Читать книгу In Paradise - Paul Heyse - Страница 7

Table of Contents

She was just about to lay her round, white little hand in his, which was rough and muddy from kneading the clay, when a knock at the door caused them both to look up and listen.

The janitor called out through the key-hole that a strange gentleman wished to speak with Herr Jansen. When he heard that the sculptor had a model sitting to him at the moment, he had asked the janitor to take in his card. With this the janitor pushed the card through a narrow hole in the door made for the purpose.

The sculptor, grumbling, went toward the threshold and picked up the card. "Felix, Freiherr von Weiblingen." He shook his head thoughtfully. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation of joy. Under the printed name was written, with a pencil, "Icarus."

"A good friend of yours?" queried the girl.

He made no answer, but threw down his modeling-tool hastily, hurriedly wiped his hands on a towel, and hastened to the door again. As he opened it, he turned around.

"Stay here, Zenz," he said. "Amuse yourself for a while; there is a book of pictures; and, if you should be hungry, you will find something in the cupboard. I will lock the door behind me."

In the hall outside there was no one but the janitor, with his bent, long-shaped head, that looked very much like the head of a horse, especially when he spoke; then he moved his under-jaw, as though he had a bit between his great, yellow teeth.

He was a most serviceable old fellow, who had grown gray in the service of art, and had a more delicate judgment than many a professor. He was a thorough expert in preparing a canvas; and occupied his leisure in studying the chemistry of colors.

"Where are the gentlemen, Fridolin?" asked the sculptor.

"There is only one. He is walking in the yard. A very handsome young gentleman. You can see in his face the look of the 'Baron' that is on his card. He said--"

But the sculptor had hurried by him, and had rushed down the steps that led into the yard. "Felix!" he cried, "is it you or your ghost?"

"I am inclined to think it is both, and a heart in addition," replied the person addressed, grasping the hand that the sculptor held out to him. "Come, old fellow, I can't see why we should be ashamed to fall on each other's necks, here under God's free heaven. I have had to get on for years without my best and dearest old Dædalus--"

He did not finish his sentence. The sculptor had pressed him so heartily to his breast that it fairly took away his breath.

Then suddenly he loosened his grasp, and, stepping back a pace, cast a critical glance over the slight figure of his friend.

"Still just the same," he said, as though to himself; "but we must get those Samson-like locks under the shears. You don't know your strongest point, my dear boy, when you bury your round head in such a thicket. And your full beard must come off. However, all that will come with time. Tell me what has conjured you forth out of your primeval forests into our tame art-city?"

He grasped the young man's arm, and led him around the house into the little garden. Both were silent, and seemed to avoid looking at one another, as though they had begun to feel ashamed of the extravagant affection with which they had marked their reunion.

At the extreme end of the garden was an arbor overgrown with honeysuckle; at its entrance stood sentry two potbellied Cupids in the rococco style, with little queues and all that--both of them painted sky-blue from head to foot.

"It's easy to see whom one is visiting," said Felix, laughing. "'His pig-tail hangs behind him,' or have you had it cut off?" Then, without waiting for an answer: "But tell me, old fellow, how have you had the heart to leave your poor Icarus all these terribly long years without a sign of life on your part? Haven't any of the six or eight letters I have written you--the last only a year ago from Chicago--"

The sculptor had turned away and buried his face in a bunch of full-blown roses. He turned suddenly toward his friend, and said, with a quick, lowering glance: "A sign of life! How do you know that I have lived these terribly long years? But let us drop all that. Come and sit down here in the arbor, and now unpack your budget. A circumnavigator like you must have brought all manner of things with you that are entertaining and wonderful to dusty stay-at-homes like us. When you went away from Kiel, we did not either of us think the earth would turn so often before we looked each other in the face again."

"What shall I tell you?" asked the young man, and his delicate brow contracted, "If my letters reached you, you have not lost the thread of my story. As for all the details that belong to it, you knew me well enough in my first university days, in those old times at Kiel, to imagine how I went on afterward in Heidelberg and Leipsic, till I got an older head under my corps-student's cap. It is true, I soon grew tired of the ridiculous corps business; but, for the mere sake of not seeming to play the renegade, I kept on with the old associations even more shamelessly than before. My three years passed away, and a fourth beside; I was fully three-and-twenty when I went back into my dear, dull, little home, and passed my examination to enter the civil service. How I managed to get on so long without giving you a call, Heaven knows! As early as the second year after our separation, I was very near you. I had a trifling reminder of a pistol-duel with a Russian, here in my left shoulder, and had to go to a watering-place for my health. In Heligoland I heard that you had moved to Hamburg. I needn't say that I designed to call upon you on my way back. But, suddenly, a sad message called me home abruptly. My poor old father had had an apoplectic stroke, and I found him dead. Then there was all the dreary necessary business, and, after it all--. But why must we spoil our first pleasant hour with all these old stories? My dear Hans, if you had a notion how good it is to be sitting here again by your side, to smell these roses, and imagine that my life is beginning all over again--a new life in a better world, free from all fetters and--. But, by-the-way, you have married, I hear? An actress, was it not? Where did she come from? I heard in Heligoland--"

