Let us follow him into the day, when he tells everything.
54. CYCLE.
Once Albano came early in the forenoon to the Captain, when the latter was usually, according to his own expression, "a fag-end of a yesterday's candle stuck on thorns"; but to-day he stood working away blusteringly at the piano-forte and writing-desk by turns; and, like a dried-up infusorial animal, was already, even at this early hour, the same old, busy creature, because wine enough had been poured upon him, that is to say, a good deal. Full of rapture, he ran to meet the welcome friend. Albano brought him from Falterle the childish leaves of love—for the Master of Exercises had not had the heart to throw them into the fire—which he had written from Blumenbühl to the unknown heart. Charles would have been moved on the subject almost to tears, had he not already been so before the arrival. The Count had to stay there all day, and neglect everything; it was his first day of irregularity; it was comic to see how the otherwise unfettered youth, subservient, however, to a long habit of daily exertions, struggled against the short calm, in which he should sail no ship, as against a sin.
Meanwhile, it was heavenly; the low-lying day of childhood, which once clothed him with wings, when the house was full of guests, and he, wherever he wanted to be, came up again above the horizon; the conversation played and made gifts with everything which exalts and enriches us; all his faculties were unchained and in ecstatic dance. Men of genius have as many festal days as others do working days, and hence it is that they can hardly endure a trivial and commonplace[126] intercalary-day, and especially on such days of youth! When Charles conjured before him tragic storm-clouds from Shakespeare, Goethe, Klinger, Schiller, and life saw itself colossally represented in the poetic magnifying-mirror, then did all the sleeping giants of his inner world rise up; his father came and his future, even his friend stood forth there as in new relief, out of that shining, fantastic time of childhood, when he had dreamed of him beforehand in these characters; and in the internal procession of heroes, even the cloud that floated through the heavens and the guard-troop marching away across the market were incorporated. His friend appeared to him far greater than he was, because, like all youths, he still believed of actors and poets, that, like miners, they always received into their bodies the metals in which they labored. How often they both said, in that favorite metaphor of the young man, "Life is a dream," and only became thereby more glad and wide-awake! The old man says it differently. And the dark gate of death, to which Charles so loved to lead the way, became before the youth's eye a glass door, behind which lay the bright, golden age of the belated heart in immeasurable meadows.
Maidens, I own,—as their conversations are more fragmentary, matter-of-fact, and less intoxicating,—instead of such an Eden-park, go for a spruce Dutch garden, well trimmed with crab's-shears and lady-scissors, which is furnished them every day in the afternoon by the black hour, which serves up to them on the coffee- or tea-table, the small black-board[127] of some evil reports, a couple of new shawls sitting by, a well-bred man who passes by with a will or marriage certificate, and finally the hope of the domestic report. Come back to our young men!
Towards evening the Captain received a red billet. "Very well!" said he to the woman who brought it, and nodded. "You'll get nothing out of that, madam," said he, turning toward Albano. "Brother, guard only against married women. Just snap once, for a joke, at one of their red beauty-patches; instantly they dart their fish-hooks into your nape.[128] Seven of these hooks, such as you see here, have made a lodgement in mine alone." The innocent child Albano! He took it for something morally great to assert at once the friendship of seven married ladies, and would gladly have been in Charles's case; he could not see the mischief of it,—that these female friends, like the Romans, love to clip the wings of victory (namely, of ourselves), so that the Divinity may not fly any farther.
On a fine day, nothing is so fine as its sunset. The Count proposed to ride out into the evening twilight, and on the hill to look at the sun. They trotted through the streets; Charles pulled off his great cocked-up hat, now before a fine nose, now before a great pair of eyes, now before transparent forelocks. They flew into the Linden avenue, which was festally decked with a motley wain-scoting of female street-sitters.[129] A tall woman, with piercing, fiery eyes, in a red shawl and yellow dress, strode through the female flower-bed, towering like the flower-goddess: it was the authoress of the red note; she was, however, more attentive to the beautiful Count than to her friend. On all walls and trees bloomed the rose-espalier of the evening redness. They blustered up the white road toward Blumenbühl; on both sides the gold-green sea of spring heaved its living waves; a feathered world went rowing about therein, and the birds dove down deep among the flowers; behind the friends blazed the sun, and before them lay the heights of Blumenbühl, all rosy-red. Having reached the eminence, they turned their horses toward the sun, which reposed behind the cupolas and smoke-columns of the proudly burning city, in distant, bright gardens. In wondrous nearness lay the illuminated earth round about them, and Albano could see the white statues on Liana's roof blush like life under the blooming clouds. He drove his horse close to his companion's, to lay his hand on Charles's shoulder; and thus they beheld in silence how the lovely sun laid down his golden cloud-crown, and, with the fluttering foliage-breath around his hot brow, descended into the sea. And when it grew dusky on the earth, and a glow lighted up the heavens, and Albano leaned across and drew his friend over to his burning heart, then rose the evening-chime in Blumenbühl. "And down below there," said Charles, with soft voice, and turned thither, "lies thy peaceful Blumenbühl, like a still churchyard of thy childhood's days. How happy are children, Albano,—ah, how happy are children!" "Are not we so?" answered he, with tears of joy. "Charles, how often have I stood on high places, in evenings like this, and fervently stretched out my childish hands after thee and after the world. Now indeed I have it all. Truly, thou art not right." But he, sick with the murmur and ringing-in-his-ears of long past times, remained deaf to the word, and said, "Only our cradle-songs, only those cradle-songs, sounding back on the memory, soothe the soul to slumber, when it has wept itself hot."
More silently and slowly they rode back. Albano bore a new world of love and bliss in his bosom; and the youth,—not yet a debtor to the past, but a guest of the present,—sweetly unbent by the long Jubilee of the day, sank into clear-obscure dreams, like a towering bird of prey hanging silent on pinions open with ecstasy.
"We will stay all night at Ratto's," said Charles, when they reached the city.