Chapter XIII: Part THREE: A Cynic in the Making (3)

The next moment sadness appeared on his face. He turned his head and muttered, “_Ach, das ist schrecklich! Ein Toter, lechzend nach den lebendigsten Lebensgenüssen._ All my life I wished to write a Faust—a Faust different from all the Fausts ever written, different also from Goethe’s—but I never fully understood my Faust until now. The conception of my Faust is a devout monk who had piously practiced self-denial and the mortification of his body to such an extent that his flesh shrivelled. Then Mephistopheles comes to tantalize him and brings him a maiden of matchless beauty. The saintly monk falls from grace, flings his life-long belief aside, and woos the fair Marguerite, who returns his love, but the poor monk can play his tune on only one string. Of all his earthly senses desire is the only one left him; a thirst unquenchable. Like old Job, he curses the day on which he was born even as he scraped himself with a potsherd to soothe his pain, but, unlike the Man of Uz, Faust dies with a curse of God upon his lips, without realizing that the great beauty-loving God has punished him for his failure to listen to His Voice earlier in life. The wasted monk is then taken to the region of the Styx, where other fools like himself are baptised in waters of spouting flame and anointed with boiling oil and sulphur, and after a period of purification is sent back to earth, fully rejuvenated. In the second volume of my Faust I would sing of Paradise Regained.”

Albert chuckled. The Butterfly now understood why the critics spoke of him as the German Voltaire. No one could be at once so reverent and blasphemous as Albert.

The sun was setting, the afternoon glow was gone, invisible shades of darkness were descending upon the sick room; silence was round them. Even the parrot was hushed.

“Ah, the first volume of my Faust I have already lived,” he sighed, “but there won’t be a second volume.” Then, with a light laugh, “who can tell, perhaps the life of Paradise Regained may yet be granted me, too. I rather like the Buddhistic doctrine of Reincarnation. I may return to earth as the crowned Sultan of Turkey.”

She caught the spirit of his levity and remarked, “From all reports you have already lived the life of a Sultan—only uncrowned!”

“_Unsinn!_” There was scorn in his voice. All levity immediately fled from him. “The world has taken me too literally. Alas! When I was in earnest they thought I was jesting and when I jested they failed to grasp my humor—the French are the only people who understand me. When I meant to be a Socrates they mistook me for an Aristophanes and when I played Aristophanes they charged me with trying to be a Socrates. I a profligate! He who has lived the life of a profligate often writes virtuous tracts. It is your priest, your morality-preaching Philistine, your man wrapped in the pure white robe of piety, who is often the real profligate. My life has been given to devotion—I have been a Carmelite, locked in the cell of my dreams. I was a little Ishmael in the wilderness of Beer Sheba dying of thirst. Ah! that consuming thirst, the thirst of beauty that sears one’s soul—thirsting, thirsting—thirsting to the end! I have always loved honorably, earnestly, with all the senses God meant for love. Ah, love! There is nothing else in life worth striving after. What else is there in life? Fame, riches, achievements?—they are only coal burnt to clinkers. If I only had a child on whom to lavish my love in my dying days!——”

A sigh, almost a groan, escaped his parted lips.

“Let me take the place of a child,” she pleaded in a whisper, tears filling her eyes.

“Indeed you are my _allersüsstes Kind_.”

He was fondling her fingers tenderly. “The fates have been kind to me after all to send you to me now, my good fairy.”

Dusk came, the invisible shades of twilight were thickening. With his eyes sealed he felt the approach of night.

“Will you come tomorrow, my child?”

“I’ll come every tomorrow.”

“Until there will be no tomorrow—” He caught his breath as he completed her thought.

VI.

The candle was burning fast; the wick was charred; the wax was all but melted; the dying flame leaping upward from the depth of the overheated sconce. Darkness, and yet again the candle flame shot up.

No one knew better than Albert that his life was spent, that the fire within him was licking the last vestige of life-grease, that he was emitting the last flicker. He did not wish to crepitate and flutter at the end. Let a tongue of red flame be the last memory of the extinguished light.

Save for the Butterfly and his faithful physician, Albert was quite forsaken in his last days. But rarely did visitors drop in and now and then a distant admirer—usually a woman of high rank—from Germany, from England, from Russia, came to pay homage to his genius. His sister had come and gone, but his good mother was obliged to stay away. The poor woman was too old to make the journey. Besides, she was wondering why her son, being the younger, did not make the trip to Hamburg. For he had succeeded in keeping up the pious deception that he was only troubled with his eyes and could therefore not write to her with his own hand.

