Perhaps that isolated life which is the ideal of a young married pair,
when from any causes its realisation by an abode upon a desert island
is found to be impracticable, can nowhere be better realised than in a
very large, populous city. It all depends upon one's possessing the
secret of creating an isle here, past whose shores the restless tides
of social life roll away. The thorough mastery of this art is greatly
facilitated to the adept, when the great world, as often happens, has
no special motive to trouble itself about him; the heart of the mystery
lies in the other and harder condition, that he shall not trouble
himself about the world.
The first of these conditions had already been very satisfactorily
fulfilled in my case. The world had interested itself amazingly little
about the young machinist while he pursued his laborious but valuable
studies in the ruinous house standing in the ruinous court. He
resembled at all points Lessing's wind-mill which went to nobody and
nobody came to it, and which simply ground the corn that was thrown
into the hopper. But now the case was very different; that court was no
longer a wilderness of rubbish. The ruins had been cleared away, or
built up into stately buildings; the wall which had separated the two
lots was pulled down and the old factory united with the new into a
single great arena for industry and activity. This was a great change,
which was much discussed, gladly welcomed by some, scornfully
criticised by others, but which still made scarcely so much talk as the
change in my own fortunes.
From the obscure chrysalis of an ordinary machinist, had been developed
that splendid butterfly, the ruling chief of this great new
establishment, and this enviable butterfly was the son-in-law of a
millionaire, the husband of a young wife whose striking beauty excited
the envy of women, the admiration of men, and attracted the attention
of all wherever she appeared. To so notable a metamorphosis even the
_blasé_ public of a metropolis could not be indifferent, and when so
remarkable a person, over whose past life there circulated the most
various and scarcely credible legends, determines to baffle the
curiosity directed to him from all sides, he must understand and
practise arts undreamed of by him in his former obscure pupa-state.
I cannot say that in the practice of an art so new to me I always
succeeded, or was at all times favored by fortune.
After spending a fortnight at Zehrendorf, we had returned to the city
and rented a set of apartments by no means expensive, but still
pleasant and roomy, the only objection I had to which was that they lay
too far from the factory, but which by no means suited Hermine, who had
always been accustomed to having a house of her own. Now, as I knew and
shared Hermine's wish in this respect, I thought I would please her,
and at the same time realize a favorite dream of my own, if with the
assistance of my good friend the architect, I very quietly, but with as
much expedition as possible, restored the house I had so long occupied,
to its original design, and by help of the old plan, turned it into a
charming little villa. I had to use an infinity of stratagems to keep
the secret a month, and I felt really childlike, as after returning
from a winter trip with Hermine to Zehrendorf, I found everything
complete and according to my wishes. In the joy of my heart I embraced
my friend the architect who had shown himself so tasteful a decorator,
and blessed the day when I should bring Hermine from her hated city
lodgings to this little paradise.
"You dear boy," said Hermine, as on the day after her return I showed
her with triumph my new creation, "you dear boy, that is all very
pretty and nice, and in the summer, for a couple of weeks or months
which we have to pass in this wretched town and not in Zehrendorf,
it will be a very nice place to stay; but now, in the middle of
winter--no, George, it will never do! It makes me shiver to think of
it. And then the great bare buildings around, and the tall chimneys
that look as if they would topple over on our heads every minute--that
one does lean a little--just look at it--I could not sleep here a
single night in peace. And you are already too fond of the horrible
noise and confusion around us here, so that the thought will come into
my head that you might change into some frightful great machine
yourself. No, you must mix more among men, go into society; you must
begin at last to have a little pleasure of your life, you poor,
overworked man! And you can do this better in our old lodgings; so I
think we will spend the winter there. The rent is paid in advance,
anyhow, and we must be economical, as all young beginners should. Have
I not heard that out of your own distinguished mouth, sir? And now put
down your distinguished mouth and give me a kiss, and that settles the
matter."
Of course that settled the matter; for I had really planned the whole
for Hermine's sake rather than my own. And if she really wished to make
a pleasure-trip or two from our lonely island upon the sea of city
life, I was certainly not the man to say no. Indeed I saw perfectly
that in my present position I was in duty bound to perform certain
social duties, if not for my own pleasure, at least in the interest of
my business, and that I had already some derelictions in this respect
to make good.
So I returned without a sigh to our city-lodgings, and while we were at
dinner we drew up, with much merriment, a list of the influential
persons upon whom, as Hermine said, we would make our first social
experiment.
I cannot say that this experiment was crowned with very brilliant
success. True we were most kindly met, and I for my part took all
possible pains--and as I flattered myself, not unsuccessfully--to play
the agreeable host; and Hermine had really no need to take pains to be
the most charming of the company. Upon this point there seemed, so far
as a young husband can judge in such a matter, to be but one opinion.
