Flamin's face closed a
little the opening blossom-cup of his heart. He begged Flamin with his
contrasting warmth of face to take a walk on this bright day. Out of
doors the contrast grew still more sharp, as Flamin thrust his cane
into the ground even to the point of cracking it, beheaded flowers,
whipped off leaves, stamped out footprints with the heel of his boot,
while Victor sought to discourse in one steady stream, in order to
maintain his soul in the warmth which he had brought with him.
One thing about him gratifies me, that he was going to pour out his
heart, overrunning with to-day's renunciations, into the very one which
he had to charge with those renunciations. At last he said, hurriedly,
just for the sake of throwing off from his soul the confession which
hall become so hard to utter, "At Whitsuntide I am going to
Maienthal,"--and then flyingly passed over to the words, "O just a year
ago to-day thou wentest with me."
Flamin interrupted him, and his icy face, like a Hecla, was cloven with
flames: "So! so!--at Whitsuntide? Thou dost not go with _us_ to
Kussewitz!--Let me once for all speak right out, Victor!"--Then they
stopped. Flamin stripped the blossoms and leaves from the branch of a
wild plum-tree with bloody hand, and looked not at his gentle friend,
lest he should be softened himself. "A year ago to-day, sayest thou?
Yes, that very evening I went with thee up to the watch-tower, and we
promised each other either truth or death. Thou sworest to me to throw
thyself headlong with me, whenever thou shouldst have taken all from
me, all,--or, say, _her_ love; for in thy presence she hardly looks at
me any more.--By the Devil, am I then blind? Do I not see, then, that
the machinery of her journey and thine has been all planned out?--What
hast thou to do just now with the Maienthal landscapes? To whom does
the _hat_ belong?--And what am I to infer from all this?--To whom,
whom? say, say!--O God, if it were true!--Help me, Victor!"--In the
eyes of the misused, to-day exhausted Victor stood the bitterest tears,
which Flamin, however, who exasperated himself by his own talking,
could now bear. Never did the latter in a rage accept remonstrances:
nevertheless he expected them, and was astounded at his being in the
right, and at the other party's silence, and desired to be
contradicted. He crushed in his bleeding hand the sloe-thorns. His eye
burned into the weeping one. Victor bewailed his firm oath to his
father, and looked on the trembling balance wherein the oath and
indulgent friendship hung in equipoise. He collected once more all his
love into his breast, and spread his arms wide open, and fain would
draw with them the struggling one to himself, and yet could say nothing
but "I and thou are innocent; but till my father comes, before that I
cannot justify myself."--Flamin repelled him from him: "What is this
for?--So it was at the garden-concert, too, and thou hast since that
been daily with her, and at Easter-balls and in sleighs, without me.
Say rather outright, wilt thou marry _her_?--Swear that thou wilt
not?--O God, hesitate not,--swear, swear!--Ay, ay, Matthieu!--Canst
thou not yet!--Well, then, lie at least!"
"Oh!" said Victor,--and eclipsing blood-streams shot through his brain
and over his face,--"thou shalt not insult me quite too much; I
am as good as thou, I am as proud as thou,--before God my soul is
pure"----But Flamin's blood on the sloe-bush repressed Victor's
indignant exaltation, and he merely lifted a sympathetic eye full of
the tears of friendship to the brighter, softer heaven.--"Only
marriage, forsooth, dost thou not forswear?----Good, good, thou
hast strangled me,--my heart hast thou trampled on, and my whole
happiness.--I had none but thee, thou wast my only friend, now will I
go to the Devil without one.--Thou dost not swear?--Oh, I tear myself
away from thee bloody and wretched, and as thy foe--we part--only
go--away! it is all up--all!--Adieu!" He rushed away, striking his
stick into the ground as he went, and his distracted friend, lying at
the feet of Truth, who lifts the flaming sword against Perjury, and
dying in tears before Friendship, who casts upon the soft heart the
melting look full of entreaties,--Victor, I say, cried, as with dying
voice, after the fleeing friend of his soul: "Farewell, my faithful
Flamin! my never-to-be-forgotten friend! I was indeed true to
thee!--But an oath lies between us.--Dost thou still hear me?--do not
hasten so!--Flamin, dost thou hear me? I love thee still, we shall find
each other again, and come when thou wilt." ... He cried after him more
vehemently, although with stifled, smothered tones: "Honest, precious,
precious soul, I have loved thee very much, and do still and
still,--only be right happy.--Flamin, Flamin, my heart breaks now that
thou art my enemy."--Flamin looked round no more, but his hand seemed
to be on his eyes. The friend of his youth vanished from his sight like
youth itself, and Victor sank down _unhappy_ under the fairest heaven,
with the consciousness of innocence, with all the feelings of
friendship!--O, Virtue itself gives no consolation, if thou hast lost a
friend, and the heart of a man, stabbed by _friendship_, bleeds on
mortally, and all the balm of _love_ avails not to heal or to soothe!--