The tales of hoffmann, p.33
The Tales of Hoffmann, page 33
Elis wept for joy – the turn of events was so unexpected that he was almost afraid he was dreaming again.
At Pehrson’s command the miners assembled at midday for a joyful feast. Ulla had dressed herself in her finest clothes and looked more charming than ever, so that all who were there cried time and again: ‘Oh, what a glorious bride our valiant Elis has won for himself! May Heaven bless them both in their piety and virtue!’
Elis’s pale countenance was still filled with the terrors of the night just gone, and he often sat staring before him as if far away from everything around him.
‘What is it, my Elis?’ Ulla asked. Elis pressed her to his breast and said: ‘Yes, yes – you are really mine and now everything is well!’
But in the midst of all his joy it sometimes seemed to him as though he was suddenly gripped by an ice-cold hand and a dark voice said: ‘Is winning Ulla now the highest thing you know? You poor fool – have you not beheld the countenance of the Queen?’
He was almost overwhelmed by an indescribable fear and tormented by the idea that one of the miners would suddenly rise up gigantically before him, reveal himself as Torbern and admonish him in terrible tones to remember the subterranean realm of metals and precious stones to which he had surrendered himself. Yet he still could not see why the spectral old man should be so hostile towards him, nor why his work in the mine should have anything to do with his love for Ulla. Pehrson could not fail to notice how disturbed and distracted Elis was, but attributed it to the shock he had had and to his nocturnal flight to the mine. Not so Ulla: seized with a secret presentiment, she begged Elis to tell her what terrible thing had happened to him that was tearing him away from her. Elis felt as if his chest were bursting asunder. He struggled in vain to tell his beloved of the wonderful vision that had come to him in the depths: it was as though an unknown power were closing his mouth, as though the fearinspiring face of the Queen were rising up within him and as though everything would turn to stone about him, as at the glance of Medusa, if he spoke her name. All the splendour that had filled him with supreme delight down in the depths of the mine now seemed to him an Inferno of inconsolable torments, disguised so as to lure him to destruction.
Pehrson demanded that Elis should stay at home for a few days to recover from the sickness into which he appeared to have fallen; and in this time Ulla’s love banished from his mind all recollection of his fateful adventure in the mine. Elis recovered his faith in his good fortune and believed no evil power could ever lay hands on it again.
When he once more descended into the mine, everything seemed different to him: the richest veins lay open before him, he worked with redoubled zeal, he forgot everything – and when he again came to the surface he had forcibly to direct his thoughts to Pehrson Dahlsjö and even to his Ulla. He felt himself split into two: the better half, his real being, descended with him into the bowels of the earth and reposed in the arms of the Queen, while in Falun all was dull and gloomy. If Ulla spoke of her love and of how happy they would be living together, he began to speak of the splendours of the depths, of the immeasurably rich treasure which lay hidden there, and became so confused and incomprehensible that the poor child was seized with fear and anguish and could not imagine how Elis had suddenly become so utterly changed. The youth ceaselessly declared to the foreman, and to Pehrson himself, how he had discovered the most ore-laden veins, and when they then found nothing but hollow rock he laughed mockingly and maintained that he alone knew how to read the secret signs, the meaningful inscriptions the hand of the Queen had inscribed on the rocky crevices, and that it was sufficient to understand these signs without also bringing forth what they proclaimed. The aged foreman gazed sadly at Elis as, with wildly blazing eyes, he spoke of the paradise which shone in the womb of the earth.
‘Alas,’ he whispered softly into Pehrson’s ear, ‘it is the wicked Torbern who has done this to the poor boy!’
‘Do not believe such miner’s fables, old man,’ Pehrson replied. ‘Love has turned the deep-thinking Neriker’s head, that is all. Once we get the wedding over with, we shall hear no more of these trap-veins and treasures and paradises under the earth.’
