Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume II Part 1

Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days.

Vol. II.

by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.

HESPERUS,

25. DOG-POST-DAY.

Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.--Julius.--Emanuel's Letter concerning G.o.d.

Good, beautiful s.e.x! Sometimes, when I see a diamond heart hanging above thy warm one, I ask: Is it for some such reason as _this_ thou wearest a copied heart on thy bosom, in order to indicate to Love, Fate, and Slander a common mark for their different arrows, as the poor soldier who is shot kneeling points out to the b.a.l.l.s of his comrades, by a heart cut out of paper, the place of the beating one?

--When this chapter is ended, the reader will no longer ask me, why I begin it thus....

Once Victor came back from a day's walk, when Marie ran breathless to meet him with a letter from Matthieu. It contained the question whether he would not accompany him and his sister to-day to Kussewitz via St.

Luna. Marie's running had arisen merely from a rich messenger's-fee and gratuity on the part of Mat, who often treated poor people at once with generosity and with persiflage, just as he thought his sister at once amiable and absurd. To people who knew him, he therefore appeared comic when he must have been serious. But Victor said "No" to the request for his company; which was very well, for in fact the two had already started. I cannot determine whether it was after two or after three days that they came back, the sister with the coldest face towards him and the brother with the warmest. This double temperature could not be wholly explained, but only about half, on the ground of discoveries which the couple might have made at Tostato's and Count O.'s concerning his disguise and his shop-drama. Heretofore Joachime's anger had always been a consequence of his: now it was the reverse; but this vexed him exceedingly.

Some days after he was standing with the Princess and Joachime in a window of the Ministerial _Louvre_. The conversation was lively enough; the Princess counted over the shops in the market, Joachime was following with her eye the swift zigzag of a swallow, Victor was standing secretly on one leg (the other he set, only apparently and without resting on it, on the floor), to try how long he could hold out. All at once the Princess said, "Holy Mary! how can one carry round a poor child shut up so in a box!" They all peered out into the street.

Victor took the liberty to remark that the poor child was "made of wax." A woman was carrying a little gla.s.s case hanging before her, wherein there slept a swaddled waxen angel; she begged, like the rest, as if for this child, and the little one supported her better than if it had been alive. The Princess called up the new apparition. The woman came in trembling with her mummy-chest, and drew back the little curtain. The Princess bent an artistically enchanted eye on the sweet slumbering form, which (like its wax material) seemed to have been born of flowers and reared in springtimes. All beauty penetrated deeply into her heart; hence she loved Clotilda so exceedingly and many Germans so little. Joachime was fond of only _one_ child and _one_ beauty,--and each was _herself_. Victor said, "This waxen mimic and copy of life had always made him sad, and that he could not even see his own wax counterfeit in St. Luna without shuddering."

"Doesn't it stand in a frock-coat at the window of the parsonage?"

asked Joachime, becoming much more pleasant.

"Isn't it true," he asked in return, "that you thought, some days ago, it was I myself?" He guessed from her look her former error, which perhaps had contributed to excite her against him.

The father confessor of the Princess now came up and added,--after his custom of being complimentary,--that, in order to save him the trouble of a sitting, he would draw him the next time merely from his wax image. The Pater was well known to be a good draughtsman.

I let circ.u.mstances which are less important lie unrelated, and gayly proceed.

It was as early as March, when the higher cla.s.ses, on account of their sedentary winter sleep, are more full-blooded than cold-blooded,--any one who does not understand the matter takes for granted that their overflow of blood proceeds more from their sucking that of others,--when sicknesses leave their visiting-cards in the form of recipes with the whole court,--when the eyes of the Princess, the _embonpoint_ of the princely ether, and the gouty hands of the court apothecary continued the storms of winter; it was even then; I say, that Clotilda also experienced every day more intensely the influence of the winter, and of her double withdrawal from relaxations and of her intercourse with her fancies.... If I must speak sincerely, I attribute little to her seclusion, but all to the necessity which propriety imposes on her of intercourse with the n.o.ble Mat, with the Schleuneses and with other cold-blooded Amphibia;[1] an innocent heart must, in moral frosty weather, like alabaster garden statues in the physical, when the former and the latter have soft, absorbing veins, get cracks, and break.