The Butterfly came daily (except when he bade her stay away, because of his excessive suffering) read to him, and attended to his correspondence. She took the place of his secretary. In order not to fatigue her he frequently paused and chatted. He loved to ramble, to skip from subject to subject, to rake up the dead leaves of the past. His mind constantly reverted to his youth, to reminiscences of Gunsdorf, of Bonn, of Goettingen, to the days when love was in his blood instead of in his brain. He knew he was deluding himself, yet found consolation in the delusion. He persuaded himself that he was in love with the mysterious stranger by his bedside—and what love is not a self-persuading delusion?—and clothed her with all the charms of his rich fantasy, permitted himself to be convinced that the love fever of youth was in his veins.

Indeed, he babbled deliriously the sweet syllables of feverish youth: “My sweetest kitten,” “Soul of my life,” “My maddening love”—red flares from the dying candle! He was again under the warm skies of Italy, his beloved Italy—Ah, Italy! he had hoped in vain to see it again—he was living over again the Florentine Nights with their thousand charms; he met again those black-eyed maidens of his fancy, those ethereal creatures of his dreams—the dreams he invented.

In the young woman by his bedside all the beauties of his dreams were blended. With his eyes sealed, his hand fondling her slender fingers, he was playing the youth again—the make-believe youth. And when she failed to come one day he was feverish with anguish and scrawled love notes to her.

“My Good, All Gracious, Sweet Butterfly,” he wrote entreatingly, “come and flutter your beautiful wings! I know one of Mendelsohn’s songs with the refrain ‘Come Soon!’ This song is running continuously through my head. ‘Come soon.’”

“I kiss both your dear little hands, not both at once, but one after the other.”

And before there was time to hear from her he dispatched another note:

“My dear Girl:

“I am very ill and do not wish to see you today. But I hope that you’ll be able to come tomorrow. Drop me a line if you can’t come before the day after tomorrow.”

An hour later he scribbled another love note, his amorous fever increasing, the restlessness of adolescence in his brain.

“My Dear, Gracious Kitten:

“No, I don’t want to see you tomorrow. I must see you today. Can’t you come today—at once—upon receipt of this note? I am afraid I won’t be able to see you tomorrow because I feel my headache is coming on. I must see you this afternoon and feel the tender caress of your sweet hand, the impress of your lips, the touch of your _Schwabengesicht_, and listen to the sound of your voice. Ah! if I could press my precious flower to my breast! But, alas! I am only a ghost, a spirit.

“But do come at once, my dear, sweet child, and let me kiss your dear little hands and let my lips graze the strands of your fragrant hair.

Madly yours,
A. Z.”

He forwarded the last note as if it were of momentous import, and became restive. Marguerite did not understand the cause of his restlessness and irritated him by her constant inquiries. She detested the Butterfly. The wife was suspicious of the intruder, and kept telling Albert that the stranger must be a spy and he ought not to let her read and talk to him and attend to his correspondence.

Yes, Marguerite was positive this Mademoiselle was a German spy and she had roguish eyes and a coquettish look and was “as thin as a rail.” No, no, she was not jealous of her—indeed, not! Marguerite’s fat chin trembled as she emitted a little forced laugh She jealous of the insignificant, plain German girl! It was laughable! While she, Marguerite, may not be as pretty as she had been, but could still hold her own——

“You remember, Albert, what you called me in those days? ‘My sweetest little kitten,’ ‘My translucent sunbeam,’ ‘My fragrant wild flower;’ (Albert tossed his head with evident annoyance)—she emitted another forced little laugh—“Indeed, even if I am not as pretty as I used to be, a flat-chested little hussy like that German vixen could not make me jealous, but I have warned you, and I am warning you again, that she is a dangerous person. She is——”

“I have a terrible headache,” he pleaded, with a grimace on his face.

“You always get a terrible headache when I make mention of this little German intriguer——”

“Can’t you get some other subject to talk about?” he groaned helplessly.

“Some other subject!—and that intriguing woman trying to steal your love right under my nose! This is what I get for my years of devotion! Go ahead and change your will—leave everything—to—this—German—spy——”

She was sobbing, the parrot was calling “_au revoir_,” Mimi, the little poodle, was barking in a falsetto voice, and Albert was beside himself.

At first he begged her to cease torturing him, then grew angry and commanded her to stop, and finally was seized with a fit of convulsive coughing which choked his breathing. Then the nurse appeared on the scene and, with an angry look at Marguerite, took Albert in her arms—his body was so wasted that it weighed no more than that of a child—and laid him on the sofa, which was usually reserved for visitors. The nurse’s arms seemed to have a strange soothing effect upon the invalid. Covered with a white sheet he rested on the sofa until he was himself again.

Marguerite, her arms folded, sat in a chair and wept silently. No, she did not mean to irritate him; she loved her Albert as the apple of her eye; she loved him as much as she did when he used to take her to the opera and to the finest restaurants in Paris . . .

“Marguerite—Marguerite——”

She wept more quietly, her fat reel cheeks tear-stained.

