In Paradise. Paul Heyse
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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."
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