The sculptor suddenly rose. "You find me as you left me," he said, his face darkening quickly; "what is past, let us let it rest. Come out of the arbor; it is suffocatingly hot under those thick vines."

He went toward the little fountain, held his hands under the slender stream, and passed them over his brow. Then, for the first time, he turned to Felix again. His face was once more composed and bright.

"And now tell me what has brought you here, and how long you are going to stay with me."

"As long as you will have me--for ever and ever--in infinitum if you will!"

"You are joking. Don't do that, my dear boy. I am so utterly alone here, in spite of a plenty of good comrades with whom I can share everything except my most intimate thoughts, that the thought of beginning our old life again seems far too happy to me to be only made a jest of."

"But it is my most serious earnest, dear old Hans. I am going to stay here with you, if you have nothing against it, in your most intimate daily companionship; and, if some day you strike your tent and wander away somewhere else, I will go too. In one word, I have put my whole past career behind me, and broken up all my old associations, so that I may begin, as I said, my whole life over again, and not be anything but what I care most to be--a free man; not make myself anything but what I have always secretly longed to be, an artist, as good or as bad a one as mother Nature will let me."

He poured forth these words hurriedly, and with downcast face, and as he talked drew a light circle in the nearest flower-bed with his cane. It was only after a pause, and when his friend made no reply, that he raised his eyes and met, with some embarrassment, the quiet gaze fixed upon him.

"You don't seem quite able to accept this change in my life all at once, Hans? Others besides you have had the same feeling--the person most concerned in it, for instance. That I have become a conceited ass, and fancy that because I used to be extravagantly fond of modeling all manner of absurdities in clay, and cutting caricatures of my friends in meerschaum--this I hope you will not believe. But why I can't get beyond the condition of a dilettante, if I only am serious about it, and think of and do nothing else but study my A, B, C, under a good master--I beg of you, my dear Dædalus, don't pull such a disheartening face! Don't look so sadly at the lost youth--as I probably seem to you; or at least smile ironically, so as to rouse my anger and wound my amour propre a little! But by the eternal gods--what is there after all so horribly fatal in this decision? That it hasn't occurred to me till after twenty-seven years? That is bad, I admit, but not a proof that it is hopeless. Think of your own half-countryman, Asmus Carstens, or of--well, I won't give you a whole chapter of artists' biographies. And besides, when I am altogether independent and have burnt my ships behind me--"

He stopped again. His friend's silence seemed to check his utterance. For a time nothing was to be heard around them but the splashing of the little fountain, and from the window above them the notes of the battle-painter's flute, every little while dying dismally away.

Suddenly the sculptor stood still.

"And does your fiancée agree to this project?"

"My fiancée? What in the world puts that question into your head?"

"Because, although I never answered your letters, I remember them all very well. Is it possible that you too do not remember what you wrote me three years ago, under the seal of the deepest--"

"So I did do it then!" cried the young man with a short, abrupt laugh. "So I did chatter, did I? I assure you, my dear Hans, I was myself doubtful how far I had initiated you--you, the only one before whom I ever lifted even a corner of the veil from this veiled picture. After awhile--as you sent no congratulations--I began to persuade myself that I had kept a quiet tongue in my head, even with you; and, in truth, that would have been the best thing to do. Then I should have escaped the full confession that it is hard enough for me to make--and after all, it is perfectly superfluous. For how shall I--who am no poet, and who am besides an interested party in the transaction--how shall I describe the persons concerned so that you will understand how it all came about--how it was partly the fault of both--and yet how both are innocent, after all?

"But if you must have it, let it be so--as briefly as possible.