“Marguerite, dearest!” His voice grew tender. “Come and sit by me.”

He drew his right hand from under the white sheet and extended it toward her.

“My sweetest kitten—my fragrant wildflower—my poor faithful wife—” His voice was husky now, tears of tenderness in his throat. “I have always loved you as I loved no other—Come, my guardian angel——”

Presently Marguerite was beside him on the sofa, kissing his broad, cadaverous forehead, pressing her lips against his lips that felt not, and murmuring the endearing terms of years gone by . . .

VII.

Months had passed. It was winter, Parisian winter, the snowless, penetrating winter of mid-February; and it was night, pitch dark, and the hazy fog, like thick smoke, dimmed the street lamps on the Avenue, even the stronger lights around the corner of the adjacent Champs Elysées spread only a glow without illumination. There was the stillness of a winter night everywhere, the stillness of a belated hour, long past midnight, the stillness of a great city asleep.

In a room on the fifth story of a drab looking building, Albert was struggling for breath. He had coughed so much that he had no more strength to cough aloud, only his chest was heaving and the expression on his emaciated face, resembling a grim grin, betrayed acute suffering, the suffering beyond expression. He was propped up with pillows in a reclining posture to ease his breathing, and from time to time he hoisted his right shoulder as if to help his breathing. A candle light on a nearby table cast a shadow in the room, and beyond the shadow sat the woman attendant, dozing.

The clock on the white marble mantle struck the hour. Semi-consciously the invalid counted the strokes—“One, two, three, four!”

The nurse jumped up, picked up a little bottle and spoon from the table, and crossed the chamber toward the bed.

The invalid stirred and shook his head.

“But Monsieur Zorn, the Doctor will scold me if I don’t give you the medicine punctually,” the nurse said.

“Be at ease! I’ll tell the doctor myself that I did not want to drink it. Medicine does me no more good.”

She did not understand him, for the past two days he had been addressing her in German, which was unknown to her beyond “_Ja_” and “_Nein_.” However, she divined his meaning and put the medicine away with a kindly smile.

He turned his head away and promptly forgot the attendant and the medicine. The strokes of the clock were still dinning in his ears; they sounded to him like church bells, like the strange sounds of psalters and harps, like—his mind wandered—the bells of St. Lombard’s Church were ringing and he was watching Christian Lutz jerk his forefingers in and out of his ears. Christian said angels floated around the belfry when the bells rang. Albert laughed. Angels never flew that low, he insisted, but hovered around God’s throne; only pigeons flew around the belfry. And that pug-nosed Fritz with his fishing rod screeched “Al—ber!” . . .

Would that clock ever stop striking the hour? It was positively deafening. He was glad Marguerite slept in a room at the furthest end of the apartment, so she could not hear him cough at night, and now she wouldn’t be disturbed by that crazy clock that was striking endlessly. He wished to call the nurse to make her stop the clock but some one was choking him—some one was gagging him—he could not make a sound! . . .

Presently he was lying on his back perfectly still . . . stretched at full length on a mossy rock on the bank of the Rhine, watching the fleecy clouds shaped like the ruins of a castle against patches of deep blue . . . What bird was that singing so melodiously? No, it was not a bird—it was the string instruments at the Swiss Pavilion on the _Jungfernstieg_—the leader of the orchestra had a funny nose that looked like a suckling pig’s snout, and it wiggled like one . . . And Miriam was standing on a pedestal in front of the palace at Sans Souci. Miriam had no arms and there was a strange smile on her lovely lips . . . He was glad that he was all alone in the Louvre—not a soul around . . . . He rose on his tip-toes and kissed those beautiful cool lips, the moonlight shining over his left shoulder . . . His mother said he must not kiss marble statues . . . His mother—poor mother—the old house in Hamburg must be very cold in the winter . . . She was in tears because her pearls were gone . . . He, too, was in tears and . . . his sister was playing the piano . . . . Was the door bell ringing? Somebody was coming to visit him. He began to count the mounting footsteps—“forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, forty-four”—The footsteps stopped. Someone must have called on the floor below . . . Yes, people called on everybody but no one called on him . . . no one . . . not even curiosity seekers . . .

Suddenly all melancholy thoughts left him and he breathed easier. He felt no pain at all. Strange that all at once he was well again and he was promenading indolently, dreamily along the Rhine. He was strolling, swinging his cane and humming a song . . . No, he was flying . . . He had never realized that one needed no wings to fly . . . He was flying over the Hartz Mountains, over the dark firs of the Black Forest, over the slender silver birches silhouetted in the moonlight, in his ears the babbling of brooks, the laughter of girls, the song of the nightingale . . . and he was sailing . . . sailing . . . sailing through the purest air . . . .

_The End._

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where
multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer
errors occur.