The day of the wedding at last arrived. A few days before, Elis had become more silent and withdrawn than ever, but never had he evidenced so much love for Ulla: he refused to leave her side for a moment and ceased to go to the mine or even, so it seemed, to think about his life as a miner – for he ceased to speak of the subterranean realm at all. Ulla was filled with joy: all her fears that the powers under the earth of which she had heard might lure her Elis to his destruction had vanished away. And Pehrson, too, said to the foreman with a smile: ‘You see, Elis was only lightheaded with love for my Ulla!’
Early on the morning of the wedding day – it was St John’s Day – Elis knocked gently on the door of his bride’s room. She opened it – and started back in alarm as she saw him, clad already in festive dress, deathly pale, dark fire darting from his eyes.
‘I only want to say, my dearly beloved Ulla,’ he began, ‘that we now stand close to the summit of all human happiness. Last night all was revealed to me. Down in the mine there lies, encased in metals and minerals, the pink sparkling almandine on which is engraved the record of our life, which you have to receive from me as a wedding gift. It is more lovely than the most glorious blood-red carbuncle, and when, united in true love, we gaze into the light that streams from it we shall behold how our inner being is intertwined with the wondrous branches which rise up out of the heart of the Queen at the mid-point of the earth. All that is needed is that I should bring this stone up to the light of day, and that I shall now do. Farewell now, my beloved Ulla. I shall soon return.’
With hot tears, Ulla pleaded with her lover to desist from this visionary undertaking, which she felt would end only in great ill-fortune; but Elis assured her that he would never know another quiet hour until he possessed that stone and that there was no danger at all involved in getting it. He pressed his bride warmly to his breast and departed.
The guests were assembled to conduct the bridal pair to the Koppaberg Church, where the betrothal was to take place after a service. A whole host of dainty maidens who were, according to the custom of the country, to precede the bride as her bridesmaids, were laughing and joking around Ulla; the musicians were tuning their instruments and practising a cheerful wedding march. It was already nearly midday – but still Elis had not arrived. Then a group of miners suddenly came running up, fear and terror inscribed in their pallid faces, and told how a fearful landslide had just overwhelmed the quarry in which Dahlsjö’s mine was situated.
‘Elis–my Elis, you are gone – gone!’ Ulla screamed, and fell down as though dead. It was only now that Pehrson learned from the foreman that, early that morning, Elis had gone to the great crater and descended into it; he had been alone, since everyone else had been invited to the wedding. Pehrson and all the miners that were there hurried out to the mine, but, though they searched even at the greatest risk to their own lives, they searched in vain. Elis Fröbom was not found. It was certain that the fall of earth had buried the unfortunate youth; thus misery and woe descended upon the house of Pehrson Dahlsjö at the moment when he thought he had secured peace and repose for his old age.
Pehrson Dahlsjö had long been dead, his daughter Ulla had long since vanished, and no one in Falun knew anything of either of them, for fifty years had passed since Elis Fröbom’s unhappy wedding-day. Then it happened that, as the miners were attempting to dig a passage-way between two shafts, they found in a pool of vitriolic water at a depth of three hundred ells the body of a young miner. The body appeared to be petrified when they brought it to the surface. The lines of the face were so well preserved, the clothes and even a flower attached to the jacket were so completely free of decomposition, that the youth might have been merely sleeping. Everyone in the neighbourhood assembled about the body, but none of them knew who it was and none of the miners could recall any of their number having been buried in an accident. They were about to take the body to Falun when an ancient woman appeared out of the distance, gasping as she made her way on her crutches.
‘Here comes the St John’s Day woman!’ cried some of the miners. It was a name they had given her on account of her habit of appearing once a year, on St John’s Day, when she would approach the crater, gaze down into its depths, wring her hands, weep and wail in the most melancholy way and then disappear again.
The old woman had hardly set eyes on the motionless youth when she let her crutches fall, raised her hands to Heaven and cried in heart-rending tones: ‘O Elis Fröbom! O my Elis! My dear bridegroom!’ And with that she knelt down beside the body and took the rigid hand in hers and pressed it to her aged breast. ‘Alas!’ she cried, gazing around at the assembled company, ‘alas! none, none of you can recognize poor Ulla Dahlsjö, who was the happy bride of this youth fifty years ago! When in misery and woe I departed for Ornäs, I was consoled by old Torbern, who told me that one day I would see my Elis – buried alive on his wedding day – again on this earth; since then I have come here, year in, year out, and, filled with desire and faithful love, gazed down into the depths. And today this happy reunion has been granted me! O my Elis, my beloved bridegroom!’
