Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 34

He placed himself before the open grave, and delivered this speech more to invisible than to visible hearers:--

"So, then, the epitaph on the tomb is _versio interlineario_ of this small, small printed life of ours. The heart does not rest until, like the head, it is set in gold.[93] Thou hidden Infinite one! make, for me, the grave a prompter's tube, and tell me what I am to think of the whole theatre. Indeed, what _is_ there in the grave? Some ashes, a few worms, coldness, and night--by Heaven! there is nothing better _above_ it either, except that one _feels_ it. Mr. Schulrath, Time sits behind us, and reads the calendar of life so cursorily, and turns over the page of month after month at such a rate, that I can fancy this grave--this moat here about our castles in the air--this fortress trench--lengthening out and extending till it reaches my bed, and I am shaken out of the bedclothes into this cooking-hole, like a heap of Spanish flies. 'Go on,' I would say, 'Go on. I shall come either to old Fritz, or to his worms--and therewith _Basta_! 'By Heaven! one is ashamed of life when the greatest of men no longer possess it. And so _holla_!"

CHAPTER XXII.

JOURNEY THROUGH FANTAISIE--RE-UNION ON THE BINDLOCHER MOUNTAIN-- BERNECK--MAN-DOUBLING--GEFREES--EXCHANGE OF CLOTHES--MUNCHBERG-- SOLO-WHISTLING--HOF--THE STONE OF GLADNESS AND DOUBLE-PARTING.

Henry now plied more wings than any seraph, that he might fly up with his friend as soon as possible. He packed up the latter's ma.n.u.scripts in haste, and addressed them to Vaduz. The sealed will and testament was lodged with the proper authorities, from whom, also, the necessary certificate of death was obtained to show the Prussian Widows' Fund that it was not being defrauded. And then he got fairly afloat, and pushed off, having first bestowed some weighty grounds for consolation--as well as some weighty ducats--upon the downcast straw-widow, who mourned in the striped calico-dress, as was right and proper.

Let us now overtake and accompany his departed friend, even before he himself does so. During the first hour of his night-journey, vague and disordered pictures of the past and of the future struggled in Firmian's heart; and it seemed to him as if, _for him_, there were no such thing as a present, but that a wilderness stretched between the past and the future. But the fresh, rich harvest month of August soon gave him back the life he had (so to speak) played away; and when the gleaming morning was come in earnest, the earth was lying all lighted up with a new-fallen thunderstorm, now emitting lovely lightning only from drops hanging on the corn-ears, as if over-silvered by the moon.

It was a new earth; he was a new creature, just burst, with ripened pinions, through the egg-sh.e.l.l of the coffin. Oh! a broad, marshy, overshadowed desert-waste, where a long, long troubled dream had kept driving him to and fro, had vanished _with_ that dream, and he was awake, and gazing deep into Eden. The last week (and that last week especially) had stretched out to enormous length those twisted convolutions of suffering which give to our brief lives a false appearance of being much too long (as we make the short walks of a garden seem longer by laying them out in curves and sweeps). On the other hand, his lightened breast, now free from all its old burdens, was heaved by a great sigh, which was partly both sorrow and joy. He had been too far into the Trophonius cave of the tomb--had looked death too closely in the face--and it seemed to him that all our country mansions, our pleasure-castles and vineyards, were built and laid out upon the verge of the crater of the volcano of the grave-hillock, and that the next night they would be shaken into dust. He felt alone, upheaved, a dead man come back to life, but scarce alive; wherefore every human face he met beamed upon him like that of a new-found brother. "These are my brethren whom I left on earth," said his heart; and a fruit-bearing love, warm like the spring, expanded all its veins and fibres; and it crept and grew round every _other_ heart with tender, clinging, ivy-like filaments. But the one he loved best was still--too long--away; and he went on as slowly as he could, that so Leibgeber (of whom he was in advance both in distance and time) might overtake him before he got to Hof. A hundred times, on his journey, he almost involuntarily looked round _for_ this overtaking, as if it were already a thing to be actually seen.

At length he came to the Fantaisie of Bayreuth, on a morning when the whole world gleamed and glittered from the drops of dew up to the little silver cloudlets. But stillness was over all. The breezes were asleep; nor had August, in air or in thicket, one single songster left.

