In the cellar there was the old running in and out of strange and
familiar faces. Albano and Schoppe climbed together those pure heights
of the mountains of the Muses, where, as on natural ones, the
atmosphere of life rests lighter, and the ether draws nearer to the
shortening column of air. Men comfort each other more easily on their
Ararat than women in their vales of Tempe. After Schoppe, made more
fiery by the tempestuous atmosphere of punch and love, had for a
considerable time played off the lightning-spark of his humor in
zigzag, and with a calcining effect, through the world-edifice,
suddenly an unknown person, like a death's-head, perfectly bald and
even without eyebrows, but with a rosy hue on his withered cheeks,
stepped up to their table and said, with iron mien, to Schoppe:
"Within fifteen months this day you will have become crazy, my merry
cock-sparrow!"
"O ho!" Schoppe broke out, inwardly shrinking up the while. Albano grew
pale. Schoppe collected himself again, stared sharply and courageously
at the repulsive shape, which rolled its withered but rosy skin to and
fro upon sharp, high cheek-bones, and said: "If you understand me,
prophetic gallows-bird and cock-sparrow, and are not yourself
crack-brained, then am I in a condition to prove that one can make
very little of a case out of such a thing as madness." Hereupon he
showed--but as one cooled-down, burnt-out, and deserted by his host of
images--that madness, like epilepsy, gave more pain to the spectator
than the performer; for it was only an earlier death, a longer dream, a
day-walking instead of night-walking; for the most part, it gave what
the whole of life and virtue and wisdom could not,--an _enduring_
agreeable idea.[53] Even if, which was rare, it chained a man to a
tormenting one, still this became, nevertheless, a panoply against all
bodily sufferings. He had, therefore, for himself, never feared madness
any more than dreaming, but could not bear to hear others speak, or
even to see them, in either of these states. "We shudder," said Albano,
"at a man who talks to us in his sleep as to an absent person, or who,
when awake, talks only to himself alone; and whenever I hear myself
soliloquize, it is just the same."
"I am no philosopher," said the Baldhead, indifferently, whose perfect,
shining baldness was more frightful than hateful. Schoppe asked
angrily, "Who he was, then, _quis_ and _quid_ and _quibus auxiliis_,
and _cur_ and _quomodo_ and _quando_."[54] "_Quando?_--After fifteen
months I come again. _Quis?_--Nothing; God uses me only when he has to
make some one unhappy," said the bald one, and begged a glass and the
liberty of drinking with them. Albano, freely granting it, said, in an
inquiring tone, he had probably just arrived? "Just from the great
Bernhard," said the bald one, growing more repulsive with every word,
because his old rosy face was a zigzag of convulsive distortions, so
that at every moment a different man seemed to be standing there. He
went out a moment. Schoppe, quite beside himself, said: "I grow more
and more exasperated with him, as with a hideous, hovering fever-image.
For God's sake, let us go. I have a feeling behind me all the time, as
if a wicked fist were thrusting me upon him, that I should strangle
him. He grows, too, more and more familiar to me, like an old
moss-grown deadly foe."
Albano answered softly: "See, my presentiment! But now that I have not
hearkened to it, I must even see where it will come out." His
courageous nature, his romantic history and position, would not let him
draw back from a prospect so full of adventure.
"But why," inquired Schoppe of the bald one, when he came back, "do you
cut so many faces, which do not present you exactly in the most
favorable light?" "They come," said he, "from poison which was given me
ten years ago. Have you observed how _aqua toffana_, taken in
quantities, distorts? In Naples, I forced it down the throat of a
beautiful girl of sixteen, who had for some years dealt in it, and
caused her to die before my eyes. I fancy there is nothing more godless
than poison-mixing." "Abominable!" cried Albano, seized with the
deepest repugnance for the man; as to Schoppe, _his_ fury had actually
relieved him.
