Schoppe"s Heart.--Dangerous Spiritual Acquaintances.
93. CYCLE.
Albano was now again lashed to the Ixion"s wheels of the clock. The setting off of the Princess and her answer were to suddenly set up lights in the dark, wide cavern in which he had so long travelled, without knowing whether it harbored frightful formations and venomous beasts, or whether it was vaulted, and filled with glistening arches and subterranean pillared halls. Over Liana"s condition two hands--Augusti"s and that of the Minister"s lady--had hitherto held fast the veil. Both were persons who never liked to answer the question, How do you do? However, he now let his whole soul rest upon the Princess, since the astronomical evening, in remembering which, he could hardly comprehend how it was that he was able at that time to speak to a female friend about his love as much and more than ever to a friend of his own s.e.x. But man does not love to speak of his feelings before a man, and does love to before a woman. A woman, however, loves best to do so before a woman. Meanwhile, the Princess held him in bonds by the finest flattery which can be,--by decided and silent attention.
He was as sick and sated of verbal praise as he was partial and tributary to that which came in a practical shape.
Pending the arrival of the decision, a confused time elapsed; like a man who travels in the night, he heard voices and saw lights; and it needed morning to decide upon their hostile or friendly significance.
Rabette lay sick and bleeding away her faint heart; for not he had drawn out of it the astringent dagger,--namely, Charles"s love,--but the latter had himself antic.i.p.ated him with bitter-sweet tears over the bitterest.
Charles had met him once, with his hat drawn down over his brows, and grimly-stinging look, without a greeting. Everywhere he heard that Charles in vain besieged and blockaded Linda"s and Julienne"s double gate. This and Liana"s illness made the tropical savage like a grownup wild boy of the woods. Even in the present state of separation,--on the death-field of _friendship_,--Albano felt it as a wound to _humanity_, that Charles did not take for granted--for to the contrary presumption he imputed the street-grimness--that he would not seek to see the Countess.
Even in the Librarian, for several days, a mystery seemed to have been lurking. He, however, since it had been growing lighter and lighter to Alban in Schoppe"s depths, and he had looked in behind his comic mask, even to the honest eye and loving lips, became very near to his heart, especially after so many partings; for even the Lector, according to his custom never to court the love of any man, or, at least, faithless friend, kept himself aloof from him,--a thing which afflicted the very same youth, who inwardly approved it.
For several days, I say, Schoppe had been transposed into an entirely new tune, and become his own remainder and after-summer. It began with his blowing away at a miserable haying song a whole half-day on the bugle; the remaining half he sang it off vocally. Instead of reading and writing, he went up and down in the city and in his chamber. All that which he had formerly despatched with rapidity,--running, swallowing of victuals, speaking, smoking, starting up,--all this went now club-footed, and finally stood fast. His slow rousing up, and his tender, gentle step, might have seemed ludicrous to those who were acquainted with his former days. His large, n.o.ble wolf-dog, whom he had ten times a day suffered to hug him round the neck with his fore-paws, and whose breast, drawn up on the skin, he so fondly pressed to his own, when he held with him a Lange"s and consistorial colloquy, he now neglected to such a degree that the dog became attentive, and did not know what to think of it. How little could he once endure the yelp of a cudgelled hound without sallying out of his house-door as protector and patron, because he conceived one might well treat men like dogs, but not dogs themselves so! Now he could hear their screaming, merely because, as it seemed, he did not hear it.
As he formerly often went to Albano merely to walk up and down, without a loud word,--because he said, "By this I recognize my friend, that he does not undertake to entertain me or himself, but will merely sit there,"--so now he came still more mute, often touched tenderly, like a playful child, the shoulder of Albano as he sat reading, and said, when the latter looked behind him, "Nothing!" Meanwhile, Albano inquired not about the change; for he knew he would surely unveil it to him in good time. Their hearts stood over against each other like open mirrors.
So lay the dark wood of life before Albano, with its paths running through each other and deep into the thicket, as he stood upon the cross-way of his future and waited for his genius, who, either as a hostile or as a good one, was to bring him Liana"s decision. At last there came from the gloomy wood a genius, but it was the dark genius, and gave him this note from the Princess:--
"Dear Count: I am always true, and would rather be unsparing than _un_true. The sick Mademoiselle v. F. is no longer in a condition to make a tour or profit by it. I take a lively interest in the case.
However fondly I could wish to-day myself to speak consolation to you, I hope, nevertheless, after this intelligence, not to have occasion to do so.
"Your Friend."