"I came back, then, to my native town, to pay the last honors to my good old father. You know what an unhomelike home I had always found it. The capital of a third-class Duodezstaat--thank your good star that you have no idea what it means. My father before me had suffered under the absurd despotism of this court-etiquette, this endlessly-branching, complicated, spun-out primeval jungle of dry genealogical trees--under these ridiculous traditions of a worm-eaten bureaucracy. He was a man of quite another type--a sturdy, stately country noble, of the most exclusive and most independent spirit; and since the death of my mother--who could not of course withdraw herself so entirely from her family connections--he had lived on our own estate, altogether apart from 'society.' Then came his death; and I--looked upon askance even as a boy because of my likeness to my father, and almost given up as far as a career at court or in politics was concerned--I believe no cock would have crowed at it, if I had once for all acknowledged that I was my father's true heir in this respect also, and had forever turned my back on the spot where I was cradled. But, much as I felt inclined to do so, it fell out otherwise."

He put his hand into his pocket and took out a little memorandum-book.

"You shall have the romance in an illustrated edition," he said, with a rather forced attempt at jesting. "See, it was this little person's fault that I thought for a while it was really my calling to be a useful citizen--chamberlain to his Highness--by and by master of the hunt--court marshal--heaven knows what all. Is not that a face that could persuade one of anything, and could turn a head that never sat very firmly? And that is only a commonplace photograph, and three years old; and besides, in these three years the wicked child has learned all manner of witches' arts; and the eyes that here in the photograph look so still and fixed--half curious, half timid, as if they were looking at a theatre-curtain that would not go up--I can tell you, my dear boy, they look into the world now with such a queenly confidence and dignity that it fairly--but that is no part of our present talk. And at that time, when the misfortune happened and I lost my heart to the child, the little thing was hardly more than a schoolgirl, just sixteen years old; and shy, silent and unformed as a young bird. We had known each other since we were children--she is some sort of a cousin, seventeen times removed--just as all good families with us are related in some way. I had not the least idea, however, of visiting her, until her uncle, with whom she lived--her parents died when she was very young--until this jovial gentleman came to make me a visit of condolence. Of course I had to return it, and it was on this occasion that I first saw the slender, pale, large-eyed child, with her exquisite, tight-shut red lips and her ravishing, tiny little ears.

"Soon afterward I went away again, and only after a year had passed--after the infernal examination that I would not shirk, in spite of my freedom, lest it should seem as though I were afraid of it--only then, when she was seventeen years old, did I see her again. While I was away, a recollection of her had come back to me from time to time; suddenly, in the midst of altogether different things, I had seen something flitting before me that resembled nothing but her slight and somewhat spare figure, about which there was one trait that always seemed to me especially charming--that though she was perhaps not quite tall enough, her little form was always so haughty and erect and so delicately and perfectly balanced on its slender pedestal. Sometimes, too, her eyes met me in a fairly ghost-like fashion, when I was among my comrades or alone out of doors. And yet I had never exchanged ten words with her.

"And now, when I found her again, a year older and suddenly developed into a young woman--no, Hans, you need not fear that I am shamelessly going to put our whole love-story at your mercy, here in the bright morning sunlight. Enough to say that it had fared much the same with her, as far as my worthy self was concerned, as with me in respect to her. We saw that we were meant for one another, as people say--without ever thinking how much is meant by the words.

"Well! everything would have been well enough; the match seemed as bien assortie as could possibly have been wished even in such an aristocratic and cosmopolitan capital as ours. If we had only married at once, on the spur of the moment, we should have been just the people--she with her seventeen years, and I with my three or four-and-twenty--to be altogether suited to one another, and, as time went on, to so round off the very perceptible and serious corners and sharpnesses of our two temperaments, that finally it would have been a thoroughly happy marriage. But, unfortunately, Irene's mother had married at seventeen, and attributed her lifelong invalidism--for she was a delicate creature and always remained so--to this early marriage. When she died--still very young--she charged her husband solemnly that he should not let their only daughter marry before she was twenty; and the uncle, who afterward filled a father's place to my sweetheart, considered himself absolutely bound by this inherited pledge. I must wait patiently, therefore, for three whole years. And as he was a bachelor, and his niece had no chaperon to call upon but a former servant, I was required to pledge myself to avoid all companionship with my betrothed during this long probation, and only to carry on my courtship by letter; so that every temptation to seek to shorten the time of waiting might be put a stop to once for all.

"You can imagine what my feelings were when the old gentleman told me all this. To decree a three years' banishment just because we should give him trouble--because he hated responsibility, and because he believed, as an old hand at love-making, that this was the best way to protect lovers against themselves! But, jovial as his manner was, he was an uncompromising egotist where his own quiet and comfort were concerned. And I was too stubborn and too proud to make any supplications, and too sure of myself and my sweetheart to fear the length of the interval; which did not seem to me at first glance so intolerable as I often felt it afterward--in sighs and misery.