It seemed to him as though, having left this mortal life, he was wandering in a second, transfigured world, where the form of his Nathalie might move by his side, with love in her eyes--and, in words straight from the soul, no longer fettered by earthly bonds, say to him, "_Here_ you looked up in grat.i.tude to the starry night; _here_ I gave you my wounded heart; here we spoke our earthly parting-vow; and here I came, often, alone, and thought of the brief, bright vision."

"And this is the spot," he said to himself, when he came to the chateau, "where she wept her last tears when she said farewell to her lady-friend."

And now, again, it seemed that only _she_ was the one transfigured.

(_He_ seemed to his fancy to be the one left behind.) He _felt_ that he should never see her more on earth; "but" (he said) "people must be able to _love_, though they cannot meet or see each other." All his meagre future was to be illuminated by transfigured and glorified dream-pictures only. But as the tree (according to Bonnet) is planted as much in the air above it as it is in the earth beneath it, and derives nourishment quite as much from the one as from the other, so it is with every true human-creature. And thus Firmian lived in the future with more vivid life than in the past--only with fewer of his root-fibres in the visible ground. The whole tree, top-shoot, branches, and all, stood under the open sky, drinking the free breeze of heaven with its every blossom--where all he had to invigorate and cheer him were two invisible friends--the one a woman, the other a man.

At length the thin, beautiful vapour of his dreams thickened to a fog.

Nathalie's sorrow for his death came hovering over him, and his lonesomeness struck heavy on his heart, which longed unutterably for some living being which should stand there and love him with all its heart. But this being was still behind him, doing its best to overtake him--Henry, to wit.

"Mr. Leibgeber," the voice of some one coming up after him suddenly cried, "stop a moment, please. Here is your handkerchief; I picked it up down below there."

He looked round, and there was the girl whom Nathalie had helped out of the water, coming running up with a white handkerchief. But as he had his own in his pocket, and the girl, gazing at him in astonishment, said he had dropped it near the basin about an hour before (though he had not then had so long a coat on)--a gush of gladness streamed into his heart. Leibgeber had arrived, and had been down by the basin.

He hastened to Bayreuth as fast as he could, all in a whirl, with the handkerchief in his hand. It was moist, as if his friend's weeping eyes had rested on it. He pressed it warmly to his own, but it would not dry them, for he thought how Henry pa.s.sed his life in solitude, exemplifying the truth of his own saying, "He who spares his feelings, and puts armour upon them, keeps them most delicately sensitive--just as the skin under the nails is the easiest hurt of all." At the Sun Hotel, Firmian learned from John the waiter that Leibgeber had actually arrived, and was gone on about half-an-hour ago. Firmian ran off after him, up and down the streets of Hof, blind and deaf, in such tempestuous pursuit of his friend that he forgot all about the moist handkerchief.

After a long while, he caught sight of him climbing the long hill behind the village of Bindloch, a mountain-road, in the true sense of the words, not to be either ascended or descended at any great speed.

Leibgeber was straining up it as fast as he could, however, with the view of unexpectedly overtaking Firmian before he got to Hof, perhaps in Munchberg, or in Gefrees, if not in Berneck itself (which is at no very great distance from Bayreuth).

But was not everything destined to turn out ten times better? Did not Siebenkaes, at the bottom of the hill, at last catch sight of him near the level place on the summit, and call out his name--which he did not hear? Did not Siebenkaes then run at an extraordinary pace after his ascending friend (with the handkerchief in his hand), and did not the latter chance to turn round, by accident, to have a glance at the sunny landscape, and see all Bayreuth, and--at long and at last--his friend hastening after him? And finally, did they not rush together, the one down the hill, the other up (not like two hostile armies, however, but like two wreathed and foaming goblets of joy and friends.h.i.+p)?

Henry speedily perceived that in his friend's breast there was much of a powerful and dissolvent kind--belonging both to past and to future times--at work, wherefore he sought to appease and calm all the "Naiads of the rivers of tears."

"Everything went off divinely," he said, "and everybody is well. Now you are as free as I am. Your chains are off--the world is before you--so in you plunge into it, fresh and merry, like me, and begin to live your _real_ life, for the first time _in_ your life." "You are right," said Firmian, "this is like meeting you again after death. Heaven is above us, peaceful and quiet, gladsome, serene, and warm." For that very reason, he had not the courage to ask after those he had left behind, particularly his widow. Leibgeber expressed great joy that he had caught him up four post-stations on that side of Hof, and all the more that, this being so, they could be together for a good long while before they must part in Hof (which latter was the very point which he was anxious to establish and emphasise).