What a dark cloud-break out of the morning redness of youth! So then the secret joy which he had hitherto nourished had been the forerunner of the dreadful blow,[43] the soft murmuring before the waterfall.[44]
That his very love was to be the blazing sword which pierced through her life: O, he dwelt upon that so constantly; _that_ pained him so!
But there was no moisture in his eye; the wormwood of conscience embitters even sorrow.
When man is no longer his own friend, then he goes to his brother, who is a friend still, in order that _he_ may softly speak to him and restore his heart and soul; Albano went to his Schoppe.
He found not him, but something else. Schoppe, namely, kept a diary about "himself and the world," wherein his friend might read whatever and whenever he wished; only he must pardon it, if he carried away with him from the reading, since it was written throughout just as if no one were to see it again,--angry slaps of the fan, and that, too, with the hard end. "Why should I spare thee any more than myself?" said Schoppe.
To this _thou_ they had come without being able to say when, chary as they generally were of this official style of the heart, this holiest dual of souls toward others; "for I thank G.o.d," said Schoppe, "that I live in a language in which I can sometimes say you, yes even (if men and monkeys are subjects for it) between every two commas, your Well-born, as well as your High-born, or Otherwise-born."
Albano found the diary open, and read with astonishment this:--"_Amandus-day_. A stupid and extremely remarkable day for the well-known Hesus or Ha.n.u.s![45] I can hardly persuade myself that the poor Thunder-G.o.d deserved to walk along behind the tall Proserpine,[46]
and at last to peep into her face, her brow, her lips, her neck! O G.o.d! If such a G.o.d had stayed now on the spot! As _Pastor fido_ he by good fortune rose up again and went on his way. O h.e.l.l-G.o.ddess, heaven-stormer of Hesus, thou hast made thyself his heaven! Can he ever let thee go?
"_Afternoon_. The _Pastor_ becomes his own baiting-house, he knows not how to stay; he lives now in all streets, in order to behold his _Jeanne d"Arc-en-ciel_,[47] and suffers enough. But, Hesus, are not sorrows the thorns, wherewith the buckle of love fastens? To-day Friday[48] went with the Princess to the observatory. The wind is south-east-east,[49]--read thirteen monthlies in one hour,--Spener sees life transfigured and poetic in the shining magnifying-mirror G.o.d, as well as another man.
"_Sabina"s day_. With the _Pastor_ it grows worse, if I see right. He is in the way to work himself over into a _billet-doux-presser_, to powder himself by night in bed; and the knave already raises in the heat, like milk which is kept warm, poetic cream. Only may Heaven never grant him to fall into a rational discourse with his h.e.l.l-G.o.ddess, face to face, breath to breath, and the two souls be confounded together!
Verily, Flins[50] would s.n.a.t.c.h him away, Hesus would devour a millennial kingdom at once; I fear he would become too wild with the nectar, and too hard for me to control.
"_Evening_. Is it not already so far gone with the _Pastor_, that he has borrowed him an author out of the whining decade of the age (he is ashamed to name him), and will fain let himself be affected by the stupid stuff, while he muses upon the effect which the author had upon him in his fourteenth year. Of course he stumbles at him, in his present period of life, like a night-watchman by day; but still he cries back his cry, and has a new affection on the subject of his old.
So does the declension of _cornu_ in the grammar still smile upon me, even to this hour, because I recollect how easily and glibly in the golden moons of childhood I retained the whole of the _Singular_.
"_Simon Jud_.[51] Curse on it! A fair face and a false Maxd"or make, in the course of a year, a couple of hundred knaves, who differ from each other only in this, that one wishes to keep and the other to get rid of the article. Hesus frowns, and charges home upon a million rivals already. Like b.u.t.ton- and lace-makers, or like copper- and bra.s.s-founders, two so nearly of a trade cannot let each other get on.[52] Right! h.e.l.l-G.o.ddess, that thou hatest all men! That is, to be sure, something for the _Pastor_,--a wound-salve! Scioppius, the two Scaligers, and the vigorous Schlegels, &c.--"
Here the diary pa.s.ses to other matters. An old portrait, for which Schoppe had sat to himself, he had retouched. A notice to be inserted in the "Pest.i.tz Weekly Advertiser" announced the purpose of the picture:--
"The undersigned, a portrait-painter of the Flemish school, makes known that he has taken up his residence in Pest.i.tz, and that he is ready to paint all of every station and s.e.x that may sit to him. As a sample of his execution may be seen at his studio a portrait of himself, which represents him sneezing, and which may be compared with the original on the spot. I also cut profiles.
"Peter Schoppe,
"No. 1778."
Probably that was to move the h.e.l.l-G.o.ddess to sit for once to the sneezing painter. Albano could not but be astonished in the midst of deep pain. In the beginning, he had imagined, according to the simplicity of his nature, that he himself was meant by Ha.n.u.s.