The gentlemen were full of sincere admiration of her beauty, her
manners, and whatever else is attractive in a young and charming woman;
and if the admiration of the other sex was not altogether so sincere,
they knew how to give it so enthusiastic an expression that it needed a
much readier wit than I could boast of to find always a fit answer to
all the handsome things that were whispered to me about my wife.
"What makes you so charming?" I used to say to her sometimes, when we
came home after one of these social experiments, and Hermine was
walking up and down our sitting-room in her full evening dress, as she
had a way of doing, stopping now and then to strike a few chords on the
piano, while I leaned back in the rocking-chair smoking my beloved
cigar.
Then she would suddenly stop, and begin to take off the company we had
just left, in the most amusing and wittiest style of caricature. There
was Privy-Councillor Zieler, our banker, who kept perpetually glancing
down at three family-orders at his button-hole, which had been
graciously bestowed on him by three small princely houses in return for
his services in negotiating a loan for them; there came his lady
rustling along in the heaviest of satins, her snub nose turned up to
the chandeliers, in whose light the diamonds that decked her bosom
glanced so splendidly; and behind the corpulent mamma floated the
sylph-like daughter, all gauze and Ess. Bouquet and fond memories of
the three court-balls at the three princely houses. Here was the
Railroad Director Schwelle, who would not talk before supper, in order
not to excite himself, had no time to talk during supper, and after
supper was in no condition for talking. Here were the two Misses
Bostelmann, the intellectual daughters of our host--a wealthy
contractor for building-stone--between whom Hermine had sat awhile,
during which time the one entertained her unremittingly with Heine,
while the other, with equal persistence and enthusiasm discoursed of
Lenau.
"Heine--Lenau; Lenau--Heine! It was enough to drive one wild!" cried
Hermine. "And that they call pleasure! Would you venture to maintain
that doctrine, Sir?"
"I made no assertion of the kind, Madam!"
"Indeed! And why then do you drag your poor little wife among these
horrible people, and rob her of the happy hours that she might spend in
a delightful tête-à-tête with her monster of a husband? Is that right?
Is that the love that you vowed to me in the St. Nicholas church at
Uselin before all the assembled population? Heine--Lenau; Lenau--Heine!
Oh!"
I laughed, and then suddenly became grave, and the remark rose to my
lips that it was perhaps not difficult to prove that we could find no
pleasant people to live with, if we did not choose to live with those
that we really liked.
And where were at this time the people who were really dear to me?
The good Fräulein Duff, Hermine's most faithful friend, was with her
relations in Saxony. She had only gone on a short visit, for eight
weeks at the furthest, and the eight weeks had lengthened to as many
months. Where was Paula? Eight hundred miles away, under another sky,
which I trusted shone as brightly on her as she deserved. It had been
now five months since Paula, with her mother and her youngest brother,
Oscar, and accompanied, as a matter of course, by old Süssmilch, had
taken a journey to Italy.
"Had to go," said Doctor Snellius. "What would you have, sir? It was an
unavoidable necessity. An artist like Paula cannot possibly develop
her talents here, in this small, petty, narrow, dark land of fog.
Sunshine, light, air, those were what she needed. Venice, Rome, Naples,
Capri--what do I know? I was never there; shall never go there;
wouldn't know what to do there; but she knows well, and we shall know
it and see it at the next Exposition, when people will make pilgrimages
to her pictures as if they were miracles. Her mother too, that angel of
a woman, will feel the benefit of a residence in a milder climate, and
as for that young fellow Oscar, a young crocodile like him cannot be
put into the water too soon. It is only in the water that one learns to
swim, sir! Only in the water, even when one is born a crocodile, that
is, has such an incredible talent as that youngster has. It will cost a
fabulous sum, to be sure; but she can afford it now, thank heaven, and
after all it is golden seed which will bring forth fruit a hundred and
a thousand fold. She felt some hesitation on this point, but I
persuaded her into it, and she writes me in her last letter--where did
I put it? I want to show you what she says; well, it is no matter; I
will show it to you the next time, if you remind me--anyhow she writes
me so happily, so very happily, that it even made me happy. God bless
her!"
This was the way the doctor talked to me, shortly after Paula's
departure, which happened early in October, when I had been married
three months, during a journey which I had to make to St. ---- on
business, and on which Hermine accompanied me. "For you know," said the
doctor, "in such cases one must take advantage of an opportunity, as
Nature does, when for example she separates soul and body by a stroke
of apoplexy or paralysis of the heart while the patient sleeps, or when
the band connecting both has been sufficiently loosened by long
sickness, so that the parting is scarcely painful, and sometimes is
even longed for. It would perhaps have been a hard trial for poor
Paula to leave you, had she gone from your presence direct to the
railroad-car; but it happened that you were not there, and whether
there are eighty or eight hundred miles between you makes very little
difference."
