The Invisible Lodge. Jean Paul

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Forcible Abduction of the Fair Face.--Important Portrait

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      The state of astonishment into which Gustavus had, all day long by one object after another, been wrought up, and the loss of sleep, ended his first heavenly day with a feverish evening, which he would have had to relieve by a gush of tears, even without any other reason. But he had one: his Genius had, during the tumult in the garden, been snatched away from the darling with a speechless kiss, and had left nothing behind but a leaf to the mother. That is, he had cut a leaf of note-paper into two halves; the one contained the dissonances of the melody and the questions of the text thereto, on the other stood the solutions and the answers. The dissonant half was to come into the hands of his Gustavus; the other he kept. "I and my friend," said he, "shall one day recognize each other thereby in the world's wilderness; in the fact, that he has questions, to which I have the answers." The poodle too, which was every day growing bigger, he took with him.... Where shall we see thee again, unknown, beautiful enthusiast? Thou art all unaware how thy orphaned pupil cries and sobs for thee, and how the new, star-studded heaven does not please him so much as his chamber-ceiling when thou wast with him, and how the lighted candles transform every apartment to the still cavern in which he had loved thee and thou him. Even so in life's evening we bend down over the graves of our early friends, whom no one mourns but we; till at length a strange youth buries the last old man out of the loving circle; but not a single soul remembers the fair, youthful days of the last old man!

      In the morning he was well again and cheery; the sun dried up his eyes, and the misty image of his genius under the veil of the past night receded far into the background. I am sorry to have to lay it to the charge of his years and his character, that, with the exception of the evening hours of the most painful yearning, he let the image of a friend be crowded out by nearer images and thrust far backward. All flowers were now playthings for him, every animal a playmate and every human being a bird Phœnix; every change in the heavens, every sunset, every minute overwhelmed him with novelties.

      It was with him as with children of distinction who come out into the country; who peer into, handle, jump over, everything in the new earth and the new sky. For it is an indescribable good fortune for children of rank, that their parents, who generally make little account of Nature, nevertheless train them between high walls and high houses, which do not leave thirty-eight square feet of heaven visible, as in hot-house gardens with high walls, that Nature may come before their eyes as little as to those of their parents; whereby their feeling for both is kept as unworn above the earth, as if they had been actually brought up under it; nay, they see sunrise for the first time almost later than Gustavus--in the post-chaise or in Carlsbad.

      His parents treated him as a new-born child, and did not like to have him out of their sight; they would hardly let him go out into the castle-garden and never down the mountain, where he would be in danger from the post-road. He had brought up with him, too, from his subterranean school-room a certain bashfulness which ordinary men and almost his father take for simplicity, but which men in higher life, if it only appears, as with him, in the company not of a staring, but of an overfull, enthusiastic eye, regard as the order-cross of a brother of the order. Nevertheless, eight days after, his parents repented not that they had shut him up, but that they had ever let him out.

      The wife of the Head-forester, von Knör, had brought a lot of Moravian men and women with her to hear the disciple of the grave; an aftermath-sheaf of old maids had already bespoken the visit four weeks before, and had renewed the invitation, just to get sight of such a wonderful child. The Moravian brethren were lively and free, within the bounds of propriety; the sisters in a body formed a wall around a tall clock, whose case was bordered with angels blowing trumpets--they could not be torn away from the horn-blowers. Nor could they be persuaded to take anything; they opened neither their jaws nor their eyes, and the Captain was black with suppressed vexation. At last the lip of a sister touched a wine-glass, the others touched theirs; as much as one nibbled off of a cake just so big a crumb nibbled the others; one shiver would agitate this whole obligato company of two-footed sheep. The aftermath of old damsels, on the contrary, plunged into everything; on solid and in fluid, like Amphibia, they were equally at home; they had never in their chewing and chattering life stirred any member but the tongue.

      But now when for the benefit or so many spectators the wondrous creature was to come forth, behold! he was--gone. Every corner was dusted out, long-lost things were found, every place was screamed into, every nook and every bush--no Gustavus! The Captain, whose first stage of distress was always a kind of anger, let the whole expectant sisterhood sit there with eyes wide open; but the Captain's lady, whose distress took hold of tenderer parts of her nature, drew her seat close up to them for sympathy. But when all anxious, inquiring, running faces came back more and more disconsolate, and when they actually found behind the open castle-gate the plucked flowers which the little fellow had stuck into his little shaded bed, and which were still moist with his sprinkling, then were the faces of the parents darkened with despair. "Ah! the angel has plunged into the Rhine," said she, and he said nothing to the contrary. At another time he would have stamped such a non sequitur under foot, for the Rhine ran half a league from the castle; but here the reasoner in both was desperate anxiety, which makes far wider leaps than hope. I spoke just now of another time, therefore, because I know what the Captain's way usually was, namely, to be, from very compassion, excited against the sufferer himself. Never, for instance, did his look express a stronger curse against his wife than when she was sick (and a single swift globule of blood would upset her); she must not murmur in the least; and when that was obeyed, she must not sigh; that done, she must not even make a sorrowful face; and if she obeyed all these directions she must not, in fact, be sick. He had the folly of idle and genteel people, he would always be jolly.

      But here, when for once his pot of luck lay in fragments, another's sigh sweetened his own and his wrath at the careless troop of servants and at the dry sheep and aftermath of the sisterhood.

      When the child had stayed out all night and the whole of the next forenoon, and when they actually found his little hat in the woods on the carriage-road, then did the stings of anxiety grow into the festering pains of inflicted wounds. There is no agitation of the soul against which it is so hard to bring an effective argument as against anxiety: I have, therefore, for a year and a day ceased to attempt any; I just willingly admit the worst it urges and then simply assail the next inward emotion which may grow out of the apprehended worst with the question, "and what if it should come?"

      Every toadstool in the woods was trodden flat and every woodpecker scared away, in the effort to find a head for the hat, but in vain; and on the third day the Captain, whose face was an etching-plate of agony, wandered, without any distinct design of searching, so deeply into the woods that he would hardly have noticed the swift passing through the thicket of a traveling carriage, set out with trunks and servants, had not, issuing from it like a thunder-clap of gladness, the voice of his lost son startled his soul. He runs after it, the carriage shoots ahead, and out in the open ground he sees it already sending up a cloud of dust beyond his castle. Beside himself he comes up storming into the castle-yard to start in pursuit of it and--let it go. For up at the house-door stood the inmates of the castle who had suddenly run together and were now gathered in a knot around Gustavus, the castle dogs barked without having any clearly defined reason, and all were talking and questioning in such a way that one could not properly hear from the child a single answer. The carriage as it whirled by had let him out. On his neck hung by a black ribbon his portrait. His eyes were red and moist with the pangs of homesickness. He told of long, long houses, which he took streets to be, and of his little sister who had played with him, and of his new hat; but no soul would have been the wiser СКАЧАТЬ