_Scribner's Monthly, December, 1877._
The 25th of May, 1866, was no doubt to many a quite indifferent date,
but to two persons it was the saddest day of their lives. Charles
Randall that day left Bonn, Germany, to catch the steamer home to
America, and Ida Werner was left with a mountain of grief on her
gentle bosom, which must be melted away drop by drop, in tears, before
she could breathe freely again.
A year before, Randall, hunting for apartments, his last term at the
university just begun, had seen the announcement, "_Zimmer zu
vermiethen_," in the hall below the flat where the Werners lived. Ida
answered his ring, for her father was still at his government office,
and her mother had gone out to the market to buy the supper. She would
much rather her mother had been at home to show the gentleman the
rooms; but knowing that they could not afford to lose a chance to
rent them, she plucked up courage, and, candle in hand, showed him
through the suite. When he came next day with his baggage he learned
for the first time what manner of apartments he had engaged; for
although he had protracted the investigation the previous evening to
the furthest corner, and had been most exacting as to explanations, he
had really rented the rooms entirely on account of a certain light in
which a set of Madonna features, in auburn hair, had shown at the
first opening of the door.
A year had passed since this, and a week ago a letter from home had
stated that his father, indignant at his unexplained stay six months
beyond the end of his course, had sent him one last remittance, barely
sufficient for a steamer ticket, with the intimation that if he did
not return on a set day he must thenceforth attend to his own
exchequer. The 25th was the last day on which he could leave Bonn to
catch the requisite steamer. Had it been in November, nature at least
would have sympathized; it was cruel that their autumn time of
separation should fall in the spring, when the sky is full of
bounteous promise and the earth of blissful trust.
Love is so improvident that a parting a year away is no more feared
than death, and a month's end seems dim and distant. But a week--a
week only--that even to love is short, and the beginning of the end.
The chilling mist that rose from the gulf of separation so near
before them, overshadowed all the brief remnant of their path. They
were constantly together. But a silence had come upon them. Never had
words seemed idler, they had so much to say. They could say nothing
that did not mock the weight on their hearts, and seem trivial and
impertinent because it was exclusive of more important matter. The
utmost they could do was to lay their hearts open toward each other to
receive every least impression of voice, and look, and manner, to be
remembered afterward. At evening they went into the minster church,
and sitting in the shadows listened to the sweet shrill choir of boys
whose music distilled the honey of sorrow, and as the deep bass organ
chords gripped their hearts with the tones that underlie all weal and
woe, they looked in each other's eyes and did for a space feel so near
that all the separation that could come after seemed but a trifling
thing.
It was all arranged between them. He was to earn money, or get a
position in business, and return in a year or two at most and bring
her to America.
"Oh," she said once, "if I could but sleep till thou comest again to
wake me, how blessed I should be; but, alas, I must wake all through
the desolate time!"
Although for the most part she comforted him rather than he her, yet
at times she gave way, and once suddenly turned to him and hid her
face on his breast, and said, trembling with tearless sobs:
"I know I shall never see thee more, Karl. Thou wilt forget me in thy
great far land and wilt love another. My heart tells me so."
And then she raised her head and her streaming eyes blazed with anger.
"I will hover about thee, and if thou lovest another I will kill her
as she sleeps by thy side."
And the woman must have loved him much, who, after seeing that look of
hers, would have married him. But a moment after she was listening
with abject ear to his promises.
The day came at last. He was to leave at three o'clock. After the
noontide meal Ida's mother sat with them and they talked a little
about America, Frau Werner exerting herself to give a cheerful tone to
the conversation, and Randall answering her questions absently and
without taking his eyes off Ida, who felt herself beginning to be
seized with a nervous trembling. At last Frau Werner rose and silently
left the room, looking back at them as she closed the door with eyes
full of tears. Then as if by a common impulse they rose and put their
arms about each other's necks, and their lips met in a long shuddering
kiss. The breath came quicker and quicker; sobs broke the kisses;
tears poured down and made them salt and bitter as parting kisses
should be in which sweetness is mockery. Hitherto they had controlled
their feelings, or rather she had controlled him; but it was no use
any longer, for the time had come, and they abandoned themselves to
the terrible voluptuousness of unrestrained grief, in which there is a
strange meaningless suggestion of power, as though it might possibly
be a force that could affect or remove its own cause if but wild and
strong enough.
"Herr Randall, the carriage waits and you will lose the train," said
Frau Werner from the door, in a husky voice.