Thus matters stood with her on a weighty day, when he found with her little Julia. This beloved name she affixed to the child of the Senior, Flamin's landlord, in order to keep alive her sad yearning after her dead Giulia by a similarity of sound, by the relic of an echo. "This funereal tone," said Victor to himself, "is indeed to her the welcome distant roll of the hea.r.s.e which shall come to take her to the friend of her youth; and her expectation of a like fate is truly the most mournful evidence of a like grief." If anything further was needed to purify his friends.h.i.+p from all love, it was this swift falling-off of the leaves of so fair a pa.s.sion-flower;--towards the suffering, one is ashamed of the least selfishness. During the conversation, from which the jealous Julia was excluded by not understanding it, the child in a pet twitched at the servants' bell; for girls make claims to attention eight years earlier than boys. Clotilda forbade this ringing by a too late interdict; the little one, delighted that she had set in motion the chambermaid, who came hastening up, tried again to twitch at the cord. Clotilda said in French to the Doctor, "One must not give her any command too monarchically; now she will not rest till I have tried my extremest method." "Julia!" said she once more, her large eye overflowing with love; but in vain. "Well, now I am going to die!" said she, already dying away, and leaned her fair head, inhabited by a departing genius, back against the chair, and closed her pure eyes, which deserved to open again only in a heaven.--While Victor stood in silent emotion before the still--tranced one, and thought to himself: "If now she should never wake again, and thou shouldst vainly s.n.a.t.c.h her stiff hand, and her last word on this dreary earth should have been, 'Now I am going to die,'--O G.o.d! would there be any other remedy for the inconsolableness of her friend than a sword and the last wound?

And I should clasp with a cold hand her hand, and say, I go with thee!"

As he thought thus, and as the little one, weeping, lifted the sinking right hand, her countenance really grew paler, and the left hand glided down from her lap;--here was that sword's sharp edge drawn across his heart;--but soon she opened her wandering eyes again, coming out of the drowsiness of the death-sleep to herself and to a sense of shame. She excused the transient swoon with the remark, "I have done as that player[2] did with the urn of his child: I imagined myself in the place of my Giulia in her last moments, but a little too successfully."

He was just on the point of drawing up medical pastoral letters against this consuming enthusiasm,--so much does an unhappy love translate every female heart from the _major_ tone into the _minor_, even that of a Clotilda, whose forehead had a manly elevation, and whose chin expressed almost more courage than beauty,--when quite other pastoral letters arrived. The bearer of them was Victor's _happier_ friend Agatha. Send back with thy laugh, thou untroubled one, life into two hearts on which death has flung his flying cloud-shadows! She fell confidingly into two friendly arms; but towards her doctor brother, who so long, instead of his whole person, had let only his hand, i. e. his handwriting, go to St. Luna, she was still shy. But this fault of his, when he had avoided a house one quarter of a year _for_ reasons, of absenting himself from it another quarter of a year _without_ reason,--this fault I cannot wholly condemn, because I--have it myself.

She could not satisfy her eyes with looking at him; her blooming country face showed him, instead of his present pa.s.sion-week of grief, a red chalk drawing of his and her vanished days of joy in the parsonage-garden. He solemnly promised her to be her Easter guest with her brother, and, instead of heads and windows, to break nothing but eggs; he rested not till he was the same old Sebastian and she the same old Agatha again. As she delivered to the two court-people, smiling only from love, the long duodecimo history of the village and her father, not at all as a compiler or epitomist, or in a mutilated edition, but in volumes as long as her heel-ligaments; then did Clotilda and Victor feel how soothing to them was this descent from the glittering, sharp court-glaciers into the soft vales of the middling stations of life, and they both yearned to exchange polished hearts for warm ones. Among men and Borsdorf apples the best are not the smooth ones, but the rough ones that have some warts. This longing for sincere souls, too, it may well have been which wrung from Clotilda the a.s.sertion, that there were mismatches only between souls, not between ranks. Hence came her growing love for this Agatha, who bloomed outside of the forcing-box of a genealogical tree only in the common pasture,--a love which the reader and I in the first volume, from sharp-sightedness, explained as the hiding-cloak of another love toward Flamin, and which ought to wean us both from bringing a reproach upon a heroine, who in the sequel continually refutes it.

