Stories/Poems

This evening, while I was still sitting at my desk and had opened the window for a while to let the tobacco smoke disappear, a butterfly visited me in my parlour. It was a Camberwell Beauty, I suddenly saw it sitting with folded wings on a snow-white begonia flower on the windowsill. What had drawn it here from the harbouring cloak of darkness? The light of my lamp or the pure white of the flower, or had its soft scent wafted out to him? I stood in front of it for a long time, in front of this mysterious creature that was motionless on the flower star and occasionally moved its wings silently in thought. I could have grabbed it; the longing of my boyhood to one day own a mourning cloak butterfly could have been fulfilled now, but I didn't do it. Who knows what lament was sent to me, what comfort, what dark longing it wanted to bring me! It appeared to me like the messenger of a secret and at the same time a messenger of memories from a long lost youth.

When I was still a farmer's boy, tending the cows on the Eifel meadows and Drieschen in the warm post-summer and autumn days, I saw it for the first time, the fluttering velvet rag of purple darkness with the golden fringe behind midnight blue round spots. At the time I thought it was the most beautiful butterfly, even more beautiful than the Peacock butterfly, the Swallowtail and the Ladybird, because I was drawn to its dark velvet mystery, which I didn't know how to interpret. The other butterflies were bright and colourful like the sun and midday light, like the flowers and berries; when they fluttered by, it was like the soundless laughter of a summer's day, like the sun glinting past. But the Camberwell Beauty didn't quite fit in with the bright day; it seemed to me to be a creature of the night, and its appearance transported me to mysterious slate tunnels and gloomy forest depths. When he suddenly hovered before the boy's gaze, when he settled on a silver raspberry leaf, on a white blackberry blossom, I held my breath to feel his breath under the black purple of his wings. I would not have dared to touch or even catch him; I had an inner fear of the mystery that already rested in his name, a silent reverence for the sorrow that touched us from him. He seemed to me to belong to an otherworldly realm and to stray into our bright day only now and then out of longing for the sunlight.

Once the long Lipp, our meadow- and schoolmate, rushed after a Camberwell Beauty to catch it and knock it down with his cap. How could he have known at such a young age that the highest beauty spoils when one desires it, that it becomes lustreless when one touches it, that it is already dead when one possesses it. He had to pay for his lust for the hunt with death, for the mourning cloak beckoned to him, and before he realised it he was lying in the black moor pond, from which we could not rescue him. They must emerge from the garden of death, I thought at the time, they must be messengers of the afterlife, a divine sadness spoke to me from the black, inaudible flapping of their wings and from the priestly jewellery of their gold-covered wings. - That evening I talked for a long time with the Camberwell Beauty butterfly in my parlour. Then I released it into the wild. I sacrificed the blossom, broke it off for him and placed it outside on the window stone so that he could float away untouched into the night, into the velvety blue, wistful October night, into which he flew away like a little corner of her, like a breeze blowing away into the invisible. Even in the darkness, I knew, he was in the Creator's hand.

It was on a summer evening, of early life, when little more than a child, in rambling through a wood on a holiday, my attention was drawn to a spray on which rested a Camberwell Beauty. I had never seen such perfection before. My eye rested on the rich dark velvety wings, fringed with ermine white, relieved by an inner border of metallic blue spots, like bracelets of lapis lazuli.

At this moment I could mark the very spot in the forest where this vision was revealed, and well do I remember the thrill of delight with which I captured and carried off my prize in triumph, to exhibit before a little knot of schoolfellows. I can see their uplifted hands, I can hear their exclamations of surprise, as they beheld the splendid captive. I can recall their features and their forms as if now living, though every individual among them has long since been called away, and now possibly familiarised with greater things than it is permitted man’s philosophy to dream of here.

But to me, trifling as this little incident may appear to many, the results through life have been neither unimportant, useless, nor uninfluential; for it is to it I stand indebted for many a happy hour. That poor insect awakened a taste which has never slumbered; and the cultivation of Natural History has been my solace in times and seasons, when the mind required something to fall back upon, apart from the business and pursuits of the world.

It so happened that from the time I have alluded to until a few summers ago, in one of the mountain passes of the Pyrenees, I had never met with a single living specimen of Vanessa antiopa when, on a lovely day, on a spray the very counterpart of that of the days of my childhood, I saw the expanded wings of this insect, and the days of auld lang syne1, which first introduced it to my notice, came across my mind vivid and clear as though but of yesterday.

This summer, again (and not unfrequently) I fell in with this associate of my early years. Children, indeed, may they be called of the sun. In the hot and sultry hours of noonday, they would flit by, rendering it almost impossible to watch their course; if in these flights two or three met in the glade, they paused in their speed, and fluttering together, so busied themselves in conflict of rivalry or afiection, I know not which, that I more than once caught two at a time, and after admiring them, in gratitude for the benefit I had received at their hands, sent them forth once again to enjoy their summer revelries.

At other times (I particularly recollect one occasion), in a wood on the summit of the Drachenfels2, when the wind was rather keen, I found numbers resting on the backs of trees, in a state of stupor; they made no attempts to escape, and when thrown into the air their wings barely opened, or flapping feebly, eased their fall, or enabled them to seek repose on the stem of a rotten trunk.