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Ebook has 3230 lines and 210946 words, and 65 pages

Translator: Schele de Vere

Through Night To Light

A NOVEL

BY FRIEDRICH SPIELHAGEN

FROM THE GERMAN

BY PROF. SCHELE DE VERE

"Ex fumo dare lucem cogitat."

Horace

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1878

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by

LEYPOLDT & HOLT,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.

STEREOTYPED BY DENNIS BRO'S & THORNE, AUBURN N. Y.

Through Night to Light.

Part First.

The sun hung glaring red near the horizon. In the valleys of the mountain ranges dark-blue shadows were gathering, while high on the forest-crowned tops the warm evening light was still aglow. The trees were gorgeous in their gay autumn livery, but in this part of the mountain dark forests of sombre evergreens covered the narrow ravines up and down, and all the swelling heights.

On the turnpike which led in manifold windings towards the main ridge of the mountains, and was lined on both sides with unbroken rows of dwarf fruit-trees, an old-fashioned carriage was slowly making its way. It was one of those broad but clumsy vehicles, drawn by two raw-boned, broken-kneed horses, and carefully provided with a huge drag-chain, which are hired in the cities for a few days' excursion into the mountains. The horses lagged, with drooping heads, heavily in their harness, and labored painfully step by step up the hill, for the road was steep and the carriage heavy. The driver encouraged them from time to time with a friendly Gee, bay! up, sorrel! as he walked slowly by their side, and the two gentlemen who had employed him for some days had gotten out at the foot of the mountain and were leisurely following at some distance behind him.

They were a couple of young men, evidently belonging to the best classes of society, that is, to the middle classes, in which intelligence and culture are nowadays almost exclusively found. They were both tall and showed the slight build and the elasticity belonging to their years. One, the smaller one, whose mouth and cheeks were nearly hid under a close, deep-black beard, would probably have been thought the more interesting of the two, as his finely-cut features, full of intelligence, were sure to please the more careful observer, and yet he was neither as tall nor as handsome as his companion, who at once attracted the eyes of all fair maidens and matrons in the towns and villages through which they had passed.

"I return your question," replied the latter, turning his beautiful, earnest eyes towards his companion.

"I enjoy in full draughts the glory of this evening's landscape," said Doctor Braun; "and enjoyment, you know, is silent, because the very pleasure is business enough, and leaves us no leisure for talking. But tell me, is it not a wonderful country, this Thuringia? Is it not worthy to be the heart of Germany, and thus the heart of the heart of our continent, in fact of the inhabited globe? Stop a moment where you are; we have just here a view which would be unique if there were not thousands and thousands like it in these lovely mountains. There is the valley, which we have just left! you can now follow easily the meandering course of the willow-fringed brook through the meadows. There is the village, a dirty place when seen near by, but now how beautiful it is, half veiled by its gay cloak of trees, and the blue columns of smoke, which rise straight up from the chimneys, and gradually dissolve on the sides of the mountains into blue, transparent clouds. And now these beautiful heights with their evergreens! how they rise one behind the other with their deep coloring. And now, here to our left, the glimpse of the blue mountains which we crossed this morning. And, above all, this marvellously fair sky, clear and deep and unfathomable, like the eye of some one we love. Oh, there is something divine in these outlines and these lights. They are surely intended to be more than a mere pleasure for the eye, or even a study for the painter: they are meant to comfort us and to admonish us. A glance at the enchanting face of our mother nature puts our wild hearts to sleep, makes us forget the eccentric character of our so-called culture, brings us back to the first harmony of the soul, and awakens and revives in us the conviction that everything true, beautiful, and noble, is infinitely simple, and that the well of contentment gushes forth at the bidding of every one who seeks it with a pure heart."

While Doctor Braun had spoken these words in his usual animated and impressive manner, Oswald had looked with sad eyes into the far distance. Now, when his companion ceased, he said--an ironical smile playing around his lips--

"Are you quite sure of that? And suppose it were so, who will blame the unfortunate man whose heart is not pure, who is cursed with blindness, and never sees the well of contentment? We shall meet one of these unfortunate men to-night. If you will open his closed eyes and restore to him the purity of his heart, I will worship you as a god."