He now commenced a series of jokes on the subject of dying (with the view of preventing anything in the shape of an _expression_ of the emotions which they both felt), and these jokes recurred like milestones, or stone-benches, all along the turnpike-road to Hof; we have no way of escaping them on the journey, unless we turn back. He asked him if the diet had been sufficient which he had given him, as the old Germans, Romans, and Egyptians did to their dead. He said that Firmian must be excessively pious, inasmuch as he had risen from the dead when he had barely shuffled off this mortal coil, confirming Lavater's doctrine that there are two resurrections, a first for the good, and a later one for the bad. He said, further, that he could not have had a better Archimimus[94] after his departure from this life than himself. Leibgeber's spirit and body _sprang_ rather than walked.

"I am always in high spirits, and free, while I am in the open air.

Beneath the clouds, I have no clouds. When we are young, the raw north wind of life whistles only on our backs, and, by Heaven! I am younger than any reviewer."

They pa.s.sed the night in Berneck, between the lofty bridge-piers of mountains, through which once streamed those seas which have overspread our globe with fields. Time and Nature--grand and almighty--were reposing side by side on the confines of two kingdoms--between the steep, lofty, memorial-pillars of creation--amongst firm mountains, empty castles crumbling into ruin, rock-barriers and stone-tumuli lying about the rounded green hills, like broken tables of the law of earth's first creation.

When they arrived here, Henry said, "The clergy between this and Vaduz must not find out that you have exchanged time for eternity, or they will ask you for the surplice fees which every corpse has to pay in each parish which it pa.s.ses through. If we were in old Rome (and not in Berneck)," said he, before the inn, "the landlord would never let you into his house except down the chimney. And if we were in Athens, you would be obliged to creep through a hoop-petticoat just as if you were going into holy orders."[95] On an occasion of this sort, he never could cease from his witticisms, in which he differed (to his disadvantage) from me; and he said that metaphors and similes were like gold pieces, of which Rousseau says that the first is harder to get than the next thousand.

Therefore it was beyond his power not to be struck with an idea when, in the evening, he saw Firmian paring his nails. "I can't understand,"

he said "(now that I see it in your case), why Katherine Bieri--whose nails had to be cut 250 years after she was dead--couldn't have done it just as well herself as _you_ do after having given tip the ghost." And when he saw him turn over on his left side in bed, he simply observed that he made his bed-quilt rise and fall in the same manner as St. John the Evangelist does _his_ earthen one--the grave--to the present hour.[96]

In the morning, it rained a little upon these flowers of humour. As Leibgeber was laving that lion's breast of his with cold water, Firmian noticed that he pushed aside a little key, and asked what it opened.

"It _un_fastens nothing," he said; "but it _fastened_ the leaden _cenotaphium_."[97] Firmian was obliged to lean out of window with his eyes, and dry them un.o.bserved. Then (with his head still outside) he said, "Give me the key. It is the wax-impression of a future one. I want to make it the music-key of my inner music. I shall hang it up, and look at it every day; and if ever my resolution to be better should run down, I shall wind it up again with this watch-key." He got it.

Then Leibgeber chanced to look into the mirror; and he cried, "I seem almost to see myself double, not to say triple. _One_ of me must be dead, the one in there or the one out here. Which of us in this room is it that is the real dead man appearing to the other? Or are we only appearing to ourselves? Heh! you my three _me's_, what say you to the fourth?"--he asked, and turned to the two-reflected images, then to Firmian--and said, "_Here I_ am, too!"

