A query which had set the blue-eyed little man roaring with laughter.
These things might be vivid still to her vision: they colored all she
had read since from his magic pen--the wonderful poems interpreting
with equal magic the romance of strange lands and times, or the modern
soul, naked and unashamed, as if clothed in its own complexity; the
humorous-tragic questionings of the universe; the delicious
travel-pictures and fantasies; the lucid criticisms of art, and
politics, and philosophy, informed with malicious wisdom, shimmering
with poetry and wit. But, as for him, doubtless she and her ingenuous
interrogation had long since faded from his tumultuous life.
The odors of the sick-room recalled her to the disagreeable present.
In the sombre light she stumbled against a screen covered with paper
painted to look like lacquer-work, and, as the slip-shod old nurse in
her _serre-tête_ motioned her forward, she had a dismal sense of a
lodging-house interior, a bourgeois barrenness enhanced by two
engravings after Léopold Robert, depressingly alien from that dainty
boudoir atmosphere of the artist-life she knew.
But this sordid impression was swallowed up in the vast tragedy behind
the screen. Upon a pile of mattresses heaped on the floor lay the
poet. He had raised himself a little on his pillows, amid which showed
a longish, pointed, white face with high cheek-bones, a Grecian nose,
and a large pale mouth, wasted from the sensualism she recollected in
it to a strange Christ-like beauty. The outlines of the shrivelled
body beneath the sheet seemed those of a child of ten, and the legs
looked curiously twisted. One thin little hand, as of transparent wax,
delicately artistic, upheld a paralyzed eyelid, through which he
peered at her.
"Lucy _Liebchen_!" he piped joyously. "So you have found out who
Heinrich Heine is!"
He used the familiar German "_du_"; for him she was still his little
friend. But to her the moment was too poignant for speech. The
terrible passages in the last writings of this greatest of
autobiographers, which she had hoped poetically colored, were then
painfully, prosaically true.
"Can it be that I still actually exist? My body is so shrunk that
there is hardly anything left of me but my voice, and my bed makes me
think of the melodious grave of the enchanter Merlin, which is in the
forest of Broceliand in Brittany, under high oaks whose tops shine
like green flames to heaven. Oh, I envy thee those trees, brother
Merlin, and their fresh waving. For over my mattress grave here in
Paris no green leaves rustle, and early and late I hear nothing but
the rattle of carriages, hammering, scolding, and the jingle of
pianos. A grave without rest, death without the privileges of the
departed, who have no longer any need to spend money, or to write
letters, or to compose books...."
And then she thought of that ghastly comparison of himself to the
ancient German singer--the poor clerk of the Chronicle of
Limburg--whose sweet songs were sung and whistled from morning to
night all through Germany; while the _Minnesinger_ himself, smitten
with leprosy, hooded and cloaked, and carrying the lazarus-clapper,
moved through the shuddering city. God's satire weighed heavily upon
him, indeed. Silently she held out her hand, and he gave her his
bloodless fingers; she touched the strangely satin skin, and felt the
fever beneath.
"It cannot be my little Lucy," he said reproachfully. "She used to
kiss me. But even Lucy's kiss cannot thrill my paralyzed lips."
She stooped and kissed his lips. His little beard felt soft and weak
as the hair of a baby.
"Ah, I have made my peace with the world and with God. Now He sends me
His death-angel."
She struggled with the lump in her throat. "You must be indeed a prey
to illusions, if you mistake an Englishwoman for Azrael."
"_Ach_, why was I so bitter against England? I was only once in
England, years ago. I knew nobody, and London seemed so full of fog
and Englishmen. Now England has avenged herself beautifully. She sends
me you. Others too mount the hundred and five steps. I am an annexe to
the Paris Exhibition. Remains of Heinrich Heine. A very pilgrimage of
the royal _demi-monde_! A Russian princess brings the hateful odor of
her pipe," he said with scornful satisfaction, "an Italian princess
babbles of _her_ aches and pains, as if in competition with mine. But
the gold medal would fall to _my_ nerves, I am convinced, if they were
on view at the Exhibition. No, no, don't cry; I meant you to laugh.