At this moment a poor, meagre joiner's wife came in for liquor, who
kept her eyes cast down and half closed with shame and weakness; she
ventured not to look up, because the whole town knew that she was
forcibly driven out of her bed at night into the street to see a
funeral procession, which some days after was really to move through
it, already in prelude and prefiguration pass before her. Hardly had
the bald one beheld her, when he covered his face. "There is only a
single innocent one among us," said he, all pale and uneasy; "this
youth here," pointing to Albano. Just then a carriage with six horses
thundered by overhead. Schoppe jumped up, twice in succession put the
question to Albano, who was lost in thought: "Wilt thou go with me?"
turned angrily away at the word No, stepped close up to the bald one,
and said furiously: "Dog!" and turning on his heel went out. On the
pale, bloodless skin of the Baldhead no expression stirred, only his
hand twitched a little, as if there were near it a stiletto to lay hold
of, but he sent after him that look at which the maiden in Naples died.
Albano was enraged at the look, and said: "Sir, this man is a
thoroughly honest, true, vigorous nature; but you have exasperated him
even against himself, and must acquit him of blame." With soft,
flattering voice he replied: "My acquaintance with him dates not from
to-day, and he knows me, too." Albano asked whether, when he spoke of
the great Bernhard some time since, he meant the Swiss mountain of that
name. "Certainly!" replied he. "I travel thither yearly to spend a
night with my sister." "So far as I know, there are only monks
there," said Albano. "She stands among the frozen ones in the
cloister-chapel,"[55] he replied. "I stay all night before her, and
look upon her, and sing Horæ."
Albano, while listening, felt himself singularly changed, which he
could ascribe only to the punch,--it was less intoxication than glow; a
flying blaze roared over his inner world, and the red lustre hovered
about on its farthest borders; now did it seem to him as if he stood
entirely on the same ground with the Baldhead, and could wrestle with
this evil genius. "I had a sister, too," said Albano; "can one call up
the dead?" "No, but the dying," said the Baldhead. "Ugh!" said Albano,
shuddering. "Whom would you see?" asked the Baldhead. "A living sister,
whom I never have seen yet," said Albano, in a glow. "It requires,"
said the Baldhead, "a little sleep, and your knowing also where your
sister was on her last birthday." Luckily Julienne, whom he took for
his sister, had, on _hers_, been at the Palace in Lilar. He told him
so. "Then come with me!" said the Baldhead.
At this moment Schoppe's servant brought Albano a sword-cane and the
following note:--
"Brother, brother, trust him not. Here is a weapon, for thou art quite
too foolhardy. Run him right through, if he does so much as make faces.
All sorts of unknown people have this evening asked after thee and thy
whereabouts. It is to me as if no life at all were safe to me from the
beast,--thine or hers. Be on thy guard, and come! Schoppe.
"Run him through, however, I pray thee."
"Are you afraid, perhaps?" asked the Baldhead. "That will appear," said
Albano, angrily, and, taking the sword-cane, went with him. As the two
passed through the little, dark anteroom of the cellar, Albano saw in a
mirror his own head set in a fiery ring. They passed out of the city
into the open country. The bald one went ahead. The sky was bright with
stars. It seemed to the Count as if he heard the subterranean waters
and fires of the globe and the creation. Hardly did he recognize out
there the way to Blumenbühl. Suddenly the bald one ran into a field on
the left. The lean joiner's wife stood on the Blumenbühl road quite
stiff, and saw abstractedly a corpse move along invisible, and heard
the far-off bell, which is borne by the mute Death. So it seemed.
Then did Albano follow the Baldhead more daringly: the fear of spirits
kills the fear of man. Both moved along in silence beside each other.
