Albano now left no stone unturned which friendship could lift, for the
sake of setting the noble patient to rights again, and renewing his
youth, inwardly and outwardly. Especially did he seek to set up again
the bridge over which all his strings were drawn, and which the Knight
and his brother had overturned in the presence of Linda, namely, his
pride of character, which had been brought so very low by this
barbarous humiliation. As only pure brotherly respect and holy worship
of a divine relic can softly warm and reanimate a wounded pride, the
faithful Albano took this course. But without satisfaction from the
Spaniard, the contriver of the mischief and the misleader of the
Knight, his backbone, Schoppe said, would never run perpendicular
again, and his spinal marrow would remain bent. Only Albano's duel with
the uncle was a fresh draught of cool water to him; he had to have it
told over to him several times. His thirsty wish was to be as well as
he needed to be in order to fight with the Spaniard, and then, as a
madman, to extort from him on a death-bed, whereupon he thought to lay
him, the confession of all his tricks and juggleries. "Then," he added,
all the time smiling, "it can well be _égal_ to me whether the world is
round or angular, and to France is my first step."
Albano had to let this Greek fire of wrath, which in the end worked as
a strengthening cure to a body frozen by humiliation, burn deeper and
deeper under itself, since every attempt to extinguish merely fed it;
only he had to watch, that he did not get a free, solitary moment, to
fly off in a blaze and seek out the Spaniard. Albano stirred not day
nor night from his sofa-bed, and that for other reasons also. For if
Schoppe should be left alone, and his Mordian fall asleep (whom he
never woke, because the dog, he said, evidently dreamed, and then went
flying and nosing about in ideal worlds, snuffing things whereof in the
streets of the actual hardly a trace of a shadow was to be scented),
if, then, he should be alone with the quiet animal (for when it was
awake he had society enough), and his eye should accidentally fall upon
his legs or hands, then would his cold fear creep over him that he
might appear to himself as his own apparition, and see his own "I." The
looking-glass had to be overhung, that he might not come across
himself.
His nights were sleepless, but dreams moved nakedly and boldly round
him. Albano readily devoted to him his own well nights, yet could not
drive away any of his friend's dreams, those spectres which generally
flee or sink before the living. They crept and peeped about in the
shadows of the corners of the room. Once toward midnight Albano had
gone out, and on returning found him just in the act of grasping one
hand with the other, and exclaiming, "Whom have I here, man?" "O good,
best Schoppe," cried Albano, half in anger, "such irrational plays!
Quite as well might one finger catch the other!" "Yes, to be sure,"
replied he. "But listen," said he softly, and squatted, ducked his
head, and pointed with the right index-finger up over his nose into the
air, "thou calledst me Schoppe; that is not my name: but I may not
utter my real name; the 'I' who has been so long seeking me would hear
it, and come stalking along,--a long gravestone lies on the name.
Schoppe or _Scioppius_ I could very well call myself, because my
many-named namesake and name-father (it is all found in Bayle) called
himself, now so, now so, now Junipere d'Amone, now Denig Bargas, or
Grosippe, or Krigsöder, Sotelo, and now Hay. I must appear to have
wholly forgotten that the man was, after all, veritable Titular Prince
of Athens and Duke of Thebes by Ottoman chancery and grace, if I should
choose to remain Maltese Librarian. In fact, I used to go from one
hotel to another with many a name, which magnificently played with and
played upon the 'I,' that forever hunted and haunted me; for example,
Löwenskiould, Leibgeber, Graul, Schoppe, too, Mordian (which I
afterward gave my dog), Sacramentierer, and once _huleu_,--many I may
have entirely forgotten. The true one," said he, shyly whispering, "is
a ss or S--s,[142]--give me a _third_ hand here. The name is cut out of
grave-clothes, and I lie therein already buried in the ground. 'I am
I.' Such were the last words of the fine old Swift, who otherwise
said little in his long madness. I might not venture, however, to
be so much myself as that. Well, courage! Infinite Wisdom has created
all,--madness, too,--in the lump. Only God grant, that God may never
say to himself, 'I!' The universe would tremble to pieces, I believe;
for God finds no third hand."
Albano shuddered at the sense of this nonsense. Schoppe seemed ice;
then he threw himself suddenly on the brotherly bosom; neither said
aught upon the subject, and Albano began sunny descriptions of the
happy Hesperia.
Thus patiently and solitarily did he spend with his sick friend, in
nursing, indulging, caressing, the days which he would gladly have made
use of for his flight out of Germany; and loved him more and more
passionately, the more he did and endured in his behalf. He absolutely
would not suffer it at the hand of fate, that such a world full of
ideas should approach its conflagration, and so free a heart, full of
honesty, its last beating. Schoppe had in the youth's heart even a
greater realm than Dian; for he took life more freely, deeply, greatly,
bravely; and if the law of Dian's life was beauty, his was freedom, and
he tended, like our solar system, to the constellation Hercules.