There was something in these sayings calculated to cause a shudder for his future. Firmian, whose calmer reason made him dread a dangerous growth of this metamorphic self-reflecting during the solitude of Leibgeber's wanderings, said, with tender anxiety, "My dear Henry, if you are going to be always so much alone upon your eternal journeys, I can't help fearing it will do you harm. G.o.d himself is not alone. He beholds His universe." "I can always triple myself, in the profoundest solitude, not excepting that of the universe itself," answered Leibgeber, strangely moved by the coffin-key--and he went to the looking-gla.s.s, and pressed his eyeball sideways with his finger, so as to see his reflection double; "but _you_ can't see the third person there." Then he went on in a merrier tone, with the view of cheering Firmian (who was _not_ much cheered by what he said, nevertheless), leading him to the window. "But it is a far finer affair as regards the street. I have a much larger company there. I put my finger to my eye, and produce the twin of everybody, be he who he may; double the landlord, as well as his chalk-score. Not a president on his way to his meeting but 'finds his fellow' and meets his match. I provide him with his Orang Utang, and the pair of them march past me, _tete-a-tete_. Does a genius want an imitator? I take my finger--and hey! presto!--a living facsimile of him on the spot. Every learned collaborator has a collaborator collaborating with him. a.s.sociates have a.s.sociates a.s.sociated with them. Only sons are made out in duplicate, because, as you see, I carry my plastic nature, author, and embossing-instrument--my finger to wit--always about with me. And I seldom let a solo-dancer caper with fewer than four legs; he has to hang in air as a _pair_ of men. But it would amaze you to see how much I can make out of a single fellow and his limbs by this sort of grouping. Try to form some idea (by way of wind-up) of the crowds and ma.s.ses of people I have when I double such things as funerals and other processions, with _doppelganger_, and strengthen every regiment with an entire regiment of flugelmen, repeating and imitating everything. For (as we have been saying), like a gra.s.shopper, I have my ovipositing instrument--my finger--always with me. From all which, Firmian, you may at all events draw the consolation that I enjoy more society than any of you--_just as much again_, in fact. And, moreover, it consists entirely of people who afford me endless amus.e.m.e.nt without trouble or inconvenience, by aping their own gestures and proceedings."

Hereupon they looked each other in the face, full of joyful affection, and wholly freed from any unpleasant traces of their recent wilder mode of jesting. A third person would have been almost terrified at their bodily resemblance in this hour, for each was a plaster-of-Paris cast of the other; but their affection for each other made their faces seem _un_like to themselves. Each saw in the other only that which he liked, because it was not in himself; and it was with their features, as with good deeds, which inspire us with, emotion and admiration in others, but not in ourselves.

When they were out in the air again, and on their way to Gefrees, and the coffin-key, as well as their recent conversation, continually brought to mind their parting (whose death sickle bent, closer around them with every milestone on their road), Henry endeavoured to cast a rosy beam or two into Firmian's mist by putting into his hands an accurate protocol of everything he had arranged and agreed upon with the Count von Vaduz concerning his duties. "The Count," he said, "would of course think you had merely forgotten the conversation; but it is better thus. Like a negro slave, you have killed yourself to obtain your freedom and reach the _Gold Coast_ of your silver coast; and it _would_ be d.a.m.nable, indeed, if you were to be d.a.m.ned now after your decease." "I can never thank you enough, you dear friend," said Firmian; "but you should not make things harder for me than they are, and draw yourself back like a hand from the clouds the moment you have emptied yourself. _Why_ is it that I am not to see you again after we have said good-bye? Tell me." "First," he answered, "because people--the Count, the Widow's Fund, your widow--might find out that I was extant in two editions, and that would be an accursed misfortune in a world where a fellow can hardly be allowed to sit and sleep in peace in his _first_ original edition. Secondly, I intend to make my appearance in several of the broad comedy characters which there are so many of to be played on this s.h.i.+p of fools of an earth; and as long as not a single devil among the audience knows me, I shall not be ashamed of my parts. Ah! I could give you plenty more reasons into the bargain.

Besides, it delights _me_ to come down with a flop, as if out of the moon on to this earth; and in among mankind, unknown, uprooted, untrammelled; a _lusus naturae_, a _diabolus ex machina_, a monstrous moon-_lithopaedium_. Firmian, it is a settled thing. Perhaps in a few years' time I may send you a letter now and then, more particularly as the Galatians[98] placed upon the funeral pyre letters directed to the dead, as they might have put them in a post-office. Hut it really is a settled thing now--positively." "I should not give in to all this so quietly," said Siebenkaes, "if I did not feel convinced that I shall very soon see you again. I am not like you. _I_ look forward to _two_ meetings with you--one here below, one there above. And would to G.o.d that I could bring you to die as you did me, and we met afterwards on a Bindloch hill, but were going to be longer together."

