BERLIN, December 25.
My Dear Emma--Your kind wish that I might have a Merry Christmas has
not been fulfilled. I never spent so melancholy a Christmas Eve. You
will not wonder that I could not bear to accept the invitations of
friends--to be a looker-on at family rejoicings--so I stayed at home,
entirely alone. I found it utterly impossible to get a servant before
New Year’s, and yesterday was even without a helper from outside.
The porter’s wife put a cold supper on the table for me early in the
afternoon, for she was too busy later with Christmas preparations for
her children. A smoky oil lamp took the place of the Christmas tree
which you always adorned so charmingly and with such exquisite taste
every year, and there were none of those pretty surprises by which you
supplied my wants and wishes almost before I was conscious of them.
There was nothing on the Christmas table but my old fur coat, which
Herr Palaschke--softened by my entreaties and assurances and perhaps
also by the spirit of Christmastide--had allowed me to take the
preceding day. It was as cold as charity in the room, for the fire had
gone out and it was beyond my skill to rekindle it, so I put on the fur
coat, sat down by the smoky lamp, and read over the letters which I
wrote you during the time of our engagement and which I had taken from
their eleven years’ resting-place to send to you to-day.
Dear Emma, I can not tell you how they have moved me. I cried like a
child, not over the tragic ending of our marriage alone, but at the
change in myself which I recognize. They are very immature and in many
ways not in accordance with my present way of thinking, but what a
fresh, frank, warm-blooded fellow I was then, and how I loved you! How
happy I was! How artlessly and unreservedly did I give myself up to my
happiness! Till now I have thought that there has been a gradual, slow
change in you alone, but now I see that I also have altered, and God
knows, when I compare the Max of those days with the Max of to-day, I
do not know to which to give the preference. In the sleepless nights
which I have lately spent, I have thought over the possibility of
transforming myself into the Max I then was, and grave doubts have
suggested themselves whether the differences in our views of matters
and things were really as great as they seemed to us, whether there
is not outside of them something eternally human, some neutral ground
where we might continue to have interests in common.
Try and see, dear Emma, whether such a voice does not speak also to
your soul. We can not undo the past, but nothing could give me greater
consolation in my present unhappy condition than to know that you
could say yes to this question, for your departure has left a void in
my house and in my life that I can never, never fill.
Thy most unhappy MAX.