The superscription of the thick letter-packet which Agatha brought was in the handwriting of Emanuel, whom Clotilda got to superscribe everything to the parson's wife, in order to save her stepmother the trouble of--closing her letters. Madame Le Baut had learned this _insight_ into doc.u.ments, this Socratic art of midwifery, in the ministry, which possesses the right of search into the letters of all subjects, because it can hold them either as infected or arrested, if it please. While the step-daughter, in the adjoining chamber, broke open the outer packet, because from its thickness she prophesied an enclosed communication for the Doctor: the latter breathed, by chance--or design, for he had, this long time, established everywhere his deciphering offices of women, in the narrowest corner, in every fold of a dress, in the marks of books which had been read,--he breathed, I said, accidentally on the window-panes, on which one can then at once read what a warm finger has written thereon. There came out, after the involuntary breathing, nothing but French initial S's, sketched with the finger-nail. "S!" thought he, "that is singular; that is the beginning of my own name."

His conjectures were interrupted by Clotilda's returning with a face blissfully cleared of all its clouds, and, handing to the thoughtful Medicus a great letter from Emanuel. Upon the heels of this second pleasure followed, in the place of the third, a piece of news; she now disclosed to him, "that Emanuel had at last enabled her to be an obedient, though not believing patient." She had, namely, hitherto suppressed the purpose of her obedience and her spring cure, until her friend in Maienthal had secured her for some spring months a sick-chamber at the Abbess's,--the very one Giulia had had,--that the fanning of spring might there lift her drooping pinions, the incense of flowers heal her torn heart, and the great friend enable _his_ great friend to stand upright.

Victor slipped away hastily, not only from hunger and thirst after what he held in his hand, but because a new flood of thought broke through his old trains of ideas. "Bastian!" said Bastian to himself on the way, "I have often held thee to be stupid, but so stupid as that--no, never.

It is sinful that a man, a court-medicus, a thinker, should ruminate for months, often half-evenings together, and yet not bring the matter out, till he hears it, now for the first time. Verily, even the 'S' on the window fits!" The reader and I will take out of his hands the thing with which he is stoning himself before our faces; for he throws at both of us as well, because we failed to guess at anything just as much as he did. In short, the unknown happy one who makes the fair Clotilda unhappy, and for whom she sighs out her dumb, shy soul, and who for most of her charms has no eye at all, is the blind--Julius in Maienthal. Hence her desire to go thither.

I should like to fill a folio volume with the proofs of this: Victor counted them off on his five fingers. On his thumb he said, "For Julius's sake she seeks little Julia; so, too, is it with Giulia." At the forefinger he said, "The French initial _I_ looks like an _S_ without the cross-stroke." At the middle finger, "Minerva has furnished him, indeed, not merely the flute, but also Minerva's fair face, and in this blind Cupid's-face Clotilda could lose herself without blus.h.i.+ng; even from love for his friend Emanuel, she might have loved him." At the ring-finger, "Hence her justification of mis-matches, since his citizenly ring-finger is to be joined to her n.o.ble one." At the little finger, "By Heaven! all this proves not the least."

For now, for the first time, all the proofs came upon him in a flood: in the first volume of this book there came often an unknown angel to Julius and said: "Be good, I will hover round thee, I will guard thy veiled soul,--I go back into heaven."--

Secondly, this angel once gave Julius a paper, and said, "Conceal it, and after a year, when the birches grow green in the temple, let Clotilda read it to thee; I take my flight, and thou wilt not hear me sooner than a year hence."----

All this fitted Clotilda as if it were moulded on her: she could never unfold to the blind one her dying heart,--she was going just now to Maienthal (how long is it still to Whitsuntide?) to read to him herself the leaf which she had handed to him in the character and mask of an angel,--finally, she was going off precisely then to St. Luna;----in short, everything hits to a hair.

