Roquairol's Advocatus Diaboli.[120]—The Festival Day of Friendship.
53. CYCLE.[121]
Not toward the years of childhood, but toward the season of youth, should we revert the most longingly, if we came forth out of the latter as innocent as out of the former. It is the festival day of our life, when all avenues are full of music and finery, and all houses are hung round with golden tapestries, and when Existence, Art, and Virtue, like gentle goddesses, still woo us with caresses; whereas, in after years, they summon us, like stern gods, with commands! And at this period Friendship dwells as yet in a serenely open Grecian temple, not, as later, in a narrow Gothic chapel.
Richly and majestically did life now glitter around Albano, covered with islands and ships; he had his whole breast full of friendship and youth, and could now let the impetuous energy of love, which on Isola Bella had rebounded from a statue, from his father, burst freely and joyously upon a man who appeared to him fully as his youthful dream had sketched him. He could not let go Charles for a day; he laid bare to him his soul and his whole life—(only Liana's name retired deeper and deeper into his heart); all models of friendship among the ancients he was fain to copy and renew, and do and suffer everything for his loved friend; his being was now a double-choir; he drank in every joy with two hearts; a double heaven embosomed his life in pure ether.
When, on the following day, he met the form of the new friend,—which was all that remained to him of the nightly show-piece of the spirit-world, as a pale moon is left by the extinguished stars of night,—and when he found him so bald-headed and white, as the fiery smoke-column of an Ætna ascends gray in the daytime, he seemed to see the whilom suicide standing before him, the more freely, but all the more warmly, did he stretch his hand across to the solitary being, who, after his leap over life, dwelt now only on his grave, as on a remote island. Others, for this very reason, would draw their hand away: the baffled self-murderer, who has made a rent in this fair, firm life, comes back from his death-hour as a strange, uncomfortable ghost, whom we can trust no longer, because in his ungovernableness he may at any moment play again the give-away game with the human form.
Therefore Albano saw in the chaotic life of the Captain only the disorder of a being who is packing up and marching away. When he stepped for the first time into his friend's summer-chamber, he saw, of course, a servant's livery wardrobe, a theatrical green-room, and an officer's tent before him at once. On the table lay confused tribes of books, as on a battle-field, and on Schiller's Tragedies the Hippocratic face of the masquerade, and on the Court Almanac a pistol; the book-shelf was occupied by the sword-belt, together with its wash-ball of chalk, a chocolate-mill, an empty candlestick, a pomatum-box, matches, the wet hand-towel and the dried mouth-napkin; the glasshouse of a run-down hour-glass, and the washing-and the writing-table stood open, on which latter I, to my astonishment, look in vain for any support whatever, or writing-sand on it; the comb-cloth, or powder-mantle, leaned back on the ottoman, and a long neck-cloth rode on the stove-screen, and the antlers on the wall had two hats with feathers shoved over the right and left ears; letters and visiting-cards were impaled like butterflies on the window-curtains. I should not have been capable of writing a billet there, much less a Cycle.
Is there not, however, a sunny-bright, free-fluttering age, when one loves to see everything which announces roving unrest, striking of tents, and nomadic liberty, and when one would be thankful to keep house in a travelling-carriage, and write and sleep therein? And does not one in those years look upon precisely such a students' chamber as this as a spiritual students' endowment of genius, and every chaos as an infusorial one full of life? Forgive my hero this truant time; there was still something noble in his nature, that kept him back from becoming an imitator of what he eulogized.
As, after the melting away of a late winter, all at once the green garment of earth flutters up high in flowers and blossoms, so in the warm air of friendship and fancy did Albano's nature start up at once into luxuriant verdure and bloom. Charles had and understood all states of the heart; he created them dramatically in himself and others; he was a second Russia, which harbors all climates, from France even to Nova Zembla, and wherein, for that very reason, every one finds his own: he was everything to everybody, although for himself nothing. He could throw himself into any character, although for that very reason it sometimes took his fancy only to carry out the most convenient. The girths, belly-bands, cruppers, and saddle-straps of court, town, and city life, his Bucephalus had long since cleared; and if the Count was vexed every day at the lingual leading-string of the Lector, who pronounced everything correctly.—Kanaster instead of Knaster, Juften instead of Juchten, Fünfzig instead of Füfzig, and Barbieren (the r in which I myself take to be a stupid barbarism),—Roquairol was a free-thinker, even to the degree of being a hectoring free-speaker; and spoke, according to an expression of his own, which was at the same time an example of the fact, "right out of his liver and jaw." He was annoyed that there should still cleave to the Count a certain epic dignity of speech acquired from books. They often thought over and cursed with one another the pitiful bald life which one would lead, who, like the Lector, should live as a well-bred citizen of extraction, have conduite and a nice dress, and a tolerable dapper knowledge of several departments, and for refreshment his table-wine, and taste for excellent masters in painting and other arts, and should advance to higher posts merely as stepping-stones to still higher, and yet, after all this, have to stretch himself out, all frizzled and washed, in his coffin, in order that the gigantic body-world might, forsooth, hand over its Pestitz representative also to the sublime world of spirits. No, said Albano, rather throw a dark mountain-chain of sorrows into the dead level of life, that one may, at least, have a prospect and something great.
But Roquairol was not the man that he seemed to him;—friendship has its deceptions as well as love;—and often, when he had long looked upon this love-drunken, high-hearted youth, with his chaste maiden-cheeks and proud, manly brow, who reposed such a confidence upon his wavering soul, and whose heart stood so wide open, and the holiness of whose fancy even he envied, then did the delusion of the noble one move him even to pain, and his heart struggled to break forth, and longed to say to him, with tears: Albano, I am not worthy of thee! But in that case I lose him, he always added; for he shunned the moral orthodoxy and decision of a man, who was not, like a maiden, to be provoked and repelled and won back again, all in sport. And yet the day came—the momentous day for both—when he did it. How could he ever have resisted Fancy, when he only resisted by and through Fancy? I do him half injustice: hear the better angel, who opens his mouth.