"My sweetheart, too, threw back her little head and said: 'Yes, we will wait.'--Afterward, it is true, when it came to our last parting, she fell out of my arms as though she were dead, and I thought she would never open her eyes again. Even now I don't know how I succeeded, in spite of it all, in tearing myself away.

"And this three years' separation itself! If I had only been a man of sense--that is, if I had been another than myself--I should have settled down somewhere in Germany, and taken up some task at which I could have worked myself tired--to fight down my unprofitable lover's-melancholy. Why could not I devote my three years to making myself a perfect agriculturist, or a prominent jurist, or a politician, or something that is of some use in the world? To make one's self so completely master of some department of life or knowledge that one knows every square foot of it is rather an absurd and commonplace consolation, to be sure; but it is better, after all, than an objectless activity, a love nourished on prison-fare, and a longing for freedom that at last makes one look upon mere change as something desirable.

"Even then I thought of my old Dædalus. I was on the very point of falling upon you in your studio, and, for want of a smooth, girlish cheek to caress, of trying my hand on a soft bit of clay. Just then I chanced upon an opportunity to go to England; there I stayed until I was ripe for America; and he who once sets foot in the New World, and hasn't left any very pressing business behind him in the Old, can get rid of a few years of his life without knowing exactly how he has done it. It is enough to tell you that I had already reached Rio, traveling by way of San Francisco and Mexico, when I said to myself one day that if I did not want to prolong my exile voluntarily, and so appear to my betrothed in rather a bad light, I must take the next steamer that sailed for Havre, in order to land at last, after all this wandering over the wide world, in the harbor of my wedded bliss.

"I had written regularly to my betrothed every month--beautiful diary-like love-letters--and had received with equal regularity letters from her, which, to speak honestly, had now and then irritated me greatly; so that we had already had (on paper) all manner of misunderstandings, tiffs, quarrels, and reconciliations. I considered that all this belonged of right to a well-conducted three-years' engagement, and did not take it too much to heart when my well-bred, rather provincial little sweetheart, who had grown up in the atmosphere of the petty capital, occasionally gave her vagabond fiancé a little moral lesson. Perhaps I was wrong, and certainly I was foolish, always to report my varied adventures with absolute candor. There were no very serious matters among them; and the few cases of real human weaknesses and sins I kept to myself--shut up in a sincerely remorseful heart. But she found fault even with the tone of my 'sketches from two hemispheres.' Good heavens! it is easily comprehensible that the poor child, living as she did among such absurd surroundings, could not have much taste for a free life out in the world! Thrown entirely on herself, watched over by a hundred eyes in a narrow, starched, formal society--I once wrote to her that she was only so serious beyond her years because she had had to fill, as it were, a mother's place to herself, and be her own governess and duenna. And, besides all this, there was her uncle's frightful example--for she could not long remain ignorant of his habit of compensating himself for outward respectability by private orgies at his bachelor clubs and petits soupers.

"Only let the three years be over, I thought to myself, and we will soon weed out the tares that have sprung up between our roses. But I did not know the vigor of the ground in which all this bad crop had grown up. Nor did I know how much the years between seventeen and twenty signified in such a girl's life.

"At last, then, I arrived at home, and found--but, no!" He checked himself abruptly, and made a sharp cut at the air with his cane. "Why should I bore you with a detailed story of a domestic comedy that has only a decidedly unfavorable likeness to 'Much Ado about Nothing,' and, instead of ending with the reconciliation between Benedict and Beatrice, finished with a ridiculous eternal separation? For isn't it almost as laughable as lamentable that two lovers, who for three whole years, the world over, have been extravagantly fond of one another, should count the days till they could fall again on one another's necks, and then should not be able to get on together for six weeks? And all this only because--as old Goethe says--man strives for liberty, woman for morality; and because the said moral law seems to the man a wretched slavery, while the unhappy young woman thinks even a very moderate freedom immoral! Ah, my dear old Hans, what did I not endure in those six weeks!--and more especially because I was thoroughly dissatisfied with myself. After our altogether fruitless (and therefore all the more obstinate) discussions of these questions, in which I poured out my bitterest scorn upon her court-etiquette, her kid-gloved prejudices, her duenna-like code of morals, while she put my baseless principles to shame with a maidenly pride and firmness that I could have kissed her for--always after these discussions I used to say to myself, in the quiet of my chamber, that I was a mad fool to upset matters as I did. With a little diplomacy, a little delicate tact, and patient hypocrisy, I could have thoroughly gained my end; could have borne the stupid ban of society until my marriage; and then, when we were alone together, could have gradually developed my little wife out of her doll-like state of servitude, and rejoiced to see her spread her wings in freedom.

