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.