Again she clasped her thin arms about the body of the youth as though she never wanted to let him go. All who stood around were deeply moved. But at length the old woman’s sobs and sighs grew softer and softer, and finally they ceased. Then the miners came forward and made to lift her from the ground, but Ulla had breathed her last on the body of her bridegroom. It was then, too, that they noticed that the body had not petrified but was beginning to dissolve into dust.
In the Koppaberg Church, where, fifty years before, the couple were to have been married, they laid the ashes of the dead youth, and with them the body of his bride, Ulla, who had been faithful to him unto death.
THE CHOOSING OF THE BRIDE
A story in which several altogether improbable adventures take place
1
On the night of the autumnal equinox, Chancellery Private Secretary Tusmann was returning from the coffee-house, where he was accustomed to spend a couple of hours each evening, to his home in the Spandauerstrasse. In everything he did, the chancellery private secretary was punctual and precise, and he had made it his practice to get out of his coat and boots as eleven o’clock was chiming from the towers of the Marienkirche and the Nikolaikirche, so that, his capacious slippers on his feet, he could pull his nightcap down over his ears with the final boom of the bell.
The clocks were already preparing to strike eleven and he was hurrying (you might almost say running) out of the Königsstrasse into the Spandauerstrasse when a strange knocking sound close beside him rooted him to the ground. At the base of the tower of the old Town Hall he perceived in the bright lamplight that a tall, thin figure shrouded in a dark cloak was hammering at the closed shop-door of the merchant Warnatz, who, as is well known, offers his hardware for sale there; the figure, having hammered louder and louder, stepped back, emitted a deep sigh and looked upwards at the dilapidated windows of the tower.
‘My dear sir,’ the chancellery private secretary turned to the man and said good-naturedly, ‘you are making a mistake: no human soul dwells up in that tower, nor indeed, if I exclude a few rats and mice and a couple of little owls, no living creature of any kind. If you wish to purchase any of Herr Warnatz’s excellent ironware or steelware you will have to put yourself to the trouble of coming back tomorrow.’
‘My esteemed Herr Tusmann –’
‘Chancellery Private Secretary Tusmann for many years now,’ Tusmann involuntarily interposed, notwithstanding that he was somewhat taken aback at the stranger’s knowing who he was.
The latter, however, paid not the slightest attention to this interruption but began again: ‘My esteemed Herr Tusmann, you are altogether mistaken in your conjecture of the reason for my presence here. I require neither ironware nor steelware, and have indeed no business whatever with Herr Warnatz. Today is the autumnal equinox and I have come to behold the bride. She has already heard my passionate knocking and my amorous sighs and will shortly appear up there in the window.’
The hollow tone with which the man spoke these words had something strangely solemn, even spectral, about it, so that the chancellery private secretary felt an icy trickle pass through every limb. Then, as the first stroke of the eleventh hour boomed down from the tower of the Marienkirche, there came a clattering and rustling from the dilapidated window of the Town Hall tower, and a female figure became visible. As the full glare of the lantern fell upon her face, Tusmann moaned dolefully: ‘O great God in Heaven, O all you heavenly host, whatever is that?’
On the final stroke – the very moment when Tusmann usually thought to put on his nightcap – the figure vanished.
The chancellery private secretary seemed to become completely beside himself at the sight of the astonishing apparition: he sighed, he groaned, he stared up at the window, he whispered to himself: ‘Tusmann! Tusmann! Chancellery secretary! Come to your senses! Beat not so wildly, my heart! Do not let the Devil deceive you, O my soul!’
‘You seem’, the stranger began, ‘to be very much affected by what you have seen, my good Herr Tusmann. I wanted merely to behold the bride, but to you, honoured sir, something quite other must have appeared.’