Don't think of me as you see me now; pretend to me I am as you first
knew me. But how fine and beautiful _you_ have grown; even to my
fraction of an eye, which sees the sunlight as through black gauze.
Fancy little Lucy has a husband; a husband--and the poodle still takes
three baths a day. Are you happy, darling? are you happy?"
She nodded. It seemed a sacrilege to claim happiness.
"_Das ist schön!_ Yes, you were always so merry. God be thanked! How
refreshing to find one woman with a heart, and that her husband's.
Here the women have a metronome under their corsets, which beats time,
but not music. _Himmel!_ What a whiff of my youth you bring me! Does
the sea still roll green at the end of Boulogue pier, and do the
sea-gulls fly? while I lie here, a Parisian Prometheus, chained to my
bed-post. Ah, had I only the bliss of a rock with the sky above me!
But I must not complain; for six years before I moved here I had
nothing but a ceiling to defy. Now my balcony gives sideways on the
Champs-Elysées, and sometimes I dare to lie outside on a sofa and peer
at beautiful, beautiful Paris, as she sends up her soul in sparkling
fountains, and incarnates herself in pretty women, who trip along like
dance music. Look!"
To please him she went to a window and saw, upon the narrow
iron-grilled balcony, a tent of striped chintz, like the awning of a
café, supported by a light iron framework. Her eyes were blurred by
unshed tears, and she divined rather than saw the far-stretching
Avenue, palpitating with the fevered life of the Great Exhibition
year; the intoxicating sunlight, the horse-chestnut trees dappling
with shade the leafy footways, the white fountain-spray and flaming
flower-beds of the Rond Point, the flashing flickering stream of
carriages flowing to the Bois with their freight of beauty and wealth
and insolent vice.
"The first time I looked out of that window," he said, "I seemed to
myself like Dante at the end of the Divine Comedy, when once again he
beheld the stars. You cannot know what I felt when after so many years
I saw the world again for the first time, with half an eye, for ever
so little a space. I had my wife's opera-glass in my hand, and I saw
with inexpressible pleasure a young vagrant vendor of pastry offering
his goods to two ladies in crinolines, with a small dog. I closed the
glass; I could see no more, for I envied the dog. The nurse carried
me back to bed and gave me morphia. That day I looked no more. For me
the Divine Comedy was far from ended. The divine humorist has even
descended to a pun. Talk of Mahomet's coffin. I lie between the two
Champs-Elysées, the one where warm life palpitates, and that other,
where the pale ghosts flit."
Then it was not a momentary fantasy of the pen, but an abiding mood
that had paid blasphemous homage to the "Aristophanes of Heaven."
Indeed, had it not always run through his work, this conception of
humor in the grotesqueries of history, "the dream of an intoxicated
divinity"? But his amusement thereat had been genial. "Like a mad
harlequin," he had written of Byron, the man to whom he felt himself
most related, "he strikes a dagger into his own heart, to sprinkle
mockingly with the jetting black blood the ladies and gentlemen
around.... My blood is not so splenetically black; my bitterness comes
only from the gall-apples of my ink." But now, she thought, that
bitter draught always at his lips had worked into his blood at last.
"Are you quite incurable?" she said gently, as she returned from the
window to seat herself at his mattress graveside.
"No, I shall die some day. Gruby says very soon. But doctors are so
inconsistent. Last week, after I had had a frightful attack of cramp
in the throat and chest, '_Pouvez-vous siffler?_' he said. '_Non, pas
méme une comédie de M. Scribe_,' I replied. So you may see how bad I
was. Well, even that, he said, wouldn't hasten the end, and I should
go on living indefinitely! I had to caution him not to tell my wife.
