48. CYCLE.
How gloriously,—before all the beating veins of the inner man, like those of the outer in old age, have stiffened into gristle, and all the vessels have become inflexible and earthy, and the moral pulse, like the physical, hardly makes sixty strokes in a minute, and before the shy old fool, at every emotion, reserves a piece of his nature which he keeps cold and dry, and which is to wait for another occasion, as sprinkled raspberry leaves always remain dry on the rough side,—how gloriously, I say, before this period of espionage, does a youth, especially an Albano, step along his path, how freely, boldly, and exultingly! and seeks with equal confidence the friend and the foe, and closes with him, to fight either for him or against him!
Let this excuse Albano's fiery letter! The next day he received from Roquairol this answer:—
"I am as thou. On ascension-evening I will seek thee among the masks.
"Charles."
The redness of mortification rushed over the Count's face at this artificial postponement of the acquaintance; he felt that, after such a tone from the heart, he would have immediately, without a dead interim of five days, and without an homage-day masquerade in a double sense, gone to his friend and become his. But now he swore no longer to run to meet him, but only to wait for him. However, the roused indignation soon subsided, and he began to invent fairer and fairer mitigations for the first leaf of the so-long-sought favorite. Charles might certainly, e. g. not wish to mix up the holy time of the first recognition with this bustle of taking the allegiance-oath,—or that first suicidal masquerade might have made every succeeding one an inspiring era of a new second life,—or he knew, perhaps, in fact, about Albano's birthday,—or, finally, this glowing spirit chose to run or fly on his own track.
Meanwhile, his note made the Count reproach himself for his own letter, as if it had been a sin against his Schoppe; he held it to be a sin, in one friendship, to yearn after another; but thou mistakest, fair soul! Friendship has steps which lead up on the throne of God, through all spirits, even to the Infinite: only love is satiable, and, like truth, admits no three degrees of comparison; and a single being fills its heart. Moreover, Albano and Schoppe, in such a mutual metempsychosis of their ideas, and such a near relationship of their pride and nobility, held each other far more dear than they showed to each other. For, as Schoppe, in fact, showed nothing, one could love him in return only with the finger on the lip, but, perhaps, so much the more strongly. Albano was a burning-hot concave mirror, which has its object near, and represents it erect behind itself; Schoppe one which holds the object far off, and throws an inverted image of it into the air.
On the evening before his birthday, and the day of allegiance, Albano stood alone at his window, and pondered his past,—for a last day is more solemn than a first: on the 31st of December I reckon up three hundred and sixty-five days and their fates; on the first of January I think of nothing, because, in fact, the whole future is transparent, or may be all out in five minutes;—while the vesper-bell pealed over the fast-closing twentieth year of his life, and the vesper-hour rose within him, he measured the abside-line[101] of his moral being, and looked up at the towering pile of the approaching morrow, which hung full either of spring-showers or hailstones. Never yet had he so tenderly surveyed the circle of his beloved beings, or glanced through the open doors of futurity, as at this time.
But the fair hour was spoiled by Malt, who burst in with the information that the limping gentleman had leaped overboard. From the dormer-window might be seen a returning village funeral-procession, conglomerated around the spot on the bank where Schoppe had plunged in. With frightful wildness—for in Albano indignation was next-door neighbor to terror and pain—he dragged along with him, as he flew to the rescue, the lazy provincial physician, and even threatened him with hard words; for Sphex was going to wait for a carriage, and meanwhile represent to himself the possible cases of too late preparations for a rescue, and besides, perhaps, cherished a hope of serving up Schoppe, on the anatomical table, as Doctor's-feast of science.
The youth ran out with him,—through corn-fields, amidst tears and amidst curses,—with alternate clenched fist and outspread palm, and his eye grew more and more dim and dizzy, and his heart hotter and hotter, the nearer they approached the dark circle. At last they could not only see the Librarian, but also hear him; in good case he turned towards them his curly head from among the reeds, and, occasionally, as he was haranguing the mourning-retinue, he flung up, in a fiery manner, his hairy arm above the water-plants.
Of course the case stood thus:—
His sorites, as long as he lived, was the following: "He had come into the world, not feet foremost, but head foremost, and, accordingly, carried his head and nose high and lofty,[102] because he could not help it. Now he knew of no more genuine freedom than health;—every malady shuts up and warps the soul, and the earth is, merely for that reason, a universal block-house, la salpetrière and house of bruises;[103]—whoso made use of an oyster-snail-viper medicine was himself a slimy, snaky, sticking viper, oyster, snail, and therefore the ever-free savages killed their invalids, and the vigorous Spartans gave no patient an office, least of all the crown;—and strength was especially necessary, in our degenerate days, in order to maul qualified subjects, because, to his certain knowledge, the fist with some substance in it was the best plaintiff's plea and actio ex lege diffamari which a citizen could institute."
