"War,"--this word alone gave Albano peace; science and poetry only
thrust their flowers into his deep wounds. He made himself ready
for a journey to France. Only one thing still delayed his breaking
up,--Schoppe's non-appearance, whom he with his riddles must await and,
if possible, induce to go away with him. He kept himself in the woods
all day so as to avoid his father and Julienne and everybody. Linda's
unhappy night had sunk deep into his breast, and only he alone saw down
into it, no stranger. He hoped that she herself would keep silent
toward Julienne, because the latter, according to the sacred, womanly
rules of her order, knew no indulgence for this sin. His first jealous
ebullition had now given place to a painful sympathy for the deceived
Linda, whose holy temple had been rifled. What pained him insufferably
was the feeling of humiliation with which the proud fair one must now,
as he imagined, think of him, and which he, with his present bitter
contempt of Roquairol, entertained so much the more strongly. "Never,
never, though she were my sister, can we see each other more; I can
well see her bleeding before me, but not bowed down," he said to
himself. Sometimes there came over him a cold fury against a destiny,
which always swept with a sudden whirlwind through his embraces, and
forced all asunder,--then an indignation against Linda, who had not
acted like a Liana, and who was herself partly guilty of the error of
the substitution by her principle of forgiving love everything,--then
again deep sympathy, since she could not have confounded persons
without any spiritual resemblances, as the secret tribunal of
conscience told him, and since she now alone was atoning for it, that
she was willing to sacrifice herself to him, even to him.
Inexpressibly did he hate the dead seducer, because by his act his
death had become only a cowardly flight. The poor deserter, whose
escape had been reported during the tragedy, he saw led along as a
prisoner before him; but his captain had escaped the hand of vengeance
forever. After some days papers of the dead were put into his hands;
but, full of abhorrence, he could not look on them. They contained
justifications, and at the same time additional sins. Roquairol had,
after the pleasure-night, spent the whole morning in the Prince's
garden writing, in order to color the remembrance, which alone (so he
wrote) had rewarded and satisfied him, that he had not that very night
played out the fifth act of the drama of life.
The Lector delivered in Albano's absence short letters from Julienne,
wherein she begged him to make his appearance, and appointed him place
and time at the castle, whither she had gone from Lilar. He went not.
Sometimes it seemed to him as if distant men tracking him stole round
him in wide circles.
Once at evening he was still standing at the foot of a woody hill, when
he espied overhead a wolf stalk out of the thicket; the wolf saw him,
sprang down upon him, and changed into Schoppe's wolf-dog. Soon his
friend himself, with an old man, stepped out from the trees above, saw
him, hurriedly gave the man money, and came down to him slower than he
went up to him. "Ah, a good evening, Albano," said Schoppe, with the
old coldness with which he spoke, when he did not write, and smiled at
the same time with so many lines and wrinkles that he appeared to
Albano altogether strange. Albano pressed him tightly to his heart, and
transformed the hot words which his friend did not love into hot tears.
It was an old star out of the spring morning when his Liana still lived
and loved; it had gone down before him on a grave in that night of his
journey; now it rose, and Albano was again unhappy.
Schoppe surveyed with visible complacency Albano's ripened form, and
drew asunder, as it were, the young man's shining wings. "Thou hast,"
said he, "spread out and colored thyself right well,--hast May and
August on one bough, like an orange-tree." Albano took no pleasure in
this. "Only relate to me thy life, my brother," said he. "Thou shouldst
tell thine first, methinks; I am tired even to stupidity," said
Schoppe, seating himself and unbuckling his hunting-pouch. "Hereafter,"
replied Albano, "what thou hast occasion for I will tell thee. I got
thy letters,--I really loved the well-known one,--a misfortune divided
us,--I am innocent and she is great;--O God, be satisfied with this for
to-day!" Never could he complain of misfortunes to his friends; still
less now expose the misery of a beloved. "And still longer," replied
Schoppe; "only say, does it add new misery if I bring with me from
Spain and proceed to unpack proofs of your being related as brother and
sister?" "No," said Albano, "I need tremble at no past." "Thou art
still going to France?" asked Schoppe. "To-morrow, if thou wilt go
too," replied Albano.
"By all means, as thy regiment chaplaincy. Not for want of the spirit
of art, as thou writest from Rome, but from a superfluity of it, thou
goest among soldiers. I should see it with pleasure, if thou wert to
consider that even Dante, Cæsar, Cervantes, Horace, served before they
wrote so preciously,--only students invert it, and compose something
short and sweet, and take up service afterward. To come to my
travels,--it costs me much, namely, time, merely to tell thee that I
caught thy absurd uncle with a carriage full of baggage in the little
nest of _Ondres_, a post and a half from Bayonne. I owned to him
I was going to Valencia to dissect the silk-stocking-weavers' looms
in that place, to enjoy, at the same time, my drop of ice and a
waistcoat-pocket full of Valencia almonds, and to visit the few
professors who had produced the best compends for three thousand
reals.[134] He should certainly arrive before me, he said. We arranged
to put up at the same inn in Valencia. I found my account in him, as he
could most easily introduce me to Romeiro's house. But I waited and
watched there for him fourteen days in vain. With the steward of the
house I found no hearing, although I cut out his stupid profile five
times, with the request that he would unlock to a travelling painter
the picture cabinet, where I wished to find the maternal picture of the
Countess.