"I will not go, by God!" he swore, as he felt her clasp convulsively
strengthen at the summons. The lesser must yield to the greater, and
no loss or gain on earth was worth the grief upon her face. His father
might disinherit him; America might sink, but she must smile again.
And she did--brave, true girl and lover. The devotion his resolute
words proved was like a strong nervine to restore her self-control.
She smiled as well as her trembling lips would let her, and said, as
she loosed him from her arms:
"No, thou must go, Karl. But thou wilt return, _nicht wahr_?"
I would not venture to say how many times he rushed to the door, and
glancing back at her as she stood there desolate, followed his glance
once more to her side. Finally, Frau Werner led him as one dazed to
the carriage, and the impatient driver drove off at full speed.
* * * * *
It is seven years later, and Randall is pacing the deck of an ocean
steamer, outward bound from New York. It is the evening of the first
day out. Here and there passengers are leaning over the bulwarks
pensively regarding the sinking sun as it sets for the first time
between them and their native land, or may be taking in with awed
faces the wonder of the deep, which has haunted their imaginations
from childhood. Others are already busily striking up acquaintances
with fellow-passengers, and a bridal pair over yonder sit thrilling
with the sense of isolation from the world that so emphasizes their
mutual dependence and all-importance to each other. And other groups
are talking business and referring to money and markets in New York,
London, and Frankfort as glibly as if they were on land, much
to the secret shock of certain raw tourists, who marvel at the
insensitiveness of men who, thus speeding between two worlds, and
freshly in the presence of the most august and awful form of nature,
can keep their minds so steadily fixed upon cash-books and ledgers.
But Randall, as, with the habit of an old voyager, he already falls to
pacing the deck, is too much engrossed with his own thoughts to pay
much heed to these things. Only, as he passes a group of Germans, and
the familiar accents of the sweet, homely tongue fall on his ear, he
pauses, and lingers near.
The darkness gathers, the breeze freshens, the waves come tumbling out
of the east, and the motion of the ship increases as she rears upward
to meet them. The groups on deck are thinning out fast as the
passengers go below to enjoy the fearsome novelty of the first night
at sea, and to compose themselves to sleep as it were in the hollow of
God's hand. But long into the night Randall's cigar still marks his
pacing up and down as he ponders, with alternations of tender, hopeful
glow and sad foreboding the chances of his quest. Will he find her?
It is necessary to go back a little. When Randall reached America on
his return from Germany, he immediately began to sow his wild oats,
and gave his whole mind to it. Answering Ida's letters got to be a
bore, and he gradually ceased doing it. Then came a few sad reproaches
from her, and their correspondence ceased. Meanwhile, having had his
youthful fling, he settled down as a steady young man of business. One
day he was surprised to observe that he had of late insensibly fallen
into the habit of thinking a good deal in a pensive sort of way about
Ida and those German days. The notion occurred to him that he would
hunt up her picture, which he hadn't thought of in five years. With
misty eyes and crowding memories he pored over it, and a wave of
regretful, yearning tenderness filled his breast.
Late one night after long search he found among his papers a bundle of
her old letters already growing yellow. Being exceedingly rusty in his
German, he had to study them out word by word. That night, till the
sky grew gray in the east, he sat there turning the pages of the
dictionary with wet eyes and glowing face, and selecting definitions
by the test of the heart. He found that some of these letters he had
never before taken the pains to read through. In the bitterness of his
indignation he cursed the fool who had thrown away a love so loyal and
priceless.
All this time he had been thinking of Ida as if dead, so far off in
another world did those days seem. It was with extraordinary effect
that the idea finally flashed upon him that she was probably alive and
now in the prime of her beauty. After a period of feverish and
impassioned excitement he wrote a letter full of wild regret and
beseeching, and an ineffable tenderness. Then he waited. After a long
time it came back from the German dead-letter office. There was no
person of the name at the address. She had left Bonn, then. Hastily
setting his affairs in order, he sailed for Germany on the next
steamer.