If these wishes chance to remind the readers of Schoppe in t.i.tan, they may consider in what sense Fate often interprets and fulfils our wishes. Leibgeber merely answered, "People must love, though they may not be able to see each other; and, when all's done, it is only Love that we can love after all, and _that_ we can each see in the other every day."

In Gefrees, Leibgeber proposed that, as there was such ample leisure (there being nothing to see in, or out of, the one street of the town), they should exchange clothes, and that particularly in order that the Count of Vaduz (who had not for years seen him in any other dress than the one he now wore) should not find anything to be struck with about Siebenkaes, but that everything about him should be exactly as it always had been, even to the nails on the heels of his shoes. The thought of being, in future, embraced (so to speak) by Henry's sleeves, and clasped and warmed by all his external _reliquia_, fell like a broad ray of warm February sun on Siebenkaes's breast. Leibgeber went into the next room, and, to begin with, threw his short green jacket through the half-open door, crying, "Come in, coat with skirts!" then followed up with necktie and waistcoat, and long trousers with leather stripes, saying, "Come in, breeches!" and ended up with his s.h.i.+rt, and the words, "Here with the winding-sheet!"

The s.h.i.+rt thus thrown in was, to Siebenkaes, as an astrologer (or interpreter of signs), with respect to Leibgeber. He saw that he had a higher motive in view in this bodily transmigration into clothes than mere dressing for a certain character at Vaduz; to wit, the taking up of his abode in the sh.e.l.l, or coc.o.o.n, which had contained his friend. Not in a whole volume of Gellert's or Klopstock's 'Letters on Friends.h.i.+p,' not in a whole week of Leibgeberian days of self-sacrifice, did there seem anything so beloved and delicious as in thus falling heir to his clothes. He would not profane this surmise which made him so happy by alluding to it in words, but he was confirmed in it when Leibgeber came out transformed into a Siebenkaes, looked at himself in a satisfied manner in the mirror, and then laid his three fingers, in silence, on Firmian's forehead. This was his highest token of love; wherefore, to my own and Firmian's great joy, I mention, that he repeated this sign more than three times during dinner (the conversation running on wholly indifferent subjects). What different and interminable jokes would he not have made upon this moulting at another time, and under the influence of other feelings!

Merely to guess at a few. How much he would have made of the rebinding of their two folio volumes, so as to involve Herr Lochmuller (the landlord at Gefrees) in the deepest and most diverting embarra.s.sment, which that polite gentleman could by no means have extricated himself from one minute before this, my fourth book, came to his aid, which at this moment is only in Bayreuth, and not even gone to press! But Leibgeber did nothing of all this; and even of witticisms he only delivered himself of a few weak ones; about their being changelings, about the sudden French transition of people _en longue robe_ into people _en robe courts_. And he said he would no longer call Siebenkaes a transfigured being in boots, but one in shoes, which was more befitting, as well as sounding somewhat more sublime. It was with particular pleasure that he saw how his dog, Saufinder--between the old bodies and the new clothes, as if between two fires of love--could not properly make out the matter in the least degree, and often went from one to the other with a most uneasy face. The _concordat_ between the two parties--the shortening of the one, and the lengthening of the other--puzzled the creature, and he could make neither head nor tail of it all. "I like him twice as much as I did," said Leibgeber; "believe me. If he is faithful to you, that is not being unfaithful to me." He could not possibly have said anything more complimentary than this.

All the bleak way from Gefrees to Muenchberg, Firmian, from grat.i.tude, took the greatest pains to reflect back on Leibgeber that suns.h.i.+ne of cheerfulness into which Henry was continually trying to lead him. It was no easy matter, especially when he saw him striding after him in the long coat. He concentrated himself to an extreme effort in Muenchberg, the last post-station before Hof, where the corporeal arms with which they clasped each other were, so to speak, to be cut off by a long separation.

As they were going along the road to Hof, more silent than before, Leibgeber being first, and feeling refreshed by the pine-covered mountain on his right, began (as he usually did on his journeys) to whistle national airs, both merry and sad, for the most part in minor keys. He said he thought there were many worse town-and-street-fifers, and that he performed on the foot-pa.s.senger's post-horn which Nature had given him in a manner deserving of some applause. To Firmian, however (now that their parting was so near), these tones, which seemed to come echoing back from Henry's long journeys of the past, and forward from his coming lonely ones as well, were as a kind of Swiss _Ranz des Vaches_, which went to his very heart; and it was well he was walking last, for he could scarce restrain his tears. Ah! take music away when the heart is full and must not overflow!

