On Friday night Gisela left her apartment in the Königinstrasse, where
she had slept for a few hours after a visit to the principal cities of
the Empire, and walked out to Schwabing, that picturesque "village" that
looked like a bit of the Alps transferred to the edge of Munich. She had
not forgotten the man she had sacrificed, and at the end of the first
day of the Revolution she had learned that his body had been caught
under the Schwabing bridge, rescued, and placed temporarily in the vault
of the little church.
It was a bright starlight night, and the old white church with its
bulbous tower, last outpost of Turkey in her heyday, looked like a lone
mourner for the dream of Mittel-Europa. Gisela climbed the mound and
entered the quiet enclosure. She had met no one in the peaceful suburb,
although she had heard the deep guttural voices of elderly men still
lingering at the tables in the beer gardens.
She had sent orders to leave the door of the church unlocked, and she
entered the barren room, guiding herself with her electric torch to the
stair that led down to the vault. Fear of any sort had long since been
crowded out of her, but it was a lonely pilgrimage she hardly would have
undertaken ten days ago.
She descended the short flight of steps and flashed her light about the
vault. It was a small room, oppressively musty and humid. All Schwabing
is damp but the Isar itself might have washed the walls of this dripping
sepulcher. The coffin stood on a rough trestle in the center of the
chamber, and it was covered with the military cloak that, with his sword
and helmet, she had ordered sent from his hotel.
She stood beside the coffin, trying to visualize the man who lay within,
wondering if the orders still bulged above the hilt of the dagger she
had driven in with so firm a hand ... or if they had taken the time to
remove it ... or if that symbol of Germany's freedom would be found ages
hence in a handful of dust when the man who had taught her all she would
ever know of love or living was long forgotten....
But in a moment these vagrant fancies, drifting from a tired brain, took
flight, her reluctant mind focused itself, and she knelt beside the
bier, pressing the folds of the cloak about her face and weeping
heavily.
It was her final tribute to her womanhood. That she had rescued her
country and incidentally the world, making democracy and liberty safe
for the first time in its history, mattered nothing to her then. Nor her
immortal fame.
To regret was impossible. Strong souls are inaccessible to regret. But
she hated life and her bitter destiny, for she had sacrificed the life
that gave meaning to her own, and she wished that the implacable Powers
that rule the destinies of individuals and nations had foreborne their
accustomed irony and presented her gifts to some woman mercifully
lacking her own terrible power to love and suffer--and the imagination
which would keep for ever vivid in her mind the poignant happiness that
had been hers and that she had immolated on the cold altar of duty. She
was still young, and her sole hope, glimmering at the end of an
interminable perspective, was that it would be her privilege to lie at
last in the grave with this man; who had been her other part and whose
heart and hers she had slain.