The incidents of the voyage were a blank in his mind. On reaching Bonn
he went straight from the station to the old house in ---- strasse. As
he turned into it from the scarcely less familiar streets leading
thither, and noted each accustomed landmark, he seemed to have just
returned to tea from an afternoon lecture at the university. In every
feature of the street some memory lurked, and as he passed threw out
delaying tendrils, clutching at his heart. Rudely he broke away,
hastening on to that house near the end of the street, in each of
whose quaint windows fancy framed the longed-for face. She was not
there, he knew, but for a while he stood on the other side of the
street, unmindful of the stares and jostling of the passers-by, gazing
at the house-front, and letting himself imagine from moment to moment
that her figure might flit across some window, or issue from the door,
basket in hand, for the evening marketing, on which journey he had so
often accompanied her. At length, crossing the street, he inquired for
the Werner family. The present tenants had never heard the name.
Perhaps the tenants from whom they had received the house might be
better informed. Where were they? They had moved to Cologne. He next
went to the Bonn police-office, and from the records kept there, in
which pretty much everything about every citizen is set down,
ascertained that several years previous Herr Werner had died of
apoplexy, and that no one of the name was now resident in the city.
Next day he went to Cologne, hunted up the former tenants of the
house, and found that they remembered quite distinctly the Werner
family, and the death of the father, and only bread-winner. It had
left the mother and daughter quite without resources, as Randall had
known must probably have been the case. His informants had heard that
they had gone to Duesseldorf.
His search had become a fever. After waiting seven years, a delay of
ten minutes was unendurable. The trains seemed to creep. And yet, on
reaching Duesseldorf, he did not at once go about his search, but said
to himself:
"Let me not risk the killing of my last hope till I have warmed myself
with it one more night, for to-morrow there may be no more warmth in
it."
He went to a hotel, ordered a room and a bottle of wine, and sat over
it all night, indulging the belief that he would find her the next
day. He denied his imagination nothing, but conjured up before his
mind's eye the lovely vision of her fairest hour, complete even to the
turn of the neck, the ribbon in the hair, and the light in the blue
eyes. So he would turn into the street. Yes, here was the number. Then
he rings the bell. She comes to the door. She regards him a moment
indifferently. Then amazed recognition, love, happiness, transfigure
her face. "Ida!" "Karl!" and he clasps her sobbing to his bosom, from
which she shall never be sundered again.
The result of his search next day was the discovery that mother and
daughter had been at Duesseldorf until about four years previous, where
the mother had died of consumption, and the daughter had removed,
leaving no address. The lodgings occupied by them were of a wretched
character, showing that their circumstances must have been very much
reduced.
There was now no further clew to guide his search. It was destined
that the last he was to know of her should be that she was thrown on
the tender mercies of the world--her last friend gone, her last penny
expended. She was buried out of his sight, not in the peaceful grave,
with its tender associations, but buried alive in the living world;
hopelessly hid in the huge, writhing confusion of humanity. He
lingered in the folly of despair about those sordid lodgings in
Duesseldorf as one might circle vainly about the spot in the ocean
where some pearl of great price had fallen overboard.
After a while he roused again, and began putting advertisements for
Ida in the principal newspapers of Germany, and making random visits
to towns all about to consult directories and police records. A
singular sort of misanthropy possessed him. He cursed the multitude of
towns and villages that reduced the chances in his favor to so small a
thing. He cursed the teeming throngs of men, women, and children, in
whose mass she was lost, as a jewel in a mountain of rubbish. Had he
possessed the power, he would in those days, without an instant's
hesitation, have swept the bewildering, obstructing millions of
Germany out of existence, as the miner washes away the earth to bring
to light the grain of gold in his pan. He must have scanned a million
women's faces in that weary search, and the bitterness of that
million-fold disappointment left its trace in a feeling of aversion
for the feminine countenance and figure that he was long in
overcoming.
Knowing that only by some desperate chance he could hope to meet her
in his random wanderings, it seemed to him that he was more likely to
be successful by resigning as far as possible all volition, and
leaving the guidance of the search to chance; as if fortune were best
disposed toward those who most entirely abdicated intelligence and
trusted themselves to her. He sacredly followed every impulse, never
making up his mind an hour before at what station he should leave the
cars, and turning to the right or left in his wanderings through the
streets of cities, as much as possible without intellectual choice.
Sometimes, waking suddenly in the middle of the night, he would rise,
dress with eager haste, and sally out to wander through the dark
streets, thinking he might be led of Providence to meet her. And once
out, nothing but utter exhaustion could drive him back; for, how
could he tell but in the moment after he had gone she might pass.