Poor Mathilde! I have been unconscionably long a-dying. And now he
turns round again and bids me order my coffin. But I fear, despite his
latest bulletin, I shall go on some time yet increasing my knowledge
of spinal disease. I read all the books about it, as well as
experiment practically. What clinical lectures I will give in heaven,
demonstrating the ignorance of doctors!"
She was glad to note the more genial _nuance_ of mockery. Raillery
vibrated almost in the very tones of his voice, which had become clear
and penetrating under the stimulus of her presence, but it passed away
in tenderness, and the sarcastic wrinkles vanished from the corners of
his mouth as he made the pathetic jest anent his wife.
"So you read as well as write," she said.
"Oh, well, De Zichlinsky, a nice young refugee, does both for me most
times. My mother, poor old soul, wrote the other day to know why I
only signed my letters, so I had to say my eyes pained me, which was
not so untrue as the rest of the letter."
"Doesn't she know?"
"Know? God bless her, of course not. Dear old lady, dreaming so
happily at the Dammthor, too old and wise to read newspapers. No, she
does not know that she has a dying son, only that she has an undying!
_Nicht Wahr?_"
He looked at her with a shade of anxiety; that tragic anxiety of the
veteran artist scenting from afar the sneers of the new critics at his
life-work, and morbidly conscious of his hosts of enemies.
"As long as the German tongue lives."
"Dear old Germany," he said, pleased. "Yes, as I wrote to you, for
_you_ are the _liebe Kleine_ of the poem,
'Nennt man die besten Namen,
So wird auch der meine genannt.'"
She was flattered, but thought sadly of the sequel:
"'Nennt man die schlimmsten Schmerzen,
So wird auch der meine genannt'"
as he went on:--
"That was why, though the German censorship forbade or mutilated my
every book, which was like sticking pins into my soul, I would not
become naturalized here. Paris has been my new Jerusalem, and I
crossed my Jordan at the Rhine; but as a French subject I should be
like those two-headed monstrosities they show at the fairs. Besides, I
hate French poetry. What measured glitter! Not that German poetry has
ever been to me more than a divine plaything. A laurel-wreath on my
grave, place or withhold, I care not; but lay on my coffin a sword,
for I was as brave a soldier as your Canning in the Liberation War of
Humanity. But my Thirty Years' War is over, and I die 'with sword
unbroken, and a broken heart.'" His head fell back in ineffable
hopelessness. "Ah," he murmured, "it was ever my prayer, 'Lord, let me
grow old in body, but let my soul stay young; let my voice quaver and
falter, but never my hope.' And this is how I end."
"But your work does not end. Your fight was not vain. You are the
inspirer of young Germany. And you are praised and worshipped by all
the world. Is that no pleasure?"
"No, I am not _le bon Dieu_!" He chuckled, his spirits revived by the
blasphemous _mot_." Ah, what a fate! To have the homage only of the
fools, a sort of celestial Victor Cousin. One compliment from Hegel
now must be sweeter than a churchful of psalms." A fearful fit of
coughing interrupted further elaboration of the blasphemous fantasia.
For five minutes it rent and shook him, the nurse bending fruitlessly
over him; but at its wildest he signed to his visitor not to go, and
when at last it lulled he went on calmly: "Donizetti ended mad in a
gala dress, but I end at least sane enough to appreciate the joke--a
little long-drawn out, and not entirely original, yet replete with
ingenious irony. Little Lucy looks shocked, but I sometimes think,
little Lucy, the disrespect is with the goody-goody folks, who, while
lauding their Deity's strength and hymning His goodness, show no
recognition at all of His humor. Yet I am praised as a wit as well as
a poet. If I could take up my bed and walk, I would preach a new
worship--the worship of the Arch-Humorist. I should draw up the Ritual
of the Ridiculous. Three times a day, when the _muezzin_ called from
the Bourse-top, all the faithful would laugh devoutly at the gigantic
joke of the cosmos. How sublime, the universal laugh! at sunrise,
noon, and sunset; those who did not laugh would be persecuted; they
would laugh, if only on the wrong side of the mouth. Delightful! As
most people have no sense of humor, they will swallow the school
catechism of the comic as stolidly as they now swallow the spiritual.