Doctor Braun seemed to be much affected by these words, which had towards the end assumed a passionate tone of bitterness. He was silent for a few moments while they ascended the mountain, and then he said,

"Now I am once more bored with the old complaint! No, Franz, I will not bring disgrace upon your mental cure and try to find the world as beautiful and reasonable as you do. That was only a recollection of the past. Is it not natural, is it not quite intelligible, that it should turn up just now, when we approach the end of our pilgrimage, and I am about once more to meet face to face the noble, unfortunate man to whom I owe so much, and that after an interval during which so much, so very much, has changed for him and for myself! I have followed your advice faithfully, as well as I could. I have let the past bury the past; I have practised industriously the art of forgetting, and I have sent the very shadows of the departed back to Hades, when they became troublesome. But here comes the form of a living man who is dead, of a dead man who still lives, and I find neither in my mind nor in my heart the magic words which will lay this spirit, whom I reverence, whom I mourn with tears, like the others."

"Then let us turn back," said Doctor Braun, with great vivacity. "If you do not feel the strength in you to maintain the position which you have yourself chosen, against every objection and every authority, it would be madness to expose yourself to such danger. Let us turn back; it is time yet."

"Willingly," replied Oswald. "I also have been thinking much of my youth in these last days. If one is engaged in settling his affairs, as I am now doing, at a certain epoch of one's life, it is almost indispensable to trace that life back to the beginning. It is true you are the first man, and perhaps the only one, whom I could permit to look into those dark portions of my existence; but I will do it."

"I shall be all the more attentive," replied Doctor Braun.

"To begin at the beginning," said Oswald, after a pause, during which he seemed to have collected his thoughts, "I was born in the capital. My father was a teacher of languages, my mother the daughter of a mechanic. You see, therefore, that I have no claims to nobility, and that my hatred against the nobles is the very natural and legitimate hatred of the plebeian against the patrician, of the Pariah against the Brahmin.

"My mother also I only recollect dimly, after the manner of a person whom we have seen in a dream. But even now I sometimes dream of a fair young lady, with great, sweet blue eyes. She says in a soft tone some words which I do not understand, but which sound like the music of heaven, and always move me to tears even in my sleep. I know that this lovely creature of my dreams is my mother, for she never changes. She died before I had ended my fourth year.

"If ever man succeeded in replacing a mother to an orphaned, motherless child, my father solved that problem. When I was a little child, he sang and talked me to sleep; when I was sick, he watched day and night by the side of my little bed; he sat by me in the garret window and blew alternately with me bright soap-bubbles from a little clay pipe into the air; he taught me the alphabet and to make ships from the bark of trees; he made me learn the first Latin words, and taught me to swim and to skate; he gave me the first lessons in Greek, and in pistol-shooting and fencing. I had no other friend but him, until I went to the University."

"The nickname, besides, had no application to my father, if I except the word Old. He had never in his life been a candidate for any office, clerical or political, as far as I know, and, in spite of his enormous erudition, he would not have been fit for any office, for his eccentricity and odd disposition would have made it impossible for him to fulfil his duties.

"In later years I have often and often tried in vain to find out what bitter experience of life, what sad misfortunes, could have changed my father into such an odd character. He was a hypochondriac and a misanthrope at once, who avoided most carefully every contact with the world, and who, therefore, was as carefully let alone by everybody else. Those who claimed to be men of refinement and religious convictions called him a cynic because he had emancipated himself from all social obligations; and an atheist, because he never appeared at church. The superstitious rabble crossed themselves when they saw him, as if he were standing in nearer relations to the Evil One than was proper for a good Christian. If he had lived two hundred years sooner, they would no doubt have burnt him as a sorcerer or a magician.

"His special hatred, however, was given to the nobility. As soon as he happened to speak of their caste, he had a whole dictionary of opprobrious epithets at his command. He never entered the house of a nobleman; and whenever young men of noble birth proposed to take lessons from him, he immediately refused. Once, as we were firing at a target--a practice in which he excelled--he told me that in his youth he had hoped thus to engage himself against a nobleman who had mortally offended him. Unfortunately the man had died before he could carry out his plan. That is the only hint which I ever received as to my father's former life.