In the depth of the distance, it seemed as if a man floated, without
walking or stirring, slowly and steadily onward through the air. The
white skin on the bald one twitched incessantly, and one invisible fist
after another thrust itself forth from the clay of his face, as in the
act of striking. Once there flitted over it the look of the Father of
Death.[56]
Suddenly Albano heard around him the smothered murmur and confused talk
of a throng. There was nothing on either side. "Do you hear nothing?"
he asked. "All is still," said the Baldhead. But the swarm kept on
murmuring and whispering eagerly and hotly, as if it could not be ready
and agreed. The bold youth shuddered. The gates of the shadowy kingdom
stood far open into the earth; dreams and shadows swarmed in and out,
and flew near to bright life.
The two stepped up to the thicket before Lilar. There came a boy out of
the wood with an enormously big head, helping himself along on two
crutches, and holding a rose, which he offered, with a nod, to the
youth. Albano took it, but the little fellow nodded incessantly, as if
he would say he should like to have him smell of it. Albano did so; and
suddenly the sinking of the stage of life, a bottomless slumber, drew
him down into the dark, unfathomable depths.
When he awoke heavily, he was alone and unarmed, in an old dusty Gothic
chamber. A faint little light scattered only shadows around. He looked
through the window; it seemed to be Lilar, but on the whole landscape
snow had fallen, and the heavens were white with cloud, and yet the
stars singularly pierced through. "What is this? Am I standing in the
mask-dance of dreams?" he asked himself.
Then an arras went up; a covered female form, with innumerable veils on
the face, stepped in, stood a moment, and flew to his heart. "Who is
it?" he asked. She pressed him to her bosom more passionately, and wept
clear through the veil. "Knowest thou me?" he asked. She nodded. "Art
thou my unknown sister?" he asked. She nodded, and with a sister's
close embrace, with hot tears of love, with rapturous kisses, held him
fast to herself. "Say, where livest thou?" She shook her head. "Art
thou dead or a dream?" She shook her head. "Is thy name Julienne?" She
shook her head. "Give me a sign of thy truth!" She showed him half of a
gold ring on a table that stood near. "Show thy face, that I may
believe thee!" She drew him away from the window. "Sister, by Heaven,
if thou liest not, then raise thy veil!" She pointed with her long,
outstretched, enveloped arm to something behind him. He kept on
intreating. She motioned vehemently toward a certain place, and
repelled him from herself. At length he obeyed, and turned sidewards;
then he saw in a mirror how she suddenly threw up the veils, and how,
beneath them, the superannuated form appeared whose image, with the
signature, his father had given him on Isola Bella. But when he turned
round again, he felt on his face a warm hand and a cold flower; and a
second slumber drew downward his conscious being.
When he awoke, he was alone, but with his weapon, and on the wooded
spot where he had first sunk to sleep. The sky was blue, and the light
constellations glimmered; the earth was green, and the snow gone; the
half-ring he no longer held in his hand; around him was no sound, and
no human being. Had all been but the fleeting cloud-procession of
dreams, the brief whirl and shaping that goes on in their magic smoke?
But life and truth had burned so livingly into his breast, and the
tears of a sister still lay on his eye. "Or might they be only my
brotherly tears!" said his perplexed spirit, as he rose, and in the
bright night went homeward. All was as still as if life were yet
sleeping on; he heard himself, and feared to waken it; he looked upon
his own body as he walked along. Yes, thought he, this thick bed in
which we are wrapped plays off before us even the woes and joys of
life. Just as, in our sleep, we seem to stifle under falling mountains
when the coverlet settles over our lips, or to stride over sticky,
melted metal when it oppresses the feet with too great a thickness of
feathers, or to freeze, like naked beggars, when it is shoved off, and
exposes us to the night-chill, so does this earth, this body, throw
into the seventy years' sleep of the immortal lights and sounds and
chills, and he shapes to himself therefrom the magnified history of his
joys and sorrows; and, when he once awakes, only a little of it proves
true!
"Heavens! why comest thou so late, and so pale?" asked Schoppe, who had
been a long time in Albano's chamber, waiting for him. "O, ask me not
to-day!" said Albano.