Yes, I see you will _not_ laugh. But why may I not endow my Deity--as
everybody else does--with the quality which I possess or admire most?"
She felt some truth in his apology. He was mocking, not God, but the
magnified man of the popular creeds; to him it was a mere intellectual
counter with which his wit played, oblivious of the sacred _aura_ that
clung round the concept for the bulk of the world. Even his famous
picture of Jehovah dying, or his suggestion that perhaps _dieser
Parvenu des Himmels_ was angry with Israel for reminding Him of his
former obscure national relations--what was it but a lively rendering
of what German savants said so unreadably about the evolution of the
God-Idea? But she felt also it would have been finer to bear unsmiling
the smileless destinies; not to affront with the tinkle of vain
laughter the vast imperturbable. She answered gently, "You are talking
nonsense."
"I always talked nonsense to you, little Lucy, for
'My heart is wise and witty
And it bleeds within my breast.'
Will you hear its melodious drip-drip, my last poem?--My manuscript,
Catherine; and then you can go take a nap. I am sure I gave you little
rest last night."
The old woman brought him some folio sheets covered with great
pathetically sprawling letters, and when she had retired, he began--
"Wie langsam kriechet sie dahin,
Die Zeit, die schauderhafte Schnecke...?"
His voice went on, but after the first lines the listener's brain was
too troubled to attend. It was agitated with whirling memories of
those earlier outcries throbbing with the passion of life, flaming
records of the days when every instant held not an eternity of
_ennui_, but of sensibility. "Red life boils in my veins.... Every
woman is to me the gift of a world.... I hear a thousand
nightingales.... I could eat all the elephants of Hindostan and pick
my teeth with the spire of Strasburg Cathedral.... Life is the
greatest of blessings, and death the worst of evils...." But the poet
was still reading--she forced herself to listen.
"'Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes,
Old faded gods, this brain is full;
Who, for their most unholy rites,
Have chosen a dead poet's skull.'"
He broke off suddenly. "No, it is too sad. A cry in the night from a
man buried alive; a new note in German poetry--_was sage ich?_--in
the poetry of the world. No poet ever had such a lucky chance
before--_voyez-vous_--to survive his own death, though many a one has
survived his own immortality. Dici _miser_ ante obitum nemo
debet--call no man wretched till he's dead. 'Tis not till the journey
is over that one can see the perspective truthfully and the tombstones
of one's hopes and illusions marking the weary miles. 'Tis not till
one is dead that the day of judgment can dawn; and when one is dead
one cannot see or judge at all. An exquisite irony. _Nicht Wahr?_ The
wrecks in the Morgue, what tales they could tell! But dead men tell no
tales. While there's life there's hope; and so the worst cynicisms
have never been spoken. But I--I alone--have dodged the Fates. I am
the dead-alive, the living dead. I hover over my racked body like a
ghost, and exist in an interregnum. And so I am the first mortal in a
position to demand an explanation. Don't tell me I have sinned, and am
in hell. Most sins are sins of classification by bigots and poor
thinkers. Who can live without sinning, or sin without living? All
very well for Kant to say: 'Act so that your conduct may be a law for
all men under similar conditions.' But Kant overlooked that _you_ are
part of the conditions. And when you are a Heine, you may very well
concede that future Heines should act just so. It is easy enough to be
virtuous when you are a professor of pure reason, a regular, punctual
mechanism, a thing for the citizens of Königsberg to set their watches
by. But if you happen to be one of those fellows to whom all the roses
nod and all the stars wink ... I am for Schelling's principle: the
highest spirits are above the law. No, no, the parson's explanation
won't do. Perhaps heaven holds different explanations, graduated to
rising intellects, from parsons upwards. Moses Lump will be satisfied
with a gold chair, and the cherubim singing, 'holy! holy! holy!' in