"When she separates soul and body." This was one of the physiological
illustrations which the doctor was fond of introducing into his
discourse, but it struck me strangely. I looked him fixedly in the eye,
and by an energetic effort he tuned down his voice a couple of octaves,
and continued in a more indifferent tone:
"And then a temporary separation will not only be beneficial to them,
but it will be a good thing for the boys that stay behind. It is time
Benno and Kurt were cutting loose from their sister's apron-strings.
Young men must learn to think and care for themselves, and to stand
upon their own feet. I know that from my own experience. Had my old
father sent me to Bonn or Heidelberg, instead of shutting me up here
for four years under the shadow of his church-steeple in the old
worm-eaten superintendent's house, I might have spread my wings
better, and would not have been the cross-patch I am now; that is, if
any man who has been christened Willibrod--Willibrord it should be
correctly--out of love for an ancestor who has been in his grave these
two hundred years, has any chance left to be anything but a cross-patch
and oddity."
The letter in which Paula wrote to the doctor how happy she felt in
that far-distant land, I never succeeded in getting a sight of. The
next time he had forgotten it; and after awhile I grew used to the
doctor's regularly wanting to show me the letters which Paula wrote him
from Venice, Rome, and Naples, and as regularly leaving them at home.
I do not know why it was that I always felt a singular confusion
whenever the doctor began one of his fruitless searches for Paula's
letter, and why I always tried to get him upon another subject as soon
as possible. Not that I had any doubt of Paula's alleged happiness. The
short and unfrequent letters which she wrote to Hermine and myself
conveyed no intimation to the contrary; but I was by no means quite
assured as to the source from which that happiness flowed, and the
letters, whether addressed to myself or to Hermine, had all the same
physiognomy, in which I could only here and there recognize a trace of
the beloved features of Paula. And the longer the separation lasted,
the shorter and fewer were these letters, so that they were nearly as
brief and rare as the doctor's visits.
"It must be so," said the doctor, as I once assailed him with friendly
reproaches on this point; "a young married pair is like a young plant,
which thrives best when put under a bell-glass, and meddled with as
little as possible. Men call Love a goddess;[9] but to me it appears a
god; a stern, inapproachable, jealous god, that will endure no rivals,
and who puts to the sword all colleagues that he may find in his chosen
realm, be they lovely Astartes or hideous Mumbo-Jumbos. And he is quite
right to do so; the human heart is a stubborn, cross-grained affair,
and takes a frightfully long time in learning merely to spell through
the ten commandments."
The doctor always said things of this sort in a very kind tone, the
same that I heard him use in speaking to his patients, and was at all
times full of friendliness and attention, even more towards my wife
than myself. Indeed a peculiar relation seemed to have been established
between Hermine and him. She, with her usual impulsiveness, had at
first made no secret of the dislike with which she regarded my old
friend, and often enough ridiculed, even in his presence, his odd
eccentric ways. But the man who on other occasions had the keenest
arrows in his quiver ready for any aggressor, let him be who he might,
and who did not lightly grant quarter to an antagonist, on no occasion
used his powerful weapons against her; and this gentleness which
nothing could change, and which was assuredly not always easy for the
hot and caustic temper of the man, succeeded at last, however she might
resist, in touching and captivating Hermine. Perhaps this happy result
may have been in part owing to the fact that lately she had received
the doctor not only as my friend, but as her medical adviser.
"He is really too good!" she said more than once, looking thoughtfully
at the door through which the odd figure of my old friend had just
vanished.
"There is not much the matter with your wife," said the doctor to me,
when I expressed some uneasiness at Hermine's altered looks. "But she
has been used from childhood to freer exercise and fresher air than can
be had in a city like this."
"I would with pleasure take her to Zehrendorf," I said; "but now it is
winter; and how can I possibly leave here?"
"Well, as it is an impossibility, we will not rack our brains any more
about it," replied the doctor. "We must do the best we can. Sometimes
mental activity may, to a certain point, make up for the deficiency of
physical. It is a pity that your wife was so soon satiated with the
bustle of society. Why do you not take her sometimes to the theatre or
the opera? She is so great a lover of music."
"I do not care to go to the opera any more," said Hermine, after we had
tried it a few times. "They sing badly and play worse. Now could you
call that a _Zerlina_? And that _Don Juan_! You might have waited for
me long enough, if you had been such a stick of a lover as that! And
with such monstrous self-conceit to boot! _Masetto_ was really the
better man."
"Try the theatre once," said the doctor.
I looked him full in the eyes.
"The Bellini has been back a week," he added, and brought his round
spectacles to bear upon me. We looked at each other awhile in silence.