At this moment, Schoppe appeared. Albano spoke first, and said, softly, "I, too, have read thy diary." The Librarian started back with an exclamatory curse, and looked glowingly out of the window. "What is the matter, Schoppe?" asked his friend. He whirled round, stared at him, and said, twisting the skin of his face apart, like one who is cleaning his teeth, and drawing up his upper lip, like a boy who bites into his bread and b.u.t.ter, "I am in love," and ran up and down the chamber in a flame, bewailing, at the same time, that he must live to experience such a thing in himself in these his oldest days. "Read my diary no more," he continued. "Ask not about the name, brother; no devil, no angel, not the h.e.l.l-G.o.ddess, shall know it. One day, perhaps, when I and she lie in Abraham"s bosom, and I on hers--thou art so troubled, brother!"
"Fly gayly in the sun-atmosphere of love!" said his friend, in that sadness of conscience which makes man simple, calm, and lowly; "I will never ask nor disturb thee! Read that!" He gave him the note of the Princess, and said to him also, while he read, "Cursed be every joy where she has none! I stay here till it is decided whether she lives or not." "I stay here too," rejoined Schoppe, with an involuntarily comic expression. "Be serious!" said Albano. "Once I could," said he, tearfully; "since day before yesterday no more!"
Meanwhile, Albano approved Schoppe"s separation from the travelling company; both secured to each other, even in friendship, the most precious freedom. Of tutors" attendance neither made account. Schoppe often ridiculed tutors of much information and manners, when they a.s.sumed he educated anything out of Albano or into him. He said: "The age educated, not a ninny; millions of men, not one; properly, at most, a pedagogical group of Pleiades sent their light after him,--namely, the seven ages of man, every age into the next following. The individual resembled very much the entire humanity, whose revolutions and improvements were nothing more than retouchings of a Schickaneder"s magic flute by a Vulpius. Meanwhile, however, there hovered around the silly, discordant piece a melody of Mozart, in respect to which one outstrips father and language-master."
"Wherefore do we sinners creep and buzz about here? Let us to Ratto"s!"
said Schoppe. With extreme reluctance, Albano agreed to it; he said the cellar had in it for him something uncomfortable, and a sultry foreboding oppressed his bosom. Schoppe referred the presentiment to the pressure of the rafters of his ruined pleasure-castle, which still lay upon his breast, and the remembrance of that Roquairol, now flying in the abyss, who had once drunk his health in the cellar, and afterwards confessed to him in Lilar. Albano followed at last, but reminded him of the fulfilment of another presentiment, which he had had on the hill above Arcadia.
"We neither of us play the best personages in love; meanwhile let us go into the cellar," said Schoppe, on the way, and, with a quite unwonted hardness, stretched his favorite upon the rack of his drollery. Once, when he was not himself in love, he was so capable of a tender, indulgent, serious silence on that subject; but now no more.
94. CYCLE.
In the cellar there was the old running in and out of strange and familiar faces. Albano and Schoppe climbed together those pure heights of the mountains of the Muses, where, as on natural ones, the atmosphere of life rests lighter, and the ether draws nearer to the shortening column of air. Men comfort each other more easily on their Ararat than women in their vales of Tempe. After Schoppe, made more fiery by the tempestuous atmosphere of punch and love, had for a considerable time played off the lightning-spark of his humor in zigzag, and with a calcining effect, through the world-edifice, suddenly an unknown person, like a death"s-head, perfectly bald and even without eyebrows, but with a rosy hue on his withered cheeks, stepped up to their table and said, with iron mien, to Schoppe: "Within fifteen months this day you will have become crazy, my merry c.o.c.k-sparrow!"
"O ho!" Schoppe broke out, inwardly shrinking up the while. Albano grew pale. Schoppe collected himself again, stared sharply and courageously at the repulsive shape, which rolled its withered but rosy skin to and fro upon sharp, high cheek-bones, and said: "If you understand me, prophetic gallows-bird and c.o.c.k-sparrow, and are not yourself crack-brained, then am I in a condition to prove that one can make very little of a case out of such a thing as madness." Hereupon he showed--but as one cooled-down, burnt-out, and deserted by his host of images--that madness, like epilepsy, gave more pain to the spectator than the performer; for it was only an earlier death, a longer dream, a day-walking instead of night-walking; for the most part, it gave what the whole of life and virtue and wisdom could not,--an _enduring_ agreeable idea.[53] Even if, which was rare, it chained a man to a tormenting one, still this became, nevertheless, a panoply against all bodily sufferings. He had, therefore, for himself, never feared madness any more than dreaming, but could not bear to hear others speak, or even to see them, in either of these states. "We shudder," said Albano, "at a man who talks to us in his sleep as to an absent person, or who, when awake, talks only to himself alone; and whenever I hear myself soliloquize, it is just the same."