He had recourse to every superstition of sortilege, clairvoyance,
presentiment, and dreams. And all the time his desperation was
singularly akin to hope. He dared revile no seeming failure, not
knowing but just that was the necessary link in the chain of accidents
destined to bring him face to face with her. The darkest hour might
usher in the sunburst. The possibility that this was at last the
blessed chance lit up his eyes ten thousand times as they fell on some
new face.
But at last he found himself back in Bonn, with the feverish
infatuation of the gambler which had succeeded hope in his mind,
succeeded in turn by utter despair! His sole occupation now was
revisiting the spots which he had frequented with her in that happy
year. As one who has lost a princely fortune sits down at length to
enumerate the little items of property that happen to be attached to
his person, disregarded before but now his all, so Randall counted up
like a miser the little store of memories that were thenceforth to be
his all. Wonderfully the smallest details of those days came back to
him. The very seats they sat in at public places, the shops they
entered together, their promenades and the pausing-places on them,
revived in memory under a concentrated inward gaze like invisible
paintings brought over heat.
One afternoon, after wandering about the city for some hours, he
turned into a park to rest. As he approached his usual bench, sacred
to him because Ida and he in the old days had often sat there, he was
annoyed to see it already occupied by a pleasant-faced, matronly
looking German woman, who was complacently listening to the chatter of
a couple of small children. Randall threw himself upon the unoccupied
end of the bench, rather hoping that his gloomy and preoccupied air
might cause them to depart and leave him to his melancholy revery.
And, indeed, it was not long before the children stopped their play
and gathered timidly about their mother, and soon after the bench
tilted slightly as she relieved it of her substantial charms, saying
in a cheery, pleasant voice:
"Come, little ones, the father will be at home before us."
It was a secluded part of the garden, and the plentiful color left her
cheeks as the odd gentleman at the other end of the bench turned with
a great start at the sound of her voice, and transfixed her with a
questioning look. But in a moment he said:
"Pardon me, madam, a thousand times. The sound of your voice so
reminded me of a friend I have lost, that I looked up involuntarily."
The woman responded with good-natured assurances that he had not at
all alarmed her. Meanwhile, Randall had an opportunity to notice that
in spite of the thick-waisted and generally matronly figure, there
were, now he came to look closely, several rather marked resemblances
to Ida. The eyes were of the same blue tint, though about half as
large, the cheeks being twice as full. In spite of the ugly style of
dressing it, he saw also that the hair was like Ida's, and as for the
nose, that feature which changes least, it might have been taken out
of Ida's own face. As may be supposed, he was thoroughly disgusted to
be reminded of that sweet girlish vision by this broadly moulded,
comfortable-looking matron. His romantic mood was scattered for that
evening at least, and he knew he shouldn't get the prosaic suggestions
of the unfortunate resemblance out of his mind for a week at least. It
would torment him as a humorous association spoils a sacred hymn.
He bowed with rather an ill grace, and was about to retire, when a
certain peculiar turn of the neck as the lady acknowledged his salute,
caught his eye and turned him to stone. Good God! this woman was Ida!
He stood there in a condition of mental paralysis. The whole fabric of
his thinking and feeling for months of intense emotional experience
had instantly been annihilated, and he was left in the midst of a
great void in his consciousness out of touching-reach of anything.
There was no sharp pang, but just a bewildered numbness. A few
filaments only of the romantic feeling for Ida that filled his mind a
moment before still lingered, floating about it, unattached to
anything, like vague neuralgic feelings in an amputated stump, as if
to remind him of what had been there.
All this was as instantaneous as a galvanic shock the moment he had
recognized--let us not say Ida, but this evidence that she was no
more. It occurred to him that the woman, who stood staring, was in
common politeness entitled to some explanation. He was in just that
state of mind when the only serious interest having suddenly dropped
out of the life, the minor conventionalities loom up as peculiarly
important and obligatory.
"You were Frauelein Ida Werner, and lived at No. ---- ---- strasse in
1866, _nicht wahr_?"
He spoke in a cold, dead tone, as if making a necessary but
distasteful explanation to a stranger.
"Yes, truly," replied the woman, curiously; "but my name is now Frau
Stein," glancing at the children, who had been staring open-mouthed at
the queer man.
"Do you remember Karl Randall? I am he."
The most formal of old acquaintances could hardly have recalled
himself in a more indifferent manner.
"_Herr Gott im Himmel!_" exclaimed the woman with the liveliest
surprise and interest. "Karl! Is it possible. Yes, now I recognize
you. Surely! surely!"