At length he brought his voice sufficiently under command to be able to say, without any apparent emotion, "Are you fond of whistling as you go, and do you do it often?" In the tone of this question there was a something as if the fluting was not quite so much of an enjoyment to him as to the musician himself. "Always," answered Leibgeber. "I whistle[99] away life, and the world's stage, and all there is upon it--and all that sort of thing--a great many matters in the past; and, like a steeple-warder at Carlsbad, I _whistle in_ the future. Do you dislike it? Is my fuguing incorrect, or my whistling a breach of the rules of pure composition?" "Oh! only too beautiful," answered Siebenkaes.

And then Leibgeber began again, but with tenfold power, and performed such a lovely and melting mouth-organ voluntary, that Siebenkaes came up to him with four long strides, and, putting his handkerchief to his eyes with his left hand, while he laid his right gently on Henry's lips, he said in broken accents, "Henry, spare me! I don't know why, but every note of music moves me too deeply to-day." The musician looked at him--Leibgeber's whole inner world was in his eyes--then nodded in a decided manner, and strode rapidly onwards in silence, without looking round or letting his face be seen. But his hands, perhaps involuntarily, went on making little movements, beating time in continuation of the melody.

At length they arrived, oppressed and anxious, at the Grub-street or Mint-city where I am now seated, pasting and colouring these a.s.signats--this paper-money for half the world--namely, Hof.[100] It is by no means in my favour, indeed, that at that time I knew nothing whatever of all these matters which half Europe is now being made acquainted with through me. I was a good deal younger then--sitting alone at home like a cabbage-lettuce, with the best will in the world to close to a head--which process of closing, in men as well as in lettuces, is hindered by nothing so much as by the contact of the neighbouring salad-plants. It is easier, pleasanter, and more advantageous, for a youngster to go from solitude into society (from the seed-bed into the garden), than the converse--from the market-place into the corner. Unmitigated solitude and unmitigated society are both bad: and, with the exception of their _order_ of succession, nothing is so important _as_ their succession.

In Hof, Siebenkaes engaged two rooms at the inn, thinking Leibgeber would not part from him till the morning. However, _he_ (whom his own pre-determination to say good-bye, and his dread of saying iv, had fretted and annoyed immensely for a considerable time) had taken a mental vow that their two spirits should be torn asunder that day, and that, immediately thereupon, he should be off into Saxony as hard as he could, though it should want but a quarter of an hour to midnight; but, at all events, before that particular day should come to a close. He went into his room, smiling and pleasant, and thought of the airs he had been whistling (which were still running in both their heads, if not in their hearts). But he soon enticed him out of that empty deaf-mute of a room into the diverting tumult and stir of the coffee-room--not remaining long there, however, either--but as the moon, in her first quarter, was standing like a lighted lamp just above a post in the market-place, he asked him to go for a cruise round the town with him. So they went, and climbed up the avenue, and looked down at the gardens in the city-moat (which, perhaps, deserve to take the _pas_ over other artificial meadows, inasmuch as they are more specially sown for cattle than others). I presume this was the reason why Leibgeber (who had been in Switzerland) remarked late at night (when the country, adorned and adopted by Nature, but disinherited by Art, lay extended before him) that the people of Hof were like the Swiss, whose whole country was a garden, except the few gardens in it.

The pair went on drawing wider and wider parallels around the town.

They crossed a bridge, from which they saw a gallows-hill overgrown with gra.s.s, which reminded them of that other ice-region, with its crater, where, exactly a year ago, they had bidden each other good-bye at night, but with the sweeter hope of an earlier meeting. Two friends such as they are always struck with the same ideas in the same circ.u.mstances. Each is--if not the unison--at all events the octave, fifth, or fourth to the other. Henry tried to rekindle a little light in his friend's dark house of sorrow and mourning by aid of the bird-pole, which stood like a commandant's flag-staff, or a burning stake, not far from the Supreme Criminal Court's place of judicature.