If the Biographer might venture to put in a word, it would be this: The Mining-Superintendent, the Biographer, for his part, believes it all with great pleasure; but as to Clotilda, who hitherto has come forth whitely radiant from every pitchy cloud, and on whom, as on the sun, one has so often confounded _clouds_ with _sun-spots_, he cannot blame her, until she herself sets the example. Victor, as I myself did in the first edition, has even forgotten many proofs of Clotilda's love for Julius: e. g. her warm interest in his blindness, and her desire of his recovery (in her letter to Emanuel), Flamin's obsolete jealousy in Maienthal, even the rapture with which, in the playhouse, she calls the vale an Eden, and rejects the Lethe.

Victor tore open the packet, and two leaves fell out of a large sheet.

One of the notes and the large sheet were from Emanuel, the other from his Lords.h.i.+p. He studied the last, written in double cipher, first; it was as follows:--

"I come in autumn, when the _apples_ ripen,--the Trinity [his Lords.h.i.+p means the Prince's three sons] is found; but the fourth Person [the fourth, merry son] is wanting.--Flee from the Palace of the Empress of all the Russias [with this cipher the two had concerted to designate the Minister Schleunes], but the grand d.u.c.h.ess [Joachime] avoid still more: she wants no heart, but a princely hat.--In Rome [he means Agnola] beware of the crucifix, out of which a stiletto springs! Think of the _Island_, ere thou makest a misstep."

Victor was astonished at first at the accidental appropriateness of these prohibitions; but when he bethought himself that he would have given them to him even on the Island, if they had not referred to his more recent circ.u.mstances, then he was still more astonished at the channels through which the espionage-despatches of his present relations might have reached his father,--(as if my correspondent and spy might not have been the father's also!)--and most of all at the warning against Joachime. "Oh! if she were false to me!" he said, sighing, and would not complete the dark picture nor the sigh.----But he drove both away by the little leaf from Emanuel, which read thus:--

"My Son:--

"The dawn of the new year shone on my face across the snow, as I placed before me the paper [Emanuel's second immediately following letter], upon which I sought to impress for the last time my soul with all its images reaching out beyond this globe. But the flames of my soul dart even to the body, and singe the frail thread of life; I was obliged often to turn away my too easily bleeding breast from the paper and from my rapture.

"I have, my son, written to thee with my blood.--Julius has now the thought of G.o.d.--The spring glows under the snow, and will soon lift itself up out of the green, and bloom even to the clouds.--My daughter [Clotilda] takes spring by the hand and comes to me,--let her take my son with the other hand, and lay him on my breast, wherein is a failing breath and an everlasting heart.... O how melodiously sound around me the evening bells of life!--Ay, when thou and thy Clotilda and our Julius, when we all, we who love each other, stand together, when I hear your voices, then shall I look to Heaven and say, The evening bells of life sound around me too mournfully; I shall for ecstasy die still earlier than the eve of the longest day, and ere my sainted father has appeared to me.

"EMANUEL."

Dear Emanuel, that, alas! thou wilt do! The heaven of joy presses downward to thy lips, and amidst breezes, amidst tones, amidst kisses, it drinks up thy flickering breath; for the earthly body which will only _graze_, not _pluck_, digests only _lowly_ joys, and chills under the beam of a higher sun!--