"Your wife does not know that Fräulein Bellini and a certain other lady
are one and the same person?" he presently asked.
"No," I answered.
"And you are not willing to tell her? Not willing to tell her what I
know, who am your friend, and what very probably others know, who are
not your friends?"
"It is a peculiar sort of thing, doctor."
"There are many peculiar things, especially in a new married life."
"Which one would do more wisely to keep to himself."
"Not in all cases," replied the doctor. "Whatever can be communicated,
should be, always; and there is but little, hardly anything, which a
young husband should not tell his wife. In a river crawling sluggishly
between sandy shores to the end of its course, every stone lies
unmoved; but a stream bursting fresh and joyous from the mountain will
roll and whirl along heavy masses of rock, its young strength sweeping
everything before it. Think it over, my dear friend."
I had thought it over, but I could not bring myself to follow the
doctor's advice. It was not cowardice that kept me silent, but rather a
feeling of shame that I could not overcome, and a fear of the
consequences upon a character so peculiar as Hermine's, and in her
present state of health. And yet the revelation hovered more than once
upon my lips, but crept back again to my heart, that beat uneasily when
in almost every number of the papers I came across the ominous name,
and Hermine once or twice said casually. "We ought really to see this
Bellini they talk so much about."
They did indeed talk much about her. "Are you a Bellinist or an
anti-Bellinist?" was the question in all _salons_: "the Bellini is a
marvel," "the Bellini is nothing at all," said the papers. I did not
know which party was right, nor wish to know; and right glad was I that
Hermine seemed as little curious in the matter as myself, until one
day, when I had replied, in answer to her question, that I was
disengaged that evening, she startled me by saying:
"Then we will go this evening and see the Bellini."
"If you wish," I answered, with the determination of a man who sees
that he has met a fatality that is too strong for him.
And we went to the theatre and saw Ada Bellini as Juliet in
Shakespeare's tragedy. I cannot assert that I felt any inclination to
join in the enthusiastic applause that was lavished upon the actress by
the crowded house, nor in the hisses that were occasionally heard, but
only to be overwhelmed by fresh plaudits. Nor can I say that in the
course of the evening I found myself able to pass a critical judgment
upon the artist. However attentively I watched the stage, I saw little
more than if I had gazed at vacancy, dreaming of times long past, and
wishing at intervals that this evening also belonged to past time, I
remember that once arousing from this unpleasant reverie and looking at
Hermine, I caught her eye fastened upon me with a mysterious
expression; but she only jested at my indifference as we drove home,
and declared that the question of Bellinist and anti-Bellinist was
settled for her.
"With what result?" I asked, lighting my cigar from the lamp.
"And are you going to smoke now, you unfeeling man? Do you suppose that
Romeo would have poisoned himself if he had had a cigar in his pocket
with the fatal flask? Much good may your cigar do you, dear Romeo:
Juliet will bid you good-night."
This evening for the first time I smoked my nightly cigar alone; and
never did I smoke one in deeper reflection.
"The doctor was right," I said to myself, as I threw the stump into the
dying coals on the hearth, and rose with a sigh from my easy-chair;
"perfectly right. I must wait for a favorable opportunity."
But as it usually happens in such cases, a week passed, two weeks
passed, and the opportunity did not occur. Nor did the necessity seem
very urgent, as Hermine had not spoken again of going to the theatre.
She still felt unwell, and the doctor's visits were more frequent than
formerly.
"Have you told your wife yet who the Bellini is?" he asked me one day.
"Not yet."
"She knows it."
"Impossible!"
"She knows it; I give you my word upon that."
"Has she said so to you?"
"No."
"How then----?"
"How then? A physician, my dear fellow, has sharp ears, and a physician
who is the friend of the family, as he should always be, has them
doubly sharp. He hears between the words that are spoken; and I can
only repeat to you that I have heard between the words of your wife,
and learned that she knows the Bellini to be Constance von Zehren, and
that she knows more beside. Whether she knows all, and whether she
knows the real truth, is only known to the person that told her."
"And that is----?"
"Our common friend Arthur."
"Arthur has not been in the city for eight weeks."
"Our postal system forwards with admirable fidelity all letters
intrusted to it, even anonymous ones."
"But good heaven, doctor, what interest could Arthur have----?"
"Revenge is sweet," said the doctor.
"In this case it would be stupid too, for----"
"It is often stupid too."
"For the steuerrath lives almost exclusively upon my father-in-law's
purse, and I bought a considerable place for Arthur only yesterday, and
upon the table there lies a letter in which he asks me again for a
large loan of money."
"All that makes no difference. And my dear George, don't take to
moping. You are a man, and there is no occasion here for despair. We
must not take things harder than they are; the really hard ones cannot
be made any lighter so, and with this latter article I should think you
were already sufficiently supplied."