"And thus I grew up, exclusively communing with this strange man. The relations between us were as extraordinary as he himself. Although my father did more for me than generally both parents jointly do for their child, and although he apparently lived and suffered only for my sake, I still do not think he really loved me. He was a purely spiritual man. Either his heart had received, at some time or other, a fatal blow from which it had never recovered, or his sentiments had all evaporated into mere notions under the influence of his scepticism. Whatever he did, he did from a sense of duty, from a conviction that it was right; for, as he said himself, Justice is higher than Love; it does all that Love does and a great deal more.

"More, and yet not quite so much," interrupted Franz, "What we do from affection for those we love, we ought to do for others from a sense of justice; that is, from a conviction that the interests of all men are represented in each. Love and Justice stand in the same relation to each other as individual and species. One can not exist without the other, for they need each other mutually. Justice can never teach us all the thousand little acts of tenderness which we lavish upon those we love, as individual love does not aid us any longer when we are called upon to help a brotherhood, a nation, or all mankind."

"You may be right," replied Oswald, "and what you say renders it easier for me to make a confession which I was about to make. I honored my father deeply, but I did not love him; on the contrary, I often experienced, as I only felt clearly in later years, a fear approaching repugnance, when I came in closer contact with the strange man. Now I hardly wonder at it, since I have found out that nature probably never produced two beings more radically different than my father and myself. We were as unlike in body as in mind and in inclination. I loved already, as a boy, with perfect passion, everything brilliant and splendid, and whatever is beautiful in nature and the world of men. I was enthusiastically fond of my schoolmates, who rejoiced in the youthful ornaments of golden locks, red cheeks, and bright eyes. I loved to visit in houses where everything was elegant and in style, after the manner of those days. I attached much importance to my dress, and liked to hear it when women called me a handsome boy.

"You may imagine how little a young fellow with such wants and such inclinations must have suited, as a companion, a misanthropic hypochondriac, whose manner of life he was nevertheless forced to share to a certain degree. For although my father allowed me a certain amount of liberty, which was hardly in keeping with his general views, and although he indulged me in my love of fine clothes and the comforts of life to a degree which I have never been able to comprehend, I knew nevertheless that he was deeply offended by this fondness of mine for a world which he despised. I tried, therefore, very hard, to wean myself from such a life, and succeeded all the more readily in my efforts, as I soon discovered in the solitude, which was at first intensely hateful to me, a source which changes the most desolate desert into a blooming paradise--the Castalian spring of poetry.

"We lived in a small house built against and upon the city wall. The solitary small window from which my room received its light was pierced in the thick wall, so that the whole looked very much more like a prison than anything else; and yet, what marvellously blessed hours I have spent in that room! From my window I had an unlimited view over the wall and the ramparts of the city--upon smooth ponds, lined with beautiful copses of trees--upon rich meadows, with willows scattered over them here and there, far out to the sea, which glittered like a dark-blue ribbon through the green woods.

"Here, at this window, I used to sit on summer evenings, when the sun was setting in brilliant splendor, my heart full to overflowing of chaotic sentiments, and my head weaving thoughts as fair and bright, and, alas! as perishable as soap bubbles! I remember I often wrote verses in bright summer days and in dark autumn evenings, afterwards, while I was sitting in deep meditation over my books, to remind me of the happy days then, which had dropped one by one from the cup of time, bright and brilliant, into the ocean of eternity.

"But why should I any longer attempt to describe to you these relations to my father, which appear only the more enigmatical to me the more clearly I desire to present them to you. If I ever had felt, as a child, true, hearty love for my father, it grew less and less as I became older and more independent. I had to hide in my heart all the feelings, all the tenderness, which we ordinarily lavish upon our mother and brothers and sisters and friends, for I could not feel any confidence in him who, as matters happened to stand, ought to have stood me in place of all of them. The constant intercourse with a mind so sombre and sceptical gave to my mind a coloring which was little in harmony with my sanguine and passionate disposition. I was an Epicurean sitting at the feet of a Stoic, a Sybarite on terms of intimacy with a Cynic philosopher. My exuberant fancy dreamed of the most magnificent worlds, which my cool judgment destroyed pitilessly; I exhausted myself in subtle devices, while my hot blood was filling my heart to overflowing; I sat in my cell and studied dusty old parchments, while my adventurous mind was longing for the marvels of the East and for lofty deeds of chivalry.