He said, "A shooter-king has his Sinai, where he can both promulgate his laws and vindicate them, close at his hand here, in a delightful manner, beside his lever and leaping-pole, such as you heaved yourself up by to the dignity of Great Negus and Grand Mogul of Kuhschnappel.

b.u.t.ton's law--that every elevation has another of equal height and similar composition opposite to it--applies to a great number of eminences which correspond to one another; gallows-hills and thrones, for instance, in this case; the two sides of the choir in churches; the fifth story and Pindus: show-booths, and the Chairs of Professors Extraordinary."

As Firmian did not speak, but remained sunk in sadder similes, Henry, too, held his peace. He led him towards another stone (for he was intimately acquainted with the whole country), one with a prettier name, the "Stone of Joy." At last, while they were toiling up the hill towards this stone, Firmian took heart and said, "Tell me right out--I am quite prepared--tell me at once, on your honour, when are you going away from me for ever?" "Now," answered Henry. On the pretence of its being easier so to climb the hill-side, all flowers and perfumed mountain-plants, they were holding each other by the hand, and as they went they pressed hands sometimes, as if from accidents of mechanical motion. But pain struck great roots that waxed amain into Firmian's heart, roots that split it asunder as the roots of trees split rocks.

Firmian laid himself down on the grey projecting rock, which divided the green slope like a boundary-stone, and he drew his departing friend down to his breast. "Sit down very close beside me this once more," he said. As the manner of friends is, each pointed out to the other everything he saw. Henry showed him the camp of the town pitched all about the foot of the hill, and looking as if fallen into a deep sleep, nothing moving in it but some flickering lights. The river went coiling along beneath the moon round the town like a great serpent with a sparkling back, then stretched itself out through two bridges. The half-s.h.i.+mmer of the moon, and the white transparent vapour of the night, lifted the hills, the woods, and the earth, up to the heavens; and the water on the earth was spangled with stars like the blue night above, and the Earth, like Ura.n.u.s, had a doubled moon, as it wore a child in either hand.

"In reality," Leibgeber began, "we can both always see each other whenever we please. All we have to do is to look into a looking-gla.s.s.

That is _our_ moon-mirror."[101] "No," said Firmian, "we will fix on a time when we will think of each other--on our birthdays--and on the day of my pantomime death, and on _this_." "Very well," said Leibgeber, "these shall be our four quarter-days."

Of a sudden, the hand of the latter rested upon a dead lark, which had probably been shot. He clasped Firmian's shoulders, and, raising him from the ground, said, "Stand up; we are men. What is all this fuss about? Fare you well! If ever I let you out of my head, or out of my heart, may G.o.d dash me to atoms with a thousand thunderbolts. You are and shall be for ever in my bosom as warmly as my own living heart. And so, good-bye, and all good attend you; and in all the Berghem Seapiece of your life may there not be a single wave the size of a tear.

Farewell!" They clung together, and wept heartily, and Firmian did not answer as yet. His fingers stroked and pressed his Henry's hair. At last he leaned his cheek against the beloved eyes; before his _own_ eyes the wide abyss of night s.h.i.+mmered, and his lips uttered (but with no cadence in the tone), "'Fare you well,' do you say to me? Ah! _that_ I _cannot_, when I have lost my truest, my oldest friend. The earth will always be as dark to me as it is now around us here. It will be hard for me when I am dying, and, in my feverish fancy, think I am only _pretending_ to die again, and stretch out my hand in the darkness to feel for you, and say, 'Henry, close my eyes again, I cannot die without you!'" Henry whispered, "Tell me what else to say to you, and then may G.o.d punish me if I utter another syllable." Firmian stammered, "Will you always like me, and shall I see you soon again?" "Not soon; not for a long time," he answered, "and I shall never cease to love you." As he was starting to go, Firmian held him back. "We will look at each other once more," he said. And they bent back, their faces channelled by streams of emotion, and looked at each other for the last time, while the night-wind, like the arm of a stream, mingled with the deep river, and then rushed on united with it in deeper billows, while the great mountain-range of creation trembled before the tearful eyes.

But Henry tore himself away, made a sign with his hand as if to say all was over, and took his flight down the hill.

After a little, Firmian was impelled after him--not knowing why--by the goad of pain and sorrow. His inner man, compressed by the tourniquet into insensibility, did not feel the amputation of his limb just then.

They both hurried along the same road, though separated by hills and valleys. Whenever Henry stopped and looked back, so did Firmian. Alas!