Hebrew, and ask no further questions. Abdullah Ben Osman's mouth will
be closed by the kisses of houris. Surely Christ will not disappoint
the poor old grandmother's vision of Jerusalem the Golden seen through
tear-dimmed spectacles as she pores over the family Bible. He will
meet her at the gates of death with a wonderful smile of love; and, as
she walks upon the heavenly Jordan's shining waters, hand in hand with
Him, she will see her erst-wrinkled face reflected from them in
angelic beauty. Ah, but to tackle a Johann Wolfgang Goethe or a
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing--what an ordeal for the celestial Professor
of Apologetics! Perhaps that's what the Gospel means--only by becoming
little children can we enter the kingdom of heaven. I told my little
god-daughter yesterday that heaven is so pure and magnificent that
they eat cakes there all day--it is only what the parson says,
translated into child-language--and that the little cherubs wipe their
mouths with their white wings. 'That's very dirty,' said the child. I
fear that unless I become a child myself I shall have severer
criticisms to bring against the cherubs. O God," he broke off
suddenly, letting fall the sheets of manuscript and stretching out his
hands in prayer, "make me a child again, even before I die; give me
back the simple faith, the clear vision of the child that holds its
father's hand. Oh, little Lucy, it takes me like that sometimes, and I
have to cry for mercy. I dreamt I _was_ a child the other night, and
saw my dear father again. He was putting on his wig, and I saw him as
through a cloud of powder. I rushed joyfully to embrace him; but, as I
approached him, everything seemed changing in the mist. I wished to
kiss his hands, but I recoiled with mortal cold. The fingers were
withered branches, my father himself a leafless tree, which the winter
had covered with hoar-frost. Ah, Lucy, Lucy, my brain is full of
madness and my heart of sorrow. Sing me the ballad of the lady who
took only one spoonful of gruel, 'with sugar and spices so rich.'"
Astonished at his memory, she repeated the song of Ladye Alice and
Giles Collins, the poet laughing immoderately till at the end,
"The parson licked up the rest,"
in his effort to repeat the line that so tickled him, he fell into a
fearful spasm, which tore and twisted him till his child's body lay
curved like a bow. Her tears fell at the sight.
"Don't pity me too much," he gasped, trying to smile with his eyes; "I
bend, but I do not break."
But she, terrified, rang the bell for aid. A jovial-looking
woman--tall and well-shaped--came in, holding a shirt she was sewing.
Her eyes and hair were black, and her oval face had the rude coloring
of health. She brought into the death-chamber at once a whiff of
ozone, and a suggestion of tragic incongruity. Nodding pleasantly at
the visitor, she advanced quickly to the bedside, and laid her hand
upon the forehead, sweating with agony.
"Mathilde," he said, when the spasm abated, "this is little Lucy of
whom I have never spoken to you, and to whom I wrote a poem about her
dark-brown eyes which you have never read."
Mathilde smiled amiably at the Roman matron.
"No, I have never read it," she said archly. "They tell me that Heine
is a very clever man, and writes very fine books; but I know nothing
about it, and must content myself with trusting to their word."
"Isn't she adorable?" cried Heine delightedly. "I have only two
consolations that sit at my bedside, my French wife and my German
muse, and they are not on speaking terms. But it has its
compensations, for she is unable also to read what my enemies in
Germany say about me, and so she continues to love me."
"How can he have enemies?" said Mathilde, smoothing his hair. "He is
so good to everybody. He has only two thoughts--to hide his illness
from his mother, and to earn enough for my future. And as for having
enemies in Germany, how can that be, when he is so kind to every poor
German that passes through Paris?"
It moved the hearer to tears--this wifely faith. Surely the saint that
lay behind the Mephistopheles in his face must have as real an
existence, if the woman who knew him only as man, undazzled by the
glitter of his fame, unwearied by his long sickness, found him thus
without flaw or stain.
