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.
51. CYCLE.
While he stood at the gate awaiting his sword, a group of new masks (mostly representatives of lifelessness, e. g. a boot, peruke-stand, &c.) came running into the city, and peered with astonishment at the tall, white, knightly stranger. He took his sword with him, but no servant. Whatever the danger into which the visit of a secluded, gloomy catacomb-avenue, and the foreknowledge of this visit on the part of others, might plunge him, his character left him no other choice than the one which he had made; no, he would sooner have let himself be murdered than shamed before his father.
How thy spirit mounted aloft, like a lightning-flash darting upward toward heaven, when the great Night, with her saintly halo of stars, stood erect before thee!—Beneath the heavens there is no terror, only under the earth!—Broad shadows lay across his road to Elysium, which on Sunday had been colored with dew-drops and butterflies. In the distance fiery prongs grew out of the earth and moved along;—it was the hearse with the torches in the lower road. When he came to the cross-way which leads through the ruined castle into Tartarus, he looked round toward the enchanted grove, on whose winding bridge life and songs of joy had met him; all was dumb therein, and only a long gray bird of prey (probably a paper dragon) wheeled over it to and fro.
He passed through the old castle into an orchard that had been sawed down, and looked like a tree-churchyard; then into a pale wood, full of peeled May-trees, which with faded ribbons and banners all looked toward Elysium,—a withered pleasure grove of so many happy days. Some windmills, with their long shadow-arms, struck into the midst, and were continually seizing and vanishing.