"I am no philosopher," said the Baldhead, indifferently, whose perfect, shining baldness was more frightful than hateful. Schoppe asked angrily, "Who he was, then, _quis_ and _quid_ and _quibus auxiliis_, and _cur_ and _quomodo_ and _quando_."[54] "_Quando?_--After fifteen months I come again. _Quis?_--Nothing; G.o.d uses me only when he has to make some one unhappy," said the bald one, and begged a gla.s.s and the liberty of drinking with them. Albano, freely granting it, said, in an inquiring tone, he had probably just arrived? "Just from the great Bernhard," said the bald one, growing more repulsive with every word, because his old rosy face was a zigzag of convulsive distortions, so that at every moment a different man seemed to be standing there. He went out a moment. Schoppe, quite beside himself, said: "I grow more and more exasperated with him, as with a hideous, hovering fever-image.
For G.o.d"s sake, let us go. I have a feeling behind me all the time, as if a wicked fist were thrusting me upon him, that I should strangle him. He grows, too, more and more familiar to me, like an old moss-grown deadly foe."
Albano answered softly: "See, my presentiment! But now that I have not hearkened to it, I must even see where it will come out." His courageous nature, his romantic history and position, would not let him draw back from a prospect so full of adventure.
"But why," inquired Schoppe of the bald one, when he came back, "do you cut so many faces, which do not present you exactly in the most favorable light?" "They come," said he, "from poison which was given me ten years ago. Have you observed how _aqua toffana_, taken in quant.i.ties, distorts? In Naples, I forced it down the throat of a beautiful girl of sixteen, who had for some years dealt in it, and caused her to die before my eyes. I fancy there is nothing more G.o.dless than poison-mixing." "Abominable!" cried Albano, seized with the deepest repugnance for the man; as to Schoppe, _his_ fury had actually relieved him.
At this moment a poor, meagre joiner"s wife came in for liquor, who kept her eyes cast down and half closed with shame and weakness; she ventured not to look up, because the whole town knew that she was forcibly driven out of her bed at night into the street to see a funeral procession, which some days after was really to move through it, already in prelude and prefiguration pa.s.s before her. Hardly had the bald one beheld her, when he covered his face. "There is only a single innocent one among us," said he, all pale and uneasy; "this youth here," pointing to Albano. Just then a carriage with six horses thundered by overhead. Schoppe jumped up, twice in succession put the question to Albano, who was lost in thought: "Wilt thou go with me?"
turned angrily away at the word No, stepped close up to the bald one, and said furiously: "Dog!" and turning on his heel went out. On the pale, bloodless skin of the Baldhead no expression stirred, only his hand twitched a little, as if there were near it a stiletto to lay hold of, but he sent after him that look at which the maiden in Naples died.
Albano was enraged at the look, and said: "Sir, this man is a thoroughly honest, true, vigorous nature; but you have exasperated him even against himself, and must acquit him of blame." With soft, flattering voice he replied: "My acquaintance with him dates not from to-day, and he knows me, too." Albano asked whether, when he spoke of the great Bernhard some time since, he meant the Swiss mountain of that name. "Certainly!" replied he. "I travel thither yearly to spend a night with my sister." "So far as I know, there are only monks there," said Albano. "She stands among the frozen ones in the cloister-chapel,"[55] he replied. "I stay all night before her, and look upon her, and sing Horae."
Albano, while listening, felt himself singularly changed, which he could ascribe only to the punch,--it was less intoxication than glow; a flying blaze roared over his inner world, and the red l.u.s.tre hovered about on its farthest borders; now did it seem to him as if he stood entirely on the same ground with the Baldhead, and could wrestle with this evil genius. "I had a sister, too," said Albano; "can one call up the dead?" "No, but the dying," said the Baldhead. "Ugh!" said Albano, shuddering. "Whom would you see?" asked the Baldhead. "A living sister, whom I never have seen yet," said Albano, in a glow. "It requires,"
said the Baldhead, "a little sleep, and your knowing also where your sister was on her last birthday." Luckily Julienne, whom he took for his sister, had, on _hers_, been at the Palace in Lilar. He told him so. "Then come with me!" said the Baldhead.
At this moment Schoppe"s servant brought Albano a sword-cane and the following note:--
"Brother, brother, trust him not. Here is a weapon, for thou art quite too foolhardy. Run him right through, if he does so much as make faces.