"But it was odd: as often as I appeared before her with the best resolves in the world--the war began again. You must not imagine that she fairly entered the lists, challenged me, and herself brought up our old points of conflict. But it was precisely her quiet reserve, her obvious good intention to be cautious with the reckless scapegrace, and to leave his reform to time--it was all this that overthrew my finest diplomatic projects. I would begin to joke, then to chaff, then to hurl the most fearful insults against people and customs that seemed fairly holy to her--and so it went on, day after day, until there came one day that fairly 'forced the bottom out of the cask'--a wretched, wretched day!"

He paused a moment, and fixed his eyes gloomily upon the ground.

"There's no help for it!" he said, at last. "It must come out. Once in my life I did something that humiliated me in my own eyes. I committed a sin against my own sense of honor--a base act, for which I never can forgive myself, although a court of honor in matters of gallantry--chosen from among my own equals, mind you--would probably have let me off with a slight penance, if not scot-free altogether. You know what I think of what is called sin; there is no absolute moral code; what brands one forever is only a little spot upon another--all according to the delicacy and sensitiveness of the skin. Even conscience is a product of culture, and the categorical imperative is a pure fiction. What a brutal blackguard of a soldier permits himself in plundering a captured town, and feels his conscience untroubled, would dishonor his officer to all eternity. But I am not going to theorize; suffice it to say that that inner harmony with one's self, on which everything depends, was utterly destroyed in me by this act. From the way in which it haunted me, you can conceive how, in a moment of weakness, I confessed the whole story to Irene's uncle, little consolation as I could get from the absolution of so very odd a saint. I saw how little, when he utterly failed to understand how I could take the matter so to heart, especially as it had taken place a considerable time before my engagement. I instantly repented most bitterly that I had confided in him; and his promise, never by a single syllable to recur to it, reassured me but little.

"I was right. He forgot it himself; and one unhappy day he began, in the very presence of his niece--we had just been speaking of all manner of far more innocent adventures, and even these she would not let pass--he began to refer to that wretched story. Something must have come into my face that instantly gave my sweetheart an idea that this reference meant something beyond the common. Her uncle, too, began to stammer, and made a clumsy attempt to change the subject. That made the matter worse. Irene stopped talking, and soon after left the room. The uncle, good-natured as usual, cursed his own loquacity again and again; but, naturally, that did not help things. When I saw my little one again, she asked me to what his words referred. I was too proud to lie to her; I confessed that I carried about with me the memory of something that I wished to conceal from myself--how much more from her! With that she grew silent again. But on the evening of that day, when I was a second time alone with her, she told me that she must know the whole. I could not have done anything that she could not forgive me; but she felt that she could not live by my side when there was such a secret between us.

"Perhaps a wiser man might have invented some story, and so have avoided a greater evil. There is such a thing as a necessary lie. But I held to the belief that every man is alone responsible for his acts; that I should add a second sin to the first if I burdened the pure soul of my darling with such a confidence; and so I remained unshaken, though I knew her too well not to know how much was at stake.

"On the next morning I received her parting letter--a letter that for the first time showed me all that I was losing.

"But I had gone too far to turn back. I answered that I would wait until she changed her opinions; that in the mean time I should look upon myself as bound to her; but she was, of course, entirely free.

"That was a week ago. I reflected that of course it would be necessary to leave at once those places where she might meet me. In putting my house in order for an indefinite absence, I came upon a package of visiting-cards in one of my mother's cupboards that had on them the name of her brother, my godfather, Felix von Weiblingen. It occurred to me as a good idea that, under this name, I might for a while (incognito) breathe the same air with my oldest friend, and at the same time attain the goal of my dearest wishes--to begin a new life. There is nothing in me of the ordinary numbered and classified type of 'man with a calling,' and, even with the best wife in the world, I never should have been able to busy myself quietly on my estate with bringing up children, making brandy, and fox-hunting. It is better, then, that I should use this involuntary opportunity to dispose of myself as I choose, in trying whether I can't really make a life of my own. If in time she should bring herself to my way of thinking, she would then find a fait accompli that she would have to accept.

"It will be no shame to me in your eyes if I don't at once find my spirits so entirely in order that I can go rushing into a mastery of the fine arts by lightning express. I have reached the door of your studio but slowly, and by very short stages--but this very slowness has done me good. You see before you a thoroughly sensible man, who is determined to submit to fate without a grumble. If you will only take me into die Mache, it will not be long before the wings of your faithful Icarus will grow again, to lift him above all this wretched world of Philistinism and its foolish love-affairs."