Notwithstanding all entreaties, he took no medicines from Dr. Sphex;
for he had already, he said, committed his case to an old, well-known
practitioner and circuit-physician, Time. He readily allowed Sphex to
draw up a recipe, to bring it; willingly looked it through, disputed
about the contents, remarked it was easier to _be_ sanitary-counsel
than to give it, and he saw, indeed, that he hit his case, because he
pursued a weakening treatment, which was the first thing with crazy
people; he added, however, that reason was not just the thing he
desired, but only a couple of valiant shanks to walk with and stand
upon, and a couple of arms well filled out to strike home withal; and
for the rest, he told him he did not like him, because he cut up dogs.
Albano, too, at last, took the position, that, if Schoppe could only
get muscular strength again for a social journey with him, then the
frenzy-dream into which the unsocial one had thrown him would readily
fly away of itself.
Schoppe was always flying out at the Doctor particularly. Once the
latter said: "Follow, if not me, at least your second self," and
pointed to Albano. "To the Devil," he replied, "with my second
self,--that may be you: I feel shy enough of you to make it
probable,--but he, there, is certainly, I have every reason to hope,
hardly my sixth, twentieth self, or the like."
Meanwhile Sphex stuck to his opinion, that his sthenic sleeplessness,
which was alternately the daughter and the mother of his fever-visions,
especially of the Baldhead, barred up the way to relief, and must be
conquered by weakening processes. When one day Dian, who often visited
his friend Albano, heard this, he asked, why one would not deceive and
cure him directly with the tidings of the Spaniard having travelled off
for fear of him, say to France. Albano replied: "Truly I should be glad
to say it, but I cannot; I could as soon will to tell a lie to God or
myself." "Whims!" said Dian; "I'll tell him myself." "Just what
I had expected of that Spaniard," replied Schoppe to the official
recipe-falsehood. When Dian had gone out, he asked Albano: "Do I not
sit now much cooler and more icy here? And, truly, since hearing that
the Baldhead is in France, I have become almost a new man. Of course I
am lying, but Dian lied first."
At last the physician resolved to mix at once a sleeping potion in his
drink. Albano allowed it. Schoppe got it; glowed and phantasied for a
space of some minutes; at last the mist of sleep came up and soon
covered the patient over.
Albano, then, after so long a time, visited again the green of the
earth and the blue of heaven, and his Dian in Lilar. What a
transformation had taken place in the interval; how had things been
confounded, and changed places, with each other! How many leaves had
become budgeons again! And many a foam of life which had once gladdened
him with its whiteness and delicacy and lightsomeness, now chilled his
bosom like gray, heavy water, and he had retained almost nothing except
his courage to meet life. At Dian's he heard of new changes, of the
Prince's approaching death, of Idoine's approaching visit to her sister
in anticipation of the bereavement. In what a strange bewilderment did
his soul open its eyes out of its winter-sleep into the warm sunshine
which this image of Liana diffused over his life! In many a still night
by Schoppe's ghostly tent had he already, since Julienne for the first
time let him see the apparition of this peace-angel without the veil,
beheld the olden time and former love come up again like a heaven of
distant stars, and in the clear-obscure of dreams disrobed of sleep he
saw on the sea of time a far, far-off island,--whether behind him or
before him, he knew not,--where a white, averted form, resembling or
suggesting Liana's, hovered and sang as an echo of the olden strain.
Now close upon the death-month of the brother followed the death-month
of the sister Liana. Were it possible that the celestial one would step
out again from the still mirror of the second world and out of its
immeasurable distances, into this earthly atmosphere, and after her
transfiguration again walk embodied here below?
But friendship demanded room for its sorrows, and these cloud-images
were soon covered over or destroyed by it. He could not find courage in
his heart, however much he wished it, to demand of Schoppe, or even to
receive from him, a description of that healing-night, in which Idoine
had been Liana; and yet this form was the only live-playing jewel in
the death-ring on the skeleton of stern time, which stood before him.
What days! What the graves had not stolen from him and swallowed up,
the earth had snatched away, and Gaspard, once his exalted father on a
serene throne of the heavens, had now appeared to his fancy with
frightful hell-powers and weapons down below, sitting on a throne of
the abyss.
So much the more mildly did he feel, flowing around him, when he was in
Dian's house, the stiller presence, the thought of the reposing friend,
the sight of the neighboring Dream-temple, where Liana had once been
Idoine, and the annunciation that the living image of the loved one was
drawing near. He portrayed to himself the sweet and bitter terror of
her apparition before him; for as in the stream the bending flower
sketches not only its _form_, but its _shadow_ also, so is she Liana's
beautiful form and shadow at once, and in the living one would a lost
and a glorified appear to him at the same time.
In this dreamy chiaroscuro and evening twilight, made up of past
and future flowing together, he came back to his house. A sharp
lightning-flash darted white across the dreamy redness. His Schoppe
had, after a few minutes of forced sleep, wildly started up and madly
sprung out, nobody knew whither. The doctor came, and said decisively,
either he had thrown himself overboard or everybody else; he had run
wildly away, and had taken his sword-cane with him, too.