"Delicious creature," said Heine fondly. "Not only thinks me good, but
thinks that goodness keeps off enemies. What ignorance of life she
crams into a dozen words. As for those poor countrymen of mine, they
are just the people that carry back to Germany all the awful tales of
my goings-on. Do you know, there was once a poor devil of a musician
who had set my _Zwei Grenadiere_, and to whom I gave no end of help
and advice, when he wanted to make an opera on the legend of the
Flying Dutchman, which I had treated in one of my books. Now he curses
me and all the Jews together, and his name is Richard Wagner."
Mathilde smiled on vaguely. "You would eat those cutlets," she said
reprovingly.
"Well, I was weary of the chopped grass cook calls spinach. I don't
want seven years of Nebuchadnezzardom."
"Cook is angry when you don't eat her things, _chéri_. I find it
difficult to get on with her, since you praised her dainty style. One
would think she was the mistress and I the servant."
"Ah, Nonotte, you don't understand the artistic temperament." Then a
twitch passed over his face. "You must give me a double dose of
morphia to-night, darling."
"No, no; the doctor forbids."
"One would think he were the employer and I the employee," he grumbled
smilingly. "But I daresay he is right. Already I spend 500 francs a
year on morphia, I must really retrench. So run away, dearest, I have
a good friend here to cheer me up."
She stooped down and kissed him.
"Ah, madame," she said, "it is very good of you to come and cheer him
up. It is as good as a new dress to me, to see a new face coming in,
for the old ones begin to drop off. Not the dresses, the friends," she
added gaily, as she disappeared.
"Isn't she divine?" cried Heine enthusiastically.
"I am glad you love her," his visitor replied simply.
"You mean you are astonished. Love? What is love? I have never loved."
"You!" And all those stories those countrymen of his had spread
abroad, all his own love-poems were in that exclamation.
"No--never mortal woman. Only statues and the beautiful dead
dream-women, vanished with the _neiges d'antan_. What did it matter
whom I married? Perhaps you would have had me aspire higher than a
_grisette_? To a tradesman's daughter? Or a demoiselle in society?
'Explain my position?'--a poor exile's position--to some
double-chinned _bourgeois_ papa who can only see that my immortal
books are worth exactly two thousand marks _banco_; yes, that's the
most I can wring out of those scoundrels in wicked Hamburg. And to
think that if I had only done my writing in ledgers, the 'prentice
millionaire might have become the master millionaire, ungalled by
avuncular advice and chary cheques. Ah, dearest Lucy, you can never
understand what we others suffer--you into whose mouths the larks drop
roasted. Should I marry fashion and be stifled? Or money and be
patronized? And lose the exquisite pleasure of toiling to buy my wife
new dresses and knick-knacks? _Après tout_, Mathilde is quite as
intelligent as any other daughter of Eve, whose first thought when she
came to reflective consciousness was a new dress. All great men are
mateless, 'tis only their own ribs they fall in love with. A more
cultured woman would only have misunderstood me more pretentiously.
Not that I didn't, in a weak moment, try to give her a little polish.
I sent her to a boarding-school to learn to read and write; my child
of nature among all the little school-girls--ha! ha! ha!--and I only
visited her on Sundays, and she could rattle off the Egyptian Kings
better than I, and once she told me with great excitement the story of
Lucretia, which she had heard for the first time. Dear Nonotte! You
should have seen her dancing at the school ball, as graceful and
maidenly as the smallest shrimp of them all. What _gaieté de coeur_!
What good humor! What mother-wit! And such a faithful chum. Ah, the
French women are wonderful. We have been married fifteen years, and
still, when I hear her laugh come through that door, my soul turns
from the gates of death and remembers the sun. Oh, how I love to see
her go off to Mass every morning with her toilette nicely adjusted and
her dainty prayer-book in her neatly gloved hand, for she's adorably
religious, is my little Nonotte. You look surprised; did you then
think religious people shock me!"