With emotion I draw aside from Victor's distracted, irrecognizable face the veil which covers his sorrows. Let us look upon thee, disconsolate man, who art going to meet a spring where thy heart is to lose everything: Emanuel by death, Clotilda by love, Flamin by jealousy, even Joachime by suspicion! Let us look upon thee, impoverished one; I know why thy eye is still dry, and why thou sayst brokenly and with a shake of the head, "No, my dear Emanuel, I shall not come, for indeed I cannot."--What ate most deeply into thy heart was, that thy true Emanuel should be the very one who still believed thou wert loved by his friend.--An undeveloped sorrow is without tears or signs; but when man through fancy draws out of his own bosom a heart full of confluent wounds, and counts the gashes, and then forgets that it is his own, then does he weep sympathetically at that which beats so painfully in his hands, and then he bethinks himself and weeps still more. Victor would fain release as it were by warming his stiff soul from frozen tears, and went to the balcony window and pictured to himself, while the suppressed evening-glow of March burned out of the clouds over the hills of Maienthal, Clotilda's marriage to Julius.--O, in order to make himself right sad, he drew a spring day over the vale, the genius of love flung open, above the nuptial altar, the blue heaven, and bore the sun as bridal torch without cloud-smoke through the pure immensity.--There walked, on that day, Emanuel transfigured, Julius blind, but blissful, Clotilda blus.h.i.+ng and long since well again, and every one was happy. Only one unhappy one he saw there standing among the flowers, namely, himself; he saw there, how this afflicted one, chary of words for sorrow, joyous from virtue, more familiar and confidential with the bride from coldness, went round among the rest, so unknown, properly so superfluous; how the guiltless pair, with every sign of love, reckoned up before him all that he had lost, or indeed concealed those signs from forbearance, because they guessed his grief;--this thought darted at him like a blaze;--and how at last, as the heavy-laden past brought all his slain hopes and his withered wishes before him, he turned round, when the beloved pair went from him to the altar and to the eternal covenant, how he turned round inconsolably toward the still, empty fields, to weep infinitely, and how he then remained so alone and dark in the fair region, and said to himself: "In thee, no human being takes an interest to-day,--none presses thy hand, and says, 'Victor, why weepest thou so?'--Oh! this heart is as full of unspeakable love as any other, but it fades unloved and unknown, and its dying and its weeping disturb no one.

Nevertheless, nevertheless, O Julius! O Clotilda! I wish you eternal happiness, and only contented days." ... Then he could do no more; he pressed his eyes to his hands and to the window-frame, and gave free play to them, and thought of nothing more; the sorrow, which, like a rattlesnake, had watched with distended jaws him and his charmed and writhing approaches, now seized and swallowed him and crushed him to pieces....

Soft hearts, ye torment yourselves as much on this flinty earth as hard ones do _others_,--the spark which only makes a burn, ye swing round till it becomes a wheel of fire, and under the blossoms a sharp leaf becomes to you a thorn!... But why, I say to myself, dost thou show that of thy friend and open afresh remote similar wounds in men who have been healed?--O, answer for me, ye who resemble him, could you do without a single tear? And since the woes of fantasy are to be reckoned among the joys of fantasy,--a moist eye and a heavily drawn breath are the least with which we buy a fair hour....

--Pride--the best counterpoise to effeminate tears--wiped away my hero's, and said to him: "Thou art worth as much as they who are more fortunate; and if unhappy love has. .h.i.therto made thee bad, how good might not a happy love make thee!" There was stillness in and around him; night stood in heaven; he read Emanuel's letter.

"My Horion!

"Within a few hours Time has reversed its hour-gla.s.s, and now the sands of a new year are trickling down.--Ura.n.u.s strikes for our little earth the centuries, the sun strikes the years, the moon the months; and on this concert clock, constructed out of worlds, human beings come forth as images, that utter cries and tones of joy, when it strikes.

"I too come out gladly under the fair new-year's dawn, which gleams through all the clouds, and flames up the high hemisphere of heaven. In a year I shall look into the sin from another world: O how my heart, for this last time, under the earthly cloud, overflows with love toward the Father of this fair earth, toward his children and my brothers and sisters, toward this flowery cradle, wherein we only once awake, and amidst its rocking in the sun only once fall asleep!

"I shall never live to see another summer-day, therefore will I describe the fairest one, on which, with thy Julius[3] I for the first time tremblingly penetrated through luminous clouds, and through harmonies, and fell down with him before a thundering throne, and said to him, 'Overhead, in the immeasurable cloud which they call eternity, He dwells, who has made us and loves us.' This day will I to-day repeat in my soul; and never, too, may it be extinguished in my Julius or my Horion!

"I have often said to my Julius, 'I have not yet given thee the greatest thought of man, which bows down his soul and yet erects it again forever; but I will name it to thee on the day when thy spirit and mine are the purest, or when I die.' Hence he often begged me, when _his angel_ had been with him, or when the flute and the awe-inspiring night or a tempest had exalted him, 'Name to me, Emanuel, the greatest thought of man!'