She clapped one hand to her bosom, and dropped on the bench to recover
herself. Fleshy people, overcome by agitation, are rather disagreeable
objects. Randall stood looking at her with a singular expression of
aversion on his listless face. But after panting a few times the
woman recovered her vivacity and began to ply him vigorously with
exclamations and questions, beaming the while with delighted interest.
He answered her like a school-boy, too destitute of presence of mind
to do otherwise than to yield passively to her impulse. But he made no
inquiries whatever of her, and did not distantly allude to the reason
of his presence in Germany. As he stood there looking at her, the real
facts about that matter struck him as so absurd and incredible, that
he couldn't believe them himself.
Pretty soon he observed that she was becoming a little conscious in
her air, and giving a slightly sentimental turn to the conversation.
It was not for some time that he saw her drift, so utterly without
connection in his mind were Ida and this comfortable matron before
him, and when he did, a smile at the exquisite absurdity of the thing
barely twitched the corners of his mouth, and ended in a sad, puzzled
stare that rather put the other out of countenance.
But the children had now for some time been whimpering for supper and
home, and at length Frau Stein rose, and, with an urgent request that
Randall should call on her and see her husband, bade him a cordial
adieu. He stood there watching her out of sight with an unconscious
smile of the most refined and subtle cynicism. Then he sat down and
stared vacantly at the close-cropped grass on the opposite side of the
path. By what handle should he lay hold of his thoughts?
That woman could not retroact and touch the memory of Ida. That dear
vision remained intact. He drew forth his locket and opening it gazed
passionately at the fair girlish face, now so hopelessly passed away.
By that blessed picture he could hold her and defy the woman.
Remembering that fat, jolly, comfortable matron, he should not at
least ever again have to reproach himself with his cruel treatment of
Ida. And yet why not? What had the woman to do with her? She had
suffered as much as if the woman had not forgotten it all. His
reckoning was with Ida--was with her. Where should he find her? In
what limbo could he imagine her? Ah, that was the wildering cruelty
of it. She was not this woman, nor was she dead in any conceivable
natural way so that her girlish spirit might have remained eternally
fixed. She was nothing. She was nowhere. She only existed in this
locket and her only soul was in his heart, far more surely than in
this woman who had forgotten her.
Death was a hopeful, cheerful state compared to that nameless
nothingness that was her portion. For had she been dead he could still
have loved her soul; but now she had none. The soul that once she had,
and if she had then died, might have kept, had been forfeited by
living on and had passed to this woman, and would from her pass on
further till finally fixed and vested in the decrepitude of age by
death. So then it was death and not life that secured the soul, and
his sweet Ida had none because she had not died in time. Ah! had not
he heard somewhere that the soul is immortal and never dies? Where
then was Ida's? She had disappeared utterly out of the universe. She
had been transformed, destroyed, swallowed up in this woman, a living
sepulchre, more cruel than the grave, for it devoured the soul as well
as the body. Pah! this prating about immortality was absurd, convicted
of meaninglessness before a tragedy like this; for what was an
immortality worth that was given to her last decrepit phase of life,
after all its beauty and strength and loveliness had passed soulless
away? To be aught but a mockery immortality must be as manifold as
the manifold phases of life. Since life devours so many souls, why
suppose death will spare the last one?
But he would contend with destiny. Painters should multiply the face
in his locket. He would immortalize her in a poem. He would constantly
keep the lamp trimmed and burning before her shrine in his heart. She
should live in spite of the woman.
But he could now never make amends to her for the suffering his cruel,
neglectful youth had caused her. He had scarcely realized before how
much the longing to make good that wrong had influenced his quest of
her. Tears of remorse for an unatonable crime gathered in his eyes. He
might indeed enrich this woman, or educate her children, or pension
her husband; but that would be no atonement to Ida.
And then as if to intensify that remorse by showing still more clearly
the impossibility of atonement, it flashed on him that he who loved
Ida was not the one to atone for an offence of which he would be
incapable, which had been committed by one who despised her love.
Justice was a meaningless word, and amends were never possible, nor
can men ever make atonement; for, ere the debt is paid, the atonement
made, one who is not the sufferer stands to receive it, while, on the
other hand, the one who atones is not the offender, but one who comes
after him, loathing his offence and himself incapable of it. The dead
must bury their dead. And thus pondering from personal to general
thoughts, the turmoil of his feelings gradually calmed, and a restful
melancholy, vague and tender, filled the aching void in his heart.