There is always an element of discontent in the desire to travel.
Contented people, like cattle in verdant pastures, remain on the
hillside, munching their food in peace and tranquility.
He could not remain much longer in Florence. He wanted to travel, to
move about. He went to Bologna, to Ferrara, to Padua, to Venice. But one
cannot escape his own shadow. He carried his griefs with him. He was
short of money but that mattered little to him. The memory of his gayety
at the Baths of Lucca, at Livorno, at Florence, was forgotten.
Innately sensual he sought to drive away his gloom (as he had often
done) by conjuring scenes of Florentine Nights and living over again
those blissful moments; Signora Francesca, with those dark brown eyes,
long, black lashes, rich black hair, and captivating body; Signora
Letitia—that temptress, with a throbbing bosom, who carried on
flirtations with half a dozen men at the same time; Matilda—that
virtuous flirt, who tried to conceal her sensuousness by constantly
talking about, and condemning, the sensuality of others; that
pink-cheeked English girl, whose face looked as if it were bedewed with
spray from the sea—No, these recollections brought no joy to his heart,
not even a momentary consolation, as they had done on other occasions.
He was seized with a morbid longing to wander, to wander everlastingly,
to run away from himself.
While at Venice he received a letter from his brother that his father
was very ill. He could read between the lines that it was a call to his
father’s death-bed. Somehow, this very sad news brought him relief. It
at once removed his restlessness. He was calm. He had suddenly become
philosophical, stoical. It was as if one of his veins had been opened to
relieve an intense pain. He left Italy and rushed back to his native
land where his father was dying.
The following three months he frittered away between Hamburg and Berlin.
His widowed mother had moved to Hamburg, and she begged him to stay
there but he detested the city. It held for him too many bitter
memories.
He finally decided to isolate himself. His action was that of the
storm-tossed woman of passion who finds refuge in a nunnery.
He went to Potsdam, where he could see only “_Himmel und Soldaten_”.
Potsdam in those days was not the suburb of Berlin that it is today.
There was neither Subway nor Elevated nor speedy surface trains to carry
one from _Unter den Linden_ to Sans Souci in half an hour. Then it was a
considerable distance from the Prussian capital.
In Potsdam he found himself truly isolated, far from friends and
diversions. And he had so many plans for work; the completion of another
book; a humorous book, poems, essays, a political treatise. Then, again,
here he was safe from his ever threatening peril—of falling in love. He
had barely escaped a strong attachment for the wife of a friend, but her
intellect had saved him.
He remained at Potsdam nearly six months, working feverishly on new
poems.
After a time he found his self-imposed imprisonment irksome. The
atmosphere in Potsdam was not to his liking either. The presence of
soldiers—_die Menschenfresser_—everywhere, the artificiality of the
gardens of San Souci, where the firs were “masked as orange trees” and
“so unnatural that they were almost human”—everything was unbearable
here.