Therefore he bathed summer and winter in ice-cold water, just as he, for the same reason, kept himself temperate in all things.
Now, then, in this odious May-weather, he had merely, in his gray hussar-cloak,—at home, his night-gown,—and with shoes down at the heel, gone to the water-side; he had previously stripped himself at the house so as to be ready as soon as he should arrive at the bank. The mourning-company, who saw him go at his swift pace down to the water, and at last throw off everything and leap in, could not but believe the man meant to drown himself, and ran in a body to his bathing-place, not to let him do it. "Do not drown himself!" cried the mourning-company of blacks, while yet afar off. He just let them come on till he could discourse the matter to them somewhat nearer, in the following wise:—"I am yet open to conviction; I can hear reason, good folk, though I am already standing up to my neck in the water; but suffer yourselves to be correctly informed in this case, dear Cherstens generally, for so Christians were called in the time of Charles. I am a poor Sacramentarian, and can hardly recollect what I have hitherto lived on, it was so bloody-desperate little. Whatever I have undertaken in this world, no blessing went with it, but it was all crab's-track backwards and forward. I set up, in Vienna, a neat little magazine of snipes' dung, but I made nothing out of it for want of snipes. I took hold on the other end, and hawked about in Carlsbad, for the lords and great ones, who are accustomed to set a picture upon every old stool and piece of trumpery, fine engravings for waste-paper and privy purposes, in order that, instead of the mere printed paper, they might have something tasty for consumption; but the whole set was left, a dead loss, on my hands, because the manner was too hard and not ideal enough. In London I prepared ready-made speeches (for I am a litterateur) to be used by men who are hanged, and yet would fain have something to say for themselves: I offered them to the richest parliamentary orators, and even knaves of booksellers, but came near having to use the speeches for myself. I would gladly have got my living by vomiting,[104] but that requires funds. I tried once to get a settlement as note-stand to a count's regiment, because it looks stupid enough on drill- and parade-days to see every one with a musical flap hanging on his shoulder, from which his next neighbor behind plays. I offered for a trifle to wear all the musicalia on my own person, and stand before them with the notes; but the first-lieutenant (who is at once in the regency and in the treasury) thought it would make the fifers laugh when they came to blow. Thus has it fared with me from time immemorial, dear Cherstens—but don't trample about on my precious cloak there! As ill luck would have it, I entered into wedlock with a lady of Vienna, who was endowed with melted seals;[105] her name was Prænumerantia Elementaria Philanthropia;[106] you don't know what this means in German,—a real hell-broom, who chased me, all heated, like a hunted stag, into the reeds here. Cherstens, I should defame myself in the water, were I to come out plainly with the whole story of our woful condition;[107] ... in short, my Philanthropia before marriage was soft as the spines of a new-born hedge-hog, but in the nuptial state, when the foliage was off, I saw, as on trees in winter, one raven's- and devil's-nest after another. She was all the time dressing herself and dressing herself, till it was time to undress; when a fault in me or the children had been removed, she would still continue to scold a little, as one continues to vomit, when the emetic and everything is out; she indulged me preciously little, and had I had a Fontanel[108] she would have reproached me for the fresh pea which I should have been obliged every day to put into it; in short, we two pulled opposite ways,—the linch-pin of love came out in the struggle, and I came with the forward-wheels down into the water here, and my Prænumerantia stays with the hind-wheels at home. See, my women, this is why I do violence to myself—besides, the gnawing-man[109] would have, at any rate, caught me by the throat; but behold yourselves in me as in a mirror! For when a man who is a litterateur, and therefore, as you yet know by the case of Fichte, goes about as instituted overseer, schoolmaster, and mentor of the human race, leaps overboard before his wife's face, and lets his Ephorie and tutorship go, you may conclude from this of what your own husbands, who cannot measure themselves with me at all in learning, are capable, in case you are such Prænumerantias, Elementarias, and Philanthropias as unfortunately you have the appearance of being. But," he concluded suddenly, as he saw Albano and the Doctor, "clear yourselves away; I am going to drown myself!"
"Ah, dear Schoppe!" said Albano. Schoppe blushed at his situation. "It must be a clown," said the retiring funeral retinue. "What child's foolery is this, then?" asked Sphex, resenting Albano's former passion and the anatomical misshot, and derived satisfaction from telling the story of the latter's rage. Schoppe knew how heartily the noble youth loved him, and he would not say anything, because he was ashamed, but he swore to himself (in the grotesque style to which he was accustomed even in soliloquy) very shortly to let him into his breast-cavern, and show him hanging therein a whole, wild heart full of love.