She leaned over him and kissed his emaciated hand in silence.
The next moment sadness appeared on his face. He turned his head and muttered, “Ach, das ist schrecklich! Ein Toter, lechzend nach den lebendigsten Lebensgenüssen. All my life I wished to write a Faust—a Faust different from all the Fausts ever written, different also from Goethe’s—but I never fully understood my Faust until now. The conception of my Faust is a devout monk who had piously practiced self-denial and the mortification of his body to such an extent that his flesh shrivelled. Then Mephistopheles comes to tantalize him and brings him a maiden of matchless beauty. The saintly monk falls from grace, flings his life-long belief aside, and woos the fair Marguerite, who returns his love, but the poor monk can play his tune on only one string. Of all his earthly senses desire is the only one left him; a thirst unquenchable. Like old Job, he curses the day on which he was born even as he scraped himself with a potsherd to soothe his pain, but, unlike the Man of Uz, Faust dies with a curse of God upon his lips, without realizing that the great beauty-loving God has punished him for his failure to listen to His Voice earlier in life. The wasted monk is then taken to the region of the Styx, where other fools like himself are baptised in waters of spouting flame and anointed with boiling oil and sulphur, and after a period of purification is sent back to earth, fully rejuvenated. In the second volume of my Faust I would sing of Paradise Regained.”
Albert chuckled. The Butterfly now understood why the critics spoke of him as the German Voltaire. No one could be at once so reverent and blasphemous as Albert.
The sun was setting, the afternoon glow was gone, invisible shades of darkness were descending upon the sick room; silence was round them. Even the parrot was hushed.
“Ah, the first volume of my Faust I have already lived,” he sighed, “but there won’t be a second volume.” Then, with a light laugh, “who can tell, perhaps the life of Paradise Regained may yet be granted me, too. I rather like the Buddhistic doctrine of Reincarnation. I may return to earth as the crowned Sultan of Turkey.”
She caught the spirit of his levity and remarked, “From all reports you have already lived the life of a Sultan—only uncrowned!”
“Unsinn!” There was scorn in his voice. All levity immediately fled from him. “The world has taken me too literally. Alas! When I was in earnest they thought I was jesting and when I jested they failed to grasp my humor—the French are the only people who understand me. When I meant to be a Socrates they mistook me for an Aristophanes and when I played Aristophanes they charged me with trying to be a Socrates. I a profligate! He who has lived the life of a profligate often writes virtuous tracts. It is your priest, your morality-preaching Philistine, your man wrapped in the pure white robe of piety, who is often the real profligate. My life has been given to devotion—I have been a Carmelite, locked in the cell of my dreams. I was a little Ishmael in the wilderness of Beer Sheba dying of thirst. Ah! that consuming thirst, the thirst of beauty that sears one’s soul—thirsting, thirsting—thirsting to the end! I have always loved honorably, earnestly, with all the senses God meant for love. Ah, love! There is nothing else in life worth striving after. What else is there in life? Fame, riches, achievements?—they are only coal burnt to clinkers. If I only had a child on whom to lavish my love in my dying days!——”
A sigh, almost a groan, escaped his parted lips.
“Let me take the place of a child,” she pleaded in a whisper, tears filling her eyes.
“Indeed you are my allersüsstes Kind.”