‘Please, please,’ Tusmann whined, ‘won’t you allow me my simple title? I am a chancellery private secretary and at this moment an extremely excited one. May I humbly state, most worthy sir, that if I do not give you your appropriate rank, that is entirely because I am utterly unacquainted with your worthy person; but I will call you Herr Privy Counsellor, for there are so remarkably many of them in our dear Berlin that if one employs that dignified title one rarely goes wrong. Therefore, Herr Privy Counsellor, would you please no longer conceal from me what kind of a bride it was you thought to behold here at this uncanny hour?’
‘You are’, the stranger said in a raised voice, ‘a peculiar man, with your titles and ranks. If one can call oneself a privy counsellor if one is privy to many secrets and is also able to give good counsel, then I possess every right to that title. I am seized with wonder that a man as well read in ancient writings and rare manuscripts as you, most worthy Herr Chancellery Private Secretary, should not know that if an initiate – mark that well! – an initiate knocks on the door or even only on the wall of this tower at eleven o’clock on the night of the equinox there will appear to him in the window above the girl who by the vernal equinox will be the happiest bride in Berlin.’
‘Herr Privy Counsellor,’ Tusmann cried, as if suddenly inspired with a transport of joy, ‘most honoured Herr Privy Counsellor, can that really be so?’
‘It is nothing but the truth,’ replied the stranger; ‘but why do we remain standing here in the street? You have already missed your usual hour of retirement; let us betake ourselves immediately to the new wine-house on the Alexanderplatz. The purpose is simply for me to tell you more about the bride, if you wish it, and for you to be restored to the composure which, I really don’t know why, you seem altogether to have lost.’
The chancellery private secretary was an extremely abstemious man. His sole relaxation consisted, as has already been indicated, in spending a couple of hours each evening in a coffee-house, where he ran through the papers and pamphlets or read a book he had brought with him, and enjoyed a glass of beer. He almost never drank wine: only on Sundays after church did he go to a wine cellar and take a small glass of Malaga with a few biscuits. He loathed roaming about at night; it therefore seemed incomprehensible that he should have allowed himself unresistingly, indeed without so much as a word, to be conducted away by the stranger, who with firm step resounding through the night hurried off to the Alexanderplatz.
When they entered the wine-house there was only one other person there: a man sitting alone at a table with a large glass of Rhine-wine standing before him. The deep lines that furrowed his brow witnessed to his great age. His glance was sharp and piercing, and only the majestic beard betrayed the Jew still faithful to ancient custom and tradition; he was, moreover, clad in the kind of dress worn about 1720 to 1730, and this was no doubt why he gave the impression of one returned to the world from an age long past.
But even more curious to look at, surely, was the stranger Tusmann had encountered: he was a large and lean but strongly built man, apparently in his fifties; his face might once have been accounted handsome, and his large eyes still flashed with youthful fire from under black bushy eyebrows; a free, open brow, a strongly arched aquiline nose, a delicately formed mouth, an arched chin – none of this would have distinguished the man from a hundred others, but while his jacket and trousers were cut according to the latest fashion, his coat, cape and cap belonged to the end of the sixteenth century; the singular glance of the stranger, however, which seemed to rise from the depths of night, the hollow tone of his voice, his whole appearance, which contrasted strongly with that of all his contemporaries – all this may have been the main reason why anyone who came into his presence felt a strange, almost uncanny sensation.
The stranger nodded to the old man seated at the table as to an old acquaintance. ‘It is a long time since I have seen you,’ he called. ‘Are you still well?’
‘I cannot complain,’ the old man replied morosely. ‘Fit and well, and up and about again, as you can see, and prepared to be busy if needs be!’
‘I am glad to hear it,’ the stranger called, laughing aloud, and ordered from the waiter a bottle of the oldest French wine they had in the cellar.
‘My good, most worthy Herr Privy Counsellor!’ Tusmann began when he heard the order.
But the stranger interrupted him quickly: ‘Let us forget all about titles, my good Herr Tusmann. I am neither a privy counsellor nor a chancellery private secretary, but nothing more nor less than an artist who works in noble metals and precious stones, and my name is Leonhard.’