"Now was I half and half resolved to become pregnant, and in this guise
to demand everything for my satisfaction, which even the Spanish King
refuses to no pregnant woman.[135] In Italy they carry the child on the
arm, in order to beg; in Spain it needs not so much as this
visibleness. But fortunately thy uncle came. The picture-gallery door
was thrown open. I set myself to copying a stupid kitchen-piece, and
looked everywhere after my island portrait. But nothing was to be
seen." (Here he drew a wooden case out of his hunting-bag, and
laid it before him and went on.) "Until at last I saw it,--a picture
leaned on the floor against the wall, turning toward me its back- and
wintry-side,--it was the child of my pencil, and I was touched by the
neglect it had suffered,--inwardly vexed, but outwardly calm, I put it
by,--and snapped off short in the kitchen-piece in the middle of a
half-finished pole-cat. Look at the likeness!"
He took off the box-cover, and Linda beamed upon his friend with a
stream of mind and charms, only dressed in older fashion. Albano could
scarcely stammer for emotion. "That were my father's spouse and my dear
mother? And thou knowest assuredly that this picture here is the one
you made of her on Isola Bella?"
"I'll just make it manifest," said he, and scoured away at a rose in
the picture about the region of the heart. "My then Paphos-name
_Loewenskiould_ lies _sub rosa_ and will be immediately forthcoming.
Had I already scraped it open on the road, then you would have believed
I had on the road for the first written myself in." As from a ghostly
writing hand Albano started back shuddering, when actually an L and an
Ö came forth from under the rose: "I shall clear away no further now,"
said Schoppe, "the rest I keep for her." Albano now poured out his
heart before his honest heart's-friend; to him he could say and object
that Julienne was his sister,--"against which I have nothing at all to
say," said Schoppe,--and that Gaspard had approved an intended marriage
between him and Linda. "There is no getting away from it," he added;
"if she is his daughter, then I am not his son,--I cannot possibly make
his sacred word of honor a lie--and, God! into what a monstrous pit and
pool of crime must one then look down!" "Touching the word and the
pool," said Schoppe, quite coldly, "there are specious proofs to be
adduced (although, to be sure, I have before this spoken superfluously
on the subject with thy father, and with the Countess), that
the Baldhead, who, as he confessed to me, has been thy father's
mass-assistant, groomsman, and bear-leader, was not a man of the
freshest morals, but that he--although otherwise upright in many
saddles _except_ the moral--had his hours and centuries when he acted
as such a dog and highwayman, that my hound there is a calendar-saint
and father of the Church to him. Only I ought not to have blown out the
lamp of his life, which of course stank more than it shone."
Albano could not disguise from him his horror at the deed. "I cannot
repent it; listen," said Schoppe, and gave this account: "Even in
Valencia thy uncle told me that he had met in Madrid such and such a
fellow,--exactly like the Baldhead,--who carried round for show a
wax-figure-cabinet of nothing but crazy creatures; often the whole
cabinet would speak, and he himself would sit therein too, and help
discourse; thy superstitious uncle procured and lent him spirits, too,
and made evil and frightful things out of it all.
"Once in a _Posada_[136] I heard in a sleeping chamber near mine all
sorts of voices murmuring through each other and saying, 'Schoppe also
is coming to us.' I rose; the strange chamber was shut. I listen and
hear it again, the devilish cry, 'Schoppe comes in also.' My room had a
balcony out of which I could, through the neighboring window, see by
the moonlight into the noisy chamber. In horrible, frizzled shapes
sat a mass of wax therein and spake, the waxen baldhead in the midst;
but I sought the living one. The wax beasts exchange with one another
their fixed ideas and slip me in among them: 'There is our honorary
fellow-member peeping in,' said the wax baldhead. By Heaven! I must be
short, my blood boils and burns again through my heart. I grow furious,
take my weapon, and petition God for a peaceable, forbearing
disposition. Unfortunately I observe, in a back corner not lighted by
the moon, near a father of death and a pregnant woman of wax, a black
cloak which stirs, and out of which peeps the living tone-leader, the
Baldhead. 'Black master of ventriloquism,' cried I, 'hold thy tongue
for God's sake; I see thee behind there and fire in.' I took it for
ventriloquism.
"Now for the first time the crazy-house properly began; I heard it
laugh,--call me in and dub me a comrade and member of the club.