"Thus matters continued till I went to the University, when I was nineteen years old. I parted without grief from my father. What he felt at the parting I cannot tell. He spoke to me, when I said good-by, like a philosopher who dismisses his pupil, and recalled to my mind once more all the great principles of his harsh worldly wisdom. The letters which he wrote to me at regular intervals were in the same tone. There were not many of them; for about six months after I had left him I received a letter from the authorities of my native place, in which they dryly informed me of the death of my father. He had left me a little property, the fruit of his long and painful saving; it was just enough to support me in a modest way during my university course, and perhaps some little time beyond that. No will had been found; nor had there been any papers, letters, diaries, or anything which might have possibly given me a clue to the former history of my parents.

"Thus I was standing alone in the world--a young man in years, with the weary mind of an old man. I was far too old for my fellow-students, who looked to me like children at play; and yet I was far too young and inexperienced myself to resist the temptations of a large city, or to wander about in such a Babel without ever and anon losing my way. How could a young man, in whom the current of full youthful life had been so long artificially dammed up, avoid going astray? I became the hero of many an intrigue, of which I was in my heart thoroughly ashamed, as I ought to have been. I was spoilt by the women, and became the innocent victim of many a heartless coquette. I gathered much experience without growing any wiser--the worst thing that can befall a man. And the most remarkable of it all was that I loathed in my heart the enjoyments to which I gave myself up; that my heart yearned after true love at the very times when I wasted it upon women unworthy of such a gift; and that I cherished the most extraordinary plans for the future, while I squandered my strength in senseless amusements.

"A friend, who in those days had some influence over me, rescued me from the whirlpool in which I would have perished sooner or later. He advised me to go to Grunwald. I followed his advice.

"From that moment you know my life, at least in its outlines. You know that I became there acquainted with the unfortunate man whom we are about to visit. You will now also be able to understand why it was utterly impossible for me to resist the charm of Berger's extraordinary character, and how I entangled myself by my intercourse with him only more and more deeply in the thorns and briars of internal conflicts, which finally made my heart bleed to death.

"Berger wished me to go to Grenwitz and to take there a position in a noble family, which suited me about as well as a dove-cote suits a hawk. You have followed me through the great periods of my life there with an observant eye, and at the same time as a philosopher and as a friend. I do not know--and I do not want to know--how much you have seen, how much you have understood, and what may have remained an unexplained mystery for you. A part of these events I dare not touch upon; another part I am in duty bound to leave untouched. When the catastrophe came which you had anticipated, and the frivolous world in which I was living, crushed me--then you stood by me as a friend; you snatched me out of the confusion, and you laid upon yourself a burden which has no doubt made you sigh more than once since. But no! that cannot be! You are as clever as you are wise, and as wise as you are kind. Tell me, Franz, what Odysseus was your father, what Penelope bore you, that Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom, should always so manifestly have held you under her gracious protection?"

"I believe everything in my life has happened in the most ordinary way," said Franz, laughing. "I pray you will not think I escaped altogether from either Scylla or Charybdis! I have been, like yourself, on the point of despair. What has saved me is the conviction that the world is, after all, but a Cosmos, in which everybody, be he what he may, has to fill his modest place--a conviction which came to me first very dimly, then more and more clearly and distinctly, and finally filled my heart with triumphant certainty. This idea has given me that cheerful calmness without which life would in the end become unbearable. I said to myself: This world, of which you know after all but very little, is such an old, solid, and well-finished edifice that you need not give up the plan on which it was built, even if you should not comprehend it in all its details. This race of ours, which maybe is intended for as many millions of years as we now know thousands, is such a marvellous and unfathomable problem of creative power that you will never come to an end studying it, if you were to live ever so long. Goethe tells us that no man ever possessed art, and I add, no one ever possessed philosophy.

"Thus you see, Oswald, the world becomes a Cosmos, and we cease to be mere atoms whirling about in the infinite space without a reasonable government, while nobody knows whence we come and whither we go. The great fault of your life, which it is true you could hardly avoid with such an experience as you had in your young days, is that you have always lived for yourself only and never truly for others. Thus you have drifted into a false position, in which you could not be useful to the world, and the world could not be useful to you. Now, all this will be different. From friendship for me, you have made the sacrifice of taking a step which I know well--and better now than before--must be very painful to your whole nature. But I am convinced you will bless this step hereafter. The trial year which you mean to devote to the college at Grunwald will be in more senses than one a trial year for you. You will see whether you can obtain the hardest of all victories, the victory over yourself--over your own arbitrary, sovereign will. I wish you were, like myself, engaged to some good, sensible girl. That would compel you to work and compel you to struggle, if not for your own interest, at least for the sake of her who is dearer to you--ten thousand times dearer to you--than your own life, and you would see how easy the battle, how easy the victory would be to you."

