"Never! But don't let that keep you," said Oswald, good-naturedly taking down the bottle and drawing the cork. "I'll make you hot water in an instant."
"No indeed! Why such ceremonies? Cold water answers just as well, especially in small quantities,--this is a charming evening," said Mr. Timm, rubbing his hands joyfully. "Now please sit down in that corner there, on the sofa, so that I feel you are comfortable, if one who does not smoke and does not drink ever can be comfortable. I will move this big chair up,--what a weight the fellow has! And now let us have a chat, as two good people ought to talk, who laugh at all the absurdity of the so-called great world and good society."
With these words Mr. Timm drew up with his foot another light chair, to rest his legs upon, and then stretched himself out comfortably, bending his head back a little, to be able to look the longer at the smoke of his cigar.
The light of the lamp fell full upon his face, and Oswald now noticed, for the first time, that Mr. Timm's features were really surprisingly handsome and interesting, especially seen in profile, when the bold, clear-cut outlines were fully seen. This discovery was by no means a matter of indifference to Oswald. He went a step farther than Voltaire, thinking that the genre ennuyeux was the worst not only of books, but of men also; and as his sense of the beautiful in forms was very keenly alive, he allowed himself so very largely to be governed by his love for all that was picturesque or statuesque, that his sense for the True and the Good frequently suffered. It was so in this case. Mr. Timm's unceremonious manner and his thinly veiled materialism had offended him more than once in the course of the evening, and he had half and half determined to limit his intercourse with the impudent fellow to the absolutely necessary meetings; but as he now followed with his eye and his mind the outlines of the handsome face, he forgot quickly his resolution.
"Will you please keep still for a few minutes," he said, instinctively seizing his pencil, in order to sketch Albert's profile on the first piece of paper which he found on the table amid books and papers.
"Half an hour, if you wish it," replied the other; "I am perfectly comfortable as I am; only let me smoke, talk, and occasionally take a sip of this earth-born nectar."
"That will not interfere in the least," said Oswald, drawing busily.
"This old castle is after all a strange old box," said Albert, dreamily. "I do not think I have any mind for romance, and yet I have only to put my foot on the winding staircase which leads up this wing, and I feel all the horrors of the middle ages. Even my language changes, and I begin to talk, as you hear, like a novel-writer. What walls! we would make a dozen of them now! If there were people in those days, as I presume, who could storm doors and walls, what thick skulls they must have had!"
"Would you be good enough to take off your spectacles," said Oswald?
"With pleasure. If I had lived in the middle ages I should not have ruined my eyes by reading dusty old books. If the middle ages really had any advantages over ours, it was this, that people were not compelled to learn so much. Just imagine: no schools, no Cornelius Nepos, no history of the middle ages, no examinations, only a few sparring lessons with an old soldier who had served a number of masters and knew how to tell a good story of every one of them, and then if a man wanted to be very highly cultivated, a few lessons on the lute from a strolling minstrel--a merry, boisterous fellow, who was full of pretty songs and gay tricks, who had sung under a thousand windows and kissed a thousand girls,--what a life it must have been! And above all, this facility of changing your residence; this perfect freedom to move about at will, limited at most by a couple of stout fellows, who knocked your brains out in a hollow lane, if they pleased. Georges Sand has said a pretty thing in one of her novels, the only one I remember, probably because it was spoken as from my soul: 'What is there finer than a highroad?' Is not that well said? I could kiss the woman for that sentence, though she is a blue-stocking, and I hate blue-stockings like poison. I won't say like the devil, because he is after all but an unappreciated man of genius, and therefore deserves the sympathy of every educated man. But if a man of our day is pursued by the devil's own knaves, his creditors, where can he flee to? Then in those good old times a man would pack his knapsack some fine morning, or, if he had none, pack himself and march out of the city gate, and after a quarter of an hour, when he was outside the corporation, he was safe, and before evening came he had passed through so many adventures already that he had long since forgotten the old city and the pretty nut-brown maid, for whom but yesterday he vowed to live and die. Have you done? Well, let us see! Hm! You draw like some great painters, the face not as nature has made it, but as nature ought to have made it, if she had not unfortunately been blind at the proper moment. Very pretty, indeed, but I prefer the original. And you are a poet, too, as I see!"