'_Presses_,' said I, 'I am notoriously a man, and see thee quite
distinctly.' It availed nothing; the waxen baldhead so much the more
replied, 'Yes, there sits brother Schoppe already,' and I actually saw
myself also embossed and modelled on the spot. 'He is to be had here
also,' cried I, grimly, and fired away at the master of the lodge, who
tumbled bleeding to the floor.
"I made off with myself in the same hour. As to the uncle, I came
across his track afterward for a short time. He dreads madmen, and
would not have me long with him, for fear I myself should strike up a
bargain with the aforesaid set. He asked me whether the director of the
wax-figure travelling madhouse had encountered me. I could not place
much confidence in him; I have the secret alone."
"Thou art a wild, true man," said Albano, with such an intense desire
to embrace him; "thou dost much for others, and art, after all, much
for thyself. I can now leave thee no more. My former life-island, with
all its flowers, lies deep under water, and I must cast myself into the
infinite sea of the world. Give me thy hand, and swim with me. We
travel to-morrow to France."
"To-morrow?" said Schoppe. "Well, yes! then I go this evening to the
Countess, and then to Don Cesara." "Tell her," begged Albano, "that I
would not visit her even as a brother, if I were such, not from
coldness, but because I revere her great spirit; say that to her, and
God help thee!" Albano was about to go, and leave him to wander alone
into the neighboring Lilar. "No, accompany me, my master," said
Schoppe, vehemently; "I have discharged the old churl over there
in the woods by fair payment of escort-money, and should now be alone
_vis-à-vis de moi_." "I do not understand thee," said Albano; "what art
thou afraid of?" "Albano," said he, in a low and important tone, and
his generally direct looks glanced shyly sidewise, and innumerable
great wrinkles encircled his smiling mouth, "the 'I' might come; yes,
yes!"
Wondering, and asking who that might be, Albano looked into his face.
"Plague take it!" said Schoppe; "I apprehend you full well; you hold me
to be not one eighth as rational as yourself, but mad. Wolf, come up!
Thou, beast, wast frequently, on lonely roads and lanes, my exorcist
and devil-catcher, against the 'I.' Sir, he who has read Fichte,
and his vicar-general and brain-servant Schelling, out of sport as
often as I, will make serious work enough out of it at last. The thing
called 'I' presupposes itself, and the person called 'I,' together with
that remainder which most call the world. When philosophers deduce
anything--for example, an idea or themselves--out of themselves, so do
they also deduce whatever else there is about them--the remaining
universe--in the same manner. They are exactly that drunken churl who
made water into a fountain, and stood there all night before it,
because he heard no cessation, and of course set down all the
subsequent continuing sound to his own account. The 'I' conceives
itself; it is therefore ob-subject, and at the same time the
residing-place of both. Gadzooks! there is an empiric and a pure 'I.'
The last phrase which the crazy Swift, according to Sheridan and
Oxford, uttered, shortly before his death, was, 'I am I.' Philosophical
enough!"
"And what fearful conclusion dost thou draw from it all?" said Albano,
with the deepest sorrow. "I can bear anything and everything," said
Schoppe, "only not the _me_,--the pure, intellectual _me_,--the god of
gods. How often have I not already changed my name, like my namesake
and cousin in renown, _Scioppius_, or _Schoppe_, and become every year
another person! but still the pure 'I' perceptibly runs after me and
besets me. One sees this best on journeys, when one looks at one's
legs, and sees them stride along, and then asks, Who in the world is
that marching along so with me down below there? I tell you he is
eternally talking with me; if he were once to start up in bodily
presence before me, I should not be the last to grow weak and deadly
pale. To be sure, no dog has occasion to use tooth-powder; but children
one should paint up, it stands to reason and propriety. For my part, I
have observed the age so so, and smile, because I say nothing. Men,
like napkins, are broken up into the finest and greatest variety of
forms,--into night-caps, pyramids, cross-bills--zounds, Albano! into
what shape are they not folded? But the consequence, brother,--O
heavens, the consequence! I say nothing: curse it, I am still as a
mouse,--few as much so; but times may come when a gentleman shall haply
remark, Men and music-notes, music-notes and men; short and sweet and
plain, with both it is now heads up, now tails,--that is to say, when
it has to go quick. These are similes, I am well aware, best friend;
but the bakers announce a slack batch by a stony or clayey one in the
shop, whereas men announce their hardest things, among which belongs
the heart, by their softest, to which appertain words."
Speechless with astonishment at these effusions, Albano led him by the
hand to Lilar before Linda's residence. All was dark therein; not a
light was stirring. "Speak thy word softly up there, my Schoppe, and
to-morrow we journey farther!" said Albano below, in a soft tone at
parting, and left him to go up alone into the gloomy castle of
mourning. "What a meeting!" said Albano, on his way back through the
garden.