Oswald made no reply. He felt convinced of the truth of what his companion said, but at the same time he felt painfully ashamed. For the face of truth is stern, and makes him tremble who does not worship it at the cost of every feeling of his own.

Thus they walked side by side in deep silence, until they reached the top of the mountain, where the carriage was waiting. They got in again, and now they rolled in a quick trot down hill towards the little town which was lying at their feet in the bosom of a secluded valley, surrounded on all sides by well-wooded hills, and veiled at this moment by the gray evening mists. It was the end of their day's journey, and for Oswald the place of his destination--a watering-place, called Fichtenau, renowned far and near on account of its charming position, its invigorating baths of spruce leaves, and more recently yet its large and admirably-kept insane asylum, which Doctor Birkenhain, a man of great intelligence and large experience in such matters, had founded there a few years ago.

Oswald's heart was filled with strange sensations as he saw from the corner in which he was leaning back the rocks and the trees flit by, and felt that every step brought him nearer to the place which had occupied his mind during the last months so persistently and so painfully. How unmeaning the name had sounded to him when he first heard it mentioned at Grenwitz as the place where Melitta von Berkow's suffering husband was living! Then he did not know Melitta yet, then he did not anticipate that he would a few days later be enchained by the charms of that beautiful woman. Afterwards he had heard her mention the name, though only rarely, and always with much reluctance, and in his state of boundless delight the place had given him very much the impression with which the owner of a superb, brilliant house looks upon a dark room which he does not like to open, and of which he avoids speaking, because years ago a person who was dear to him had committed suicide there. Then the time had come when Melitta obeyed Dr. Birkenhain's summons and went to see her dying husband--at last the painful, wretched days during which he knew she was at Fichtenau by the side of her unfortunate husband, and when he received from Fichtenau those letters in which every word was a longing kiss. In those days Fichtenau had appeared to him alternately the grave and the cradle of his happiness, as he at one moment fancied Berkow's death would remove all impediments in the way of his marrying Melitta, and then again feared the very same event might forever separate him from her. Then came the fatal day when he found out that the man whom he had from the beginning looked upon as his most formidable rival was with Melitta; when malicious tongues had whispered the most hateful explanations of this fact in his ear, and he, unhappy man, had but too readily listened to these abominable slanders. Alas! he had even then betrayed his own love by his own acts, and, like a ship-wrecked man, who, in order to save himself and his treasures, pitilessly pushes his best friend from the frail plank into the ocean, he had sacrificed Melitta in order to justify his passion for the fair Helen before the tribunal of his own heart! And finally, to fill the cup to overflowing, and to prove as it were to his troubled mind that the whole world was out of joint, and one error more or less did not matter much, the same place must hold both the woman he loved so ardently, who sought comfort for the moments she must needs spend at the deathbed of her husband in the arms of a fascinating rou?, and the revered friend and teacher, whose genius, so like a bright blazing torch, had just been extinguished in the deep darkness of insanity! Only a little later death had robbed him of the boy whom he had learnt to love as a brother, and Fate had broken, in a most painful manner, his connection with a great and noble family; then he had seen his rival wounded unto death by his ball, lying at his feet, and separating him forever by this one deed from the beloved girl, from whom a thousand other reasons would, even without this, have compelled him to flee. Was it a wonder that he felt as if the whole earth had no more suitable asylum for him than a cell adjoining that of his friend and teacher in Doctor Birkenhain's famous Insane Asylum at Fichtenau?

Moved by this apprehension Doctor Braun had postponed the visit to Fichtenau till the end of their journey, instead of going there at first, as Oswald had wished. He had hoped that the frequent intercourse with other men, the beneficent influence of a journey through a beautiful country, brilliant in all the glory of autumn, would bring Oswald back to calmer and more reasonable views of life, and enable him to meet Berger, if not with the superiority of this calmness, at least without danger for himself.

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