50. CYCLE.
Albano stepped, for the first time, into the inverted puppet-world of a masquerade, as into a dancing realm of the dead. The black forms, the slit masks, the strange eyes, gleaming as out of night behind them, which, as in that mouldering Sultan in the coffin, alone remained alive,—the mingling and mimicking of all ranks, the flying and ring-running of the clinking dance, and his own solitude under the mask,—all this translated him, with his Shakespearian frame of spirit, into an enchanted and ghostly island full of juggleries, chimeras, and metamorphoses. Ah, this is the bloody scaffold, was his first thought, where the brother of thy Liana rent his young life, like a mourning-garment; and he looked fearfully round, as if he feared Roquairol might again attempt death.
Among the masks he found no one under which he could suppose him to be; this meaningless cousinship of standing parts, footmen, butchers, Moors, ancestors, &c.,—these could not conceal any loved one of Albano's. Lonesomely and inquisitively he paced up and down behind the rows of the Anglaise; and more than ten eyes, which glistened opposite in the annular eclipse of the lace mask,—for women, from their open-heartedness, do not love masks, but are fond of showing themselves,—followed the powerfully and pliantly built form, which, with the bold helm and plume, with the crossed white mantle and the gleaming mail on his breast, seemed to bring a knight out of the heroic age.
At last a masked lady, who was chatting between unmasked ones, came up to him with long steps and large feet, and boldly grasped his hand as if for a dance. He was extremely embarrassed at the boldness of the summons, and about the choice of an answer; it is valor precisely that loves to marry itself to gallantry, as the Damascene blade, besides hardness, possesses a perpetual fragrance; but the lady only wrote in his hand his initials, with the interrogation-mark after them,—"v. C.?" and after the Yes, the charming one said, softly, "Do you not remember me? the master of exercises, Von Falterle?" Albano testified, notwithstanding his dislike of the part, a real joy at finding again a companion of his youth. He asked which mask was Captain Roquairol; Falterle assured him he had not yet arrived.
By this time—as the footmen, the butchers, Falterle, &c., were only the snow-drops of this masquerade-spring—better flowers—violets, forget-me-nots, and primroses—had sprung up or come in. For one such forget-me-not I see a churl entering, puffed out behind and before, and convex like a burning-glass, who now opened the back-door and shook out confects from his hump-back, and then the front-door and produced sausages. Hafenreffer, however, writes me the invention has once before appeared at a masquerade in Vienna. Then came a company of German play-cards, which shuffled and played out and took each other; a fine emblem of atheism, which exhibits it wholly free from the absurdity wherewith men have so loved to disfigure it! Mr. Von Augusti appeared also, but in simple dress and domino; he became (incomprehensibly to the Count) very soon the polar-star of the dancers, and the controlling Cartesian vortex of the dancing-school.
With what miserable, black ammunition-biscuit and beggar's-bread of enjoyment these people get along! thought Albano, to whom, all day long, his dreams, those Jupiter's-doves, had been bringing ambrosia. And how pale and stale is their fire, their fancy, and their speech, he thought too. Verily, a life down in a gloomy glacier-chasm! for he imagined everybody must speak and feel as intensely and ardently as he.
Now came a limping man, with a great glass-chest on his belly; of course it was easy to recognize the Librarian; he had on—either because he sent too late, or would not pay, for a domino—something black, which he had borrowed of a mourning-cloak lender, and was covered from shoulder-blade to shin-bone with awful masks, which he, with many finger-signs, offered mostly to those people who played their parts behind the opposite kind, e. g. short-nosed ones to long noses. He was waiting for the beginning of a hop Anglaise, the notes for which stood just on the hand-organ of his chest; then he, too, began; he had therein an excellent puppet-masquerade which had been planed out by Bestelmaier, and now he set the little masks to hopping parallel with the great ones. His object was a comparative anatomy of the two masquerades, and the parallelism was melancholy. Besides, he had rigged it all out with by-work: little dumb persons swung their little bells in the chest; a tolerably grown-up child rocked the cradle of an inanimate doll, with which the little fool still played; a mechanic was working away at his speaking machine, by which he was going to show the world how far mere mechanism could go toward giving life to puppets; a live, white mouse[114] sprang out by a little chain, and would have upset many of the club, if he could have broken it; a starling, buried-alive, a true first Greek comedy and school for scandal in miniature, was practising upon the dancing-company the death-blow of the tongue with perfect freedom and without distinction; a looking-glass-wall mimicked the living scenes of the chest so deceptively, that every one took the images for true puppets.
The point of this comico-tragic dagger came home directly enough upon Albano, as, besides, the hopping wax-figure-cabinet of the great masquerade seemed to double the solitude of man, and to separate two selves by four faces; but Schoppe went further.
In his glass case stood a faro-bank, and by it a little man, who cut out the masked banker in black paper, but into a likeness of the German gentleman; this picture he carried into the card-chamber, where a bank-keeping mask—most certainly Cephisio—must needs hear and see him. The banker looked at him some time inquiringly. Another, dressed wholly in black, with a dying expression, which represented the Hippocratica facies,[115] did the same. Albano looked towards it with a fiery glance, because it occurred to him it might be Roquairol, for it had his stature and torch-like eye. The pale mask lost much, and kept redoubling its loss; at that it drank out of a quill immoderate draughts of Champagne wine. The Lector came up; Schoppe kept on playing before the eyes that crowded round; the pale mask looked steadily and sternly at the Count. Schoppe took off his own before Bouverot; but there was another under it; he pulled this off; it disclosed an under-mask of the under-mask; he carried on the process to the fifth root;—at last his own rough face came forth, but bronzed with gold-beater's skin and distorted, as it turned towards Bouverot, with an almost frightful glaze and smile.
The pale mask itself seemed to start, and hastened with long strides off into the dancing-hall; it threw itself wildly into the wildest of the dance. This, too, confirmed Albano's conjecture, as well as its great defying hat, which seemed to him a crown, because he prized nothing more highly about manly attire than fur, cloak, and hat.
More and more fingers continually drew the letters "v. C." in his hand, and he nodded composedly. The time surrounded him with manifold dramas, and everywhere he stood between theatre-curtains. As with uneasy head and heart he stepped to the window, to see whether he should soon have moonshine for his night-walk, he saw a heavy hearse, flanked by torches, move along across the market, which was conveying a manor-lord to his family-vault; and the undisturbed night-watchman called out, behind the creeping dead man, the beginning of the spirit-hour and of a birth-hour, which is precious to us. Could his smitten heart refrain from saying to him how sharply Death, the hard, solid, insoluble, with its glacier-air, sweeps through the warm scenes of life, and leaves behind it all over which it breathes stiff and snow-white? Could he help thinking of the cold young sister, whose voice now awaited him in Tartarus? And as Schoppe, with his puppet-parody, came to him, and he pointed out to him the street, and the latter said: "Bon! Friend Death sits on his game-wagon, and glances quietly up, as if the friend would say, 'Bon! only dance on; I make my return trip, and carry you too to your place and spot,'"—how close must it have been to him under his sultry visor! At this second the pale mask came, with others, to the window; he opened his glowing face for coolness; a hasty draught of wine, and still more his fancy, showed him the world in burning surfaces; the mask surveyed him closely, with a dark, uncertain glow of the eye, which he at last could no longer bear, because it might as well have been kindled by hatred as by love, just as the spots on the sun seem now like abysses and now like mountains.
Eleven o'clock had gone by; he suddenly disappeared from the hot looks and the crushing throng, and betook himself on his way to the heart without a breast.